GOOD FRIDAY
“The Holy Father says there are no such things as vampires,” Sister Bernadette Gileen said.
Sister Carole Hanarty glanced up from the pile of chemistry tests on her lap—tests she might never be able to return to her sophomore students—and watched Bernadette as she drove through town, working the shift on the old Nissan like a long-haul trucker. Her dear friend and fellow Sister of Mercy was thin, almost painfully so, with large blue eyes and short red hair showing around the white band of her wimple. As she peered through the windshield, the light of the setting sun ruddied the clear, smooth skin of her round face.
“If His Holiness said it, then we must believe it,” Sister Carole said. “But we haven't heard anything from him in so long. I hope…”
Bernadette turned toward her, eyes wide with alarm.
“Oh, you wouldn't be thinking anything's happened to His Holiness now, would you, Carole?” she said, the lilt of her native Ireland elbowing its way into her voice. “They wouldn't dare!”
Carole was momentarily at a loss as to what to say, so she gazed out the side window at the budding trees sliding past. The sidewalks of this little Jersey Shore town were empty, and hardly any other cars on the road. She and Bernadette had had to try three grocery stores before finding one with anything to sell. Between the hoarders and delayed or canceled shipments, food was getting scarce.
Everybody sensed it. How did that saying go? By pricking in my thumbs, something wicked this way comes…
Or something like that.
She rubbed her cold hands together and thought about Bernadette, younger than she by five years—only twenty-six —with such a good mind, such a clear thinker in so many ways. But her faith was almost childlike.
She'd come to the convent at St. Anthony's two years ago and the two of them had established instant rapport. They shared so much. Not just a common Irish heritage, but a certain isolation as well. Carole's parents had died years ago, and Bernadette's were back on the Old Sod. So they became sisters in a sense that went beyond their sisterhood in the order. Carole was the big sister, Bernadette the little one. They prayed together, laughed together, walked together. They took over the convent kitchen and did all the food shopping together. Carole could only hope that she had enriched Bernadette's life half as much as the younger woman had enriched hers.
Bernadette was such an innocent. She seemed to assume that since the Pope was infallible when he spoke on matters of faith or morals he somehow must be invincible too.
Carole hadn't told Bernadette, but she'd decided not to believe the Pope on the matter of the undead. After all, their existence was not a matter of faith or morals. Either they existed or they didn't. And all the news out of Eastern Europe last fall had left little doubt that vampires were real.
And that they were on the march.
Somehow they had got themselves organized. Not only did they exist, but more of them had been hiding in Eastern Europe than even the most superstitious peasant could have imagined. And when the communist bloc crumbled, when all the former client states and Russia were in disarray, grabbing for land, slaughtering in the name of nation and race and religion, the vampires took advantage of the power vacuum and struck.
They struck high, they struck low, and before the rest of the world could react, they controlled all Eastern Europe.
If they had merely killed, they might have been containable. But because each kill was a conversion, their numbers increased in a geometric progression. Sister Carole understood geometric progressions better than most. Hadn't she spent years demonstrating them to her chemistry class by dropping a seed crystal into a beaker of supersaturated solution? That one crystal became two, which became four, which became eight, which became sixteen, and so on. You could watch the lattices forming, slowly at first, then bridging through the solution with increasing speed until the liquid contents of the beaker became a solid mass of crystals.
That was how it had gone in Eastern Europe, then spreading into Russia and into Western Europe.
The vampires became unstoppable.
All of Europe had been silent for months. Officially, at least. But a couple of the students at St. Anthony's High who had short wave radios had told Carole of faint transmissions filtering through the transatlantic night recounting ghastly horrors all across Europe under vampire rule.
But the Pope had declared there were no vampires. He'd said it, but shortly thereafter he and the Vatican had fallen silent along with the rest of Europe.
Washington had played down the immediate threat, saying the Atlantic Ocean formed a natural barrier against the undead. Europe was quarantined. America was safe.
Then came reports, disputed at first, and still officially denied, of vampires in New York City. Most of the New York TV and radio stations had stopped transmitting last week. And now…
“You can't really believe vampires are coming into New Jersey, can you?” Bernadette said. “I mean, that is, if there were such things.”
“It is hard to believe, isn’t it?” Carole said, hiding a smile. “Especially since no one comes to Jersey unless they have to.”
“Oh, don’t you be having on with me now. This is serious.”
Bernadette was right. It was serious. “Well, it fits the pattern my students have heard from Europe.”
“But dear God, 'tis Holy Week! 'Tis Good Friday, it is! How could they dare?”
“It's the perfect time, if you think about it. There will be no Mass said until the first Easter Mass on Sunday morning. What other time of the year is daily mass suspended?”
Bernadette shook her head. “None.”
“Exactly.” Carole looked down at her cold hands and felt the chill crawl all the way up her arms.
The car suddenly lurched to a halt and she heard Bernadette cry out. “Dear Jesus! They’re already here!”
Half a dozen black-clad forms clustered on the corner ahead, staring at them.
“Got to get out of here!” Bernadette said and hit the gas.
The old car coughed and died.
“Oh, no!” Bernadette wailed, frantically pumping the gas pedal and turning the key as the dark forms glided toward them. “No!”
“Easy, dear,” Carole said, laying a gentle hand on her arm. “It’s all right. They’re just kids.”
