Bless the Child (68 page)

“I couldn’t tell them,” the old man whispered, trapped in his own undoing. Peter knew the demon could do that, leeching on to your inmost horror and exploiting it from within, so you felt defenseless, ravaged, undone. And the Rebbe was old . . . it took great physical strength to withstand an assault of this magnitude. “The hidden Name of God, they wanted,” he murmured. “Not even to save her, could I speak . . .”

“No. No! Of course not,” Peter soothed, holding the fierce old man, made frail by anguish. “They were the People of the Lie, Rebbe! They would not have kept their bargain. You did what you had to do.”

Peter turned to face the demon, fury raging in him at this unspeakable evil that crushed whatever stood in its path. Just as it would all humanity, unless it could be stopped.

“You issued this invitation for
me,
demon!” he shouted, trying to master his own wrath. “Let us find out why?” It was dangerous to depart from the prescribed ritual.
“Never engage the Entity, my boy!”
It was the one admonition no one must ever transgress. But he needed to provoke it out into the open.

Cody turned unseeing eyes toward Peter, her mouth in a hideous sneer. “An egotist to the end,” the demon laughed with satisfaction. “Certain as always, that
you’re
the star attraction. But that’s all right, Peter, dear. We’ll have some fun. You have more faults to play with than the old man.”

Peter forced his eyes back to the book.
I must not let this creature bait me, or we are lost.
He began to recite again: “
‘He who commands you is He who ordered you to be thrown from the Highest Heaven into the depths of Hell. He who commands you is He who dominated the sea, the wind, and the stars. Hear therefore, and fear, Satan! Enemy of Faith. Enemy of the human race!’”

“Oh, the human race!” the voice hissed. “The dunghill race!
Cadaver race!
Don’t you fucking well know you’ve already
lost
the race! We’ve got all the cards in our hands, Peter the Cheater! Do you really think the human race wants
God
to win, you ecclesiastical asshole? Have you ever seen any indication whatsoever that the world
isn’t on our side?
Take a look around you!

“Your beloved humans rape and torture and maim and kill. For greed and avarice, and even for their trumped-up sanctimonious ideals. Men wage war on each other to extinction! Why, they even wage war on their own planet, now that technology allows that. Your lovely human race is so greedy it’ll suck up the ozone, until every living thing is dead of cancer. It’ll destroy the forests, so there’s no more air to breathe, and poison the streams and rivers, until nothing can live that isn’t mutant.

“And let us not forget man’s inhumanity to man, Peter my holy-go-pious fool!” Peter could feel his mind, sliding, slipping away . . . He struggled to pull it back, when the Rebbe’s voice broke through to him, intoning a prayer.

“Hofked alav rasha v’ Satan al y’ min . . .” Peter tried desperately to concentrate on the Hebrew words, as the Rebbe began the verse, again, this time backward. There were certain Kabbalistic formulae, Peter remembered, that could call up angelic forces . ..

He forced his eyes back to the page, grateful for the Rebbe’s reinforcement, and relentlessly began again: “
‘God, creator and defender of the Human Race, look on this your servant . . .

“Creator and defender of the human race, indeed!” the demon mocked. “Peter the soiled priest, trying to debate with your betters . . . But I won’t hold that against you. Instead, I might even offer you a sporting chance to
win!
Of course you’ll have to accept my challenge to do so.”

The voice took on a seductive tone. “I can give you each your heart’s desires you know . . .” it cajoled. “Every man has his price. Behold, what I offer . . .”

Again visions rose within them. This time, of their most secret dreams . . . and oh, it was hard to push them away, for to each he showed the one thing needed more than life itself. The one desperate vulnerability of the heart and soul . . . And what were these foolish Amulets, after all, compared to such compelling needs? And why should a burden fall on the shoulders of the merely human . . .

Ellie
rounded the last corner of the basement labyrinth and hit the stairway, just as two of Abraham’s men did.

One seized her left arm as she attempted to run past him. The bloodied sickle axe in her right hand whizzed through the air so fast, the man was down before his companion could cover him.

“Let her go!”
Abraham’s voice rang out in the echoing dark of the corridor. “Let the woman through!”

She was down the stairs and at their side in seconds, staring at the arch before them, with a deep frown of concentration on her face.

Warrior. Abraham noted. He knew her from the dossier, but this he hadn’t known. This one gives no quarter. She had most likely just killed his man, but there were no girlish protestations of remorse on her lips, just concentration on the objective.

“They’re in there, Ellie,” Devlin said quickly. “We can’t get through.”

Ellie nodded, moved forward to touch the forcefield with her hand, then stepped back to examine the carvings on the spandrel. There were sigils and figures, as well as the carved writings to be deciphered.

