by Peter Nealen
As I was levering myself up from the bike rack, slower and more painfully than I cared for, I spotted my flask in a flash of sickly green lighting overhead. It had slid into the gutter, on the other side of The Rag Man, and was in danger of being flushed down the storm drain. Even as I spotted it, it slid a couple inches in the torrent of water heading flowing down the gutter.
I was running out of time and options. My guns weren’t even annoying this thing and the Bowie barely cut it when it was physical enough to cut. And the whole time, the summoning was going forward, that leviathan in the Abyss getting closer and closer to getting loose.
Chapter 11
The next time it lashed out to try to grab me, I tried to dodge. That didn’t work out so well.
As soon as I barely ducked one ragged tentacle, four more lashed out, smashing me to the ground, then grabbing me by the ankle. It swung me into the bike rack again, and I felt a rib crack.
Wincing with the searing pain coming from my chest, I scrambled to face the thing again. I’d lost my rifle in that last impact, and searched desperately to find it without taking my eyes off that horrifying emptiness under the ragged cowl. It might not do much good against The Rag Man, but I was under no illusions that, provided I survived the next five minutes, this would be the last nasty I was going to get to face that night.
Even though it was barely four o’clock in the afternoon, make no mistake. It was night.
I risked a glance over my shoulder. The street was empty in both directions. Time for a little maneuvering. I stayed down, scrabbling backward away from The Rag Man, doing a pretty convincing job, if I do say so myself, of appearing sufficiently terrified. It didn’t take much in the way of acting, to be honest. I was able to put a little space between me and the demonic scarecrow, at the cost of some skin off my palms and a sore tailbone. As I went, I started drifting toward the middle of the street.
As I moved, and as it stalked me, I remembered another weapon in my arsenal. The one that was presently dangling from its leather thong just outside my shirt.
I got to an angle where I might be able to make a rush for it. The flask was still almost twenty feet away, and getting farther as I retreated, but I was now on the right side of the street, anyway. I hadn’t bothered to try to shoot it again. It seemed more amused than ever. Maybe it was buying the act, and thought that it was all over but the screaming.
I lunged up off the asphalt, sending lances of pain through my injured side as I did so, and tried to dash for the flask. It was ready for that.
Five iron-hard strips of spectral wrappings hammered me to the street and held me there. Not well enough, though. I was able to get one hand free, grasp the silver crucifix hanging from its thong, and pressed it against the cloth holding me.
The howl of pain and rage that slammed out of that tattered cowl almost smacked me flat. Silver fire blazed up the length of the strip I’d touched with the cross. The Rag Man staggered backward, flailing in pain. I picked myself up and made my move.
I wasn’t moving nearly as fast as I would have liked; pain and exhaustion were already starting to take their toll. But The Rag Man was preoccupied enough with the holy fire burning it that I was already within reach of the flask before it even thought of coming after me again.
I snatched up the little steel flask a heartbeat before it went down the storm drain. I turned toward The Rag Man, twisting open the cap.
It was a lot more wary now. It kept its distance, only whipping a frayed strip of wrapping at me to hit me when I got closer. It had been burned, and now it didn’t want to chance facing that again. It still wanted me dead, but it didn’t want to suffer pain or possible banishment for it.
The trouble was, I had to get close enough to hit it with the holy water before I stood a chance of weakening it enough to finish it off and send it back to the Abyss or wherever it came from. And it didn’t want to close that distance. Its blows were quick, lashing snaps of fluttering shroud that hit like freight trains before withdrawing as quickly as they’d struck.
“Well, be like that, then,” I snarled at it. “You stay out here, and I’ll go in there to do what I came here to do.”
Its head snapped up as though it had just noticed something. I’d maneuvered so that I was now between it and the center’s door.
It howled again, a deep, bone-chilling sound of pure hate. “Sucker,” I told it, and ran for the door.
It came after me, still screaming that hateful sound. The very noise of it battered me around the head, feeling like I was being punched constantly. I fought not to stagger under the assault.