Perhaps “kids” was not entirely correct. Two males and four females who looked to be in their late teens and early twenties, but carried any number of adult lifetimes behind their heavily made-up eyes. Grinning, leering, they gathered around the car, four on Bernadette’s side and two on Carole’s. Sallow faces made paler by a layer of white powder, kohl-crusted eyelids, and black lipstick. Black fingernails, rings in their ears and eyebrows and nostrils, chrome studs piercing cheeks and lips. Their hair ranged the color spectrum, from dead white through burgundy to crankcase black. Bare hairless chests on the boys beneath their leather jackets, almost-bare chests on the girls in their black push-up bras and bustiers. Boots of shiny leather or vinyl, fishnet stockings, layer upon layer of lace, and everything black, black, black.
“Hey, look!” one of the boys said. A spiked leather collar girded his throat, acne lumps bulged under his white-face. “Nuns!”
“Penguins!” someone else said.
Apparently this was deemed hilarious. The six of them screamed with laughter.
We’re not penguins, Carole thought. She hadn’t worn a full habit in years. Only the headpiece.
“Shit, are they gonna be in for a surprise tomorrow morning!” said a buxom girl wearing a silk top hat.
Another roar of laughter by all except one. A tall, slim girl with three large black tears tattooed down one cheek, and blond roots peeking from under her black-dyed hair, hung back, looking uncomfortable. Carole stared at her. Something familiar there…
She rolled down her window. “Mary Margaret? Mary Margaret Flanagan, is that you?”
More laughter. “'Mary Margaret’?” someone cried. “That’s Wicky!”
The girl stepped forward and looked Carole in the eye. “Yes, Sister. That used to be my name. But I’m not Mary Margaret anymore.”
“I can see that.”
She remembered Mary Margaret. A sweet girl, extremely bright, but so quiet. A voracious reader who never seemed to fit in with the rest of the kids. Her grades plummeted as a junior. She never returned for her senior year. When Carole had called her parents, she was told that Mary Margaret had left home. She’d been unable to learn anything more.
“You’ve changed a bit since I last saw you. What is it—three years now?”
“You talk about change?” said the top-hatted girl, sticking her face in the window. “Wait’ll tonight. Then you’ll really see her change!” She brayed a laugh that revealed a chrome stud in her tongue.
“Butt out, Carmilla!” Mary Margaret said.
Carmilla ignored her. “They’re coming tonight, you know. The Lords of the Night will be arriving after sunset, and that’ll spell the death of your world and the birth of ours. We will present ourselves to them, we will bare our throats and let them drain us, and then we’ll join them. Then we will rule the night with them!”
It sounded like a canned speech, one she must have delivered time and again to her black-clad troupe.
Carole looked past Carmilla to Mary Margaret. “Is that what you believe? Is that what you really want?”
The girl shrugged her high thin shoulders. “Beats anything else I got going.”
Finally, the old Nissan shuddered to life. Carole heard Bernadette working the shift. She touched her arm and said, “Wait. Just one more moment, please.”
She was about to speak to Mary Margaret when Carmilla jabbed her finger at Carole’s face, shouting.
“Then you bitches and the candy-ass god you whore for will be fucking extinct!”
With a surprising show of strength, Mary Margaret yanked Carmilla away from the window.
“Better go, Sister Carole,” Mary Margaret said.
The Nissan started to move.
“What the fuck’s with you, Wicky?” Carole heard Carmilla scream as the car eased away from the dark cluster. “Getting religion or somethin’? Should we start callin’ you ‘Sister Mary Margaret’ now?”
“She was one of the few people who was ever straight with me,” Mary Margaret said. “So fuck off, Carmilla.”
The car had traveled too far to hear more.
***
“What awful creatures they were!” Bernadette said, staring out the window in Carole’s room. She hadn’t been able to stop talking about the incident on the street. “Almost my age, they were, and such horrible language!”
Her convent room was little more than a ten-by -ten -foot plaster box with cracks in the walls and the latest coat of paint beginning to flake off the ancient, embossed tin ceiling. She had one window, a crucifix, a dresser and mirror, a work table and chair, a bed, and a night stand as furnishings. Not much, but she gladly called it home. She took her vow of poverty seriously.
“Perhaps we should pray for them.”
“They need more than prayer, I’d think. Believe you me, they’re heading for a bad end.” Bernadette removed the oversized rosary she wore looped around her neck, gathering the beads and its attached crucifix in her hand. “Maybe we could offer them some crosses for protection?”
Carole couldn't resist a smile. “That's a sweet thought, Bern, but I don't think they're looking for protection.”
“Sure, and lookit after what I'm saying,” Bernadette said, her own smile rueful. “No, of course they wouldn't.”
“But we'll pray for them,” Carole said.
Bernadette dropped into a chair, stayed there for no more than a heartbeat, then was up again, moving about, pacing the confines of Carole's room. She couldn't seem to sit still. She wandered out into the hall and came back almost immediately, rubbing her hands together as if washing them.
“It's so quiet,” she said. “So empty.”
“I certainly hope so,” Carole said. “We're the only two who are supposed to be here.”
The little convent was half empty even when all its residents were present. And now, with St. Anthony's School closed for the coming week, the rest of the nuns had gone home to spend Easter Week with brothers and sisters and parents. Even those who might have stayed around the convent in past years had heard the rumors that the undead might be moving this way, so they'd scattered south and west. Carole's only living relative was a brother who lived in California and he hadn't invited her; and even if he had, she couldn't afford to fly there and back to Jersey just for Easter. Bernadette hadn't heard from her family in Ireland for months.
So that left just the two of them to hold the fort, as it were.
Carole wasn't afraid. She knew they'd be safe here at St. Anthony's. The convent was part of a complex consisting of the Church itself, the rectory, the grammar school and high school buildings, and the sturdy old, two-story rooming house that was now the convent. She and Bernadette had taken second -floor rooms, leaving the first floor to the older nuns.
