2012 The War for Souls

by Whitley Strieber

  Silence, then, followed by little Kimberly Wilson singing: “A-hunting we will go, a-hunting we will go, heigh-ho the derry-o…” until her mother hushed her.

  Total silence. This was not what they had been expecting. Now, a murmur among the congregation. Bobby looked to Martin. “Any idea?” Martin shook his head. This wasn’t supposed to involve people being dropped onto roofs, but that’s what it had sounded like. “Doctor,” Bobby said, “let’s you and I go out and take a look around.”

  Rose said, “No!”

  “Rose, I—”

  “Bobby, no! You stay in here.”

  There was a silent look between them. She knew Bobby’s duty, and finally turned away, her eyes swimming.

  Bobby and Doctor Willerson crossed the room, went out the vestry door. The body—if that’s what it was—had fallen down that side of the church.

  The congregation stood in silence, waiting, some bowed in prayer, other people simply staring.

  When they returned a moment later, the doctor said into the silent, watching faces, “I believe it is Mayor Tarr. He’s dead from a fall. He had a rifle. I believe he was on the roof trying to defend us, and lost his footing.”

  Peg fainted.

  As Ginger Forester and her boyfriend, Lyndon Lynch, who had been sitting with her, moved to help, there came more screaming, fainter, but from many more throats.

  One of the other groups was under attack. Bobby went to the main door, opened it for a moment, then returned. “It’s Saint Peter’s,” he announced.

  Mal Holmes said, “This is insane! What are we doing just waiting like this. Tarr had a point, let’s go outside, let’s put up a fight. For God’s sake, let’s fight!”

  “Our fight is in our prayers,” Reg shouted.

  Mrs. James cried out loudly, then, and shook her fist, a gesture that must have been repeated billions upon billions of times on earth over these past terrible weeks.

  “I want to read now,” Reg called out. “I have a text. And then we will pray. We will pray all night and the children can sleep in the pews.”

  “No way am I going to sleep,” Trevor said.

  “Me neither!” Winnie added.

  “Okay, kids, hush,” Lindy whispered.

  Winnie pulled on Martin’s pant leg. “I’m real thirsty,” she whispered.

  “I’ve, uh—oh, it’s in the street,” Lindy said. “When that thing—”

  “We have plenty,” Jim said, producing a bottle of Ayers water.

  “This is from the Book of Isaiah,” Reg announced. “Listen to this. Isaiah fifty-five, you can turn to it in the pew Bibles, it’s page four hundred and thirty-five.” He read, “‘So shall you summon a nation you knew not, and nations that knew you not shall run to you, because of the Lord, your God, the Holy One of Israel, who has glorified you. Seek the Lord while he may be found, call him while he is near. Let the scoundrel forsake his way, and the wicked man his thoughts; let him turn to the Lord for mercy; to our God, who is generous in forgiving.’”

  At that moment, the lights went out. There was a roar from the whole congregation, ringing loud, shrill with terror.

  “Let us pray,” Reg called into the din. “LET US PRAY!” Voices dropped, flashlights came on.

  But there also came another light, crawling along the tops of the stained glass windows of the birth, youth, and ministry of Jesus that lined the west wall.

  Martin watched, unable to turn away, transfixed with horrified fascination.

  As the congregation realized that it was there, silence slowly fell. Became absolute. They watched it coming down, this most terrible weapon that had ever been in the world, and yet so strange, so unexpected.

  As a scientist, Martin tried to use what skills of observation he could muster. It moved like a thick liquid, this light. We had slowed light down, stopped it, reversed it, but had never created anything like this.

  When it began to come in, there was a sigh in the room, just the softest of sighs, no more, and a little girl’s voice piping, “Look at the pretty, Mommy, the pretty is on Jesus!”

  The painted glass with the bearded figure on the cross, the rough rocks, and the praying virgin in her chipped blue glittered with new life as the light ran along them, seemed to pause as if it was looking out across the congregation, evaluating them, scanning them, tasting of them…and then it came on, glaring on their upturned faces.

