Mr. Murder

Heat poured off its body, and it was as hot to the touch as the sun-warmed vinyl of a car seat in summer.

Letting go of Marty’s throat but still pinning him against the parapet, The Other reached back and seized the hand with which he had clutched its hair. Bony fingers. Inhuman. Hard talons. It seemed fleshless, brittle, yet increasingly fierce and strong, and it almost crushed his hand before he let go of its hair. Then it whipped its head to the side and bit his forearm, ripped the sleeve of his jacket but not his flesh. 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 overwhelmed 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 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, NEEEEEEEEED.”

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 something 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?”