The Night Church Part 32

"You will know know the rightness of our cause." And she had written: "The earth's will is toward evolution. It is your privilege to enact it." the rightness of our cause." And she had written: "The earth's will is toward evolution. It is your privilege to enact it."

"No! We don't know anything about the will of the planet! We're mistaken, we're doing something terrible!"

Bubonic positive 2 had killed in thirty seconds, but it could not live outside a human host. Transmission only by physical contact.

"Oh, G.o.d! Jerry-let me out of here! Jerry, does bubonic 3 work? Does it work?" Does it work?"

His memory was now so clear that he could almost see the bacterial colonies in the microscope, swarming and propa-gating right out of their media.

And he could smell the animal rooms, the sharp scent of fear, the thick odor of sickness. In his mind's eye he saw the rats, exploding with buboes as soon as they were exposed to bubonic positive 3, dying within seconds, and the sheep within minutes, ba-a-a, ba-a-a-a-a, as great welts rose and turned purple beneath their coats, then burst as they knelt and vomited and gasped and fell twitching.

And the rhesus monkeys, brachiating frantically in their cages, screaming, clawing their throats open, buboes raising their arms so that they looked like they were doing the turkey trot as they scurried about, and coughing blood and pus and dying amid their own offal, their eyes fixed on the unearthly figures who tormented them, Jerry and his a.s.sis-tants in their green isolation suits and helmets.

"Oh, no. No!" He ran back and forth across the room, hurling things to the floor, grappling with the mattress, pointlessly searching the desk for a phone.

There was no phone.

They had been about to carry out a human test of bubonic 3-murder somebody, just to test-My dear G.o.d, what have we done? He asked, but he knew perfectly well. Jerry had created from the bacillus Yersinia pestis Yersinia pestis a mutant, hyperactive strain that reproduced itself almost instantaneously. It was respiratory, spread through the air. It could be delivered by simply propagating it from a small plane. a mutant, hyperactive strain that reproduced itself almost instantaneously. It was respiratory, spread through the air. It could be delivered by simply propagating it from a small plane.

Vector a.n.a.lysis indicated that 21.235 hours would elapse from propagation to complete contagion of a given popula-tion. After the first one million individuals the rate of trans-fer would be very rapid, with a potential of seven hundred and fifty million further infections within another fifty-three hours.

Jonathan wanted to help them, to somehow warn them. But Jonathan was a seasonal king come to the end of his time.

He heard the thundering music that would awaken the monstrum, monstrum, remembered how it felt to change. remembered how it felt to change.

"Oh, G.o.d, you've got to help me! You've got to get me out of here! Please, somehow, plea-a-se!" plea-a-se!"

The disease would be fatal in 98.237 percent of the cases and so damaging in the remainder that the individuals would succ.u.mb to other diseases, especially given the chaotic nature of the social infrastructure in which they would find themselves.

The memories rushed like fiery, hurtling meteors through Jonathan's mind. His nightmares were a pleasure compared to this.

Jerry had read a paper to the a.s.sembled Scientific Unit of the Night Church: "The causative organism is a short bacil-lus which often displays bipolar staining with Giemsa stain. The positive 3 form always displays staining, but the poles reveal flagella under light. The positive 3 is motile."

"Shut up! Shut up!" Shut up!"

"The incubation period varies from a matter of seconds in a newborn human infant to three to five minutes in a healthy adult male of substantial volume. Onset is abrupt, a.s.sociated with deep chills.Temperature rises from 41C to 42.5C (106F to 108F). Pulse will be rapid and thready, buboes will appear upon elevation of temperature. The femoral or inguinal lymph nodes will be the usual primary sites of involvement. The nodes will initially be tender but firm, sclerosing rapidly and becoming filled with pus.Bursting of the nodes indicates that terminal praeludium has commenced."

"Help! Get me out of here! I've got to tell somebody! I've got to warn them!"

Mike! I've got to get word to Mike. I've got to get word to Mike.

He began a more organized attempt to free himself. Again and again he ran against the door, using his own body as a battering ram. It hurt when his shoulder impacted the metal but he didn't care. He had overwhelming humanitarian reasons for getting out. The fact that he might break a bone in the process was of little consequence, as long as it did not prevent him from reaching his goal.

The door clicked.

