by Tad Williams
There is nothing quite so terrible as fleeing something that you know is more than a match for you. The helplessness, the way the strength just runs out of your limbs like sand…you feel yourself getting colder and slower by the moment. Your worst fears rise in triumph.
I didn’t bother to check on Sam-I could hear him struggling to get out on his own side. I just kicked my door open and sprinted in the direction of Beeger Square, shouldering my way through inebriated and oblivious revelers. There was no chance to look back, nor did I want to. I knew the fetch would be right behind us like a distorted, smoldering shadow, eyes narrowed to slits, mouth like a hole torn in a curtain. I knew it was only a few moments until our weak earthly flesh finally let us down.
Sam pulled abreast of me, his overcoat flapping crazily as he ran. I’d never seen him move so fast, like a big farm horse on a steep downhill slope-everything was moving at the same time, and there was no way it was going to stop by itself.
“Garage!” he gasped. He was holding something out in front of him. For a moment I thought it was a gun and that he was going to shoot some of the drunken idiots blocking our way, but it was a remote door-opener, and he was pressing that button over and over as if he were a rat left too long in a gratification experiment. We leaped and scuttled between two deserted police cars and under a wooden barrier, then sprinted down Main toward the Alhambra Building at the end. Beyond it, Beeger Square was still packed with people, and I had a momentary, nightmarish vision of leading the monstrous thing into the crowd where it would rip up all those innocent folk like a power mower going through a brood of Easter chicks.
“Driveway!” Sam shouted. He skidded into a sharp right turn and pelted down the cement ramp of the Alhambra’s garage. To my immense relief the remote had worked: the gate was open and the way clear. Even as we reached it, Sam thumbed the remote again and the gate started down.
As we scrambled through the closing gap I risked a look back and saw the ghallu reach the top of the driveway. It hesitated for a moment, visibly confused, then realized we were no longer running in front of it. It whirled and leaped down the sloping concrete after us like a giant black frog. To my immense relief it slammed against the metal gate and bounced back, then lowered itself like a cringing dog and stared at the bars with a hiss that sounded of frustration and, of all things, pain.
“The wards,” Sam said as he bent double, gasping for air. “The wards are holding him. God really does love us.”
I could no longer see out to the city lights-the ghallu was blocking the whole of the metal fence and it didn’t look like it was planning to go away. “Yeah-for how long? Come on. Let’s get upstairs.”
The monster had begun stamping and huffing its way all along the base and sides of the gate as if trying to find a weak spot in whatever charms or holy names held it at bay. Tired as I was, I still had no urge to stand in the cold lights of the garage waiting for the elevator while that unholy thing stared red murder at us, so I led Sam toward the stairs. After a few carefully selected words of disagreement, he followed.
We staggered out onto the fourth floor and down the hallway to The Compasses. A slightly faded sign next to the front door proclaimed, “Tonight-One Night Only! Gabriel and His Hot Trumpet at the Living End!” Chico’s put that sign out every day for years-somebody’s joke from way back when, now a tradition. It’s also a tradition that the front door is always open during business hours.
I ended that one.
“Hey, Dollar, what are you doing?” Chico shouted from behind the bar as I slammed the thing and threw the bolt. “We got fire regulations! The Opposition call in complaints all the time just to get us hassled-!”
“No time. Bad shit outside.” I looked around. There were only a few other people in the place: Young Elvis and Jimmy the Table camped at the bar along with Kool Filter and an angel friend of his named Teddy Nebraska who I didn’t know very well. It wasn’t quite the doomsday survival crew I would have chosen; Jimmy the Table is built along the lines of George from the Seinfeld show, and Kool looks like he’s just stepped off the Duff Breweries tour. Nebraska at least looked like he had some smarts-he was strapped and was already reaching for his piece at my announcement. I allowed myself to wonder for an idle second what he did before he became an advocate.
“What’s going on?” Chico was no slouch either; he was already digging under the bar. “What is it?”
“Demon called a ghallu. Big, hot as hell, and old,” I said. “Holy water won’t work. Silver-a little, maybe. That’s what I’m using, anyway. Beyond that I’m out of ideas.”
