Looking at the petrified wood in his hands, Will twitched his lips sideways, consumed by doubt. “It might snap the rod in two.”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
Will clutched the knobby end of the staff, projecting the point toward the wall.
“Not that way, Mr. Wilder,” a voice bellowed behind him. It was Tobias Shen, who had just stepped into the hallway followed by Aunt Lucille, Bartimaeus, and Leo. “Turn it around. Your great-grandfather broke through stone using the thick end. Of course, he used Moses’s staff, but…hit the figure on the wall there. Be very, very gentle.”
Will flipped the rod around and pressed the thick end to the Amon carving. The entire stick began to radiate with dim amber light.
“Now shove it at the wall firmly, but not in anger,” Shen instructed.
Will shot Tobias an irritated look, but since everybody was watching, followed directions. In his hands, the staff vibrated like the power drill his dad used to repair the deck or build Boy Scout projects with him. The staff pulsated and under its own power, punched through the image of Amon. It actually penetrated the wall.
Will swallowed hard, turning to Shen. “Should I pull it out?”
“Keep hold of it and be still,” Tobias advised.
From the staff, cracks like black thunderbolts started moving in all directions along the face of the wall. Everyone, including the abbot, stepped back.
“Wait.” Will worriedly looked over his shoulder. “Why are you all backing up?”
“Because the wall is coming down,” the abbot said flatly.
“Uh, I kind of figured that out!” Will said, still holding the amber rod.
In the detached voice he used when he was sensing something out of the ordinary, Bartimaeus started to speak. “When you see what’s on the other side of that wall, ya might want to back up too. That is one baaad dude in there.”
The velocity of the traveling cracks made the wall look like a mosaic.
“Mr. Wilder, it is time to pull the staff out,” Shen said, pushing Lucille, Leo, and Bart back into the room where they had entered.
Will yanked the staff from the wall and ran to join the abbot. Chunks of sandstone, starting from the hole in the middle, crumbled away, filling the corridor with debris and dust. Soon the whole wall had collapsed.
Will grabbed an unlit torch from a stand in the hallway. He touched it to the flame on the abbot’s candle and ventured through the thick haze into the crimson red chamber. Squat columns hugged the circular walls. In the smoggy firelight, Will detected a figure, its back to him, sitting at an ancient bronze table. A rapid snapping sound, like castanets clicking, was the only thing he could hear. Then silence. An awful eerie silence. The click, click, clicking resonated once more. Will slowly approached the table. It was littered with mostly geese carcasses and bones, as was the floor.
The figure eating at the table wore off-white linen and had a familiar dark tangle of wiry, shoulder-length hair.
“You came at feeding time,” the airy voice of Ann Hye said without turning around. “Aren’t you lucky.”
At that moment, from the table and the floor, all the dead geese and fowl sat up, honking loudly at Will. Their cries and hisses were shrill and unnatural.
This could be a problem!
He instinctively fled the room to the safety of the hall.
The abbot caught Will by the arm. “What did you see? You can stay out here. Just tell me where to go and I’ll confront it.”
Aunt Lucille stuck her head out from the side room. “You know you can’t do that, Athanasius. The prophecy was very clear: Will has to face the demon alone with the Staff of Aaron.”
The abbot reluctantly agreed with her. “What was the line in the prophecy about silence?” he asked Will and Lucille.
“Silence and trust shall be his strength,” Lucille said as Will mouthed the last words along with her. The abrasive hissing and honks echoed in the hallway.
Athanasius placed a long hand on Will’s helmet. “Remember what you did on the Purgatorial Course. Guard your thoughts, permit no anger in, and remain silent. Move quickly and take back Moses’s staff.” The abbot’s voice fell into a harsh whisper. “Do not converse with the demon.”
“What do I do if it comes at me? It supposedly spits fire! My great-grandfather said it—”
“TRUST. Trust in the grace you’ve been given. Improvise the rest. What you do in that room is less important than the state of your heart when you do it.” He clapped Will on the shoulders. “Call me once the demon is restrained and I’ll finish it off.”
Will took a deep breath and nodded sharply. Carrying the torch and the staff, he stepped over the broken wall and into the smoke-filled chamber. It was chilly inside, more like a walk-in freezer than a stone room. Will tossed the torch to the middle of the floor and held the staff with two hands, like a lance. The geese and macaws fell silent, appearing lifeless once more.
A shadowy figure familiar to him stood facing the far wall. Ann Hye threw a gnawed, bloody goose onto the table before her. In the torchlight, Will realized she no longer had hands but gargantuan gray paws with dirty talons.
“Isn’t it interesting…I told you Mr. Bobbit lied. Yet you believed him over me. He knew me all too well, Will Wilder. My spirit was in him. Oh, the time I spent with that cruel, cruel man,” Ann said, her voice darkening into a low growl. “AND STILL HE TOOK MY PRECIOUS GEESE. THEY WERE NOT HIS TO TAKE. HE DARED TO FOUL MY OFFERING—AS YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS HAVE!”
The table and its contents flew into the air and collided with the metal door on the far wall. Pained, ghostly honks and hisses rang out in the chamber.
Will breathed hard but did not move.
“I know why you’ve come, silly boy.” Ann’s high musical voice was back. “You want this, don’t you, Will Wilder?” A gray paw held out the Staff of Moses, tapping it on the floor. “Well, do you want it or not? You can tell us.” There was no sound. Will wrestled with whether to lunge for the staff or ask the demon for it. He finally opted to shut his mouth and stay put.
“If you want the staff, Will, you can have it.” Ann lifted the sapphire rod above her head. “Or rather, it can have you.” She threw the staff to the ground and retreated behind a shadowy column near the ruined table.
Will was too busy tracking Ann to notice that Moses’s staff had started to squirm and balloon on the flagstones. He reached for it, but as he bent down, the expanding face of a blue snake, big as an elephant, rushed at him.
In self-defense, he cast Aaron’s staff to the ground and hid behind the nearest column. From the rod rose an amber snake larger than the blue serpent filling half the chamber. The two snakes reared back and sprang at one another. The yellow one, defying gravity, slithered along the ceiling to avoid the blue snake’s fangs, which struck the wall. Will tried to stay off the battlefield in the shelter of a pillar. All the while, he worried that Amon might attack him from the side.
Lucille and the abbot craned their necks for a view of the snakes flipping and flailing, striking at one another in the next chamber.
“Aunt Lucille.” It was Leo, tugging at the side of her jacket. “I need to go to the bathroom.”
She glanced away from the battling serpents for a millisecond. “You’ll have to wait, dear. I don’t even know where the facilities are.”
“I don’t need a facility. I need a toilet,” he said, scowling.
Aunt Lucille ignored him, returning her attention to the action. The blue snake’s fangs were sunk deep into the floor opposite Will. It writhed to extract itself from the flagstones. That’s when the yellow snake coiled itself around the blue one. Disengaging its jaws, it began to swallow the blue snake whole, from the tail up.
The amber tail, with a rock-hard tip, wriggled near Will. Without hesitation, he clutched the snake’s tail just as it consumed the blue viper. Instantaneously, the great serpent trembled and started to shrink. The scaled body was absorbed into a single emerald st
aff webbed with blue fissures. Will gripped the newly combined rods in amazement.
“Abbot, I’ve got it—I mean them. I have the staffs,” he called out toward the hallway.
“They’ve all lied to you, Will Wilder,” Ann Hye said in a reverberating sweet tone. She remained hidden by a column. “Did they tell you that those staffs would stop me? It’s not true. They sent you here as a sacrifice. Athanasius and Lucille knew that only a healthy offering would satiate me. You must be it.”
“I don’t believe you,” Will sputtered without thinking.
Ann came out from behind the column, her hair shielding her face from Will’s glance. “Thank you for talking, Will. The truth can be upsetting. But you know I speak the truth, don’t you?”
Will angrily shook his head, the luminous staff at the ready.
Ann edged closer to him, her arms behind her back. “What did I tell you when we first met? Oh, I remember.” A gray hairy arm shot up, one paw pointing to the sky. “If you only see the outside, you miss a great deal.” The paw pulled back her weedy black hair to reveal a hideous raven’s face. Shiny, coal-black eyes glared at Will and a sharp yellow beak stuffed with rows of serrated teeth snapped. Ann then jiggled the rats’ nest atop her head, and it transformed into sleek black feathers. In the smoldering torchlight, she seemed to grow larger as she advanced on him. The wolfish arms and chest, covered in filthy gray hair, swelled with each step. And then inexplicably, her two paws hit the ground and her legs disappeared. From beneath the torn linen around her midsection, the gray-green tail of an immense serpent emerged.
Undulating slightly on its massive tail, the monstrosity stood upright and roared in a deep voice, “Jacob Wilder had that same expression when I came for him. They told him lies as well. Told him he could restrain me. HAAAAAAA. As long as there is anger in the world and willing servants, Amon will never be restrained.”
The demon had gotten too close to him. Will had to move. In an awkward somersault, he flipped past the beast and ducked behind a column.
“Oh, you are playful. I like games,” Amon said, wriggling around. “Let’s try one in the dark.” The beast raised its tail and smothered the torchlight in the center of the room. “I can feel your fear, Will Wilder. Or is that your rage?”
Will could hear its talons scraping across the floor and the scuff of its slithering tail as the demon moved. He used the sound to help him locate new hiding spots. At one point, the tail slid only inches from where he stood.
“William, are you all right?” the abbot yelled into the chamber.
“GO ON, ANSWER HIM!” the demon fumed.
Will said nothing.
“William?” the abbot called again.
“Why don’t we turn the light up,” the demon said. A flame spewed from the open beak of the creature. It shot upward, setting the edges of the ceiling aflame. “Ah, that’s better,” it said.
From his hiding place, Will could see the abbot approaching the room. He silently motioned him back. But Athanasius had already started mounting the rubble.
“There will be no assistance! Each one faces us alone,” Amon raged. At the demon’s command, broken sandstone hurtled down the hall, colliding into the staircase behind the abbot. Athanasius ducked into the side room with the others just in time to avoid the airborne avalanche of debris.
“Now where is my little Seer?” The demon spun in a circle, the huge raven head poking behind the pillars. “I’ll flatten every wall and post in this building to find you, Wilder.” The serpent’s tail crushed a column it imagined Will to be hiding behind. “Show yourself, Jacob—AAAH—Will!”
Will stood in the rear of the room near the mangled table and the sealed metal door. His shoulders pressed against a column, he knew he had to move quickly toward the entryway. With the fire spreading across the ceiling, it was his only path to safety. While the demon searched behind the columns on the left side of the room, Will ran along the opposite wall.
Amon caught sight of him and spat clumps of flame in rapid succession. But Will moved so fast the fireballs missed him. On the run, he concluded that if silence and trust were his great weapons, he would deploy them in the main doorway. Pointing the fused staffs at the beast, he would stand his ground and trust that the One who fashioned them, who gave them their powers, would know how to stop this evil creature.
“WHERE ARE YOU, WILDER?” the demon fumed. “We will consume you as we once devoured your great-grandfather. Did your daddy or Athanasius or Aunt Lucille ever tell you that? That even the great Jacob Wilder fell? Oh, how they’ve lied to you, boy. They all knew what awaited you—and still they sent you in here to die like the others.”
Questions, anger, doubts clouded Will’s mind. Did my great-grandfather die at the hands of a demon? How could he have written so much about the Sinestri if they killed him? Maybe he died like this: alone with nothing between him and a demon but a stick. He forcefully banished the thoughts from his head and focused on his mission: face the enemy with silence and trust. Nothing else.
He stepped into the middle of the entryway, his back to the hall, and took a wide stance. His radiant staff pointed directly at Amon.
The demon slid down the center of the room toward the boy, flaming bits of the ceiling falling around him. “No, Jacob had no staff when he faced us, but it would have done him as little good as it will do you. Resign yourself to the fate of your ancestors. This is the time of the Sinestri, Will Wilder. Give us the stick and submit. Without you the Brethren will be—”
The beady eyes of the beast dilated as a surging emerald beam from the staff struck its body. Its tail decomposed before Will’s eyes. The wolfish arms and torso flailed on the ground. Its raven head thrashed about in hatred, cursing and squawking. Minutes later the glow of the staff dimmed and Amon lay moaning in the middle of the chamber.
