Dean Koontz: Brother Odd

As he bends down and grips that weapon, he hears a pane of glass crack above him, and as he startles upright, he shouts, "Salvatore!"

Although it had formed out of cubes, the floppy was as furry, cuddly, and floppy as its name. Its huge ears drooped over its face, and it brushed them back with one paw, then rose on its hind feet. The Pillsbury Doughboy might have something like this as his pet.

His face a portrait of enchantment, Brother John said, "All my life, I've been obsessed with order. With finding order within chaos. With imposing order on chaos. And here is this sweet little thing, born out of the chaos of thought, out of the void, out of nothing."

Still standing, no less wary than when he had expected one of the boneyards to rise up before him, Romanovich said, "Surely you have not shown this to the abbot."

"Not yet," Brother John said. "In fact, you're the first to see this… this proof of God."

"Does the abbot even know your research was leading to… this?"

Brother John shook his head. "He understands that I intended to prove that at the bottom of physical reality, under the last layer of apparent chaos is ordered thought waves, the mind of God. But I never told him that I would create living proof."

"You never told him," Romanovich said, his voice groaning under the weight of his astonishment.

Smiling at his creation as it tottered this way and that, Brother John said, "I wanted to surprise him."

"Surprise him?" Romanovich traded astonishment for disbelief. "Surprise him?"

"Yes. With proof of God."

With barely throttled contempt, more directly than I might have said it under these circumstances, Romanovich declared, "This is not proof of God. This is blasphemy."

Brother John flinched as if he had been slapped, but recovered at once. "I'm afraid you haven't entirely followed what I've told you, Mr. Romanovich."

The giggling, toddling, big-eyed floppy did not at first glance seem like a work of supreme blasphemy. My initial take was: furry, cute, cuddly, adorable.

When I sat down on the edge of my chair and leaned forward to have a closer look at it, however, I got a chill as sharp as an icicle in the eye.

The floppy's big blue peepers did not engage me, did not have the curiosity of a kitten's or puppy's eyes. They were vacant; a void lay beyond them.

The musical burbling and the giggle charmed, like the recorded voice of a toy-until I reminded myself that here was not a toy, that here was a living being. Then its utterances reminded me of the low muttering of dead-eyed dolls in nightmares.

I rose from the chair and took a step or two back from Brother John's dark miracle.

"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."

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."