It grabbed me from behind. I was ready for it; in fact I’d been banking on it. I twisted, brought up the flask, and with a loud, “In nomine Patris, et Fili, et Spiritus Sancti!” I splashed the sign of the cross on its front in holy water.
I though the screams before were brutal. The noise it made in reaction to that shattered windows. I was pretty sure I’d gone deaf there for a moment, as I fell to the pavement. I didn’t have time to lollygag. I dragged myself to my feet, leaving the flask on the ground as I leveled my Winchester. It was weakened now, writhing in pain on the ground, those same silver flames dancing around it.
“In the Name of the One in Three, Who came to free us from the tyranny of sin, I command you back into the pit you crawled out of!” I yelled over the noise of the storm as I placed the gold bead on the cowl. I pulled the trigger.
The boom was muted, my ears having been assaulted by some pretty brutal noise already. The effect was not.
With a final despairing, hate-filled howl, The Rag Man burst apart, the scraps of cloth enshrouding its spectral form dissolving into smoke.
I turned toward the center, bending to retrieve my flask and stopper it. It was still about half full.
I had the sudden, disquieting question pop into my head as I picked my Bowie up off the street and sheathed it that if The Rag Man was outside, what was inside?
The front door was locked. I tried to kick it in, and just about broke my foot. It might look like an everyday door, but it was definitely reinforced. Too bad for Mayhew that he’d picked one with a window in it. I swung my rifle butt into the glass.
It rebounded. The glass was bulletproof, apparently. Great.
Well, it wasn’t the first time I’d had to do this the hard way.
The scabbard for my Bowie was a little wider than normal. That was because I sometimes carried a short crowbar with it, for just these sorts of occasions. I happened to have made sure I had the tool before I went out into that unnatural night.
I slung my rifle and pulled out the crowbar. The door fit the frame pretty tightly, but I’d practiced a lot of door breaches when I was a Marine. I placed the crowbar right about where the deadbolt should be, put my shoulder to the wall, and pulled.
My cracked rib screamed in agony at the effort, but I didn’t dare let up. The pain was negligible compared to what would happen if Mayhew and the Shadowman succeeded.
I almost bent the crowbar, but finally the jamb cracked and I was able to wrench the door open. They’d picked a solid door, and the plate was plenty heavy, but the doorjamb was just wood. Sloppy. Shoving the crowbar back in its scabbard, I unslung my rifle, making sure to thumb several more rounds into the tube, and headed in.
If I thought the place was creepy and oppressive before, it was even worse now. All the lights were off, but there were red candles set in disturbing patterns all over the floor of the foyer. The blast of wind and rain that came in with me set the flames to fluttering, but didn’t blow them out. The air was heavy with a sour, metallic stink, and I thought I could see some of the symbols I’d seen woven into the decorations writhing in the uneven light.
The door to the back was open, and a sullen red glow was pulsing beyond it. I really didn’t want to see what was in there, but I had to do something, and I wasn’t sure that destroying the symbols out in the foyer was going to do the trick. None of them were as extensive as the demonic
murals that the Shadowman had put up at the other points of the massive glyph, so I doubted that they were much more than traps for the curious, meant to start getting in their heads after they came in and had a look around. I suspected a lot of the curious were the demented psychos running around out there tearing each other apart at the urging of the shadow snakes.
I drew my Bowie with my off hand. I wanted to be able to stick it in the floor and start shooting if something popped out at me. Before I ventured into that glow, I took care to slash every symbol-infused New Age painting on the walls into incomprehensibility. Then I sheathed the knife and headed into the lion’s den.
The glow was coming from the end of a hallway lined with modern-looking rooms, all of which were empty. The end of the hallway opened onto a staircase leading down.
It figured. The really nasty stuff would be underground, where only the chosen could see it. I’d seen the modus operandi before.
Leading with the rifle muzzle, I started down the stairs.