“It’s called the
Devils Doorway,”
she said finally. “It says, ‘Who enters here, enters Hell.’ The words ‘Maa Kheru’ open the Gates of Hell . . . this must be one of them. Probably an energy vortex of some kind that allows easy passage back and forth from the demonic dimensions.”

“Look, Ellie,” Devlin interjected. “I’ll believe it’s Club Med for Demons, if you can just get me in there.”

Ellie shook her head. “Eric’s sealed the sanctuary with the help of powerful forces, Dev. I can’t undo that alone . . . I’ll have to ask help from my ancestors on the Angelic Plane. But I’ll see what I can do.”

She turned to Abraham. “I assume the soldiers are yours?” He nodded yes.

“Keep them, and everything else, away from me, while I’m in trance. My nervous system will be vulnerable to sound and impact.”

She turned toward Devlin. “We’re deep within the earth here—I’ll ask the spirits of my Cherokee ancestors to entreat the Earth Mother to aid us. Indian magic has purer roots than Eric’s—there’s no Black Magic for a Cherokee. All magic, like all life, belongs to the Great Spirit. That may give us an edge.”

With that, she turned her face to the portal, raised her arms in a Shaman’s salute to the Powers of the Four Directions, and asked entry to the Shadow World. Minutes passed before she began to chant, a low moaning sound at first, then a rising resonance that filled the cavernous space like the roar of a waterfall in a box canyon.

The air vibrated around them in an escalating frequency that made the hair on the men’s necks stand on end. The blackness of the portal began to shimmer under the archway, like an iridescent curtain rippled by the wind.

“Go when the shimmer fades!” Ellie rasped hoarsely; it was easy to see it was taking all her power to battle back the forces protecting the sanctuary. “I can’t break the seal, but I can weaken it enough to get us through.”

Both men poised themselves to wait for the moment they could charge . . .

Maggie
dragged herself back from the brink of acceptance of the demon’s offer, shocked at her own weakness. She caught Peter’s eyes with her own, and saw in him the same terror that pounded in her own breast. She wondered what he’d dreamed . . . She saw him pull himself together again with desperate concentration, to face down the enemy. The presence saw it, too.

“So our sacerdotal excrescence girds for the fray, does he?” it baited. “Does this mean you have realized this is not your average garden-variety exorcism, pious Peter?”

“It means that I accept your challenge,” Peter replied evenly. “Name it!”

Never engage the demon in conversation, my boy. Only your pride makes you think you can win.

“How delicious,” the demon voice crackled. “The sinner-in-priest’s-clothing steps out from behind his little book, does he? Well, my challenge is very simple, really. All you need to do is
prove
to me that Good is stronger than Evil. Of course, you’ll never pull
that
off because your world is now, and ever shall be, the true crucible of Evil.
Behold!”

Perversions rose in the minds of each person in the room; against their wills they saw the Holocaust . . . the Killing Fields . . . Caligula’s court. Children molested, old women murdered in their beds. The oil fires of Kuwait, cadaverous bodies behind barbed-wire fences. Torturers at their trade, grinning over the mutilated bodies of their victims. Armies clashing, and sirens shattering eardrums . . . pain beyond endurance rose in each of them, pummeling them, assaulting every sensibility. Man’s inhumanity to man, too fearsome for the soul to contemplate . . .

Maggie groaned despite herself, but Peter and the Rebbe held their ground against the onslaught, and quickly as it had come, the wall of thought subsided.

Peter drew himself up to his full stature with immense effort.
“That isn’t all we are!”
he shouted fiercely. “We are so much
more!
We humans are capable of loving one another, without thought of self. No greed. No avarice. No self-aggrandizement. Only love. Mothers sacrifice a kidney to save a dying child . . . fathers slave in coal mines, knowing they’ll spit up their lungs piecemeal, to provide a better life for their children. Christian families saved Jewish children from the Nazis at the cost of their own lives. Men have allowed themselves to be tortured to save a comrade. They don’t do these things for profit, or for fame . . . they do it out of
goodness.
There are a million unsung acts of selfless heroism every hour of every day, that counterbalance any horror you could possibly conjure up.”

“It is not enough!” the demon rasped. “At best it would only be a draw.”

And suddenly, Peter knew what he’d been called to do. All his life, every moment of seeking God, had been in preparation for this moment.
When a sacrifice had been promised, a sacrifice must be made.

“I know how to defeat you, demon!” he cried out in a clear, ringing voice. “I will trade you my life for the child’s!”

Maggie gasped aloud and the Rebbe stepped toward Peter. The demon roared with laughter and the air shook around them like half-done Jell-O.

“I don’t want
you,
you arrogant
nothing,
” it spat. “I want it all! The child. The Amulets. All the power in the world! What are
you
compared to that? An intellectually pretentious failure of a priest? Why, you even failed at being a heretic!

“I don’t want
you . . .
you’re
nothing.
Do you understand me? Nothing. Nothing.
Nothing!”