Koontz, Dean R. - Mr. Murder

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Koontz, Dean R. - Mr. Murder Page 51

by Mr. Murder(Lit)


  the top.

  She briefly considered charging downward, opening fire when she was

  about to come upon him. But hearing her descend, he might retreat into

  the sacristy, where already the heavy yarn of dusk was knitting into

  darkness, where he could stalk her in the gloom and attack when her

  attention was diverted to the wrong skein of shadows.

  She could also wait where she was, let him come to her, and blow his

  head off as soon as he rose into sight. If he sensed her waiting,

  however, and if he opened fire as he rounded the bend, he couldn't miss

  her in those tight confines. She might be dead before she could pull

  the trigger, or might at best get off a shot into the ceiling of the

  stairwell as she fell, harming nothing but plaster.

  Remembering the black silhouette on the sill of the nave window and the

  uncanny fluidity with which it had moved, she suspected that The Other's

  senses were sharper than her own. Lying in wait with the hope of

  surprising it was probably a fool's. game.

  She continued upward, trying to convince herself that they were in the

  best of all possible positions, defending high ground against an enemy

  that was allowed only one narrow approach. It seemed as if the

  bell-tower platform ought to be an unassailable redoubt.

  Awash in agonies of hunger, sweating with need and rage, lead pellets

  popping from his flesh, he heals step by rising step but at a cost.

  Body fat dwindles and even some muscle tissue and bone mass are

  sacrificed to the wildly accelerated mending of buckshot wounds.

  He gnashes his teeth with the compulsive need to chew, chew and swallow,

  rend and tear, feed, feed, even though there is no food to satisfy the

  terrible pangs that rack him.

  At the top of the tower, one half of the space was completely walled,

  providing a landing for the stairs. An ordinary door gave access from

  that vestibule to another portion of the platform that was exposed to

  the elements on three sides. Charlotte and Emily opened the door

  without difficulty and hurried out of the stairwell.

  Marty followed them. He was dismayingly weak but even dizzier than

  feeble. He gripped the door jamb and then the cast-concrete cap of the

  waist-high wall--the parapet--that enclosed the other three sides of the

  outer bell-tower platform.

  With the wind-chill factor, the temperature must have been five or ten

  degrees below zero. He winced as the bitter gale lashed his face--and

  didn't dare think about how much colder it would seem ten minutes or an

  hour later.

  Though Paige might have enough shotgun shells to prevent The Other from

  reaching them, they wouldn't all survive the night.

  If the weather reports proved correct and the storm lasted until well

  past dawn, they wouldn't be able to use the Mossberg to try to draw

  attention to their plight until morning. The wailing wind would

  disperse the crash of gunfire before that telltale sound could reach

  beyond church property.

  The exposed platform was twelve feet across with a tile floor and

  scuppers to let out rainwater. Two corner posts, about six feet high,

  stood atop the perimeter wall and, with the assistance of the full wall

  on the east side, supported a peaked belfry roof.

  No bell hung in the belfry. When Marty squinted up into the dim

  recesses of that conical space, he saw the black shapes of what might

  have been loudspeaker horns from which the taped tolling of bells had

  once been broadcast.

  Appearing to grow ever whiter as the day steadily darkened, snow slanted

  into the belfry on the northwest wind. A small drift was forming along

  the base of the south wall.

  The girls had fled directly across the deck to the west side, as far as

  they could get from the door, but Marty felt too wobbly to traverse even

  that short distance without support. As he circled the platform to join

  them, leaning with his right hand against the waist-high parapet, the

  floor tiles seemed slippery though they were textured to be less

  treacherous when wet.

  He made the mistake of glancing over the edge of the parapet at the

  phosphorescent mantle of snow on the ground six or seven stories below.

  The view prompted an attack of vertigo so strong that he almost passed

  out before averting his eyes from the long fall.

  When he reached his daughters, Marty was more nauseous than ever and

  shivering so badly that any attempt to speak would have resulted in

  shuddery chains of sounds only vaguely resembling words. As frigid as

  he was, perspiration nonetheless trickled the length of his spine.

  Wind howled, snow whirled, night descended, and the bell tower seemed to

  be turning like a carrousel.

  The pain from the wound in his shoulder had spread through his upper

  body, until the fiery point of injury was only the center of a more

  generalized ache that throbbed with every thud of his rapidly pounding

  heart. He felt helpless, ineffective, and cursed himself for being so

  useless at that very moment when his family needed him most.

  Paige hadn't joined Marty and the girls on the platform. She stood on

  the far side of the open door, on the enclosed landing, peering down the

  curved stairs.

