At first the slight bulk of the old man's body made Karen feel as if she were carrying an impossible load. His weight, she knew, was not just physical, it was in some way incorporeal. Somehow, he was adding the density of his spirit, his essence, to her own. Before they'd made it halfway to the bottom of the stairs, the demon was seeing through her eyes, moving with the strength of her muscles, tottering forward propelled by her life energy, rather than his own.
It was a perfect sharing. It felt right. Complete.
Although he was not speaking, he was communicating with her. She could feel his thoughts and her thoughts as a single mind. He was telling her what he wanted. What he had always wanted.
Her.
Not the old priest, not Father Sullivan. Not Jeff or Casey, not Alton Barnes or any of the others. They were all expendable parts of the plan.
The demon wanted Karen. Just Karen. For she was unmarred and uncorrupt. She was unspoiled, youthful, perfect, and powerful. And with those persuasive words ringing in her mind, Karen began to feel beautiful, dynamic. Supremely confident, perhaps for the first time in her life.
It was wonderful!
Though she knew she was seeing herself as the demon saw her, their visions were starting to mesh, blend, become a single perception. And she welcomed this new outlook, loving these strong and unfamiliar feelings about herself. She was lovely, vital, glowing with feminine charisma. She felt an ecstasy moving in waves along her spine, splashing between her thighs, lapping at the two perfect points where her nipples met the fabric of her bra. Her face was a beautiful persuader, her body a potent sexual tool. She could do anything. Influence anyone.
Her clothes fell away and pooled at her feet. She stepped over them, another shackle gone forever. Standing elegant and free, her naked body shone with a fierce sexual radiance. She sighed deeply, her muscles rippled and flowed beneath a steaming glaze of sweat.
Now she could actually feel the demon's will coupling with hers. He would command her to take another step, and she would move forward. Step after step until she needed no more commands, progressing toward the stairway and toward Jeffrey Chandler.
Yes. She would stop him. Now. Forever.
"Jeffrey," she said. "Wait, Jeffrey. . . ."
The darkness was complete. It was as if his eyes had suddenly vanished from his head.
Blinded, Jeff suffered a profound disorientation. No up or down. No floor beneath his feet. Oddly, he stood in a slippery, sloshing liquid. And he could walk on it! He took another tentative step, fearing that if he acknowledged this impossibility he'd sink and drown in a bottomless sea.
Another cautious step. The waves he caused rippled in concentric circles to the ends of the universe. Then back. Flooding over him as an invisible tide.
He felt things that might have been fish brushing against his flesh as they swain by. Their touch was cold, clammy, impossibly foreign.
He pulled away in disgust.
Someone called from all around, "Jeffrey, wait. Jeffrey."
When he turned he saw his wife Jessica. His dead wife. Grinning at him from Casey's wheelchair.
Her face exploded, just as it had a million times in his mind. The assassin's bullet blasted it to pieces.
There was another face underneath. It exploded, too.
And another . . .
Jeff turned away, screaming. All the time knowing that if he escaped into hysteria, something would jump into his mind and take hold of him.
But he didn't care.
He heard the sound of another explosion. Another.
He screamed again.
Then something grabbed him.
Lying flat on the porch floor, McCurdy tried to open the screen door without making any noise.
He allowed the spring to tug the door's weight against him, forcing it to close a little at a time as he dragged himself through.
When he was fully into the kitchen, he let the door shut quietly against its frame. Then he exhaled with great relief.
The first thing he saw was the priest's body, a new addition to the farmhouse morgue. Seeing it shriveled against the wall inspired a momentary stab of hopelessness. The priest had been God's man. Did this mean all faith was powerless against the accursed thing?
Because McCurdy had been deluded, was he also to be damned? Had salvation and a lifetime of prayers been . . . wasted?
No matter. God or Devil, the thing had betrayed him.
The remnants of his pride demanded revenge. With a motivator stronger than love, McCurdy propelled himself forward. Arm over arm, he slid across the gritty floor toward the hail. Beside the doorway, he used a chair to help himself get to his feet. There was no way he'd meet the fiend lying on his belly, groveling on the floor.
Leaning against the door frame now, McCurdy reached into his pocket for the pistol.
Then he stepped into the hail, took aim. And fired!
A
lton Barnes pulled Jeff into the bedroom. Jeff's face was brilliant red. Veins stood out in his forehead and neck as he screamed and screamed.
"Jeff, stop it!"
Jeff's body was rigid, almost convulsing. His hands were balled, locked against his chin.
"Jeff. It's okay, you're all right."
Al slapped him gently. Slapped him again, harder. "Jeff, come on. Snap out of it, for Christ's sake. You're okay."
Tension released and Jeff slumped into Alton's arms. The old man supported him with ease, dragging him into the bedroom.
"You was so dazed up I thought you was gonna walk straight into that christly wall out there. What they doin', messin' with your mind, Jeffrey?"
Jeff shook his head as if trying to wake up. "Alton? Christ? What . . . ? Where'd you . . . ? How'd you get up here?"
"I come back with the car and seen what's goin' on in here. Figgered I'd better get the computer for ya. So I climbed up that maple by the porch roof and come in the window. Hurry up now, grab the sonuvabitch and let's get the hell out of here."
"There's no time. I've got to do it here. Now. Stay by the door, will you? See to it nobody bothers me."
"You got it."
The liquid crystal screen was still lighted, glowing its eerie neon purple glow. Jeff hit the enter button to activate the program. When the outline of a left hand with a truncated little figure appeared, he knew he was beaten.
McCurdy's bullet smacked the old man in the shoulder, spinning him away from Karen.
