The monsters in this flick were only marginally more convincing than the actors, on a par with sock puppets, but the skewering-stinger scene stuck in my mind.
Now I stepped away from the door. Watched the knob rattling back and forth. Eased farther away.
I had seen movies in which one kind of fool or another, putting his face to a window to scope the territory, gets shotgunned or gets seized by a creature that doesn't need a gun and that smashes through the glass and drags him screaming into the night. Nevertheless, I went to the window beside the door.
If I lived my entire life according to movie wisdom, I would risk winding up as spinning-eyed crazy as do many of our nation's most successful actors.
Besides, this wasn't a night scene. This was a morning scene, and snow was falling, so probably the worst that would happen, if life imitated films, would be someone breaking into 'White Christmas' or the equivalent.
A thin crust of ice had crystallized across the exterior of the windowpanes. I detected something moving outside, but it was no more than a white blur, an amorphous shape, a pallid form quivering with potential.
Squinting, I put my nose to the cold glass.
To my left, the knob ceased rattling.
I held my breath for a moment to avoid further clouding the window with every exhalation.
The visitor on the doorstep surged forward and bumped against the glass, as if peering in at me.
I twitched but did not reel back. Curiosity transfixed me.
The opaque glass still masked the visitor even as it pressed forward insistently. In spite of the obscuring ice, if this had been a face before me, I should have seen at least the hollows of eyes and something that might have been a mouth, but I did not.
What I did see, I could not understand. Again, the impression was of bones, but not the bones of any animal known to me. Longer and broader than fingers, they were lined up like piano keys, although they were not in straight keyboards, but were serpentine, and curved through other undulant rows of bones. They appeared to be joined by a variety of knuckles and sockets that I observed, in spite of the veil of ice, were of extraordinary design.
This macabre collage, which filled the window from side to side, from sill to header, abruptly flexed. With a soft click-and-rattle like a thousand tumbling dice on a felt-lined craps table, all the elements shifted as if they were fragments in a kaleidoscope, forming a new pattern more amazing than the previous.
I leaned back from the window just far enough to be able to appreciate the entire elaborate mosaic, which had both a cold beauty and a fearsome quality.
The joints that linked these ranked rows of bones-if bones they were, and not insectile limbs sheathed in chitin-evidently permitted 360-degree rotation along more than one plane of movement.
With the dice-on-felt sound, the kaleidoscope shifted, producing another intricate pattern as eerily beautiful as the one before it, though a degree more menacing.
I got the distinct feeling that the joints between the bones allowed universal rotation on numerous if not infinite planes, which was not just biologically impossible but mechanically impossible.
Perhaps to taunt me, the spectacle remade itself once more.
Yes, I have seen the dead, the tragic dead and the foolish dead, the dead who linger in hatred and the dead who are chained to this world by love, and they are different from one another yet all the same, the same in that they cannot accept the truth of their place in the vertical of sacred order, cannot move in any direction from this place, neither to glory nor to an eternal void.
And I have seen bodachs, whatever they may be. I have more than one theory about them but not a single fact to support a theory.
Ghosts and bodachs are the sum of it. I do not see fairyfolk or elves, neither gremlins nor goblins, neither dryads nor nymphs, nor pixies, neither vampires nor werewolves. A long time ago, I stopped keeping an eye out for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve because, when I was five, my mother told me that Santa was a wicked pervert who would cut off my peepee with a pair of scissors and that if I didn't stop chattering about him, he would be certain to put me on his list and look me up.
Christmas was never the same after that, but at least I still have my peepee.
Although my experience with supernatural presences had been limited to the dead and bodachs, the thing pressed to the window seemed more supernatural than real. I had no idea what it might be, but I was reasonably confident that the words fiend and demon were more applicable than the word angel.
Whatever it was, thing of bone or thing of ectoplasm, it had something to do with the threat of violence that hung over the nuns and the children in their charge. I didn't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure that out.
Apparently each time the bones shifted, they abraded the ice and shaved some off the glass, for this mosaic was clearer than those that had preceded it, the edges of the bones sharper, the details of the joints slightly more defined.
Seeking a better understanding of the apparition, I leaned close to the glass again, studying the disturbing details of this unearthly osteography.
Nothing supernatural has ever harmed me. My wounds and losses have all been at the hands of human beings, some in porkpie hats but most dressed otherwise.
None of the many elements in the bony mosaic trembled, but I had an impression that it was tight with tension.
Although my breath bloomed directly against the window, the surface did not cloud, most likely because my exhalations remained shallow, expelled with little force.
I had the disturbing thought, however, that my breath was without warmth, too frigid to cloud the glass, and that I inhaled darkness with the air but breathed no darkness out, which was a strange notion even for me.
I stripped off my gloves, shoved them in my jacket pockets, and placed one hand lightly on the cold glass.
Again the bones clicked, fanned, seemed almost to shuffle in the manner of a deck of cards, and rearranged themselves.
Shavings of ice in fact peeled from the outside of the window.
This new pattern of bones must have expressed a primal image of evil that spoke to my unconscious mind, for I saw nothing of beauty anymore, but felt as though something with a thin flicking tail had skittered the length of my spine.
My curiosity had ripened into a less healthy fascination, and fascination had become something darker. I wondered if I might be spellbound, somehow mesmerized, but I figured that I could not be spellbound if I remained capable of considering the possibility, though I was something, if not spellbound, because I found myself contemplating a return to the front steps to consider this visitor without the hampering interface of ice and glass.
A splintering sound came from a couple of the wooden muntins that divided the window into panes. I saw a hairline crack open in the white paint that sealed the wood; the fissure traced a crooked path along a vertical muntin, across a horizontal.
Under the hand that I still pressed to the window, the pane cracked.
The single brittle snap of failing glass alarmed me, broke the spell. I snatched my hand back and retreated three steps from the window.
No loose glass fell. The fractured pane remained within the framing muntins.
The thing of bone or ectoplasm flexed once more, conjuring yet another but no less menacing pattern, as if seeking a new arrangement of its elements that would apply greater pressure to the stubborn window.
Although it changed from one malignant mosaic to another, the effect was nonetheless elegant, as economical as the movements of an efficient machine.
The word machine resonated in my mind, seemed important, seemed revealing, though I knew this could not be a machine. If this world could not produce such a biological structure as the one to which I now stood fearful witness-and it could not- then just as surely, human beings did not possess the knowledge to engineer and build a machine with this phenomenal dexterity.
The storm-born thing flexed again. This newest kaleidoscopic wonder of bones suggested that, just as no two snowflakes in history have been alike, so no two of the thing's manifestations would produce the same pattern.
My expectation was not merely that the glass would shatter, all eight bright panes at once, but also that every muntin would burst into splinters and that the frame would tear out of the wall, taking chunks of plaster with it, and
