Brother Odd

real life, but I remembered old adventure films in which the ceaseless pounding of jungle drums had put the sweaty pith-helmeted explorers on edge. The abrupt cessation of the drumming was never the relief that it ought to have been, however, because often the silence signaled imminent attack.
        I suspected Hollywood had gotten that one right.
        Sensing that I was soon to receive something worse and stranger than a poison dart in the throat or an arrow through an eye, I cast aside indecision and hurried toward the school.
        Something loomed in the storm ahead and to the right, veiled by snow, suggestive of the bare frosted limbs of a tree thrashing in the wind. Not a tree. No trees stood in the meadow between the abbey and the school.
        Instead, I had glimpsed a narrow aspect of a mysterious presence that was more aware than wood, that moved not as the wind commanded it but with a fierce purpose of its own.
        Having revealed only enough to make of itself a deeper enigma than it had been previously, the thing drew cloaks of snow around itself, vanishing. It had not gone away, still paralleled me out of sight, like a lion pacing a gazelle that had become separated from its herd.
        Intuitively perceived but not seen, another predator rose at my back. I became convinced that I would be seized from behind and that my head would be ripped off as if it were the pull-tab on a can of cola.
        I do not want a fancy funeral. I would be embarrassed by flowery tributes delivered over my casket. On the other hand, I do not want my death to be observed solely by the belch of some beast that has slaked its thirst with my precious bodily fluids.
        As I plunged across the sloping meadow, kicking through drifts, heart knocking, the all-enveloping whiteness of the blizzard bleached my vision. The fluorescence of the snow made my eyes ache, and the driven flakes appeared to strobe.
        In this further-reduced visibility, something crossed my path, perhaps ten feet ahead, from right to left, its size and shape and nature obscured, but not simply obscured, also distorted, surely distorted, because the quick scuttling something, judging by the portion briefly glimpsed in glare, appeared to be a construct of bones jacketed in ice. With its impossible biological architecture, it should have moved, if at all, with a shambling instability but instead exhibited a wicked kind of grace, a visual glissando of rippling motion, gliding past, gone.
        I had momentum, and the school was near, so I didn't halt or turn, but crossed the tracks of whatever had passed in front of me. I didn't pause to examine the prints it left. The fact that there were prints proved that I hadn't been hallucinating.
        No keening rose-just the stillness of imminent attack, the sense of something rearing up behind me to strike-and through my mind flew words like horde, host, legion, swarm.
        Snow had drifted across the front steps of the school. The footprints of the searchers, who had been here seeking poor Brother Timothy, had already been erased by the wind.
        I scrambled up the steps, tore open the door, expecting to be snatched off the threshold, one step from safety. I crossed into the reception lounge, shoved the door shut, leaned against it.
        The moment that I was out of the wind, out of the eye-searing glare, in a bath of warm air, the pursuit seemed like a dream from which I had awakened, the beasts in the blizzard only figments of a particularly vivid nightmare. Then something scraped against the far side of the door.

CHAPTER 15
        
        HAD THE VISITOR BEEN A MAN, HE WOULD HAVE knocked. If it had been only the wind, it would have huffed and strained against the door until the planks creaked.
        This scrape was the sound of bone on wood, or something like bone. I could imagine an animated skeleton clawing with mindless persistence at the other side of the door.
        In all my bizarre experiences, I had never actually encountered an animated skeleton. But in a world where McDonald's now sells salads with low-fat dressing, anything is possible.
        The reception lounge was deserted. Had it been staffed, only a nun or two would have been there, anyway.
        If something like what I had glimpsed in the storm was able to break the door off its hinges, I would have preferred better backup than the average nun could provide. I needed someone even