Repeating, “MarymotherofGod, MarymotherofGod,” 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 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.