Dean Koontz - (1989)

by Midnight(Lit)

  He put down a muffin that he had been raising to his mouth, and he

  reached across the table, between the plates and tins of food, to take

  her hand. His fingers were slightly greasy with butter, but she did not

  mind, for he was so reassuring and comforting; right now she needed a

  lot of reassuring and comforting.

  "You'll be reunited with your parents," Father Castelli said with great

  sympathy.

  "I absolutely guarantee that you will."

  She bit her lower lip, trying to hold back her tears.

  "I guarantee it," he repeated.

  Abruptly his face bulged. Not evenly like an inflating balloon. Rather,

  it bulged in some places and not others, rippled and pulsed, as if his

  skull had turned to mush and as if balls of worms were writhing and

  squirming just under the skin.

  "I guarantee it!"

  Chrissie was too terrified to scream. For a moment she could not move.

  She was paralyzed by fear, frozen in her chair, unable to summon even

  enough motor control to blink or draw a breath.

  She could hear his bones loudly crackling-crunching-popping as they

  splintered and dissolved and reshaped themselves with impossible speed.

  His flesh made a disgusting, wet, oozing sound as it flowed into new

  forms almost with the ease of hot wax.

  The priest's skull swelled upward and swept back in a bony crest, and

  his face was hardly human at all now but partly crustacean, partly

  insectile, vaguely wasplike, with something of the jackal in it, too,

  and with fiery hateful eyes.

  At last Chrissie cried out explosively, "No!" Her heart was pounding so

  hard that each beat was painful.

  "No, go away, let me alone, let me go!"

  His jaws lengthened, then split back nearly to his ears in a menacing

  grin defined by double rows of immense sharp teeth.

  "No, no!

  " She tried to get up.

  She realized that he was still holding her left hand.

  - 281 He spoke in a voice eerily reminiscent of those of her mother and

  Tucker when they had stalked her as far as the mouth of the culvert last

  night ". . . need, need . . . want . . . give me . . . give

  me . . .

  need - - - " He didn't look like her parents had looked when

  transformed. Why wouldn't all the aliens look the same?

  He opened his mouth wide and hissed at her, and thick yellowish saliva

  was strung like threads of taffy from his upper to his lower teeth.

  Something stirred inside his mouth, a strange looking tongue; it thrust

  out at her like a jack-in-the-box popping forth on its spring, and it

  proved to be a mouth within his mouth, another set of smaller and even

  sharper teeth on a stalk, designed to get into tight places and bite

  prey that took refuge there.

  Father Castelli was becoming something startlingly familiar the creature

  from the movie Alien. Not exactly that monster in every detail but

  uncannily similar to it.

  She was trapped in a movie, just as the priest had said, a real-life

  horror flick no doubt one of his favorites. Was Father Castelli able to

  assume whatever shape he wanted, and was he becoming this beast only

  because it pleased him to do so and because it would best fulfill

  Chrissie's expectations of alien invaders?

  This was crazy.

  Beneath his clothes, the priest's body was changing too. His shirt

  sagged on him in some places, as if the substance of him had melted away

  beneath it, but in other places it strained at the seams as his body

  acquired new bony extrusions and inhuman excrescences. Shirt buttons

  popped. Fabric tore. His Roman collar came apart and fell askew on his

  hideously resculpted neck.

  Gasping, making a curious uh-uh-uh-uh-uh sound in the back of her throat

  but unable to stop, she tried to pull free of him. She stood up,

  knocking her chair over, but she was Still held fast. He was very

  strong. She could not tear loose.

  His hands also had begun to change. His fingers had lengthened. They

  were plated with a horn-like substance-smooth, hard, and shiny

  black-more like pincers with digits than like human hands.

  ". . . need . . . want, want . . . need. She plucked up her

  breakfast knife, swung it high over her head, and drove it down with all

  her might, stabbing him in the forearm, just above the wrist, where his

  flesh still looked more human than not. She had hoped that the blade

  would pin him to the table, but she didn't feel it bite all the way

  through him to the wood beneath.

  His shriek was so shrill and piercing that it seemed to vibrate through

  Chrissie's bones.

  His armored, demonic hand spasmed open. She yanked free of him.

  Fortunately she was quick, for his hand clamped shut again a fraction of

  a second later, pinching her fingertips but unable to hold her.

  The kitchen door was on the priest's side of the table. She could not

  reach it without exposing her back to him.

  With a cry that was half scream and half roar, he tore the knife from

  his arm and threw it aside. He knocked the dishes and food from the

  table with one sweep of his bizarrely mutated arm, which was now eight

  or ten inches longer than it had been. It protruded from the cuff of

  his black shirt in nightmarish gnarls and planes and hooks of the dark,

  chitinous stuff that had replaced his flesh.

  Mary, Mother of God, pray for me; mother, most pure, pray for me; Mother

  most chaste, pray for me. Please, Chrissie thought.

  The priest grabbed hold of the table and threw it aside, tool as if it

  weighed only ounces. It crashed into the refrigerator. Now nothing

  separated her from him.

  From it.

  She feinted toward the kitchen door, taking a couple of steps in that

  direction.

  The priest-not really a priest any more; a thing that sometimes

  masqueraded as a priest-swung to his right, intending to cut her off and

  snare her.

  Immediately she turned, as she'd always intended, and ran in the

  opposite direction, toward the open door that led to the downstairs

  hall, leaping over scattered toast and links of sausage. The trick

  worked. Wet shoes squishing and squeaking on the linoleum, she was past

  him before he realized she actually was going to his left.

  She suspected that he was quick as well as strong. Quicker than she, no

  doubt. She could hear him coming behind her.

  - 283 If she could only reach the front door, get out onto the porch and

  into the yard, she would probably be safe. She suspected that he would

  not follow her beyond the house, into the street, where others might see

  him. Surely not everyone in Moonlight Cove had already been possessed

  by these aliens, and until the last real person in town was taken over,

  they could not strut around in a transformed state, eating young girls

  with impunity].

  Not far. Just the front door and a few steps beyond.

  She had covered two-thirds of the distance, expecting to feel a claw

  snag her shirt from behind, when the door opened ahead of her. The other

  priest, Father O'Brien, stepped across the threshold and blinked in

  surprise
.

  At once she knew that she couldn't trust him, either. He could not have

  lived in the same house as Father Castelli without the alien seed having

  been planted in him. Seed, spoor, slimy parasite, spirit-whatever was

  used to effect possession, Father O'Brien undoubtedly had had it rammed

  or injected into him.

  Unable to go forward or back, unwilling to swerve through the archway on

  her right and into the living room because that was a dead end-in every

  sense of the word-she grabbed hold of the newel post, which she was just

  passing, and swung herself onto the stairs. She ran pell-mell for the

  second floor.

  The front door slammed below her.

  By the time she turned at the landing and started up the second flight

  of stairs, she heard both of them climbing behind her.

  The upper hall had white plaster walls, a dark wood floor, and a wood

  ceiling. Rooms lay on both sides.

  She Sprinted to the end of the hall and into a bedroom furnished only

  with a simple dresser, one nightstand, a double bed with a white

  chenille spread, a bookcase full of paperbacks, and a crucifix on the

  wall. She threw the door shut after her but didn't bother trying to

  lock or brace it. There was no time. They'd smash through it in

  seconds, anyway.

  Repeating, "Mary mother of God, Mary mother of God," in a breathless and

  desperate whisper, she rushed across the room to the window that was

  framed by emerald-green drapes. Rain washed down the glass.

  Her Pursuers were in the upstairs hall. Their footsteps boomed through

  the house.

  She grabbed the handles on the sash and tried to pull the window up. It

  would not budge. She fumbled with the latch, but it already was

  disengaged.

  Farther back the hall toward the head of the stairs, they were throwing

  open doors, looking for her.

  The window was either painted shut or perhaps swollen tight because of

  the high humidity. She stepped back from it.

  The door behind her crashed inward, and something snarled.

  Without glancing behind her, she tucked her head down and crossed her

  arms over her face and threw herself through the window, wondering if

  she could kill herself by jumping from the second story, figuring it

  depended where she landed. Grass would be good. Sidewalk would be bad.

  The pointed spires of a wrought-iron fence would be real bad.

  The sound of shattering glass was still in the air when she hit a porch

  roof two feet below the window, which was virtually a miracle-she was

  uncut too-so she kept saying MarymotherofGod as she did a controlled

  roll through hammering rain toward the edge of the shingled expanse.

  When she reached the brink, she clung there for a moment, her left side

  on the roof, right side supported by a creaking and rapidly sagging rain

  gutter, and she looked back at the window.

  Something wolfish and grotesque was coming after her.

  She dropped. She landed on a walkway, on her left side, jarring her

  bones, clacking her teeth together so hard that she feared they'd fall

  out in pieces, and scraping one hand badly on the concrete.

  But she didn't lie there pitying herself. She scrambled up and, huddled

  around her pain, turned from the house to run into the street.

