Midnight Read online

  Steel pistons stroking. Human hearts dependably pumping lubricants of all kinds. Blood and oil, iron and bone, plastic and tendon, wires and nerves.

  9

  Chrissie was amazed that priests ate so well. The table in the rectory kitchen was heavily laden with food an immense plateful of sausages, eggs, a stack of toast, a package of sweetrolls, another of blueberry muffins, a bowl of hash-brown potatoes that had been warming in the oven, fresh fruit, and a bag of marshmallows for the hot cocoa. Father Castelli was pudgy, sure, but Chrissie had always thought of priests as abstemious in all things, denying themselves at least some of the pleasures of food and drink just as they denied themselves marriage. If Father Castelli consumed as much at every meal, he ought to weigh twice what he did. No, three times as much!

  As they ate, she told him about the aliens taking over her folks. In deference to Father Castelli’s predisposition toward spiritual answers, and as a means of keeping him hooked, she left the door open on demonic possession, though personally she much favored the alien-invasion explanation. She told him what she’d seen in the upstairs hall yesterday, how she’d been locked in the pantry and, later, had been pursued by her parents and Tucker in their strange new shapes.

  The priest expressed astonishment and concern, and several times he demanded more details, but he did not once pause significantly in his eating. In fact he ate with such tremendous gusto that his table manners suffered. Chrissie was as surprised by his sloppiness as she was by the size of his appetite. A couple of times he had egg yolk on his chin, and when she got up the nerve to point it out to him, he made a joke about it and immediately wiped it off. But a moment later she looked up, and there was more egg yolk. He dropped a few miniature marshmallows and didn’t seem to care. The front of his black shirt was speckled with toast crumbs, a couple of tiny pieces of sausage, flecks of potatoes, sweetroll crumbs, muffin crumbs… .

  Really, she was beginning to think that Father Castelli was as guilty as any man had ever been of the sin of gluttony.

  But she loved him in spite of his eating habits because he’ never once doubted her sanity or expressed a lack of belief in her wild story. He listened with interest and utmost seriousness, and seemed genuinely concerned, even frightened, by what she told him. “Well, Chrissie, they’ve made maybe a thousand movies about alien invasions, hostile creatures from other worlds, and they’ve written maybe ten thousand books about it, and I’ve always said that man’s mind can’t imagine anything that isn’t possible in God’s world. So who knows, hmmmm? Who’s to say they might not have landed here in Moonlight Cove? I’m a film buff, and I’ve always liked scary movies best, but I never imagined that I’d find myself in the middle of a real-life scary movie. He was sincere. He never patronized her.”

  Although Father Castelli continued to eat with undiminished appetite, Chrissie finished breakfast and her story at the same time. Because the kitchen was warm, she was rapidly drying out, and only the seat of her pants and her running shoes were still really wet. She felt sufficiently reinvigorated to consider what lay ahead of her now that she had reached help. “What next? We’ve got to call in the Army, don’t you think, Father?”

  “Perhaps the Army and the Marines,” he said after a moment of deliberation. “The Marines might be better at this sort of thing.”

  “Do you think …”

  “What is it, dear girl?”

  “Do you think there’s any chance … well, any chance of getting my folks back? The way they were, I mean?”

  He put down a muffin that he had been raising to his mouth, and he reached across the table, between the plates and tins of food, to take her hand. His fingers were slightly greasy with butter, but she did not mind, for he was so reassuring and comforting; right now she needed a lot of reassuring and comforting.

  “You’ll be reunited with your parents,” Father Castelli said with great sympathy.

  “I absolutely guarantee that you will.”

  She bit her lower lip, trying to hold back her tears.

  “I guarantee it,” he repeated.

  Abruptly his face bulged. Not evenly like an inflating balloon. Rather, it bulged in some places and not others, rippled and pulsed, as if his skull had turned to mush and as if balls of worms were writhing and squirming just under the skin.

  “I guarantee it!”

  Chrissie was too terrified to scream. For a moment she could not move. She was paralyzed by fear, frozen in her chair, unable to summon even enough motor control to blink or draw a breath.

  She could hear his bones loudly crackling-crunching-popping as they splintered and dissolved and reshaped themselves with impossible speed. His flesh made a disgusting, wet, oozing sound as it flowed into new forms almost with the ease of hot wax.

