Beneath the veneer of a face lay the fullness of what I had only glimpsed in the eye sockets, in the yawning mouth: a phantasmagoria of bony forms linked by hinge joints, by pivot joints, by ellipsoidal joints, by ball-and-socket joints, and by joints for which no names existed, and which were not natural to this world.

The apparition appeared to be a solid mass of bones combined so intimately that they must be fused, compacted so completely that they could have no room to rotate or flex. Yet they did rotate and flex and pivot and more, seemed to move not merely in three dimensions but in four, in an unceasing exhibition of dexterity that astonished and amazed.

Imagine that all the universe and all of time are together kept in right motion and in perfect balance by an infinite gearbox, and in your mind look down into that intricate mechanism, and you will have a sense of my incomprehension, awe, and terror as I stood before the uberskeleton that churned and ticked and flexed and clicked, peeling the gossamer remnants of Brother Tim away from itself.

Something moved vigorously under the dead monk's tunic.

If popcorn, Pepsi, and a comfortable chair had been available, I might have stayed. But the cooling tower was an inhospitable place, dusty and drafty, offering no refreshments.

Besides, I had an appointment with the Hoosier librarian cake-baker in the school garage. I am loath to be late for an engagement. Tardiness is rude.

A piton popped out of the wall. The fibrous tether reeled that wedge into the kaleidoscopic boneworks, incorporating it in a wink. Another piton came loose, raveled back to Papa.

This rough beast, its hour come 'round at last, didn't need to slouch to Bethlehem to be born. Sharp white blades slashed through the tunic from within, shredding it. No need for Rosemary; no need to waste years as a baby.

The time had come either to light the black candles and start chanting in admiration-or blow this dump.

Boo had already scrammed. I vamoosed.

I pulled the door shut between the cooling tower and the service passage and fumbled with my key for a moment before I realized that the lock only kept people out; I couldn't lock anyone inside.

The four hundred feet to the school appeared to be immeasurable miles, the ceiling lights receding to Pittsburgh and beyond.

Boo was already out of sight. Maybe he had taken a shortcut through another dimension to the school boiler room.

I wished I'd been hanging on to his tail.

WHEN I HAD SPRINTED ABOUT A HUNDRED feet, I heard the cooling-tower door slam open. The crash boomed like a shotgun blast through the service passageway.

Tommy Cloudwalker's Mojave pal, the three-headed poster boy for the evils of smoking, seemed more likely to exist than did the skeletonized boogeyman that now coveted my bones. But fear of this thing was a rational fear.

Brother Timothy had been sweet, kind, and devout; yet look what happened to him. A shiftless, unemployed, smart-ass specimen like me, who had never exercised his precious American right to vote, who had accepted a compliment at the expense of the late James Dean, ought to expect a fate even more gruesome than Tim's, though I couldn't imagine one.

I glanced over my shoulder.

As it advanced through alternating pools of shadow and light, my pursuer's method of locomotion could not clearly be discerned, though these were not steps that it had learned at a dance studio. It seemed to be marshaling some of its numerous bones into stubby legs, but not all were legs of the same design, and they moved independently of one another, foiling one another and causing the eager creature to lurch.

I was still moving, repeatedly glancing back, not standing in thoughtful contemplation and making notes of my impressions of the beast, but in retrospect I think that I was most alarmed to see it progressing not on the floor but along the junction of the ceiling and the right-hand wall. It was a climber, which meant the children's quarters on the second floor would be more difficult to defend than I had hoped.

Furthermore, as it came, the entire structure of it appeared to turn ceaselessly, as if it were drilling forward like an auger boring through wood. The word machine came to mind, as it had when I watched another of these things flexing itself into one elaborate new pattern after another, against the reception-lounge window.

Tripping again, my pursuer lost its perch and clattered down the wall to the floor. Scissoring jacks of bone cranked it erect, and it came forward, eager but uncertain.

Perhaps it was learning its capabilities, as does any newborn. Maybe this was a Kodak moment, baby's first steps.

By the time I reached the intersection with the passageway that evidently led to the new abbey, I felt confident that I would be able to outrun the thing-unless its learning curve was very steep.

Glancing back again, I saw that it was not just clumsy but also had become translucent. The light from the overhead fixtures did not play across its contours any longer, but seemed to pass through it, as if it were made of milky glass.

For a moment, as it faltered to a halt, I thought it was going to dematerialize, not at all like a machine but like a spirit. Then the translucency passed from it, and it became solid again, and it surged forward.

A familiar keening drew my attention toward the intersecting passage. Far uphill, in the voice that I had heard earlier in the storm, another of these things expressed its sincere desire to have a tête-à-tête with me.

From this distance, I couldn't be certain of its size, but I suspected that it was considerably larger than the lovely that had come out of the chrysalis. It moved with confidence, too, with grace, glissading without benefit of snow, legs churning in a faultless rhythm, with centipede swiftness.

So I did one of the things that I do best: I ran like a sonofabitch.

I only had two legs instead of a hundred, and I was wearing ski boots when I should have been in athletic shoes with air-cushioned insoles, but I had the benefit of wild desperation and the energy provided by Sister Regina Marie's superb beef sandwich. I almost made it to the boiler room safely ahead of Satan and Satan Junior, or whatever they were.

Then something tangled around my feet. I cried out, fell, and scrambled up at once, flailing at my assailant until I realized that it was the quilted thermal jacket I had shucked off earlier because of the whistling noise it made.

As if a chorus line of frenzied skeletons were tapping out the final bars of the show's big number, the clickety-clack of my pursuer rose to a crescendo.

I turned, and it was right there.

As one, the regimented legs, different from but as hideous as those of a Jerusalem cricket, clattered to a halt. Although knuckled, knobbed, ribbed, and bristling, the forward half of the twelve-foot apparition rose off the floor with serpentine elegance.

We were face to face, or would have been if I hadn't been the only one of us with a face.

Across the whole of it, patterns of elaborately integrated bones blossomed, withered, were replaced by new forms and patterns, but in a tickless, clickless quicksilver hush.

This silent exhibition was intended to display its absolute and otherworldly control of its physiology, and to leave me terrified and abashed at my comparative weakness. As when I had watched it at the window, I sensed an overweening vanity in its display of itself, an arrogance that was eerily human, a pompous-ness and boastfulness that exceeded mere vanity and that might be called vainglory

I backed up a step, another. "Kiss my ass, you ugly bastard."

In a rending fury, it fell upon me, ice-cold and merciless. Uncountable maxillas and mandibles chewed, spurred heelbones ripped, stiletto-sharp phalanges gouged, a whiplike spine with hooked and razored vertebrae slashed me open from abdomen to throat, and my heart was found and torn apart, and thereafter what I could do for the children of St. Bartholomew's School was limited to what power I might have as one of the lingering dead.