Brother Odd

away from the column, his left hand rose and tossed the noose, which floated toward me like a ring of dark smoke. I twisted my head away. The rope fell across my face, and back into his hand.
        The moment he had succeeded in slipping the noose around my neck and had drawn it tight, he would pitch me out of the belfry, and I would ring the bells to announce my death.
        I stopped ripping at his hand, which had me firmly yoked, and grabbed the loop of rope as he tried once more to fit me with that crude necktie.
        Struggling to foil the noose, staring down into the emptiness of his hood, I heard myself croak, "I know you, don't I?"
        That question, born of intuition, seemed to work magic, as if it were an incantation. Something began to form in the void where a face should have been.
        He faltered in the struggle for the noose.
        Encouraged, I said more certainly, "I know you."
        Within the hood, the basic contours of a face began to take shape, like molten black plastic conforming to a die.
        The countenance lacked sufficient detail to spark recognition, glistened darkly as the dim reflection of a face might glimmer and ripple in a night pond where no moonlight brightens the black water.
        "Mother of God, I know you," I said, though intuition had still not given me a name.
        My third insistence conjured greater dimension in the glossy black face before me, almost as though my words had spawned in him a guilt and an irresistible compulsion to confess his identity.
        The Reaper turned his head from me. He threw me aside, and then tossed away the hangman's rope, which raveled down upon me as I collapsed onto the belfry deck.
        In a silken black swirl, he sprang onto the parapet between two columns, hesitated there, and then flung himself into the snowstorm.
        I thrust up from the floor even as he jumped, and I leaned over the parapet.
        His tunic spread like wings, and he sailed down from the tower, landed with balletic grace upon the church roof, and at once flung himself toward the lower roof of the abbey.
        Although he seemed to me to have been something other than a spirit, less supernatural than unnatural, he dematerialized as fully as any ghost might, though in a manner that I had never seen before.
        In flight, he seemed to come apart like a clay disk blasted by a skeet-shooter's shotgun. A million flakes of snow and a million fragments of the Reaper laced out into a black-and-white symmetrical pattern, a kaleidoscopic image in midair, which the wind respected only for an instant and then dissolved.

CHAPTER 26
        
        IN THE GROUND-FLOOR RECEPTION LOUNGE, I SAT on the edge of a sofa to pull on my ski boots, which had dried.
        My feet were still stiff with cold. I would have liked to slouch deep in an armchair, put my feet on a stool, warm myself with a lap robe, read a good novel, nibble cookies, and be served cup after cup of hot cocoa by my fairy godmother.
        If I had a fairy godmother, she would resemble Angela Lansbury, the actress in Murder, She Wrote. She would love me unconditionally, would bring me anything my heart desired, and would tuck me into bed each night and put me to sleep with a kiss on the forehead, because she would have been through a training program at Disneyland and would have sworn the godmother's oath while in the presence of Walt Disney's cryogenically preserved corpse.
        I stood up in my boots and flexed my half-numb toes.
        Beast of bones or no beast of bones, I would have to go outside again into the blizzard, not immediately, but soon.
        Whatever forces were at work at St. Bartholomew's, I had never encountered anything like them, had never seen such apparitions, and didn't have much confidence that I would understand their intentions in time to prevent disaster. If I should fail to identify the threat before it was upon us, I needed brave hearts and strong hands to help me protect the children, and I knew where to find them.
        Graceful, stately, her footsteps hushed by her flowing white habit, Sister Angela arrived as if she were the avatar of a snow goddess who had stepped down from a celestial palace to assess the effectiveness of the storm spell that she had cast upon the Sierra.
        "Sister Clare Marie says you need to speak with me, Oddie."
        Brother Constantine had accompanied me from the bell tower and