Inevitably I thought of the hunchback of Notre Dame: Quasimodo, his tragic hope, his unrequited love.
'You're very talented,' I said, which was true.
He did not reply.
Although his hands were short and broad, his stubby fingers wielded the pencil with dexterity and exquisite precision.
'My name is Odd Thomas.'
He took his tongue into his mouth, tucked it into one cheek, and pressed his lips together.
'I'm staying in the guesthouse at the abbey.'
Looking around at the room, I saw that the dozen framed pencil portraits decorating the walls were of this woman. Here she smiled; there she laughed; most often she appeared contemplative, serene.
In an especially compelling piece, she had been rendered full-face, eyes brimming bright, cheeks jeweled with tears. Her features had not been melodramatically distorted; instead, you could see that her anguish was great but also that she strove with some success to conceal the depth of it.
Such a complex emotional state, rendered so subtly, suggested that my praise of Jacob's talent had been inadequate. The woman's emotion was palpable.
The condition of the artist's heart, while he had labored on this portrait, was also evident, somehow infused into the work. Drawing, he had been in torment.
'Who is she?' I asked.
'Do you float away when the dark comes?' He had only a mild speech impediment. His thick tongue apparently wasn't fissured.
'I'm not sure I know what you mean, Jacob.'
Too shy to look at me, he continued drawing, and after a silence said, 'I seen the ocean some days, but not that day.'
'What day, Jacob?'
'The day they went and the bell rung.'
Although already I sensed a rhythm to his conversation and knew that rhythm was a sign of meaning, I couldn't find the beat.
He was willing to count cadence alone. 'Jacob's scared he'll float wrong when the dark comes.'
From the pencil case, he selected a new instrument.
'Jacob's gotta float where the bell rung.'
As he paused in his work and studied the unfinished portrait, his tragic features were beautified by a look of intense affection.
'Never seen where the bell rung, and the ocean it moves, and it moves, so where the bell rung is gone somewhere new.'
Sadness captured his face, but the look of affection did not entirely retreat.
For a while, he chewed worriedly on his lower lip.
When he set to work with the new pencil, he said, 'And the dark is gonna come with the dark.'
'What do you mean, Jacob-the dark is going to come with the dark?'
He glanced at the snow-scrubbed window. 'When there's no light again, the dark is gonna come, too. Maybe. Maybe the dark is gonna come, too.'
'When there's no light again-that means tonight?'
Jacob nodded. 'Maybe tonight.'
'And the other dark that's coming with the night… do you mean death, Jacob?'
He thrust his tongue between his teeth again. After rolling the pencil in his fingers to find the right grip, he set to work once more on the portrait.
I wondered if I had been too straightforward when I had used the word death. Perhaps he expressed himself obliquely not because that was the only way his mind worked, but because speaking about some subjects too directly disturbed him.
After a while, he said, 'He wants me dead.'
CHAPTER 21
WITH LEAD HE SHADED LOVE INTO THE woman's eyes.
As one who had no talent except for magic at the griddle and grill, I watched with respect as Jacob created her from memory as he made real on paper what was in his mind and what was evidently lost to him except by the grace of his art.
When I had given him time to proceed but had gotten not another word from him, I said, 'Who wants you dead, Jacob?'
'The Neverwas.'
'Help me understand.'
'The Neverwas came once to see, and Jacob was full of the black, and the Neverwas said, 'Let him die.''
'He came here to this room?'
Jacob shook his head. 'A long time ago the Neverwas came, before the ocean and the bell and the floating away.'
'Why do you call him the Neverwas?'
'That's his name.'
'He must have another name.'
'No. He's the Neverwas, and we don't care.'
'I never heard anyone named the Neverwas before.'
Jacob said, 'Never heard no one named the Odd Thomas before.'
'All right. Fair enough.'
Employing an X-Acto knife, Jacob shaved the point on the pencil.
Watching him, I wished that I could whittle my dull brain to a sharper point. If only I could understand something about the scheme of simple metaphors in which he spoke, I might be able to crack the code of his conversation.
I had made some progress, figuring out that when he said 'the dark is gonna come with the dark,' he meant that death was coming tonight or some night soon.
Although his drawing ability made him a savant, that was the extent of his special talent. Jacob wasn't clairvoyant. His warning of oncoming death was not a presentiment.
He had seen something, heard something, knew something that I had not seen, had not heard, did not know. His conviction that death loomed was based on hard evidence, not on supernatural perception.
Now that the pencil wood had been cut away, he put down the X-Acto knife and used a sandpaper block to sharpen the point of the lead.
Brooding about the riddle that was Jacob, I stared at the snow falling thicker and faster than ever past the window, so thick that maybe you could drown out there, trying to breathe but your lungs filling up with snow.
'Jacob's dumb,' he said, 'but not stupid.'
When I shifted my attention from the window, I discovered he was looking at me for the first time.
'That must be another Jacob,' I said. 'I don't see dumb here.'
At once he shifted his eyes to the pencil, and he put aside the sandpaper block. In a different, singsong voice, he said, 'Dumb as a duck run down by a truck.'
'Dumb doesn't draw like Michelangelo.'
'Dumb as a cow knocked flat by a plow.'
'You're repeating something you heard, aren't you?'
'Dumb as a mutt with his nose up his butt.'
'No more,' I said softly. 'Okay? No more.'
'There's lots more.'
'I don't want to hear. It hurts me to hear this.'
