Darkfall (42 page)

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 Hell 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 entity 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
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 Hell-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 gods of
Rada
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. Hell was not a mythical place, and there was nothing supernatural about demons and gods, nothing holy or unholy about them. Hell—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 assault. 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 he 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 massive 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 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 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 hellish 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 entities 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, snatched 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 reconstitute the goblins. One small lump, lying apart from all the others, began to shape itself into a tiny, wickedly clawed foot.

“Die, damnit,” 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 hell-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 gods of
Rada
must have visited a revelation upon Jack, for he knew—without understanding 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.

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 prone 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.

He cast more of his blood into the chasm, and the tortured cries of the damned faded but only slightly. He blinked and squinted at the pulsing, shifting, mysteriously indefinable bottom of the hole, leaned out even farther to get a better look—

—and with a whoosh of blisteringly hot air, a huge face rose up toward him, ballooning out of the shimmering light, a face as big as a truck, filling most of the pit. It was the leering face of all evil. It was composed of slime and mold and rotting carcasses, a pebbled and cracked and lumpy and pock-marked face, dark and mottled, riddled with pustules, maggot-rich, with vile brown foam dripping from its ragged and decaying nostrils. Worms wriggled in its night-black eyes, and yet it could see, for Jack could feel the terrible weight of its hateful gaze. Its mouth broke open—a vicious, jagged slash large enough to swallow a man whole—and bile-green fluid drooled out. Its tongue was long and black and prickled with needle-sharp thorns that punctured and tore its own lips as it licked them.

Dizzied, dispirited, and weakened by the unbearable stench of death that rose from the gaping mouth, Jack shook his wounded hand above the apparition, and a rain of blood fell away from his weeping stigmata. “Go away,” he told the thing, choking on the tomb-foul air. “Leave. Go. Now.”

The face receded into the furnace glow as his blood fell upon it. In a moment it vanished into the bottom of the pit.

He heard a pathetic whimpering. He realized he was listening to himself.

And it wasn’t over yet. Below, the multitude of voices became louder again, and the light grew brighter, and dirt began to fall away from the perimeter of the hole once more.