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“Carole,” she said weakly. “Why did you leave me?”

The sight of Bernadette standing before her, alive, speaking, had drained most of Carole’s strength; the added weight of guilt from her words nearly drove her to her knees. She sagged against the door frame.

“Bern …” Carole’s voice failed her. She swallowed and tried again. “I—I thought you were dead. And … what happened to your clothes?”

Bernadette raised her hand to her throat. “I tore up my nightgown for a bandage. Can I come in?”

Carole straightened and opened the door farther. “Oh, Lord, yes. Come in. Sit down. I’ll get you a blanket.”

Bernadette shuffled into the room, head down, eyes fixed on the floor. She moved like someone on drugs. But then, after losing so much blood, it was a wonder she could walk at all.

“Don’t want a blanket,” Bern said. “Too hot. Aren’t you hot?”

She backed herself stiffly onto Carole’s bed, then lifted her ankles and sat cross-legged, facing her. Mentally, Carole explained the casual, blatant way she exposed herself by the fact that Bernadette was still recovering from a horrific trauma, but that made it no less discomfiting.

Carole glanced at the crucifix on the wall over her bed, above and behind Bernadette. For a moment, as Bernadette had seated herself beneath it, she thought she had seen it glow. It must have been reflected candlelight. She turned away and retrieved a spare blanket from the closet. She unfolded it and wrapped it around Bernadette’s shoulders and over her spread knees, covering her.

“I’m thirsty, Carole. Could you get me some water?”

Her voice was strange. Lower pitched and hoarse, yes, but that should be expected after the throat wound she’d suffered. No, something else had changed in her voice, but Carole could not pin it down.

“Of course. You’ll need fluids. Lots of fluids.”

The bathroom was only two doors down. She took her water pitcher, lit a second candle, and left Bernadette on the bed, looking like an Indian draped in a serape.

When she returned with the full pitcher, she was startled to find the bed empty. She spied Bernadette immediately, by the window. She hadn’t opened it, but she’d pulled off the bedspread drape and raised the shade. She stood there, staring out at the night. And she was naked again.

Carole looked around for the blanket and found it … hanging on the wall over her bed …

Covering the crucifix.

Part of Carole screamed at her to run, to flee down the hall and not look back. But another part of her insisted she stay. This was her friend. Something terrible had happened to Bernadette and she needed Carole now, probably more than she’d needed anyone in her entire life. And if someone was going to help her, it was Carole.
Only
Carole.

She placed the pitcher on the nightstand.

“Bernadette,” she said, her mouth as dry as the timbers in these old walls, “the blanket …”

“I was hot,” Bernadette said without turning.

“I brought you the water. I’ll pour—”

“I’ll drink it later. Come and watch the night.”

“I don’t want to see the night. It frightens me.”

Bernadette turned, a faint smile on her lips. “But the darkness is so beautiful.”

She stepped closer and stretched her arms toward Carole, laying a hand on each shoulder and gently massaging the terror-tightened muscles there. A sweet lethargy began to seep through Carole. Her eyelids began to drift closed … so tired … so long since she’d had any sleep …

No!

She forced her eyes open and gripped Bernadette’s hands, pulling them from her shoulders. She pressed the palms together and clasped them between her own.

“Let’s pray, Bern. With me: Hail Mary, full of grace …”

“No!”

“… the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou …”

Her friend’s face twisted in rage. “I said NO, damn you!”

Carole struggled to keep a grip on Bernadette’s hands but she was too strong.

“… amongst women …”

And suddenly Bernadette’s struggles ceased. Her face relaxed, her eyes cleared, even her voice changed, still hoarse, but higher in pitch, lighter in tone as she took up the words of the prayer.

“And Blessed is the fruit of thy womb …” Bernadette struggled with the next word, unable to say it. Instead she gripped Carole’s hands with painful intensity and loosed a torrent of her own words. “Carole, get out! Get out, oh, please, for the love of God, get out now! There’s not much of me left in here, and soon I’ll be like the ones that killed me and I’ll be after killing you! So run, Carole! Hide! Lock yourself in the chapel downstairs but get away from me
now!”

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 deep, jagged 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 control.

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, her movements stiff, 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 match-sticks, 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,
Caroler
she hissed, spitting her name.

“… hallowed be Thy Name …” Carole said, quaking in terror as 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 window.

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 claw-like hand at the window. “Go A
-way!
She’s MINE!”

Carole glanced to the 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 ankle 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 flannel at the back of Carole’s nightgown 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 at Carole, arms curved before her, body arcing into 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 through the air.

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 stopped.

