Mr. Murder

by Dean Koontz

  He ruled out trying to reach one of the other cabins scattered through the high woods. Most were vacation homes. No one would be in residence on a Tuesday in December unless, by morning, the new snow brought them in for the skiing. And if they stumbled into a cabin where someone was at home, with The Other trailing after them, Marty didn’t want the deaths of innocent strangers on his conscience.

  Route 203 lay at the bottom of the county road. Even in the early hours of a blizzard, steady traffic would be passing between the lakes and Mammoth Lakes itself. If there were a lot of witnesses, The Other couldn’t kill them all. He’d have to retreat.

  But the bottom of the county road was too distant. They’d never make it before they ran out of shotgun shells to keep their enemy at bay—or before the greater accuracy and range of the revolver allowed him to pick them off one by one.

  They came to a gap in the battered chain-link fence.

  “Here, come on,” Marty said.

  “Isn’t that place abandoned?” Paige objected.

  “There’s nowhere else,” he said, taking Charlotte and Emily by the hand and leading them onto the church property.

  His hope was that someone would come along soon, see the half-burned BMW, and report it to the sheriff’s department. Instead of fanning the fire that had been feeding on the paint, the wind had snuffed it, but the tire was still burning, and the battered car was hard to ignore. If a couple of well-armed deputies showed up to check out the area and could be enlisted in the struggle, they wouldn’t understand how formidable The Other was, but they wouldn’t be as naive and helpless as ordinary citizens, either.

  After a brief hesitation, during which she glanced worriedly uphill at their nemesis, Paige followed him and the girls through the hole in the fence.

  The speedloader slips from his fingers and drops into the snow as he removes it from the pouch on his belt. It is the last of the two he took from the dead man in the surveillance van.

  He stoops, plucks it out of the snow, and brushes it off against the cranberry-red sweater under his varsity jacket. He brings it to the open revolver, slips it in, twists it, drops it, and snaps the cylinder shut.

  He will have to use his last rounds carefully. The replicants are not going to be easy to kill.

  He now knows that the woman is a replicant just like the false father. Alien flesh. Inhuman. She cannot be his Paige, for she is too aggressive. His Paige would be submissive, eager for domination, like the women in the Senator’s film collection. His Paige is surely dead. He must accept that, difficult as it is. This thing is only masquerading as Paige, and not well. Worse, if Paige is gone forever, so are his loving daughters. The girls, cute and convincingly human, are also replicants—demonic, extraterrestrial, and dangerous.

  His former life is irretrievable.

  His family is gone forever.

  A black abyss of despair yawns under him, but he must not fall into it. He must find the strength to go on and fight either until he achieves victory in the name of all humankind—or is destroyed. He must be as courageous as Kurt Russell and Donald Sutherland were when they found themselves in similar dire straits, for he is a hero, and a hero must persevere.

  Downhill, the four creatures disappear through a hole in the chain-link fence. All he wants now is to see them dead, scramble their brains, dismember and decapitate them, eviscerate them, set them afire, take every precaution against their resurrection, for they are not merely the killers of his real family but a threat to the world.

  The thought occurs to him that, if he survives, these terrifying experiences will provide him with material for a novel. He surely will be able to get past the opening sentence, an accomplishment of which he was incapable yesterday. Though his wife and children are lost to him forever, he might be able to salvage his career from the ruins of his life.

  Slipping and sliding, he hurries toward the gap in the fence.

  The windshield wipers were caked with snow that was hardening into ice. They stuttered and thumped across the glass.

  Oslett consulted the computer-generated map, then pointed to a turn-off ahead. “There, on the right.”

  Clocker put on the turn signal.

  Like the ghost ship Mary Celeste silently materializing from a strange fog with tattered sails unfurled and decks empty of crew, the abandoned church loomed out of the driving snow.

