On the other hand, if I asked to see the tablet and he refused permission, that avenue of inquiry would be closed off.

Jacob’s last name was not revelatory, as I had thought it would be, but in this case, I did not think that intuition would fail me. The tablet seemed almost to glow, almost to be floating above the table, the most vivid thing in the room, hyper-real.

I slid the tablet in front of me, and Jacob either did not notice or did not care.

When I turned back the cover, I found a drawing of this room’s only window. Pressed to the glass was a kaleidoscope of bones, which he had rendered in exquisite detail.

Sensing that I had found something alarming, Romanovich took a step into the room.

I raised one hand to warn him to stop, but then held up the drawing so he could see it.

When I turned the page, I found another depiction of the beast at the same window, though in this one, the bones formed a pattern different from the first.

Either the thing had clung to the window long enough for Jacob to draw it in great detail, which I doubted, or he had a photographic memory.

The third drawing was of a robed figure wearing a necklace of human teeth and bones: Death as I had seen him in the bell tower, with pale hands and without a face.

As I was about to show this drawing to Romanovich, three bodachs slunk into the room, and I closed the tablet.

CHAPTER 43

EITHER NOT INTERESTED IN ME OR PRETENDING no interest, the three sinister shapes gathered around Jacob.

Their hands were fingerless, as devoid of detail as were their faces and forms. Yet they were more suggestive of paws — or the webbed extremities of amphibians — than of hands.

As Jacob worked, oblivious of his spirit visitors, they appeared to stroke his cheeks. Quivering with excitement, the specters traced the curve of his thick neck and kneaded his heavy shoulders.

Bodachs appear to experience this world with some if not all of the usual five senses, perhaps also with a sixth sense of their own, but they have no effect on things here. If a hundred were to rush past in a pack, they would make no sound, create no slightest draft.

They seemed to thrill to a radiance produced by Jacob that was invisible to me, perhaps his life force, knowing that soon it would be torn from him. When eventually the violence comes, the pending horror that has drawn them, they will shudder and spasm and swoon in ecstasy.

Previously, I have had reason to suspect that they might not be spirits. I sometimes wonder if they are instead time travelers who return to the past not physically but in virtual bodies.

If our current barbaric world spirals into greater corruption and brutality, our descendants may become so cruel and so morally perverse that they cross time to watch us suffer, bearing orgasmic witness to the bloodbaths from which their sick civilization grew.

In truth, that is a few small steps down from current audiences’ fascination with the wall-to-wall disaster coverage, bloody murder stories, and relentless fear-mongering that comprise TV news.

These descendants of ours would surely look like us and would be able to pass for us if they journeyed here in their real bodies. Therefore, the creepy bodach form, the virtual body, might be a reflection of their twisted, diseased souls.

One of these three prowled on all fours around the room, and sprang onto the bed, where it seemed to sniff the sheets.

As if it were smoke drawn by a draft, another bodach slithered through a crack under the bathroom door. I don’t know what it did in there, but for sure it didn’t take a potty break.

They don’t pass through walls and closed doors, as the lingering dead can do. They must have the crack, the chink, the open keyhole.

While they have no mass and should not be affected by gravity, the bodachs do not fly. They climb and descend stairs three or four at a time, in a lope, but never glide through the air as do movie ghosts. I have seen them race in frenzied packs, as swift as panthers but limited by the contours of the land.

They seem to be bound by some — but not all — rules of our world.

From the doorway, Romanovich said, “Is something wrong?”

I shook my head and subtly made a zip-your-lips gesture, which any real librarian should at once understand.

Although surreptitiously watching the bodachs, I pretended to be interested only in Jacob’s drawing of a boat at sea.

In all my life, I have encountered just one other person who could see bodachs, a six-year-old English boy. Moments after he had spoken aloud of these dark presences, within their hearing, he had been crushed by a runaway truck.

According to the Pico Mundo coroner, the driver of the truck had suffered a massive stroke and had collapsed against the steering wheel.

