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 bilegreen 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.
Sweating, gasping, squeezing his sphincter muscles to keep his bowels
from loosening in terror, Jack wanted to run away from the pit. He
wanted to flee into the night, into the storm and the sheltering city.
But he knew that was no solution. If he didn’t stop it now, the pit
would widen until it grew large enough to swallow him no matter where he
hid.
With his uninjured right hand, he pulled and squeezed and clawed at the
wounds in his left hand until they had opened farther, until his blood
was flowing much faster. Fear had anesthetized him; he no longer felt
any pain. Like a Catholic priest swinging a sacred vessel to cast holy
water or incense in a ritual of sanctification, he sprayed his blood
into the yawning mouth of Hell.
The light dimmed somewhat but pulsed and struggled to maintain itself.
Jack prayed for it to be extinguished, for if this did not do the trick,
there was only one other course of action: He would have to sacrifice
himself entirely; he would have to go down into the pit. And if he went
down there . . . he knew he would never come back.
The last evil energy seemed to have drained out of the clumps of soil on
the altar steps. The dirt had been still for a minute or more. With
each passing second, it was increasingly difficult to believe that the
stuff had ever really been alive.
At last Father Walotsky picked up a clod of earth and broke it between
his fingers.
Penny and Davey stared in fascination. Then the girl turned to Rebecca
and said, “What happened?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “But I think your daddy accomplished what he
set out to do. I think Lavelle is dead. ” She looked out across the
immense cathedral, as if Jack might come strolling in from the
vestibule, and she said softly, “I love you, Jack.”
The light faded from orange to yellow to blue.
Jack watched tensely, not quite daring to believe that it was finally
finished.
A grating-creaking sound came out of the earth, as if enormous gates
were swinging shut on rusted hinges.
The faint cries rising from the pit had changed from expressions of rage
and hatred and triumph to pitiful moans of despair.
Then the light was extinguished altogether.
The grating and creaking ceased.
The air no longer had a sulphurous stench.
No sounds at all came from the pit.
It wasn’t a doorway any longer. Now, it was just a hole in the ground.
The night was still bitterly cold, but the storm seemed to be passing.
Jack cupped his wounded hand and packed it full of snow to slow the
bleeding now that he no longer needed blood. He was still too high on