And The Devil Will Drag You Under (1979) (35 page)

The mobster stood there a moment, just staring through the gate at her in concentrated fury.

Then, suddenly, his fury was spent. He holstered his pistol, turned, and walked back to his horse, mounting quickly.

He
rode up to his forces, past the wagons, past the men, back over the mountain and into the night. His forces hesitated a moment, then turned and followed him.

Jill walked back to her own troops assembled inside as she had ordered. "Listen well to me,"

she com-manded. "I must leave you now, for a time. I must go to save my world. This is
your
land now, and no man can take it from you. You are here because you did not fit into the societies that men had made for you. Now you may make your own. Create your own land here. Nurture it, protect it, love it as the people we have killed loved it. Make something new and won-derful here-if you can, if you dare! Go from this place for a time if you will,
but have your children here!
It is yours now! I free you from any spells placed upon you, but I challenge you!" She hesitated a moment, sensing something.

These women, bound by spell, had been silent, almost automatons to her wishes, and they had killed this day as such, without emotion, with no objective other than to carry out the orders of their Queen.

Many were weeping now.

"Farewell," she concluded, feeling a lump in her throat. "Others need me." She turned and walked down the road, out past the ancient gate, to Mac and the jewel. She didn't look back once, but
he
did-they were all still standing there, still at attention, but more of them were weeping.

Jill was weeping, too, and he tried to comfort her. He took her hand. "Let's go home," he said gently, and pulled the jewel out of his pocket with his other hand.

"Take us both to Asmodeus Mogart!" he com-manded.

The world vanished.

Main Line +2076

MAC WALTERS COULDN'T HELP BUT GLANCE OUT THE front door of the bar. He opened it a crack, and a whirlwind of tremendous force almost tore it from his hands. He pulled it shut with great effort. The glance had been a quick one, but it was all he needed to see.

"Jesus!" was all he could manage. "I think we're too late! The world's already ended out there!"

Jill McCulloch looked around anxiously for Asmodeus Mogart. The strange little man was no-where to be seen, nor were any of the other patrons of the bar or the barman, either.

The two of them looked exactly as they had when they'd entered the bar only a few hours before, ob-jective time.

"I wonder if you're right," she replied grimly. "I don't see Mogart or anybody else anywhere."

Mac shook his head. "He's here someplace. Only the five jewels have kept this place standing at all. If
they're
here, then so is he."

They started searching the nooks and crannies. Jill finally walked around the bar and stopped short. "Mac! Here he is! Oh, my God!"

Walters bounded over the top of the bar in an in-stant. Mogart lay face down on the floor, stark naked, his goatlike tail sticking almost straight up in the air.

"Is he dead?" Jill asked worriedly, afraid to confirm her worst fears herself.

Walters knelt down by the demon and gently tried to turn him over. Mogart groaned and issued a loud snore.

Mac Walters grunted. "Damn! Out cold! Stinkol Look-he's still clutching a fifth of Scotch!"

Jill spied the ice-water tap and hastily filled a pitcher usually used for mixing drinks. "We've got to wake him up!" she exclaimed almost hysterically. See-ing the water start to overflow the pitcher, she shut off the tap, aimed the container at Mogart, and turned it upside down over the little man's head.

Mogart reacted. He shivered uncomfortably and gave a shrill, high-pitched snort of annoyance, but he didn't wake up.

Walters grabbed him.

"Mogart! Come on, you bastard! Wake up!" Mac screamed into the little man's face, then shook the frail-looking body violently.

The demon seemed to come out of it, slowly, grog-gily, and just barely. His eyes opened halfway, re-vealing pupils wandering off in different directions, and he murmured something unintelligible and sank back again to the floor.

"More water!" Mac called frantically to Jill, and she hastily filled another pitcher. He took it from her hands and poured it slowly over the little man's head while continuing the shaking motions. Both of the humans were screaming now for Asmodeus Mogart to wake up.

Oh, dear God! No! Jill
kept thinking even as she yelled.
He's got to wake up! After all we've
just been through!