“Okay,” Chico said, straightening up. “Sam, you pushing silver or lead?”
“All I got’s Brand X.”
“Then catch.” Chico straightened up and lobbed Sam a pump-action Mossberg and a couple of boxes of shells. Sam caught them and started loading the magazine. Chico bent again and stood up with the ugliest-looking weapon I’ve seen in a while-a massive black shotgun with a round drum like an old-fashioned tommy gun.
“AA12,” Chico said. I think he must have been in the vengeance business too, once upon a time, but he never talks about it. Still, I hadn’t seen him this happy since the Davis verdict riots. “Automatic shottie. This will fuck some supernatural shit up.”
“Oh my God. What are you firing?”
“Silver nitrate-that’s silver salt for you lay brothers,” Chico told me with a very disturbing smile on his usually stoic Aztec face. “Gonna spread some pain.”
His own gun now loaded, Sam had started tipping over freestanding tables and shoving them against The Compasses’ front door. I ran to help him. At just that moment Monica came out of the ladies’ room with Annie Pilgrim, another co-worker I hadn’t seen much of late. For just the barest microsecond I wondered whether they been double-dating with Kool and Nebraska. And then I thought, Who the hell cares?
Monica’s eyes went very wide as they turned from Chico and his monstrous gun to me. “Bobby, what are…?”
“That ghallu thing that was after me? It’s outside trying to sniff its way through the wards. Any idea how strong they are?” Monica was our unofficial historian and knew a lot more about the Alhambra Building than I did.
“Strong.” She thought about it for a moment. “Does it fly?”
“The ghallu? Not as far as I’ve ever seen, but it sure can run-why?”
“Because the wards are strongest around the base of the building, of course, on the doors and windows on the ground floor.” She frowned, thinking. “And I’m pretty sure the roof is warded as well. But I’m not so certain about everything else.”
“What does that mean?” Suddenly I had a cold, cold feeling around my heart. “Monica, that thing can jump like a flea-a giant, two-thousand-degrees-hot, man-eating flea.”
“Push!” Sam shouted at me. We had almost completely buried the front door behind a pile of tables eight-feet high. It might not keep the ghallu out for long but it would keep it exposed as it smashed its way through-enough time for Chico and Sam and me to put a bunch of silver in it, anyway.
“It’s just that I’m not so certain about the upstairs windows…” was all Monica had time to say before the lights suddenly went out, and something huge came through the big glass rectangle behind us like a runaway jet plane, spraying glass and bricks everywhere, its blackness big enough to obliterate the very stars of the sky.
twenty
wards and wheels
Once again I was stuck in a dark room with guns booming all around me. At least this time I wasn’t the one being shot at.
Chico rested his front grip on the top of the bar and hosed down the hulking shadow that had come through the window, his gun on deafening full auto, strobing the darkness with muzzle flare. Beside me Sam fired the Mossberg slowly and methodically, trying to put as much of each load into the target as possible. I could hear Teddy Nebraska and Annie and Monica and Jimmy yelling, but the guns made too much noise for me to understand what they were saying. I’m
guessing it was something on the order of “Oh, shit, what is that?”
The ghallu didn’t like Chico’s silver nitrate at all, which was probably all that was keeping us alive. Like rock salt from a farmer’s old bird gun it clearly stung more than it wounded, but from the howling and thrashing of the ghallu it stung a lot. How much it disliked the silver salt became clear a second later when it leaped right past me and bashed a smoking hole in the middle of The Compasses’ ancient mahogany bar in an attempt to get Chico. I didn’t see what happened to the bartender after he dove to the side but for at least the moment his weapon had been silenced.
“Annie, follow me!” Monica shouted as the ghallu dug through the wreckage of the bar like some monster badger trying to claw its prey out of the earth. I didn’t know what Monica was up to-running for her life, I hoped-but I needed to cover her, so I stepped forward with my revolver leveled, and as the thing turned its nasty, inhuman mask of a face toward the running women I started firing. The fetch swatted at the flashes and reared back from what I presume was the annoying pitter-patter of my little silver bullets on its skin. I hit an empty chamber and dove to one side to avoid being skewered by a spike of shattered bartop the size of a surfboard that the ghallu flung at me. I was seriously rethinking my little five-shot Smith amp; Wesson, which emptied in seconds. I hadn’t been forced into this kind of military rate of fire in a very long while, but right now I wished I had something with a more generous magazine. Like maybe a silver-throwing antiaircraft gun.
