Brother Odd

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Even Brother Timothy, on a dangerous sugar high and crazed by Kit Kat guilt, didn’t scare me.

The glowering Russian staying on the second floor of the guesthouse was a more deserving object of suspicion. He did not wear a porkpie hat, but he had a dour demeanor and secretive ways.

My months of peace and contemplation were at an end.

The demands of my gift, the silent but insistent pleas of the lingering dead, the terrible losses that I had not always been able to prevent: These things had driven me to the seclusion of St. Bartholomew’s Abbey. I needed to simplify my life.

I had not come to this high redoubt forever. I had only asked God for a time-out, which had been granted, but now the clock was ticking again.

When I backed out of the heating-and-cooling-system schema, the computer monitor went to black with a simple white menu. In that more reflective screen, I saw movement behind me.

For seven months, the abbey had been a still point in the river, where I turned in a lazy gyre, always in sight of the same familiar shore, but now the true rhythm of the river asserted itself. Sullen, untamed, and intractable, it washed away my sense of peace and washed me toward my destiny once more.

Expecting a hard blow or the thrust of something sharp, I spun the office chair around, toward the source of the reflection in the computer screen.