  The priest’s skull swelled upward and swept back in a bony crest, and his face was hardly human at all now but partly crustacean, partly insectile, vaguely wasplike, with something of the jackal in it, too, and with fiery hateful eyes.

  At last Chrissie cried out explosively, “No!” Her heart was pounding so hard that each beat was painful. “No, go away, let me alone, let me go!”

  His jaws lengthened, then split back nearly to his ears in a menacing grin defined by double rows of immense sharp teeth.

  “No, no!”

  She tried to get up.

  She realized that he was still holding her left hand.

  He spoke in a voice eerily reminiscent of those of her mother and Tucker when they had stalked her as far as the mouth of the culvert last night:

  “… need, need … want … give me … give me … need …”

  He didn’t look like her parents had looked when transformed. Why wouldn’t all the aliens look the same?

  He opened his mouth wide and hissed at her, and thick yellowish saliva was strung like threads of taffy from his upper to his lower teeth. Something stirred inside his mouth, a strange looking tongue; it thrust out at her like a jack-in-the-box popping forth on its spring, and it proved to be a mouth within his mouth, another set of smaller and even sharper teeth on a stalk, designed to get into tight places and bite prey that took refuge there.

  Father Castelli was becoming something startlingly familiar the creature from the movie Alien. Not exactly that monster in every detail but uncannily similar to it.

  She was trapped in a movie, just as the priest had said, a real-life horror flick no doubt one of his favorites. Was Father Castelli able to assume whatever shape he wanted, and was he becoming this beast only because it pleased him to do so and because it would best fulfill Chrissie’s expectations of alien invaders?

  This was crazy.

  Beneath his clothes, the priest’s body was changing too. His shirt sagged on him in some places, as if the substance of him had melted away beneath it, but in other places it strained at the seams as his body acquired new bony extrusions and inhuman excrescences. Shirt buttons popped. Fabric tore. His Roman collar came apart and fell askew on his hideously resculpted neck.

  Gasping, making a curious uh-uh-uh-uh-uh sound in the back of her throat but unable to stop, she tried to pull free of him. She stood up, knocking her chair over, but she was still held fast. He was very strong. She could not tear loose.

  His hands also had begun to change. His fingers had lengthened. They were plated with a horn-like substance—smooth, hard, and shiny black—more like pincers with digits than like human hands.

  “… need … want, want … need …”

  She plucked up her breakfast knife, swung it high over her head, and drove it down with all her might, stabbing him in the forearm, just above the wrist, where his flesh still looked more human than not. She had hoped that the blade would pin him to the table, but she didn’t feel it bite all the way through him to the wood beneath.

  His shriek was so shrill and piercing that it seemed to vibrate through Chrissie’s bones.

  His armored, demonic hand spasmed open. She yanked free of him. Fortunately she was quick, for his
hand clamped shut again a fraction of a second later, pinching her fingertips but unable to hold her.

  The kitchen door was on the priest’s side of the table. She could not reach it without exposing her back to him.

  With a cry that was half scream and half roar, he tore the knife from his arm and threw it aside. He knocked the dishes and food from the table with one sweep of his bizarrely mutated arm, which was now eight or ten inches longer than it had been. It protruded from the cuff of his black shirt in nightmarish gnarls and planes and hooks of the dark, chitinous stuff that had replaced his flesh.

  Mary, Mother of God, pray for me; mother, most pure, pray for me; Mother most chaste, pray for me. Please, Chrissie thought.

  The priest grabbed hold of the table and threw it aside, tool as if it weighed only ounces. It crashed into the refrigerator. Now nothing separated her from him.

  From it.

  She feinted toward the kitchen door, taking a couple of steps in that direction.

  The priest—not really a priest any more; a thing that sometimes masqueraded as a priest—swung to his right, intending to cut her off and snare her.

  Immediately she turned, as she’d always intended, and ran in the opposite direction, toward the open door that led to the downstairs hall, leaping over scattered toast and links of sausage. The trick worked. Wet shoes squishing and squeaking on the linoleum, she was past him before he realized she actually was going to his left.

  She suspected that he was quick as well as strong. Quicker than she, no doubt. She could hear him coming behind her.

  If she could only reach the front door, get out onto the porch and into the yard, she would probably be safe. She suspected that he would not follow her beyond the house, into the street, where others might see him. Surely not everyone in Moonlight Cove had already been possessed by these aliens, and until the last real person in town was taken over, they could not strut around in a transformed state, eating young girls with impunity.

