of blood or shock or both that he could only push at it feebly with his
right hand. “Let me go.”
“Need,” it said. “Need, need, need, need, NEED, NEEEEEF,FEED.
” The voice spiraled into a shrill squeal. Its mouth cracked wide in a
humorless grin, and it struck at Marty’s face.
A gunshot boomed, The Other’s head jerked back, Marty sagged against the
parapet as the creature let go of him, and its scream of demonic fury
drew muffled cries of terror from Emily and Charlotte.
The Other clamped its skeletal hands to its shattered skull, as if
trying to hold itself together.
The flashlight beam wavered, found it.
The fissures in the bone healed, and the bullet hole began to close up,
forcing the lead slug out of the skull. But the cost of this miraculous
healing became obvious as The Other’s skull began to change more
dramatically, growing smaller and narrower and more lupine, as if bone
was melting and reforming under the tight sheath of skin, borrowing mass
from one place to rebuild damage in another.
“Cannibalizing itself to close the wound,” said the big man.
More ghostly wisps of vapor were rising from the creature, and it began
to tear at the clothes it wore as if it could not tolerate the heat.
The smaller man shot it again. In the face.
Still holding its head, The Other reeled across the bell-tower platform
and collided with the south parapet. It almost tipped over and out into
the void.
It crumpled to its knees, shedding its torn clothing as if the garments
were the tatters of a cocoon, squirming forth in a darker and utterly
inhuman form, twitching, jittering.
It was no longer shrieking or hissing. It sobbed. In spite of its
increasingly monstrous appearance, the sobbing rendered it less
threatening and even pitiable.
Relentless, the gunman stepped toward it and fired a third shot.
The sobbing chilled Marty, perhaps because there was some thing human
and pathetic about it. Too weak to stand, he slid down to the floor,
his back against the waist-high parapet, and had to look away from the
thrashing creature.
An eternity passed before The Other was entirely motionless and quiet.
Marty heard his daughters weeping.
Reluctantly he turned his eyes to the body which lay directly across the
platform from him and which was bathed in the mercilessly revealing beam
of the flashlight. The corpse was a puzzle of black bones and
glistening flesh, the greater part of its substance having been consumed
in its frantic attempts to heal itself and stay alive. The twisted and
jagged remains more resembled those of an alien life form than those of
a man.
Wind blew.
Snow fell.
A greater cold came down.
After a while, the man in the black ski suit turned away from the
remains and spoke to the bearish man. “A very bad boy indeed.”
The larger man said nothing.
Marty wanted to ask who they were. His grip on consciousness was so
tenuous, however, that he thought the effort of speaking might cause him
to pass out.
To his partner, the smaller man said, “What’d you think of the church?
As weird as anything Kirk and the crew have turned up, isn’t it? All
those obscenities Day-Gloing on the walls. It’ll make our little
scenario all the more convincing, don’t you think?”
Though he felt as lightheaded as if he had been drinking, and though he
was having difficulty keeping his thoughts focused, Marty now had
confirmed what he’d suspected when the two men first arrived, they were
not saviors, merely new executioners, and only marginally less
mysterious than The Other.
“You’re going to do it?” the larger of the two asked.
“Too much trouble to haul them back to the cabin. You don’t think this
weird church is an even better setting?”
“Drew,” the big man said, “there are a number of things about you I
like.”
The smaller man seemed confused. He wiped at the snow that the wind
stuck to his eyelashes. “What’d you say?”
“You’re damned smart, even if you did go to Princeton and Harvard.
You’ve got a good sense of humor, you really do, you make me laugh, even