Not really afraid, although she wished there were more people left in the complex than just Bernadette, herself, and Father Palmeri.
“I don’t understand Father Palmeri,” Bernadette said. “Locking up the church and keeping his parishioners from making the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday. Who's ever heard of such a thing, I ask you? I just don't understand it.”
Carole thought she understood. She suspected that Father Alberto Palmeri was afraid. Sometime this morning he'd locked up the rectory, barred the door to St. Anthony's, and hidden himself in the church basement.
God forgive her, but to Sister Carole's mind, Father Palmeri was a coward.
“Oh, I do wish he'd open the church, just for a little while,” Bernadette said. “I need to be in there, Carole. I need it.”
Carole knew how Bern felt. Who had said religion was an opiate of the people? Marx? Whoever it was, he hadn't been completely wrong. For Carole, sitting in the cool, peaceful quiet beneath St. Anthony's gothic arches, praying, meditating, and feeling the presence of the Lord were like a daily dose of an addictive drug. A dose she and Bern had been denied today. Bern's withdrawal pangs seemed worse than Carole's.
The younger nun paused as she passed the window, then pointed down to the street.
“And now who in God's name would they be?”
Carole rose and stepped to the window. Passing on the street below was a cavalcade of shiny new cars—Mercedes Benzes, BMW's, Jaguars, Lincolns, Cadillacs—all with New York plates, all cruising from the direction of the Parkway.
The sight of them in the dusk tightened a knot in Carole's stomach. The lupine faces she spied through the windows looked brutish, and the way they drove their gleaming, luxury cars down the center line… as if they owned the road.
A Cadillac convertible with its top down passed below, carrying four scruffy men. The driver wore a cowboy hat, the two in the back sat atop the rear seat, drinking beer. When Carol saw one of them glance up and look their way, she tugged on Bern's sleeve.
“Stand back! Don't let them see you!”
“Why not? Who are they?”
“I'm not sure, but I've heard of bands of men who do the vampires' dirty work during the daytime, who've traded their souls for the promise of immortality later on, and for… other things now.”
“Sure and you're joking, Carole!”
Carole shook her head. “I wish I were.”
“Oh, dear God, and now the sun's down.” She turned frightened blue eyes toward Carole. “Do you think maybe we should…?”
“Lock up? Most certainly. I know what His Holiness said about there not being any such things as vampires, but maybe he's changed his mind since then and just can't get word to us.”
“Sure, and you're probably right. You close these and I'll check down the hall.” She hurried out, her voice trailing behind her. “Oh, I do wish Father Palmeri hadn't locked the church. I'd dearly love to say a few prayers there.”
Sister Carole glanced out the window again. The fancy new cars were gone, but rumbling in their wake was a convoy of trucks—big, eighteen-wheel semis, lumbering down the center line. What were they for? What did carry? What were they delivering to town?
Suddenly a dog began to bark, and then another, and more and more until it seemed as if every dog in town was giving voice.
To fight the unease rising within her like a flood tide, Sister Carole concentrated on the simple manual tasks of closing and locking her window, and drawing the curtains.
But the dread remained, a sick, cold certainty that the world was falling into darkness, that the creeping hem of shadow had reached her corner of the globe, and that without some miracle, without some direct intervention by a wrathful God, the coming night hours would wreak an irrevocable change on her life.
She began to pray for that miracle.
***
The two remaining sisters decided to leave the convent of St. Anthony's dark tonight.
And they decided to spend the night together in Carole's room. They dragged in Bernadette's mattress, locked the door, and double-draped the window with the bedspread. They lit the room with a single candle and prayed together.
Yet the music of the night filtered through the walls and the doors and the drapes, the muted moan of sirens singing antiphon to their hymns, the muffled pops of gunfire punctuating their psalms, reaching a crescendo shortly after midnight, then tapering off to… silence.
Carole could see that Bernadette was having an especially rough time of it. She cringed with every siren wail, jumped at every shot. She shared Bern's terror, but she buried it, hid it deep within for her friend's sake. After all, Carole was older, and she knew she was made of sterner stuff. Bernadette was an innocent, too sensitive even for yesterday's world, the world before the vampires. How would she survive in the world as it would be after tonight? She'd need help. Carole would provide as much as she could.
But for all the imagined horrors conjured by the night noises, the silence was worse. No human wails of pain and horror had penetrated their sanctum, but imagined cries of human suffering echoed through their minds in the ensuing stillness.
“Dear God, what's happening out there?” Bernadette said after they'd finished reading aloud the Twenty-third Psalm.
She huddled on her mattress, a blanket thrown over her shoulders. The candle's flame reflected in her frightened eyes, and cast her shadow, high, hunched, and wavering, on the wall behind her.
Carole sat cross-legged on her bed. She leaned back against the wall and fought to keep her eyes open. Exhaustion was a weight on her shoulders, a cloud over her brain, but she knew sleep was out of the question. Not now, not tonight, not until the sun was up. And maybe not even then.
“Easy, Bern—” Carole began, then stopped.
From below, on the first floor of the convent, a faint thumping noise.
“What’s that?” Bernadette said, voice hushed, eyes wide.
“I don’t know.”
Carole grabbed her robe and stepped out into the hall for a better listen.
“Don’t you be leaving me alone, now!” Bernadette said, running after her with the blanket still wrapped around her shoulders.
“Hush,” Carole said. “Listen. It’s the front door. Someone’s knocking. I’m going down to see.”
