Mr. Murder. By: Dean R. Koontz

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