Brother Odd

tire salesman?"
        "What's the punch line?"
        "It's not a joke, sir. When my life became too complicated and I had to give up being a fry cook, I considered the tire life. But I came here instead."
        He said nothing.
        "If I could be a tire salesman, help people get rolling on good rubber, at a fair price, that would be useful work. If I could be a tire salesman and nothing else, just a good tire salesman with a little apartment and this girl I once knew, that would be enough."
        His violet eyes were ruddy with the light of the vestibule. He shook his head, rejecting the tire life. "I want to know."
        "Know what?" I asked.
        "Everything," he said, and the door slid shut between us.
        Polished-steel letters on brushed steel: PER OMNIA SAECULA SAECULORUM.
        For ever and ever.
        Through hissing doors, through buttery light and blue, I went to the surface, into the night, and locked the bronze door with my universal key.
        
        LIBERA NOS A MALO said the door.
        Deliver us from evil.
        As I climbed the stone steps to the abbey yard, snow began to fall. Huge flakes turned gracefully in the windless dark, turned as if to a waltz that I could not hear.
        The night did not seem as frigid as it had been earlier. Perhaps I had been colder in John's Mew than I realized, and by comparison to that realm, the winter night seemed mild.
        In moments, the flakes as big as frosted flowers gave way to smaller formations. The air filled with fine shavings of the unseen clouds.
        This was the moment that I had been waiting for at the window of my small guest suite, before Boo and bodach had appeared in the yard below.
        Until coming to this monastery, I had spent my life in the town of Pico Mundo, in the California desert. I had never seen snow fall until, earlier in the night, the sky had spit out a few flakes in a false start.
        Here in the first minute of the true storm, I stood transfixed by the spectacle, taking on faith what I had heard, that no two snowflakes are alike.
        The beauty took my breath, the way the snow fell and yet the night was still, the intricacy of the simplicity. Although the night would have been even more beautiful if she had been here to share it with me, for a moment all was well, all manner of things were well, and then of course someone screamed.

CHAPTER 7
        
        THE SHARP CRY OF ALARM WAS SO BRIEF THAT you might have thought it was imagined or that a night bird, chased by snow to the shelter of the forest, had shrilled just as it flew overhead and away.
        In the summer of the previous year, when gunmen stormed the mall in Pico Mundo, I had heard so many screams that I hoped my ears would fail me thereafter. Forty-one innocent people had been shot. Nineteen perished. I would have traded music and the voices of my friends for a silence that would exclude for the rest of my life all human cries of pain and mortal terror.
        We so often hope for the wrong things, and my selfish hope was not fulfilled. I am not deaf to pain or blind to blood-or dead, as for a while I might have wished to be.
        Instinctively, I hurried around the nearby corner of the abbey. I turned north along the refectory, in which the monks take their meals, and no lights were aglow at one o'clock in the morning.
        Squinting through the screening snow, I scanned the night toward the western forest. If someone was out there, the storm hid him.
        The refectory formed an inner corner with the library wing. I headed west again, past deep-set windows beyond which lay a darkness of ordered books.
        As I turned the southwest corner of the library, I almost fell over a man lying facedown on the ground. He wore the hooded black habit of a monk.
        Surprise brought cold air suddenly into my lungs-a brief ache in the chest-and expelled it in a pale rushing plume.
        I dropped to my knees at the monk's side, but then hesitated to touch him, for fear that I would find he had not merely fallen, that he had been beaten to the ground.
        The world beyond this mountain retreat was largely barbarian, a condition it had been striving toward for perhaps a century and a half. A once-glorious civilization was now only a pretense, a mask allowing barbarians to commit ever greater cruelties in the name of virtues that a truly civilized world would have