“Pfeil!” Don yelled. “Stop or I’ll shoot.”
The minister had no intention of stopping. He pressed his attack even more fiercely, the knife swishing through the air so fast Pfeil could have been cutting down weeds with a sickle. Don was still backing up. He knew he should shoot, but a part of him refused, because he’d be gunning down the Lutheran minister. The knife made a swooshing sound as it passed within an inch of Don’s nose.
Don tripped, nearly losing his balance, and Pfeil leaped at him.
Don aimed at the minister’s legs and fired.
Pfeil dropped, falling face-first into the wet leaves that covered the thawing earth. Quickly Don swung his weapon toward the men who’d accompanied the clergyman, but they were just standing around, looking bewildered. Tommy Quirk was still holding Jean, looking as if part of him wanted to help Don while another part wanted to flee with his semiconscious wife as fast as he could.
“Look out,” Tommy Quirk shouted, and Don whirled.
Pfeil was getting to his feet. Don stepped toward him, intending to take the knife away from him, but the minister slashed at Don with it, forcing him to back away.
“Drop it,” Don ordered, leveling his weapon.
Pfeil stood up, took a wobbly step, then another. He raised the knife. He was grinning.
“Pfeil,” Don said, but he never got to complete the warning because the minister charged. Don shot him again, the bullet hitting the clergyman in the shoulder. This time he didn’t fall. He swayed, looking at Don with eyes that were filled with something approximating glee.
“Die,” Pfeil said, his words raspy, barely audible. “Gonna die.”
Then, despite his wounds, he attacked once more. And again Don shot him.
The bullet hit the minister in the chest. He stood there, a perplexed expression on his face, still holding the knife in front of him. Then he smiled, and it was the smug, self-satisfied grin of one who’d just had the last laugh. I win, it seemed to say. And you’re a dumb shit. Dropping the knife, Pfeil sank to the ground. Again Don turned to check on the men who’d accompanied the minister, but they were still simply standing there, appearing dazed.
“Oh, shit,” Tommy Quirk said. He was staring at something, wide-eyed.
Don followed Quirk’s gaze and found himself involuntarily sucking in his breath. Pfeil was lying face-up, two red stains on the front of his shirt, his eyes open and staring heavenward, as if asking God to forgive him. But they were dull and lifeless eyes that were seeing nothing. Don had to blink to make sure he was truly seeing what he was seeing.
Something was rising from the dead clergyman.
A shadow and yet not a shadow.
An undulating darkness.
It seemed to be seeping from every pore in Pfeil’s body, congealing above him into an oblong blackness. Looking at it was like staring into an endless darkness. And yet it had no thickness, cast no shadow. Unable to comprehend what was happening, Don’s mind desperately tried to find an explanation. It was an opening, a portal into the world of the dead, through which Pfeil was passing. It was the minister’s soul rising from the body. And then Don quit trying to make sense of what he was seeing, because doing so was beyond his ability. How did you explain the impossible?
The shadow rippled, shifting from a horizontal oblong to a vertical one. Then it wavered again, sending out tendrils, narrowing in the middle. It was taking on a distinct form. And it was absolutely nothing Don had seen before—even when as a boy he’d watched all those old science fiction movies on TV. Watching those movies, you indulged in fantasy, temporarily closing the door on that part of your mind that knew it was all a crock, nothing but a guy in a monster suit. Well, the monster he was seeing now wasn’t wearing any suit.
The wavering image was there, and it wasn’t there, as if it was occupying two planes of existence simultaneously. And then, for just an instant, the thing seemed solid. The air turned so cold Don could have just stepped into a walk-in freezer. And a dank, vaguely fetid odor filled the air.
It was big and furry like a bear.
It stood upright on two hooves, and its massive arms ended in claws.
It had the face of an iguana.
It opened its mouth, revealing sharp, alligator-like teeth.
It was staring at Don with glowing red eyes.
