Brother Odd (20 page)

CHAPTER 41

W
HILE THE SIXTEEN WARRIOR MONKS AND the one duplicitous novice determined how to fortify the two stairwells that served the second floor of the school, Sister Angela was present to ensure that her nuns were prepared to offer any assistance that might be wanted.

As I headed toward the northwest nurses’ station, she fell in beside me. “Oddie, I hear something happened on the trip back from the abbey.”

“Yes, ma’am. Sure did. I don’t have time to go into it now, but your insurance carrier is going to have a lot of questions.”

“Do we have bodachs here?”

I looked left and right into the rooms we passed. “The place is crawling with them, Sister.”

Rodion Romanovich followed us with the authoritarian air of one of those librarians who rules the stacks with an intimidating scowl, whispers
quiet
sharply enough to lacerate the tender inner tissues of the ear, and will pursue an overdue-book fine with the ferocity of a rabid ferret.

“How is Mr. Romanovich assisting here?” Sister Angela asked.

“He isn’t assisting, ma’am.”

“Then what’s he doing?”

“Scheming, most likely.”

“Shall I throw him out?” she asked.

Through my mind flickered a short film of the mother superior wrenching the Russian’s arm up hard behind his back in some clever tae kwon do move, muscling him downstairs to the kitchen, and making him sit in a corner on a stool for the duration.

“Actually, ma’am, I’d rather have him hovering over me than have to wonder where he is and what he’s up to.”

At the nurses’ station, Sister Miriam, with
Thanks be to God
forever on her lips, or at least forever on the lower one, was still behind the counter.

She said, “Dear, the dark clouds of mystery surrounding you are getting so thick I soon won’t be able to see you. This sooty whirl of smog will go past, and people will say, ‘There’s Odd Thomas. Wonder what he looks like these days.’ ”

“Ma’am, I need your help. You know Justine in Room Thirty-two?”

“Dear, I not only know every child here, but I love them like they were my own.”

“When she was four, her father drowned her in the bathtub but didn’t finish the job the way he did with her mother. Is that correct, do I have it right?”

Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t want to think in what sort of place his soul is festering now.” She glanced at her mother superior and said, with an edge of guilt in her voice, “Actually, I not only sometimes think about it, I
enjoy
thinking about it.”

“What I need to know, Sister, is maybe he
did
finish the job, and Justine was dead for a couple minutes before the police or the paramedics revived her. Could that have happened?”

Sister Angela said, “Yes, Oddie. We can check her file, but I believe that was the case. She suffered brain damage from prolonged lack of oxygen, and in fact had no vital signs when the police broke into the house and found her.”

This was why the girl could serve as a bridge between our world and the next: She had once been over there, if only briefly, and had been pulled back by men who had all the best intentions. Stormy had been able to reach out to me through Justine because Justine belonged on the Other Side more than she did here.

I asked, “Are there other children here who suffered brain damage from oxygen deprivation?”

“A few,” Sister Miriam confirmed.

“Are they—are any of them—more alert than Justine? No, that’s not the issue. Are they capable of speech? That’s what I need to know.”

Having moved to the counter beside the mother superior, Rodion Romanovich scowled intently at me, like a mortician who, in need of work, believed that I would soon be a candidate for embalming.

“Yes,” said Sister Angela. “There are at least two.”

“Three,” Sister Miriam amended.

“Ma’am, were any of the three clinically dead and then revived by police or paramedics, the way Justine was?”

Frowning, Sister Miriam looked at her mother superior. “Do you know?”

Sister Angela shook her head. “I suppose it would be in the patient records.”

“How long will it take you to review the records, ma’am?”

“Half an hour, forty minutes? Maybe we’ll find something like that in the first file.”

“Would you please do it, Sister, fast as you can? I need a child who was dead once but can still talk.”

Of the three of them, only Sister Miriam knew nothing about my sixth sense. “Dear, you are starting to get downright spooky.”

“I’ve always been, ma’am.”

CHAPTER 42

I
N ROOM 14, JACOB HAD FINISHED THE LATEST portrait of his mother and had sprayed it with fixative. He carefully sharpened each of his many pencils on the sandpaper block, in anticipation of the blank page of the drawing tablet on the slantboard.

