Winnie pulled on Martin’s pant leg. “I’m real thirsty,” she whispered.
“I’ve, uh-oh, it’s in the street,” Lindy said. “When that thing—”
“We have plenty,” Jim said, producing a bottle of Ayers water.
“This is from the Book of Isaiah,” Reg announced. “Listen to this. Isaiah fifty-five, you can turn to it in the pew Bibles, it’s page four hundred and thirty-five.” He read, “’So shall you summon a nation you knew not, and nations that knew you not shall run to you, because of the Lord, your God, the Holy One of Israel, who has glorified you. Seek the Lord while he may be found, call him while he is near. Let the scoundrel forsake his way, and the wicked man his thoughts; let him turn to the Lord for mercy; to our God, who is generous in forgiving.’”
At that moment, the lights went out. There was a roar from the whole congregation, ringing loud, shrill with terror.
“Let us pray,” Reg called into the din. “LET US PRAY!” Voices dropped, flashlights came on.
But there also came another light, crawling along the tops of the stained glass windows of the birth, youth, and ministry of Jesus that lined the west wall.
Martin watched, unable to turn away, transfixed with horrified fascination.
As the congregation realized that it was there, silence slowly fell. Became absolute. They watched it coming down, this most terrible weapon that had ever been in the world, and yet so strange, so unexpected.
As a scientist, Martin tried to use what skills of observation he could muster. It moved like a thick liquid, this light. We had slowed light down, stopped it, reversed it, but had never created anything like this.
When it began to come in, there was a sigh in the room, just the softest of sighs, no more, and a little girl’s voice piping, “Look at the pretty, Mommy, the pretty is on Jesus!”
The painted glass with the bearded figure on the cross, the rough rocks, and the praying virgin in her chipped blue glittered with new life as the light ran along them, seemed to pause as if it was looking out across the congregation, evaluating them, scanning them, tasting of them…and then it came on, glaring on their upturned faces.
“Dad, is this an alien being?” Trevor asked.
“It’s Lucifer,” Winnie said. “Be quiet or he’ll come after us.”
Some children began to cry, and a ripple of panic spread. Parents held them.
Martin saw immediately that the thing moved like something alive—and something that felt no need to be careful, not the way it came surging in the windows, filling the room with its slicing glare. He was fascinated by its motion, he couldn’t help himself. It was a little like the spread of a membrane, he thought. But then it came forward so quickly that there were shrieks of literal agony, the terror was so extreme.
Old Man Michaels dropped to the floor with a thud. He went gray, and Martin thought he’d probably died. A stench of urine and feces filled the air. Children broke away from their parents and began running toward the doors, in their terror imagining that they could escape. Mamie Leonard dashed after Kevin, but the boy reached the vestry door and threw it open.
Glare literally gushed in. The boy cried out and jumped back, but the light swept around him. Martin observed only a flicker, and the child went still, standing in the body of it, surrounded by it, his jaw agape. His mother raced to the far side of the nave, and stood there shrieking again and again, sorrowing cries that dominated the room.
Reg cried out, “‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways,’ says the Lord. ‘As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts.’”
The light moved and expanded, crossing the sanctuary and flowing down into the nave. People got up on the pews to keep their feet out of it, but Martin knew it was useless, it would do its infamous bloom any second, and then, well he could not imagine it. He just could not.
There was no sign of any biological material. It was definitely a plasma, he could see that. But it had the stability of a highly organized membrane. He tried to think of any bas-relief, any wall painting, any sculpture anywhere in the world that reminded him of this, and could not.
This was new, he was pretty sure, to the experience of mankind.
“Pray now,” Reg said, “pray and hold the children and be ready with the guns.”
Martin put his arm around Trevor and Lindy picked up Winnie, and Martin felt the pistol in his pocket. He’d loaded it with hollow points. A shot to the head would destroy a child instantly, but Martin did not frankly know if he could do it. God willing, Homeland Security was right about the value of congregating and they would survive.
“Shoot it,” a voice said. “God help us, shoot it!”
“Don’t do that!” Bobby shouted. “That spreads it, we all know. That—”
They were suddenly surrounded by the strangest thing any of them had ever experienced, a flickering mass of colors that hurt and felt good against the skin at the same time…and felt like somebody was watching you, not with malice, but with a sort of evaluative skill that seemed almost…professional.
Martin thought, we are destroyed, a destroyed species. This is how we end, killed in a way we do not understand by something beyond our knowledge. And then also thought, But it’s the way cattle die every day, or used to.
He glimpsed a man, lean, dark hat over his eyes, face of a snake, sliding toward him. He shook the hallucination off. They’d all heard stories about this phenomenon, it was the mind trying to force the impossible into some form that it might be able to understand and thus to fight.
Now Trevor closed his eyes. “Dad, I’m seeing a sort of snake.” He opened them. “In my mind. Watching me in my mind.”
Children’s voices were raised, “There’s a cobra, Mommy, a dragon, Daddy, a python…” and he knew where the ancient tale of the snake originated. It was how the mind of man gave form to disincarnate evil.
There came a dull sound, like one of those deep thuds that never seem to find an explanation, that one sometimes hears back in the woods. But something had changed. Reg had changed. Where he had been in his pulpit with his Bible in his hand, wearing an old gray suit with no tie, now stood a man who appeared to be wearing the most intricately beautiful colored coat ever devised. But it was not cloth, the colors came from tiny, exquisitely detailed memories, each one full of life and motion, swarming around him like living jewels. He threw back his head and roared like a maddened gorilla.
A passage from the Bible occurred to Martin, the one about the coat of many colors. He understood the message: Joseph’s coat had been his soul. The old biblical authors, therefore, had known what souls looked like. They were seeing Reg’s soul being sucked from his body the way a monkey might suck the pulp from an orange.
Nobody made a sound now, nobody dared. But every single one of them hoped in his heart that this would be enough for it, this would be an end of it, after Reg it would go.
Reg began to physically distort, his face growing long, his eye sockets stretching into bizarre vertical ovals, his lips opening, mouth gaping—and then all over the room others did the same, their faces twisting, colors oozing like gorgeous pus out of their bodies. They pissed and shat and howled and writhed, sinking down, tearing at their throats.
There was a deafening wham as Milly Fisher blew her boy Tim’s head apart.
“Mother,” Winnie shouted into Lindy’s face, “what is this, what is this?”
Crackling became screeching became sucking, deep, the sucking of a chest wound, of a woman of the night, and the congregation became a blur of light and struggling, writhing people, some of them clawing at themselves and howling, others with guns in their shaking hands, trying to kill the ones who were being destroyed—as if it mattered, as if it would help.
It remained like that, people crawling, leaping over one another and running for the light-choked doors, wading in it, pushing against the warmth of its ghastly fleshiness.
Then came darkness, then silence, broken by a single wracking sob.
The chandeliers flickered, and with their return came the sense of a storm having passed.
The minister still stood in his pulpit. From a middle pew somebody asked, “Reg? Reg are you okay?”
The Bible dropped from Reg’s hand, hitting the floor beside the pulpit with a crack like a shot. In the pews, some people shook others, calling into blank faces, shaking them until the spittle flew.
“Angie, honey, Angie, you’re okay! She’s okay, it didn’t do her—”
Martin saw Angie Bright, Carl Bright’s wife of thirty years, looking at him with the blank innocence of a