Remembering the gun in his hand, Don slowly raised it, aimed it at the creature. It opened its mouth as if it were grinning at him, as if it were trying to tell him that if he was stupid enough to think the gun would have any effect, then he should go ahead and fire it. Don didn’t shoot. He doubted he could have pulled the trigger no matter how hard he tried. He felt as if his whole body had turned to ice, as if he were frozen solid.
And then the thing was gone, simply winking out of existence as if it were a holographic image that had just been switched off.
For several long moments no one spoke. Then Tommy Quirk broke the silence. “Jesus,” he muttered. “Oh, holy Jesus.”
“You did see it too, didn’t you?” Don asked.
“Big furry sucker with the face of a lizard? Yeah, I saw it.”
“At least I’ll have company when the men in the white suits come for me.”
The men who’d come with Pfeil were muttering to themselves now, looking groggy, as if they’d just been woken from a sound sleep. Al McDougall looked at Don.
“How’d we get here?” he asked.
“What happened to Reverend Pfeil?” Todd Wolfe asked.
The others were coming out of it now, too, and they all began asking questions. Don told them to go back to the barn, find their cars, and go home.
Jean Quirk was also coming out of it. Tommy put her in the Cherokee, then helped Don get Pfeil’s body into the wagon’s rear. No one said much on the way back to town.
Fourteen
1
“Me and Jean were in the office when Ozzy Nordquist and some of his buddies came in and jumped us,” Tommy Quirk said. “He’d been mad at me ever since his dog chased my garbage truck and got caught under the wheels. I guess I didn’t think he was that mad. Wasn’t my fault, you know. I like dogs.”
He and his wife were sitting in chairs that had been pulled up by Don’s desk. They both looked a little befuddled. Corrine had checked Don’s knife wound and pronounced it minor. To prove the point, she put a Band-Aid on it: She was sitting at her desk now, spellbound by what she was hearing.
“They tied us up, got us into a car, and drove us to Al McDougall’s place,” Tommy Quirk said. “Kept us in the dairy barn until they were ready for us.”
“I … I don’t understand,” Jean said weakly. It was only about the third time she’d spoken. “What … what was wrong with Reverend Pfeil?”
“I don’t know,” Don said. But her husband’s words to the minister came back to him. The devil’s got you. Don let the words hang in his mind. He didn’t know what to do with them.
“What was he going to do?” Jean asked.
“He was going to kill us,” Tommy said. “We were going to be human sacrifices.” His chair was right next to Jean’s, and he slipped his arm around her. She shivered.
Tommy said, “All the people at the barn … I’ve known most of them for years. Why were they going along, just letting it happen?”
“They were being controlled,” Don said.
“You mean like mass hypnosis or something?”
“I don’t know how it was done,” Don replied. “But I don’t think it was hypnosis, because of the way McDougall and the rest of them began snapping out of it when Pfeil died. I mean, they wouldn’t come out of a hypnotic trance just because something happened to the hypnotist.”
“What did happen to Pfefl?” Quirk asked, a haunted look appearing in his eyes. “What was that thing? What exactly did we see?”
Which brought them to the matter they’d been skirting, because in all of them there was a part that refused to believe what had happened. Sure, it was damn near unexplainable that a mini
ster could somehow turn a couple hundred people into zombies who’d do his bidding—and that part of the bidding would be human sacrifices. It was incredible, inconceivable. But it wasn’t impossible. The mind rejected it as very unlikely, but didn’t go so far as to say such a thing could never, under any circumstances, occur.
The beast rising from a dead minister was another matter.
Shadows did not seep through a corpse’s pores. Period.
Furry, cloven-hooved iguanas with glowing red eyes did not exist. Period.
These were not mere improbabilities. These were things that simply could not be. The eyes saw what they saw, but the brain rejected it, for to do otherwise would be to undermine the whole system of logic upon which the mind operated. What could not be could not be. No exceptions.
“It was something from some other place,” Jean said. “There’s nothing like that in this world.”