She hurried down the wide, oak-railed stairway to the front foyer. The knocking was louder here, but still sounded weak. Carole put her eye to the peephole, peered through the sidelights, but saw no one.
But the knocking, weaker still, continued.
“Wh-who’s there?” she said, her words cracking with fear.
“Sister Carole,” came a faint voice through the door. “It’s me… Mary Margaret. I’m hurt.”
Instinctively, Carole reached for the handle, but Bernadette grabbed her arm.
“Wait! It could be a trick!”
She’s right, Carole thought. Then she glanced down and saw blood leaking across the threshold from the other side.
She gasped and pointed at the crimson puddle. “That’s no trick.”
She unlocked the door and pulled it open. Mary Margaret huddled on the welcome mat in a pool of blood.
“Dear sweet Jesus!” Carole cried. “Help me, Bern!”
“What if she’s a vampire?” Bernadette said, standing frozen. “They can’t cross the threshold unless you ask them in.”
“Stop that silliness! She’s hurt!”
Bernadette’s good heart won out over her fear. She threw off the blanket, revealing a faded blue, ankle-length flannel nightgown that swirled just above the floppy slippers she wore. Together they dragged Mary Margaret inside. Bernadette closed and relocked the door immediately.
“Call 911!” Carole told her.
Bernadette hurried down the hall to the phone.
Mary Margaret lay moaning on the foyer tiles, clutching her bleeding abdomen. Carole saw a piece of metal, coated with rust and blood, protruding from the area of her navel. From the fecal smell of the gore Carole guessed that her intestines had been pierced.
“Oh, you poor child!” Carole knelt beside her and cradled her head in her lap. She arranged Bernadette’s blanket over Mary Margaret’s trembling body. “Who did this to you?”
“Accident,” Mary Margaret gasped. Real tears had run her black eye make-up over her tattooed tears. “I was running… fell.”
“Running from what?”
“From them. God… terrible. We searched for them, Carmilla’s Lords of the Night. Just after sundown we found one. Looked just like we always knew he would… you know, tall and regal and graceful and seductive and cool. Standing by one of those big trailers that came through town. My friends approached him but I sorta stayed back. Wasn’t too sure I was really into having my blood sucked. But Carmilla goes right up to him, pulling off her top and baring her throat, offering herself to him.”
Mary Margaret coughed and groaned as a spasm of pain shook her.
“Don’t talk,” Carole said. “Save your strength.”
“No,” she said in a weaker voice when it eased. “You got to know. This Lord guy just smiles at Carmilla, then he signals his helpers who pull open the back doors of the trailer.” Mary Margaret sobbed. “Horrible! Truck’s filled with these… things! Look human but they’re dirty and naked and act like beasts. They like pour out the truck and right off a bunch of them jump Carmilla. They start biting and ripping at her throat. I see her go down and hear her screaming and I start backing up. My other friends try to run but they’re pulled down too. And then I see one of the things hold up Carmilla’s head and hear the Lord guy say, ‘That’s right, children. Take their heads. Always take their heads. There are enough of us now.’ And that’s when I turned and ran. I was running through a vacant lot when I fell on… this.”
Bernadette rushed back into the foyer. Her face was drawn with fear. “Nine-one-one doesn’t answer! I can’t raise anyone!”
“They’re all over town.” Mary Margaret said after another spasm of coughing. Carole could barely hear her. She touched her throat—so cold. “They set fires and attack the cops and firemen when they arrive. Their human helpers break into houses and drive the people outside where they’re attacked. And after the things drain the blood, they rip the heads off.”
“Dear God, why?” Bernadette said, crouching beside Carole.
“My guess… don’t want any more vampires. Maybe only so much blood to go around and—”
She moaned with another spasm, then lay still. Carole patted her cheeks and called her name, but Mary Margaret Flanagan’s dull, staring eyes told it all.
“Is she…?” Bernadette said.
Carole nodded as tears filled her eyes. You poor misguided child, she thought, closing Mary Margaret’s eyelids.
“She’s died in sin,” Bernadette said. “She needs anointing immediately! I’ll get Father.”
“No, Bern,” Carole said. “Father Palmeri won’t come.”
“Of course he will. He’s a priest and this poor lost soul needs him.”
“Trust me. He won’t leave that church basement for anything.”
“But he must!” she said, almost childishly, her voice rising. “He’s a priest.”
“Just be calm, Bernadette, and we'll pray for her ourselves.”
“We can’t do what a priest can do,” she said, springing to her feet. “It's not the same.”
“Where are you going?” Carole said.
“To… to get a robe. It's cold.”
My poor, dear, frightened Bernadette, Carole thought as she watched her scurry up the steps. I know exactly how you feel.
“And bring my prayer book back with you,” she called after her.
Carole pulled the blanket over Mary Margaret’s face and gently lowered her head to the floor.
She waited for Bernadette to return… and waited. What was taking her so long? She called her name but got not answer.
Uneasy, Carole returned to the second floor. The hallway was empty and dark except for a pale shaft of moonlight slanting through the window at its far end. Carole hurried to Bern's room. The door was closed. She knocked.
“Bern? Bern, are you in there?”
Silence.
Carole opened the door and peered inside. More moonlight, more emptiness.
Where could — ?
Down on the first floor, almost directly under Carole's feet, the convent's back door slammed. How could that be? Carole had locked it herself—dead bolted it at sunset.
Unless Bernadette had gone down the back stairs and…
She darted to the window and stared down at the grassy area between the convent and the church. The high, bright moon had made a black-and -white photo of the world outside, bleaching the lawn below with its stark glow, etching deep ebony wells around the shrubs and foundation plantings. It glared from St. Anthony's slate roof, stretching a long, crocheted wedge of night behind its Gothic spire.
