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 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 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 overwhelmed 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.