Mr. Murder

hesitating.
        Marty knew that he should use the moment to ram a knee into the thing's crotch, try to rush it backward across the platform, to the opposite parapet, up, out, and over. He could imagine what to do, see it in his writer's eye, a fully realized moment of action in a novel or movie, but he had no strength left. The pain in his gunshot wound, throat, and bitten hand swelled anew, dizziness and nausea over whelmed him, and he knew he was on the verge of a blackout.
        "Be at peace, Alfie," the voice repeated more firmly.
        Still holding Marty, who was helpless in its ferocious grip, The Other turned its head toward the speaker.
        A flashlight winked on, directed at the creature's face.
        Blinking toward the light source, Marty saw a bearlike man, tall and barrel-chested, and a smaller man in a black ski suit. They were strangers.
        They showed a little surprise but not the shock and horror that Marty would have expected.
        "Jesus," the smaller man said, "what's happening to him?"
        "Metabolic meltdown," said the larger man.
        "Jesus."
        Marty glanced toward the west wall of the belfry, where Paige was crouched with the kids, sheltering them, holding their heads against her breast to prevent them from seeing too much of the creature.
        "Be at peace, Alfie," the smaller man repeated.
        In a voice tortured by rage, pain, and confusion, The Other rasped,
        "Father. Father. Father?"
        Marty was still tightly held, and his attention was again drawn to the thing that had once looked like him.
        The flashlight-illuminated face was more hideous than it had appeared in the gloom. Wisps of steam were rising off it in some places, confirming his sense that it was hot. Scores of shotgun wounds pocked one side of its head, but they were not bleeding and, in fact, seemed more than half healed. As Marty stared, a black lead pellet squeezed out of the creature's temple and oozed down its cheek in a thin trail of yellowish fluid.
        The wounds were its least repulsive features. In spite of the physical strength it still possessed, it was as meagerly padded with flesh as something that had crawled out of a coffin after a year underground.
        Skin was stretched tightly over its facial bones. Its ears were shriveled into hard knots of cartilage and lay flat against the head.
        Desiccated lips had shrunk back from the gums, giving the teeth greater prominence, creating the illusion of a nascent muzzle and the wicked bite of a predator.
        It was Death personified, the Grim Reaper without his voluminous black robes and scythe, on his way to a masquerade ball in a costume of flesh so thin and cheap that it was not for a moment convincing.
        "Father?" it said again, gazing at the stranger in the black ski suit.
        "Father?"
        Insistently, "Be at peace, Alfie."
        The name "Alfie" was so unsuited to the grotesque apparition still clutching Marty that he suspected he was hallucinating the arrival of the two men.
        The Other turned away from the flashlight beam and glared at Marty once more. It seemed uncertain of what to do next.
        Then it lowered its graveyard face to his, cocking its head as if with curiosity. "My life? My life?"
        Marty didn't know what it was asking him, and he was so weak from loss of blood or shock or both that he could only push at it feebly with his right hand. "Let me go."
        "Need," it said. "Need, need, need, need, NEED, NEEEEEF,FEED.
        " The voice spiraled into a shrill squeal. Its mouth cracked wide in a humorless grin, and it struck at Marty's face.
        A gunshot boomed, The Other's head jerked back, Marty sagged against the parapet as the creature let go of him, and its scream of demonic fury drew muffled cries of terror from Emily and Charlotte.
        The Other clamped its skeletal hands to its shattered skull, as if trying to hold itself together.
        The flashlight beam wavered, found it.
        The fissures in the bone healed, and the bullet hole began to close up, forcing the lead slug out of the skull. But the cost of this miraculous healing became obvious as The Other's skull began to change more dramatically, growing smaller and narrower and more lupine, as if bone was melting and reforming under the tight sheath of skin, borrowing mass from one place to rebuild damage in