by Dean Koontz
A child screams.
Racing down the center aisle of the graffiti-smeared church, Paige had the peculiar feeling that she was underwater in tropical climes, beneath a Caribbean cove, in caverns of gaudily luminescent coral, equatorial seaweed waving its feathery and radiant fronds on all sides of her.
Charlotte screamed.
Having reached the chancel rail, Paige spun to face the nave. Swinging the Mossberg left and right, searching in panic for the threat, she saw The Other as Emily shouted, “In the window, get him!”
He was, indeed, squatting in one of the south-wall windows, a dark shape that seemed only half human against the fading light and the whitening showers of snow. Shoulders hunched, head low, arms dangling, he had an apelike aspect.
Her reflexes were quick. She fired the Mossberg without hesitation.
Even if the distance hadn’t been in his favor, however, he would have escaped untouched because he was moving even as she pulled the trigger. With the fluid grace of a wolf, he seemed to pour off the sill and onto the floor. The buckshot passed harmlessly through the space that he had occupied and clattered off the window jambs that had framed him.
Evidently on all fours, he vanished among the rows of pews, where the deepest shadows in the church were humbled. If she went hunting for him there, he would drag her down and kill her.
She backed through the chancel rail and across the sanctuary to Marty and the girls, keeping the shotgun ready.
The four of them retreated into an adjoining room that might have been the sacristy. A pair of casement windows admitted barely enough light to reveal three doors in addition to the one through which they’d entered.
Paige closed the door to the sanctuary and attempted to lock it. But it wasn’t equipped with a lock. No furniture was available to brace or blockade it, either.
Marty tried one of the other doors. “Closet.”
Shrill wind and snow erupted through the door that Charlotte opened, so she slammed it shut.
Checking the third possibility, Emily said, “Stairs.”
Among the pews. Creeping. Cautious.
He hears a door slam shut.
He waits.
Listens.
Hunger. Hot pain fades quickly to a low heat. Bleeding slows to a trickle, an ooze. Now hunger overwhelms him as his body demands enormous amounts of fuel to facilitate the reconstruction of damaged tissues.
Already he’s metabolizing body fat and protein to make urgent repairs to torn and severed blood vessels. His metabolism accelerates unmercifully, an entirely autonomic function over which he has no power.
This gift that makes him so much less vulnerable than other men will soon begin to exact a toll. His weight will decline. Hunger will intensify until it is nearly as excruciating as the agony of mortal wounds. The hunger will become a craving. The craving will become a desperate need.
He considers retreating, but he is so close. So close. They are on the run. Increasingly isolated. They cannot hold out against him. If he perseveres, in minutes they will all be dead.
Besides, his hatred and rage are as great as his hunger. He is frantic for the sweet satisfaction that only extreme violence can assure.
On the movie screen of his mind, homicidal images flicker enticingly: bullet-shattered skulls, brutally hammered faces, gouged eyes, torn throats, slashed torsos, flashing knives, hatchets, axes, severed limbs, women on fire, screaming children, the bruised throats of young prostitutes, flesh dissolving under a spray of acid. . . .
He crawls out from among the pews, into the center aisle, rising into a crouch.
The walls swarm with glowing extraterrestrial hieroglyphics.
He is in the nest of the enemy.
Alien and strange. Hostile and inhuman.
His fear is great. But it only feeds his rage.
He hurries to the front of the room, through a gap in a railing, toward the door beyond which they retreated.
Light as thin as fish broth seeped down from unseen windows above and around the turns in the spiral staircase.
The buildings to which the church was attached were two stories high. There might be a connecting passage between these stairs and another structure, but Marty had no idea where they were headed. For that reason he almost wished they had taken the door that led outside.
However, the numbness in his arm hampered him severely, and the pain in his shoulder, which grew worse by the minute, was a serious drain on his energy. The building was unheated, as cold as the world outside, but at least it offered shelter from the wind. Between his wound and the storm, he didn’t think he would last long beyond the walls of the church.
The girls climbed ahead of him.
Paige came last, worrying aloud because the door at the foot of the stairs, like the sacristy door, did not have a lock. She edged up backward, step by step, covering the territory behind them.
They soon reached a deep-set multifoil window in the outer wall, which had been the source of the meager illumination below. Most of the clear glass was intact. The light on the twisting stairs above was of an equally dreary quality and most likely came from another window of the same size and style.
Marty moved slower and his breathing grew more labored the higher they ascended, as if they were reaching altitudes at which the oxygen content of the air was drastically declining. The pain in his left shoulder intensified, and his nausea thickened.
The stained plaster walls, gray wooden steps, and dishwater light reminded him of depressing Swedish movies from the fifties and sixties, films about hopelessness, despair, and grim fate.
Initially, the handrail along the outer wall was not essential to his progress. However, it swiftly became a necessary crutch. In dismayingly short order, he found that he could not rely entirely on the strength of his increasingly shaky legs and also needed to pull himself upward with his good right arm.
By the time they came to the second multifoil window, with still more steps and gray luminosity ahead, he knew where they were. In a bell tower.
The stairwell was not going to lead to a passageway that would connect them to the second floor of another building, because they were already higher than two floors. Each additional step upward was an irreversible commitment to this single option.
Gripping the rail with his good right hand, beginning to feel lightheaded and afraid of losing his balance, Marty stopped to warn Paige that they better consider going back. Perhaps her reverse perspective on the stairwell had prevented her from realizing the nature of the trap.
Before he could speak, the door clattered open below, out of sight beyond the first few turns.
His last clear thought is the sudden realization that he does not have the .38 Chief’s Special any longer, must have lost it after being shot at the front entrance to the church, dropped it in the snow, and has not noticed the loss until this moment. He has no time to retrieve it, even if he knew where to search. Now his primary weapon is his body, his hands, his murderous skills, and his exceptional strength. His ferocious hatred is a weapon, as well, because it motivates him to take any risk, confront extreme danger, and endure cruel suffering that would incapacitate an ordinary man. But he is not ordinary, he is a hero, he is judgment and vengeance, he is the rending fury of justice, avenger of his murdered family, nemesis of all creatures that are not of this earth but would try to claim it as their own, savior of humanity. That is his reason for existence. His life has meaning and purpose at last: to save the world from this inhuman scourge.
Just before the door opened below Paige, the narrow winding stairs called to mind lighthouses she had seen in movies. From the image of a lighthouse, she leapt to the realization that they were in the church bell tower. Then the lower door opened, out of sight beyond the curving walls of the spiral stairwell, and they had no choice but to continue to 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, w
here 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 upward, 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, going 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 lan
ding, 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.