  At first, in the obscuring storm and fading gray light of late afternoon, Marty thought the building was in good repair, but that impression was transient. As they drew nearer, he saw that a lot of roof tiles were missing. Sections of the copper rain gutter were gone, while other pieces dangled precariously, swaying and creaking in the wind. Most of the windows were broken out, and vandals had spray-painted obscenities on the once-handsome brick walls.

  Rambling complexes of buildings—offices, workshops, a nursery, dormitories, a dining hall—stood immediately behind and to both sides of the steepled main structure. The Prophetic Church of the Rapture had been a cult that required its members to contribute all of their worldly belongings upon admittance and to live in a tightly governed commune.

  They raced through the inch-deep snow, as fast as the girls could manage, toward the entrance to the church, rather than to one of the other buildings, because the church was closest. They needed to get out of sight as quickly as possible. Though The Other could track them through his connection with Marty no matter where they went, at least he couldn’t shoot at them if he couldn’t see them.

  Twelve broad steps led up to a double set of ten-foot -high oak doors with six-foot-high fanlights above each pair. All but a few ruby and yellow shards of glass had been broken out of the fanlights, leaving dark gaps between the thick ribs of leading. The doors were recessed in a twenty-foot-high cinquefoil arch, above which was an enormous and elaborately patterned wheel window that still contained twenty percent of its original glass, most likely because it was a harder target for stones.

  The four carved-oak doors were weather-beaten, scarred, cracked, and spray-painted with more obscenities that glowed softly in the ashen light of the premature dusk. On one, a vandal had crudely drawn the white hourglass shape of a female form complete with breasts and a crotch defined by the letter Y, and beside it was a representation of a phallus as large as a man. Beveled letters, cut by a master stone carver, made the same promise in the granite lintel above each set of doors, HE LIFTETH US UNTO HEAVEN; however, over those words, the spoilers had sprayed BULLSHIT in red paint.

  The cult had been creepy, and its founder—Jonathan Caine—had been a fraud and pederast, but Marty was more chilled by the vandals than by the misguided people who had followed Caine. At least the faithful cultists had believed in something, no matter how misguided, had yearned to be worthy of God’s grace, and had sacrificed for their beliefs, even if the sacrifices ultimately proved to be stupid; they had dared to dream even if their dreams had ended in tragedy. The mindless hatred that informed the scrawlings of the graffitists was the work of empty people who believed in nothing, were incapable of dreaming, and thrived on the pain of others.

  One of the doors stood ajar six inches. Marty grabbed the edge of it and pulled. The hinges were corroded, the oak was warped, but the door grated outward another twelve or fourteen inches.

  Paige went inside first. Charlotte and Emily trailed close behind her.

  Marty never heard the shot that hit him.

  As he started to follow the girls, a lance of ice impaled him, entering the upper-left quadrant of his back, exiting through the muscles and tendons below the collarbone on the same side. The piercing chill was so cold that the blizzard hammering the church seemed like a tropical disturbance by comparison, and he shuddered violently.

  The next thing he knew, he was lying on the snow-covered brick stoop in front of the door, wondering how he had gotten there. He was half convinced he had just stretched out for a nap, but the pain in his bones indicated he’d dropped hard onto his unlikely bed.

  He star
ed up through the descending snow and wintry light at letters in granite, letters on granite.

  HE LIFTETH US UNTO HEAVEN.

  BULLSHIT.

  He only realized he’d been shot when Paige rushed out of the church and dropped to one knee at his side, shouting, “Marty, oh God, my God, you’ve been shot, the son of a bitch shot you,” and he thought, Oh, yes, of course, that’s it, I’ve been shot, not stabbed by a lance of ice.

  Paige rose from beside him, raised the Mossberg. He heard two shots. They were exceedingly loud, unlike the stealthy bullet that had knocked him to the bricks.

  Curious, he turned his head to see how close their indefatigable enemy had come. He expected to discover the look-alike charging at him, only a few yards away, unfazed by shotgun pellets.

