Vanity is strictly a human weakness. No animal is capable of vanity. People sometimes say cats are vain, but cats are haughty. They are confident of their superiority and do not crave admiration, as do vain men and women.
The lingering dead, though they might have been vain in life, have been stripped of vanity by the discovery of their mortality.
Now this Reaper made a mocking come-to-me gesture, as if I should be so intimidated by his fearsome appearance and his grandeur that I would put the noose around my neck and spare him the struggle to snare me.
The recognition that those two apparitions shared an all-too-human vanity, a conceit unseen in all that is truly otherworldly, was significant. But I didn't know why.
In response to his come-to-me gesture, I stepped back from him, and he flew at me with sudden ferocity.
Before I could raise an arm to block him, he got his right hand around my throat and, exhibiting inhuman strength, lifted me off the floor with one hand.
The Reaper's arm was so unnaturally long that I couldn't strike at him or claw at the perfect blackness that pooled within his hood. I was reduced to tearing at the hand that gripped me, trying to pry back his fingers.
Although his hand looked like flesh, flexed like flesh, I could not claw blood from it. My fingernails scraping across his pale skin produced the sound they would have raised from a slate chalkboard.
He slammed me against a column, and the back of my head rapped the stone. For a moment, the blizzard seemed to find its way inside my skull, and a whirl of white behind my eyes almost spun me away into an eternal winter.
When I kicked and kicked, my feet landed without effect in soft billows of black tunic, and his body, if one existed under those silken folds, seemed to have no more solidity than quicksand or than the sucking tar into which Jurassic behemoths had blundered to their destruction.
I gasped for breath and found it. He was holding me, not choking me, perhaps to ensure that, when I was discovered and hauled back into the belfry, the only marks on my throat and under my chin would be those left by the lethal snap of the rope.
As he pulled me away from the column, his left hand rose and tossed the noose, which floated toward me like a ring of dark smoke. I twisted my head away. The rope fell across my face, and back into his hand.
The moment he had succeeded in slipping the noose around my neck and had drawn it tight, he would pitch me out of the belfry, and I would ring the bells to announce my death.
I stopped ripping at his hand, which had me firmly yoked, and grabbed the loop of rope as he tried once more to fit me with that crude necktie.
Struggling to foil the noose, staring down into the emptiness of his hood, I heard myself croak, 'I know you, don't I?'
That question, born of intuition, seemed to work magic, as if it were an incantation. Something began to form in the void where a face should have been.
He faltered in the struggle for the noose.
Encouraged, I said more certainly, 'I know you.'
Within the hood, the basic contours of a face began to take shape, like molten black plastic conforming to a die.
The countenance lacked sufficient detail to spark recognition, glistened darkly as the dim reflection of a face might glimmer and ripple in a night pond where no moonlight brightens the black water.
'Mother of God, I know you,' I said, though intuition had still not given me a name.
My third insistence conjured greater dimension in the glossy black face before me, almost as though my words had spawned in him a guilt and an irresistible compulsion to confess his identity.
The Reaper turned his head from me. He threw me aside, and then tossed away the hangman's rope, which raveled down upon me as I collapsed onto the belfry deck.
In a silken black swirl, he sprang onto the parapet between two columns, hesitated there, and then flung himself into the snowstorm.
I thrust up from the floor even as he jumped, and I leaned over the parapet.
His tunic spread like wings, and he sailed down from the tower, landed with balletic grace upon the church roof, and at once flung himself toward the lower roof of the abbey.
Although he seemed to me to have been something other than a spirit, less supernatural than unnatural, he dematerialized as fully as any ghost might, though in a manner that I had never seen before.
In flight, he seemed to come apart like a clay disk blasted by a skeet-shooter's shotgun. A million flakes of snow and a million fragments of the Reaper laced out into a black-and-white symmetrical pattern, a kaleidoscopic image in midair, which the wind respected only for an instant and then dissolved.
CHAPTER 26
IN THE GROUND-FLOOR RECEPTION LOUNGE, I SAT on the edge of a sofa to pull on my ski boots, which had dried.
My feet were still stiff with cold. I would have liked to slouch deep in an armchair, put my feet on a stool, warm myself with a lap robe, read a good novel, nibble cookies, and be served cup after cup of hot cocoa by my fairy godmother.
If I had a fairy godmother, she would resemble Angela Lansbury, the actress in Murder, She Wrote. She would love me unconditionally, would bring me anything my heart desired, and would tuck me into bed each night and put me to sleep with a kiss on the forehead, because she would have been through a training program at Disneyland and would have sworn the godmother's oath while in the presence of Walt Disney's cryogenically preserved corpse.
I stood up in my boots and flexed my half-numb toes.
Beast of bones or no beast of bones, I would have to go outside again into the blizzard, not immediately, but soon.
Whatever forces were at work at St. Bartholomew's, I had never encountered anything like them, had never seen such apparitions, and didn't have much confidence that I would understand their intentions in time to prevent disaster. If I should fail to identify the threat before it was upon us, I needed brave hearts and strong hands to help me protect the children, and I knew where to find them.
Graceful, stately, her footsteps hushed by her flowing white habit, Sister Angela arrived as if she were the avatar of a snow goddess who had stepped down from a celestial palace to assess the effectiveness of the storm spell that she had cast upon the Sierra.
'Sister Clare Marie says you need to speak with me, Oddie.'
Brother Constantine had accompanied me from the bell tower and now joined us. The mother superior, of course, could not see him.
'George Washington was famous for his bad false teeth,' I said, 'but I don't know anything about the dental situations of Flannery O'Connor and Harper Lee.'
'Nor do I,' she said. 'And before you ask, it has nothing to do with their hairstyles, either.'
'Brother Constantine did not commit suicide,' I told her. 'He was murdered.'
Her eyes widened. 'I've never heard such glorious news followed by such terrible news in the same sentence.'
'He lingers not because he fears his judgment in the next world but because he despairs for his brothers at the abbey.'
Surveying the reception lounge, she said, 'Is he here with us now?'
'Right beside me.' I indicated his position.
'Dear Brother Constantine.' Her voice broke with sentiment. 'We've prayed every day for you, and have missed you every day.'
Tears shone in the spirit's eyes.
I said, 'He was reluctant to move on from this world while his brothers believed that he'd killed himself.'