“You mean it was from space?” asked her husband, frowning.
“No,” she said. “Space is still part of the universe we live in. This came from someplace else.”
No one asked her to explain that.
“We’re getting off the island,” Tommy Quirk said.
Jean took his hand, squeezed it. She seemed to be saying that’s what she wanted, too. To get away from this place, for the island had gone mad, and it would drag everyone on it down into the abyss of its insanity.
“You can’t get off,” Don said. “We’re in the middle of the Split.”
“We’ll take an aluminum canoe,” Quirk said. “Carry it over the ice.”
“But the ice is breaking up. Step on the wrong chunk, and you’re in ice water. You’ve lived here long enough to know what happens then.”
“I’ll take my chances with the ice,” Quirk said. “Ice I can understand.”
“We’ve got to get away from here,” Jean said softly. “We’ve got to.” She had a distant look in her eyes, but not at all like the look he’d seen in the eyes of the people at the barn. Jean was withdrawing from the horror. The people in the barn hadn’t known there was any horror.
“I wish you’d think about this,” Don said.
The Quirks just stared at him. Their minds were made up. Not that Don blamed them. People they’d known all their lives had been willing to watch the Quirks sacrificed. A whole barn full of their friends and neighbors, all of them groovin’ to the signal from Reverend Pfeil’s own private little radio station, the DJ saying, Okay, gang, now we’re going to play that golden oldie “Let’s Murder the Quirks” by that incomparable rock superstar, the Knifewielding Minister.
Don had shut down the radio station.
And they’d all seen the real DJ.
Don started to tell the Quirks about watching out for breaks in the ice, testing each chunk before they stepped on it, and all the other things the Quirks should think about before attempting to travel the three miles to the mainland. But he didn’t. The Quirks had lived there all their lives. They knew as much about the ice as he did. So Don simply said, “Be careful.” The Quirks said they would.
2
After the Quirks left, Don fingerprinted Pfeil’s body. When he got the chance, he’d compare Pfeil’s prints with those he’d lifted from the Gordon and Edley houses.
Not knowing what else to do with it, he took the corpse over to Doc Ingram’s, so he could put it in one of the freezers. Although the physician wasn’t there, he’d apparently left without remembering to lock the door. Don put the minister on top of Samantha Gordon, who stared up at Don with eyes in which ice crystals had formed, giving them the look of shattered glass.
Don hoped the state police would be able to take the bodies out by helicopter tomorrow. Otherwise, if anyone else died, he’d have nowhere to put the corpse—or corpses. There won’t be any more, he thought. But he wasn’t sure he believed that. Violent death, once unknown to the island, had become the norm.
Don had killed the man whose body he’d put in the freezer, but he wasn’t ready to deal with that yet. Too much had happened, too many puzzling, impossible things.
He closed the freezer, cutting off his view of Samantha Gordon’s bluish-white, frosty-looking face, which now had one of Reverend Pfeil’s feet on each side of it. Leaning against the freezer, he wondered what Doc Ingram would have been like, had he been there. The physician was one of those at the barn, listening to the radio station that played requests from Bedlam. Now that Pfeil was dead, would all those people be normal again, as if nothing had happened?
It had worked that way previously for Allison and Sarah, who’d been completely normal except for the holes in their memories.
Allison and Sarah.
Quickly leaving the doctor’s office, he got into his police car and sped toward home. At that moment he hated being the island’s policeman. His responsibility to the community was getting in the way of his responsibility to his family. Allison and Sarah had been part of that crowd, prepared to sway and chant while the Quirks died. He hoped they were home. He prayed they were home. Home and well. Safe. Although he was already speeding, he pushed the accelerator down a little farther.
3
His wife and daughter were home. They both looked distraught, and when Don came in, they took turns hugging him.
“I was at school,” Sarah said, tears streaming down her cheeks, “and Mr. Bellamy announced over the PA system that anyone who wanted to could leave to go to the revival, and … and then I was out at the McDougall place, and everybody was standing around looking sort of weird, and nobody knew how they got there.”
