I took one step toward where the school ought to be, but then halted, retracted that step. I turned uphill but dared not retreat to the abbey. Something unseen in the camouflaging storm, something with an alien voice full of need and fury, seemed to await me no matter in which direction I proceeded.

STRIPPING VELCRO FROM VELCRO, PUSHING BACK the insulated hood of my jacket, I raised my head, turned my head, cocked my head, striving to determine from which point of the compass the cry arose.

Icy wind tossed my hair and frosted it with snow, boxed my ears and made them burn.

All magic had been snuffed from the storm. The grace of falling snow was now a graceless wildness, a churning maelstrom as raw and flaying as human rage.

I had the strange perception, beyond my power to explain, that reality had shifted, down there twenty powers of ten below the level of protons, that nothing was as it had been, nothing as it should be.

Even with my hood off, I could not locate the source of the eerie keening. The wind might be distorting and displacing the sound, but perhaps the cry seemed to come from every side because more than one shrieking entity prowled the snowblind morning.

Reason asserted that anything stalking me must be of the Sierra, but this didn't sound like wolves or mountain lions. And bears were cavebound now, lost in dreams of fruit and honey.

I am not a guy who likes to pack a gun. My mother's affection for her pistol-and the threats of suicide that she employed to control me when I was a child-left me with a preference for other forms of self-defense.

Over the years, in pinches and crunches, I have survived- often just barely-by the effective use of such weapons as fists, feet, knees, elbows, a baseball bat, a shovel, a knife, a rubber snake, a real snake, three expensive antique porcelain vases, about a hundred gallons of molten tar, a bucket, a lug wrench, an angry cross-eyed ferret, a broom, a frying pan, a toaster, butter, a fire hose, and a large bratwurst.

As reckless as this strategy might be in my case, I prefer to rely on my wits rather than on a personal armory. Unfortunately, at that moment in the meadow, my wits were so dry that I could wring from them no idea except that perhaps I should make snowballs.

Because I doubted that my eerily keening, unknown stalkers were mischievous ten-year-old boys, I rejected the snowball defense. I pulled the hood over my half-frozen head and fixed the Velcro clasp under my chin.

These cries were purposeful, but in spite of how different they were from other chaotic blusterings of the storm, perhaps they were only wind noises, after all.

When my wits fail me, I resort to self-deception.

I started toward the school again and at once detected movement to my left, at the periphery of vision.

Turning to confront the threat, I saw something white and quick, visible only because it was angular and bristling in contrast to the undulant billow and whirl of falling and upswept snow. Like a goblin in a dream, it was gone even as it appeared, infolding into the downfall, leaving a vague impression of sharp points, hard edges, gloss and translucency.

The keening stopped. The groan and hiss and whistle of the wind sounded almost welcoming without that other craving cry.

Movies offer no wisdom and have little to do with real life, but I remembered old adventure films in which the ceaseless pounding of jungle drums had put the sweaty pith-helmeted explorers on edge. The abrupt cessation of the drumming was never the relief that it ought to have been, however, because often the silence signaled imminent attack.

I suspected Hollywood had gotten that one right.

Sensing that I was soon to receive something worse and stranger than a poison dart in the throat or an arrow through an eye, I cast aside indecision and hurried toward the school.

Something loomed in the storm ahead and to the right, veiled by snow, suggestive of the bare frosted limbs of a tree thrashing in the wind. Not a tree. No trees stood in the meadow between the abbey and the school.

Instead, I had glimpsed a narrow aspect of a mysterious presence that was more aware than wood, that moved not as the wind commanded it but with a fierce purpose of its own.

Having revealed only enough to make of itself a deeper enigma than it had been previously, the thing drew cloaks of snow around itself, vanishing. It had not gone away, still paralleled me out of sight, like a lion pacing a gazelle that had become separated from its herd.

Intuitively perceived but not seen, another predator rose at my back. I became convinced that I would be seized from behind and that my head would be ripped off as if it were the pull-tab on a can of cola.

I do not want a fancy funeral. I would be embarrassed by flowery tributes delivered over my casket. On the other hand, I do not want my death to be observed solely by the belch of some beast that has slaked its thirst with my precious bodily fluids.

As I plunged across the sloping meadow, kicking through drifts, heart knocking, the all-enveloping whiteness of the blizzard bleached my vision. The fluorescence of the snow made my eyes ache, and the driven flakes appeared to strobe.

In this further-reduced visibility, something crossed my path, perhaps ten feet ahead, from right to left, its size and shape and nature obscured, but not simply obscured, also distorted, surely distorted, because the quick scuttling something, judging by the portion briefly glimpsed in glare, appeared to be a construct of bones jacketed in ice. With its impossible biological architecture, it should have moved, if at all, with a shambling instability but instead exhibited a wicked kind of grace, a visual glissando of rippling motion, gliding past, gone.

I had momentum, and the school was near, so I didn't halt or turn, but crossed the tracks of whatever had passed in front of me. I didn't pause to examine the prints it left. The fact that there were prints proved that I hadn't been hallucinating.

No keening rose-just the stillness of imminent attack, the sense of something rearing up behind me to strike-and through my mind flew words like horde, host, legion, swarm.

Snow had drifted across the front steps of the school. The footprints of the searchers, who had been here seeking poor Brother Timothy, had already been erased by the wind.

I scrambled up the steps, tore open the door, expecting to be snatched off the threshold, one step from safety. I crossed into the reception lounge, shoved the door shut, leaned against it.

The moment that I was out of the wind, out of the eye-searing glare, in a bath of warm air, the pursuit seemed like a dream from which I had awakened, the beasts in the blizzard only figments of a particularly vivid nightmare. Then something scraped against the far side of the door.