Koontz, Dean R. - Mr. Murder

by Dean Koontz

  Marty remembered having this same discussion before, back at the cabin,

  when she wanted to go outside and hide in the rocks. Her plan hadn't

  worked then, although not because it was flawed. The Other had driven

  past her in the Jeep, evidently unaware that she was lying in wait. If

  he hadn't pulled such an unpredictable stunt, ramming the station wagon

  right into the house, she might have slipped up on him and dropped him

  from behind.

  Nevertheless, Marty didn't want to leave her alone by the door.

  But there was no time for debate because he suspected his wound was soon

  going to begin sapping what strength he still had.

  Besides, he didn't have a better plan to suggest.

  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 hartied 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 wall.

  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 back ward, 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 o ner.

  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 out

  side.

  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