Instead of falling, the ghastly body spun slow motion into the air as if it were no longer subject to gravity. With arms spread, the old man hovered between floor and ceiling like a wrinkled helium balloon.
McCurdy aimed, preparing to fire another round.
Karen turned, ready to attack the intruder.
Sneering, the old man pointed a gnarled finger at McCurdy. With a voice that seemed impossibly loud, he commanded, "Disarm him!"
McCurdy's arms snapped straight out to the sides as if yanked by invisible ropes. The gun flew from his hand and vanished in the darkness.
It was as if the old man's unseen bodyguards were holding McCurdy in place while brutally pulling his arms at right angles to his body. And those invisible protectors were impossibly strong.
McCurdy screamed in agony, his body lurched this way and that, caught in an impossible tug-of-war. He issued a lunatic scream as both arms ripped from their sockets and thumped to the floor. Blood spurted like a fountain as McCurdy's body started to spin.
On their way downstairs, Jeff and Al watched McCurdy collapse, crying and moaning.
"Alâ" Jeff began.
"I know," Al assured him and ran down the stairway.
In her peripheral vision, Karen saw everything go crazy.
Alton Barnes scooted by her like a furtive animal and disappeared from sight; McCurdy twitched and cried on the floor; the walls seemed to fade and the candlelit hallway became part of some endless emptiness that was far too alien to register coherently on what remained of her human senses. She saw tiny beings composed entirely of light skittering around her feet. They emitted high-pitched birdlike giggles as they scampered and swarmed. She heard leathery wings flapping like sodden sheets somewhere behind her. Vaguely human voices whispered, "It is done." She saw stars blinking out one by one in the vast celestial dome she used to call the sky.
Even while these impossible things happened around her, she could not move her eyes to see them directly, to try to understand. Instead, her gaze was welded to the eyes of the old man who floated before her, suspended horizontally in the blackness of space.
As Karen stared, his eyes glowed like two penlights, boring laser beams directly into her mind. What looked like fine silver strands extruded from the many orifices of the old man's body. They reached out from his ears, his nostrils, his tiny pores, millions of them, stretching toward her like the threadlike tentacles of a gigantic jellyfish. And when they touched her, they tunneled like worms into her skin.
Words from her profession popped to mind and fell away like dry, dead leaves: delusion, hallucination, dementia.
Reality had changed, shifted. Then it too fell away with the obsolete jargon of her career.
I can kill and destroy
, she thought.
I can bring this whole house to the ground with the flex of a finger.
Spider web strands continued to flow as the old man emptied himself into her. It was a preternatural copulation that would bring about the birth of a new god on the earth. A god of metamorphosis and transmutation. Because Karen herself was mutating, becoming. The demon spirit, the god spirit, the soul of Splitfoot poured into her, its essence surging, its will filling her to the bursting point.
And when what she saw as silver cords stopped moving from the withered body into hers, she watched the once-human thing shrivel and fall away.
Like a snake shedding its skin.
Like a chrysalis discarded.
Like an insect sucked dry.
It flashed and streaked and vanished like lightning from Heaven. And a will that was almost her own commanded, End this now.
Finish them! We've toyed with these puppets long enough.
She turned on Alton Barnes who was moving past her like a fish, swimming in slow motion against a night-black tide. His aura glowed rainbow patterns and she found them irritating.
She watched as he clutched at something. He picked it up, threw it into the void. She saw the alien object catapult from his hand. Flying toward the stairs.
Turning end over end, the thing vanished into oblivion.
Finish him!
Karen flexed incorporeal muscles. Air moved around her in response, swirling, gathering speed and density, growing to whirlwind force. It smashed Alton. He flew off his feet. His back smacked an invisible wall and he crumbled to an invisible floor.
Tides of electrical pleasure coursed through Karen; the workout was invigorating.
Good
, her instincts assured her.
Now stop Jeffrey. Stop him, kill him!
Yes
, her mind hissed.
Yesss
.
She turned to face the invisible stairs.
When she suspected Lucy was no longer breathing, Casey knew what to do. Mindless of the insanity around her, she flopped from the chair and crawled across the porch to the little girl's side.
Lucy's chest wasn't moving. Her lips and nostrils were still.
How to help? The child's deformity made mouth-to-mouth impossible.
Fighting growing revulsion, Casey folded the rubbery lips against the child's chin and held them there with her hand. Then, reluctantly, she lowered her mouth over Lucy's nose and exhaled. She breathed and exhaled, just like they taught her in school. She kept this up until she realized it was no use. The child's body had swollen to twice its former size, and mean as it sounded in the privacy of her own thoughts, Casey guessed death might be the best thing for her.
Should she call for help? Maybe someone would come out and look at Lucy. But Casey didn't dare risk shouting.
She dragged herself to the door and looked inside.
What she saw made no sense.
Karen was standing in the middle of the hall, naked, grinning like a madwoman. There were two bodies on the floor: the priest and McCurdy. Where'd he come from?
And old Mr. Barnes was standing near Karen. He shrank from her as if she frightened him. All at once Mr. Barnes heaved something to Dad. It was white and bent. Before she could tell what it was, Dad snatched it from the air.
Then Karen flicked her wrist. It was a quick, tight motion, as if she were trying to shake a drop of water from her fingertip. Though she never touched him, Mr. Barnes flew off his feet and slammed into the wall!
And when he crumbled to the floor, Karen laughed. Then she turned her whole body toward the steps that led to the upstairs room where Dad had just disappeared.
Holding the severed arm, Jeff flattened McCurdy's left palm against the computer screen. It flashed: