Father C.-it isn't Father C.I-made a gesture with pale hands. Mike had never noticed how long the priest's fingers were. "Very well, Michael... I come to offer you and your little friends a ... what shall we call it? A truce."
"What kind of truce?" said Mike. He felt as if his tongue had been given a shot of Novocaine.
It was dark enough now that the priest's black garb blended with the night, allowing only his hands, face, and the white circle of his collar to reflect the light. "A truce that will allow you to live," he said flatly. "Perhaps."
Mike made a noise that he'd meant as a laugh. "Why should we make a truce? You saw what happened to your buddy Van Syke today."
The face above the swing opened its mouth and laughter emerged ... if one could call a sound like the rattling of stones in an old gourd laughter. "Michael, Michael," he said softly, "your actions today had no significance whatsoever. Our buddy, as you call him, was scheduled to be ... ah ... retired tonight anyway.''
Mike's fists clenched. "Like you retired C. J. Congden's old man?"
"Precisely," came the voice from deep inside the thing in priest's garb. "His usefulness was effectively at an end. He had other ... ah ... services to offer." Mike leaned forward. "Who in hell are you?" Again the rattle of stones. "Michael, Michael ... all the explanations in the world could not begin to make you understand the complexity of the situation you have stumbled into. Trying to explain would be like teaching catechism to a cat or dog."
"Go ahead," whispered Mike. "Try me." "No," snapped the white face. There was no illusion of small talk in the dead voice now. "Suffice it to say that if you and your friends accept our offer of a truce, you may live to see the autumn."
Mike felt his heart lurch in his chest. His legs were suddenly weak as he leaned against the wall in what he thought was a relaxed, almost casual manner. Once, during a High Mass with Father Harrison years before, just after he'd become an altar boy, Mike had fainted after twenty-five minutes of kneeling. He felt a similar rushing in his ears now. No, no, hold on, pay attention.
"Who's this 'we' you keep talking about," said Mike, amazed to hear his own voice sounding so strong, "a bunch of corpses and a bell?"
The white face moved back and forth. "Michael, Michael ..." The priest stood, took a step toward him.
Mike glanced furtively to his left, saw something the size of the Soldier step out of the field across the road and begin gliding toward the lawn near Memo's window.
"Call him off!" cried Mike. He pulled out the water pistol.
The face of Father Cavanaugh smiled. He snapped his fingers and the Soldier glided to a stop under the linden tree thirty feet away. Father C.'s smile continued to broaden, pulling back to show his back teeth, broadening further until it seemed the man's face would snap in half as if on a hinge. That impossible mouth opened wide and Mike saw more teeth-rows and rows of teeth, endless lines of white that seemed to recede down the thing's gullet.
The Cavanaugh-thing made no pretense of moving its mouth or jaw as the voice came up from its belly. "You surrender now, you motherfucking little worm, or we shall rip your fucking heart from your chest ... we shall chew your balls off and serve them to our minions . . . tear your fucking eyes out of their sockets the way we did that putrid friend's of yours. ..."
"Duane," whispered Mike, feeling his breathing stop, lurch, and start again, although reluctantly. His neck and belly ached from tension. In the shadows of the lawn, the Soldier began gliding toward Memo's window once again.
"Ah, yesssssss," hissed Father Cavanaugh, taking another step toward Mike. His long fingers were rising. His face was . . . melting, it looked to Mike . . . flesh flowing under skin, cartilage and bone rearranging itself, the long nose and chin moving together to form the snout that Mike had seen on the Soldier in the cemetery. When they killed Father C.
He could not see the slugs yet, but the priest's face was becoming more of a funnel than a face. The thing took another step closer, hands coming up.
"Fuck you!" shouted Mike, pulling the squirt gun from his waistband and squeezing the trigger.
The Father Cavanaugh-thing seemed startled a second, then stepped back, then laughed, making a sound like teeth biting into slate. Behind Mike, the Soldier glided out of sight beyond the edge of the house.
Mike raised the squirt gun with a steady arm and fired another stream of holy water into the thing's face. It doesn't work . . . he doesn't believe.
Once their fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Shrives, had meant to do an experiment where she took a few drops of hydrochloric acid from a beaker and used an eyedropper to drip it onto a fresh orange. Instead, the old lady had accidentally overturned the beaker, drenching the orange and the thick felt cloth the beaker had been on.
That same sizzling, hissing noise now emanated from Father Cavanaugh's face and clothing. Mike saw the white flesh of the snout shrivel and curl, as if the skin itself were being eaten away by the holy water. The man's left eyelid hissed and was gone, the eyeball sizzling as it stared at Mike through raised fingers. Great holes were appearing in the black coat and Roman collar, allowing a stench of dead flesh to escape from the interior.
Father Cavanaugh screamed like Cordie's dog had several hours earlier, lowered its misshapen head, and rushed the boy.
Mike jumped aside, squirting more holy water on the thing and seeing fumes rise thicker from its hissing, burning back. Peg, Bonnie and Kathleen were shouting from inside the house. His mother's voice came weakly from her back bedroom.
"Stay in your rooms!" he screamed and jumped onto the lawn.
The Soldier had wrestled the screen out of its frame and was leaning into the lighted window, his fingers scrabbling on wood.
Mike ran forward and squirted the last of the holy water onto the back of its neck.
The thing did not scream. A smell worse than the burning Rendering Truck rose from it and it flung itself into the loose soil of the flower bed under the window, scrabbling and kicking its way through the shrubbery into the darkness.
Mike turned just as the Father Cavanaugh figure leapt from the porch and reached for him. Mike ducked under the long arms, dropped the empty squirt gun into the bushes, and reached for Memo's small jewel case on the sill.
Peg was visible through the billowing curtains, standing by the doorway of Memo's room, hands to her mouth. "Mike, what . . ."
Father Cavanaugh's long fingers closed on Mike's shoulders and jerked him back out of the light, into the darkness under the linden tree. The tall priest-form hugged Mike closer.
Mike smelled the stench in his face, saw the face cracked now with acid-chewed scars, sensed things writhing under that flesh and in the long tunnel of the proboscis, and then Father C. leaned forward, the cartilage of its snout pulsating above Mike's face.
He had no time to look. Mike opened the case, lifted the large piece of consecrated Host out, and thrust it against the obscene opening in the thing's face just as the pressure of the slugs inside it threatened to burst forth.
Mike had watched once as C. J. Congden had fired a 12-gauge shotgun at a full watermelon on a post only eight feet away..
This was worse.
The Father Cavanaugh-thing's snout and face seemed to explode sideways with chunks of pasty white flesh bouncing off the house and pattering on the linden leaves. There was a scream, audibly from the figure's belly this time, and Mike dropped the Host as the thing staggered backward, fingers to what was left of its face now.
Mike jumped back as he saw six-inch brown slugs curling and writhing in the grass as the Host seemed to glow from some blue-green radiance of its own. Fragments of Father Cavanaugh's flesh hissed and deliquesced like snails caught out of their shells in a rain of salt.