And scurrying across the lawn toward the church was a slim figure wrapped in a long raincoat, the moon picking out the white band of her wimple, its black veil a fluttering shadow along her neck and upper back—Bernadette was too old-country to approach the church with her head uncovered.
“Oh, Bern,” Carole whispered, pressing her face against the glass. “Bern, don't.”
She watched as Bernadette ran up to St. Anthony's side entrance and began clanking the heavy brass knocker against the thick oak door. Her high, clear voice filtered faintly through the window glass.
“Father! Father Palmeri! Please open up! There’s a dead girl in the convent who needs anointing! Won't you please come over?”
She kept banging, kept calling, but the door never opened. Carole thought she saw Father Palmeri's pale face float into view to Bern's right through the glass of one of the church's few unstained windows. It hovered there for a few seconds or so, then disappeared.
But the door remained closed.
That didn't seem to faze Bern. She only increased the force of her blows with the knocker, and raised her voice even higher until it echoed off the stone walls and reverberated through the night.
Carole's heart went out to her. She shared Bern's need, if not her desperation.
Why doesn't Father Palmeri at least let her in? she thought. The poor thing's making enough racket to wake the dead.
Sudden terror tightened along the back of Carole's neck.
…wake the dead…
Bern was too loud. She thought only of attracting the attention of Father Palmeri, but what if she attracted… others?
Even as the thought crawled across her mind, Carole saw a dark, rangy figure creep onto the lawn from the street side, slinking from shadow to shadow, closing in on her unsuspecting friend.
“Oh, my God!” she cried, and fumbled with the window lock. She twisted it open and yanked up the sash.
Carole screamed into the night. “Bernadette! Behind you! There's someone coming! Get back here now, Bernadette! NOW!”
Bernadette turned and looked up toward Carole, then stared around her. The approaching figure had dissolved into the shadows at the sound of the shouted warnings. But Bernadette must have sensed something in Carole's voice, for she started back toward the convent.
She didn't get far—ten paces, maybe—before the shadowy form caught up to her.
“NO!” Carole screamed as she saw it leap upon her friend.
She stood frozen at the window, her fingers clawing the molding on each side as Bernadette's high wail of terror and pain cut the night.
For the span of an endless, helpless, paralyzed heartbeat, Carole watched the form drag her down to the silver lawn, tear open her raincoat, and fall upon her, watched her arms and legs flail wildly, frantically in the moonlight, and all the while her screams, oh, dear God in Heaven, her screams for help were slim, white hot nails driven into Carole's ears.
And then, out of the corner of her eye, Carole saw the pale face appear again at the window of St. Anthony's, watch for a moment, then once more fade into the inner darkness.
With a low moan of horror, fear, and desperation, Carole pushed herself away from the window and stumbled toward the hall. Someone had to help. On the way, she snatched the foot-long wooden crucifix from Bernadette's wall and clutched it against her chest with both hands. As she picked up speed, graduating from a lurch to a walk to a loping run, she began to scream—not a wail of fear, but a long, seamless ululation of rage.
Something was killing her friend.
The rage was good. It canceled the fear and the horror and the loathing that had paralyzed her. It allowed her to move, to keep moving. She embraced the rage.
Carole hurtled down the stairs and burst onto the moonlit lawn—
And stopped.
She was disoriented for an instant. She didn't see Bern. Where was she? Where was her attacker?
And then she saw a patch of writhing shadow on the grass ahead of her near one of the shrubs.
Bernadette?
Clutching the crucifix, Carole ran for the spot, and as she neared she realized it was indeed Bernadette, sprawled face down, but not alone. Another shadow sat astride her, hissing like a reptile, gnashing its teeth, its fingers curved into talons that tugged at Bernadette’s head as if trying to tear it off.
Carole reacted without thinking. Screaming, she launched herself at the creature, ramming the big crucifix against its exposed back. Light flashed and sizzled and thick black smoke shot upward in oily swirls from where cross met flesh. The thing arched its back and howled, writhing beneath the cruciform brand, thrashing wildly as it tried to wriggle out from under the fiery weight.
But Carole stayed with it, following its slithering crawl on her knees, pressing the flashing cross deeper and deeper into its steaming, boiling flesh, down to the spine, into the vertebrae. Its cries became almost piteous as it weakened, and Carole gagged on the thick black smoke that fumed around her, but her rage would not allow her to slack off. She kept up the pressure, pushed the wooden crucifix deeper and deeper in the creature's back until it penetrated the chest cavity and seared into its heart. Suddenly the thing gagged and shuddered and then was still.
The flashes faded. The final wisps of smoke trailed away on the breeze.
Carole abruptly released the shaft of the crucifix as if it had shocked her, and ran back to Bernadette. She dropped to her knees beside the still form and turned her over onto her back.
“Oh, no!” she screamed when she saw Bernadette's torn throat, her wide, glazed, sightless eyes, and the blood, so much blood smeared all over the front of her. Oh no. Oh, dear God, please no! This can't be! This can't be real!
A sob burst from her. “No, Bern! Nooooo!”
Somewhere nearby, a dog howled in answer.
Or was it a dog?
Carole realized she was defenseless now. She had to get back to the convent. She leaped to her feet and looked around. Nothing moving. A yard or two away she saw the dead thing with her crucifix still buried in it back.
She hurried over to retrieve it, but recoiled from touching the creature. She could see now that it was a man—a naked man, or something that very much resembled one. But not quite. Some indefinable quality was missing.
