The Gates

by John Connolly

  “What’s happening?” said Professor Stefan.

  But he already knew.

  Somehow, the collider had started up again.

  Mrs. Abernathy answered the door. Standing on the step was a small man with a pointed beard. He was sucking on the frame of a pair of dark-rimmed glasses.

  “Mrs. Abernathy?” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Dr. Planck. I’d like to talk with you for a moment, if it’s convenient.”

  “Actually,” said Mrs. Abernathy, “I’m rather busy right now.”

  Dr. Planck sniffed the air. He smelled rotten eggs. Then he noticed a faint blue glow coming from the basement, a light that also seemed to be flickering on the window frames of the house, and around the door. A wind blew in his face, its force increasing. As it did so, the blue glow became brighter.

  “What are you doing?” said Dr. Planck. “This isn’t right.”

  “Run,” said Mrs. Abernathy.

  “What?”

  “I said, ‘Run.’”

  Her eyes filled with cold fire. Her mouth opened, and the light shone like a beam from it. It felt like ice on Dr. Planck’s skin.

  He ran.

  The basement of number 666 was filled with a vast swirling mass of light and dark, of blue beams and a blackness that was so thick as to be almost tangible. Little tendrils of electricity flickered deep within it, like bolts of lightning against the night sky, then shot out to strike Mr. Abernathy and Mr. Renfield. They began to change shape, shedding their human skins and assuming once again their true demonic forms. Mr. Abernathy looked like a gray toad, with unblinking eyes that protruded from his head on long stalks. Mr. Renfield became spiderlike, his body covered with spiny hairs, eight black eyes appearing on his head: two large ones at the front, two smaller ones on either side, then four more behind. Eight long, jointed legs burst from his torso, each ending in a sharp claw, yet he remained standing on his human legs, which were stronger and thicker than the rest. Pointed fangs burst from his jaws, their tips glistening with poison.

  Mrs. Abernathy joined them, but she remained unchanged, the blue fire in her eyes aside. She did not want to assume her true shape, not yet. Although she was restricted by this human body, it had its uses. If necessary it would allow her to move freely through the world of men during the early stages of the attack. Only when victory was secured did she intend to reveal herself as she really was.

  The walls of the house began to shudder. Dust fell from the ceiling of the basement, and old paint cans and boxes of nails dropped from shelves and spilled their contents on the floor. The mortar between the bricks crumbled, and the bricks started to float away. As the house came apart, more tendrils of blue light appeared, shooting through the gaps and disappearing into the ground. The wind grew stronger, blowing from one universe into another across the portal that was now opening. Mrs. Abernathy watched as the gates, those hated prison bars, began to glow white hot, dripping molten metal as her master harnessed the power of the collider to begin to free himself.

  Now the first of the demons appeared. They were simple entities, little more than skulls with black wings. Their mouths appeared to have too many teeth, so that the top and bottom rows were snagged and uneven, yet sharp as needles. There were four of them, and they hovered in the air before Mrs. Abernathy, their jaws snapping and their wings flapping.

  “I have work for you,” she said. She reached out to touch the nearest one, imparting through her fingers knowledge of the three children, the ones who had hurt her and forced her to appear weak before her master, and the little man with the beard, who she sensed meant her harm.

  “Find them,” she said. “Find them all and tear them apart.”

  Samuel, Maria, and Tom were in Samuel’s bedroom, sitting in front of Samuel’s computer and staring at the e-mail message that Samuel had accessed through his Google account. Samuel’s mother stood over them. The message from Dr. Planck read:

  VERY INTERESTED IN YOUR E-MAIL. I WILL COME TO YOUR HOUSE THIS EVENING AT FIVE THIRTY TO DISCUSS IT. HOPE THIS IS CONVENIENT. IF THERE IS A PROBLEM, I CAN BE CONTACTED AT THE NUMBER BELOW.

  “He waited here for a while, then said he wanted to take a look at the Abernathys’ house,” said Mrs. Johnson. “What have you been telling people, Samuel?”

  “What I’ve been trying to explain to you all along,” said Samuel. “The Abernathys are about to do something terrible, and they have to be stopped.”

