A Soft Barren Aftershock

by F. Paul Wilson

  “I’m thirsty, Carole. Could you get me some water?”

  Her voice was strange. Lower pitched and hoarse, yes, but that should be expected after the throat wound she’d suffered. No, something else had changed in her voice, but Carole could not pin it down.

  “Of course. You’ll need fluids. Lots of fluids.”

  The bathroom was only two doors down. She took her water pitcher, lit a second candle, and left Bernadette on the bed, looking like an Indian draped in a serape.

  When she returned with the full pitcher, she was startled to find the bed empty. She spied Bernadette immediately, by the window. She hadn’t opened it, but she’d pulled off the bedspread drape and raised the shade. She stood there, staring out at the night. And she was naked again.

  Carole looked around for the blanket and found it . . . hanging on the wall over her bed . . .

  Covering the crucifix.

  Part of Carole screamed at her to run, to flee down the hall and not look back. But another part of her insisted she stay. This was her friend. Something terrible had happened to Bernadette and she needed Carole now, probably more than she’d needed anyone in her entire life. And if someone was going to help her, it was Carole. Only Carole.

  She placed the pitcher on the nightstand.

  “Bernadette,” she said, her mouth as dry as the timbers in these old walls, “the blanket . . .”

  “I was hot,” Bernadette said without turning.

  “I brought you the water. I’ll pour—”

  “I’ll drink it later. Come and watch the night.”

  “I don’t want to see the night. It frightens me.”

  Bernadette turned, a faint smile on her lips. “But the darkness is so beautiful.”

  She stepped closer and stretched her arms toward Carole, laying a hand on each shoulder and gently massaging the terror-tightened muscles there. A sweet lethargy began to seep through Carole. Her eyelids began to drift closed . . . so tired . . . so long since she’d had any sleep . . .

  No!

  She forced her eyes open and gripped Bernadette’s hands, pulling them from her shoulders. She pressed the palms together and clasped them between her own.

  “Let’s pray, Bern. With me: Hail Mary, full of grace . . .”

  “No!”

  “. . . the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou . . .”

  Her friend’s face twisted in rage. “I said NO, damn you!”

  Carole struggled to keep a grip on Bernadette’s hands but she was too strong.

  “. . . amongst women . . .”

  And suddenly Bernadette’s struggles ceased. Her face relaxed, her eyes cleared, even her voice changed, still hoarse, but higher in pitch, lighter in tone as she took up the words of the prayer.

  “And Blessed is the fruit of thy womb . . .” Bernadette struggled with the next word, unable to say it. Instead she gripped Carole’s hands with painful intensity and loosed a torrent of her own words. “Carole, get out! Get out, oh, please, for the love of God, get out now! There’s not much of me left in here, and soon I’ll be like the ones that killed me and I’ll be after killing you! So run, Carole! Hide! Lock yourself in the chapel downstairs but get away from me now!”

  Carole knew now what had been missing from Bernadette’s voice—her brogue. But now it was back. This was the real Bernadette speaking. She was back! Her friend, her sister, was back! Carole bit back a sob.

  “Oh, Bern, I can help! I can—”

  Bernadette pushed her toward the door. “No one can help me, Carole!” She ripped the makeshift bandage from her neck, exposing the deep, jagged wound and the ragged ends of the torn blood vessels within it. “It’s too late for me, but not for you. They’re a bad lot and I’ll be one of them again soon, so get out while you—”

  Suddenly Bernadette stiffened and her features shifted. Carole knew immediately that the brief respite her friend had stolen from the horror that gripped her was over. Something else was back in control.

  Carole turned and ran.

  But the Bernadette-thing was astonishingly swift. Carole had barely reached the threshold when a steel-fingered hand gripped her upper arm and yanked her back, nearly dislocating her shoulder. She cried out in pain and terror as she was spun about and flung across the room. Her hip struck hard against the rickety old spindle chair by her desk, knocking it over as she landed in a heap beside it.