  Flames spouted from the bore of the gun, making shadows dance. The boom

  of the shot--and echoes of it--tolled across the bell-tower platform,

  and from the stairwell came a shriek of pain and rage that was less than

  human, followed immediately by a second shot and an even more shrill and

  alien screech.

  Marty's hopes soared--and collapsed an instant later when the agonized

  cry of The Other was followed by Paige's scream.

  Along the curved wall, step by step, burning with hunger, filled with

  fire, the body's furnace stoked to a white-hot blaze, tortured by need,

  alert for a sound, higher, higher, higher in the darkness, churning

  within, seething, desperate and driven, driven by need, then the looming

  thing, the Paige-thing on the landing above, a silhouette wrapped in

  shadows but recognizably the Paige-thing, repulsive and deadly, an alien

  seed. He crosses his arms over his face, protecting his eyes, absorbing

  the first hard blast, a thousand spikes of pain, hammered deep, almost

  knocked backward down the stairs, rocking on his heels, arms paralyzed

  for an instant, bleeding and torn, afire with need, need, inner pain

  worse than the outer, move-move-confront challenge-grapple-and-prevail,

  lunging forward, upward, screaming involuntarily, the second blast a

  sledgehammer to the chest, heart stutters, stutters, blackness swoops,

  heart stutters, left lung pops like a balloon, no breath, blood in his

  mouth. Flesh rips, blood spurts, flesh knits, blood seeps. He inhales,

  inhales and is still moving up ward, upward into the woman, never having

  endured such agony, a world of pain, cauldron of fire, lava in his

  veins, a nightmare of all-consuming hunger, testing his miraculous

  body's limits, teetering on the edge of death, smashes into her, drives

  her backward, claws at the weapon, tears it away from her, pitches it

  aside, goin
g for her throat, her face, snapping at her face, biting at

  her face, she's holding him back, but he needs her face, face, her

  smooth pale face, alien meat, sustenance to slake the need, the need,

  the terrible burning endless need.

  The Other tore the shotgun out of Paige's grasp, threw it aside, slammed

  into her, and knocked her backward through the doorway.

  The area under the belfry seemed to be illuminated more by the natural

  phosphorescence of the falling snow than by the fast-fading light of the

  dying day. Marty saw The Other had been gruesomely wounded and had

  undergone strange changes--was still undergoing them--although the ashen

  twilight shrouded details of its metamorphosis.

  Paige fell onto the bell-tower platform. The Other dropped atop her

  like a predator upon its prey, tearing at her ski jacket, issuing a dry

  hiss of excitement, gnashing its teeth with the ferocity of a wild

  creature from out of the mountain woods.

  It was a thing now. Not a man. Something dreadful if not quite

  identifiable was happening to it.

  Driven by desperation, Marty found within himself one last well of

  strength. He overcame dizziness bordering on total disorientation, and

  he took a running kick at the hateful thing that wanted his life.

  He caught it squarely in the head. Although he was wearing sneakers,

  the kick had tremendous impact, shattering all the ice that had formed

  on the shoe.

  The Other howled, tumbled off Paige, rolled against the south wall, but

  at once came onto its knees, then into a standing position, cat-quick

  and unpredictable.

  As the thing was still tumbling, Paige scrambled to the kids, crowding

  them behind her.

  Marty lunged for the discarded gun on the landing, inches beyond the

  other side of the open door. He crouched and, with his right hand,

  grabbed the Mossberg by the barrel.

  Paige and one of the girls yelled a warning.

  He didn't have time to reverse his grip on the weapon and pump a round

  into the chamber. He rose and turned in one movement, issuing a savage

  scream not unlike the sounds his adversary had been making, and swung

  the shotgun by the barrel.

  The Mossberg stock hammered into The Other's left side, but not hard

  enough to shatter any ribs. Marty had been forced to wield it with one

  hand, unable to use his left, and the jolt of the blow rang back on him,

  sent pain through his chest, hurting him worse than it hurt The Other.

  Wrenching the Mossberg from Marty, the look-alike didn't turn the gun to

  its own use, as if it had devolved into a subhuman state in which it no

  longer recognized the weapon as anything more than a club. Instead, it

  pitched the Mossberg away, whirled it over the waist high wall into the

  snowy night.

  "Look-alike" no longer applied. Marty could still see aspects of

  himself in that warped countenance, but, even in the murky dusk, no one

  would mistake them for brothers. The shotgun damage wasn't primarily

  what made the difference. The pale face was strangely thin and pointed,

  bone structure too prominent, eyes sunken deep in dark circles,

  cadaverous.

  The Mossberg was still spinning into the falling snow when the thing

  rushed Marty and drove him into the north wall. The waist-high concrete

  cap caught him across the kidneys so hard it knocked out of him what

  little strength he had managed to dredge up.

