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.
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 adrenalin to feel any pain.
The wind was barely blowing now, but to his surprise it brought a voice to him. Rebecca’s voice. Unmistakable. And four words that he much wanted to hear: “I love you, Jack.”
He turned, bewildered.
She was nowhere in sight, yet her voice seemed to have been at his ear.
He said, “I love you, too,” and he knew that, wherever she was, she heard him as clearly as he had heard her.
The snow had slackened. The flakes were no longer small and hard but big and fluffy, as they had been at the beginning of the storm. They fell lazily now, in wide, swooping spirals.
Jack turned away from the pit and went back into the house to call an ambulance for Carver Hampton.
NEW AFTERWORD BY DEAN KOONTZ
During the first fifteen years of my career, my income per novel was so small that I might have done better trying to sell hamburgers to Hindus. The proceeds from one novel per year would have sustained me only if I had crafted all my clothes from leaves, wild grass, and bird feathers—with no concern for the cruel stares that rude people would direct at me, and with a willingness to tolerate the pain from being pecked by all of those angry, bald birds. A strict diet of peat moss and beef bouillon would have been within my one-novel-per-year budget, because peat costs mere pennies per pound when bought at a discount garden-supply center. And if I had found an occasional entrée of fresh roadkill, first-rate nutrition would have been assured.
Because I prefer classic vegetables rather than peat moss, and because I believe the main course at dinner should be processed by professional food-handlers rather than by drunken drivers, I was motivated to write more than a single novel every twelve months. Out went the corn-husk shirts and grass pants; in came cotton pullovers and jeans. A modest apartment proved far more comfortable than either a cave or the interior of a big hollow log. And in an apartment, my wife, Gerda, didn’t have to pedal furiously on a bicycle ten hours a day to generate power for my electric typewriter—a task that creates a huge appetite and dramatically increases the peat-moss bill, ironically reducing the positive budgetary effect
of relying on a cheap garden-store food source.
In those days, when a young and unknown writer routinely completed more than one book per year, publishers urged him to use a pen name—or names—for what they viewed as excess production. They believed that critics would dismiss the work of a prolific writer without even reading it, assuming it was piffle. Many critics do, indeed, respond this way, even though Henry James—the litterateur’s litterateur—produced more than 120 books in his lifetime, and though writers from Shakespeare to Dickens to Joyce Carol Oates have proved that one can produce quantity with quality.
Publishers also recommend—often insist—that pen names be used on books the writer creates outside of the genre in which he first began publishing. If one begins writing adventure novels about trout fishing, then delivers a romance with not a trout to be found in its chapters, one will be pressured to use a pen name for this suspect, fishless fiction. Because I enjoyed writing in a variety of genres—international intrigue, romantic suspense, psychological suspense, tales of terror, science fiction, humorous suspense—I ultimately published under several pseudonyms before finally forsaking all false identities.
One of my early pen names, Owen West, wrote horror novels for Jove Books, a sub-imprint of Berkley Books, my primary paperback publisher at that time. Owen’s first shuddery tale was a novelization of a motion-picture screenplay, The Funhouse, to which Jove owned the book rights. I was beginning to build a reputation as a suspense novelist, and I didn’t want to be known as a horror writer. Some of my novels had, I admit, enough of a macabre edge to be tagged with that label by critics who didn’t like to think too much. (Most critics are responsible and thoughtful, but a significant minority resents thinking, because the time devoted to thinking inevitably means fewer hours in the day for swilling down booze and torturing kittens). Although I enjoyed the horror genre both as reader and writer, I didn’t want to doom myself to that limiting label by publishing novels of the supernatural under my name. Consequently, also because Jove wanted to build a new name in the horror genre, I wrote The Funhouse under my Owen West persona—he had shorter hair than mine, delft-blue eyes, and a lapdog named Pookie that slept draped across his thighs while he worked—and I signed a contract to do two more West novels.