  This time, his mother didn’t contradict him. Listening to Dr. Planck, she had begun to remember her encounter with Mrs. Abernathy at the supermarket, and how frightened she had been to see Samuel talking to her by the churchyard, even if she hadn’t understood why at the time. Now she knew that Samuel was telling the truth. Mrs. Abernathy was bad. Mrs. Abernathy was, in fact, quite horrid.

  There was a cell phone number with the message. Using his home phone, Samuel dialed the number. The phone was answered on the second ring.

  “Hello?” said a man’s voice. He sounded out of breath.

  “Is that Dr. Planck?” asked Samuel.

  “Indeed it is. Is that Samuel?”

  “Yes. I got your e-mail.”

  “Samuel, I’m rather busy right now.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes. It appears that I’m being chased by a flying skull.”

  Before Samuel could say anything more, they were cut off.

  Mrs. Johnson looked worried.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked.

  Samuel tried redialing the number, but there was no tone. He handed the phone to Tom.

  “It’s gone dead.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That he was being chased by a flying skull.”

  “Oh,” said Tom. “That’s not good.”

  But before he could say anything else, they heard the sound of glass breaking from somewhere downstairs.

  “What was that?” said Mrs. Johnson.

  “It sounded like one of your windows breaking,” said Tom. He grabbed Samuel’s cricket bat from beside the bedroom door. They listened, but could hear no further noise. Slowly they advanced down the hallway, toward the stairs, Tom in the lead.

  “Careful,” said Mrs. Johnson. “Oh, Samuel, I wish your dad was here.”

  They were halfway to the stairs when a white object flew round the corner and then stopped in midair, its wings flapping just hard enough to keep it from falling to the floor. Its jaws never stopped snapping, opening wide enough for a moment to take a man’s fist before the twin rows of sharp teeth closed on each other again. Two unblinking black eyes were set like dark jewels in its bony sockets.

  “What. Is. That?” said Mrs. Johnson.

  “It looks like a skull. With wings,” said Samuel.

  “What’s it doing in our house?” said Mrs. Johnson.

  It was Maria who spoke. “I think it’s looking for us.”

  As if in response, the wings of the chattering skull began to beat faster. It changed its position slightly, then shot forward so fast that it was almost a blur. Samuel, Maria, and Mrs. Johnson dived to the floor, but Tom remained standing. Instinctively he drew back his bat and struck the flying skull when it was about two feet from his face. There was a loud crack! and the skull fell to the floor, its jaws still moving but with most of its teeth now knocked out. One wing had broken off, while the other was beating feebly against the carpet. Tom stood over it and hit it once again with the bat. The skull broke into fragments, the jaws ceased snapping, and its eyes went from black to a milky gray.

  “Tom!” shouted Maria. “Look out!”

  A second skull appeared at the end of the hallway, followed by a third. The three children and Mrs. Johnson backed away until they came to the wall. Tom took a few steps forward, tapped his bat on the carpet, and then took up a stance that would have been frowned upon on a cricket field, the bat raised to shoulder level, ready to strike.

  “Tom,” said Mrs. Johnson, pulling Samuel and Maria in
to the nearest bedroom. “Please be careful!”

  “I know what I’m doing,” said Tom. “Right, then,” he shouted at the skulls. “Come and have a go, if you think you’re hard enough.”

  The two skulls flew toward him at the same moment, one traveling slightly faster and lower than the other. Tom crouched and caught the lead skull with a perfect swing, the bat striking so hard that the skull immediately shattered into three pieces, but Tom wasn’t quick enough to destroy the second skull as well. He was forced to drop to the floor as it zoomed over his head and hit the wall, leaving a mark on the paintwork and dislodging a chunk of plaster. It seemed a little dazed by the collision, but recovered quickly and was preparing to attack again when Samuel flung a blue towel over it, blinding it.

  “Now, Tom!” shouted Samuel.

  Tom brought the bat down as hard as he could on the top of the skull. It dropped to the floor, still covered by the towel, and he struck at it until he had virtually flattened it. Samuel, Maria, and Mrs. Johnson joined him, and all four of them stared at the remains of the skulls that now littered the hallway.

