Mr. Murder

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.

Marty was tense with the expectation of gunfire.

At the chancel rail, the gate was missing.

“Keep going,” he urged the girls.

The three of them continued on to the altar platform, from which all of the ceremonial objects had been removed. On the back wall hung a thirty-foot-high cross of wood festooned with cobwebs.

His left arm was numb, yet it felt grossly swollen. The pain was like that of an abscessed tooth misplaced in his shoulder. He was nauseous—though whether from loss of blood or fear for Paige or because of the disorienting weirdness of the church, he didn’t know.

Paige shrank from the front entrance into an area of the narthex that would remain dark even if the door opened farther.

Staring at the gap between the door and jamb, she saw phantom movements in the fuzzy gray light and churning snow. She repeatedly raised and lowered the gun. Each time the confrontation seemed to have arrived, her breath caught in her throat.

She didn’t have to wait long. He came within three or four minutes, and he was not as circumspect as she expected him to be. Apparently sensing Marty’s movement toward the far end of the building, The Other entered confidently, boldly.

As he was stepping across the threshold, silhouetted in the waning daylight, she aimed for mid-chest. The gun was shaking in her hands even before she squeezed the trigger, and it jumped with the recoil. She immediately chambered another round, fired again.

The first blast hit him solidly, but the second probably ruined the jamb more thoroughly than it ruined him, because he pitched backward, out of the doorway, out of sight.

She knew she’d inflicted a lot of damage, but there were no screams or cries of pain, so she went through the door with as much hope as caution, ready for the sight of a corpse on the steps. He was gone, and somehow that wasn’t a surprise, either, although the manner of his swift disappearance was so puzzling that she actually turned and squinted up at the front of the church, as if he might be climbing that sheer facade with the alacrity of a spider.

She could search for tracks in the snow and try to hunt him down. She suspected he might want her to do that very thing.

Unnerved, she re-entered the church at a run.

Kill them, kill them all, kill them now.

Buckshot. In the throat, working abrasively deep in the meat of him. Along one side of the neck. Hard lumps embedded in his left temple. Left ear ragged and dripping. Lead acne pimples the flesh down the left cheek, across the chin. Lower lip torn. Teeth cracked and chipped. Spitting pellets. A blaze of pain but no eye damage, vision unimpaired.

He scuttles in a crouch along the south side of the church, through a twilight so flat and gray, so wrapped in gauzes of snow, that he casts no shadow. No shadow. No wife, no children, no mother, no father, gone, no life, stolen, used up and thrown away, no mirror in which to look, no reflection to confirm his substance, no shadow, only footprints in the new snow to support his claim to existence, footprints and his hatred, like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man, defined by footprints and fury.

He frenziedly seeks an entrance, hastily inspecting each window as he passes it.

Virtually all of the glass is gone from the tall stained-glass panels, but the steel mullions remain. Much of the lead came that defined the original patterns remains between the mullions, though in many places it is bent and twisted and drooping, tortured by weather or by the hands of vandals, rendering the outlines of the original religious symbols and figures unrecognizable, and in their place leaving teratogenic forms as meaningless as the shapes in melted candles.

The next to the last nave window is missing its steel frame, mullions, and came. The granite stool marking the base of the window is five feet off the ground. He boosts himself up with the nimbleness of a gymnast and squats on his haunches on the deep sill. He peers into numberless shadows interleaved with strange sinuous streams of radiant orange, yellow, green, and blue.

A child screams.

Racing down the center aisle of the graffiti-smeared church, Paige had the peculiar feeling that she was underwater in tropical climes, beneath a Caribbean cove, in caverns of gaudily luminescent coral, equatorial seaweed waving its feathery and radiant fronds on all sides of her.

Charlotte screamed.

Having reached the chancel rail, Paige spun to face the nave. Swinging the Mossberg left and right, searching in panic for the threat, she saw The Other as Emily shouted, “In the window, get him!”

He was, indeed, squatting in one of the south-wall windows, a dark shape that seemed only half human against the fading light and the whitening showers of snow. Shoulders hunched, head low, arms dangling, he had an apelike aspect.

Her reflexes were quick. She fired the Mossberg without hesitation.

Even if the distance hadn’t been in his favor, however, he would have escaped untouched because he was moving even as she pulled the trigger. With the fluid grace of a wolf, he seemed to pour off the sill and onto the floor. The buckshot passed harmlessly through the space that he had occupied and clattered off the window jambs that had framed him.

Evidently on all fours, he vanished among the rows of pews, where the deepest shadows in the church were humbled. If she went hunting for him there, he would drag her down and kill her.

She backed through the chancel rail and across the sanctuary to Marty and the girls, keeping the shotgun ready.

The four of them retreated into an adjoining room that might have been the sacristy. A pair of casement windows admitted barely enough light to reveal three doors in addition to the one through which they’d entered.

Paige closed the door to the sanctuary and attempted to lock it. But it wasn’t equipped with a lock. No furniture was available to brace or blockade it, either.

Marty tried one of the other doors. “Closet.”

Shrill wind and snow erupted through the door that Charlotte opened, so she slammed it shut.

Checking the third possibility, Emily said, “Stairs.”

Among the pews. Creeping. Cautious.