Tore at him again, sank teeth into his hand, he screamed. It grabbed
his ski jacket, pulling him off the parapet as he tried to lean into the
void to escape it, snapped at his face, teeth clashing a fraction of an
inch short of his cheek, rasped out a single tortured word, “Need,” and
snapped at his eyes, snapped, snapped at his eyes.
“Be at peace, Alfie.”
Marty registered the words but initially wasn’t clear-headed enough
either to realize what they meant or to grasp that the voice was one he
had never heard before.
The Other reared its head back, as if about to make its final lunge for
his face. But it held that posture, eyes wild, skeletal face as softly
luminous as the snow, teeth bared, rolling its head from side to side,
issuing a thin wordless sound as if it wasn’t sure why it was
hesitating.
Marty knew that he should use the moment to ram a knee into the thing’s
crotch, try to rush it backward across the platform, to the opposite
parapet, up, out, and over. He could imagine what to do, see it in his
writer’s eye, a fully realized moment of action in a novel or movie, but
he had no strength left. The pain in his gunshot wound, throat, and
bitten hand swelled anew, dizziness and nausea over whelmed him, and he
knew he was on the verge of a blackout.
“Be at peace, Alfie,” the voice repeated more firmly.
Still holding Marty, who was helpless in its ferocious grip, The Other
turned its head toward the speaker.
A flashlight winked on, directed at the creature’s face.
Blinking toward the light source, Marty saw a bearlike man, tall and
barrel-chested, and a smaller man in a black ski suit. They were
strangers.
They showed a little surprise but not the shock and horror that Marty
would have expected.
“Jesus,” the smaller man said, “what’s happening to him?”
“Metabolic meltdown,” said the larger man.
“Jesus.”
Marty glanced toward the west wall of the belfry, where Paige was
crouched with the kids, sheltering them, holding their heads against her
breast to prevent them from seeing too much of the creature.
“Be at peace, Alfie,” the smaller man repeated.
In a voice tortured by rage, pain, and confusion, The Other rasped,
“Father. Father. Father?”
Marty was still tightly held, and his attention was again drawn to the
thing that had once looked like him.
The flashlight-illuminated face was more hideous than it had appeared in
the gloom. Wisps of steam were rising off it in some places, confirming
his sense that it was hot. Scores of shotgun wounds pocked one side of
its head, but they were not bleeding and, in fact, seemed more than half
healed. As Marty stared, a black lead pellet squeezed out of the
creature’s temple and oozed down its cheek in a thin trail of yellowish
fluid.
The wounds were its least repulsive features. In spite of the physical
strength it still possessed, it was as meagerly padded with flesh as
something that had crawled out of a coffin after a year underground.
Skin was stretched tightly over its facial bones. Its ears were
shriveled into hard knots of cartilage and lay flat against the head.
Desiccated lips had shrunk back from the gums, giving the teeth greater
prominence, creating the illusion of a nascent muzzle and the wicked
bite of a predator.
It was Death personified, the Grim Reaper without his voluminous black
robes and scythe, on his way to a masquerade ball in a costume of flesh
so thin and cheap that it was not for a moment convincing.
“Father?” it said again, gazing at the stranger in the black ski suit.
“Father?”
Insistently, “Be at peace, Alfie.”
The name
“Alfie” was so unsuited to the grotesque apparition still clutching
Marty that he suspected he was hallucinating the arrival of the two men.
The Other turned away from the flashlight beam and glared at Marty once
more. It seemed uncertain of what to do next.
Then it lowered its graveyard face to his, cocking its head as if with
curiosity. “My life? My life?”
Marty didn’t know what it was asking him, and he was so weak from loss