The man-form goblin, the three even more hideous creatures behind it, and the other beasts moving through the dark vestibule (and now seen only as pairs of shining eyes) all moved slowly, as if the very air inside this house of worship was, for them, an immensely heavy burden that made every step a painful labor. None of them hissed or snarled or shrieked, either. They just approached silently, sluggishly, but implacably.
Beyond the goblins, the doors to the street still appeared to be closed. They had entered the cathedral by some other route, through a vent or a drain that was unscreened and offered them an easy entrance, a virtual invitation, the equivalent of the “open door” that they, like vampires, probably needed in order to come where evil wasn’t welcome.
Father Walotsky, briefly mesmerized by his first glimpse of the goblins, was the first to break the silence. He fumbled in a pocket of his black cassock, withdrew a rosary, and began to pray.
The man-form devil and the three things immediately behind it moved steadily closer, along the main aisle, and other monstrous beings crept and slithered out of the dark vestibule, while new pairs of glowing eyes appeared in the darkness there. They still moved too slowly to be dangerous.
But how long will that last? Rebecca wondered. Perhaps they’ll somehow become conditioned to the atmosphere in the cathedral. Perhaps they’ll gradually become bolder and begin to move faster. What then?
Pulling the kids with her, Rebecca began to back up the aisle, toward the altar. Father Walotsky came with them, the rosary beads clicking in his hands.
8
They slogged through the snow to the foot of the steps that led up to Lavelle’s front door.
Jack’s revolver was already in his hand. To Carver Hampton, he said, “I wish you’d wait in the car.”
“No.”
“This is police business.”
“It’s more than that. You know it’s more than that.”
Jack sighed and nodded.
They climbed the steps.
Obtaining an arrest warrant, pounding on the door, announcing his status as an officer of the law—none of that usual procedure seemed necessary or sensible to Jack. Not in this bizarre situation. Still, he wasn’t comfortable or happy about just barging into a private residence.
Carver tried the doorknob, twisted it back and forth several times. “Locked.”
Jack could see that it was locked, but something told him to try it for himself. The knob turned under his hand, and the latch clicked softly, and the door opened a crack.
“Locked for me,” Carver said, “but not for you.”
They stepped aside, out of the line of fire.
Jack reached out, pushed the door open hard, and snatched his hand back.
But Lavelle didn’t shoot.
They waited ten or fifteen seconds, and snow blew in through the open door. Finally, crouching, Jack moved into the doorway and crossed the threshold, his gun thrust out in front of him.
The house was exceptionally dark. Darkness would work to Lavelle’s advantage, for he was familiar with the place, while it was all strange territory to Jack.
He fumbled for the light switch and found it.
He was in a broad entrance hall. To the left were inlaid oak stairs with an ornate railing. Directly ahead, beyond the stairs, the hall narrowed and led all the way to the rear of the house. A couple of feet ahead and to the right, there was an archway, beyond which lay more darkness.
Jack edged to the brink of the arch. A little light spilled in from the hall, but it showed him only a section of bare floor. He supposed it was a living room.
He reached awkwardly around the corner, trying to present a slim profile, feeling for another light switch, found and flipped it. The switch operated a ceiling fixture; light filled the room. But that was just about the only thing in it—light. No furniture. No drapes. A film of gray dust, a few balls of dust in the corners, a lot of light, and four bare walls.
Carver moved up beside Jack and whispered, “Are you sure this is the right place?”
As Jack opened his mouth to answer, he felt something whiz past his face and, a fraction of a second later, he heard two loud shots, fired from behind him. He dropped to the floor, rolled out of the hall, into the living room.
Carver dropped and rolled, too. But he had been hit. His face was contorted by pain. He was clutching his left thigh, and there was blood on his trousers.
“He’s on the stairs,” Carver said raggedly. “I got a glimpse.”
“Must’ve been upstairs, then came down behind us.”
“Yeah.”
Jack scuttled to the wall beside the archway, crouched there. “You hit bad?”
“Bad enough,” Carver said. “Won’t kill me, though. You just worry about getting him.”
Jack leaned around the archway and squeezed off a shot right away, at the staircase, without bothering to look or aim first.
Lavelle was there. He was halfway down the final flight of stairs, hunkered behind the railing.
Jack’s shot tore a chunk out of the bannister two feet from the Bocor’s head.
Lavelle returned the fire, and Jack ducked back, and shattered plaster exploded from the edge of the archway.
Another shot.
Then silence.
Jack leaned out into the archway again and pulled off three shots in rapid succession, aiming at where Lavelle had been, but Lavelle was already on his way upstairs, and all three shots missed him, and then he was out of sight.
Pausing to reload his revolver with the loose bullets he carried in one coat pocket, Jack glanced at Carver and said, “Can you make it out to the car on your own?”
“No. Can’t walk with this leg. But I’ll be all right here. He only winged me. You just go get him.”
“We should call an ambulance for you.”
“Just get him!” Carver said.
Jack nodded, stepped through the archway, and went cautiously to the foot of the stairs.
9
Penny, Davey, Rebecca, and Father Walotsky took refuge in the chancel, behind the altar railing. In fact, they climbed up onto the altar platform, directly beneath the crucifix.
The goblins stopped on the other side of the railing. Some of them peered between the ornate supporting .posts. Others climbed onto the communion rail itself, perched there, eyes flickering hungrily, black tongues licking slowly back and forth across their sharp teeth.
