• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“And bring your prayer book back with you,” she called after her.

Carole pulled the blanket over Mary Margaret’s face and gently lowered her head to the floor. She waited for Bernadette to return … and waited. What was taking her so long? She called her name but got no answer.

Uneasy, Carole returned to the second floor. The hallway was empty and dark except for a pale shaft of moonlight slanting through the window at its far end. Carole hurried to Bern’s room. The door was closed. She knocked.

“Bern? Bern, are you in there?”

Silence.

Carole opened the door and peered inside. More moonlight, more emptiness.

Where could—?

Down on the first floor, almost directly under Carole’s feet, the convent’s back door slammed. How could that be? Carole had locked it herself—dead-bolted it at sunset.

Unless Bernadette had gone down the back stairs and …

She darted to the window and stared down at the grassy area between the convent and the church. The high, bright moon had made a black-and-white photo of the world outside, bleaching the lawn below with its stark glow, etching deep ebony wells around the shrubs and foundation plantings. It glared from St. Anthony’s slate roof, stretching a long, crocketted wedge of night behind its gothic spire.

And scurrying across the lawn toward the church was a slim figure wrapped in a long raincoat, the moon picking out the white band of her wimple, its black veil a fluttering shadow along her neck and upper back—Bernadette was too old-country to approach the church with her head uncovered.

“Oh, Bern,” Carole whispered, pressing her face against the glass. “Bern, don’t.”

She watched as Bernadette ran up to St. Anthony’s side entrance and began clanking the heavy brass knocker against the thick oak door. Her high, clear voice filtered faintly through the window glass.

“Father! Father Palmeri! Please open up! There’s a dead girl in the convent who needs anointing! Won’t you please come over?”

She kept banging, kept calling, but the door never opened. Carole thought she saw Father Palmeri’s pale face float into view to Bern’s right through the glass of one of the church’s few unstained windows. It hovered there for a few seconds or so, then disappeared.

But the door remained closed.

That didn’t seem to faze Bern. She only increased the force of her blows with the knocker, and raised her voice even higher until it echoed off the stone walls and reverberated through the night.

Carole’s heart went out to her. She shared Bern’s need, if not her desperation.

Why doesn’t Father Palmeri at least let her in? she thought. The poor thing’s making enough racket to wake the dead.

Sudden terror tightened along the back of Carole’s neck.

… wake the dead …

Bern was too loud. She thought only of attracting the attention of Father Palmeri, but what if she attracted … others?

Even as the thought crawled across her mind, Carole saw a dark, rangy figure creep onto the lawn from the street side, slinking from shadow to shadow, closing in on her unsuspecting friend.

“Oh, my God!” she cried, and fumbled with the window lock. She twisted it open and yanked up the sash.

Carole screamed into the night. “Bernadette! Behind you! There’s someone coming! Get back here now, Bernadette! Now!”

Bernadette turned and looked up toward Carole, then stared around her. The approaching figure had dissolved into the shadows at the sound of the shouted warnings. But Bernadette must have sensed something in Carole’s voice, for she started back toward the convent.

She didn’t get far—ten paces, maybe—before the shadowy form caught up to her.

“No!” Carole screamed as she saw it leap upon her friend.

She stood frozen at the window, her fingers clawing the molding on each side as Bernadette’s high wail of terror and pain cut the night.

For the span of an endless, helpless, paralyzed heartbeat, Carole watched the form drag her down to the silver lawn, tear open her raincoat, and fall upon her, watched her arms and legs flail wildly, frantically in the moonlight, and all the while