  “Dad, is this an alien being?” Trevor asked.

  “It’s Lucifer,” Winnie said. “Be quiet or he’ll come after us.”

  Some children began to cry, and a ripple of panic spread. Parents held them.

  Martin saw immediately that the thing moved like something alive—and something that felt no need to be careful, not the way it came surging in the windows, filling the room with its slicing glare. He was fascinated by its motion, he couldn’t help himself. It was a little like the spread of a membrane, he thought. But then it came forward so quickly that there were shrieks of literal agony, the terror was so extreme.

  Old Man Michaels dropped to the floor with a thud. He went gray, and Martin thought he’d probably died. A stench of urine and feces filled the air. Children broke away from their parents and began running toward the doors, in their terror imagining that they could escape. Mamie Leonard dashed after Kevin, but the boy reached the vestry door and threw it open.

  Glare literally gushed in. The boy cried out and jumped back, but the light swept around him. Martin observed only a flicker, and the child went still, standing in the body of it, surrounded by it, his jaw agape. His mother raced to the far side of the nave, and stood there shrieking again and again, sorrowing cries that dominated the room.

  Reg cried out, “‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways,’ says the Lord. ‘As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts.’”

  The light moved and expanded, crossing the sanctuary and flowing down into the nave. People got up on the pews to keep their feet out of it, but Martin knew it was useless, it would do its infamous bloom any second, and then, well he could not imagine it. He just could not.

  There was no sign of any biological material. It was definitely a plasma, he could see that. But it had the stability of a highly organized membrane. He tried to think of any bas-relief, any wall painting, any sculpture anywhere in the world that reminded him of this, and could not.

  This was new, he was pretty sure, to the experience of mankind.

  “Pray now,” Reg said, “pray and hold the children and be ready with the guns.”

  Martin put his arm around Trevor and Lindy picked up Winnie, and Martin felt the pistol in his pocket. He’d loaded it with hollow points. A shot to the head would destroy a child instantly, but Martin did not frankly know if he could do it. God willing, Homeland Security was right about the value of congregating and they would survive.

  “Shoot it,” a voice said. “God help us, shoot it!”

  “Don’t do that!” Bobby shouted. “That spreads it, we all know. That—”

  They were suddenly surrounded by the strangest thing any of them had ever experienced, a flickering mass of colors that hurt and felt good against the skin at the same time…and felt like somebody was watching you, not with malice, but with a sort of evaluative skill that seemed almost…professional.

  Martin thought, we are destroyed, a destroyed species. This is how we end, killed in a way we do not understand by something beyond our knowledge. And then also thought, But it’s the way cattle die every day, or used to.

  He glimpsed a man, lean, dark hat over his eyes, face of a snake, sliding toward him. He shook the hallucination off. They’d all heard stories about this phenomenon, it was the mind trying to force the impossible into some form that it might be able to understand and thus to fight.

  Now Trevor closed his eyes. “Dad, I’m seeing a sort of snake.” He opened them. “In my mind. Watching me in my mind.”

  Ch
ildren’s voices were raised, “There’s a cobra, Mommy, a dragon, Daddy, a python…” and he knew where the ancient tale of the snake originated. It was how the mind of man gave form to disincarnate evil.

  There came a dull sound, like one of those deep thuds that never seem to find an explanation, that one sometimes hears back in the woods. But something had changed. Reg had changed. Where he had been in his pulpit with his Bible in his hand, wearing an old gray suit with no tie, now stood a man who appeared to be wearing the most intricately beautiful colored coat ever devised. But it was not cloth, the colors came from tiny, exquisitely detailed memories, each one full of life and motion, swarming around him like living jewels. He threw back his head and roared like a maddened gorilla.

  A passage from the Bible occurred to Martin, the one about the coat of many colors. He understood the message: Joseph’s coat had been his soul. The old biblical authors, therefore, had known what souls looked like. They were seeing Reg’s soul being sucked from his body the way a monkey might suck the pulp from an orange.