Also on the table was a lunch tray laden with empty dishes and dirty flatware.

No bodachs were currently present, although the darksome spirit who called himself Rodion Romanovich stood in the open doorway, his coat draped over one arm but his fur hat still on his head. I had forbidden him to enter the room because his glowering presence might intimidate the shy young artist.

If the Russian entered against my wishes, I would snatch his hat from his head, park my butt on it, and threaten to scent it with essence of Odd if he didn’t back off. I can be ruthless.

I sat across the table from Jacob and said, “It’s me again. The Odd Thomas.”

Toward the end of my previous visit, he had met my every comment and question with such silence that I’d become convinced he had gone into an internal redoubt where he didn’t any longer hear me or even recognize that I was present.

“The new portrait of your mother came out very well. It’s one of your best.”

I had hoped that he would be in a more garrulous mood than when I had last seen him. This proved to be a false hope.

“She must have been very proud of your talent.”

Jacob finished sharpening the last of the pencils, kept it in his hand, and shifted his attention to the drawing tablet, studying the blank page.

“Since I was last here,” I told him, “I had a wonderful roast-beef sandwich and a crisp dill pickle that probably wasn’t poisoned.”

His thick tongue appeared, and he bit gently on it, perhaps deciding what his first pencil strokes should be.

“Then this nasty guy almost hanged me from the bell tower, and I got chased through a tunnel by a big bad scary thing, and I went on a snow adventure with Elvis Presley.”

He began lightly and fluidly to sketch the outline of something that I could not recognize at once from my upside-down point of view.

At the doorway, Romanovich sighed impatiently.

Without looking at him, I said, “Sorry. I know my interrogation techniques aren’t as direct as those of a librarian.”

To Jacob, I said, “Sister Miriam says you lost your mother when you were thirteen, more than twelve years ago.”

He was sketching a boat from a high perspective.

“I’ve never lost a mother because I never really had one. But I lost a girl I loved. She meant everything to me.”

With a few lines he suggested that the sea, when fully drawn, would be gently rolling.

“She was beautiful, this girl, and beautiful in her heart. She was kind and tough, sweet and determined. Smart, she was smarter than me. And so funny.”

Jacob paused to study what he had thus far put on the paper.

“Life had been hard on this girl, Jacob, but she had enough courage for an army.”

His tongue retreated, and he bit instead on his lower lip.

“We never made love. Because of a bad thing that happened to her when she was a little girl, she wanted to wait. Wait until we could afford to be married.”

With two styles of cross-hatching, he began to give substance to the hull of the boat.

“Sometimes I thought I couldn’t wait, but then I always could. Because she gave me so much else, and everything she gave me was more than a thousand other girls could ever give. All she wanted was love with respect, respect was so important to her, and I could give her that. I don’t know what she saw in me, you know? But I could give her that much.”

The pencil whispered over the paper.

“She took four bullets in the chest and abdomen. My sweet girl, who never hurt a soul.”

The moving pencil gave Jacob comfort. I could see how he took comfort from creation.

“I killed the man who killed her, Jacob. If I had gotten there two minutes sooner, I might have killed him before he killed her.”

The pencil hesitated, but then moved on.

“We were destined to be together forever, my girl and I. We had a fortune-teller’s card that said so. And we will be…forever. This here, now—this is just an intermission between act one and act two.”

Perhaps Jacob trusts God to guide his hand and show him the very boat and the precise place on the ocean where the bell rang, so he will know it, after all, when his own time comes to float away.

“They didn’t scatter my girl’s ashes at sea. They gave them to me in an urn. A friend in my hometown keeps it safe for me.”

As the pencil whispered, Jacob murmured, “She could sing.”

“If her voice was as lovely as her face, it must have been sweet. What did she sing?”

“So pretty. Just for me. When the dark came.”

“She sang you to sleep.”

“When I woke up and the dark wasn’t gone yet, and the dark seemed so big, then she sang soft and made the dark small again.”

That is the best of all things we can do for one another: Make the dark small.

“Jacob, earlier you told me about someone called the Neverwas.”

“He’s the Neverwas, and we don’t care.”

