Brother Odd

clenched in her frail hands, as if ready to throw off the bedclothes. Her face was taut with an expression of concerned anticipation, less than anxiety, more than mere disquiet.
        Although she slept soundly, she appeared to be prepared to flee at the slightest provocation.
        One day each week, of her own accord, with eyes closed tight, Annamarie practiced piloting her battery-powered wheelchair to each of two elevators. One lay in the east wing, the other in the west.
        In spite of her limitations and her suffering, she was a happy child. These preparations for flight were out of character.
        Although she would not talk about it, she seemed to sense that a night of terror was coming, a hostile darkness through which she would need to find her way. She might be prescient.
        The bodach, first glimpsed from my high window, had come here, but not alone. Three of them, silent wolf-like shadows, were gathered around the second bed, in which Justine slept.
        A single bodach signals impending violence that may be either near and probable or remote and less certain. If they appear in twos and threes, the danger is more immediate.
        In my experience, when they appear in packs, the pending danger has become imminent peril, and the deaths of many people are days or hours away. Although the sight of three of them chilled me, I was grateful that they didn't number thirty.
        Trembling with evident excitement, the bodachs bent over Justine while she slept, as if studying her intently. As if feeding on her.

CHAPTER 2
        
        THE LAMP ABOVE THE SECOND BED HAD BEEN turned low, but Justine had not adjusted it herself. A nun had selected the dimmest setting, hoping that it might please the girl.
        Justine did little for herself and asked for nothing. She was partially paralyzed and could not speak.
        When Justine had been four years old, her father had strangled her mother to death. They say that after she had died, he put a rose between her teeth-but with the long thorny stem down her throat.
        He drowned little Justine in the bathtub, or thought he did. He left her for dead, but she survived with brain damage from prolonged lack of oxygen.
        For weeks, she lingered in a coma, though that was years ago. These days she slept and woke, but when awake, her capacity for engagement with her caregivers fluctuated.
        Photographs of Justine at four reveal a child of exceptional beauty. In those snapshots, she looks impish and full of delight.
        Eight years after the tub, at twelve, she was more beautiful than ever. Brain damage had not resulted in facial paralysis or distorted expressions. Curiously, a life spent largely indoors had not left her pale and drawn. Her face had color, and not a blemish.
        Her beauty was chaste, like that of a Botticelli Madonna, and ethereal. For everyone who knew Justine, her beauty stirred neither envy nor desire, but inspired a surprising reverence and, inexplicably, something like hope.
        I suspect that the three menacing figures, hunched over her with keen interest, were not drawn by her beauty. Her enduring innocence attracted them, as did their expectation-their certain knowledge?-that she would soon be dead by violence and, at last, ugly These purposeful shadows, as black as scraps of starless night sky, have no eyes, yet I could sense them leering; no mouths, though I could almost hear the greedy sounds of them feasting on the promise of this girl's death.
        I once saw them gathered at a nursing home in the hours before an earthquake leveled it. At a service station prior to an explosion and tragic fire. Following a teenager named Gary Tolliver in the days before he tortured and murdered his entire family.
        A single death does not draw them, or two deaths, or even three. They prefer operatic violence, and for them the performance is not over when the fat lady sings, but only when she is torn to pieces.
        They seem incapable of affecting our world, as though they are not fully present in this place and this time, but are in some way virtual presences. They are travelers, observers, aficionados of our pain.
        Yet I fear them, and not solely because their presence signals oncoming horror. While they seem unable to affect this world in any significant way, I suspect that I am an exception to the rules that limit them, that I am vulnerable to them, as