Brother Odd (23 page)

CHAPTER 48

I
N THE ONLY ROOM CURRENTLY WITHOUT CHILDREN in residence, Rodion Romanovich put a large attaché case on one of the beds.

The case belonged to him. Brother Leopold had earlier fetched it from the Russian’s room in the guesthouse and had brought it back in the SUV.

He opened the case, which contained two pistols nestled in the custom-molded foam interior.

Picking up one of the weapons, he said, “This is a Desert Eagle in fifty Magnum. In a forty-four Magnum or three-fifty-seven, it is a formidable beast, but the fifty Magnum makes an incredible noise. You will enjoy the noise.”

“Sir, with that in a cactus grove, you could do some heavy-duty meditation.”

“It does the job, but it has kick, Mr. Thomas, so I recommend that you take the other pistol.”

“Thank you, sir, but no thank you.”

“The other is a SIG Pro three-fifty-seven, quite manageable.”

“I don’t like guns, sir.”

“You took down those shooters in the mall, Mr. Thomas.”

“Yes, sir, but that was the first time I ever pulled a trigger, and anyway it was someone else’s gun.”

“This is someone else’s gun. It is my gun. Go ahead, take it.”

“What I usually do is just improvise.”

“Improvise what?”

“Self-defense. If there’s not a real snake or a rubber snake around, there’s always a bucket or something.”

“I know you better now, Mr. Thomas, than I did yesterday, but in my judgment you remain in some ways a peculiar young man.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The attaché case contained two loaded magazines for each pistol. Romanovich jammed a magazine in each weapon, put the spare magazines in his pants pockets.

The case also contained a shoulder holster, but he didn’t want it. Holding the pistols, he put his hands in his coat pockets. They were deep pockets.

When he took his hands out of his pockets, the guns were no longer in them. The coat had been so well made that it hardly sagged with its burdens.

He looked at the window, checked his watch, and said, “You would not think it was just twenty past three.”

Behind the white gravecloth of churning snow, the dead-gray face of the day awaited imminent burial.

After closing the attaché case and tucking it under the bed, he said, “I sincerely hope that he is merely misguided.”

“Who, sir?”

“John Heineman. I hope he is not mad. Mad scientists are not only dangerous, they are tedious, and I have no patience for tedious people.”

To avoid interfering with the work of the brothers in the two stairwells, we rode down to the basement in the elevator. There was no elevator music. That was nice.

When all the children were in their rooms and the stairwells were secured, the monks would call the two elevators to the second floor. They would use the mother superior’s key to shut them down at that position.

If anything nefarious got into a shaft from the top or the bottom, the elevator cab itself would blockade access to the second floor.

The ceiling of each cab featured an escape panel. The brothers had already secured those panels from the inside, so nothing on the roof of the cab could enter by that route.

They seemed to have thought of everything, but they were human, and therefore they had definitely not thought of everything. If we were capable of thinking of everything, we would still be living in Eden, rent-free with all-you-can-eat buffets and infinitely better daytime TV programming.

In the basement, we went to the boiler room. The gas fire-rings were hissing, and the pumps were rumbling, and there was a general happy atmosphere of Western mechanical genius about the place.

To reach John’s Mew, we could venture out into the blizzard and strive through deep drifts to the new abbey, risking encounter with an uberskeleton sans the armor of an SUV. For adventure, that route had many things to recommend it: challenging weather, terror, air so cold it would clear your head if it didn’t freeze the mucus in your sinus passages, and an opportunity to make snow angels.

The service tunnels offered an avenue without weather and with no wind shriek to cover the rattling approach of the plug-uglies. If perhaps those boneyards, however many there might be, had all gone topside, to prowl around the school in anticipation of nightfall, we would have an easy sprint to the basement of the new abbey.

I took the special wrench from the hook beside the crawl-through entrance to the service passageway, and we knelt at the steel access panel. We listened.

After half a minute, I asked, “You hear anything?”

When another half minute had passed, he said, “Nothing.”

As I put the wrench to the first of the four bolts and started to turn it, I thought I heard a soft scraping noise against the farther side of the panel.

I paused, listened, and after a while said, “Did you hear something?”

“Nothing, Mr. Thomas,” said Romanovich.

Following another half-minute of attentive listening, I rapped one knuckle against the access panel.