“You said he came to see you when you were ‘full of the black.’ ”

“Jacob was full of the black, and the Neverwas said,
‘Let him die.’
 ”

“So ‘full of the black’ means you were ill. Very ill. Was the man who said they should let you die—was he a doctor?”

“He was the Neverwas. That’s all he was. And we don’t care.”

I watched the graceful lines emerge from the simple pencil gripped by the stubby fingers of the short broad hand.

“Jacob, do you remember the face of the Neverwas?”

“A long time ago.” He shook his head. “A long time ago.”

Cataracts of falling snow made a blind eye of the window.

In the doorway, Romanovich tapped one finger against the face of his watch and raised his eyebrows.

We might have precious little time remaining, but I could think of nowhere better to spend it than here, where I had been sent by the medium of the once-dead Justine.

Intuition raised a question that at once seemed important to me.

“Jacob, you know my name, my full name.”

“The Odd Thomas.”

“Yes. My last name is Thomas. Do you know your last name?”

“Her name.”

“That’s right. It would be your mother’s last name, too.”

“Jennifer.”

“That’s a first name, like Jacob.”

The pencil stopped moving, as if the memory of his mother came so vividly to him that no part of his mind or heart remained free to guide his drawing.

“Jenny,” he said. “Jenny Calvino.”

“So you are Jacob Calvino.”

“Jacob Calvino,” he confirmed.

Intuition had told me that the name would be revealing, but it meant nothing to me.

Again the pencil moved, and the boat took further form, the vessel from which Jenny Calvino’s ashes had been dispersed.

As during my previous visit, a second large drawing tablet lay closed on the table. The longer I tried and dismally failed to think of questions that might extract vital information from Jacob, the more my attention was compelled toward that tablet.

If I inspected the second tablet without permission, Jacob might consider my curiosity a violation of his privacy. Offended, he might withdraw again, and give me nothing further.

On the other hand, if I asked to see the tablet and he refused permission, that avenue of inquiry would be closed off.

Jacob’s last name was not revelatory, as I had thought it would be, but in this case, I did not think that intuition would fail me. The tablet seemed almost to glow, almost to be floating above the table, the most vivid thing in the room, hyper-real.

I slid the tablet in front of me, and Jacob either did not notice or did not care.

When I turned back the cover, I found a drawing of this room’s only window. Pressed to the glass was a kaleidoscope of bones, which he had rendered in exquisite detail.

Sensing that I had found something alarming, Romanovich took a step into the room.

I raised one hand to warn him to stop, but then held up the drawing so he could see it.

When I turned the page, I found another depiction of the beast at the same window, though in this one, the bones formed a pattern different from the first.

Either the thing had clung to the window long enough for Jacob to draw it in great detail, which I doubted, or he had a photographic memory.

The third drawing was of a robed figure wearing a necklace of human teeth and bones: Death as I had seen him in the bell tower, with pale hands and without a face.

As I was about to show this drawing to Romanovich, three bodachs slunk into the room, and I closed the tablet.

CHAPTER 43

E
ITHER NOT INTERESTED IN ME OR PRETENDING no interest, the three sinister shapes gathered around Jacob.

Their hands were fingerless, as devoid of detail as were their faces and forms. Yet they were more suggestive of paws—or the webbed extremities of amphibians—than of hands.

As Jacob worked, oblivious of his spirit visitors, they appeared to stroke his cheeks. Quivering with excitement, the specters traced the curve of his thick neck and kneaded his heavy shoulders.

Bodachs appear to experience this world with some if not all of the usual five senses, perhaps also with a sixth sense of their own, but they have no effect on things here. If a hundred were to rush past in a pack, they would make no sound, create no slightest draft.

They seemed to thrill to a radiance produced by Jacob that was invisible to me, perhaps his life force, knowing that soon it would be torn from him. When eventually the violence comes, the pending horror that has drawn them, they will shudder and spasm and swoon in ecstasy.

Previously, I have 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 medicine.”

“So you were in the hospital, and the Neverwas came. But did he come in a black robe with a hood, with a necklace of human teeth?”

“No. Not like that, not back in the long ago, only now.”

“And he had a face then, didn’t he?”