  Unfortunately she wasn't in front of the rectory. She was behind it, in

  the rear yard. The back wall of Our Lady of Mercy bordered the lawn on

  her right, and a seven-foot-high brick wall encircled the rest of the

  property.

  Because of the wall and the trees on both sides of it, she could not see

  either the neighboring house to the south or the one to the west, on the

  other side of the alley that ran behind the property. If she couldn't

  see the rectory's neighbors, they couldn't see her, either, even if they

  happened to be looking out a window.

  That privacy explained why the wolf-thing dared to come onto - 285 the

  roof, pursuing her in broad-if rather gray and dismal daylight.

  She briefly considered going into the house, through the kitchen, down

  the hall, out the front door, into the street, because that was the last

  thing they'd expect. But then she thought Are YOu insane?

  She did not bother to scream for help. Her thudding heart seemed to

  have swollen until her lungs had too little room to expand, so she could

  barely get enough air to remain conscious, on her feet, and moving. No

  breath was left for a scream. Besides, even if people heard her call

  for help, they wouldn't necessarily be able to tell where she was; by

  the time they tracked her down, she would be either torn apart or

  possessed, because the scream would have slowed her by a fateful second

  or two.

  Instead, limping slightly to favor a pulled muscle in her left leg but

  losing no time, she hurried across the expansive rear lawn. She knew

  she could not scale a blank seven-foot wall fast enough to save herself,

  especially not with one stingingly abraded hand, so she studied the

  trees as she ran. She needed one close to the wall; maybe she could

  climb into it, crawl out on a branch, and drop into the alleyway or into

  the neighbor's yard.

  Above the slosh and patter of the rain, she heard a low growl behind

  her, and she dared to glance over her shoulder. Wearing only tatters of

  a shirt, freed entirely from shoes and trousers, the wolf-thing that had

  been Father O'Brien leaped from the edge of the porch roof in pursuit.

  She finally saw a suitable tree-but an instant later noticed a gate in

  the wall at the southwest corner. She hadn't seen it sooner because it

  had been screened from her by some shrubbery that she had just passed.

  Gasping for air, she put her head down, tucked her arms against her

  sides, and ran to the gate. She hit the bar latch with her hand,

  popping it out of the slot in which it had been cradled, and burst

  through into the alley. Turning left, away from Ocean Avenue toward

  Jacobi Street, she ran through deep puddles nearly to the end of the

  block before risking a glance behind her.

  Nothing had followed her out of the rectory gate.

  twice she had been in the hands of the aliens, and twice she had

  escaped. She knew she would not be so lucky if she were captured a

  third time.

  t Shortly before nine o'clock, after less than four hours of sleep

  altogether, Sam Booker woke to the quiet clink and clatter of someone at

  work in the kitchen. He sat up on the living-room sofa, wiped at his

  matted eyes, put on his shoes and shoulder holster, and went down the

  hall.

  Tessa Lockland was humming softly as she lined up pans, bowls, and food

  on the wheelchair-low counter near the stove, preparing to make

  breakfast.

  "Good morning," she said brightly when Sam came into the kitchen.

  'What's good about it?" he asked.

  'Just listen to that rain," she said.

  "Rain always makes me feel clean and fresh."

  "Always depresses me.And it's nice to be in a warm, dry kitchen,

  listening to the storm but cozy."

  He scratched at the stubble of beard on his unshaven cheeks. "Seems a

  little stuffy in
here to me."

  'Well, anyway, we're still alive, and that's good."

  'I guess so.

  " 'God in heaven!" She banged an empty frying pan down on the stove and

  scowled at him.

  "Are all FBI agents like you"" 'In what way?"

  'Are they all sourpusses?

  'I'm not a sourpuss. You're a classic Gloomy Gus," 'Well, life isn't a

  carnival."

  'It isn't?"

  Life is hard and mean."

  "Maybe. But isn't it a carnival too?"

  - 287 "Are all documentary filmmakers like you?"

  -'In what way?"

  Pollyannas?"

  "That's ridiculous - I'm no Pollyanna.

  "Oh, no?"

  "No. Here we are trapped in a town where reality seems to have been

  temporarily suspended, where people are being torn apart by species

  unknown, where Boogeymen roam the streets at night, where some mad

  computer genius seems to have turned human biology inside out, where

  we're all likely to be killed or 'converted' before midnight tonight,

  and when I come in here you're grinning and sprightly and humming a

  Beatles tune."

  "It wasn't the Beatles."

  " Huh? Rolling Stones."

  "And that makes a difference?"