F Paul Wilson - Novel 10 (9 page)
Read F Paul Wilson - Novel 10 Online
Authors: Midnight Mass (v2.1)
Bernadette
pushed her toward the door. "No one can help me, Carole!"
She
ripped the makeshift bandage from her neck, exposing the jagged, partially
healed 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 command.
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 movements swift, 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 matchsticks, 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, Carole!" she rasped, spitting her name.
"...
hallowed be Thy Name ..." Carole said, quaking in terror as frigid 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 glass.
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 clawlike hand at the window. "Go aWAY! She's
MINE!"
Carole
glanced to her 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 calf 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 fabric at the back of Carole's blouse 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, arms curved before her,
body arcing toward Carole in 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 roll 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.
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 ceased.
Carole
opened her eyes to see the naked Bernadette-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
Bernadette-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 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 begin 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 on Easter Sunday.
CAROLE
. . .
The
voice yanked her from sleep, the voice that sounded like Bernadette's but
robbed of all her sweetness and compassion.
life of sin.>
After
the horrors of Easter weekend had come loneliness. Carole had begun talking to
herself in her head—just for company of sorts—to ease her through the long
empty hours. But the voice had taken on a life of its own, becoming
Bernadette's. In a way, then,
Bern
was still alive.
"Yes,"
Carole said, sitting up on the side of the bed and peering out the window at
the lightening sky. "I suppose that was when it began."
She'd
walked out of the tomb of St. Anthony's convent on Easter morning and left the
old Sister Carole Hanarty behind. That 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 dead.
In
her place was a new Sister Carole, tempered in the forge of that 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'd
departed St. Anthony's and begun her hunt. She'd been hunting ever since.
Carole
stretched and glanced around the room. The walls had been decked with family
pictures of weddings and children when she'd moved herself in. She'd removed
those and lain the ones on the bureau and dresser face down. All those smiling
children ... she couldn't bear their eyes watching her.
She
knew their names. The Bennetts—Kevin, Marie, and their twin girls. She hadn't
known them before, but Carole felt she knew them now. She'd seen their family
photos, seen the twins' bedroom.
She
knew from the state of the empty house when she'd found it that the owners
hadn't moved out. They'd been driven out. She hoped for the sake of their souls
that they were dead now. Truly dead.
can become a good person again and go back to doing the Lord's work.>
"But
the rules have changed," Carole whispered.
Being
a good person meant something different than it had then. And doing the Lord's
work . . . well, it was an entirely different sort of work now.
-
2 -
ZEV
. . .
It
had been almost a full minute since he'd slammed the brass knocker against the
heavy oak door. That should have been proof enough. After all, wasn't the
knocker in the shape of a cross? But no, they had to squint through their
peephole and peer through the sidelights that framed the door.
Zev
sighed and resigned himself to the scrutiny. He couldn't blame people for being
cautious, but this seemed overly so. The sun was in the west and shining full
on his back; he was all but silhouetted in it. What more did they want?
I
should maybe take off my clothes and dance naked?
He
gave a mental shrug and savored the salt tang of the sea air. The bulk of this
huge Tudor mansion stood between him and the
Atlantic
, but the ocean's briny scent and rhythmic
rumble were everywhere. He'd bicycled from
Lakewood
, which was only ten miles inland from here,
but the warm May day and the bright sun beating on his dark blue suit coat had
sweated him up. It had taken him longer than he'd planned to find this retreat
house.
Spring
Lake
. The Irish
Riviera
. An Irish Catholic seaside resort since before
the turn of the century. He looked around at its carefully restored Victorian
houses, the huge mansions facing the beach, the smaller homes set in neat rows
running straight back from the ocean. Many of them were still occupied. Not
like
Lakewood
.
Lakewood
was an empty shell.
Oh,
they'd been smart, those bloodsuckers. They knew their easiest targets.
Whenever they swooped into an area they went after officialdom first — the
civic leaders, the cops, the firemen, the clergy. But after that, they attacked
the non-Christian neighborhoods. And among Jews they picked the Orthodox first
of the first. Smart. Where else would they be less likely to run up against a
cross? It worked for them in Brooklyn and Queens, and so when they came south
into New Jersey, spreading like a plague, they headed straight for the town
with one of the largest collections of yeshivas in North America.
But
after the Bensonhurst and
Kew
Gardens
holocausts, the people in the
Lakewood
communities should not have taken quite so
long to figure out what was going to happen. The Reformed and Conservative
synagogues started handing out crosses at Shabbes—too late for many but it
saved a few. Did the Orthodox congregations follow suit? No. They hid in their
homes and shuls and yeshivas and read and prayed.
And
were liquidated.
A
cross, a crucifix — they held power over the undead, drove them away. Zev's
fellow rabbis did not want to accept that simple fact because they could not
face its devastating ramifications. To hold up a cross was to negate two
thousand years of Jewish history, it was to say that the Messiah had come and
they had missed him.
Did
it say that? Zev didn't know. For all he knew, the undead predated
Christianity, and their fear of crosses might be related to something else.
Argue about it later—people were dying. But the rabbis had to argue it then and
there. And as they argued, their people were slaughtered like cattle.
How
Zev had railed at them, how he'd pleaded with them! Blind, stubborn fools! If a
fire was consuming your house, would you refuse to throw water on it just
because you'd always been taught not to believe in water? Zev had arrived at
the rabbinical council wearing a cross and had been thrown out—literally sent
hurding through the front door. But at least he had managed to save a few of
his own people. Too few.
