Brother Odd

did not accurately forecast events in this world, because Stormy is dead and I am alone, I know the card means that we will be together forever in the next world. This promise is more important than food to me, than air.
        Although the light from the bathroom did not reach far enough to allow Romanovich to read the words on the framed card, he read them anyway because, being a dream Russian, he could do anything that he wanted, just as dream horses can fly and dream spiders can have the heads of human babies.
        In a murmur, in accented speech, he spoke the words aloud: "You are destined to be together forever."
        His solemn yet mellifluous voice was suitable for a poet, and those seven words sounded like a line of lyrical verse.
        I saw Stormy as she'd been that evening at the carnival, and the dream became about her, about us, about a sweet past beyond recovery After less than four hours of troubled sleep, I woke before dawn.
        The leaded window showed a black sky, and snow fairies danced down the glass. In the bottom panes, a few ferns of frost twinkled with a strange light, alternately red and blue.
        The digital clock on the nightstand was where it had been when I'd fallen into bed, but the framed fortune-teller's card appeared to have been moved. I felt certain it had been standing upright in front of the lamp. Now it lay flat.
        I threw aside the bedclothes and got up. I walked out to the living room, turned on a lamp.
        The straight-backed chair remained wedged under the knob of the door to the third-floor hallway. I tested it. Secure.
        Before communism bled them of so much of their faith, the Russian people had a history of both Christian and Judaic mysticism. They weren't known, however, for walking through locked doors or solid walls.
        The living-room window was three stories above the ground and not approachable by a ledge. I checked the latch anyhow, and found it engaged.
        Although lacking nuns on fire, lacking spiders with the heads of human babies, the night disturbance had been a dream. Nothing but a dream.
        Looking down from the latch, I discovered the source of the pulsing light that throbbed in the filigree of frost along the edges of the glass. A thick blanket of snow had been drawn over the land while I slept, and three Ford Explorers, each with the word SHERIFF on its roof, stood idling on the driveway, clouds of exhaust pluming from their tailpipes, emergency beacons flashing.
        Although still windless, the storm had not relented. Through the screening cold confetti, I glimpsed six widely separated flashlights wielded by unseen men moving in coordinated fashion, as if quartering the meadow in search of something.

CHAPTER 10
        
        BY THE TIME I CHANGED INTO THERMAL LONG Johns, pulled on jeans and a crewneck sweater, got feet into ski boots, grabbed my Gore-Tex/Thermolite jacket, rushed downstairs, crossed the parlor, and pushed through the oak door into the guesthouse cloister, dawn had come.
        Sullen light brushed a gray veneer over the limestone columns encircling the courtyard. Under the cloister ceiling, darkness held fast, as if the night were so unimpressed by the dreary morning that it might not retreat.
        In the courtyard, without ski boots, St. Bartholomew stood in fresh powder, offering a winterized pumpkin in his outstretched hand.
        On the east side of the cloister, directly across from the point at which I burst into it, was the guesthouse entrance to the abbatial church. Voices raised in prayer and a tolling bell echoed to me not from the church but instead along a passageway ahead and to my right.
        Four steps led up to that barrel-vaulted stone corridor, which itself led twenty feet into the grand cloister. Here a courtyard four times larger than the first was framed by an even more impressive colonnade.
        The forty-six brothers and five novices were gathered in this open courtyard in full habit, facing Abbot Bernard, who stood on the bell dais, with one hand rhythmically drawing upon the toll rope.
        Matins had concluded, and near the end of Lauds, they had come out of the church for the final prayer and the abbot's address.
        The prayer was the Angelus, which is beautiful in Latin, when raised with many voices.
        A chanted response rose from the brothers as I arrived: "Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum." Then abbot and