In graded tones, the sea formed, full of its own darkness, but brightened elsewhere by reflections of the sky.

“Jacob, did he have a face in the long ago?”

“A face and hands, and she said, ‘What’s wrong with you,’ and the Neverwas said, ‘What’s wrong is with him,’ and she said, ‘My God, my God, are you afraid to touch him,’ and he said, ‘Don’t be a bitch about it.’ ”

He lifted his pencil from the paper because his hand had begun to tremble.

The emotion in his voice had been intense. Toward the end of that soliloquy, his mild speech impediment had thickened.

Concerned that I might drive him into withdrawal by pressing too hard, I gave him time to settle.

When his hand stopped trembling, he returned to the creation of the sea.

I said, “You are being such a help to me, Jake. You are being a friend to me, and I know this isn’t easy for you, but I love you for being such a friend to me.”

He glanced almost furtively at me, then returned his gaze at once to the drawing paper.

“Jake, will you draw something especially for me? Will you draw the face of the Neverwas, the way he looked in the long ago?”

“Can’t,” he said.

“I’m pretty sure you have a photographic memory. That means you remember everything you see, in great detail, even from long before the ocean and the bell and the floating away.” I glanced at the wall with the many portraits of his mother. “Like your mother’s face. Am I right, Jake? Do you remember everything from long ago as clear as if you just saw it an hour ago?”

He said, “It hurts.”

“What hurts, Jake?”

“All of it, so clear.”

“I’ll bet it does. I know it does. My girl has been gone sixteen months, and I see her clearer every day.”

He drew, and I waited.

Then I said, “Do you know how old you were that time in the hospital?”

“Seven. I was seven.”

“So will you draw me the face of the Neverwas, from that time in the hospital when you were seven?”

“Can’t. My eyes was funny then. Like a window with the rain and nothing looks right through it.”

“Your vision was blurred that day?”

“Blurred.”

“From the sickness, you mean.” My hope deflated. “I guess it might have been blurred.”

I turned back one tablet page to the second drawing of the bone kaleidoscope at the window.

“How often have you seen this thing, Jake?”

“More than one thing. Different ones.”

“How often have they been at the window?”

“Three times.”

“Just three? When?”

“Two times yesterday. Then when I woke from the sleep.”

“When you woke up this morning?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve seen them, too,” I told him. “I can’t figure out what they are. What do you think they are, Jake?”

“The dogs of the Neverwas,” he said without hesitation. “I’m not scared of them.”

“Dogs, huh? I don’t see dogs.”

“Not dogs but like dogs,” he explained. “Like really bad dogs, he teaches to kill, and he sends them, and they kill.”

“Attack dogs,” I said.

“I’m not scared, and I won’t be.”

“You’re a very brave young man, Jacob Calvino.”

“She said…she said don’t be scared, we wasn’t born to be all the time scared, we was born happy, babies laugh at everything, we was born happy and to make a better world.”

“I wish I’d known your mother.”

“She said everyone…everyone, if he’s rich or he’s poor, if he’s somebody big or nobody at all—everyone has a grace.” A look of peace came over his embattled face when he said the word
grace
. “You know what a grace is?”

“Yes.”

“A grace is a thing you get from God, you use it to make a better world, or not use it, you have to choose.”

“Like your art,” I said. “Like your beautiful drawings.”

He said, “Like your pancakes.”

“Ah, you know I made those pancakes, huh?”

“Those pancakes, that’s a grace.”

“Thank you, Jake. That’s very kind of you.” I closed the second tablet and got up from my chair. “I have to go now, but I’d like to come back, if that’s all right.”

“All right.”

“Are you going to be okay?”

“All right, okay,” he assured me.

I went to his side of the table, put a hand on his shoulder, and studied the drawing from his perspective.

He was a superb renderer, but he wasn’t just that. He understood the qualities of light, the fact of light even in shadow, the beauty of light and the need for it.

At the window, though the winter twilight lay a few hours away, most of the light had been choked out of the blizzard-throttled sky. Already the day had come to dusk.

Earlier, Jacob had warned me that the dark would come with the dark. Maybe we couldn’t expect that death would wait for full night. Maybe the gloom of this false dusk was dark enough.