  Carole groaned with the pain. As she shook her head to clear it, she saw Bernadette approaching her, her movements stiff, more assured now, her teeth bared—so many teeth, and so much longer than the old Bernadette’s—her fingers curved, reaching for Carole’s throat. With each passing second there was less and less of Bernadette about her.

  Carole tried to back away, her frantic hands and feet slipping on the floor as she pressed her spine against the wall. She had nowhere to go. She pulled the fallen chair atop her and held it as a shield against the Bernadette-thing. The face that had once belonged to her dearest friend grimaced with contempt as she swung her hand at the chair. It scythed through the spindles, splintering them like match-sticks, sending the carved headpiece flying. A second blow cracked the seat in two. A third and fourth sent the remnants of the chair hurtling to opposite sides of the room.

  Carole was helpless now. All she could do was pray.

  “Our Father, who art—”

  “Too late for that to help you now, Caroler she hissed, spitting her name.

  “. . . hallowed be Thy Name . . .” Carole said, quaking in terror as undead fingers closed on her throat.

  And then the Bernadette-thing froze, listening. Carole heard it too. An insistent tapping. On the window. The creature turned to look, and Carole followed her gaze.

  A face was peering through the window.

  Carole blinked but it didn’t go away. This was the second floor! How—?

  And then a second face appeared, this one upside down, looking in from the top of the window. And then a third, and a fourth, each more bestial than the last. And as each appeared it began to tap its fingers and knuckles on the window glass.

  “No!” the Bernadette-thing screamed at them. “You can’t come in! She’s mine! No one touches her but me!”

  She turned back to Carole and smiled, showing those teeth that had never fit in Bernadette’s mouth. “They can’t cross a threshold unless invited in by one who lives there. I live here—or at least I did. And I’m not sharing you, Carole.”

  She turned again and raked a claw-like hand at the window. “Go A-way! She’s MINE!”

  Carole glanced to the left. The bed was only a few feet away. And above it—the blanket-shrouded crucifix. If she could reach it . . .

  She didn’t hesitate. With the mad tapping tattoo from the window echoing around her, Carole gathered her feet beneath her and sprang for the bed. She scrambled across the sheets, one hand outstretched, reaching for the blanket—

  A manacle of icy flesh closed around her ankle and roughly dragged her back.

  “Oh, no, bitch,” said the hoarse, unaccented voice of the Bernadette-thing. “Don’t even think about it!”

  It grabbed two fistfuls of flannel at the back of Carole’s nightgown and hurled her across the room as if she weighed no more than a pillow. The wind whooshed out of Carole as she slammed against the far wall. She heard ribs crack. She fell among the splintered ruins of the chair, pain lancing through her right flank. The room wavered and blurred. But through the roaring in her ears she still heard that insistent tapping on the window.

  As her vision cleared she saw the Bernadette-thing’s naked form gesturing again to the creatures at the window, now a mass of salivating mouths and tapping fingers.

  “Watch!” she hissed. “Watch me!”

  With that, she loosed a long, howling scream and lunged at Carole, arms curved before her, body arcing into a flying leap. The scream, the tapping, the faces at the window, the dear friend who now wanted only to slaughter her—it all was suddenly too much for Carole. She wanted to ro
ll away but couldn’t get her body to move. Her hand found the broken seat of the chair by her hip. Instinctively she pulled it closer. She closed her eyes as she raised it between herself and the horror hurtling toward her through the air.

  The impact drove the wood of the seat against Carole’s chest; she groaned as new stabs of pain shot through her ribs. But the Bernadette-thing’s triumphant feeding cry cut off abruptly and devolved into a coughing gurgle.

  Suddenly the weight was released from Carole’s chest, and the chair seat with it.

  And the tapping at the window stopped.

  Carole opened her eyes to see the naked Bemadette-thing standing above her, straddling her, holding the chair seat before her, choking and gagging as she struggled with it.

  At first Carole didn’t understand. She drew her legs back and inched away along the wall. And then she saw what had happened.

