Snow(42)

“Stop it!” Meg screamed from the pulpit. “Stop it! You’re hurting him!”

Kate’s fingers closed around the boy’s throat. Chris’s spittle flecked her face as his thick-fingered hands attempted to loosen her grasp on him.

Distantly, Kate was aware of a looming presence…and she was reminded in that instant of being a young girl out on the softball field, and how cool it had been when airliners would pass overhead, their shadows like the shadows of a giant bird bulleting across the outfield…

Kate let go of Chris’s throat and rolled off him just in time to glimpse a dark, wavering shape floating just beyond the panels of stained glass in the ceiling high above the altar. Then, a second later, something came crashing through the windows, sending a shower of jagged spearheads raining down on them all. Kate blocked her eyes with one arm but still managed to see a figure, undeniably human, fall through the shattered windows and plummet like a sack of potatoes to the altar. The figure struck the altar with a bone-crunching din and nearly buckled in half at the force of the landing. A cone of moonlight poured in through the ceiling, spotlighting the altar and the twisted, mangled corpse that lay folded over the top of it.

Meg screamed.

Kate quickly scrambled to her hands and knees and pitched forward, pawing for the handgun. Its blue steel practically glowed in the moonlight. Gripping the gun by the hilt, Kate then swung around and hurried over to Todd, who sat half-cocked against a pew, staring up with stark disbelief at the wound in the ceiling.

“Where are you tied?” she said, nearly knocking her forehead against his ear as she slid into him.

“My hands.” But he wasn’t looking at her; he was staring numbly at the ceiling. His face was a network of small cuts and bleeding lacerations from the shower of glass.

Kate reached behind him and found that Chris had tied Todd’s hands around the front leg of the pew. Quickly she felt out the knot and managed to dig her fingernails between the sections of rope, prying them apart.

“Oh, f*ck,” Todd said, his voice sounding like it was sticking to his throat. “That’s Nan.”

Kate paused in her work just long enough to look back up at the altar. Had Todd not said anything she would have never recognized poor Nan Wilkinson, owing to the stage of her mutilation, but once she locked eyes on Nan’s face—the frozen grimace of fear and pain, the bulging, milked-over eyes, the skin pulled taut like the flesh of a balloon—she couldn’t not see her.

“Oh, Christ,” Kate whispered breathlessly into Todd’s ear. “Oh…Christ, Todd…”

“Untie me.”

She quickly went back to work with the rope. Peripherally, she saw Chris scoot away from her in the darkness, possibly looking for sanctuary behind one of the pews. Up on the pulpit, a pinpoint of light sparked through the darkness: Meg’s lighter. The flame shook and wavered until the girl was able once again to light the candle. This time, her brother did not yell at her to blow it out.

Meg approached the altar and the mangled corpse that lay across it. One bloodied arm jutted out at an unnatural angle. Meg moved with the lethargy of a somnambulist while the candle’s flame jittered in her hand. Above the girl’s head, it began to snow through the opening in the roof.

Kate finally got the rope untied. Todd pulled his hands into his lap and rubbed his wrists before climbing to his feet. He was staring up at the snow coming through the roof. “We need to get out of here. Fast.”

Kate rushed up to the altar and snatched the bag of ammo from beneath it. As she stood, she locked eyes again with Nan Wilkinson’s corpse. Ice clung to the woman’s silvery hair and her skin looked cold and brittle, like porcelain.

“Come with me,” Kate said, grabbing Meg by the wrist. The motion caused Meg to drop the candle.

“My brother,” Meg said.

“We all need to get out of here.”

The hands against the windows began banging on the glass—all of them in unison, like some orchestrated percussive beat. Kate pulled Meg down off the altar just as the snow above their heads began to solidify and come together. At the center of the blustery mass was a tendril of silver light, like light spilling out of a keyhole.

“Here!” Kate shouted, tossing Todd the handgun. Dragging Meg by the wrist, she ran toward the farthest wall. Meg was as lifeless as a rag doll in her grasp.

Chris began whimpering from behind one of the pews.

Todd press-checked the nine-millimeter, then took several steps backward. The mass of snow rotating above the altar seemed to darken and take on form, like a shadow. Watching it, Kate found herself hoping that Chris had been right—that perhaps this was sanctified land and no evil would dare cross its threshold. But as the swirling mass of snow and light above the altar became thicker and more prominent, she knew that was not the case.

They were going to die.

The carpet beneath the altar suddenly went up in a blaze of white flame: Meg’s dropped candle. A second later and Nan’s outstretched arm went up, too, filling the nave with a dark black smoke and the acrid, gunpowdery reek of burning flesh. As the black smoke rose up out of the hole in the roof, it commingled with the twirling mass of living snow hovering just above the altar. Briefly, like a sheet draped over a mannequin, the smoke brought the creature into frightening relief—the human-shaped head with the distended jowls and the hollow pits for eyes; the thin stalk of its neck; the heart-shaped scurf of its upper chest…