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
the top.
She briefly considered charging downward, opening fire when she was
about to come upon him. But hearing her descend, he might retreat into
the sacristy, where already the heavy yarn of dusk was knitting into
darkness, where he could stalk her in the gloom and attack when her
attention was diverted to the wrong skein of shadows.
She could also wait where she was, let him come to her, and blow his
head off as soon as he rose into sight. If he sensed her waiting,
however, and if he opened fire as he rounded the bend, he couldn’t miss
her in those tight confines. She might be dead before she could pull
the trigger, or might at best get off a shot into the ceiling of the
stairwell as she fell, harming nothing but plaster.
Remembering the black silhouette on the sill of the nave window and the
uncanny fluidity with which it had moved, she suspected that The Other’s
senses were sharper than her own. Lying in wait with the hope of
surprising it was probably a fool’s. game.
She continued upward, trying to convince herself that they were in the
best of all possible positions, defending high ground against an enemy
that was allowed only one narrow approach. It seemed as if the
bell-tower platform ought to be an unassailable redoubt.
Awash in agonies of hunger, sweating with need and rage, lead pellets
popping from his flesh, he heals step by rising step but at a cost.
Body fat dwindles and even some muscle tissue and bone mass are
sacrificed to the wildly accelerated mending of buckshot wounds.
He gnashes his teeth with the compulsive need to chew, chew and swallow,
rend and tear, feed, feed, even though there is no food to satisfy the
terrible pangs that rack him.
At the top of the tower, one half of the space was completely walled,
providing a landing for the stairs. An ordinary door gave access from
that vestibule to another portion of the platform that was exposed to
the elements on three sides. Charlotte and Emily opened the door
without difficulty and hurried out of the stairwell.
Marty followed them. He was dismayingly weak but even dizzier than
feeble. He gripped the door jamb and then the cast-concrete cap of the
waist-high wall–the parapet–that enclosed the other three sides of the
outer bell-tower platform.
With the wind-chill factor, the temperature must have been five or ten
degrees below zero. He winced as the bitter gale lashed his face–and
didn’t dare think about how much colder it would seem ten minutes or an
hour later.
Though Paige might have enough shotgun shells to prevent The Other from
reaching them, they wouldn’t all survive the night.
If the weather reports proved correct and the storm lasted until well
past dawn, they wouldn’t be able to use the Mossberg to try to draw
attention to their plight until morning. The wailing wind would
disperse the crash of gunfire before that telltale sound could reach
beyond church property.
The exposed platform was twelve feet across with a tile floor and
scuppers to let out rainwater. Two corner posts, about six feet high,
stood atop the perimeter wall and, with the assistance of the full wall
on the east side, supported a peaked belfry roof.
No bell hung in the belfry. When Marty squinted up into the dim
recesses of that conical space, he saw the black shapes of what might
have been loudspeaker horns from which the taped tolling of bells had
once been broadcast.
Appearing to grow ever whiter as the day steadily darkened, snow slanted
into the belfry on the northwest wind. A small drift was forming along
the base of the south wall.
The girls had fled directly across the deck to the west side, as far as