He was running with all his might when it swept open. He staggered out into the hall and hit the wall.

Strong arms enfolded him. "Cool down, Jonathan. It's all right, you're home, you're safe."

"Let me go! You're crazy, Jerry, you and all the others." The arms tightened around him. "Please, listen to me. This is all insane."

Jerry put something against his shoulder, something that stung.

"Jerry, you're a good man. A fine man. Best friend-" It got harder to talk. "Best friend I ever . . .oh, Jerry, it's obscene, it's . . ." He realized that he had just been sedated. The hypodermic Jerry had used was lying on the carpet, glittering in the soft light. Jonathan looked at it, his mind seeming to sink into the reflections. "Not the plague . . . no . . ."

"Sh, take it easy, guy. Get some sleep."

Jonathan's mind tried a final struggle. I'm letting him drug me, put me to sleep! I mustn't sleep, I I'm letting him drug me, put me to sleep! I mustn't sleep, I haven't got the time! haven't got the time!

Then Jerry picked him up and carried him to his bed.

"Now, just relax, loosen up your muscles, guy. Your uncle says you need a little rest before you learn anything more, and I think he's right. Don't you think so?"

"N-n-mmm . . ."

"Sure he is. Sure."

Resistance just wasn't possible. Deadening, black, hostile waves carried Jonathan away.

To the place where the serpent lived. Laughing, lifeless eyes, so cunning, so sensual, so dangerous ...

You are the guilty one, Jonathan, you, you, you. . ..

"Please-"

You will hurt her!

"No!"

You will thrust and crush and tear!

"No, No, NO!"

He sat straight up, sweating, his mouth parched, his hands shaking uncontrollably.

The sun was setting beyond the garden wall, casting warm light into his room. Down below he could hear the rhythm of fresh-voiced t.i.tus schoolgirls chanting jump-rope rhymes. This was the hour between dinner and evening study hall, known as the Strolls, when the students had the freedom of the courtyard.

Farther away there were traffic noises, a horn, a shout, and ordinary children laughing together out on Sullivan Street.

The sounds of ordinary people. At that moment Jonathan would have cheerfully traded places with the smallest, most humble human being in the world. The taste he and Patricia had gotten of outside life had been so sweet.

If only they could somehow warn that innocent world of the danger it was in.

Somehow.

He looked down at his own perfect hands. The violence he knew to be in himself literally was was another creature, coiled beneath his own soft skin. And another creature, coiled beneath his own soft skin. And It It did not want to escape from the Night Church. did not want to escape from the Night Church.

No, indeed. It It wanted to get married! wanted to get married!

If It is the beast, the monstrum monstrum-then so am I.

I beg to die.

Chapter Twenty-one.

PATRICIA LAY IN the dark listening to footsteps approach her door. Others had come and pa.s.sed.

These stopped.

She bit her clenched fist to keep from screaming.

It is looking for me. It knows I am here. Sometime soon It will come for me.

The door was tested, the door rattled. Then the footsteps once again retreated down the hall. Slowly, carefully, Patri-cia began to breathe again.

When they had been dragging her down to this room she had smelled a thick animal smell coming from behind a door marked LABORATORIES. And she had heard animal-like screaming.

Had that been the thing that wanted her?

Patricia lay between silk sheets, sweating with terror. Her face was cooled by a fragrant breeze. Wind chimes tinkled. She remembered that sound.

Such old friends, those chimes. They are in the courtyard elm. They rang and moaned and rustled all through her girlhood.

She sat up in the bed. Now she remembered. Sister Saint John had brought her down here, had given her a shot... .

Forced it on her.

"Jonathan!"

She jumped up and rushed to the door. Then she recoiled. She couldn't go out there! But there was an alternative. One wall of her room overlooked the courtyard. She threw open the French doors.

The yard was full of children, little girls in black jumpers, boys in charcoal blazers and gray pants. There were easily three dozen of them taking their pleasure in the evening light. These were not the noisy children of the Queens streets. These children sat in groups or strolled together. A group of younger girls played jump rope. On the low wall that separated her room from the yard a sister in red habit sat leading a group in plainchant: "Aeterne rerum conditor noctem diemque qui regis et temporum, das tempora ut alleves "Aeterne rerum conditor noctem diemque qui regis et temporum, das tempora ut alleves fastidium . . . hoc excitatus lucifer solvit polum." fastidium . . . hoc excitatus lucifer solvit polum."