  Three splintered spindles had remained fixed in that half of the broken seat, and those spindles were now firmly and deeply embedded in the center of the Bemadette-thing’s chest. She wrenched wildly at the chair seat, trying to dislodge the oak daggers but succeeded only in breaking them off at skin level. She dropped the remnant of the seat and swayed like a tree in a storm, her mouth working spasmodically as her hands fluttered ineffectually over the bloodless wounds between her ribs and the slim wooden stakes deep out of reach within them.

  Abruptly she dropped to her knees with a dull thud. Then, only inches from Carole, she slumped into a splay-legged squat. The agony faded from her face and she closed her eyes. She fell forward against Carole.

  Carole threw her arms around her friend and gathered her close.

  “Oh, Bern, oh, Bern, oh, Bern,” she moaned. “I’m so sorry. If only I’d got there sooner!”

  Bernadette’s eyes fluttered open and the darkness was gone. Only her own spring-sky blue remained, clear, grateful. Her lips began to curve upward but made it only halfway to a smile, then she was gone.

  Carole hugged the limp cold body closer and moaned in boundless grief and anguish to the unfeeling walls. She saw the leering faces begging to crawl away from the window and she shouted at them though her tears.

  “Go! That’s it! Run away and hide! Soon it’ll be light and then I’ll come looking for you! For all of you! And woe to any of you that I find!”

  She cried over Bernadette’s body a long time. And then she wrapped it in a sheet and held and rocked her dead friend in her arms until sunrise.

  With the dawn she left the old Sister Carole Hanarty behind. The gentle soul, happy to spend her days and nights in the service of the Lord, praying, fasting, teaching chemistry to reluctant adolescents, and holding to her vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, was gone.

  The new Sister Carole had been tempered in the forge of the night and recast into someone relentlessly vengeful and fearless to the point of recklessness. And perhaps, she admitted with no shame or regret, more than a little mad.

  She departed the convent and began her hunt.

  NIGHT DIVE

  What is wrong? Silvio wondered as he cast his little net again.

  He stood waist deep in the clear warm water near the big coral head. He held his thin brown arms high and squinted into the glare of the morning sun as gentle Caribbean swells lapped at his ribcage. Every morning for two years now, since he’d turned six, Silvio had waded offshore to net bait fish for his grandfather. A simple task. The shallows were alive with silversides, and one or two casts usually netted more than enough.

  But not lately. Every day for the past week or so Silvio had found fewer fish wriggling in the fine mesh, and needed more and more casts to fill Granpa’s bait bucket. Today was the worst—eleven casts and nothing.

  Granpa too was having bad luck in the deeper waters around the island. Usually he had no trouble bringing home enough snapper, barjack, and grouper to keep everyone well fed, but lately his catches had been falling off.

  Silvio pulled on the string and hauled in his net for the twelfth time. It felt heavier. Success at last.

  But when he lifted the net out of the water, instead of silversides he found a six-inch squirrel fish. He grinned. Never before had he caught anything this size in his little net. But his excitement faded as he took a closer look at the feebly flapping fish. The scales seemed to be sloughing from its red-and-white flanks, and its huge black eyes looked dull and blind. As he watched, it stretched its gills wide, then lay still.

  Silvio lowered his net back into the water but the squirrel fish remained immobile. It looked dead. He reached into the net to examine it, but as he lifted the body it broke in half, releasing a sickening stink. Silvio cried out in shock and quickly washed off the putrid goo that coated his hand.

  He was afraid now. Something was terribly wrong. Holding his net at arm’s length, he splashed toward shore. He had to show Granpa. Granpa would know what to do. This was Granpa’s island. He knew everything about the sandy land and the sea that enclosed it.

  Michael Stover ascended along the mooring rope to a depth of about fifteen feet, then shut off his light and hung in the inky water. He waved his free arm back and forth in figure eights, watching bioluminescent plankton flash in its wake like a mini Fourth of July.

  Cool.

  He hadn’t been deep—fifty feet, max—so he didn’t need much of a safety stop. The water was warm and he was comfortable in his nylon bodysuit. He wished he could stay here all night, but the 300psi reading on his pressure gauge was a reality he couldn’t ignore. Reluctantly he released the rope and followed his bubbles to the surface.

  Time to face the music.

