F Paul Wilson - Novel 10

by Midnight Mass (v2. 1)

  All right," Zev said. "I'll try to find him. I won't promise to bring him back, because such a decision will not be mine to make. But I promise to look for him."

  "Tomorrow?"

  "First light. And who should I say sent me?"

  The woman turned away and shook her head. "No one."

  "You won't tell me your name?"

  "It's not important."

  "But you seem to know him."

  "Once, yes." Her voice grew thick. "But he wouldn't recognize me now."

  "You can be so sure?"

  She nodded. "I've fallen too far away. There's no coming back for me, I'm afraid."

  She'd been through something terrible, this one. So had everyone who was still alive, including Zev, but her experience, whatever it was, had made her a little meshugeh. More than a little, maybe.

  She started walking away, looking almost silly dragging that little red wagon behind her.

  "Wait..."

  "Just find him," she said without turning. "And don't mention me."

  She stepped into the shadows and was gone from sight, with only the squeaks of the wagon wheels as proof that she hadn't evaporated.

  Father Joe Cahill and a prostitute? Zev couldn't believe it. But even if it were true, it was far less serious than what Joe had been accused of.

  Maybe she hadn't sold herself in the old days. Maybe it was something she had to do to survive in these new and terrible times. Whatever the truth, he blessed her for being here to help him tonight.

  But who is she? he wondered. Or perhaps more important, who was she.

  CAROLE . . .

  Carole hid the red wagon behind the bushes along the side of the house, then climbed the rickety stairs to the front porch, unlocked the door, and stepped inside. That was when the voice spoke. It had been silent the whole long walk home. Now it started in again.

 

  "Quiet," Carole muttered. "I need to listen."

  She'd been in this house two weeks now, and she'd made it as secure as possible. As secure as anything could be since her world ended last month.

  Last month? Yes... six weeks this coming Friday. It seemed a lifetime ago. She never would have believed everything could fall apart so fast. But it had.

  Despite her security measures, she held her breath, listening for the sound of someone—or something—else in the house besides her. She heard nothing but the breeze stirring the curtains in the upstairs bedroom. It had been warm when she'd left but the night had grown chilly. May was such an untrustworthy month.

  She fished the flashlight out of her shoulder bag and turned it on, then off again—just long enough to orient herself. She wasn't worried about the light being seen from outside—the blankets draped over the windows would prevent that. She wanted to save her batteries, a rare and precious commodity. When she reached the stairs she flicked the light on again so she could step over the broken first tread. She noticed little splatters of blood on the banister and newel post. She'd clean them up in the morning, when she could use natural light.

  When she reached the bedroom she closed the window and quickly undressed.

 

  Carole had no illusions about that. She pulled on a baggy gray sweatsuit and slipped beneath the covers, praying the voice would let her sleep tonight. The night's labors had exhausted her.

  She thought of Rabbi Wolpin, and that made her think of Father Cahill, and that led to thoughts of St. Anthony's and the school where she'd taught, and the convent where she'd lived...

  She thought of her last nights there, less than six weeks ago, just days before Easter, when everything had been so different...

  GOOD FRIDAY ...

  The Holy Father says there are no such things as vampires," Sister Bernadette Gileen said.

  Sister Carole Hanarty glanced up from the pile of chemistry tests on her lap—tests she might never be able to return to her sophomore students—and watched Bernadette as she drove through town, working the shift on the old Datsun like a long-haul trucker. Her dear friend and fellow Sister of Mercy was thin, almost painfully so, with large blue eyes and short red hair showing around the white band of her wimple. As she peered through the windshield, the glow of the setting sun ruddied the clear, smooth skin of her round face.

  Sister Carole shrugged. "If His Holiness said it, then we must believe it. But we haven't heard anything from him in so long. I hope ..."

  Bernadette turned toward her, eyes wide with alarm.

  "Oh, you wouldn't be thinking anything's happened to His Holiness now, would you, Carole?" she said, the lilt of her native Ireland elbowing its way into her voice. "They wouldn't dare!"

  Momentarily at a loss as to what to say, Carole gazed out the side window at the budding trees sliding past. The sidewalks of this little Jersey Shore town were empty, and hardly any other cars were on the road. She and Bernadette had had to try three grocery stores before finding one with anything to sell. Between the hoarders and delayed or canceled shipments, food was getting scarce.

  Everybody sensed it. How did that saying go? By the pricking in my thumbs, something wicked this way comes...

  Or something like that.

  She rubbed her cold hands together and thought about Bernadette, younger than she by five years—only twenty-six—with such a good mind, such a clear thinker in so many ways. But her faith was almost childlike.

  She'd come to the convent at St. Anthony's two years ago and the pair of them had established instant rapport. They shared so much. Not just a common Irish heritage, but a certain isolation as well. Carole's parents had died years ago, and Bernadette's were back on the Auld Sod. So they became sisters in a sense that went beyond their sisterhood in the order. Carole was the big sister, Bernadette the little one. They prayed together, laughed together, walked together. They took over the convent kitchen and did all the food shopping together. Carole could only hope that she had enriched Bernadette's life half as much as the younger woman had enriched hers.

