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
Koontz, Dean R. - Mr. Murder Page 51