The chant lit darkened halls in Patricia's mind. Aeterne rerum conditor! Aeterne rerum conditor! "Eternal creator of the world, who doth guide the day and night and give the times their times to relieve our weariness . . . through Him awakes the morning star." "Eternal creator of the world, who doth guide the day and night and give the times their times to relieve our weariness . . . through Him awakes the morning star."

The great hymn of the Church, the Song of Lucifer, the Morning Star.

She was no orphan; she hadn't been raised at Our Lady of Victory-if such a piace even existed-she had grown up here, at the t.i.tus School, and she was the highest princess of the blood . .

Such remembrance was brought by those clear young voices! She had sat on that very wall, singing in the evening with Sister Saint John and Sister Mary and her cla.s.smates . . . Jonathan and his friend Jerry Cochran, and Kathleen and Kevin and Susan. . .. "We've brought you to the senior women's wing," Sister had told her as she administered the shot. "Your room is just as you left it."

So true. She realized that she had chosen exactly the same kind of curtains for her apartment in Queens-light green silk. Only in Queens she had settled for rayon.

She wanted the rayon curtains!

The sun pa.s.sed behind the wall. A bell rang and the children began lining up at the boys' and girls' doors.

Such sweet little children.

Her own lessons, thin Sister Saint Julian rasping on about the evils of humankind, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, Communism. "In man the animal predominates. And in the world man is himself dominant. But not for long. This planet does not belong to animals. It has a far greater destiny."

With a force so great it almost made her cry out, Patricia rejected that belief. She had seen too much of the outside world. There had been bad things, but there had also been much more goodness and decency than she had ever been allowed to know about.

"The anti-man will be the opposite of man in every way. Where man is degraded, the new species will be exalted. He will be selfless where man is greedy. And where man is weak, he will be strong. We believers are the best of a poor lot," Sister Saint Julian had concluded. "Outside these walls there are monsters."

No, Sister. We are the worst of a good lot. As she lay on her bed, memory after memory returned. In all the flood, one single recollection dominated: it was an image, quite terrible, of a wild ritual that had been held during her childhood, where she had witnessed the transformation of one Robert t.i.tus Ungar, gangling, jokey Robbie, into some-thing else. . . .

There had been music and strange dancing and hypnotic words, and poor Robbie, eighteen years old and very self-conscious, had begun to change. Before them all he had actually undergone an alteration of his physical body. At first mucus had come out of his nose and mouth, then out of his eyes too. He had gagged and retched, and then screamed as his skull began to change shape beneath his scalp, blood replaced his sweat, and awful scales came crinkling out from under his skin.

She slammed her fists into her eyes, trying to rid herself of the ugliness she remembered.

If he had lived he would have been the father of the anti-man.

The ritual was to unleash the creature within the human skin ... for a human body could be nothing more than a disguise, a sort of wrapping paper for something . . . some-thing . . .

She gasped. Then she shrieked wildly and rushed up and down the room. Monstrum! Monstrum!

She had to get Jonathan and get out of here. But as she paced, the room whirled. "I'm still so d.a.m.n dizzy!" The chimes rang and the complex scent of many flowers waxed the air.

A voice said, "Come now, Patricia, you don't belong out of bed."

"Where's Jonathan? I want Jonathan!"

Sister Saint John also had another name. She was Letty Cochran. Her husband George had been Master Accountant for the American Church for years. And their son Jerry-he ran those foul-smelling labs in the bas.e.m.e.nt. "The Cochrans are my best pupils," Uncle Franklin often said.

"Remember," Letty Cochran said. "Patricia, remember who you are."

"I'm me!"

"You are much more than that. You-"

"I know who I want to be. I want to be Jonathan's wife and raise a family, and I want us to live together the rest of our lives."

The way Letty Cochran looked at her, with such a mixture of shock and sadness, filled Patricia with foreboding.

The foreboding focused into a quite specific memory. She was kneeling at an altar rail. She was trying to say the rosary. The beads broke apart in her hands and scattered all over the floor of the sanctuary.

"My rosary!"

Then Sister Saint John were there, in her memory, bend-ing over her exactly as she was now.

She screamed. She turned and clawed her way through the yielding sheets of her bed, she leaped at the door.