  Instead, The Other remained at a distance from the church, out of range of the two rounds Paige had fired. He was a black figure on a field of white, the details of his too-familiar face unrevealed by the waning gray light. Ranging back and forth through the snow, back and forth, lanky and quick, he seemed to be a wolf stalking a herd of sheep, watchful and patient, biding his time until the moment of ultimate vulnerability arrived.

  The poniard of ice that transfixed Marty became, from one second to the next, a stiletto of fire. With the heat came excruciating pain that made him gasp. At last the abstract concept of a bullet wound was translated into the language of reality.

  Paige lifted the Mossberg again.

  Regaining clarity of mind with the pain, Marty said, “Don’t waste the ammo. Let him go for now. Help me up.”

  With her assistance, he was able to get to his feet.

  “How bad?” she asked worriedly.

  “I’m not dying. Let’s get inside before he decides to take another shot at us.”

  He followed her through the door into the narthex, where the darkness was relieved only by faint rays penetrating the partly open door and glassless fanlights.

  The girls were crying, Charlotte louder than Emily, and Marty tried to reassure them. “It’s okay, I’m all right, just a little nick. All I need is a Band-Aid, one with a picture of Snoopy on it, and I’ll feel all better.”

  In truth, his left arm was half numb. He only had partial use of it. When he flexed his hand, he couldn’t curl it into a tight fist.

  Paige eased to the eighteen-inch gap between the big door and the jamb, where the wind whistled and gibbered. She peered out at The Other.

  Trying to get a better sense of the damage the bullet had done, Marty slipped his right hand inside his ski jacket and gingerly explored the front of his left shoulder. Even a light touch ignited a flare of pain that made him grit his teeth. His wool sweater was saturated with blood.

  “Take the girls farther back into the church,” Paige whispered urgently, though their enemy could not possibly have heard her out there in the storm. “All the way to the other end.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “I’ll wait here for him.”

  The girls protested. “Mommy, don’t.” “Mom, come with us, you gotta.” “Mommy, please.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Paige said, “I’ll be safe. Really. It’ll be perfect. Don’t you see? Marty, when the creep senses you moving away, he’ll come into the church. He’ll expect us to be together.” As she talked, she put two more shells into the Mossberg magazine to replace the most recent rounds she’d expended. “He won’t expect me to be waiting right here for him.”

  Marty remembered having this same discussion before, back at the cabin, when she wanted to go outside and hide in the rocks. Her plan hadn’t worked then, although not because it was flawed. The Other had driven past her in the Jeep, evidently unaware that she was lying in wait. If he hadn’t pulled such an unpredictable stunt, ramming the station wagon right into the house, she might have slipped up on him and dropped him from behind.

  Nevertheless, Marty didn’t want to leave her alone by the door. But there was no time for debate because he suspected his wound was soon going to begin sapping what strength he still had. Besides, he didn’t have a better plan to suggest.

  In the gloom, he could barely recognize Paige’s face.

  He hoped this wouldn’t be the last time he saw it.

  He shepherded Charlotte and Emily out of the narthex and into the nave. It smelled of dust and dampness and the wild things that nested there in the years since the cultists had left to resume their shattered lives instead of rising to sit at the right hand of the Lord.

  On the north side, the restless wind harried snow through the broken windows. If winter had a heart, inanimate and carved of ice, it would have been no more frigid than that place, nor could death have been more arctic.

  “My feet are cold,” Emily said.

  He said, “Sssshhh. I know.”

  “Mine too,” Charlotte said in a whisper.

  “I know.”

  Having something so ordinary to complain about helped to make their situation seem less bizarre, less frightening.

  “Really cold,” Charlotte elaborated.

  “Keep going. All the way to the front.”

  None of them had boots, only athletic shoes. Snow had saturated the fabric, caked in every crease, and turned to ice. Marty figured they didn’t need to worry about frostbite just yet. That took a while to develop. They might not live long enough to suffer from it.

  Shadows hung like bunting throughout the nave, but that large chamber was brighter than the narthex. Arched double-lancet windows, long ago relieved of the burden of glass, were featured along both side walls and soared two-thirds of the distance to the vaulted ceiling. They admitted sufficient light to reveal the rows of pews, the long center aisle leading to the chancel rail, the great choir, and even some of the high altar at the front.

