Brother Odd

emotions, and the broad melodramatic gestures of the actors should make Japanese theater as laughable as America's brand of professional wrestling. Yet by some mysterious effect, to the knowledgeable audience, kabuki becomes as real as a razor drawn across a thumb.
        In the silence of the bells, with the storm seeming to roar its approval of his performance, Death pointed at me, and I knew that he intended the noose for my neck.
        Spirits cannot harm the living. This is our world, not theirs.
        Death is not actually a figure that stalks the world in costume, collecting souls.
        Both of those things were true, which meant that this menacing Reaper could not do me any harm.
        Because my imagination is as rich as my bank account is empty, I could nevertheless imagine the coarse fibers of the rope against my throat, my Adam's apple cinched to sauce.
        Taking courage from the fact that he was already dead, Brother Constantine stepped forward, as if to draw Death's attention and give me a chance to make a break for the stairs.
        The monk leaped to the bells again, but he no longer could summon the rage required to produce psychokinetic phenomena. He appeared instead to be overcome by fear for me. He wrung his hands, and his mouth wrenched wide in a silent scream.
        My confidence that no spirit could harm me was shaken by Brother Constantine's conviction that I was toast.
        Although the Reaper was a simpler figure than the kaleidoscope of bones that had stalked me through the storm, I sensed that they were alike in that they were theatrical, mannered, self-conscious in a way that the lingering dead never are. Even a poltergeist at the summit of his wrath does not design his rampage for maximum effect on the living, has no intention of spooking anyone, but wants only to work off his frustration, his self-loathing, his rage at being stuck in a kind of purgatory between two worlds.
        The dazzling transformations of the bone beast at the window had smacked of vanity: Behold the wonder of me, stand in awe, and tremble. Likewise, the Reaper moved as might a conceited dancer on a stage, ostentatious, in expectation of applause.
        Vanity is strictly a human weakness. No animal is capable of vanity. People sometimes say cats are vain, but cats are haughty. They are confident of their superiority and do not crave admiration, as do vain men and women.
        The lingering dead, though they might have been vain in life, have been stripped of vanity by the discovery of their mortality.
        Now this Reaper made a mocking come-to-me gesture, as if I should be so intimidated by his fearsome appearance and his grandeur that I would put the noose around my neck and spare him the struggle to snare me.
        The recognition that those two apparitions shared an all-too-human vanity, a conceit unseen in all that is truly otherworldly, was significant. But I didn't know why.
        In response to his come-to-me gesture, I stepped back from him, and he flew at me with sudden ferocity.
        Before I could raise an arm to block him, he got his right hand around my throat and, exhibiting inhuman strength, lifted me off the floor with one hand.
        The Reaper's arm was so unnaturally long that I couldn't strike at him or claw at the perfect blackness that pooled within his hood. I was reduced to tearing at the hand that gripped me, trying to pry back his fingers.
        Although his hand looked like flesh, flexed like flesh, I could not claw blood from it. My fingernails scraping across his pale skin produced the sound they would have raised from a slate chalkboard.
        He slammed me against a column, and the back of my head rapped the stone. For a moment, the blizzard seemed to find its way inside my skull, and a whirl of white behind my eyes almost spun me away into an eternal winter.
        When I kicked and kicked, my feet landed without effect in soft billows of black tunic, and his body, if one existed under those silken folds, seemed to have no more solidity than quicksand or than the sucking tar into which Jurassic behemoths had blundered to their destruction.
        I gasped for breath and found it. He was holding me, not choking me, perhaps to ensure that, when I was discovered and hauled back into the belfry, the only marks on my throat and under my chin would be those left by the lethal snap of the rope.
        As he pulled me