Darkfall

"Lavelle?" he shouted.

No answer.

"Open up. No use trying to hide in there."

From inside the room came the sound of a shattering window.

"s.h.i.t," Jack said.

He stepped back and kicked at the door, but there was more to the lock than he"d expected, and he had to kick it four times, as hard as he could, before he finally smashed it open.

He switched on the light. An ordinary bedroom. No sign of Lavelle.

The window in the opposite wall was broken out. Drapes billowed on the in-rushing wind.

Jack checked the closet first, just to be sure this wasn"t a bit of misdirection to enable Lavelle to get behind his back. But no one waited in the closet.

He went to the window. In the light that spilled past him, he saw footprints in the snow that covered the porch roof. They led out to the edge. Lavelle had jumped down to the yard below.

Jack squeezed through the window, briefly snagging his coat on a shard of gla.s.s, and went onto the roof.

In the cathedral, approximately seventy or eighty goblins had come out of the vestibule. They were lined up on the communion rail and between the supporting posts under the rail. Behind them, other beasts slouched up the long aisle.

Father Walotsky was on his knees, praying, but he didn"t seem to be doing any good, so far as Rebecca could see.

In fact, there were some bad signs. The goblins weren"t as sluggish as they had been. Tails lashed. Mutant heads whipped back and forth. Tongues flickered faster than before.

Rebecca wondered if they could, through sheer numbers, overcome the benign power that held sway within the cathedral and that had, so far, prevented them from attacking. As each of the demonic creatures entered, it brought its own measure of malignant energy. If the balance of power tipped in the other direction*

One of the goblins hissed. They had been perfectly silent since entering the cathedral, but now one of them hissed, and then another, and then three more, and in seconds all of them were hissing angrily.

Another bad sign.

Carver Hampton.

When he saw the demonic ent.i.ty in the hallway, the floor suddenly seemed a bit more solid to him. His heart began to pound, and the real world came swimming back to him out of the tropical hallucination-although this part of the real world contained, at this time, something from a nightmare.

The thing in the hall skittered toward the open arch and the living room. From Carver"s perspective, it looked enormous, at least his own size, but he realized it wasn"t really as large as it seemed from his peculiar floor-level point of view. But big enough. Oh, yes. Its head was the size of his fist. Its sinuous, segmented, wormlike body was half again as long as his arm. Its crablike legs ticked against the wooden floor. The only features on its misshapen head were an ugly suckerlike mouth full of teeth and those haunting eyes of which Jack Dawson had spoken, those eyes of silver-white fire.

Carver found the strength to move. He hitched himself backwards across the floor, grasping in exhaustion and wincing with rediscovered pain, leaving a trail of blood in his wake. He came up against the wall almost at once, startling himself; he"d thought the room was bigger than that.

With a thin, high-pitched keening, the worm-thing came through the archway and scurried toward him.

When Lavelle jumped off the porch roof, he didn"t land on his feet. He slipped in the snow and crashed onto his wounded arm. The explosion of pain almost blew him into unconsciousness.

He couldn"t understand why everything had gone so wrong. He was confused and angry. He felt naked, powerless; that was a new feeling for him. He didn"t like it.

He crawled a few feet through the snow before he could find the strength to stand, and when he stood he heard Dawson shouting at him from the edge of the porch roof. He didn"t stop, didn"t wait pa.s.sively to be captured, not Baba Lavelle the great Bocor Bocor. He headed across the rear lawn toward the storage shed.

His source of power lay beyond the pit, with the dark G.o.ds on the other side. He would demand to know why they were failing him. He would demand their aid.

Dawson fired one shot, but it must have been just a warning because it didn"t come anywhere close to Lavelle.

The wind battered him and threw snow in his face, and with blood pouring out of his shattered arm he wasn"t easily able to resist the storm, but he stayed on his feet and reached the shed and pulled open the door-and cried out in shock when he saw that the pit had grown. It now occupied the entire small building, from one corrugated wall to the other, and the light coming from it wasn"t orange any longer but blood-red and so bright it hurt his eyes.