  The brightest things in the church were the desecrations by the vandals, who had sprayed their obscenities across the interior walls in greater profusion than they had done outside. He’d suspected the paint was luminous when he’d seen it on the exterior of the building; indeed, in dimmer precincts, the serpentine scrawls glowed orange and blue and green and yellow, overlapping, coiling, intertwining, until it almost seemed as if they were real snakes writhing on the walls.

  Marty was tense with the expectation of gunfire.

  At the chancel rail, the gate was missing.

  “Keep going,” he urged the girls.

  The three of them continued on to the altar platform, from which all of the ceremonial objects had been removed. On the back wall hung a thirty-foot-high cross of wood festooned with cobwebs.

  His left arm was numb, yet it felt grossly swollen. The pain was like that of an abscessed tooth misplaced in his shoulder. He was nauseous—though whether from loss of blood or fear for Paige or because of the disorienting weirdness of the church, he didn’t know.

  Paige shrank from the front entrance into an area of the narthex that would remain dark even if the door opened farther.

  Staring at the gap between the door and jamb, she saw phantom movements in the fuzzy gray light and churning snow. She repeatedly raised and lowered the gun. Each time the confrontation seemed to have arrived, her breath caught in her throat.

  She didn’t have to wait long. He came within three or four minutes, and he was not as circumspect as she expected him to be. Apparently sensing Marty’s movement toward the far end of the building, The Other entered confidently, boldly.

  As he was stepping across the threshold, silhouetted in the waning daylight, she aimed for mid-chest. The gun was shaking in her hands even before she squeezed the trigger, and it jumped with the recoil. She immediately chambered another round, fired again.

  The first blast hit him solidly, but the second probably ruined the jamb more thoroughly than it ruined him, because he pitched backward, out of the doorway, out of sight.

  She knew she’d inflicted a lot of damage, but there were no screams or cries of pain, so she went through the door with as much hope as caution, ready for the s
ight of a corpse on the steps. He was gone, and somehow that wasn’t a surprise, either, although the manner of his swift disappearance was so puzzling that she actually turned and squinted up at the front of the church, as if he might be climbing that sheer facade with the alacrity of a spider.

  She could search for tracks in the snow and try to hunt him down. She suspected he might want her to do that very thing.

  Unnerved, she re-entered the church at a run.

  Kill them, kill them all, kill them now.

  Buckshot. In the throat, working abrasively deep in the meat of him. Along one side of the neck. Hard lumps embedded in his left temple. Left ear ragged and dripping. Lead acne pimples the flesh down the left cheek, across the chin. Lower lip torn. Teeth cracked and chipped. Spitting pellets. A blaze of pain but no eye damage, vision unimpaired.

  He scuttles in a crouch along the south side of the church, through a twilight so flat and gray, so wrapped in gauzes of snow, that he casts no shadow. No shadow. No wife, no children, no mother, no father, gone, no life, stolen, used up and thrown away, no mirror in which to look, no reflection to confirm his substance, no shadow, only footprints in the new snow to support his claim to existence, footprints and his hatred, like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man, defined by footprints and fury.

  He frenziedly seeks an entrance, hastily inspecting each window as he passes it.

  Virtually all of the glass is gone from the tall stained-glass panels, but the steel mullions remain. Much of the lead came that defined the original patterns remains between the mullions, though in many places it is bent and twisted and drooping, tortured by weather or by the hands of vandals, rendering the outlines of the original religious symbols and figures unrecognizable, and in their place leaving teratogenic forms as meaningless as the shapes in melted candles.

  The next to the last nave window is missing its steel frame, mullions, and came. The granite stool marking the base of the window is five feet off the ground. He boosts himself up with the nimbleness of a gymnast and squats on his haunches on the deep sill. He peers into numberless shadows interleaved with strange sinuous streams of radiant orange, yellow, green, and blue.