  Not far. Just the front door and a few steps beyond.

  She had covered two-thirds of the distance, expecting to feel a claw snag her shirt from behind, when the door opened ahead of her. The other priest, Father O’Brien, stepped across the threshold and blinked in surprise.

  At once she knew that she couldn’t trust him, either. He could not have lived in the same house as Father Castelli without the alien seed having been planted in him. Seed, spoor, slimy parasite, spirit—whatever was used to effect possession, Father O’Brien undoubtedly had had it rammed or injected into him.

  Unable to go forward or back, unwilling to swerve through the archway on her right and into the living room because that was a dead end—in every sense of the word—she grabbed hold of the newel post, which she was just passing, and swung herself onto the stairs. She ran pell-mell for the second floor.

  The front door slammed below her.

  By the time she turned at the landing and started up the second flight of stairs, she heard both of them climbing behind her.

  The upper hall had white plaster walls, a dark wood floor, and a wood ceiling. Rooms lay on both sides.

  She sprinted to the end of the hall and into a bedroom furnished only with a simple dresser, one nightstand, a double bed with a white chenille spread, a bookcase full of paperbacks, and a crucifix on the wall. She threw the door shut after her but didn’t bother trying to lock or brace it. There was no time. They’d smash through it in seconds, anyway.

  Repeating, “MarymotherofGod, MarymotherofGod,” in a breathless and desperate whisper, she rushed across the room to the window that was framed by emerald-green drapes. Rain washed down the glass.

  Her pursuers were in the upstairs hall. Their footsteps boomed through the house.

  She grabbed the handles on the sash and tried to pull the window up. It would not budge. She fumbled with the latch, but it already was disengaged.

  Farther back the hall toward the head of the stairs, they were throwing open doors, looking for her.

  The window was either painted shut or perhaps swollen tight because of the high humidity. She stepped back from it.

  The door behind her crashed inward, and something snarled.

  Without glancing behind her, she tucked her head down and crossed her arms over her face and threw herself through the window, wondering if she could kill herself by jumping from the second story, figuring it depended where she landed. Grass would be good. Sidewalk would be bad. The pointed spires of a wrought-iron fence would be real bad.

  The sound of shattering glass was still in the air when she hit a porch roof two feet below the window, which was virtually a miracle—she was uncut too—so she kept saying MarymotherofGod as she did a controlled roll through hammering rain toward the edge of the shingled expanse. When she reached the brink, she clung there for a moment, her left side on the roof, right side supported by a creaking and rapidly sagging rain gutter, and she looked back at the window.

  Something wolfish and grotesque was coming after her.

  She dropped. She landed on a walkway, on her left side, jarring her bones, clacking her teeth together so hard that she feared they’d fall out in pieces, and scraping one hand badly on the concrete.

  But she didn’t lie there pitying herself. She scrambled up and, huddled around her pain, turned from the house to run into the street.

  Unfortunately she wasn’t in front of the rectory. She was behind it, in the rear yard. The back wall of Our Lady of Mercy bordered the lawn on her right, and a seven-foot-high brick wall encircled the rest of the property.

  Because of the wall and the trees on both sides of it, she could not see either the neighboring house to the south or the one to the west, on the other side of the alley that ran behind the property. If she couldn’t see the rectory’s neighbors, they couldn’t see her, either, even if they happened to be looking out a window.

  That privacy explained why the wolf-thing dared to come onto the roof, pursuing her in broad—if rather gray and dismal—daylight.

  She briefly considered going into the house, through the kitchen, down the hall, out the front door, into the street, because that was the last thing they’d expect. But then she thought: Are you insane?

  She did not bother to scream for help. Her thudding heart seemed to have swollen until her lungs had too little room to expand, so she could barely get enough air to remain conscious, on her feet, and moving. No breath was left for a scream. Besides, even if people heard her call for help, they wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell where she was; by the time they tracked her down, she would be either torn apart or possessed, because the scream would have slowed her by a fateful second or two.

  Instead, limping slightly to favor a pulled muscle in her left leg but losing no time, she hurried across the expansive rear lawn. She knew she could not scale a blank seven-foot wall fast enough to save herself, especially not with one stingingly abraded hand, so she studied the trees as she ran. She needed one close to the wall; maybe she could climb into it, crawl out on a branch, and drop into the alleyway or into the neighbor’s yard.