Was it one of them?
This must be one of the undead Mary Margaret had warned about. But could this… this thing… be a vampire? It had acted like little more than a rabid dog in human form.
Whatever it was, it had mauled and murdered Bernadette. Rage bloomed again within Carole like a virulent, rampant virus, spreading through her bloodstream, invading her nervous system, threatening to take her over completely. She fought the urge to batter the corpse.
Bile rose in her throat; she choked it down and stared at the inert form prone before her. This once had been a man, someone with a family, perhaps. Surely he hadn't asked to become this vicious night thing.
“Whoever you were,” Carole whispered, “you're free now. Free to return to God.”
She gripped the shaft of the crucifix to remove it but found it fixed in the seared flesh like a steel rod set in concrete.
Something howled again. Closer.
She had to get back inside, but she couldn't leave Bern out here.
Swiftly, she returned to Bernadette's side, worked her hands through the grass under her back and knees, and lifted her into her arms. So light! Dear Lord, she weighed almost nothing.
Carole carried Bernadette back to the convent as fast as her rubbery legs would allow. Once inside, she bolted the door, then staggered up to the second floor with Bernadette in her arms.
She returned Sister Bernadette Gileen to her own room. Carole didn't have the energy to drag the mattress back across the hall, so she stretched her supine on the box spring of her bed. She straightened Bern's thin legs, crossed her hands over her blood-splattered chest, arranged her torn clothing as best she could, and covered her from head to toe with a bedspread.
And then, looking down at that still form under the quilt she had helped Bernadette make, Carole sagged to her knees and began to cry. She tried to say a requiem prayer but her grief-racked mind had lost the words. So she sobbed aloud and asked God, Why? How could He let this happen to a dear, sweet innocent who had wished only to spend her life serving Him? WHY?
But no answer came.
When Carole finally controlled her tears, she forced herself to her feet, closed Bernadette's door, and stumbled into the hall. She saw the light from the front foyer and knew she shouldn’t leave it on. She hurried down and stepped over the still form of Mary Margaret under the blood-soaked blanket. Two violent deaths here tonight in a house devoted to God. How many more outside these doors?
She turned off the light but didn’t have the strength to carry Mary Margaret upstairs. She left her there and raced through the dark back to her own room.
***
Carole didn't know what time the power went out.
She had no idea how long she'd been kneeling beside her bed, alternately sobbing and praying, when she glanced at the digital alarm clock on her night table and saw that its face had gone dark and blank.
Not that a power failure mattered. She'd been spending the night by candlelight anyway. There was barely an inch of candle left, but that gave her no clue as to the hour. Who knew how fast a candle burned?
She was tempted to lift the bedspread draped over the window and peek outside, but was afraid of what she might see.
How long until dawn? she wondered, rubbing her eyes. This night seemed endless. If only—
Beyond her locked door, a faint squeak came from somewhere along the hall. It could have been anything—the wind in the attic, the old building settling, but it had been long, drawn out, and high pitched. Almost like…
A door opening.
Carole froze, still on her knees, hands still folded in prayer, her elbows resting on the bed, and listened for it again. But the sound was not repeated. Instead, something else… a rhythmic shuffle… in the hall… approaching her door…
Footsteps.
With her heart punching frantically against the inner wall of her chest, Carole leaped to her feet and stepped close to the door, listening with her ear almost touching the wood. Yes. Footsteps. Slow. And soft, like bare feet scuffing the floor. Coming this way. Closer. They were right outside the door. Carole felt a sudden chill, as if a wave of icy air had penetrated the wood, but the footsteps didn't pause. They passed her door, moving on.
And then they stopped.
Carole had her ear pressed against the wood now. She could hear her pulse pounding through her head as she strained for the next sound. And then it came, more shuffling outside in the hall, almost confused at first, and then the footsteps began again.
Coming back.
This time they stopped directly outside Carole's door. The cold was there again, a damp, penetrating chill that reached for her bones. Carole backed away from it.
And then the doorknob turned. Slowly. The door creaked with the weight of a body leaning against it from the other side, but Carole's bolt held.
Then a voice. Hoarse. A single whispered word, barely audible, but a shout could not have startled her more.
“Carole?”
Carole didn't reply—couldn't reply.
“Carole, it's me. Bern. Let me in.”
Against her will, a low moan escaped Carole. No, no, no, this couldn't be Bernadette. Bernadette was dead. Carole had left her cooling body lying in her room across the hall. This was some horrible joke…
Or was it? Maybe Bernadette had become one of them, one of the very things that had killed her.
But the voice on the other side of the door was not that of some ravenous beast. It was…
“Please let me in, Carole. I'm frightened out here alone.”
Maybe Bern is alive, Carole thought, her mind racing, ranging for an answer. I'm no doctor. I could have been wrong about her being dead. Maybe she survived…
She stood trembling, torn between the desperate, aching need to see her friend alive, and the wary terror of being tricked by whatever creature Bernadette might have become.
“Carole?”
Carole wished for a peephole in the door, or at the very least a chain lock, but she had neither, and she had to do something. She couldn't stand here like this and listen to that plaintive voice any longer without going mad. She had to know. Without giving herself any more time to think, she snapped back the bolt and pulled the door open, ready to face whatever awaited her in the hall.
She gasped. “Bernadette!”
Her friend stood just beyond the threshold, swaying, stark naked.