“Abbot? Abbot?” Will called over his shoulder.
A wary Athanasius bounded over the stones in the hallway and ran into the chamber. “Where is it?” the abbot asked, studying the room.
“It’s there.” Will pointed to a spot near the middle of the room, though the abbot saw only a wobbling goose carcass, bruised fruit, and cascading ceiling embers hitting the floor.
Trusting Will’s sight, Athanasius laid a purple sash over his shoulders, which he only wore during major exorcisms. He pressed his index fingers and thumbs together and projected the wispy blue rays Will had witnessed earlier. Amon cried in anguish under the punishment of the beams and the forceful words spilling from the abbot’s mouth. It finally yelped mournfully as if finishing an argument, “Amon. AMON! Are you happy now, Athanasius? We are AMON!” With those words, a black hole opened up in the center of the creature and it collapsed in on itself. Amon was no more. Within seconds, the coldness in the room lifted and only the crackle of the burning ceiling could be heard.
Aunt Lucille and Tobias watched from the hallway. “You’d both better get in here before that ceiling falls in. I know what that’s like and it isn’t pleasant,” she said, massaging her wrist. Will and the abbot heeded her warning.
“Aunt Lucille!” Leo groused, popping out of the side room. A hand on a hip, his lips in full pucker, he asked, “Can I use the bathroom now?”
The fire set by Amon destroyed everything but the Karnak Center foundations. Tobias and the abbot managed to pull Valens from the blaze, but the floor gave way before they could reach Pothinus Sab. Had Sab remained against the wall of the inner sanctum, where they left him, he might have survived. But the self-help guru awakened at some point and crawled toward the statue of Amon. The weight of the stone figure dragged him into the inferno created, ironically, by the beast he worshipped to the very end.
For his role in the Sab affair and for stealing artifacts from the museum, Valens was sentenced to a long prison term. By a unanimous vote, the Brethren expelled him from the community. Still Athanasius and occasionally Aunt Lucille would visit him in jail, offering their support and prayers. Valens was remorseful an
d eagerly talked about returning to Peniel someday. But not even Lucille could ever see that happening.
Days after his confrontation with Amon, Will still wrestled with questions seared into his mind by the demon. Once sunshine returned and the strange wildlife had fully receded from Perilous Falls, Will stopped by Peniel to seek the answers only Aunt Lucille could provide.
Hard at work in the depths of the museum, Lucille had just locked some artifacts in the vault when Will located her. He shadowed her upstairs to Jacob Wilder’s office like an unfed, eager puppy.
“I need to know what happened to my great-grandfather,” Will insisted.
“It’s a complicated story. Why so curious all of a sudden, dear?” Lucille asked, opening the elaborate door of the office.
“Shouldn’t I know what happened?” The clinks and clamor of the great door unlatching nearly drowned out his voice.
Aunt Lucille briskly stepped into the office, Will in pursuit. “I don’t have all the answers, Will. There are some things…” She fluttered her eyelids, running her fingers through the strawberry-blond curls on the back of her head. “You’re not prepared to hear all of that history.”
“I already know it,” Will said, throwing himself into the chair in front of the desk, his eyes steady. “The demon told me.”
Lucille laughed lightly, sitting in her father’s high-backed leather chair. “Well, that’s hardly a reliable source. You know how they distort and deceive—”
“He was devoured by the Sinestri. A demon killed him.”
Aunt Lucille’s face turned crimson. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Are you lying to me?” Will asked, laying his hands flat on the desk. “The demon said you were lying—and I think you might be.”
She leaned over the desktop. “Listen to the Sinestri long enough and you won’t be able to distinguish truth from lies. You have no idea how my father perished and neither does that demon.”
“Were you afraid that I wouldn’t help the Brethren if I knew that demons killed him?”
Will Wilder #2 Page 23