“It was the same for me,” Allison said. “One minute I was here, and the next I was standing around Al McDougall’s place with a whole bunch of other confused people. The time in between is just … well, gone.” She looked at Don as if waiting for him to tell her what was going on.
What was he supposed to tell her? That she and Sarah were part of a group of people who had been about to use the Quirks for human sacrifices? That something that looked like a cross between a bear and a crocodile had floated out of Reverend Pfeil’s body? They’d talk about these things in time, he knew, but not now, while everything was still so confused, while the horror was still so fresh. Still, there were a couple of things he had to tell them.
“Reverend Pfeil was behind it,” Don said. “He’s dead, so everything should be okay now.”
“What happened?” Allison asked. Her color was gone. She looked as frightened as Don had ever seen her.
“He attacked me with a knife. I shot him.”
“Oh, my God,” she whispered. “Oh, Don. How did it happen?”
“I’ll tell you everything, but not right now. There’s something very important I have to do.”
His wife and daughter clung to him. Allison said, “Don’t leave. Not now, Don. Please.”
“I’m afraid,” Sarah said, starting to cry.
“I have to,” Don said. “Stay here and keep the door locked. You’ll be okay.” He fervently hoped he was telling them the truth.
4
Don drove to the Superior Motel. This time Kesselring was in his room. When the retired policeman opened the door, Don pushed him back into the room and closed the door.
“Sit,” he said.
Noting the expression on Don’s face, Kesselring sat down on his bed.
“I want to know what you know about what’s happening on this island,” Don said. “And don’t even think about telling me you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
Kesselring studied him appraisingly. “What do you think’s going on?”
Don stepped toward him, bunching his fists.
“All right, all right,” the retired policeman said, holding up his hands. “Calm down and we’ll talk.”
“I’m listening,” Don said.
“If you’ll tell me what you already know,” Kesselring said, “I’ll fill in the gaps—at least the gaps I’m able to fill in.”
Don told him, starting with the first murder and endi
ng with Pfeil’s death.
Kesselring nodded. “I knew it was the minister. I’ve been watching him, waiting for my chance.”
“Your chance to do what?”
“Kill him.”
“I’ve taken care of that for you.”
“You killed the minister, but the Evil got away.”
Don stared at him. “The what?”
“The Evil. That’s what I call the thing you saw emerge from Pfeil’s body. That’s why I’m here. I followed it here to kill it.”
The first thought that popped into Don’s mind was that the ex-cop had to be psycho-ward material to say anything like that. Don instantly dismissed the thought, for it was a product of the old reality, the one in which furry iguanas with hooves did not rise shadowlike from the bodies of Lutheran ministers. There was a new reality now, and having sampled it, Don would be very careful about calling anyone crazy.
He sat down beside the ex-cop. “All right,” he said. “Tell me about the Evil.”
Kesselring thought for a moment, as if deciding where to begin, then said, “The first time I encountered it, it was using the body of a man named Charles Capwell. Capwell went to the grocery store where he worked one day and started blowing people away. There’re lots of Capwells out there. They climb a tower and start sniping. They walk into a girls’ dorm and start stabbing coeds while they sleep. They come home and kill everyone in the family. The quiet guys who just go crazy, start killing. But they’re not the ones doing it. Not really. The Evil’s just using them.”
“What is this Evil?” Don asked. And he remembered Doc Ingram’s words: The devil got loose in there. And Tommy Quirk’s words to Reverend Pfeil: The devil’s got you.
“Choose your term,” Kesselring said. “An evil spirit, a demon, one of Satan’s minions.” He shrugged.
“What do you call it?”
“I think of it as an evil spirit, something that figuratively—if not literally—comes from hell. I think of it as the enemy. I think of it as something that has to be destroyed.” There was a hardness in the ex-cop’s eyes as he said these things, along with a smouldering passion. He truly hated the Evil. He had appointed himself its executioner.
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