Part 22 (1/2)

Out of church rows instead of corn rows, across this field where only souls were cultivated, the dead paris.h.i.+oners in their ragged grave clothes approached like scarecrows set walking by sorcery, some on fire and spreading flames as they moved.

The floor quaked, the walls shook, a stained-gla.s.s window cracked along a line of leading.

Virgil barked as if to say, Time to go. Time to go.

Molly agreed.

The shotgun roared.

Johnny had retrieved the flashlight dropped by the fat man. He gave it to Molly.

All energy and instinct, flashlight in her left hand and pistol in her right, she disdained the k.n.o.b and kicked open the sacristy door.

Although flapping a dazzle of bright wings behind her, firelight feathered into darkness just past the threshold.

She shouldered through the rebounding door, thrusting recklessly into the room, chasing shadows with the beam, ready to shoot anything that light alone could not banish.

The church rocked, cabinet doors flew open, and she fired two rounds into ca.s.socks and chasubles just to be sure that they were only vestments hanging from a closet rod.

Virgil padded past her, unfazed by the gunfire, quick to the outer door.

Hollow haunting groans and semi-electronic yowls, reminiscent of the voices of whales, rose from the very bones of the church, as if out of a hundred fathoms. This time the floor both trembled and sagged. sagged.

Turning, shouting for the kids, Molly discovered that all five had already followed her.

Beyond them, Neil stood in the doorway, facing the sanctuary, prepared to defend their retreat.

The floor had turned spongy, quivering like a membrane with each step she took. She threw open the outer door, and the dog dashed from the church.

Alert for hostile forces-known, unknown, and unimaginable-she led the children into the rectory yard, where the purple light had grown no brighter with the progress of the morning. The ceiling of fog still hung low, so dense that the position of the sun could not be discerned.

Except for their little group, there were no signs of life, Earthborn or otherwise. Black Lake lay bound in stillness, wrapped in m.u.f.fling mist, as ready for eternity as a pharaoh embalmed for the tomb.

As Neil backed out of the sacristy into the yard, a storm seemed to break inside the church. A hard clap of thunder shuddered the building, as violent as any lightning-chasing crash that ever shook the heavens.

Crumblings of loose mortar rattled out of the stone walls. Dust and paper debris plumed from the open sacristy door.

Surely the floor had collapsed into the bas.e.m.e.nt. The roiling fire damped suddenly, briefly, then flared higher and brighter than before, flamboyantly illuminating the sacred geometries of the colorful windows.

Even this roar brought no citizens into the street. They were huddled in their homes with baseball bats and handguns, or gone to other redoubts-or dead. Or worse than dead: living farms for alien fungus, living egg cases for the entomological wonders of another world.

42.

THE DRAMA OF THE BURNING CHURCH PLAYED bright upon the gloom, but Molly was surfeited with spectacle. Trusting that the collapsed floor and the storm of fire would eradicate the pestilence in the bas.e.m.e.nt and reduce the hag-ridden cadavers to ashes and k.n.o.bs of charred bones, she turned away and urged the children across the yard, toward the street.

Looking shaken but grimly determined, Neil joined them. ”Where now?”

”If Virgil has more places to lead us,” she said, ”we'll follow him, but not until we've gone back to the tavern.”

”Why there?”

Molly remembered Ca.s.sie, the nine-year-old girl with sapphire eyes, daughter of fence-sitters, left behind.

She recalled, as well, how the nine dogs had roamed the tavern end to end, a.s.siduously sniffing the well-worn floor. She had a.s.sumed they were savoring the fragrant stains of dropped food and spilled drinks.

Her a.s.sumptions had changed.

”If the tavern has a bas.e.m.e.nt, there's something in it, sure as h.e.l.l. We've got to get those people out of there before it's too late.”

They were just twenty feet from the street when a refugee out of an LSD-inspired hallucination moved in the purple half-light, approaching from their right across the rectory lawn. They halted but didn't at once retreat.

A colony of white fungi, smaller than but otherwise identical to the one they had seen in the narthex of St. Perpetua's, was on the move: round bladderlike structures in various sizes, glistering with a milky ooze, and soft veiny sacs that continuously swelled and partially deflated and swelled again, as though the creature had been turned inside out, revealing cl.u.s.ters of internal organs. It progressed on eight short legs that reminded Molly of those on a Jerusalem cricket-insectile but thick and tough.

The children crowded close to Molly. She discovered that their trust gave her courage in return for whatever strength her presence imparted to them.

Neil fished sh.e.l.ls out of his coat pockets, pumped one into the chamber of the shotgun, and loaded three more in the tubular magazine.

Asymmetrical, about twice the size of Virgil, low to the ground, the thing proceeded at a measured pace. Although it didn't seem to be built for speed and had no apparent visual apparatus to guide it, Molly didn't discount the possibility that it could move much faster when necessary, guided by some sense other than-but as reliable as-eyesight.

Well fed and content, crocodiles also appeared to be slow and ungainly. When hungry or irritated, however, they could outrun most dogs or any human.

If this too-solid apparition was a mere fungus or another more sophisticated phylum of plant, it wasn't likely to be a dangerous predator in the tradition of the potted carnivore in Little Shop of Horrors. Little Shop of Horrors. On the other hand, innocuous plant life didn't sprout legs and travel. On the other hand, innocuous plant life didn't sprout legs and travel.

Behind them, church windows burst from the heat. Showers of bright gla.s.s rained down and puddled into darker mosaics on the wet lawn.

Like cloud-fluttered moonglow in a dream rich with psychosis, orange firelight rippled across the rain-soaked lawn, over the loathsome bulbous fungus that now seemed obscene in its slimy tumescence.

She remembered her certainty, at first sight of the larger specimen in the narthex, that it was malignant, if not malevolent. And aware. aware.

Drunk or not, Derek Sawtelle had gotten to the heart of the matter when he had said that on the world from which these invaders came, perhaps the differences between plant and animal life were not as clearly defined as on Earth. Consequently, predators might not be easily recognized in all instances.

The creature didn't deviate from its original line of direction, didn't start toward them, but marched steadily southward. It crossed their path and kept going.

As it began to move away, a sound so unexpected and disturbing issued from it that Molly felt her reason wobble like a spinning coin losing momentum. This thing, this pale atrocity, let out a sound that was too much like a grief-stricken woman weeping quietly, quietly but in the most poignant misery.

For an instant she tried to deny the source of the lamentations, and scanned the nearby night for a human figure to match the voice. She could see no one.

The eight-legged abomination was indeed the mourner, although the quality of its cry was most likely natural to it and not mimicry, a similarity explained sheerly by chance.

To hear it as grief or misery was no doubt to misunderstand it. The cry of a loon pealing across the stillness of a lake on a summer night will sound lonely to the human ear even if loneliness is not the state of mind that the loon intends to express.