From beyond exploded a frenzied clitterclatter full of rage and need and cold desire, and the eerie keening that accompanied all the frantic tap-dancing seemed to arise from three or four voices.

After tightening the bolt that I had begun to loosen, I returned the special wrench to the hook.

As we rode the elevator up to the ground floor, Romanovich said, “I regret that Mrs. Romanovich is not here.”

“For some reason, sir, I wouldn’t have thought there was a Mrs. Romanovich.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Thomas. We have been married for twenty blissful years. We share many interests. If she were here, she would
so
enjoy this.”

CHAPTER 49

I
F ANY EXITS FROM THE SCHOOL WERE BEING monitored by skeletal sentinels, the front door, the garage doors, and the mud-room door adjacent the kitchen would be the most likely places for them to concentrate their attention.

Romanovich and I agreed to depart the building by a window in Sister Angela’s office, which was the point farthest removed from the three doors that most invited the enemy’s attention. Although the mother superior was not present, her desk lamp glowed.

Indicating the posters of George Washington, Flannery O’Connor, and Harper Lee, I said, “The sister has a riddle, sir. What shared quality does she most admire in those three people?”

He didn’t have to ask who the women were. “Fortitude,” he said. “Washington obviously had it. Ms. O’Connor suffered from lupus but refused to let it defeat her. And Ms. Lee needed fortitude to live in that place at that time, publish that book, and deal with the bigots who were angered by her portrait of them.”

“Two of them being writers, you had a librarian’s advantage.”

When I switched off the lamp and opened the drapes, Romanovich said, “It is still a total whiteout. We will be disoriented and lost ten steps from the school.”

“Not with my psychic magnetism, sir.”

“Do they still include prizes in boxes of Cracker Jack?”

With a twinge of guilt, I opened a couple of Sister Angela’s desk drawers, found a pair of scissors, and cut off six feet of drapery cord. I wrapped one end around my gloved right hand.

“When we’re outside, I’ll give you the other end, sir. Then we won’t be separated even if we’re snowblind.”

“I do not understand, Mr. Thomas. Are you saying that the cord will act as some kind of dowsing rod leading us to the abbey?”

“No, sir. The cord just keeps us together. If I concentrate on a person that I need to find, and drive or walk around awhile, I’ll almost always be drawn to him by my psychic magnetism. I’m going to be thinking about Brother John Heineman, who is in the Mew.”

“How interesting. The most interesting part, to me, is the adverb
almost
.”

“Well, I’m the first to admit that I don’t live rent-free in Eden.”

“And what does that mean when you admit it, Mr. Thomas?”

“I’m not perfect, sir.”

After making sure that my hood was firmly fastened under my chin, I raised the bottom half of the double-hung window, went out into the roar and rush of the storm, and scanned the day for signs of cemetery escapees. If I’d seen any shambling bones, I would have been in big trouble, because visibility was down to an arm’s length.

Romanovich followed me and closed the window behind us. We were not able to lock it, but our warrior monks and nuns could not guard the entire building, anyway; they were even now retreating to the second floor, to defend that more limited position.

I watched the Russian tie the loose end of the cord to his wrist. The tether between us was about four and a half feet long.

Only six steps from the school, I became disoriented. I had no clue which direction would bring us to the abbey.

I summoned into mind an image of Brother John sitting in one of the armchairs in his mysterious receiving room, down in the Mew, and I slogged forward, reminding myself to be alert for a loss of tension on the cord.

The snow lay everywhere at least knee-deep, and in places the drifts came nearly to my hips. Wading uphill through an avalanche couldn’t have been a whole lot more annoying than this.

Being a Mojave boy, I again found the bitter cold only slightly more appealing than machine-gun fire. But the cacophony of the storm, combined with the whiteout, was the worst of it. Step by frigid step, a weird kind of open-air claustrophobia got a grip on me.

I also resented that the deafening hoot-and-boom of the wind prevented Romanovich and me from saying a word. During the weeks that he had been in the guesthouse, he’d seemed to be a taciturn old bear; but as this day had unfolded, he had become positively loquacious. I was enjoying our conversations as much now that we were allied in a cause as when I had thought that we were enemies.

Once they have exhausted the subject of Indianapolis and its many wonders, a lot of people have nothing more of interest to say.

I knew we had reached the stone stairs down to John’s Mew when I stumbled into them and nearly fell. Snow had drifted against the door at the bottom of the steps.