Yeah, right. And the sun comes up every morning by sheer chance, and mere coincidence explains why darkness follows sunset.

After the bodachs departed Room 14, I said to Romanovich, “For a minute there, we weren’t alone.”

I opened the tablet to the third drawing and stared at faceless Death festooned with human teeth. The following pages were blank.

When I turned the tablet to face Jacob and put it on the table near him, he did not glance at it, but remained fixated on his work.

“Jacob, where did you see this thing?”

He did not reply, and I hoped that he had not gone away from me again.

“Jake, I’ve seen this thing, too. Just today. At the top of the bell tower.”

Trading his pencil for another, Jacob said, “He comes here.”

“To this room, Jake? When did he come?”

“Many times he comes.”

“What does he do here?”

“Watches Jacob.”

“He just watches you?”

The sea began to flow from the pencil. The initial tones and textures committed to the paper suggested that the water would be undulant, ominous, and dark.

“Why does he watch you?” I asked.

“You know.”

“I do? I guess I forgot.”

“Wants me dead.”

“You said earlier that the Neverwas wants you dead.”

“He’s the Neverwas, and we don’t care.”

“This drawing, this hooded figure — is he the Neverwas?”

“Not scared of him.”

“Is this who came to see you when you were sick that time, when you were full of the black?”

“The Neverwas said, ‘Let him die’ but she wouldn’t let Jacob die.”

Either Jacob saw spirits, as I did, or this death figure was no more a spirit than had been the walking boneyard.

Seeking to establish the reality of it, I said, “Your mother saw the Neverwas?”

“She said come, and he came just the once.”

“Where were you when he came?”

“Where they all wore white and squeaked in their shoes and used the needles for medicine.”

“So you were in the hospital, and the Neverwas came. But did he come in a black robe with a hood, with a necklace of human teeth?”

“No. Not like that, not back in the long ago, only now.”

“And he had a face then, didn’t he?”

In graded tones, the sea formed, full of its own darkness, but brightened elsewhere by reflections of the sky.

“Jacob, did he have a face in the long ago?”

“A face and hands, and she said, ‘What’s wrong with you,’ and the Neverwas said, ‘What’s wrong is with him,’ and she said, ‘My God, my God, are you afraid to touch him,’ and he said, ‘Don’t be a bitch about it.’ “

He lifted his pencil from the paper because his hand had begun to tremble.

The emotion in his voice had been intense. Toward the end of that soliloquy, his mild speech impediment had thickened.

Concerned that I might drive him into withdrawal by pressing too hard, I gave him time to settle.

When his hand stopped trembling, he returned to the creation of the sea.

I said, “You are being such a help to me, Jake. You are being a friend to me, and I know this isn’t easy for you, but I love you for being such a friend to me.”

He glanced almost furtively at me, then returned his gaze at once to the drawing paper.

“Jake, will you draw something especially for me? Will you draw the face of the Neverwas, the way he looked in the long ago?

“Can’t,” he said.

“I’m pretty sure you have a photographic memory. That means you remember everything you see, in great detail, even from long before the ocean and the bell and the floating away.” I glanced at the wall with the many portraits of his mother. “Like your mother’s face. Am I right, Jake? Do you remember everything from long ago as clear as if you just saw it an hour ago?”

He said, “It hurts.”

“What hurts, Jake?”

“All of it, so clear.”

“I’ll bet it does. I know it does. My girl has been gone sixteen months, and I see her clearer every day.”

He drew, and I waited.

Then I said, “Do you know how old you were that time in the hospital?”

“Seven. I was seven.”

“So will you draw me the face of the Neverwas, from that time in the hospital when you were seven?”

“Can’t. My eyes was funny then. Like a window with the rain and nothing looks right through it.”

“Your vision was blurred that day?”

“Blurred.”

“From the sickness, you mean.” My hope deflated. “I guess it might have been blurred.”

I turned back one tablet page to the second drawing of the bone kaleidoscope at the window.

