Mr. Murder

to save the world from this inhuman scourge.
        Just before the door opened below Paige, the narrow winding stairs called to mind lighthouses she had seen in movies. From the image of a lighthouse, she leapt to the realization that they were in the church bell tower. Then the lower door opened, out of sight beyond the curving walls of the spiral stairwell, and they had no choice but to continue to the top.
        She briefly considered charging downward, opening fire when she was about to come upon him. But hearing her descend, he might retreat into the sacristy, where already the heavy yarn of dusk was knitting into darkness, where he could stalk her in the gloom and attack when her attention was diverted to the wrong skein of shadows.
        She could also wait where she was, let him come to her, and blow his head off as soon as he rose into sight. If he sensed her waiting, however, and if he opened fire as he rounded the bend, he couldn't miss her in those tight confines. She might be dead before she could pull the trigger, or might at best get off a shot into the ceiling of the stairwell as she fell, harming nothing but plaster.
        Remembering the black silhouette on the sill of the nave window and the uncanny fluidity with which it had moved, she suspected that The Other's senses were sharper than her own. Lying in wait with the hope of surprising it was probably a fool's. game.
        She continued upward, trying to convince herself that they were in the best of all possible positions, defending high ground against an enemy that was allowed only one narrow approach. It seemed as if the bell-tower platform ought to be an unassailable redoubt.
        Awash in agonies of hunger, sweating with need and rage, lead pellets popping from his flesh, he heals step by rising step but at a cost.
        Body fat dwindles and even some muscle tissue and bone mass are sacrificed to the wildly accelerated mending of buckshot wounds.
        He gnashes his teeth with the compulsive need to chew, chew and swallow, rend and tear, feed, feed, even though there is no food to satisfy the terrible pangs that rack him.
        At the top of the tower, one half of the space was completely walled, providing a landing for the stairs. An ordinary door gave access from that vestibule to another portion of the platform that was exposed to the elements on three sides. Charlotte and Emily opened the door without difficulty and hurried out of the stairwell.
        Marty followed them. He was dismayingly weak but even dizzier than feeble. He gripped the door jamb and then the cast-concrete cap of the waist-high wall-the parapet-that enclosed the other three sides of the outer bell-tower platform.
        With the wind-chill factor, the temperature must have been five or ten degrees below zero. He winced as the bitter gale lashed his face-and didn't dare think about how much colder it would seem ten minutes or an hour later.
        Though Paige might have enough shotgun shells to prevent The Other from reaching them, they wouldn't all survive the night.
        If the weather reports proved correct and the storm lasted until well past dawn, they wouldn't be able to use the Mossberg to try to draw attention to their plight until morning. The wailing wind would disperse the crash of gunfire before that telltale sound could reach beyond church property.
        The exposed platform was twelve feet across with a tile floor and scuppers to let out rainwater. Two corner posts, about six feet high, stood atop the perimeter wall and, with the assistance of the full wall on the east side, supported a peaked belfry roof.
        No bell hung in the belfry. When Marty squinted up into the dim recesses of that conical space, he saw the black shapes of what might have been loudspeaker horns from which the taped tolling of bells had once been broadcast.
        Appearing to grow ever whiter as the day steadily darkened, snow slanted into the belfry on the northwest wind. A small drift was forming along the base of the south wall.
        The girls had fled directly across the deck to the west side, as far as they could get from the door, but Marty felt too wobbly to traverse even that short distance without support. As he circled the platform to join them, leaning with his right hand against the waist-high parapet, the floor tiles seemed slippery though they were textured to be less treacherous when wet.
        He made the