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 passively to be
captured, not Baba Lavelle the great Bocor. He headed across the rear
lawn toward the storage shed.
His source of power lay beyond the pit, with the dark gods 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 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, Hell
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 hatelight 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 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.