'It ain't gonna, Brother. Yeah, it's makin' a big show, but the true fact is-this geek, he's scared of us.'
The stressed bronze muntins and rails of the casement window creaked, groaned.
'Abominations?' Brother John's round face seemed to swell and redden with the pressure of new dark possibilities that his mind could barely contain. 'Create without conscious awareness? It isn't possible.'
'If it is not possible,' Romanovich said, 'then have you created them intentionally? Because they do exist. We have seen them.'
I unzipped my jacket and removed from within a folded page that I had torn out of Jacob's tablet. As I opened the sheet of paper, the drawing of the beast flexed with an illusion of movement.
'Your son has seen this at his window, sir. He says it is the dog of the Neverwas. Jennifer called you the Neverwas.'
Brother John accepted the drawing, spellbound by it. The doubt and fear in his face belied the confidence in his voice when he said, 'This is meaningless. The boy is retarded. This is the fantasy of a deformed mind.'
'Dr. Heineman,' the Russian said, 'twenty-seven months ago, from things you said to your former colleagues in calls and E-mails, they inferred that you might have already… created something.'
'I did. Yes. I showed it to you moments ago.'
'That pathetic flop-eared creature?'
Pity more than scorn informed Romanovich's voice, and Brother John met it with silence. Vanity receives pity as a wasp receives a threat to its nest, and a desire to sting brought an unholy venomous shine to the monk's violet, hooded eyes.
'If you have advanced no further in these twenty-seven months,' Romanovich said, 'could it be because something happened about two years ago that frightened you off your research, and you have only recently begun again to power up this god-machine of yours and 'create'?'
'Brother Constantine's suicide,' I said.
'Which was not a suicide,' said Romanovich. 'Unconsciously, you had dispatched some abomination into the night, Dr. Heineman, and when Constantine saw it, he could not be allowed to live.'
Either the drawing cast a dark enchantment over the scientist monk or he did not trust himself to meet our eyes.
'You suspected what had happened, and you put your research on hold-but twisted pride made you return to it recently. Now Brother Timothy is dead… and even at this hour, you stalk your son through this monstrous surrogate.'
With his gaze still upon the drawing, a pulse jumping in his temples, Brother John said tightly, 'I long ago accused myself of my sins against my son and his mother.'
'And I believe your confession was even sincere,' Romanovich conceded.
'I received absolution.'
'You confessed and were forgiven, but some darker self within you did not confess and did not think he needed to be forgiven.'
'Sir, Brother Timothy's murder last night was… horrendous, inhuman. You have to help us stop this.'
All this time later, I am saddened to write that when Brother John's eyes welled with tears, which he managed not to spill, I half believed they were not for Tim but for himself.
Romanovich said, 'You progressed from postulant to novice, to professed monk. But you yourself have said you were spooked when your research led you to believe in a created universe, so you came to God in fear.'
Straining the words through his teeth, Brother John said, 'The motivation matters less than the contrition.'
'Perhaps,' Romanovich allowed. 'But most come to Him in love. And some part of you, some Other John, has not come to Him at all.'
With sudden intuition, I said, 'Brother John, the Other is an angry child.'
At last he looked up from the drawing and met my eyes.
'The child who, far too young, saw anarchy in the world and feared it. The child who resented being born into such a disordered world, who saw chaos and yearned to find order in it.'
Behind his violet windows, the Other regarded me with the contempt and self-regard of a child not yet acquainted with empathy and compassion, a child from whom the Better John had separated himself but from whom he had not escaped.
I called his attention to the drawing once more. 'Sir, the obsessed child who built a model of quantum foam out of forty-seven sets of Lego blocks is the same child who conceived of this complex mechanism of cold bones and efficient joints.'
As he studied the architecture of the bone beast, reluctantly he recognized that the obsession behind the Lego model was the same that inspired this eerie construction.
'Sir, there is still time. Time for that little boy to give up his anger and have his pain lifted.'
The surface tension of his pent-up tears abruptly broke, and one tracked down each cheek.
He looked up at me and, in a voice thick with sadness but also with bitterness, he said, 'No. It's too late.'
CHAPTER 53
FOR ALL I KNOW, DEATH HAD BEEN IN THE ROOM when the curved walls had bloomed with colorful patterns of imagined God thought, and had moved as our heads had turned, to stay always just out of our line of sight. But it came at me now as if it had just swept into the chamber in a cold fury, seized me, lifted me, pulled me face to face with it.
Instead of the previous void in the hood, confronting me was a brutal version of the face of Brother John, angular where his was round, hard where his was soft, a child's idea less of the face of Death than of the face of Power personified. The young genius who had recognized and feared the chaos of the world but who had been powerless to bring order to it had now empowered himself.
His breath was that of a machine, rife with the reek of smoking copper and scalding steel.
He threw me over the wingback chair, as if I were but a knotted mass of rags. I slammed into the cool, curved wall and jacked myself up from the floor even as I landed.
A wingback chair flew, I ducked and scooted, the wall rang like a glass bell, as it had not done when I struck it, the chair stayed where it fell, but I kept moving. And here came Death again.
At the window, the bronze rails and muntins strain and slightly tweak but do not fail. The keening of the frustrated attacker grows louder than the clatter of its busy bones.
'This geek,' Brother Maxwell decides, 'isn't scared of us.'
'It's gonna be before we're done,' Knuckles assures him.
Out of the kaleidoscopic beast and through one of the empty spaces where a windowpane had been, an urgent thrusting tentacle of scissoring bones invades five feet into the room.
The brothers stagger back in surprise.
The extruded form breaks off or is ejected from the mother mass, and collapses to the floor. Instantly the severed limb assembles into a version of the larger creature.
Pincered, spined, barbed, and hooked, as big as an industrial vacuum cleaner, it comes roach-quick, and Knuckles swings for the bleachers.
The Louisville Slugger slams some corrective discipline into the delinquent, splintering off clusters of bones. Knuckles steps toward the thing as it shudders backward, demolishes it with a second swing.
Through the window comes another thrusting tentacle, and as it detaches, Brother Maxwell shouts to Brother Fletcher, 'Get Jacob out of here!'
Brother Fletcher, having played some dangerous gigs in his salad days as a saxophonist, knows how to split a dive when customers start trading gunfire, so he is already scramming from the room with Jacob before Maxwell shouts. Entering the hallway, he hears Brother Gregory cry out that something is in the elevator shaft and is furiously intent on getting through the roof of the blocking cab.