  Cries of relief and concern greeted his arrival on the surface. He lowered his mask and blinked his eyes. A moonless night, with bright stars glittering above, and the bars and hotels glowing along Seven Mile beach far to his right. The voices came from the dive boat looming over him.

  “Are you okay?” . . . “Need any help?” . . . “Thank God! We’ve been worried sick about you!”

  “I’m fine,” Stover said.

  He shot a little more air into his BCD and stroked to the platform at the rear of the boat. He clung to the ladder as he removed his fins, then climbed aboard.

  “Shit, man!”

  Stover looked up and saw his assigned dive buddy—Lawson or Dawson or something like that—a bearded, balding, overweight talker. Like Stover he’d booked as a single and the dive master had paired them up.

  “What happened? We hit bottom, you give me the O-K, we start toward the others, then a minute later I look around and you’re gone!”

  He and the half-dozen other divers on board were crowded around him now.

  “I got lost,” Stover said, seating himself on a side bench and sliding his tank into an empty slot. “I got disoriented down there in the dark. I didn’t know where everyone—”

  “Bullshit!” said another voice.

  Stover saw the divemaster pushing through the semicircle.

  Uh-oh. Here it comes.

  His name was Jim—or was it Tim?—late twenties like Stover, blond, deeply tanned, with one of those thorny freeform tattoos encircling each of his considerable biceps. An affable dude on the trip out, but thoroughly pissed at the moment.

  “Pardon?”

  “You heard me,” Jim-Tim said. “You weren’t lost. Our lights were visible from a hundred-fifty feet down there.”

  “Then why didn’t you see mine?”

  “We should have . . . unless you were hiding behind a coral head. Anyway, if you were lost you would’ve surfaced and come back to the boat. But you never came up. What the fuck’s your problem, man?”

  Michael Stover’s problem was that he preferred to dive alone, a preference that broke one of the sacred rules of diving. No, he wasn’t stupid—the buddy system made tons of safety sense—and no, he wasn’t a loser loner—he sort of liked the crowded dive boats and the après-dive sharing of wonders seen below.

  But during a dive . . .

  Once he was
under, Stover had his own priorities. First off, he loved the silence. Once below, all you heard was your own breath bubbling through the regulator. And tagging along with the silence was this wonderful sense of solitude. He loved to imagine he was the only person on the planet with a scuba rig, and that his were the first human eyes to gorge on the wonders of a Caribbean reef. But having a dive buddy—or worse, being part of an excursion group—shattered that illusion. Plus you had to go where someone else wanted to go.

  So Stover tended to sneak off on his own as soon as he hit target depth.

  In the world of scuba, this was sacrilege, anathema, the ultimate no-no. And Stover couldn’t blame them, really: The divemaster descends with eight divers; a few minutes later he looks around and counts only seven. He raps on his tank with his knife handle, but no answering clang comes back. He goes back to the surface and no one on the boat has seen the missing diver. That’s when his wetsuit tends to acquire a brown stain.

  Thirty minutes later, when Stover surfaces, there’s the all-too-brief joyous celebration, followed quickly by anger: Where the hell did you go? Don’t you know better than . . . blah-blah-blah . . . yadda-yadda-yadda . . .

  Was it worth it? he asked himself as the red-faced Jim-Tim rattled on.

  Yeah. Especially on a night dive when you chance upon a coral head as spectacular as the one he’d found tonight. The colors alone are worth the grief. Water leaches the sunlight as it filters down from the surface, so even in the extraordinarily clear waters of the Caymans, you get down to a hundred feet and the brightest gobies and hydroids look faded. But at night, when you shine your torch from six inches away, the colors leap out at you. Tonight he’d found diamondback blennies among the anemones, and brilliant Christmas tree worms jutting from a brain coral formation, and he’d spent a good ten minutes watching two bright red hermit crabs battling over an empty shell.

  But colors were only part of the story. Lots of things that stay hidden during the day come out when it’s dark—octopus, squid, eels, snakes—and they’re all hungry. The waters are alive with death. And Stover liked to participate in the feeding frenzy—not by eating, but by playing maestro with the eaters and the eaten.