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 sight 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.
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.