  The Other had him by the throat. Replay of the upstairs hall,

  yesterday, Mission Viejo. Bending him backward as he'd been bent over

  the gallery railing. Farther to fall this time, into a darkness blacker

  than night, into a coldness deeper than winter storms.

  The hands around his neck felt not like hands at all. Hard as the metal

  jaws of a bear trap. Hot in spite of the bitter night, so hot they

  almost scorched him.

  It wasn't just strangling him but trying to bite him as it had tried to

  bite Paige, striking snakelike, hissing. Growling in the back of its

  throat. Teeth snapped shut on empty air an inch from Marty's face.

  Breath sour and thick. The stench of decay. He had the feeling it

  would devour him if it could, rip out his throat and take his blood.

  Reality outstripped imagination.

  All reason fled.

  Nightmares were real. Monsters existed.

  With his good hand, he got a fistful of its hair and pulled hard,

  jerking its head back, frantic to keep its flashing teeth away from him.

  Its eyes glittered and rolled. Foaming spittle flew when it shrieked.

  Heat poured off its body, and it was as hot to the touch as the

  sun-warmed vinyl of a car seat in summer.

  Letting go of Marty's throat but still pinning him against the parapet,

  The Other reached back and seized the hand with which he had clutched

  its hair. Bony fingers. Inhuman. Hard talons. It seemed fleshless,

  brittle, yet increasingly fierce and strong, and it almost crushed his

  hand before he let go of its hair. Then it whipped its head to the side

  and bit his forearm, ripped the sleeve of his jacket but not his flesh.

  Tore at him again, sank teeth into his hand, he screamed. It grabbed

  his ski jacket, pulling him off the parapet as he tried to lean into the

  void to escape it, snapped at his face, teeth clashing a fraction of an

  inch short of his cheek, rasped out a single tortured word, "Need," and

  snapped at his eyes, snapped, snapped at his eyes.

  "Be at peace, Alfie."

  Marty registered the words but initially wasn't clear-headed enough

  either to realize what they meant or to grasp that the voice was one he

  had never heard before.

  The Other reared its head back, as if about to make its final lunge for

  his face. But it held that posture, eyes wild, skeletal face as softly

  luminous as the snow, teeth bared, rolling its head from side to side,

  issuing a thin wordless sound as if it wasn't sure why it was

  hesitating.

  Marty knew that he should use the moment to ram a knee into the thing's

  crotch, try to rush it backward across the platform, to the opposite

  parapet, up, out, and over. He could imagine what to do, see it in his

  writer's eye, a fully realized moment of action in a novel or movie, but

  he had no strength left. The pain in his gunshot wound, throat, and

  bitten hand swelled anew, dizziness and nausea over whelmed him, and he

  knew he was on the verge of a blackout.

  "Be at peace, Alfie," the voice repeated more firmly.

  Still holding Marty, who was helpless in its ferocious grip, The Other

  turned its head toward the speaker.

  A flashlight winked on, directed at the creature's face.

  Blinking toward the light source, Marty saw a bearlike man, tall and

  barrel-chested, and a smaller man in a black ski suit. They were

  strangers.

  They showed a little surprise but not the shock and horror that Marty

  would have expected.

  "Jesus," the smaller man said, "what's happening to him?"

  "Metabolic meltdown," said the larger man.

  "Jesus."

  Marty glanced toward the west wall of the belfry, where Paige was

  crouched with the kids,
sheltering them, holding their heads against her

  breast to prevent them from seeing too much of the creature.

  "Be at peace, Alfie," the smaller man repeated.

  In a voice tortured by rage, pain, and confusion, The Other rasped,

  "Father. Father. Father?"

  Marty was still tightly held, and his attention was again drawn to the

  thing that had once looked like him.

  The flashlight-illuminated face was more hideous than it had appeared in

  the gloom. Wisps of steam were rising off it in some places, confirming

  his sense that it was hot. Scores of shotgun wounds pocked one side of

  its head, but they were not bleeding and, in fact, seemed more than half

  healed. As Marty stared, a black lead pellet squeezed out of the

  creature's temple and oozed down its cheek in a thin trail of yellowish

  fluid.

  The wounds were its least repulsive features. In spite of the physical

  strength it still possessed, it was as meagerly padded with flesh as

  something that had crawled out of a coffin after a year underground.

  Skin was stretched tightly over its facial bones. Its ears were

  shriveled into hard knots of cartilage and lay flat against the head.

  Desiccated lips had shrunk back from the gums, giving the teeth greater

  prominence, creating the illusion of a nascent muzzle and the wicked

  bite of a predator.

  It was Death personified, the Grim Reaper without his voluminous black

  robes and scythe, on his way to a masquerade ball in a costume of flesh

 

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