The cult had been creepy, and its founder—Jonathan Caine—had been a fraud and pederast, but Marty was more chilled by the vandals than by the misguided people who had followed Caine. At least the faithful cultists had believed in something, no matter how misguided, had yearned to be worthy of God’s grace, and had sacrificed for their beliefs, even if the sacrifices ultimately proved to be stupid; they had dared to dream even if their dreams had ended in tragedy. The mindless hatred that informed the scrawlings of the graffitists was the work of empty people who believed in nothing, were incapable of dreaming, and thrived on the pain of others.
One of the doors stood ajar six inches. Marty grabbed the edge of it and pulled. The hinges were corroded, the oak was warped, but the door grated outward another twelve or fourteen inches.
Paige went inside first. Charlotte and Emily trailed close behind her.
Marty never heard the shot that hit him.
As he started to follow the girls, a lance of ice impaled him, entering the upper-left quadrant of his back, exiting through the muscles and tendons below the collarbone on the same side. The piercing chill was so cold that the blizzard hammering the church seemed like a tropical disturbance by comparison, and he shuddered violently.
The next thing he knew, he was lying on the snow-covered brick stoop in front of the door, wondering how he had gotten there. He was half convinced he had just stretched out for a nap, but the pain in his bones indicated he’d dropped hard onto his unlikely bed.
He stared up through the descending snow and wintry light at letters in granite, letters on granite.
HE LIFTETH US UNTO HEAVEN.
BULLSHIT.
He only realized he’d been shot when Paige rushed out of the church and dropped to one knee at his side, shouting, “Marty, oh God, my God, you’ve been shot, the son of a bitch shot you,” and he thought, Oh, yes, of course, that’s it, I’ve been shot, not stabbed by a lance of ice.
Paige rose from beside him, raised the Mossberg. He heard two shots. They were exceedingly loud, unlike the stealthy bullet that had knocked him to the bricks.
Curious, he turned his head to see how close their indefatigable enemy had come. He expected to discover the look-alike charging at him, only a few yards away, unfazed by shotgun pellets.
Instead, The Other remained at a distance from the church, out of range of the two rounds Paige had fired. He was a black figure on a field of white, the details of his too-familiar face unrevealed by the waning gray light. Ranging back and forth through the snow, back and forth, lanky and quick, he seemed to be a wolf stalking a herd of sheep, watchful and patient, biding his time until the moment of ultimate vulnerability arrived.
The poniard of ice that transfixed Marty became, from one second to the next, a stiletto of fire. With the heat came excruciating pain that made him gasp. At last the abstract concept of a bullet wound was translated into the language of reality.
Paige lifted the Mossberg again.
Regaining clarity of mind with the pain, Marty said, “Don’t waste the ammo. Let him go for now. Help me up.”
With her assistance, he was able to get to his feet.
“How bad?” she asked worriedly.
“I’m not dying. Let’s get inside before he decides to take another shot at us.”
He followed her through the door into the narthex, where the darkness was relieved only by faint rays penetrating the partly open door and glassless fanlights.
The girls were crying, Charlotte louder than Emily, and Marty tried to reassure them. “It’s okay, I’m all right, just a little nick. All I need is a Band-Aid, one with a picture of Snoopy on it, and I’ll feel all better.”
In truth, his left arm was half numb. He only had partial use of it. When he flexed his hand, he couldn’t curl it into a tight fist.
Paige eased to the eighteen-inch gap between the big door and the jamb, where the wind whistled and gibbered. She peered out at The Other.
Trying to get a better sense of the damage the bullet had done, Marty slipped his right hand inside his ski jacket and gingerly explored the front of his left shoulder. Even a light touch ignited a flare of pain that made him grit his teeth. His wool sweater was saturated with blood.
“Take the girls farther back into the church,” Paige whispered urgently, though their enemy could not possibly have heard her out there in the storm. “All the way to the other end.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“I’ll wait here for him.”
The girls protested. “Mommy, don’t.” “Mom, come with us, you gotta.” “Mommy, please.”
“I’ll be fine,” Paige said, “I’ll be safe. Really. It’ll be perfect. Don’t you see? Marty, when the creep senses you moving away, he’ll come into the church. He’ll expect us to be together.” As she talked, she put two more shells into the Mossberg magazine to replace the most recent rounds she’d expended. “He won’t expect me to be waiting right here for him.”
Marty remembered having this same discussion before, back at the cabin, when she wanted to go outside and hide in the rocks. Her plan hadn’t worked then, although not because it was flawed. The Other had driven past her in the Jeep, evidently unaware that she was lying in wait. If he hadn’t pulled such an unpredictable stunt, ramming the station wagon right into the house, she might have slipped up on him and dropped him from behind.
Nevertheless, Marty didn’t want to leave her alone by the door. But there was no time for debate because he suspected his wound was soon going to begin sapping what strength he still had. Besides, he didn’t have a better plan to suggest.
In the gloom, he could barely recognize Paige’s face.
He hoped this wouldn’t be the last time he saw it.
He shepherded Charlotte and Emily out of the narthex and into the nave. It smelled of dust and dampness and the wild things that nested there in the years since the cultists had left to resume their shattered lives instead of rising to sit at the right hand of the Lord.
On the north side, the restless wind harried snow through the broken windows. If winter had a heart, inanimate and carved of ice, it would have been no more frigid than that place, nor could death have been more arctic.
“My feet are cold,” Emily said.
He said, “Sssshhh. I know.”
“Mine too,” Charlotte said in a whisper.
“I know.”
Having something so ordinary to complain about helped to make their situation seem less bizarre, less frightening.
“Really cold,” Charlotte elaborated.
“Keep going. All the way to the front.”
None of them had boots, only athletic shoes. Snow had saturated the fabric, caked in every crease, and turned to ice. Marty figured they didn’t need to worry about frostbite just yet. That took a while to develop. They might not live long enough to suffer from it.
Shadows hung like bunting throughout the nave, but that large chamber was brighter than the narthex. Arched double-lancet windows, long ago relieved of the burden of glass, were featured along both side walls and soared two-thirds of the distance to the vaulted ceiling. They admitted 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 walls.