Now he knew why his malevolent benefactors were letting him go down to defeat. They had allowed him to use them only as long as they could use him, in turn. He had been their conduit to this world, a means by which they could reach out and claw at the living. But now they had something better than a conduit; now they had a doorway to this plane of existence, a real real doorway that would permit them to leave the Underworld. And it was thanks to him that they"d been given it. He had opened the Gates just a crack, confident that he could hold them to that narrow and insignificant breach, but he had lost control without knowing it, and now the Gates were surging wide. The Ancient Ones were coming. They were on their way. They were almost here. When they arrived, h.e.l.l would have relocated to the surface of the earth. doorway that would permit them to leave the Underworld. And it was thanks to him that they"d been given it. He had opened the Gates just a crack, confident that he could hold them to that narrow and insignificant breach, but he had lost control without knowing it, and now the Gates were surging wide. The Ancient Ones were coming. They were on their way. They were almost here. When they arrived, h.e.l.l would have relocated to the surface of the earth.

In front of his feet, the rim of the pit was continuing to crumble inward, faster and faster.

Lavelle stared in horror at the beating heart of hate-light within the pit. He saw something dark at the bottom of that intense red glow. It rippled. It was huge. And it was rising toward him.

Jack jumped from the roof, landed on both feet in the snow, and started after Lavelle. He was halfway across the lawn when Lavelle opened the door to the corrugated metal shed. The brilliant and eerie crimson light that poured forth was sufficient to stop Jack in his tracks.

It was the pit, of course, just as Carver had described it. But it surely wasn"t as small as it was supposed to be, and the light wasn"t soft and orange. Carver"s worst fear was coming true: the Gates of h.e.l.l were swinging open all the way.

As that mad thought struck Jack, the pit suddenly grew larger than the shed that had once contained it. The corrugated metal walls fell away into the void. Now there was only a hole in the ground. Like a giant searchlight, the red beams from the pit speared up into the dark and storm-churned sky.

Lavelle staggered back a few steps, but he was evidently too terrified to be able to turn and run.

The earth trembled.

Within the pit, something roared. It had a voice that shook the night.

The air stank of sulphur.

Something snaked up from the depths. It was like a tentacle but not exactly a tentacle, like a chitinous insect leg but not exactly an insect leg, sharply jointed in several places and yet as sinuous as a serpent. It soared up to a height of fifteen feet. The tip of the thing was equipped with long whiplike appendages that writhed around a loose, drooling, toothless mouth large enough to swallow a man whole. Worse, it was in some ways exceedingly clear that this was only a minor feature of the huge beast rising from the Gates; it was as small, proportionately, as a human finger compared to an entire human body. Perhaps this was the only thing that the escaping Lovecraftian ent.i.ty had thus far been able to extrude between the opening Gates-this one finger.

The giant, insectile, tentacular limb bent toward Lavelle. The whiplike appendages at the tip lashed out, snared him, and lifted him off the ground, into the blood-red light. He screamed and flailed, but he could do nothing to prevent himself from being drawn into that obscene, drooling mouth. And then he was gone.

In the cathedral, the last of the goblins had reached the communion railing. At least a hundred of them turned blazing eyes on Rebecca, Penny, Davey, and Father Walotsky.

Their hissing was now augmented with an occasional snarl.

Suddenly the four-eyed, four-armed manlike demon leaped off the rail, into the chancel. It took a few tentative steps forward and looked from side to side; there was an air of wariness about it. Then it raised its tiny spear, shook it, and shrieked.

Immediately, all of the other goblins shrieked, too.

Another one dared to enter the chancel.

Then a third. Then four more.

Rebecca glanced sideways, toward the sacristy door. But it was no use running in there. The goblins would only follow. The end had come at last.

The worm-thing reached Carver Hampton where he sat on the floor, his back pressed to the wall. It reared up, until half its disgusting body was off the floor.

He looked into those bottomless, fiery eyes and knew that he was too weak a Houngon Houngon to protect himself. to protect himself.

Then, out behind the house, something roared; it sounded enormous and very much alive.

The earth quaked, and the house rocked, and the worm-demon seemed to lose interest in Carver. It turned half away from him and moved its head from side to side, began to sway to some music that Carver could not hear.