He
remembered his fellow Orthodox rabbis, though. All the ones who had refused to
face the reality of the vampires' fear of crosses, who had forbidden their
students and their congregations to wear crosses, who had watched those same
students and congregations die en masse. And soon those very same rabbis were
roaming their own community, hunting the survivors, preying on other yeshivas,
other congregations, until the entire community was liquidated and its leaders
incorporated into the brotherhood of the undead.
This
was the most brilliant aspect of the undead tactics: turn all the community
leaders into their own kind and set them loose among the population. What could
be more dismaying, more devastating than seeing the very people who should have
been leading the resistance become enthusiastic participants in the slaughter?
The
rabbis could have saved themselves, could have saved their people, but they
would not bend to the reality of what was happening around them. Which, when
Zev thought about it, was not at all out of character. Hadn't they spent
generations learning to turn away from the rest of the world?
But
now their greatest fear had come to pass: they'd been assimilated— with a vengeance.
Those
early days of anarchic slaughter were over. Now that the undead held the ruling
hand, the bloodletting had become more organized. But the damage to Zev's
people had been done—and it was irreparable. Hitler would have been proud. His
Nazi "final solution" was an afternoon picnic compared to the work of
the undead. In a matter of months, in
Israel
and
Eastern Europe
, the undead did what Hitler's Reich could
not do in all the years of the Second World War. Muslims and Hindus had fared
just as poorly, but that was not Zev's concern. His heart did not bleed for
Islam and
India
.
There's
only a few of us now. So few and so scattered. A final Diaspora.
For
a moment Zev was almost overwhelmed by grief, but he pushed it down, locked it
back into that place where he kept his sorrows, and thought of how fortunate it
was for his wife Chana that she died of natural causes before the horror began.
Her soul had been too gentle to weather what had happened to their community.
Forcing
himself back to the present, he looked around. Not such a bad place for a
retreat, he thought. He wondered how many houses like this the Catholic Church
owned.
A
series of clicks and clacks drew his attention back to the door as numerous
bolts were pulled in rapid succession. The door swung inward, revealing a
nervous-looking young man in a long black cassock. As he looked at Zev his
mouth twisted and he rubbed the back of his wrist across it to hide a smile.
"And
what should be so funny?" Zev asked.
"I'm
sorry. It's just—"
"I
know," Zev said, waving off any explanation as he glanced down at the
wooden cross slung on a cord around his neck. "I know."
A
bearded Jew in a baggy serge suit wearing a yarmulke and a cross. Hilarious,
no?
Nu?
This was what the times demanded, this was what it came down to if he wanted to
survive. And Zev did want to survive. Someone had to live to carry on the
traditions of the Talmud and the Torah, even if there were hardly any Jews left
alive in the world.
Zev
stood on the sunny porch, waiting. The priest watched him in silence.
Finally
Zev said, "Well, may a wandering Jew come in?"
"I
won't stop you," the priest said, "but surely you don't expect me to
invite you."
Ah,
yes. Another precaution. The undead couldn't cross the threshold of a home
unless invited, so don't invite. A good habit to cultivate, he supposed.
He
stepped inside and the priest immediately closed the door behind him,
relatching all the locks one by one. When he turned around Zev held out his
hand.
"Rabbi
Zev Wolpin, Father. I thank you for allowing me in."
"Brother
Christopher, sir," he said, smiling and shaking Zev's hand. His suspicions
seemed to have been allayed. "I'm not a priest yet. We can't offer you
much here, but—"
"Oh,
I won't be staying long. I just came to talk to Father Joseph Cahill."
Brother
Christopher frowned. "Father Cahill isn't here at the moment."
"When
will he be back?"
"I—I'm
not sure. You see—"
"Father
Cahill is on another bender," said a stentorian voice behind Zev.
He
turned to see an elderly priest facing him from the far end of the foyer.
White-haired, heavyset, also wearing a black cassock.
"I'm
Rabbi Wolpin."
"Father
Adams," the priest said, stepping forward and extending his hand.
As
they shook Zev said, "Did you say he was on 'another' bender? I never knew
Father Cahill to be much of a drinker."
The
priest's face turned stony. "Apparently there was a lot we never knew
about Father Cahill."
"If
you're referring to that nastiness last year," Zev said, feeling the old
anger rise in him, "I for one never believed it for a minute. I'm
surprised anyone gave it the slightest credence."
"The
veracity of the accusation was irrelevant in the final analysis. The damage to
Father Cahill's reputation was a fait accompli. The bishops' rules are clear.
Father Palmeri was forced to request his removal for the good of St. Anthony's
parish."
Zev
was sure that sort of attitude had something to do with Father Joe being on
"another bender."
"Where
can I find Father Cahill?"
"He's
in town somewhere, I suppose, making a spectacle of himself. If there's any way
you can talk some sense into him, please do. Not only is he killing himself
with drink but he's become a public embarrassment to the priesthood and to the
Church."
Zev
wondered which bothered Father Adams more. And as for embarrassing the
priesthood, he was tempted to point out that too many others had done a bang-up
job of that already. But he held his tongue.
I'll
try."
He
waited for Brother Christopher to undo all the locks, then stepped toward the
sunlight.
"Try
Morton's down on Seventy-one," the younger man whispered as Zev passed.
*
* *
Zev
rode his bicycle south on route 71. So strange to see people on the streets.
Not many, but more than he'd ever see in
Lakewood
again. Yet he knew that as the undead
consolidated their grip on the rest of the coast, they'd start arriving with
their living minions in the Catholic communities like
Spring
Lake
, and then these streets would be as empty
as
Lakewood
's.