Not completely naked. She still wore her wimple, although it was askew on her head, and a strip of cloth had been layered around her neck to dress her throat wound. In the wan, flickering candlelight that leaked from Carole's room, she saw that the blood that had splattered her was gone. Carole had never seen Bernadette unclothed before. She'd never realized how thin she was. Her ribs rippled beneath the skin of her chest, disappearing only beneath the scant padding of her small breasts with their erect nipples; the bones of her hips and pelvis bulged around her flat belly. Her normally fair skin was almost blue-white. The only other colors were the dark pools of her eyes and the orange splotches of hair on her head and her pubes.
“Carole,” she said weakly. “Why did you leave me?”
The sight of Bernadette standing before her, alive, speaking, had drained most of Carole's strength; the added weight of guilt from her words nearly drove her to her knees. She sagged against the door frame.
“Bern…” Carole’s voice failed her. She swallowed and tried again. “I—I thought you were dead. And… what happened to your clothes?”
Bernadette raised her hand to her throat.”I tore up my nightgown for a bandage. Can I come in?”
Carole straightened and opened the door further. “Oh, Lord, yes. Come in. Sit down. I'll get you a blanket.”
Bernadette shuffled into the room, head down, eyes fixed on the floor. She moved like someone on drugs. But then, after losing so much blood, it was a wonder she could walk at all.
“Don't want a blanket,” Bern said. “Too hot. Aren't you hot?”
She backed herself stiffly onto Carole's bed, then lifted her ankles and sat cross-legged , facing her. Mentally, Carole explained the casual, blatant way she exposed herself by the fact that Bernadette was still recovering from a horrific trauma, but that made it no less discomfiting.
Carole glanced at the crucifix on the wall over her bed, above and behind Bernadette. For moment, as Bernadette had seated herself beneath it, she thought she had seen it glow. It must have been reflected candlelight. She turned away and retrieved a spare blanket from the closet. She unfolded it and wrapped it around Bernadette's shoulders and over her spread knees, covering her.
“I'm thirsty, Carole. Could you get me some water?”
Her voice was strange. Lower pitched and hoarse, yes, but that should to be expected after the throat wound she'd suffered. No, something else had changed in her voice, but Carole could not pin it down.
“Of course. You'll need fluids. Lots of fluids.”
The bathroom was only two doors down. She took her water pitcher, lit a second candle, and left Bernadette on the bed, looking like an Indian draped in a serape.
When she returned with the full pitcher, she was startled to find the bed empty. She spied Bernadette immediately, by the window. She hadn't opened it, but she'd pulled off the bedspread drape and raised the shade. She stood there, staring out at the night. And she was naked again.
Carole looked around for the blanket and found it… hanging on the wall over her bed…
Covering the crucifix.
Part of Carole screamed at her to run, to flee down the hall and not look back. But another part of her insisted she stay. This was her friend. Something terrible had happened to Bernadette and she needed Carole now, probably more than she'd needed anyone in her entire life. And if someone was going to help her, it was Carole. Only Carole.
She placed the pitcher on the night stand.
“Bernadette,” she said, her mouth as dry as the timbers in these old walls, “the blanket…”
“I was hot,” Bernadette said without turning.
“I brought you the water. I'll pour—”
“I'll drink it later. Come and watch the night.”
“I don't want to see the night. It frightens me.”
Bernadette turned, a faint smile on her lips. “But the darkness is so beautiful.”
She stepped closer and stretched her arms toward Carole, laying a hand and each shoulder and gently massaging the terror-tightened muscles there. A sweet lethargy began to seep through Carole. Her eyelids began to drift closed… so tired… so long since she'd had any sleep…
No!
She forced her eyes open and gripped Bernadette's hands, pulling them from her shoulders. She pressed the palms together and clasped them between her own.
“Let's pray, Bern. With me: Hail Mary, full of grace…”
“No!”
“…the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou…”
Her friend's face twisted in rage. “I said, NO, damn you!”
Carole struggled to keep a grip on Bernadette's hands but she was too strong.
“… amongst women…”
And suddenly Bernadette's struggles ceased. Her face relaxed, her eyes cleared, even her voiced changed, still hoarse, but higher in pitch, lighter in tone as she took up the words of the prayer.
“And blessed is the fruit of thy womb…” Bernadette struggled with the next word, unable to say it. Instead she gripped Carole's hands with painful intensity and loosed a torrent of her own words. “Carole, get out! Get out, oh, please, for the love of God, get out now! There's not much of me left in here, and soon I'll be like the ones that killed me and I'll be after killing you! So run, Carole! Hide! Lock yourself in the chapel downstairs but get away from me now!”
Carole knew now what had been missing from Bernadette's voice—her brogue. But now it was back. This was the real Bernadette speaking. She was back! Her friend, her sister was back! Carole bit back a sob.
“Oh, Bern, I can help! I can—”
Bernadette pushed her toward the door. “No one can help me, Carole!” She ripped the makeshift bandage from her neck, exposing the deep, jagged wound and the ragged ends of the torn blood vessels within it. “It's too late for me, but not for you. They're a bad lot and I'll be one of them again soon, so get out while you—”
Suddenly Bernadette stiffened and her features shifted. Carole knew immediately that the brief respite her friend had stolen from the horror that gripped her was over. Something else was back in control.
Carole turned and ran.
But the Bernadette-thing was astonishingly swift. Carole had barely reached the threshold when a steel -fingered hand gripped her upper arm and yanked her back, nearly dislocating her shoulder. She cried out in pain and terror as she was spun about and flung across the room. Her hip struck hard against the rickety old spindle chair by her desk, knocking it over as she landed in a heap beside it.
Carole groaned with the pain. As she shook her head to clear it, she saw Bernadette approaching her, her movements swift, more assured now, her teeth bared—so many teeth, and so much longer than the old Bernadette's—her fingers curved, reaching for Carole's throat. With each passing second there was less and less of Bernadette about her.
