Monsters | Page 6

reds had gone to mud,
the blues almost black. Each of the fourteen narrow windows of St.
Sebastian's depicted one of the Stations of the Cross. Henry liked to
pray to the sixth: Veronica wiping the face of Jesus. Once, years ago,
he had wondered whether the impression of His face that Jesus had left
on Veronica's handkerchief could be removed with wet spotter, or
maybe a hydrogen peroxide soak. It was as close as he had ever come
to having a bad thought in a church.

After he finished the pickle, he slid forward onto the kneeler to say a
Hail Mary. The monster snuffed the prayer by ramming a fist up
Henry's windpipe. He rocked back onto the pew, choking. People
turned to stare; Henry put a hand to his mouth and pretended to cough
into it. It took a moment before he could breathe again. He sat very still,
closed his eyes and tried not to panic. Our Father, he thought, Who art
in ... His head snapped back as veins of fire pulsed across his lids; it felt
as if someone were squashing his eyes into his skull. He couldn't speak,
couldn't even think to Him. Henry had never needed God's help more.
Why couldn't he ask for it? Nothing else had changed: Up at the altar,
votive candles still flickered like angels and the tabernacle glittered
with the gold of heaven. But Henry could not pray. He covered his face
with his hands.
"Hey, you. Bum."
Henry turned and blinked at a pale twitchy man in a rain-spattered blue
jacket stitched with the name Phil.
"This is a church, scumbag." Phil's voice swelled with outrage,
snapping through the gloom like a sermon. "Not some flop where you
can sleep off a drunk. You understand? And look at all this garbage. Go
on, get out of here!"
Henry crumbled the sandwich box and the wax paper into a ball. The
last place he wanted something to happen was in God's house. He
sensed the creature plugging into the man's anger, feeding off it into a
frenzy. If Phil tried to hurt him, it would hurt him back. Oh God. He
had to get away before it was too late. As he gathered in the milk carton,
Phil decided he wasn't hurrying fast enough.
"Now, bum! Or I'm calling the cops." He grabbed at Henry to haul him
out of the pew.
He tried to twist away but Phil's hand closed on his shoulder. Henry
moaned with dread and pleasure as he yielded to the madness. The
spark surged down his arm; muscles spasmed in an explosion of awful
strength. He snapped his attacker back as easily as a wet shirt. Phil hit

the wall of the church with a sharp crack. He sagged to the floor, face
slack, eyes like eggs.
Someone screamed. The shock of monstrous pleasure had left Henry
momentarily limp; now he shuddered and flung himself out of the pew
past the body. The touch had never been this good before, this vicious.
He sprinted through the baptistry out the side door into the rain. He ran
five blocks before he realized no one was paying attention to him.
Everyone was hunkered down against the weather.
He slowed to a walk. His cheeks were hot; he was in no hurry to get out
of the rain. The monster was spent and he was back in control. He
hadn't felt this relaxed in weeks. What harm had been done, really? Phil
would wake up with a headache and a story he'd exaggerate down at
the corner bar for years. So Henry would have lunch at Our Lady of
Mercy for a while. Or find an even darker church.
"Hail Mary, full of grace," he said to a parking meter. "The Lord is
with thee." He fished a dime from his pocket, cranked it into the slot
and the violation flag clicked down. "Deliver us from evil." He laughed.
"Amen."
By the time he got back to Kaplan's, he had convinced himself that for
today, at least, he'd left the nightmare behind.
It rained that afternoon on everyone but Henry; he was still shining
hours after lunch. Even Celeste's yattering failed to rile him, perhaps
because she talked mostly about drycleaning instead of her cats and rice
pudding and the world's tallest woman. And she worked much harder
than Jerry; he was secretly impressed. She may have been a
rattletongue, but when Celeste started something, it got done.
He was pressing pants and she was hanging whites. "How long ago did
you start in cleaning anyway?" she said. "Ten years, twenty?"
"Before your time."
"Really?" She brightened. "How old do you think I am?"

He didn't understand why she was still honeying up to him, now that
she