  Nobody made a sound now, nobody dared. But every single one of them hoped in his heart that this would be enough for it, this would be an end of it, after Reg it would go.

  Reg began to physically distort, his face growing long, his eye sockets stretching into bizarre vertical ovals, his lips opening, mouth gaping—and then all over the room others did the same, their faces twisting, colors oozing like gorgeous pus out of their bodies. They pissed and shat and howled and writhed, sinking down, tearing at their throats.

  There was a deafening wham as Milly Fisher blew her boy Tim’s head apart.

  “Mother,” Winnie shouted into Lindy’s face, “what is this, what is this?”

  Crackling became screeching became sucking, deep, the sucking of a chest wound, of a woman of the night, and the congregation became a blur of light and struggling, writhing people, some of them clawing at themselves and howling, others with guns in their shaking hands, trying to kill the ones who were being destroyed—as if it mattered, as if it would help.

  It remained like that, people crawling, leaping over one another and running for the light-choked doors, wading in it, pushing against the warmth of its ghastly fleshiness.

  Then came darkness, then silence, broken by a single wracking sob.

  The chandeliers flickered, and with their return came the sense of a storm having passed.

  The minister still stood in his pulpit. From a middle pew somebody asked, “Reg? Reg are you okay?”

  The Bible dropped from Reg’s hand, hitting the floor beside the pulpit with a crack like a shot. In the pews, some people shook others, calling into blank faces, shaking them until the spittle flew.

  “Angie, honey, Angie, you’re okay! She’s okay, it didn’t do her—”

  Martin saw Angie Bright, Carl Bright’s wife of thirty years, looking at him with the blank innocence of a newborn.

  Others began to growl, to laugh, to back away toward the walls. As the minister did this, he laughed softly. His face was still his own, but it was empty, the eyes glassy, staring.

  Bobby came to the center aisle, then trotted up to the pulpit. “Okay, we have the law on our side, we need to do this, people.”

  “My baby, my baby is fine. Lucy, you’re fine. She’s fine!” Becky Lindner shook her twelve-year-old. “Lucy! Lucy, don’t you playact!”

  The girl, who had been plastic like a catatonic, lunged at her mother, biting as a dog bites when it is cornered and cannot get away. Becky cried out, falling back into the Baker family, and young Timothy Baker caught her in his arms.

  Then Carl Bright screamed as he realized that his teenage son Robert, also, was among the wanderers. Martin’s heart was torn by all he was seeing, but the families like this one were the hardest. The Brights lived back in the hills in a comfortable house. In fact, it was only a few miles from their own place. He was a technical writer, she ran an online crafts business.

  Without so much as a murmured warning, Mrs. Haggerty leaped on Lindy’s back like a lioness leaping on a wildebeest, and she lurched forward into Martin, and the three of them went down with Mrs. Haggerty ripping Lindy’s hair out in handfuls while her husband, crying out, dragged her off and took her into the aisle.

  “Kids, don’t look,” Martin shouted as young Haggerty shot his mother dead.

  Lindy and Winnie and Trevor turned and moved to the back of the church. Martin was confused by this. “Lindy? Hey.”

  Another shot from the back of the sanctuary, and one of the Desmond boys stood over his father’s body, looking down out of tear-flooded young eyes. “Momma, I did it, I did it,” he cried, and his mother took him to her, and buried him in her embrace.

  Phil Knippa, whose wife was gathering at the back of the church with the others who had been ruined, asked Martin, “What happens?”

  Martin ran to his family. “Hey, this—”

  His Lindy had reached the door. She stood with the others. “Lindy? Oh, no!”

  Bobby came up to him. “Hey, come on, guy.”

  “But they didn’t—nothing happened to them!” He laughed. “She’s in shock. Hey, Lindy!” He went down to his kids. “See, they’re fine, Bobby, they’re just following their mother. Winnie! Trevor! Stop this! Stop this!”

  Phil said, “In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.”