Walters slapped the demon a few times in the face, trying to jar him awake. Mogart stirred again, the tail drooped, and be opened his dazed eyes and looked around. He seemed to be having a great deal of trouble focusing on anything.

For the first time, Jill noticed the number of empty whiskey bottles behind the bar. She could count a dozen at least without even trying. Enough to kill any normal human being. The, term

"alcoholic" was far too mild to describe Asmodeus Mogart.

"More water!" Mac commanded, and she again filled the pitcher. "I think his eyes are staying open!"

She almost dropped the pitcher in her anxiety. An impossibly violent gust of wind shook the whole build-ing-or was it the wind? It sounded and felt as if the very Earth were crumbling around them.

Again Mac poured the water, and this time Mogart knew what was happening. He screamed and tried to knock away the pitcher.

"Enough! Enough!" he screamed at them in that high-pitched whine. "Begone, foul fiends!

Water shall not touch these lips unless well diluted with Scotch!"

"Mogart!" Walters yelled at him, almost nose to nose. "It's us! We have the fifth jewel, Mogart!

We have the fifth jewel' You have to save the world!"

A tiny light dawned in his brain. "Oh, yesh, yesh. Da crash. Gotta shtop the crash. Crishy, crashy, crunchy," he sang. "But firsht I gotta shleep," he an-nounced. His eyelids closed, and he tried to turn over.

Jill was ahead of him, pouring more water on his head. Their actions seemed to infuriate him, and his manner changed. His eyes opened wide and glared at her menacingly. "Oh, foul bearer of that putrid liquid," he screamed hoarsely, "I shall turn you into a toad for that!"

He reached over to a shelf behind the bar, knocking a few of the glasses onto the floor, where they shattered with a crash that seemed to please him. He liked the sound so much, in fact, that he started knocking over all the other glasses as well. Then, reaching back, he pulled out one of the jewels-then a second, third, fourth, and a fifth.

He stared at them in fascination, then looked up angrily, facing his tormentors. He tried to stand, but it was too much for him.

Mac turned to Jill anxiously. "Where's the damned jewel? We have to show it to him!"

She started for a minute, then responded,
"You've
got it! I never even saw it!"

He looked momentarily sheepish, then reached into a pocket where he had slipped the thing after remateri-alizing in the bar.

Mogart saw it, and his jaw dropped. He stared down at the others in his hands and counted,

"One . . two ... three ... four ... five! Five and one makesh shix!" He looked up at Mac, a look of childish anti-cipation on his face. "Gimme!"

Nervously, Mac Walters handed the demon the sixth jewel. He was not too thrilled by the prospect, though, since he'd been told what six could do-and Mogart was in no condition to do anything right.

The demon stared at his palm full of glowing, throbbing gems for a moment, as if deep in thought. Then he cupped both his hands and let the jewels tumble between them. Abruptly this stopped, and he cupped his hands together and pressed hard, so hard that the effort was obvious in his face. Smoke issued from his closed, joined hands, and Jill and Mac heard a slight hissing sound. Whatever he was doing was obviously painful, as his facial expression and jerky movements indicated, but Mogart didn't seem to mind. A change was coming over him, and the man and woman stepped back, watching the demon in growing wonder.

There was a smile on his face, one of almost incon-ceivable rapture. He seemed to be growing in stature, to be filling out, becoming the potential of his body in full. The transformation was astonishing. He was no longer a thin and broken drunk but a creature of tre-mendous power, the image of the devil at his most fearsome.

Suddenly Mogart relaxed and walked out from behind the bar, now in full command of his body and mind. The smile was no longer one of rapture but the look of total satisfaction, of one who has power and the ability to use it. He glanced around, ignoring the two humans, then slowly and deliberately walked around the far end of the bar and over to the door. Each second his metamorphosis became more pronounced; a tiny man before, he was now more than two meters high. A weak, frail man before, his chest was now massive, his arms bulging with muscles. Veins and sinews rippled with each slow movement. His skin had taken on a light bluish cast, and below his waist thick, curly black hair was now covering him like a coarse pair of fur pants. His legs were even more ani-malistic than they had been, somewhat goatlike yet thick and sturdy, terminating in great cloven hooves. His tail, extended now, whiplike, terminated in a trian-gular membrane that looked something like a cobra's hood.

