Brother Odd

barely contain. "Create without conscious awareness? It isn't possible."
        "If it is not possible," Romanovich said, "then have you created them intentionally? Because they do exist. We have seen them."
        I unzipped my jacket and removed from within a folded page that I had torn out of Jacob's tablet. As I opened the sheet of paper, the drawing of the beast flexed with an illusion of movement.
        "Your son has seen this at his window, sir. He says it is the dog of the Neverwas. Jennifer called you the Neverwas."
        Brother John accepted the drawing, spellbound by it. The doubt and fear in his face belied the confidence in his voice when he said, "This is meaningless. The boy is retarded. This is the fantasy of a deformed mind."
        "Dr. Heineman," the Russian said, "twenty-seven months ago, from things you said to your former colleagues in calls and E-mails, they inferred that you might have already… created something."
        "I did. Yes. I showed it to you moments ago."
        "That pathetic flop-eared creature?"
        Pity more than scorn informed Romanovich's voice, and Brother John met it with silence. Vanity receives pity as a wasp receives a threat to its nest, and a desire to sting brought an unholy venomous shine to the monk's violet, hooded eyes.
        "If you have advanced no further in these twenty-seven months," Romanovich said, "could it be because something happened about two years ago that frightened you off your research, and you have only recently begun again to power up this god-machine of yours and 'create'?"
        "Brother Constantine's suicide," I said.
        "Which was not a suicide," said Romanovich. "Unconsciously, you had dispatched some abomination into the night, Dr. Heineman, and when Constantine saw it, he could not be allowed to live."
        Either the drawing cast a dark enchantment over the scientist monk or he did not trust himself to meet our eyes.
        "You suspected what had happened, and you put your research on hold-but twisted pride made you return to it recently. Now Brother Timothy is dead… and even at this hour, you stalk your son through this monstrous surrogate."
        With his gaze still upon the drawing, a pulse jumping in his temples, Brother John said tightly, "I long ago accused myself of my sins against my son and his mother."
        "And I believe your confession was even sincere," Romanovich conceded.
        "I received absolution."
        "You confessed and were forgiven, but some darker self within you did not confess and did not think he needed to be forgiven."
        "Sir, Brother Timothy's murder last night was… horrendous, inhuman. You have to help us stop this."
        All this time later, I am saddened to write that when Brother John's eyes welled with tears, which he managed not to spill, I half believed they were not for Tim but for himself.
        Romanovich said, "You progressed from postulant to novice, to professed monk. But you yourself have said you were spooked when your research led you to believe in a created universe, so you came to God in fear."
        Straining the words through his teeth, Brother John said, "The motivation matters less than the contrition."
        "Perhaps," Romanovich allowed. "But most come to Him in love. And some part of you, some Other John, has not come to Him at all."
        With sudden intuition, I said, "Brother John, the Other is an angry child."
        At last he looked up from the drawing and met my eyes.
        "The child who, far too young, saw anarchy in the world and feared it. The child who resented being born into such a disordered world, who saw chaos and yearned to find order in it."
        Behind his violet windows, the Other regarded me with the contempt and self-regard of a child not yet acquainted with empathy and compassion, a child from whom the Better John had separated himself but from whom he had not escaped.
        I called his attention to the drawing once more. "Sir, the obsessed child who built a model of quantum foam out of forty-seven sets of Lego blocks is the same child who conceived of this complex mechanism of cold bones and efficient joints."
        As he studied the architecture of the bone beast, reluctantly he recognized that the obsession behind the Lego model was the same that inspired this eerie construction.
        "Sir, there is still time. Time for that little boy to give up his anger and