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 knewwithout 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,