  Bernadette was such an innocent. She seemed to assume that since the Pope was infallible when he spoke on matters of faith or morals he somehow must be invincible too.

  Carole hadn't told Bernadette, but she'd decided not to believe the Pope on the matter of the undead. After all, their existence was not a matter of faith or morals. Either they existed or they didn't. And all the news out of Europe last year had left little doubt that vampires were real.

  And that they were on the march.

  Somehow they had got themselves organized. Not only did they exist, but more of them had been hiding in Eastern Europe than even the most superstitious peasant could have imagined. And when the communist bloc crumbled, when all the former client states and Russia were in disarray, grabbing for land, slaughtering in the name of nation and race and religion, the undead took advantage of the power vacuum and struck.

  They struck high, they struck low, and before the rest of the world could react, they controlled all Eastern Europe.

  If they had merely killed, they might have been containable. But because each kill was a conversion, their numbers increased in a geometric progression. Sister Carole understood geometric progressions better than most. Hadn't she spent years demonstrating them to her chemistry class by dropping a seed crystal into a beaker of supersaturated solution? That one crystal became two, which became four, which became eight, which became sixteen, and so on. You could watch the lattices forming, slowly at first, then bridging through the solution with increasing speed until the liquid contents of the beaker became a solid crystalline mass.

  That was how it had gone in Eastern Europe and Russia, then spreading into the Middle East and India, then China. And last fall, in
to Western Europe.

  The undead became unstoppable.

  All of Europe had been silent for months. Officially, at least. But a couple of the students at St. Anthony's High who had shortwave radios had told Carole of faint transmissions filtering through the transatlantic night recounting ghastly horrors all across Europe under undead rule.

  But the Pope had declared there were no vampires. He'd said it, but shortly thereafter he and the Vatican had fallen silent along with the rest of the continent.

  Washington had played down the immediate threat, saying the Atlantic Ocean formed a natural barrier against the undead. Europe was quarantined. America was safe.

  Then had come reports, disputed at first, and still officially denied, of undead in Washington, DC, running rampant through the Pentagon, the legislators' posh neighborhoods, the White House itself. Then New York City. The New York TV and radio stations had stopped transmitting. And now...

  "You can't really believe vampires are coming to the Jersey Shore, can you?" Bernadette said. "I mean, that is, if there were such things."

  "It is hard to believe, isn't it?" Carole said, hiding a smile. "Especially since no one comes to Jersey unless they have to."

  "Oh, don't you be having on with me now. This is serious."

  Bernadette was right. It was serious. "Well, it fits the pattern my students have heard from Europe."

  "But dear God, 'tis Holy Week! 'Tis Good Friday, it is! How could they dare?"

  "It's the perfect time, if you think about it. There will be no Mass said until the first Easter Mass on Sunday morning. What other time of the year is daily mass suspended?"

  Bernadette shook her head. "None."

  "Exactly." Carole looked down at her cold hands and felt the chill crawl all the way up her arms.

  The car suddenly lurched to a halt and she heard Bernadette cry out. "Dear Jesus! They're already here!"

  Half a dozen black-clad forms clustered on the corner ahead, staring at them.

  "Got to get out of here!" Bernadette said and hit the gas.

  The old car coughed and died.

  "Oh, no!" Bernadette wailed, frantically pumping the gas pedal and turning the key as the dark forms glided toward them. "No!"

  "Easy, dear," Carole said, laying a gentle hand on her arm. "It's all right. They're just kids."

  Perhaps "kids" was not entirely correct. Two males and four females who looked to be in their late teens and early twenties, but carried any number of adult lifetimes behind their heavily made-up eyes. Grinning, leering, they gathered around the car, four on Bernadette's side and two on Carole's. Sallow faces made paler by a layer of white powder, kohl-crusted eyelids, and black lipstick. Black fingernails, rings in their ears and eyebrows and nostrils, chrome studs piercing cheeks and lips. Their hair ranged the color spectrum, from dead white through burgundy to crankcase black. Bare hairless chests on the boys under their leather jackets, almost-bare chests on the girls in their black push-up bras and bustiers. Boots of shiny leather or vinyl, fishnet stockings, layer upon layer of lace, and everything black, black, black.

  "Hey, look!" one of the boys said. A spiked leather collar girded his throat; acne lumps bulged under his whiteface. "Nuns!" "Penguins!" someone else said. Apparently this was deemed hilarious. The six of them screamed with laughter.

  We're not penguins, Carole thought. She hadn't worn a full habit in years. Only the headpiece.

  "Shit, are they gonna be in for a surprise tomorrow morning!" said a buxom girl wearing a silk top hat.

  Another roar of laughter by all except one. A tall slim girl with three large black tears tattooed down one cheek, and blond roots peeking from under her black-dyed hair, hung back, looking uncomfortable. Carole stared at her. Something familiar there...

  She rolled down her window. "Rosita? Rosita Hernandez, is that you?'

  More laughter. " 'Rosita'?" someone cried. "That's Wicky!"

  The girl stepped forward and looked Carole in the eye. "Yes, Sister. That used to be my name. But I'm not Rosita anymore."

