'Dr. Heineman,' Romanovich said, 'you do not know yourself. You do not know what you have done.'
Brother John appeared bewildered by the Russian's hostility. 'We have a different perspective, I see, but-'
'Twenty-five years ago, you rejected your deformed and disabled child, disowned and abandoned him.'
Shocked that the Russian was privy to that transgression but also clearly stricken by shame, Brother John said, 'I am not that man anymore.'
'I will grant that you became remorseful, even contrite, and you did an amazingly generous thing by giving away your fortune, taking vows. You are reformed, you may be a better man, but you are not a different man. How can you convince yourself of such a thing when you are so conversant with the theology of your faith? From one end of this life to the other, you carry with you all that you have done. Absolution grants you forgiveness for it, but does not expunge the past. The man you were still lives within you, repressed by the man you have struggled to become.'
I said, 'Brother John, have you ever seen Fredric March in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? If we get through this alive, maybe we can watch it together.'
CHAPTER 52
THE ATMOSPHERE IN THE MEW WAS NOT healthy, which is like saying that you might not want to have a picnic in the cone of a dormant volcano if the ground is rumbling underfoot.
Brother John's feelings had been hurt when his miraculous work had been received with less enthusiasm than he had expected. And his disappointment had about it a quality of wounded pride, a thinly masked resentment, a disturbing childlike peevishness.
The cute, creepy, cuddly, soulless floppy sat on the floor, playing with its feet, making all the noises of a creature that was wonderfully amused with itself, showing off for us, as if confident that we would at any moment coo with admiration for it. Its giggle, however, sounded more humorless by the second.
The bone beasts, the tower phantom, and now this demonic Beanie Baby had exhibited a vanity unseen in genuine supernatural entities. They existed outside the vertical sacred order of human beings and spirits. Their vanity reflected the vanity of their troubled creator.
I thought of Tommy Cloudwalker's three-headed coyote-man and realized that another difference between the genuinely supernatural and the bizarre things we had seen in the past twelve hours was the fundamentally organic character of what is supernatural, which is no surprise, really, since true spirits once lived as flesh.
The bone beasts had seemed not organic but like machines. When Death had leaped from the bell tower, it had disassembled in flight, had broken apart into geometric fragments, as might a failed machine. The floppy was not the equivalent of a puppy or a kitten, but of a wind-up toy.
Standing with his hands in the pockets of his coat, as if he would at any moment withdraw the.50-caliber Desert Eagle and blow the floppy to smithereens, Rodion Romanovich said, 'Dr. Heineman, what you have made is not life. Upon death, it does not decompose. It deconstructs itself in some process similar to fission but not fission, producing no heat, leaving nothing. What you have created is anti-life.'
'You simply do not grasp the achievement,' said Brother John. Like the facade of a summer hotel being boarded up for the off-season, his face steadily put away its former light and animation.
'Doctor,' Romanovich continued, 'I am sure that you built the school as atonement for abandoning your son, and I am sure that you had Jacob brought here as an act of contrition.'
Brother John stared at him, still withdrawing behind shutters and boarded windows.
'But the man you were is still within the man you are, and he had his own motivations.'
This accusation aroused Brother John from his withdrawal. 'What are you implying?'
Pointing to the floppy, Romanovich said, 'How can you put an end to that thing?'
'I am able to think it out of existence as efficiently as I created it.'
'Then for the love of God, do so.'
For a moment, Brother John's jaw clenched, his eyes narrowed, and he did not appear disposed to oblige the request.
The Russian radiated not just the authority of an officer of the state but also moral authority. He removed his left hand from a coat pocket and made a hurry-up gesture.
Closing his eyes, furrowing his forehead, Brother John imagined the floppy out of existence. Mercifully, the giggling stopped. Then the thing disassembled into rattling, twitching cubes. It vanished.
When the scientist monk opened his eyes, Romanovich said, 'You yourself noted that you have been obsessed with order all your life.'
'Any sane man sides with order over anarchy, order over chaos,' said Brother John.
'I agree, Dr. Heineman. But as a young man, you were so obsessed with order that you not only decried disorder, you despised it as if it were a personal affront. You abhorred it, recoiled from it. You had no patience for anyone whom you felt furthered disorder in society. Ironically, you exhibited what might be called an intellectual rather than an emotional obsessive-compulsive disorder.'
'You have been talking to envious men,' said Brother John.
'When your son was born, his deformities and disabilities struck you as biological disorder, the more intolerable because it came from your loins. You disowned him. You wanted him to die.'
'I never wanted him to die. That is outrageous.'
I felt a little like a traitor to him when I said, 'Sir, Jacob remembers when you visited him in the hospital and urged his mother to let his infection run its course untreated.'
Atop his tall lanky body, his round face bobbed like a balloon on the end of a string, and I could not tell whether he was nodding in agreement or shaking his head in denial. He might have been doing both. He could not speak.
In a voice no longer characterized by accusation, opting for a note of quiet entreaty, Romanovich said, 'Dr. Heineman, have you any conscious awareness that you have been creating abominations that have materialized outside this room, that have killed?'
At the school, in Room 14, Brother Maxwell stands tense, his baseball bat raised, while Brother Knuckles, having dealt with more than his share of wiseguys in years past, and having recently mowed down an uberskeleton with an SUV, is wary but not wound tight.
In fact, leaning almost insouciantly on his bat as if it is a cane, Knuckles says, 'Some big guys, they think struttin' the muscle will put your tail between your legs, but all they got is strut, they ain't got the guts to back up the brag.'
'This thing,' says Maxwell, 'doesn't have either guts or muscle, it's all bones.'
'Ain't that what I'm tellin' you?'
Half the cracked pane breaks out of the bronze muntins, shatters on the floor.
'No way this chump gets through the window, not with all them little squares.'
The remaining portion of the broken pane cracks loose and falls to the floor.
'You don't scare me,' Knuckles tells the dog of the Neverwas.
Maxwell says, 'It scares me.'
'No it don't,' Knuckles assures him. 'You're good, Brother, you're solid.'
A clutching gnarl of flexing bones gropes through the hole in the casement window.
Another pane cracks, and a third explodes, spraying shards of glass onto the two monks' shoes.
Toward the farther end of the room, Jacob sits with the pillow on his lap, his head bowed to his embroidery, exhibiting no fear, creating beautiful order out of blank white cloth and peach thread, while the disorderly creation at the window shatters two more panes of glass and strains against the bronze muntins.
Brother Fletcher steps in from the hall. 'Showtime. You need some backup?'
Brother Maxwell says yes, but Brother Knuckles says, 'Seen tougher mugs than this in Jersey. You watchin' the elevator?'
'It's covered,' Brother Fletcher assures him.
'Then maybe stay beside Jacob, move him out fast if this chump gets through the window.'
Brother Maxwell protests: 'You said it won't get through.'