With a sinking heart, he realized what had temporarily enthralled the thing: the sound of other h.e.l.l-trapped souls screeching toward a long-desired freedom, the triumphant ululation of the Ancient Ones at last breaking their bonds.

The end had come.

Jack advanced to the edge of the pit. The rim was dissolving, and the hole was growing larger by the second. He was careful not to stand at the very brink.

The fierce red glow made the snowflakes look like whirling embers. But now there were shafts of bright white light mixed in with the red, the same silvery-white as the goblins" eyes, and Jack was sure this meant the Gates were opening dangerously far.

The monstrous appendage, half insectile and half like a tentacle, swayed above him threateningly, but he knew it couldn"t touch him. Not yet, anyway. Not until the Gates were all the way open. For now, the benevolent G.o.ds of Rada Rada still possessed some power over the earth, and he was protected by them. still possessed some power over the earth, and he was protected by them.

He took the jar of holy water from his coat pocket. He wished he had Carver"s jar, as well, but this would have to do. He unscrewed the lid and threw it aside.

Another menacing shape was rising from the depths. He could see it, a vague dark presence rushing up through the nearly blinding light, howling like a thousand dogs.

He had accepted the reality of Lavelle"s black magic and of Carver"s white magic, but now he suddenly was able to do more than accept it; he was able to understand it in concrete terms, and he knew he now understood it better than Lavelle or Carver ever had or ever would. He looked into the pit and he knew knew. h.e.l.l was not a mythical place, and there was nothing supernatural about demons and G.o.ds, nothing holy or unholy about them. h.e.l.l-and consequently Heaven-were as real as the earth; they were merely other dimensions, other planes of physical existence. Normally, it was impossible for a living man or woman to cross over from one plane to the other. But religion was the crude and clumsy science that had theorized ways in which to bring the planes together, if only temporarily, and magic was the tool of that science.

After absorbing that realization, it seemed as easy to believe in voodoo or Christianity or any other religion as it was to believe in the existence of the atom.

He threw the holy water, jar and all, into the pit.

The goblins surged through the communion rail and up the steps toward the altar platform.

The kids screamed, and Father Walotsky held his rosary out in front of him as if certain it would render him impervious to the a.s.sault. Rebecca drew her gun, though she knew it was useless, took careful aim on the first of the pack- And all one hundred of the goblins turned to clumps of earth which cascaded harmlessly down the altar steps.

The worm-thing swung its hateful head back toward Carver and hissed and struck at him.

He screamed.

Then gasped in surprise as nothing more than dirt showered over him.

The holy water disappeared into the pit.

The jubilant squeals, the roars of hatred, the triumphant screams all ceased as abruptly as if someone had pulled the plug on a stereo. The silence lasted only a second, and then the night was filled with cries of anger, rage, frustration, and anguish.

The earth shook more violently than before.

Jack was knocked off his feet, but he fell backwards, away from the pit.

He saw that the rim had stopped dissolving. The hole wasn"t getting any larger.

The mammoth appendage that towered over him, like some ma.s.sive fairytale serpent, did not take a swipe at him as he had been afraid it might. Instead, its disgusting mouth sucking ceaselessly at the night, it collapsed back into the pit.

Jack got to his feet again. His overcoat was caked with snow.

The earth continued to shake. He felt as if he were standing on an egg from which something deadly was about to hatch. Cracks radiated out from the pit, half a dozen of them-four, six, even eight inches wide and as much as ten feet long. Jack found himself between the two largest gaps, on an unstable island of rocking, heaving earth. The snow melted into the cracks, and light shone up from the strange depths, and heat rose in waves as if from an open furnace door, and for one ghastly moment it seemed as if the entire world would shatter underfoot. Then quickly, mercifully, the cracks closed up again, sealed tight, as if they had never been.

The light began to fade within the pit, changing from red to orange around the edges.

The h.e.l.lish voices were fading, too.

The gates were easing shut.

With a flush of triumph, Jack inched closer to the rim, squinting into the hole, trying to see more of the monstrous and fantastic shapes that writhed and raged beyond the glare.

