For ever and ever.
Through hissing doors, through buttery light and blue, I went to the surface, into the night, and locked the bronze door with my universal key.
LIBERA NOS A MALO said the door.
Deliver us from evil.
As I climbed the stone steps to the abbey yard, snow began to fall. Huge flakes turned gracefully in the windless dark, turned as if to a waltz that I could not hear.
The night did not seem as frigid as it had been earlier. Perhaps I had been colder in John’s Mew than I realized, and by comparison to that realm, the winter night seemed mild.
In moments, the flakes as big as frosted flowers gave way to smaller formations. The air filled with fine shavings of the unseen clouds.
This was the moment that I had been waiting for at the window of my small guest suite, before Boo and bodach had appeared in the yard below.
Until coming to this monastery, I had spent my life in the town of Pico Mundo, in the California desert. I had never seen snow fall until, earlier in the night, the sky had spit out a few flakes in a false start.
Here in the first minute of the true storm, I stood transfixed by the spectacle, taking on faith what I had heard, that no two snowflakes are alike.
The beauty took my breath, the way the snow fell and yet the night was still, the intricacy of the simplicity. Although the night would have been even more beautiful if she had been here to share it with me, for a moment all was well, all manner of things were well, and then of course someone screamed.
The sharp cry of alarm was so brief that you might have thought it was imagined or that a night bird, chased by snow to the shelter of the forest, had shrilled just as it flew overhead and away.
In the summer of the previous year, when gunmen stormed the mall in Pico Mundo, I had heard so many screams that I hoped my ears would fail me thereafter. Forty-one innocent people had been shot. Nineteen perished. I would have traded music and the voices of my friends for a silence that would exclude for the rest of my life all human cries of pain and mortal terror.
We so often hope for the wrong things, and my selfish hope was not fulfilled. I am not deaf to pain or blind to blood—or dead, as for a while I might have wished to be.
Instinctively, I hurried around the nearby corner of the abbey. I turned north along the refectory, in which the monks take their meals, and no lights were aglow at one o’clock in the morning.
Squinting through the screening snow, I scanned the night toward the western forest. If someone was out there, the storm hid him.
The refectory formed an inner corner with the library wing. I headed west again, past deep-set windows beyond which lay a darkness of ordered books.
As I turned the southwest corner of the library, I almost fell over a man lying facedown on the ground. He wore the hooded black habit of a monk.
Surprise brought cold air suddenly into my lungs—a brief ache in the chest—and expelled it in a pale rushing plume.
I dropped to my knees at the monk’s side, but then hesitated to touch him, for fear that I would find he had not merely fallen, that he had been beaten to the ground.
The world beyond this mountain retreat was largely barbarian, a condition it had been striving toward for perhaps a century and a half. A once-glorious civilization was now only a pretense, a mask allowing barbarians to commit ever greater cruelties in the name of virtues that a truly civilized world would have recognized as evils.
Having fled that barbaric disorder, I was reluctant to admit that no place was safe, no retreat beyond the reach of anarchy. The huddled form on the ground beside me might be proof, more solid than bodachs, that no haven existed to which I could safely withdraw.
Anticipating his smashed face, his slashed face, I touched him as snow ornamented his plain tunic. With a shudder of expectation, I turned him on his back.
The falling snow seemed to bring light to the night, but it was a ghost light that illuminated nothing. Although the hood had slipped back from the victim’s face, I could not see him clearly enough to identify him.
Putting a hand to his mouth, I felt no breath, also no beard. Some of the brothers wear beards, but some do not.
I pressed my fingertips to his throat, which was still warm, and felt for the artery. I thought I detected a pulse.
Because my hands were half numb with cold and therefore less sensitive to heat, I might not have felt a faint exhalation, when I had touched his lips.
As I leaned forward to put my ear to his mouth, hoping to hear at least a sigh of breath, I was struck from behind.
No doubt the assailant meant to shatter my skull. He swung just as I bent forward, and the club grazed the back of my head, thumped hard off my left shoulder.
I pitched forward, rolled to the left, rolled again, scrambled to my feet, ran. I had no weapon. He had a club and maybe something worse, a knife.
The hands-on kind of killers, the gunless kind, might stave in with a club or strangle with a scarf, but most of them carry blades, as well, for backup, or for entertainment that might come as foreplay or as aftermath.
The guys in the porkpie hats, mentioned earlier, had blackjacks and guns and even a hydraulic automobile press, and still they had carried knives. If your work is deathwork, one weapon is not enough, just as a plumber would not answer an urgent service call with a single wrench.
Although life has made me old for my age, I am still fast in my youth. Hoping my assailant was older and therefore slower, I sprinted away from the abbey, into the open yard, where there were no corners in which to be cornered.
I hurled myself through the snowfall, so it seemed as though a wind had sprung up, pasting flakes to my lashes.
In this second minute of the storm, the ground remained black, unchanged by the blizzard’s brush. Within a few bounding steps, the land began to slope gently toward woods that I could not see, open dark descending toward a bristling dark.
Intuition insisted that the forest would be the death of me. Running into it, I would be running to my grave.
The wilds are not my natural habitat. I am a town boy, at home with pavement under my feet, a whiz with a library card, a master at the gas grill and griddle.
If my pursuer was a beast of the new barbarism, he might not be able to make a fire with two sticks and a stone, might not be able to discern true north from the growth of moss on trees, but his lawless nature would make him more at home in the woods than I would ever be.
I needed a weapon, but I had nothing except my universal key, a Kleenex, and insufficient martial-arts knowledge to make a deadly weapon of them.
Cut grass relented to tall grass, and ten yards later, nature put weapons under my feet: loose stones that tested my agility and balance. I skidded to a halt, stooped, scooped up two stones the size of plums, turned, and threw one, threw it hard, and then the other.
The stones vanished into snow and gloom. I had either lost my pursuer or, intuiting my intent, he had circled around me when I stopped and stooped.
I clawed more missiles off the ground, turned 360 degrees, and surveyed the night, ready to pelt him with a couple of half-pound stones.
Nothing moved but the snow, seeming to come down in skeins as straight as the strands of a beaded curtain, yet each flake turning as it fell.
I could see no more than fifteen feet. I had never realized that snow could fall heavily enough to limit visibility this much.
Once,