  “Well,” said Samuel. “I think it’s begun.”

  XIX

  In Which Assorted Foul Things Begin to Arrive, and Nurd Discovers the Joys of Motoring

  NURD FELT HIS FINGERTIPS begin to tingle again, but this time he was ready. He was wearing an assortment of rusty armor, some of the few possessions he had been permitted to retain in exile, to protect himself from any unseen eventualities. As he was about to be torn out of one world and hurled into another, this meant just about every possible eventuality was unseen. Only his head remained uncovered because the helmet no longer fit correctly.

  “Maybe your head has swollen,” Wormwood had suggested somewhat unhelpfully as he tried for the third and last time to force the helmet over Nurd’s ears.

  Nurd had responded by hitting Wormwood hard on the head with his scepter.

  “Now your head is swollen,” Nurd had replied. “Leave the helmet. It must have taken a dent.”

  The tingling spread to the rest of his body. It was time. Nurd wondered if he would get to see Samuel again. He hoped so. Samuel was the only creature who had ever been kind to Nurd, and the memory of the boy’s company made the demon smile. He was determined to become friends with Samuel, if he could avoid being crushed by household appliances, or hit by trucks.

  “Good-bye, Wormwood,” said Nurd. “I’d like to say that I’ll miss you, but I won’t.”

  With that he blinked out of existence, leaving Wormwood alone once again.

  “Good riddance,” said Wormwood. “I never liked you anyway.”

  He looked around at the great Wasteland, which stretched emptily in every direction.

  He felt very lonely.

  At CERN, the collider was generating impacts at a startling rate, creating a constant stream of explosions. As the collisions released their energy, the collider filled with more blue light.

  In the main control room, Professor Hilbert and his team were frantically trying to turn the collider off, to no avail.

  “We’re not in control of it,” he told Professor Stefan, who was pacing anxiously in the manner of someone who sees his job about to go up in smoke. Given the amount of energy being given off by the collider, it wasn’t the only thing in danger of doing so.

  “If we aren’t, then who is?” asked Professor Stefan.

  Professor Hilbert reached for the volume button on the nearest computer, and turned it up to full. The control room filled with the sound of whispering: many voices speaking in an assortment of ancient tongues. Despite their panic, all activity ceased as the scientists listened, their faces betraying confusion, yet also curiosity. After all, this was fascinating! Dangerous, and very possibly fatal to all of mankind, but undoubtedly fascinating.

  Then a single voice rose above the babble, a deep voice filled with eons of loneliness and jealousy and rage. It spoke just two words.

  It said: “It begins.”

  “I think,” said Professor Hilbert, his face pale,“that he is.”

  Nurd popped into existence again in the world of men just at the point where his body felt as though it were about to be crushed to the size of a pea. He immediately began running, wary of standing still for too long after what had happened to him on his previous visits. He got three steps before the ground disappeared beneath him, and he fell down an open manhole and into a sewer.

  There was a wail, then a splash, followed by a long, smelly silence.

  Finally, Nurd’s voice spoke from the darkness. It said, somewhat unhappily, “I appear to be covered in poo.”

  The portal in the Abernathys’ basement was growing larger with every minute. The flying skulls had been followed by more demonic forms. Most were still primitive, and not very smart, but some of them were big and strong, and all of them were frightening to look at. Mrs. Abernathy watched them stumble forth into the Halloween night to sow terror: a pair of pig demons, their snouts moist with mucus, great boar tusks on either side, their little eyes glinting with menace; three winged creatures with the bodies of lizards and the heads of beautiful women, their fingers tipped with nails of steel; and a quartet of horned devils, their bodies entirely black from shoveling coals into the fires of Hell, their eyes transformed into red orbs from centuries of staring into the flames. There were creatures that looked like fossils come to life, their insides protected by hard exoskeletons, carried along on short, plated legs. Others were warped versions of earthly animals, as though the things emerging had once caught a brief but imperfect glimpse of life on this planet: goat-headed men with long, curved horns; beasts with the heads of dinosaurs and the bodies of mammals; and winged crocodiles with the tails of lions.