The basement was one large, open room. Like the foyer, it had been lined with burning red candles, except unlike the foyer, these appeared to be mounted on human skulls. In the red light I couldn’t tell if the dark runnels spread down the skulls were candle wax or blood. They might easily have been both.
Most of the light was not coming from the candles, but from the demonic, stomach-churning mural on the floor. It formed a web of shapes that were somehow abstractly disturbing and images that were not so abstract. I thought the mural in the Robinson house had been bad. This was an order of magnitude worse. I briefly took my hand off my rifle to touch the crucifix at my throat. Please, Lord, defend me from this.
There was another figure standing in the middle of the web of glowing blasphemy. At first glance, it reminded me of the Brothers that the Shadowman had sicced on us up by the Booker place. It was made up of the same oily, smoky otherness. But this thing was bigger by about a head, bipedal, and had its two arms spread wide.
It was watching me with four red, glowing eyes, which were the only features I could see. It may as well have been a silhouette.
Somehow I sensed that as bad as The Rag Man had been, this thing was even nastier. It still wasn’t the Shadowman; he had had a recognizably human shape, while this thing managed to look somehow reptilian. Its arms and legs were too long, crooked, and ended in shadowy talons that looked long enough to cut me in half.
It spoke, though not in any language I knew, nor any language I want to know. I felt a trickle from my nose that had to be blood, just before I nearly crumpled at the foot of the steps as every limb suddenly felt like it weighed a hundred pounds.
I started praying. I don’t remember what I said, but I knew that there was no way I was taking this thing on without help. It hadn’t even moved, but those red eyes were locked onto me, and it kept muttering. I didn’t know what it had up its sleeve next, but I hoped I wouldn’t have to find out.
My prayers were heard. The weight vanished from my limbs and the thing reared back as if slapped. The red eyes narrowed. It started to mutter again, and I whipped my rifle to my shoulder and fired, the litany of banishment rolling off my lips as the silver jacketed bullet slammed out of the muzzle.
Again the thing’s head snapped back. Granted, a glorified punch to the jaw was not what I was hoping for with a 300-grain silver-jacketed bullet. It snarled and started to advance on me.
I levered another round into the chamber, continuing the litany of banishment without pause, and fired again. I may as well have poked it.
Now, if this was a video game, I’d be looking for a weak spot. But how do you find a weak spot on something that isn’t innately physical in the first place? Something that has just wrapped a sort of shell around itself? Answer: you don’t.
I kept shooting as fast as I could crank the rifle’s lever. It wasn’t slowing the thing down much, but it was slowing it down. Not that it seemed to be in much of a hurry in the first place. The noise of the gunshots was deafening in the enclosed space and my ears had already been ringing.
Bringing the rifle down from recoil, I took my hand off the forearm and let the weight of the weapon drop the muzzle toward the floor, working the lever one-handed, John Wayne style, while I reached into my back pocket for the holy water flask. That stopped it.
The big shadow thing just stood there, still inside the gut-wrenching design on the floor, watching my hand with the flask. When I took a step forward, it took a step back. The bullets might just be annoying it, but it knew what was in that flask, and didn’t want anything to do with it. I sure hoped I still had enough left in it after the confrontation with The Rag Man outside. It sloshed when I shook it; it felt like it was about half-full.
I confess I got cocky at that point. Hell, I was probably essentially punch-drunk by then; I’d seen my guardian angel take on the possessed corpse of a woman whom I’d spoken to just the day before, seen people inflict horrors on each other on impulse, fought The Rag Man and survived, and that was just in the last half hour. I figured I had this thing licked.
At least I did until it spread its arms wide with a chuckle and let about four dozen shadowy spider things pop out and start scuttling toward me. My triumphant grin disappeared as a cold, heavy feeling settled in my gut.
Now I’m not especially arachnophobic, nor do bugs in general usually bother me. This was different. These weren’t bugs from this world, and they all had one thing in mind—eating me. Probably as agonizingly slowly as possible.
