CHAPTER 49

IF ANY EXITS FROM THE SCHOOL WERE BEING monitored by skeletal sentinels, the front door, the garage doors, and the mud-room door adjacent the kitchen would be the most likely places for them to concentrate their attention.

Romanovich and I agreed to depart the building by a window in Sister Angela's office, which was the point farthest removed from the three doors that most invited the enemy's attention. Although the mother superior was not present, her desk lamp glowed.

Indicating the posters of George Washington, Flannery O'Connor, and Harper Lee, I said, "The sister has a riddle, sir. What shared quality does she most admire in those three people?"

He didn't have to ask who the women were. "Fortitude," he said. " Washington obviously had it. Ms. O'Connor suffered from lupus but refused to let it defeat her. And Ms. Lee needed fortitude to live in that place at that time, publish that book, and deal with the bigots who were angered by her portrait of them."

"Two of them being writers, you had a librarian's advantage."

When I switched off the lamp and opened the drapes, Romanovich said, "It is still a total whiteout. We will be disoriented and lost ten steps from the school."

"Not with my psychic magnetism, sir."

"Do they still include prizes in boxes of Cracker Jack?''

With a twinge of guilt, I opened a couple of Sister Angela's desk drawers, found a pair of scissors, and cut off six feet of drapery cord. I wrapped one end around my gloved right hand.

"When we're outside, I'll give you the other end, sir. Then we won't be separated even if we're snow-blind."

"I do not understand, Mr. Thomas. Are you saying that the cord will act as some kind of dowsing rod leading us to the abbey?"

"No, sir. The cord just keeps us together. If I concentrate on a person that I need to find, and drive or walk around awhile, I'll almost always be drawn to him by my psychic magnetism. I'm going to be thinking about Brother John Heineman, who is in the Mew."

"How interesting. The most interesting part, to me, is the adverb almost."

"Well, I'm the first to admit that I don't live rent-free in Eden."

"And what does that mean when you admit it, Mr. Thomas?"

"I'm not perfect, sir."

After making sure that my hood was firmly fastened under my chin, I raised the bottom half of the double-hung window, went out into the roar and rush of the storm, and scanned the day for signs of cemetery escapees. If I'd seen any shambling bones, I would have been in big trouble, because visibility was down to an arm's length.

Romanovich followed me and closed the window behind us. We were not able to lock it, but our warrior monks and nuns could not guard the entire building, anyway; they were even now retreating to the second floor, to defend that more limited position.

I watched the Russian tie the loose end of the cord to his wrist. The tether between us was about four and a half feet long.

Only six steps from the school, I became disoriented. I had no clue which direction would bring us to the abbey.

I summoned into mind an image of Brother John sitting in one of the armchairs in his mysterious receiving room, down in the Mew, and I slogged forward, reminding myself to be alert for a loss of tension on the cord.

The snow lay everywhere at least knee-deep, and in places the drifts came nearly to my hips. Wading uphill through an avalanche couldn't have been a whole lot more annoying than this.

Being a Mojave boy, I again found the bitter cold only slightly more appealing than machine-gun fire. But the cacophony of the storm, combined with the whiteout, was the worst of it. Step by frigid step, a weird kind of open-air claustrophobia got a grip on me.

I also resented that the deafening hoot-and-boom of the wind prevented Romanovich and me from saying a word. During the weeks that he had been in the guesthouse, he'd seemed to be a taciturn old bear; but as this day had unfolded, he had become positively loquacious. I was enjoying our conversations as much now that we were allied in a cause as when I had thought that we were enemies.

Once they have exhausted the subject of Indianapolis and its many wonders, a lot of people have nothing more of interest to say.

I knew we had reached the stone stairs down to John's Mew when I stumbled into them and nearly fell. Snow had drifted against the door at the bottom of the steps.

The cast-bronze words libera nos a malo, on the plaque above the door, had mostly been obscured by encrusting snow, so that instead of reading Deliver us from evil, it read simply evil.

After I unlocked the half-ton door, it pivoted open smoothly on ball-bearing hinges, revealing the stone corridor bathed in blue light.

We went inside, and the door closed, and we disengaged ourselves from the tether that had kept us together during the slog.

"That was most impressive, Mr. Thomas."

"Psychic magnetism isn't an earned skill, sir. Taking pride in it would be like taking pride in how well my kidneys function."

We brushed snow from our coats, and he took off his bearskin hat to shake it.

At the brushed stainless-steel door with LUMIN DE LUMINE embedded in polished letters, I knocked one foot against the other to shed as much caked snow as possible.

Romanovich removed his zippered boots and stood in dry shoes, a more considerate guest than I.

Translating the words on the door, he said, "'Light from light.'"

"'Waste and void, waste and void. Darkness on the face of the deep,'" I said. "Then God commanded light. The light of the world descends from the Everlasting Light that is God."

"That is surely one thing it means," said Romanovich. "But it may also mean that the visible can be born from the invisible, that matter can arise from energy, that thought is a form of energy and that thought itself can be concretized into the very object that is imagined."

"Well, sir, that's a mouthful to get out of three words."

"Most assuredly," he agreed.

I flattened the palm and fingers of my right hand against the plasma screen in the wide steel architrave.

The pneumatic door slid open with the engineered hiss intended to remind Brother John that in every human enterprise, no matter with what good intentions it is undertaken, a serpent lurks. Considering where his work apparently had led him, perhaps in addition to the hiss, loud bells should have rung, lights should have flashed, and an ominous recorded voice should have said Some things men were never meant to know.

We stepped into the seamless, wax-yellow, porcelain-like vessel where buttery light emanated from the walls. The doors hissed shut at our backs, the light faded, and darkness enveloped us.

"I have no sense of motion," I said, "but I'm pretty sure it's an elevator, and we're going down a few floors."

"Yes," Romanovich said, "and I suspect that surrounding us is an enormous lead reservoir filled with heavy water."

"Really? That thought hadn't occurred to me."

"No, it would not."

"What is heavy water, sir, besides being obviously heavier than ordinary water?"

"Heavy water is water in which the hydrogen atoms have been replaced with deuterium."

"Yes, of course. I'd forgotten. Most people buy it at the grocery store, but I prefer to get the million-gallon jug at Costco."

A door hissed open in front of us, and we stepped into the vestibule bathed in red light.

"Sir, what is the purpose of heavy water?"

"It is used chiefly as a coolant in nuclear reactors, but here I believe it has other purposes, including perhaps, secondarily, as an additional layer of shielding against cosmic radiation that might affect subatomic experiments."

In the vestibule, we ignored the plain stainless-steel doors to the left and right, and went forward to the door in which were embedded the words PER OMNIA SAECULA SAECULORUM.