Sam had dug his way backward into the mound of chairs and desks we had stacked, which were now blocking our only exit, and from this improvised defensive position was laying down fire as fast as he could pump the Mossberg. I knew Chico had only tossed him a couple of boxes of shells, so he was going to run out soon. On the other side of the bar, and true to his name, Jimmy had turned over a table and he and Nebraska and Kool were barricaded behind it in one of the booths. I figured they were probably firing plain old lead, but even the ghallu still had to be made out of some kind of flesh and blood, since it was here on Earth vigorously breaking things: a shitload of regular bullets couldn’t hurt our cause any and might do some good as an annoyance. Young Elvis lay in a well-coiffed heap behind them, knocked silly by a piece of flying debris, but there was no sign of Monica and Annie in the main room, which made me feel a little better-maybe they would survive this unholy clusterfuck to tell everybody else what had happened. Then I could hope that somewhere up the line someone might pay Eligor back for letting his monstrous servant rip up The Compasses. I mean, the place was practically a sovereign embassy…!
The monster tore away chunks of the bar now, trying to get to Chico and his semi-automatic shotgun as the bartender fired the AA12 in ear-splitting drumrolls. Sam straightened up in his improvised blind and began peppering the creature’s back to distract it from killing Chico. He did his job well enough that the thing decided to do something about Sam instead.
The ghallu turned with a roar I felt as much as heard, a burst of pressure and heat that smelled like boiling sewage, then it flung a huge broken slab of the heavy mahogany bar at Sam. It hit like a missile and sent most of the tables flying as if they were bowling pins, silencing my buddy and his Mossberg. The impact knocked me down as well, and I knew I’d be limping later when the adrenaline faded. Before I could go help Sam the ghallu leaped toward the spot and began digging through the wreckage, roaring like a Harley that had lost its muffler. Even from a few feet away I could feel the heat radiating from it as if it were a dark sun. Worried that Sam might be unconscious and unable to defend himself, I stood up and gave the ugly bastard the rest of my silver rounds right in the side of its inhuman head. As my hammer fell on the last shell, and the flash of light caught that dreadful half-face turning toward me, twisted with near-mindless rage, I suddenly realized that we had this whole thing wrong: Sam and I had come here for the safety of the wards, but whatever Heaven had devised to protect The Compasses had come up short against this ancient hobgoblin. The bar was no longer a place of refuge, it was a trap with no way out but a fifty-foot drop or a deadly bottleneck in the stairway or the elevator.
More importantly, though, the monster was after me, not Sam or any of the others, so if they couldn’t help me kill it-and if Chico’s awesome silver-salt machine gun wasn’t going to do it, nothing else would-then I needed to get out. Otherwise my friends would die too, and what would be the point of that?
Of course, this was all completely academic because the ghallu had just refocused itself on me, a soft squishy thing with an empty revolver, standing only a couple of yards away. It dropped the shattered table it had just lifted, then sprang toward me like a cat on a lame mouse.
A stream of water smashed into the ghallu and knocked the thing stumbling to one side. It soaked me too but I hardly noticed that. The creature bellowed in anger and-hallelujah! — serious pain, enveloped in clouds of hissing, billowing steam. Police spotlights were now shining through the broken window from the street below, but even by their glare all I could see of our attacker was a writhing, black shape, a shadow within a shadow.
Monica and Annie Pilgrim stood in the doorway of the hall leading to the restroom, struggling to aim a giant fire hose as if they were wrestling a live anaconda, hammering away at the demon with something like a hundred pounds of water per square inch. The steam clouds were getting thicker and thicker but the creature hadn’t lost its footing and, in fact, appeared to be wading against the thunderous flow of the hose toward the source.