The cast-bronze words
LIBERA NOS A MALO
, on the plaque above the door, had mostly been obscured by encrusting snow, so that instead of reading
Deliver us from evil
, it read simply
evil.

After I unlocked the half-ton door, it pivoted open smoothly on ball-bearing hinges, revealing the stone corridor bathed in blue light.

We went inside, and the door closed, and we disengaged ourselves from the tether that had kept us together during the slog.

“That was most impressive, Mr. Thomas.”

“Psychic magnetism isn’t an earned skill, sir. Taking pride in it would be like taking pride in how well my kidneys function.”

We brushed snow from our coats, and he took off his bearskin hat to shake it.

At the brushed stainless-steel door with
LUMIN DE LUMINE
embedded in polished letters, I knocked one foot against the other to shed as much caked snow as possible.

Romanovich removed his zippered boots and stood in dry shoes, a more considerate guest than I.

Translating the words on the door, he said, “ ‘Light from light.’ ”

“ ‘Waste and void, waste and void. Darkness on the face of the deep,’ ” I said. “Then God commanded light. The light of the world descends from the Everlasting Light that is God.”

“That is surely one thing it means,” said Romanovich. “But it may also mean that the visible can be born from the invisible, that matter can arise from energy, that thought is a form of energy and that thought itself can be concretized into the very object that is imagined.”

“Well, sir, that’s a mouthful to get out of three words.”

“Most assuredly,” he agreed.

I flattened the palm and fingers of my right hand against the plasma screen in the wide steel architrave.

The pneumatic door slid open with the engineered hiss intended to remind Brother John that in every human enterprise, no matter with what good intentions it is undertaken, a serpent lurks. Considering where his work apparently had led him, perhaps in addition to the hiss, loud bells should have rung, lights should have flashed, and an ominous recorded voice should have said
Some things men were never meant to know.

We stepped into the seamless, wax-yellow, porcelain-like vessel where buttery light emanated from the walls. The doors hissed shut at our backs, the light faded, and darkness enveloped us.

“I have no sense of motion,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure it’s an elevator, and we’re going down a few floors.”

“Yes,” Romanovich said, “and I suspect that surrounding us is an enormous lead reservoir filled with heavy water.”

“Really? That thought hadn’t occurred to me.”

“No, it would not.”

“What is heavy water, sir, besides being obviously heavier than ordinary water?”

“Heavy water is water in which the hydrogen atoms have been replaced with deuterium.”

“Yes, of course. I’d forgotten. Most people buy it at the grocery store, but I prefer to get the million-gallon jug at Costco.”

A door hissed open in front of us, and we stepped into the vestibule bathed in red light.

“Sir, what is the purpose of heavy water?”

“It is used chiefly as a coolant in nuclear reactors, but here I believe it has other purposes, including perhaps, secondarily, as an additional layer of shielding against cosmic radiation that might affect subatomic experiments.”

In the vestibule, we ignored the plain stainless-steel doors to the left and right, and went forward to the door in which were embedded the words
PER OMNIA SAECULA SAECULORUM
.

“ ‘For ever and ever,’ ” said Romanovich, scowling. “I do not like the sound of that.”

Pollyanna Odd, surfacing again, said, “But, sir, it’s merely praising God. ‘For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, for ever and ever, amen.’ ”

“No doubt that was Heineman’s conscious intention when he chose these words. But one suspects that unconsciously he was expressing pride in his own achievements, suggesting that his works, performed here, would endure for ever and ever, beyond the end of time, where only God’s kingdom otherwise endures.”

“I hadn’t thought of that interpretation, sir.”

“No, you would not, Mr. Thomas. These words might indicate pride beyond mere hubris, the self-glorification of one who needs no word of praise or approval from others.”

“But Brother John is not an egomaniacal nutbag, sir.”

“I did not say that he was a nutbag. And more likely than not, he sincerely believes that, through this work, he is devoutly and humbly seeking to know God.”

Without a hiss,
For ever and ever
slid aside, and we proceeded into the thirty-foot-diameter chamber where, at the center, standing on a wine-colored Persian carpet, four wingback chairs were served by four floor lamps. Currently, three lamps shed light.

Brother John, in tunic and scapular, with his hood pushed back from his head, waited in one of those three chairs.