There were fifty or sixty of them now, and more were still coming out of the vestibule, far back at the end of the main aisle.
“They w-won’t come up here, w-w-will they?” Penny asked. “Not this c-close to the crucifix. Will they?”
Rebecca hugged the girl and Davey, held them tight and close. She said, “You can see they’ve stopped. It’s all right. It’s all right now. They’re afraid of the altar. They’ve stopped.”
But for how long? she wondered.
10
Jack climbed the stairs with his back flat against the wall, moving sideways, trying to be utterly silent, nearly succeeding. He held his revolver in his left hand, with his arm rigidly extended, aiming at the top of the steps, his aim never wavering as he ascended, so he’d be ready to pull the trigger the instant Lavelle appeared. He reached the landing without being shot at, climbed three steps of the second flight, and then Lavelle leaned out around the corner above, and both of them fired—Lavelle twice, Jack once.
Lavelle pulled the trigger without pausing to take aim, without even knowing exactly where Jack was. He just took a chance that two rounds, placed down the center of the stairwell, would do the job. Both missed.
On the other hand, Jack’s gun was aimed along the wall, and Lavelle leaned right into its line of fire. The slug smashed into his arm at the same moment he finished pulling the trigger of his own gun. He screamed, and the pistol flew out of his hand, and he stumbled back into the upstairs hall where he’d been hiding.
Jack took the stairs two at a time, jumping over Lavelle’s pistol as
it came tumbling down. He reached the second-floor hallway in time to see Lavelle enter a room and slam the door behind him.
Downstairs, Carver lay on the dust-filmed floor, eyes closed. He was too weary to keep his eyes open. He was growing wearier by the second.
He didn’t feel like he was lying on a hard floor. He felt as if he were floating in a warm pool of water, somewhere in the tropics. He remembered being shot, remembered falling; he knew the floor really was there, under him, but he just couldn’t feel it.
He figured he was bleeding to death. The wound didn’t seem that bad, but maybe it was worse than he thought. Or maybe it was just shock that made him feel this way. Yeah, that must be it, shock, just shock, not bleeding to death after all, just suffering from shock, but of course shock could kill, too.
Whatever the reasons, he floated, oblivious of his own pain, just bobbing up and down, drifting there on the hard floor that wasn’t hard at all, drifting on some far-away tropical tide... until, from upstairs, there was the sound of gunfire and a shrill scream that snapped his eyes open. He had an out-of-focus, floor-level view of the empty room. He blinked his eyes rapidly and squinted until his clouded visions cleared, and then he wished it hadn’t cleared because he saw that he was no longer alone.
One of the denizens of the pit was with him, its eyes aglow.
Upstairs, Jack tried the door that Lavelle had slammed. It was locked, but the lock probably didn’t amount to much, just a privacy set, flimsy as they could be made, because people didn’t want to put heavy and expensive locks inside a house.
“Lavelle?” he shouted.
No answer.
“Open up. No use trying to hide in there.”
From inside the room came the sound of a shattering window.
“Shit,” Jack said.
He stepped back and kicked at the door, but there was more to the lock than he’d expected, and he had to kick it four times, as hard as he could, before he finally smashed it open.
He switched on the light. An ordinary bedroom. No sign of Lavelle.
The window in the opposite wall was broken out. Drapes billowed on the in-rushing wind.
Jack checked the closet first, just to be sure this wasn’t a bit of misdirection to enable Lavelle to get behind his back. But no one waited in the closet.
He went to the window. In the light that spilled past him, he saw footprints in the snow that covered the porch roof. They led out to the edge. Lavelle had jumped down to the yard below.
Jack squeezed through the window, briefly snagging his coat on a shard of glass, and went onto the roof.
In the cathedral, approximately seventy or eighty goblins had come out of the vestibule. They were lined up on the communion rail and between the supporting posts under the rail. Behind them, other beasts slouched up the long aisle.
Father Walotsky was on his knees, praying, but he didn’t seem to be doing any good, so far as Rebecca could see.
In fact, there were some bad signs. The goblins weren’t as sluggish as they had been. Tails lashed. Mutant heads whipped back and forth. Tongues flickered faster than before.
Rebecca wondered if they could, through sheer numbers, overcome the benign power that held sway within the cathedral and that had, so far, prevented them from attacking. As each of the demonic creatures entered, it brought its own measure of malignant energy. If the balance of power tipped in the other direction ...
One of the goblins hissed. They had been perfectly silent since entering the cathedral, but now one of them hissed, and then another, and then three more, and in seconds all of them were hissing angrily.
Another bad sign.
Carver Hampton.
When he saw the demonic entity in the hallway, the floor suddenly seemed a bit more solid to him. His heart began to pound, and the real world came swimming back to him out of the tropical hallucination—although this part of the real world contained, at this time, something from a nightmare.
The thing in the hall skittered toward the open arch and the living room. From Carver’s perspective, it looked enormous, at least his own size, but he realized it wasn’t really as large as it seemed from his peculiar floor-level point of view. But big enough. Oh, yes. Its head was the size of his fist. Its sinuous, segmented, wormlike body was half again as long as his arm. Its crablike legs ticked against the wooden floor. The only features on its misshapen head were an ugly 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, gasping 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 hate-light 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 fro
m 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.