"Mogart!" Jill called to him. "The planetoid! You must stop the collision!"

The strange being who only moments before had been a helpless, pitiful drunk turned slowly to face them. Great eyes seemed to blaze with a strange red-black fire; his nose was flatter, his teeth animallike and those of a carnivore when he smiled at them. He looked at them as if they were some kind of trained animals, not real people at all.

Neither Mac nor Jill could help remembering the warnings they had received from the other demons, that Mogart was not at all what he seemed and would be dangerous beyond their wildest dreams given all the jewels. Mac gripped Jill's hand tightly, and both had the same thought, the same questions:
What have we done? Have we done right?

"I am not unmindful of the problem of the satellite," he told them in a voice at least two octaves lower than the old Mogart's. "I have been considering how to deal with it." He held up the object in his hands formed by the fusion of the six gems-a perfect larger gem, blaz-ing with that living fire around the edges and shim-mering blue-black along its facets.

"Behold the Eye of Baal," he intoned, looking down at it with a mixture of wonder and excitement. "It has been long, far too long, since I have seen one, let alone possessed one."

"You lied to us!" Jill accused him. "You never cared about this world! You just needed somebody to do your dirty work for you!"

He grinned evilly. "Clever one, aren't you? Yes, this is what it is all about, but I think you have yet to perceive the fullness of my genius. Many times through the millennia I have tried to secure an Eye of Baal to replace the one taken from me so long ago. They said I was misusing the power, establishing myself as a self-indulgent god. As if-as if constructs, mere creations of a fertile imagination, artificial creatures formed by superior intelligence and science, had some sort of rights! In the past I failed. Security was too good. It was too easy for them to spot me, and when I sent others they were incompetent. What my envoys lacked, I decided, was motivation. When they had to face the problems, worlds, and creatures you faced, they were working for me, not for themselves, and the difficulties sapped their will to carry out the job." His grin widened.

"Do you think," he continued, "that it' was just a coincidence that the two of you were here, in this spot, when you were needed? Did you think you accom-plished what you did without help, without training? I planned for years for this! Years! Ever since I detected the gravitational imbalances almost twenty years ago. I picked people, many people, to be my agents. They didn't know it, of course. Using what powers I had, I endowed them with superb bodies and even better minds. Thoughts and motivations planted in their parents', teachers', and all other close-contact people's brains shaped and molded their interests, their person-alities, so they would be the people
best
equipped to succeed in the Alternatives. There were thousands of such people,
not just the
two of you!"

Mogart paused, enjoying the delicious shock on their faces, then continued. He was thoroughly delighting in this.

"Such activities took a lot out of me. The jewel and its powers have very definite limits; as hard as it is for you to comprehend, there
are
immutable natural laws applicable to all the universes.

What it took out of me left me that pitiful, drunken weakling you saw. Almost too much. The story I told you about being on a drunk for key weeks when I should have been gathering and sending out my agents was true.
All
of it was true, except why I was exiled here. It wasn't for alco-holism, but for what they, termed incurable megalo-mania." He shrugged. "They were probably right. It didn't matter to them. I resisted treatment because megalomania is such a wonderful thing to have. This is a working universe-projects go on here. But Earth was just a byproduct of the forces set in motion. As I think I told you, there are no real ongoing projects closer than the Andromeda galaxy. I was safely out of the way. And I accepted exile, since the alternative was a brainwipe, the destruction of my entire personal-ity and memory. I would still be here, a prisoner, had not a number of fortuitous events coincided."

"The asteroid," Jill breathed.

He nodded. "Getting the idea into the right people's heads to try and hold it captive was a problem-the project was so costly! Then it was discovered that the asteroid really
did
contain riches, and the way was cleared. Just as important a factor was that this event should not come about until there was adequate tech-nology to implement the plan. After that the pride and greed that are reflections of me in your race took over."