  Above the slosh and patter of the rain, she heard a low growl behind her, and she dared to glance over her shoulder. Wearing only tatters of a shirt, freed entirely from shoes and trousers, the wolf-thing that had been Father O’Brien leaped from the edge of the porch roof in pursuit.

  She finally saw a suitable tree—but an instant later noticed a gate in the wall at the southwest corner. She hadn’t seen it sooner because it had been screened from her by some shrubbery that she had just passed.

  Gasping for air, she put her head down, tucked her arms against her sides, and ran to the gate. She hit the bar latch with her hand, popping it out of the slot in which it had been cradled, and burst through into the alley. Turning left, away from Ocean Avenue toward Jacobi Street, she ran through deep puddles nearly to the end of the block before risking a glance behind her.

  Nothing had followed her out of the rectory gate.

  Twice s
he had been in the hands of the aliens, and twice she had escaped. She knew she would not be so lucky if she were captured a third time.

  10

  Shortly before nine o’clock, after less than four hours of sleep altogether, Sam Booker woke to the quiet clink and clatter of someone at work in the kitchen. He sat up on the living-room sofa, wiped at his matted eyes, put on his shoes and shoulder holster, and went down the hall.

  Tessa Lockland was humming softly as she lined up pans, bowls, and food on the wheelchair-low counter near the stove, preparing to make breakfast.

  “Good morning,” she said brightly when Sam came into the kitchen.

  “What’s good about it?” he asked.

  “Just listen to that rain,” she said. “Rain always makes me feel clean and fresh.”

  “Always depresses me.”

  “And it’s nice to be in a warm, dry kitchen, listening to the storm but cozy.”

  He scratched at the stubble of beard on his unshaven cheeks. “Seems a little stuffy in here to me.”

  “Well, anyway, we’re still alive, and that’s good.”

  “I guess so.”

  “God in heaven!” She banged an empty frying pan down on the stove and scowled at him. “Are all FBI agents like you”

  “In what way?”

  “Are they all sourpusses?”

  “I’m not a sourpuss.”

  “You’re a classic Gloomy Gus.”

  “Well, life isn’t a carnival.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “Life is hard and mean.”

  “Maybe. But isn’t it a carnival too?”

  “Are all documentary filmmakers like you?”

  “In what way?”

  “Pollyannas?”

  “That’s ridiculous. I’m no Pollyanna.”

  “Oh, no?”

  “No.”

  “Here we are trapped in a town where reality seems to have been temporarily suspended, where people are being torn apart by species unknown, where Boogeymen roam the streets at night, where some mad computer genius seems to have turned human biology inside out, where we’re all likely to be killed or ‘converted’ before midnight tonight, and when I come in here you’re grinning and sprightly and humming a Beatles tune.”

  “It wasn’t the Beatles.”

  “Huh?”

  “Rolling Stones.”

  “And that makes a difference?”

  She sighed. “Listen, if you’re going to help eat this breakfast, you’re going to help make it, so don’t just stand there glowering.”

  “All right, okay, what can I do?”

  “First, get on the intercom there and call Harry, make sure he’s awake. Tell him breakfast in … ummmm … forty minutes. Pancakes and eggs and shaved, fried ham.”

  Sam pressed the intercom button and said, “Hello, Harry,” and Harry answered at once, already awake. He said he’d be down in about half an hour.

  “Now what?” Sam asked Tessa.

  “Get the eggs and milk from the refrigerator—but for God’s sake don’t look in the cartons.”

  “Why not?”

  She grinned. “You’ll spoil the eggs and curdle the milk.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I thought so.”

  While making pancake mix from scratch, cracking six eggs into glass dishes and preparing them so they could be quickly slipped into the frying pans when she needed them, directing Sam to set the table and help her with other small chores, chopping onions, and shaving ham, Tessa alternately hummed and sang songs by Patti La Belle and the Pointer Sisters. Sam knew whose music it was because she told him, announcing each song as if she were a disc jockey or as if she hoped to educate him and loosen him up. While she worked and sang, she danced in place, shaking her bottom, swiveling her hips, rolling her shoulders, sometimes snapping her fingers, really getting into it.

  She was genuinely enjoying herself, but he knew that she was also needling him a little and getting a kick out of that too. He tried to hold fast to his gloom, and when she smiled at him, he did not return her smile, but damn she was cute. Her hair was tousled, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup, and her clothes were wrinkled from having been slept in, but her slightly disheveled look only added to her allure.