Brother Odd

tougher than Sister Angela with her penetrating periwinkle stare.
        The doorknob rattled, rattled, turned.
        Doubtful that my resistance alone would keep out this unwanted caller, I engaged the dead-bolt lock.
        A scene from an old movie played in my memory: a man standing with his back pressed to a stout oak door, believing himself to be safe from preternatural forces on the farther side.
        The film had been about the evils of nuclear energy, about how minimal exposure to radiation will overnight cause ordinary creatures to mutate into monsters and to grow gigantic as well. As we know, in the real world, this has had a devastating impact on the real-estate values in the monster-plagued communities near all of our nuclear power plants.
        Anyway, the guy is standing with his back to the door, feeling safe, when a giant stinger, curved like a rhino horn, pierces the oak. It bursts through his chest, exploding his heart.
        The monsters in this flick were only marginally more convincing than the actors, on a par with sock puppets, but the skewering-stinger scene stuck in my mind.
        Now I stepped away from the door. Watched the knob rattling back and forth. Eased farther away.
        I had seen movies in which one kind of fool or another, putting his face to a window to scope the territory, gets shotgunned or gets seized by a creature that doesn't need a gun and that smashes through the glass and drags him screaming into the night. Nevertheless, I went to the window beside the door.
        If I lived my entire life according to movie wisdom, I would risk winding up as spinning-eyed crazy as do many of our nation's most successful actors.
        Besides, this wasn't a night scene. This was a morning scene, and snow was falling, so probably the worst that would happen, if life imitated films, would be someone breaking into "White Christmas" or the equivalent.
        A thin crust of ice had crystallized across the exterior of the windowpanes. I detected something moving outside, but it was no more than a white blur, an amorphous shape, a pallid form quivering with potential.
        Squinting, I put my nose to the cold glass.
        To my left, the knob ceased rattling.
        I held my breath for a moment to avoid further clouding the window with every exhalation.
        The visitor on the doorstep surged forward and bumped against the glass, as if peering in at me.
        I twitched but did not reel back. Curiosity transfixed me.
        The opaque glass still masked the visitor even as it pressed forward insistently. In spite of the obscuring ice, if this had been a face before me, I should have seen at least the hollows of eyes and something that might have been a mouth, but I did not.
        What I did see, I could not understand. Again, the impression was of bones, but not the bones of any animal known to me. Longer and broader than fingers, they were lined up like piano keys, although they were not in straight keyboards, but were serpentine, and curved through other undulant rows of bones. They appeared to be joined by a variety of knuckles and sockets that I observed, in spite of the veil of ice, were of extraordinary design.
        This macabre collage, which filled the window from side to side, from sill to header, abruptly flexed. With a soft click-and-rattle like a thousand tumbling dice on a felt-lined craps table, all the elements shifted as if they were fragments in a kaleidoscope, forming a new pattern more amazing than the previous.
        I leaned back from the window just far enough to be able to appreciate the entire elaborate mosaic, which had both a cold beauty and a fearsome quality.
        The joints that linked these ranked rows of bones-if bones they were, and not insectile limbs sheathed in chitin-evidently permitted 360-degree rotation along more than one plane of movement.
        With the dice-on-felt sound, the kaleidoscope shifted, producing another intricate pattern as eerily beautiful as the one before it, though a degree more menacing.
        I got the distinct feeling that the joints between the bones allowed universal rotation on numerous if not infinite planes, which was not just biologically impossible but mechanically impossible.
        Perhaps to taunt me, the spectacle remade itself once more.
        
        Yes, I have seen the dead, the tragic dead and the foolish dead, the dead who linger in hatred