Midnight Mass

Carole looked past Carmilla to Rosita. "Is that what you believe? Is that what you really want?"

The girl shrugged her high thin shoulders. "Beats anything else I got going."

Finally the old Datsun shuddered to life. Carole heard Bernadette working the shift. She touched her arm and said, "Wait. Just one more moment, please."

She was about to speak to Rosita when Carmilla jabbed her finger at Carole's face, shouting.

"Then you bitches and the candy-ass god you whore for will be fucking extinct!"

With a surprising show of strength, Rosita yanked Carmilla away from the window.

"Better go, Sister Carole," Rosita said.

The Datsun started to move.

"What the fuck's with you, Wicky?" Carole heard Carmilla scream as the car eased away from the dark cluster. "Getting religion or somethin? Should we start callin you Sister Rosita now?"

"She was one of the few people who was ever straight with me," Rosita said. "So fuck off, Carmilla."

By then the car had traveled too far to hear more.

* * *

"What awful creatures they were!" Bernadette said, staring out the window in Carole's convent room. She hadn't been able to stop talking about the incident on the street. "Almost my age, they were, and such horrible language!"

The room was little more than a ten-by-ten-foot plaster box with cracks in the walls and the latest coat of paint begi

"Perhaps we should pray for them."

"They need more than prayer, I'd think. Believe me you, they're heading for a bad end." Bernadette removed the oversized rosary she wore looped around her neck, gathering the beads and its attached crucifix in her hand. "Maybe we could offer them some crosses for protection?"

Carole couldn't resist a smile. "That's a sweet thought, Bern, but I don't think they're looking for protection."

"Sure, and lookit after what I'm saying," Bernadette said, her own smile rueful. "No, of course they wouldn't."

"But we'll pray for them," Carole said.

Bernadette dropped into a chair, stayed there for no more than a heartbeat, then was up again, moving about, pacing the confines of Carole's room. She couldn't seem to sit still. She wandered out into the hall and came back almost immediately, rubbing her hands together as if washing them.

"It's so quiet," she said. "So empty."

"I certainly hope so," Carole said. "We're the only two who are supposed to be here."

The little convent was half empty even when all its residents were present. And now, with St. Anthony's School closed for the coming week, the rest of the nuns had gone home to spend Easter Week with brothers and sisters and parents. Even those who might have stayed around the convent in past years had heard the rumors that the undead might be moving this way, so they'd scattered. Carole's only living relative was an aunt, her mother's sister Joyce, who lived in Harrisburg and usually invited her to spend Easter and the following week with her; but she hadn't invited her this year, and wasn't answering her phone. She had a son in California; maybe she'd gone to stay with him. Lots of people were leaving the East Coast.

Bernadette hadn't heard from her family in Ireland for months. Carole feared she never would.

So that left just the two of them to hold the fort, as it were. The convent was part of a complex consisting of the church itself, the rectory, the grammar school and high school buildings, the tiny cemetery, and the sturdy old two-story rooming house that was now the convent. She and Bernadette had taken second-floor rooms, leaving the first floor to the older nuns.

Carole wasn't afraid. She knew they'd be safe here at St. Anthony's, although she wished there were more people left in the complex than just Bernadette, herself, and Father Palmeri.

"I don't understand Father Palmeri," Bernadette said. "Locking up the church and keeping his parishioners from making the stations of the cross on Good Friday. Who's ever heard of such a thing, I ask you? I just don't understand it."

Carole thought she understood. She suspected that Father Alberto Palmeri was afraid. Sometime this morning he'd locked up the rectory, barred the door to St. Anthony's, and hidden himself in the church basement.

God forgive her for thinking it, but to Sister Carole's mind Father Palmeri was a coward.

"Oh, I do wish he'd open the church, just for a little while," Bernadette said. "I need to be in there, Carole. I need it."

Carole knew how Bern felt. Who had said religion was an opiate of the people? Marx? Whoever it was, he hadn't been completely wrong. For Carole, sitting in the cool, peaceful quiet beneath St. Anthony's gothic arches, praying, meditating, and feeling the presence of the Lord were like a daily dose of an addictive drug. A dose she and Bern had been denied today. Bern's withdrawal pangs seemed worse than Carole's.

The younger nun paused as she passed the window, then pointed down to the street.

"And now who in God's name would they be?"

Carole rose and stepped to Bernadette's side. Passing on the street below was a cavalcade of shiny new cars—Mercedes Benzes, BMW's, Jaguars, Lin-colns, Cadillacs—all with New York plates, all cruising from the direction of the Parkway.

The sight of them in the dusk tightened a knot in Carole's stomach. The lupine faces she spied through the windows looked brutish, and the way they drove their gleaming luxury cars down the center line ... as if they owned the road.

A Cadillac convertible with its top down passed below; four scruffy occupants lounged on the seats. The driver wore a cowboy hat, a woman in leather sat next to him. Both were drinking beer. When Carol saw the driver glance up and look their way, she tugged on Bern's sleeve.

"Stand back! Don't let them see you!"

"Why not? Who are they?"

"I'm not sure, but I've heard of bands of men who do the vampires' dirty work during the daytime, who've traded their souls for the promise of immortality later on, and for ... other things now."

"Sure and you're joking, Carole!"

Carole shook her head. "I wish I were."

"Oh, dear God, and now the sun's down." She turned frightened blue eyes toward Carole. "Do you think maybe we should . . . ?"

"Lock up? Most certainly. I know what His Holiness said about there not being any such things as vampires, but maybe he's changed his mind since then and just can't get word to us."

"Sure and you're probably right. You close these and I'll check down the hall." She hurried out, her voice trailing behind her. "Oh, I do wish Father Palmeri hadn't locked the church. I'd dearly love to say a few prayers there.

Sister Carole glanced out the window again. The fancy new cars were gone, but rumbling in their wake was a convoy of trucks—big, eighteen-wheel semis, lumbering down the center line. What were they for? What did they carry? What were they delivering to town?

Suddenly a dog began to bark, and then another, and more and more until it seemed as if every dog in town was giving voice.

To fight the unease rising like a flood tide within her, Sister Carole concentrated on the simple manual tasks of closing and locking her window and drawing the curtains.

But the dread remained, a sick, cold certainty that the world was falling into darkness, that the creeping hem of shadow had reached her corner of the globe, and that without some miracle, without some direct intervention by a wrathful God, the coming night hours would wreak an irrevocable change on her life.