I only had a couple of rounds left in the rifle, and now both my hands were full. I started backing up the stairs, trying to stuff the flask back in my pocket and draw a bead on one of the little demonic critters at the same time. They were fast, and they weren’t holding still.
Ever try to fire a .45-70 one-handed? Take my advice; don’t. That hurt, and I missed anyway. Then I tripped on the steps—scrambling up stairs backwards isn’t that great an idea, either—and then they were on me.
I can’t describe the pain. Agonizing, excruciating, blinding…none of those words do it justice. I couldn’t even pray out loud; all I could do was scream as I skidded back down the stairs, sure I was dead.
The pain didn’t vanish with the spider-things, but it did subside. I lay on the floor, panting. When I got myself under enough control to look up, the shadowy thing was looming over me, an evil amusement in those four red, molten eyes.
Every fiber of my being screamed at me to run, stagger, crawl away. But I could barely move. Burning pain still stabbed through every muscle. I couldn’t avoid that dark, taloned hand that reached down for me.
It grabbed me by the ankle and dragged me into the middle of the floor. The effect of being dragged over that glowing blasphemy on the floor was rather like having a million red-hot needles stuck into every nerve ending in my body. I felt warm blood running from my nose, and the sheer twisted wrongness of it brought whatever was left in my stomach up. I was able to turn my head to get most of it out, and managed not to choke to death on my own vomit.
Somehow, I still had my hands wrapped around my rifle. I was in too much pain to tell if I’d gotten the flask back in my pocket, or lost it somewhere. But I still had the Winchester, so I shot the thing again. It might not do much, but I’d be damned if I went out without a fight.
It’s interesting, the fatalistic things that go through your head when you’re about to be torn apart by a demon. Like the fact that I’d failed; the summoning was going to go ahead, because I hadn’t been able to handle the job. Lots more people were going to die. Horror and degradation would spread from this little town. I didn’t know if this was the apocalypse—it might just be another, nastier episode in this long, long, long war. But either way, I had failed.
Then the door at the top of the stairs exploded.
I hadn’t even realized it was shut. The thing must have closed it; I didn’t know whether to keep me from escaping or anyone else from coming in after me. Not that it mattered. Even as I shot it
again, I wasn’t hurting it, and unless “Sam” had dealt with his opponent, nobody else in town had a hope in hell of saving me.
Good thing for me, the one who came through that door was new in town.
I was in too much agony to see much. All I was aware of was a flash like the sun had just blinked into the room, and a noise like the sky falling in. Then I was picked up and carried over to the stairs. The pain began to recede.
When I could focus, I saw no sign of the demon; just smoke and some oily ichor on the floor, which was still glowing. A hand was on my shoulder, and a face was hovering over me.
The figure I slowly made out was huge. He had to be six foot six if he was an inch, and at least three hundred pounds, none of it fat. His shoulders strained at his light gray shirt.
His face might have been carved out of granite, craggy and hard. He looked like a man in his prime, yet ancient beyond words at the same time. His eyes were pale.
When I met those eyes, I had a sudden image flash indelibly across my mind. It was of a gigantic figure, tall as a mountain, and wrapped in blinding light. His hair was more like a stormcloud, and lighting seemed to flicker around his eyes. Flames licked along the blade of a sword that seemed to be the size of the Sears Tower. He laughed as he strode forward against a great shadow, and the sound was like a hurricane.
I had a sudden sneaking suspicion I knew just who this was, but he didn’t give me a chance to ask questions or even do much more than catch my breath. “You’ll be all right,” he said, in a deep rumble of a voice that felt like it could rattle the building apart all by itself if he spoke loudly enough. He stood up and towered over me. That was when I saw the gigantic Walker Colt in his hand. “Now come on. We’ve got work to do.”
I picked myself up, checking that I still had everything. I’d lost the flask, which was now at the base of the steps, but my Winchester was still clutched in my hands, my Colt was still on my hip, and my bandolier was still over my shoulder. I started shoving rounds through the loading port as he led the way up the stairs.