  "l can see that."

  She remembered Rosita. A sweet girl, extremely bright, but so quiet. A voracious reader who never seemed to fit in with the rest of the kids. Her grades plummeted as a junior. She never returned for her senior year. When Carole had called her parents, she was told that Rosita had left home. She'd been unable to learn anything more.

  "You've changed a bit since I last saw you. What is it—three years now?"

  "You talk about change?" said the top-hatted girl, sticking her face in the window. "Wait'll tonight. Then you'll really see her change!" She brayed a laugh that revealed a chrome stud in her tongue.

  "Butt out, Carmilla!" Rosita said.

  Carmilla ignored her. "They're coming tonight, you know. The Lords of the Night will be arriving after sunset, and that'll spell the death of your world and the birth of ours. We will present ourselves to them, we will bare our throats and let them drain us, and we'll join them. Then we'll rule the night with them!"

  It sounded like a canned speech, one she must have delivered time and again to her black-clad troupe.

  Carole looked past Carmilla to Rosita. "Is that what you believe? Is that what you really want?"

  The girl shrugged her high thin shoulders. "Beats anything else I got going."

  Finally the old Datsun shuddered to life. Carole heard Bernadette working the shift. She touched her arm and said, "Wait. Just one more moment, please."

  She was about to speak to Rosita when Carmilla jabbed her finger at Carole's face, shouting.

  "Then you bitches and the candy-ass god you whore for will be fucking extinct!"

  With a surprising show of strength, Rosita yanked Carmilla away from the window.

  "Better go, Sister Carole," Rosita said.

  The Datsun started to move.

  "What the fuck's with you, Wicky?" Carole heard Carmilla scream as the car eased away from the dark cluster. "Getting religion or somethin? Should we start callin you Sister Rosita now?"

  "She was one of the few people who was ever straight with me," Rosita said. "So fuck off, Carmilla."

  By then the car had traveled too far to hear more.

  * * *

  "What awful creatures they were!" Bernadette said, staring out the window in Carole's convent room. She hadn't been able to stop talking about the incident on the street. "Almost my age, they were, and such horrible language!"

  The room was little more than a ten-by-ten-foot plaster box with cracks in the walls and the latest coat of paint beginning to flake off the ancient embossed tin ceiling. She had one window and, for furnishings, a crucifix, a dresser and mirror, a work table and chair, a bed, and a night stand. Not much, but she gladly called it home. She took her vow of poverty seriously.

  "Perhaps we should pray for them."

  "They need more than prayer, I'd think. Believe me you, they're heading for a bad end." Bernadette removed the oversized rosary she wore looped around her neck, gathering the beads and its attached crucifix in her hand. "Maybe we could offer them some crosses for protection?"

  Carole couldn't resist a smile. "That's a sweet thought, Bern, but I don't think they're looking for protection."

  "Sure, and lookit after what I'm saying," Bernadette said, her own smile rueful. "No, of course they wouldn't."

  "But we'll pray for them," Carole said.

  Bernadette dropped into a chair, stayed there for no more than a heartbeat, then was up again, moving about, pacing the confines of Carole's room. She couldn't seem to sit still. She wandered out into the hall and came back almost immediately, rubbing her hands together as if washing them.

  "It's so quiet," she said. "So empty."

  "I certainly hope so," Carole said. "We're the only two who are supposed to be here."

  The little convent was half empty even when all its residents were present. And now, with St. Anthony's School closed for the coming week, the rest of the nuns had gone home to spend Easter Week with broth
ers and sisters and parents. Even those who might have stayed around the convent in past years had heard the rumors that the undead might be moving this way, so they'd scattered. Carole's only living relative was an aunt, her mother's sister Joyce, who lived in Harrisburg and usually invited her to spend Easter and the following week with her; but she hadn't invited her this year, and wasn't answering her phone. She had a son in California; maybe she'd gone to stay with him. Lots of people were leaving the East Coast.

  Bernadette hadn't heard from her family in Ireland for months. Carole feared she never would.

  So that left just the two of them to hold the fort, as it were. The convent was part of a complex consisting of the church itself, the rectory, the grammar school and high school buildings, the tiny cemetery, and the sturdy old two-story rooming house that was now the convent. She and Bernadette had taken second-floor rooms, leaving the first floor to the older nuns.

  Carole wasn't afraid. She knew they'd be safe here at St. Anthony's, although she wished there were more people left in the complex than just Bernadette, herself, and Father Palmeri.

  "I don't understand Father Palmeri," Bernadette said. "Locking up the church and keeping his parishioners from making the stations of the cross on Good Friday. Who's ever heard of such a thing, I ask you? I just don't understand it."

  Carole thought she understood. She suspected that Father Alberto Palmeri was afraid. Sometime this morning he'd locked up the rectory, barred the door to St. Anthony's, and hidden himself in the church basement.

  God forgive her for thinking it, but to Sister Carole's mind Father Palmeri was a coward.

  "Oh, I do wish he'd open the church, just for a little while," Bernadette said. "I need to be in there, Carole. I need it."