Brother Odd

window, turned his head to look at me as I descended the broad front steps. His stare was clear and blue, with none of the eerie eyeshine common to animals at night.
        Without benefit of stars or moon, most of the expansive yard receded into murk. If a bodach lurked out there, I could not see it.
        "Boo, where's it gone?" I whispered.
        He didn't answer. My life is strange but not so strange that it includes talking canines.
        With wary purpose, however, the dog moved off the driveway, onto the yard. He headed east, past the formidable abbey, which appears almost to have been carved from a single great mass of rock, so tight are the mortar joints between its stones.
        No wind ruffled the night, and darkness hung with folded wings.
        Seared brown by winter, the trampled grass crunched underfoot. Boo moved with far greater stealth than I could manage.
        Feeling watched, I looked up at the windows, but I didn't see anyone, no light other than the faint flicker of the candle in my quarters, no pale face peering through a dark pane.
        I had rushed out of the guest wing wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt. December stropped its teeth on my bare arms.
        We proceeded eastward alongside the church, which is part of the abbey, not a separate building.
        A sanctuary lamp glows perpetually, but it isn't sufficient to fire the colorful stained glass. Through window after window, that dim light seemed to watch us as though it were the single sullen eye of something in a bloody mood.
        Having led me to the northeast corner of the building, Boo turned south, past the back of the church. We continued to the wing of the abbey that, on the first floor, contains the novitiate.
        Not yet having taken their vows, the novices slept here. Of the five who were currently taking instruction, I liked and trusted four.
        Suddenly Boo abandoned his cautious pace. He ran due east, away from the abbey, and I pursued him.
        As the yard relented to the untamed meadow, grass lashed my knees. Soon the first heavy snow would compact these tall dry blades.
        For a few hundred feet, the land sloped gently before leveling off, whereupon the knee-high grass became a mown lawn again. Before us in the gloom rose St. Bartholomew's School.
        In part the word school is a euphemism. These students are unwanted elsewhere, and the school is also their home, perhaps the only one that some of them will ever have.
        This is the original abbey, internally remodeled but still an impressive pile of stone. The structure also houses the convent in which reside the nuns who teach the students and care for them.
        Behind the former abbey, the forest bristled against the storm-ready sky, black boughs sheltering blind pathways that led far into the lonely dark.
        Evidently tracking the bodach, the dog went up the broad steps to the front door of the school, and through.
        Few doors in the abbey are ever locked. But for the protection of the students, the school is routinely secured.
        Only the abbot, the mother superior, and I possess a universal key that allows admittance everywhere. No guest before me has been entrusted with such access.
        I take no pride in their trust. It is a burden. In my pocket, the simple key sometimes feels like an iron fate drawn to a lodestone deep in the earth.
        The key allows me quickly to seek Brother Constantine, the dead monk, when he manifests with a ringing of bells in one of the towers or with some other kind of cacophony elsewhere.
        In Pico Mundo, the desert town in which I had lived for most of my time on earth, the spirits of many men and women linger. But here we have just Brother Constantine, who is no less disturbing than all of Pico Mundo's dead combined, one ghost but one too many.
        With a bodach on the prowl, Brother Constantine was the least of my worries.
        Shivering, I used my key, and hinges squeaked, and I followed the dog into the school.
        Two night-lights staved off total gloom in the reception lounge. Multiple arrangements of sofas and armchairs suggested a hotel lobby.
        I hurried past the unmanned information desk and went through a swinging door into a corridor lighted by an emergency lamp and red exit signs.
        On this ground floor were the classrooms, the rehabilitation clinic, the infirmary, the kitchen, and the