F Wilson - Midnight Mass

She knew their names. The Bennetts—Kevin, Marie, and their twin girls. She hadn't known them before, but Carole felt she knew them now. She'd seen their family photos, seen the twins' bedroom.

She knew from the state of the empty house when she'd found it that the owners hadn't moved out. They'd been driven out. She hoped for the sake of their souls that they were dead now. Truly dead.

"But the rules have changed," Carole whispered.

Being a good person meant something different than it had then. And doing the Lord's work . . . well, it was an entirely different sort of work now.

- 2 -

ZEV . . .

It had been almost a full minute since he'd slammed the brass knocker against the heavy oak door. That should have been proof enough. After all, wasn't the knocker in the shape of a cross? But no, they had to squint through their peephole and peer through the sidelights that framed the door.

Zev sighed and resigned himself to the scrutiny. He couldn't blame people for being cautious, but this seemed overly so. The sun was in the west and shining full on his back; he was all but silhouetted in it. What more did they want?

I should maybe take off my clothes and dance naked?

He gave a mental shrug and savored the salt tang of the sea air. The bulk of this huge Tudor mansion stood between him and the Atlantic, but the ocean's briny scent and rhythmic rumble were everywhere. He'd bicycled from Lakewood, which was only ten miles inland from here, but the warm May day and the bright sun beating on his dark blue suit coat had sweated him up. It had taken him longer than he'd planned to find this retreat house.

Spring Lake. The Irish Riviera. An Irish Catholic seaside resort since before the turn of the century. He looked around at its carefully restored Victorian houses, the huge mansions facing the beach, the smaller homes set in neat rows running straight back from the ocean. Many of them were still occupied. Not like Lakewood. Lakewood was an empty shell.

Oh, they'd been smart, those bloodsuckers. They knew their easiest targets. Whenever they swooped into an area they went after officialdom first — the civic leaders, the cops, the firemen, the clergy. But after that, they attacked the non-Christian neighborhoods. And among Jews they picked the Orthodox first of the first. Smart. Where else would they be less likely to run up against a cross? It worked for them in Brooklyn and Queens, and so when they came south into New Jersey, spreading like a plague, they headed straight for the town with one of the largest collections of yeshivas in North America.

But after the Bensonhurst and Kew Gardens holocausts, the people in the Lakewood communities should not have taken quite so long to figure out what was going to happen. The Reformed and Conservative synagogues started handing out crosses at Shabbes—too late for many but it saved a few. Did the Orthodox congregations follow suit? No. They hid in their homes and shuls and yeshivas and read and prayed.

And were liquidated.

A cross, a crucifix — they held power over the undead, drove them away. Zev's fellow rabbis did not want to accept that simple fact because they could not face its devastating ramifications. To hold up a cross was to negate two thousand years of Jewish history, it was to say that the Messiah had come and they had missed him.

Did it say that? Zev didn't know. For all he knew, the undead predated Christianity, and their fear of crosses might be related to something else. Argue about it later—people were dying. But the rabbis had to argue it then and there. And as they argued, their people were slaughtered like cattle.

How Zev had railed at them, how he'd pleaded with them! Blind, stubborn fools! If a fire was consuming your house, would you refuse to throw water on it just because you'd always been taught not to believe in water? Zev had arrived at the rabbinical council wearing a cross and had been thrown out—literally sent hurding through the front door. But at least he had managed to save a few of his own people. Too few.

He remembered his fellow Orthodox rabbis, though. All the ones who had refused to face the reality of the vampires' fear of crosses, who had forbidden their students and their congregations to wear crosses, who had watched those same students and congregations die en masse. And soon those very same rabbis were roaming their own community, hunting the survivors, preying on other yeshivas, other congregations, until the entire community was liquidated and its leaders incorporated into the brotherhood of the undead.

This was the most brilliant aspect of the undead tactics: turn all the community leaders into their own kind and set them loose among the population. What could be more dismaying, more devastating than seeing the very people who should have been leading the resistance become enthusiastic participants in the slaughter?

The rabbis could have saved themselves, could have saved their people, but they would not bend to the reality of what was happening around them. Which, when Zev thought about it, was not at all out of character. Hadn't they spent generations learning to turn away from the rest of the world?

But now their greatest fear had come to pass: they'd been assimilated— with a vengeance.

Those early days of anarchic slaughter were over. Now that the undead held the ruling hand, the bloodletting had become more organized. But the damage to Zev's people had been done—and it was irreparable. Hitler would have been proud. His Nazi "final solution" was an afternoon picnic compared to the work of the undead. In a matter of months, in Israel and Eastern Europe, the undead did what Hitler's Reich could not do in all the years of the Second World War. Muslims and Hindus had fared just as poorly, but that was not Zev's concern. His heart did not bleed for Islam and India.

There's only a few of us now. So few and so scattered. A final Diaspora.

For a moment Zev was almost overwhelmed by grief, but he pushed it down, locked it back into that place where he kept his sorrows, and thought of how fortunate it was for his wife Chana that she died of natural causes before the horror began. Her soul had been too gentle to weather what had happened to their community.

Forcing himself back to the present, he looked around. Not such a bad place for a retreat, he thought. He wondered how many houses like this the Catholic Church owned.

A series of clicks and clacks drew his attention back to the door as numerous bolts were pulled in rapid succession. The door swung inward, revealing a nervous-looking young man in a long black cassock. As he looked at Zev his mouth twisted and he rubbed the back of his wrist across it to hide a smile.

"And what should be so funny?" Zev asked.

"I'm sorry. It's just—"

"I know," Zev said, waving off any explanation as he glanced down at the wooden cross slung on a cord around his neck. "I know."

A bearded Jew in a baggy serge suit wearing a yarmulke and a cross. Hilarious, no?

Nu? This was what the times demanded, this was what it came down to if he wanted to survive. And Zev did want to survive. Someone had to live to carry on the traditions of the Talmud and the Torah, even if there were hardly any Jews left alive in the world.

Zev stood on the sunny porch, waiting. The priest watched him in silence.

Finally Zev said, "Well, may a wandering Jew come in?"

"I won't stop you," the priest said, "but surely you don't expect me to invite you."

Ah, yes. Another precaution. The undead couldn't cross the threshold of a home unless invited, so don't invite. A good habit to cultivate, he supposed.

He stepped inside and the priest immediately closed the door behind him, relatching all the locks one by one. When he turned around Zev held out his hand.