Carole opened her eyes to see the naked Bemadette-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 Bemadette-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 deep 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 begging 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.

With the dawn she left the old Sister Carole Hanarty behind. The gentle soul, happy to spend her days and nights in the service of the Lord, praying, fasting, teaching chemistry to reluctant adolescents, and holding to her vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, was gone.

The new Sister Carole had been tempered in the forge of the night and recast into someone relentlessly vengeful and fearless to the point of recklessness. And perhaps, she admitted with no shame or regret, more than a little mad.

She departed the convent and began her hunt.

Chet Williamson

EXCERPTS FROM THE
RECORDS OF THE NEW ZODIAC
AND THE DIARIES
OF HENRY WATSON FAIRFAX

Chet Williamson is a funny guy, and here he’s produced a story that’s both funny and horrifying at the same time. He has worked in both humor and horror (fields which are oddly compatible); in another book I edited years ago, I was able to reprint a piece he had originally written for
The New Yorker
titled “Ghandi at the Bat.”

Horror readers know Williamson mainly by novels such as
Ash Wednesday
and
Dreamthorp,
as well as by such short stories as “Yore Skin’s Jes’s Soft ‘N Purty … He Said,” which originally appeared in the landmark anthology
Razored Saddles
and which is one of the most singularly brilliant and disgusting tales ever published in the field—and not funny at all
.

(Note: The Zodiac was a New York City dining club established in 1868 and consisted of twelve gentlemen active in New York society. At least two volumes of the collected minutes of the meetings were privately published.)

September 18th, 20—
:

Before I retired last night, I read a column which suggested that many of the outrages perpetrated by both children and adults might be due to the lack of civility in society. I cannot help but agree
.

The final decades of the previous century witnessed a dreadful decline in civility, and this new century promises to be no more refined. We are on every side beset by adversarial imagery. The media poses everything in terms of battles, wars, and combat, and I find myself falling into this modem-day vernacular
.

I recall (with chagrin) speaking before the board of our computer company just yesterday, and telling them that we should not rest until we have thoroughly crushed Tom Chambers’s company, which is all that stands between us and a virtual legal monopoly on network servers. I described our position, quite accurately, as “outnumbered and outgunned,” but suggested that sheer courage and resourcefulness could yet win the war, though I would also be willing to shift some cash from other Fairfax corporations into the fray. I went on to demonize Chambers as the head of an evil empire who would be content with nothing less than total domination of the world’s computers
.

Although that representation is certainly true, I am ashamed of my martial hyperbole, and my forebears would be ashamed of me as well. For a hundred and fifty years the Fairfaxes have conducted their many enterprises with restraint and even temper, and I feel the ghostly censure of my father, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather for betraying that tradition
.

Therefore, in order to assuage my guilt, I plan to institute—or rather, reinstate—a tradition which, I believe, has long been neglected and which will, I trust, add a touch of civility and goodwill to the practices of at least a dozen businessmen, myself and my most powerful competitors among them. …

C
ONSTITUTION

Article I
. This Club shall be known as the New Zodiac, modelled after the original Zodiac dining club founded in 1868.

Article II
. It shall be made up of twelve members, or
Signs
, who shall be addressed by the zodiacal sign assigned to them by lot.

Article III
. The New Zodiac shall meet for dinner on the final Saturday evening of every month, the place to be selected by that month’s host, or
caterer
, who shall make all arrangements for the dinner, the cost of which shall be equally shared by the Signs. The cost of the wines and spirits shall be borne by the caterer.

CHARTER MEMBERS

Aquarius Mr.........Frank Reynolds

Pisces Mr.........Todd Arnold

Aries Mr.........Jeff Condelli

Taurus Mr.........Richard Rank

Gemini Mr.........Thomas Chambers

Cancer Mr.........Edward Devore

Leo Mr.........John Thornton

Virgo Mr.........Clark Taylor

Libra Mr.........Bruce Levine

Scorpio Mr.........Cary Black

Sagittarius Mr.........David Walsh

Capricorn Mr.........Henry Fairfax

November 25th:

I fear that I may have made a mistake in selecting the charter members of the New Zodiac. Only Ed Devore and John Thornton come, like myself, from old money, while the rest are all
nouveau.
The strength of the original Zodiac may have come from the fact that the Signs were all members of New York society in a time when society meant something. Through its history, the Zodiac boasted both J. P. Morgans, Senior and Junior, the Rev. Henry Van Dyke, Joseph H. Choate and John William Davis, both Ambassadors to the Court of St. James, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, and other wealthy and powerful, and, above all
, dignified,
men who knew the importance of civility. In my effort to make the club more democratic, I simply selected the wealthiest and most powerful men, hoping to bring civility to those who most needed it, including myself
.

