Brother Odd

the lesser paleness of the blizzard.
        No one at a window in either building would be able to see me at this distance, in these conditions. My scream would not carry in the wind.
        The keening rose again, needful and agitated.
        I turned in a circle, seeking the source. Much was obscured by the falling snow and by clouds of already-fallen snow whisked off the ground, and the bleak light deceived.
        Although I had only turned in place, the school had entirely vanished along with the lower portion of the meadow. Uphill, the abbey shimmered like a mirage, rippled like an image painted on a sheer curtain.
        Because I live with the dead, my tolerance for the macabre is so high that I am seldom spooked. The part-shriek-part-squeal-part-buzz, however, was so otherworldly that my imagination failed to conjure a creature that might have made it, and the marrow in my bones seemed to shrink in the way that mercury, in winter, contracts to the bottom of a thermometer.
        I took one step toward where the school ought to be, but then halted, retracted that step. I turned uphill but dared not retreat to the abbey. Something unseen in the camouflaging storm, something with an alien voice full of need and fury, seemed to await me no matter in which direction I proceeded.

CHAPTER 14
        
        STRIPPING VELCRO FROM VELCRO, PUSHING BACK the insulated hood of my jacket, I raised my head, turned my head, cocked my head, striving to determine from which point of the compass the cry arose.
        Icy wind tossed my hair and frosted it with snow, boxed my ears and made them burn.
        All magic had been snuffed from the storm. The grace of falling snow was now a graceless wildness, a churning maelstrom as raw and flaying as human rage.
        I had the strange perception, beyond my power to explain, that reality had shifted, down there twenty powers of ten below the level of protons, that nothing was as it had been, nothing as it should be.
        Even with my hood off, I could not locate the source of the eerie keening. The wind might be distorting and displacing the sound, but perhaps the cry seemed to come from every side because more than one shrieking entity prowled the snowblind morning.
        Reason asserted that anything stalking me must be of the Sierra, but this didn't sound like wolves or mountain lions. And bears were cavebound now, lost in dreams of fruit and honey.
        I am not a guy who likes to pack a gun. My mother's affection for her pistol-and the threats of suicide that she employed to control me when I was a child-left me with a preference for other forms of self-defense.
        Over the years, in pinches and crunches, I have survived- often just barely-by the effective use of such weapons as fists, feet, knees, elbows, a baseball bat, a shovel, a knife, a rubber snake, a real snake, three expensive antique porcelain vases, about a hundred gallons of molten tar, a bucket, a lug wrench, an angry cross-eyed ferret, a broom, a frying pan, a toaster, butter, a fire hose, and a large bratwurst.
        As reckless as this strategy might be in my case, I prefer to rely on my wits rather than on a personal armory. Unfortunately, at that moment in the meadow, my wits were so dry that I could wring from them no idea except that perhaps I should make snowballs.
        Because I doubted that my eerily keening, unknown stalkers were mischievous ten-year-old boys, I rejected the snowball defense. I pulled the hood over my half-frozen head and fixed the Velcro clasp under my chin.
        These cries were purposeful, but in spite of how different they were from other chaotic blusterings of the storm, perhaps they were only wind noises, after all.
        When my wits fail me, I resort to self-deception.
        I started toward the school again and at once detected movement to my left, at the periphery of vision.
        Turning to confront the threat, I saw something white and quick, visible only because it was angular and bristling in contrast to the undulant billow and whirl of falling and upswept snow. Like a goblin in a dream, it was gone even as it appeared, infolding into the downfall, leaving a vague impression of sharp points, hard edges, gloss and translucency.
        The keening stopped. The groan and hiss and whistle of the wind sounded almost welcoming without that other craving cry.
        Movies offer no wisdom and have little to do with