Brother Odd

the junction of the ceiling and the right-hand wall. It was a climber, which meant the children's quarters on the second floor would be more difficult to defend than I had hoped.
        Furthermore, as it came, the entire structure of it appeared to turn ceaselessly, as if it were drilling forward like an auger boring through wood. The word machine came to mind, as it had when I watched another of these things flexing itself into one elaborate new pattern after another, against the reception-lounge window.
        Tripping again, my pursuer lost its perch and clattered down the wall to the floor. Scissoring jacks of bone cranked it erect, and it came forward, eager but uncertain.
        Perhaps it was learning its capabilities, as does any newborn. Maybe this was a Kodak moment, baby's first steps.
        By the time I reached the intersection with the passageway that evidently led to the new abbey, I felt confident that I would be able to outrun the thing-unless its learning curve was very steep.
        Glancing back again, I saw that it was not just clumsy but also had become translucent. The light from the overhead fixtures did not play across its contours any longer, but seemed to pass through it, as if it were made of milky glass.
        For a moment, as it faltered to a halt, I thought it was going to dematerialize, not at all like a machine but like a spirit. Then the translucency passed from it, and it became solid again, and it surged forward.
        A familiar keening drew my attention toward the intersecting passage. Far uphill, in the voice that I had heard earlier in the storm, another of these things expressed its sincere desire to have a tęte-ŕ-tęte with me.
        From this distance, I couldn't be certain of its size, but I suspected that it was considerably larger than the lovely that had come out of the chrysalis. It moved with confidence, too, with grace, glissading without benefit of snow, legs churning in a faultless rhythm, with centipede swiftness.
        So I did one of the things that I do best: I ran like a sonofabitch.
        I only had two legs instead of a hundred, and I was wearing ski boots when I should have been in athletic shoes with air-cushioned insoles, but I had the benefit of wild desperation and the energy provided by Sister Regina Marie's superb beef sandwich. I almost made it to the boiler room safely ahead of Satan and Satan Junior, or whatever they were.
        Then something tangled around my feet. I cried out, fell, and scrambled up at once, flailing at my assailant until I realized that it was the quilted thermal jacket I had shucked off earlier because of the whistling noise it made.
        As if a chorus line of frenzied skeletons were tapping out the final bars of the show's big number, the clickety-clack of my pursuer rose to a crescendo.
        I turned, and it was right there.
        As one, the regimented legs, different from but as hideous as those of a Jerusalem cricket, clattered to a halt. Although knuckled, knobbed, ribbed, and bristling, the forward half of the twelve-foot apparition rose off the floor with serpentine elegance.
        We were face to face, or would have been if I hadn't been the only one of us with a face.
        Across the whole of it, patterns of elaborately integrated bones blossomed, withered, were replaced by new forms and patterns, but in a tickless, clickless quicksilver hush.
        
        This silent exhibition was intended to display its absolute and otherworldly control of its physiology, and to leave me terrified and abashed at my comparative weakness. As when I had watched it at the window, I sensed an overweening vanity in its display of itself, an arrogance that was eerily human, a pompousness and boastfulness that exceeded mere vanity and that might be called vainglory I backed up a step, another. "Kiss my ass, you ugly bastard."
        In a rending fury, it fell upon me, ice-cold and merciless. Uncountable maxillas and mandibles chewed, spurred heelbones ripped, stiletto-sharp phalanges gouged, a whiplike spine with hooked and razored vertebrae slashed me open from abdomen to throat, and my heart was found and torn apart, and thereafter what I could do for the children of St. Bartholomew's School was limited to what power I might have as one of the lingering dead.
        Yes, it could have gone as badly as that, but in fact I just lied to you. The truth is stranger than the lie,