The light suddenly pulsed, grew brighter, startling him. The screaming and bellowing became louder.

He stepped back.

The light dimmed once more, then grew brighter again, dimmed, grew brighter. The immortal ent.i.ties beyond the Gates were struggling to keep them open, to force them wide.

The rim of the pit began to dissolve again. Earth crumbled away in small clods. Then stopped. Then started. In spurts, the pit was still growing.

Jack"s heart seemed to beat in concert with the crumbling of the pit"s perimeter. Each time the dirt began to fall away, his heart seemed to stop; each time the perimeter stabilized, his heart began to beat again.

Maybe Carver Hampton had been wrong. Maybe holy water and the good intentions of a righteous man had not been sufficient to put an end to it. Perhaps it had gone too far. Perhaps nothing could prevent Armageddon now.

Two glossy black, segmented, whiplike appendages, each an inch in diameter, lashed up from the pit, snapped in front of Jack, snaked around him. One wound around his left leg from ankle to crotch. The other looped around his chest, spiraled down his left arm, curled around his wrist, s.n.a.t.c.hed at his fingers. His leg was jerked out from under him. He fell, thrashing, flailing desperately at the attacker but to no avail; it had a steel grip; he couldn"t free himself, couldn"t pry it loose. The beast from which the tentacles sprouted was hidden far down in the pit, and now it tugged at him, dragged him toward the brink, a demonic fisherman reeling in its catch. A serrated spine ran the length of each tentacle, and the serrations were sharp; they didn"t immediately cut through his clothes, but where they crossed the bare skin of his wrist and hand, they sliced open his flesh, cut deep.

He had never known such pain.

He was suddenly scared that he would never see Davey, Penny, or Rebecca again.

He began to scream.

In St. Patrick"s Cathedral, Rebecca took two steps toward the piles of now-ordinary earth that had, only a moment ago, been living creatures, but she stopped short when the scattered dirt trembled with a current of impossible, perverse life. The stuff wasn"t dead after all. The grains and clots and clumps of soil seemed to draw moisture from the air; the stuff became damp; the separate pieces in each loose pile began to quiver and strain and draw laboriously toward the others. This evilly enchanted earth was apparently trying to regain its previous forms, struggling to reconst.i.tute the goblins.

One small lump, lying apart from all the others, began to shape itself into a tiny, wickedly clawed foot.

"Die, d.a.m.nit," Rebecca said. "Die!"

Sprawled on the rim of the pit, certain that he was going to be pulled into it, his attention split between the void in front of him and the pain blazing in his savaged hand, Jack screamed- -and at that same instant the tentacle around his arm and torso abruptly whipped free of him. The second demonic appendage slithered away from his left leg a moment later.

The h.e.l.l-light dimmed.

Now, the beast below was wailing in pain and torment of its own. Its tentacles lashed erratically at the night above the pit.

In that moment of chaos and crisis, the G.o.ds of Rada Rada must have visited a revelation upon Jack, for he knew-without understanding must have visited a revelation upon Jack, for he knew-without understanding how how he knew-that it was his blood that had made the beast recoil from him. In a confrontation with evil, perhaps the blood of a righteous man was (much like holy water) a substance with powerful magical qualities. And perhaps his blood could accomplish what holy water alone could not. he knew-that it was his blood that had made the beast recoil from him. In a confrontation with evil, perhaps the blood of a righteous man was (much like holy water) a substance with powerful magical qualities. And perhaps his blood could accomplish what holy water alone could not.

The rim of the pit began to crumble again. The hole grew wider. The Gates were again rolling open. The light rising out of the earth turned from orange to crimson once more.

Jack pushed up from his p.r.o.ne position and knelt at the brink. He could feel the earth slowly-and then not so slowly-coming apart beneath his knees. Blood was streaming off his torn hand, dripping from all five fingertips. He leaned out precariously, over the pit, and shook his hand, flinging scarlet droplets into the center of the seething light.

Below, the shrieking and keening swelled to an even more ear- splitting pitch than it had when he"d tossed the holy water into the breach. The light from the devil"s furnace dimmed and flickered, and the perimeter of the pit stabilized.