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 jagged, partially healed 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 command.
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 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 rasped, spitting her name.
"... hallowed be Thy Name ..." Carole said, quaking in terror as frigid 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 glass.
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 clawlike 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 calf 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 fabric at the back of Carole's blouse 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, arms curved before her, body arcing toward Carole in 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.
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 ceased.
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 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 halfway 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 on Easter Sunday.
CAROLE . . .
The voice yanked her from sleep, the voice that sounded like Bernadette's but robbed of all her sweetness and compassion.
<That was when you turned your back on the Lord, Carole. That was when you began your life of sin.>