  And then there were those that bore no resemblance to any living thing that had ever existed, pale, nightmarish visions consisting of little more than legs and bone and teeth, with no urge other than to consume.

  “Go,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “Begin our master’s work. Kill and destroy until there is no building left standing and nothing left alive. Turn this world to blood and ash. Make it smell of death!”23

  They lumbered away, and Mrs. Abernathy resumed her vigil at the portal. Through the mists, she could see more forms approaching, more demons sent to prepare the way for the Great Malevolence. Soon, the gates would disintegrate entirely, and then their master would be free at last, free to lead his great army into this world.

  Nurd climbed from the sewer, unpleasant substances dripping from his armor. He had also managed to hurt his head, and there was a large lump behind his left ear, but at least he was still in one piece.

  He looked to his right and instantly forgot his aches, and the nasty smells that were troubling his nostrils, and his plans to take over this place and rule it. In front of him was a sign that read BIDDLECOMBE CAR SALES. It stood on the roof of a building filled with a number of the small, fast metal things that ran on wheels. One of them, a blue one with stripes along the sides, was particularly lovely.

  Nurd ran toward it with great joy, and smacked his face hard against the glass of the showroom. He stumbled back, his hand pressed to his nose. It was bleeding. The pain made his eyes water.

  “Right,” said Nurd. “That’s it. No more Mister Nice Demon.”

  Using an iron-booted foot, he smashed the glass. Somewhere a bell began to sound, but Nurd ignored it. He laid his hand on the fast blue stripy thing and stroked it lovingly, concentrating hard, trying to come to an understanding of what he was touching.

  Car, he thought. Engine. Fuel. Keys.

  Porsche.

  He explored its workings in his mind until they became clear to him. There was a locked box in a small office at the back of the dealership. When he touched it, he knew that it held the keys to the cars. He ripped the door from it and instantly found the ones he wanted.

  Porsche. Mine.

  Minutes later, with a screech of tires and the smell of burning rubber, Nurd was in car heave
n.

  XX

  In Which It Becomes Increasingly Clear That the Demons Are Not Going to Have Things All Their Own Way

  ALL ACROSS THE TOWN, some very strange things were starting to happen.

  While Tom used flying skulls for cricket practice, a pair of old ladies were called rude names by a dark-eyed entity that appeared to be living in a drain. One of the old ladies poked at it with her umbrella until it gave up and went away, still calling out rude names, some of which she had never heard before but which, she was certain, were meant to be offensive. In her statement to local police some time later, she claimed that it “looked and smelled like a big, diseased fish.”

  Two men on their way to a Halloween party dressed as schoolboys—only grown-ups think that it’s fun to dress up in school uniforms; young people, who have no choice in the matter, don’t think it’s fun at all—reported that a hunched shape resembling a lump of frog spawn, albeit frog spawn with arms like trumpets, was squatting on the roof of the hardware shop and “absorbing pigeons.”

  A taxi, or something that had taken the form of a taxi, stopped to pick up a young lady on Benson Road and subsequently tried to eat her. She escaped by spraying perfume into its mouth. “At least,” she told a puzzled street sweeper, “I think it was its mouth.”

  Meanwhile, in a house on Blackwood Grove, Stephanie, the babysitter so unbeloved of Samuel, heard noises coming from the wardrobe in her bedroom. She approached it warily, wondering if a mouse might have become trapped inside, but when she opened the door she saw, not a mouse, but a very long, very thick snake. A snake, oddly enough, with elephant ears.

  “Boo!” said the snake. “Er, I mean, hiss!”

  Stephanie promptly fainted. For a moment the snake looked pleased, or as pleased as a demon in the form of a snake can look, until it noticed that the girl had not been alone. There was now a large young man staring angrily into the wardrobe. The demon tried to discover some creature of which the young man was frightened in order to transform itself into the relevant animal, but the young man didn’t appear to be afraid of anything. Instead, he reached out and grabbed the demon by the neck.