“How often have you seen this thing, Jake?”

“More than one thing. Different ones.”

“How often have they been at the window?”

“Three times.”

“Just three? When?”

“Two times yesterday.

Then when I woke from the sleep.”

“When you woke up this morning?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve seen them, too,” I told him. “I can’t figure out what they are. What do you think they are, Jake?”

“The dogs of the Neverwas,” he said without hesitation. “I’m not scared of them.”

“Dogs, huh? I don’t see dogs.”

“Not dogs but like dogs,” he explained. “Like really bad dogs, he teaches to kill, and he sends them, and they kill.”

“Attack dogs,” I said.

“I’m not scared, and I won’t be.”

“You’re a very brave young man, Jacob Calvino.”

“She said … she said don’t be scared, we wasn’t born to be all the time scared, we was born happy, babies laugh at everything, we was born happy and to make a better world.”

“I wish I’d known your mother.”

“She said everyone … everyone, if he’s rich or he’s poor, if he’s somebody big or nobody at all — everyone has a grace.” A look of peace came over his embattled face when he said the word grace. “You know what a grace is?”

“Yes.”

“A grace is a thing you get from God, you use it to make a better world, or not use it, you have to choose.”

“Like your art,” I said. “Like your beautiful drawings.”

He said, “Like your pancakes.”

“Ah, you know I made those pancakes, huh?”

“Those pancakes, that’s a grace.”

“Thank you, Jake. That’s very kind of you.” I closed the second tablet and got up from my chair. “I have to go now, but I’d like to come back, if that’s all right.”

“All right.”

“Are you going to be okay?”

“All right, okay,” he assured me.

I went to his side of the table, put a hand on his shoulder, and studied the drawing from his perspective.

He was a superb renderer, but he wasn’t just that. He understood the qualities of light, the fact of light even in shadow, the beauty of light and the need for it.

At the window, though the winter twilight lay a few hours away, most of the light had been choked out of the blizzard-throttled sky. Already the day had come to dusk.

Earlier, Jacob had warned me that the dark would come with the dark. Maybe we couldn’t expect that death would wait for full night. Maybe the gloom of this false dusk was dark enough.

CHAPTER 44

OUTSIDE ROOM 14, AFTER I LEFT JACOB WITH the promise to return, Rodion Romanovich said, “Mr. Thomas, your questioning of that young man — it was not done as I would have done it.”

“Yes, sir, but the nuns have an absolute rule against ripping out fingernails with pliers.”

“Well, even nuns are not right about everything. What I was about to say, however, is that you drew him out as well as anyone could have done. I am impressed.”

“I don’t know, sir. I’m circling close to it, but I’m not there yet. He has the key. I was sent to him earlier in the day because he has the key.”

“Sent to him by whom?”

“By someone dead who tried to help me through Justine.”

“Through the drowned girl you mentioned earlier, the one who was dead and then revived.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I was right about you,” Romanovich said. “Complex, complicated, even intricate.”

“But innocuous,” I assured him.

Unaware that she walked through a cluster of bodachs, scattering them, Sister Angela came to us.

She started to speak, and I zipped my lips again. Her periwinkle blues narrowed, for although she understood about bodachs, she wasn’t used to being told to shut up.

When the malign spirits had vanished into various rooms, I said, “Ma’am, I’m hoping you can help me. Jacob here — what do you know about his father?”

“His father? Nothing.”

“I thought you had backgrounds on all the kids.”

“We do. But Jacob’s mother was never married.”

“Jenny Calvino. So that’s a maiden — not a married — name.”

“Yes. Before she died of cancer, she arranged for Jacob to be admitted to another church home.”

“Twelve years ago.”

“Yes. She had no family to take him, and on the forms, where the father’s name was requested, I’m sad to say, she wrote unknown.”

I said, “I never met the lady, but from even what little I know about her, I can’t believe she was so promiscuous that she wouldn’t know.”

“It’s a world of sorrow, Oddie, because we make it so.”