  The new wanderers crowded the entrance, pressing against the doors, slapping them and Lindy and Trevor and Winnie were doing it, too, and then Bobby put his hand on Martin’s shoulder. Martin turned, and when he saw the gun that his dear old friend was offering him, the anguish that ripped his heart caused him to throw his head back and cry out, and in that quiet part of him that is in us all and sees and knows all, a voice said, “This has happened. This is what you have, now.”

  Lovers, wives, husbands, children—all circulated among them, trying to communicate with them, and the church was filled with their tears.

  Bobby got the door open for them, and they went out into the street…and joined many others, a shocking number, all walking away into the night. Martin thought that it was more than half the town. Three quarters.

  They shuffled silently off toward the low water crossing and the back roads that led up into the Smokey Hills, hardly hills at all, but wilder than they looked from a distance.

  A few people ran after them, two husbands, a wife, some others who had exchanged death promises. “If it happens to me, don’t let me be like that.” Pacts made in blood and love.

  Martin ran, too, touching his love, calling to her, calling to his babies, “Kids, come back here, this is Dad, this is an order!” And to his wife, “Oh, Lindy, wake up, love, wake up, love.”

  But they did not wake up, none of them woke up. An arm came around Martin’s shoulder, the arm of somebody he knew vaguely but who now seemed like a savior, and he leaned against this man and wept, and in the street the little clusters of those left behind wept, and the wanderers went on down the street, disappearing into the dark.

  Martin ran after them again, and then he stopped, and he went to his knees and he howled her name, “LINDY!” He cried in rage and in anguish as she went off without even a backward glance, taking his babies and his love and all that meant anything to him with her into the night.

  The shattered town sank away into the horrible small hours, with weeping in the churches, and the bodies of the destroyed dead lined up with what little dignity could be managed on the lawns. Most of the ruined, though, were not killed, because people did not have it in their hearts to rip the life out of the familiar and the beloved, no matter their state. So they went away, absorbed by the night. When daylight came, people would seek them out, taking water and food to the empty shells of their loved ones, trying to feed them, to talk to them. And they would smile, the wanderers, or sometimes lash out like scared animals, but the followers wo
uld stay with them, begging, pleading, praying, trying anything to bring them back. It is an extraordinary anguish to say good-bye to your dead while they are still alive, and many, many people could not do it.

  Martin went to his feet. He would not be a follower. He vowed that. He would be a fighter. Somehow, he was going to rescue his love and his children, he was going to go out there into that darkness, and whatever it took, whatever was needed, if he give his blood or his life or his own soul, it mattered not a bit, he would rescue his family.

  Toward dawn there was a fall of dew, and morning came pearled with it, on the leaves of autumn and the yellowing late grasses, on the neat houses, the empty streets, and on the wanderers, too, far out in the rustling fields, shining on their pale skin, pearl upon pearl.

  FOUR

  DECEMBER 2 THE POISONER

  WILEY LEAPED UP FROM THE computer, threw open the bottom drawer of the desk, grabbed the booze he kept in there, and just plain poured it down. “Christ, you dummies, can’t you see it’s a damn trick?”

  But they had not seen, not even Martin and Lindy. They’d gone to the church, too, they’d made themselves sitting damn ducks and they’d—oh, God, the poor Winters family, and poor Harrow. All those good, decent people.

  Wanderers. It was worse than dying. But why was this being done to them and where were they going? He thought that Martin was right about one thing—they were certainly on their way to designated locations. Collection points, though—he was just guessing about that. Maybe they were going to gas chambers or something, God forbid that such a fate would befall Lindy and Winnie. He was crazy about them, that sweet, bright little girl, her mother so full of love and brilliance.

  “This is not real,” he said, “I refuse to let this be real.”

  Maybe he wasn’t recording events in the other human universe, but creating them. Maybe he was an instrument of the reptilians, and maybe that was why they had came into his life five years ago. They had done something to him. Prepared him. But how?.

  He knew that supple movement between parallel universes was involved with belief and the lack thereof. By continuing to deny that UFOs were something real, our own version of NASA had saved us—at least, so far. But not him. Maybe not him.