Brother Odd

had reason to suspect that they might not be spirits. I sometimes wonder if they are instead time travelers who return to the past not physically but in virtual bodies.
        If our current barbaric world spirals into greater corruption and brutality, our descendants may become so cruel and so morally perverse that they cross time to watch us suffer, bearing orgasmic witness to the bloodbaths from which their sick civilization grew.
        In truth, that is a few small steps down from current audiences' fascination with the wall-to-wall disaster coverage, bloody murder stories, and relentless fear-mongering that comprise TV news.
        These descendants of ours would surely look like us and would be able to pass for us if they journeyed here in their real bodies. Therefore, the creepy bodach form, the virtual body, might be a reflection of their twisted, diseased souls.
        One of these three prowled on all fours around the room, and sprang onto the bed, where it seemed to sniff the sheets.
        As if it were smoke drawn by a draft, another bodach slithered through a crack under the bathroom door. I don't know what it did in there, but for sure it didn't take a potty break.
        They don't pass through walls and closed doors, as the lingering dead can do. They must have the crack, the chink, the open keyhole.
        While they have no mass and should not be affected by gravity, the bodachs do not fly. They climb and descend stairs three or four at a time, in a lope, but never glide through the air as do movie ghosts. I have seen them race in frenzied packs, as swift as panthers but limited by the contours of the land.
        They seem to be bound by some-but not all-rules of our world.
        From the doorway, Romanovich said, "Is something wrong?"
        I shook my head and subtly made a zip-your-lips gesture, which any real librarian should at once understand.
        Although surreptitiously watching the bodachs, I pretended to be interested only in Jacob's drawing of a boat at sea.
        In all my life, I have encountered just one other person who could see bodachs, a six-year-old English boy. Moments after he had spoken aloud of these dark presences, within their hearing, he had been crushed by a runaway truck.
        According to the Pico Mundo coroner, the driver of the truck had suffered a massive stroke and had collapsed against the steering wheel.
        Yeah, right. And the sun comes up every morning by sheer chance, and mere coincidence explains why darkness follows sunset.
        After the bodachs departed Room 14, I said to Romanovich, "For a minute there, we weren't alone."
        I opened the tablet to the third drawing and stared at faceless Death festooned with human teeth. The following pages were blank.
        When I turned the tablet to face Jacob and put it on the table near him, he did not glance at it, but remained fixated on his work.
        "Jacob, where did you see this thing?"
        He did not reply, and I hoped that he had not gone away from me again.
        "Jake, I've seen this thing, too. Just today. At the top of the bell tower."
        Trading his pencil for another, Jacob said, "He comes here."
        "To this room, Jake? When did he come?"
        "Many times he comes."
        "What does he do here?"
        "Watches Jacob."
        "He just watches you?"
        The sea began to flow from the pencil. The initial tones and textures committed to the paper suggested that the water would be undulant, ominous, and dark.
        "Why does he watch you?" I asked.
        "You know."
        "I do? I guess I forgot."
        "Wants me dead."
        "You said earlier that the Neverwas wants you dead."
        "He's the Neverwas, and we don't care."
        "This drawing, this hooded figure-is he the Neverwas?"
        "Not scared of him."
        "Is this who came to see you when you were sick that time, when you were full of the black?"
        "The Neverwas said, 'Let him die/ but she wouldn't let Jacob die."
        Either Jacob saw spirits, as I did, or this death figure was no more a spirit than had been the walking boneyard.
        Seeking to establish the reality of it, I said, "Your mother saw the Neverwas?"
        "She said come, and he came just the once."
        "Where were you when he came?"
        "Where they all wore white and squeaked in their shoes and used the needles for