But the first meeting was not as I had anticipated, even though I tried to recreate as best I could the original menu served at the very first dinner of the original Zodiac on February 29th, 1868. …

Minutes of the First Meeting of the New Zodiac

T
HE
H
OUGHTON
C
LUB
, N
EW
Y
ORK
        N
OVEMBER
24
TH
, 20—

Present at table: All Signs. Capricorn, caterer
.

MENU:

WINES:

Krug 1982

Lafitte 1969

Chambertin 1947

Old brandy vintage 1895

It was moved by Brother Gemini to make Brother Capricorn, the member who initiated this series of dinners, the Secretary of the New Zodiac. A unanimous voice vote followed, after which Bro. Gemini observed that perhaps the extra work would keep Bro. Capricorn so busy that he would find no time “to f—over my business.” Much pleasant laughter followed, and Bro. Capricorn accepted his new post.

Dinner seemed to be received well, although Bro. Aries had to be reminded that fruit was not to be thrown at his fellow Signs. “We are, after all,” said Bro. Capricorn, “the New Zodiac and not the Drones’ Club.”

“What the hell’s the Drones’ Club?” Bro. Aries asked, and when informed stated that he had never heard of P. G. Wodehouse. “F—this Woodhead, whoever he is,” he said, and tossed a strawberry, which hit Bro. Capricorn in the left eye, to the merriment of the company.

When the party was asked who would volunteer to cater the following month’s dinner, Bro. Gemini offered to do so, upon receiving assurances in the form of each Sign’s solemn word that whatever went on at the dinners would remain confidential. Bro. Gemini then made a vow of his own, that he would serve the Signs a feast at the next dinner “like no billionaire has ever tasted before, but which we all f—ing well deserve. It’ll make what we had tonight seem like sh—t in comparison—as far as scarcity goes, anyway.”

Bro. Gemini then inquired of Bro. Capricorn if he might borrow the two volumes of the original
Records of the Zodiac
, which he wished to consult for further menu ideas, and Bro. Capricorn happily agreed.

The evening was concluded by the relating of several humorous stories by Bros. Taurus, Libra, and Cancer concerning African-Americans, and some ribald anecdotes told by Bros. Virgo and Sagittarius about women who have worked under them.

Adjourned.

Capricorn,
Secretary

… Most of them seemed to be Philistines, but I confess that I was not surprised to find Ed Devore joining in with the ethnic jokes. He’s long had a prejudice against blacks, all the more so since his company was barred from doing any more business in South Africa, after nearly a century of high profits there. And though John Thornton didn’t make a fool of himself as most of the others did, he seemed ready to join in at the slightest provocation, and I expect him to be equally frivolous at the next dinner
.

At least they all seemed to be civil to each other, which is a start. And Condelli didn’t throw any more food after my reprimand, except of course for the face-saving strawberry to show that my billions held no greater sway than his. Perhaps they will calm down in time. And perhaps Chambers’s attention to the dinner he’s catering will help to take his eye off his business long enough for us to make further inroads into his market share. I wonder, though, just what it is that he’s planning to serve. …

Second Meeting

THE MEDIA MANSE, PORTLAND, OREGON DECEMBER 29TH, 20—

Present at table: All Signs. Gemini, caterer
.

MENU:

WINES:

Convent sherry 1894

Moët-Chandon 1969

Château Latour 1957

Musigny 1954

Hôel de Paris

Blue Pipe Madeira

Holmes Rainwater Madeira 1819

Cognac Napoleon 1890

The sumptuous meal was a near-complete recreation, Brother Gemini so informed us, of a dinner put together in 1925 by J. P. Morgan Jr., the differences being the years of the vintages and the meat utilized in two of the entrées, of which he would say more later.

In further emulation of J. P. Morgan’s magnanimity, Bro. Gemini presented the Signs with a linen tablecloth woven in Venice upon which were embossed all the signs of the zodiac, similar to the one Morgan had given to the original Zodiac.

As superb as was the meal (and its setting—Bro. Gemini’s newly completed mansion that overlooks the Pacific), even more extraordinary were the wines and spirits. It was not until everyone had made their way through every vintage and was well fortified with the extraordinary Cognac that Bro. Gemini revealed to us the secret ingredient of the Cubicle Steak à la Pompadour and the Champion de Virginie, sauce champagne. Morgan Jr. had originally served Cotelettes de pigeouaux à la Pompadour and Jambon de Virginie, and all the Signs were curious as to with what meats Bro. Gemini had improved the recipes.