It had been a wonderful idea but it wasn’t enough water to completely cool the creature, or even enough force to slow it down very much. It was enough, however, to give me a single desperate idea and the chance to operate on it. As the room slowly turned into a boiling hot sauna, and the monster bellowed and gurgled and fought back against the hose, I leaped over the bar and dug through the wreckage until I found the bar hoses for soda water and tonic. I ripped off the nearest one, faucet and all, then crawled through the wreckage to the wall, feeling with my hands until I found a heavy extension cord, which I pulled loose from the socket. I could hear Chico groaning somewhere in the rubble.
“Chico?” I called. “You okay, man?”
“Some broken ribs, I think. I need to reload but I can’t find the rest of the fucking shells!”
“I’m getting out of here-I think it’ll follow me if I do.” I jammed the siphon hose into my belt, grabbed the extension cord, then straightened up and sloshed as quickly as I could past the splashing, thrashing giant and toward the shattered window. I was almost blinded by the thick clouds of steam, but fortunately so was the ghallu, and I managed to slither past just beyond its reach. The water around my ankles was already getting uncomfortably warm from the demon’s heat as I reached the jukebox and looped the extension cord around it, keeping an end in each hand like a logger climbing a big tree. It was almost certainly too far down to the street to jump without breaking an ankle-our angel bodies are tough but not magically invulnerable-but I was hoping to lessen the distance with this little trick. I climbed onto the window sill, kicking long slivers of glass out of the frame, then when the creature’s angry bellowing quieted for a moment I shouted, “Monica-take the hose off it!”
“Are you crazy?”
“Trust me!”
The stream of water shifted to the side and the ghallu straightened. For an instant I could see something of what it looked like undistorted by heat, its skin dark, knotted and shiny, like something out of one of Billy Blake’s most apocalyptic etchings. The pressure suddenly gone, the ghallu actually stumbled; before it could regain its balance and go after the two female angels who had made it so angry, I bellowed as loud as I could, “Hey, you! Yeah, you-big, hot and stupid!”
As the steaming thing turned toward me, I leaped off the window backward, one end of the heavy-duty extension cord in each hand like a giant jump rope. I had a moment of freefall, then a painful jounce that almost yanked my arms out of their s
ockets. I didn’t have long to suffer, though: my weight on the loop of electrical cord tipped the juke box over, a result I hadn’t expected, so instead of having a moment to ready myself for the rest of the drop I simply bounced once in midair and then kept falling.
I hit the ground with a painful jolt to both legs, but did my best to parachute-roll and disperse the force. As I lay panting on the ground feeling for anything interesting like compound fractures, I saw the ghallu staring down from the shattered window above me, haloed in the water from the hose that Annie and Monica had trained on it once more. The thing stood almost motionless despite all that pressure, looking for me…or sniffing for me. Police officers and firefighters were all over the sidewalk and street around me, clearly called in on what they thought was some kind of armed robbery of the Alhambra Building gone very wrong-another reason I had to get the monster away quickly, before it massacred them all. I rolled over, scrambled to my feet, and ran limping away from the flashing lights into Beeger Square with people yelling after me and a few policemen even trying to catch me.
That wasn’t going to happen.
As I reached the middle of the square I heard the first startled screams from the late-night crowds, and I knew the ghallu was after me again. That was one less thing to feel bad about-at least I was taking it away from my friends-but if the next part of my hasty plan didn’t work, I definitely wasn’t going to make it to Ash Wednesday this year.
A couple of teenagers riding double on a motorcycle almost knocked me over in their hurry to escape the square, self-selecting themselves as key ingredients in Part Two of my plan: I knew that if I didn’t get back into some kind of vehicle I wasn’t even going to make it to the far side of the plaza before the demon pulled all my bits off. I ran after the motorcycle kids and caught them in a few strides. I yanked the one in the back off his seat, then jumped up behind the driver and, before he realized quite what was going on, lifted him up and tossed him over too. I leaned down over the handlebars and fumbled the bike into second gear-it was a newish Yamaha, and I hadn’t ridden one in a while-then yelled back at its driver where he lay on the ground, “Tell me you got insurance. You do, right?”