Carole tried to back away, her frantic hands and feet slipping on the floor as she pressed her spine against the wall. She had nowhere to go. She pulled the fallen chair atop her and held it as a shield against the Bernadette-thing . The face that had once belonged to her dearest friend grimaced with contempt as she swung her hand at the chair. It scythed through the spindles, splintering them like matchsticks, sending the carved headpiece flying. A second blow cracked the seat in two. A third and fourth sent the remnants of the chair hurtling to opposite sides of the room.
Carole was helpless now. All she could do was pray.
“Our Father, who art—”
“Too late for that to help you now, Carole!” she hissed, spitting her name.
“…hallowed be Thy name…” Carole said, quaking in terror as undead fingers closed on her throat.
And then the Bernadette-thing froze, listening. Carole heard it too. An insistent tapping. On the window. The creature turned to look, and Carole followed her gaze.
A face was peering through the window.
Carole blinked but it didn't go away. This was the second floor! How—?
And then a second face appeared, this one upside down, looking in from the top of the window. And then a third, and a fourth, each more bestial than the last. And as each appeared it began to tap its fingers and knuckles on the window glass.
“NO!” the Bernadette-thing screamed at them. “You can't come in! She's mine! No one touches her but me!”
She turned back to Carole and smiled, showing those teeth that had never fit in Bernadette's mouth. “They can't cross a threshold unless invited in by one who lives there. I live here—or at least I did. And I'm not sharing you, Carole.”
She turned again and raked a claw-like hand at the window. “Go AWAY ! She's MINE!”
Carole glanced to her left. The bed was only a few feet away. And above it—the blanket-shrouded crucifix. If she could reach it…
She didn't hesitate. With the mad tapping tattoo from the window echoing around her, Carole gathered her feet beneath her and sprang for the bed. She scrambled across the sheets, one hand outstretched, reaching for the blanket—
A manacle of icy flesh closed around her ankle and roughly dragged her back.
“Oh, no, bitch,” said the hoarse, unaccented voice of the Bernadette-thing . “Don't even think about it!”
It grabbed two fistfuls of flannel at the back of Carole's nightgown and hurled her across the room as if she weighed no more than a pillow. The wind whooshed out of Carole as she slammed against the far wall. She heard ribs crack. She fell among the splintered ruins of the chair, pain lancing through her right flank. The room wavered and blurred. But through the roaring in her ears she still heard that insistent tapping on the window.
As her vision cleared she saw the Bernadette-thing's naked form gesturing again to the creatures at the window, now a mass of salivating mouths and tapping fingers.
“Watch!” she hissed. “Watch me!”
With that, she loosed a long, howling scream and lunged at Carole, arms curved before her, body arcing into a flying leap. The scream, the tapping, the faces at the window, the dear friend who now wanted only to slaughter her—it all was suddenly too much for Carole. She wanted to roll away but couldn't get her body to move. Her hand found the broken seat of the chair by her hip. Instinctively she pulled it closer. She closed her eyes as she raised it between herself and the horror hurtling toward her through the air.
The impact drove the wood of the seat against Carole's chest; she groaned as new stabs of pain shot through her ribs. But the Bernadette-thing's triumphant feeding cry cut off abruptly and devolved into a coughing gurgle.
Suddenly the weight was released from Carole's chest, and the chair seat with it.
And the tapping at the window stopped.
Carole opened her eyes to see the naked Bernadette-thing standing above her, straddling her, holding the chair seat before her, choking and gagging as she struggled with it.
At first Carole didn't understand. She drew her legs back and inched away along the wall. And then she saw what had happened.
Three splintered spindles had remained fixed in that half of the broken seat, and those spindles were now firmly and deeply embedded in the center of the Bernadette-thing's chest. She wrenched wildly at the chair seat, trying to dislodge the oak daggers but succeeded only in breaking them off at skin level. She dropped the remnant of the seat and swayed like a tree in a storm, her mouth working spasmodically as her hands fluttered ineffectually over the bloodless wounds between her ribs and the slim wooden stakes deep out of reach within them.
Abruptly she dropped to her knees with a dull thud. Then, only inches from Carole, she slumped into a splay-legged squat. The agony faded from her face and she closed her eyes. She fell forward against Carole.
Carole threw her arms around her friend and gathered her close.
“Oh, Bern, oh, Bern, oh, Bern,” she moaned. “I'm so sorry. If only I'd got there sooner!”
Bernadette's eyes fluttered open and the darkness was gone. Only her own spring-sky blue remained, clear, grateful. Her lips began to curve upward but made it only half way to a smile, then she was gone.
Carole hugged the limp cold body closer and moaned in boundless grief and anguish to the unfeeling walls. She saw the leering faces begin to crawl away from the window and she shouted at them though her tears.
“Go! That's it! Run away and hide! Soon it'll be light and then I'll come looking for you! For all of you! And woe to any of you that I find!”
She cried over Bernadette's body a long time. And then she wrapped it in a sheet and held and rocked her dead friend in her arms until sunrise.
***
With the dawn she left the old Sister Carole Hanarty behind. The gentle soul, happy to spend her days and nights in the service of the Lord, praying, fasting, teaching chemistry to reluctant adolescents, and holding to her vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, was gone.
The new Sister Carole had been tempered in the forge of the night, and recast into someone relentlessly vengeful and fearless to the point of recklessness. And perhaps, she admitted with no shame or regret, more than a little mad.
She departed the convent and began her hunt.