Brethren
Page 17
"Come no closer or I'll destroy you. I'll send you back in tiny pieces to whatever hellish bog you crawled from. Leave this world and live. Stay and I'll rend you limb from limb."
The air in the room seemed heavy and waterlogged. Alex felt herself sinking below the surface. Not only was the speech outdated and odd, the voice was not even Jason's. It was deeper, with a European brogue. Chills scampered down her backbone and arms.
"Beast of hell," Jason shouted. "You will not reside in this world. The Medlockes shall see to that. Do your worst. We shall overcome."
Another speech, another voice. What's going on here? Alex asked herself. What kind of dream is he having?
"Jason, Jason, wake up," she called out. "You're having a nightmare."
He didn't acknowledge her and she started to approach him, deciding a good shaking might wake him up. God knows she didn't want to hear any more of this. She was within a couple of feet of him when Jason cried out again.
"You must be a real embarrassment to your family," he said. "What does it take to get through that malformed head of yours that you're a loser?"
As he finished the last sentence, Jason sagged to his knees. His head slumped forward until his chin rested on his chest and his arms sank to the floor, hands rolled up like a monkey's paws.
The sudden collapse alarmed Alex. She could see he still was breathing, but he looked comatose. She rushed forward to make sure he was okay.
She never made it.
From all corners of the room a roaring began, a trumpeting bedlam that made the hairs on her neck stand up and her blood flow cold as marble. Jason groaned but did not awaken.
The roar grew in volume and Alex threw her hands over her ears. The walls shook, the windows rattled in their frames. She could feel the basso profundo thunder making her organs tremble.
She looked around the room, trying to find the source of the sound. But it came from nowhere, everywhere. Under the sofa, on the ceiling, behind the door, outside the window.
As the roaring continued, the room became bitterly cold. Alex's breath came in clouds and her skin burned in the freeze. Tendrils of ice crept across the windowpanes. With the dropping temperature, a foul odor rose, causing her to gag. It was the smell of wickedness, age-old and unforgiving.
Then the roar changed from a mindless, keening din to a single word.
"Meeeeeedlooooocke."
All the hate and evil of the universe was contained in the utterance of that name, as if the speaker wanted to tear it from the fabric of reality and smash it into a thousand pieces. There was nothing human about the voice, nothing merciful. It seemed envious and jealous of mankind, as if humans grasped a prize forever out of its reach.
Bathed in these horrifying emotions, Alex felt the room swimming out of control. Yet just as she thought terror had reached its zenith, just as her sanity appeared ready to tear loose from it moorings and sink into the pit of lunacy, things got worse.
In the far corner of the room, near the ceiling, a greenish glow began to ooze. It spread across the ceiling and down the walls like a massive amoeba. Even in her horror-stricken state, Alex thought of a can of paint tossed into the corner then allowed to drip.
Mesmerized, she stared at the center of the glow and watched with dread as a form began to take shape. The outline of a head appeared, a head unlike any human. While the rest of the head remained wispy and vague, two burning silver eyes opened in the middle. They glared at Jason.
"Medlocke, I'm here," the eyes hissed.
Alex's thoughts spun and she wanted to faint. But her mind wouldn't give her the relief. Instead, her knees gave out and she sat back heavily on the edge of the sofa, her hands spreading out behind her to keep her steady. She groaned loudly and the eyes turned toward her. Hate hit her in a wave. She wanted to scream, but couldn't. Fingers of terror wrapped around her throat in a vise.
Inside the cloud, a bloodthirsty smile spread across the face and a chuckle danced about the room. An arm of greenish-white mucus emerged from the glow and snaked toward the couch. Alex sat petrified, her eyes dry and scratchy from not blinking.
If this is a dream, please, please let me wake up, she prayed. Please, please, please.
When the tendril was two feet from her face, it began to mutate, to blossom. A hand sprang from the end, a huge hand with long fingers. Double-bladed nails split through the skin at the fingertips, emerging with a sucking, ripping sound. Black blood dripped to the carpet. The fingers became longer and longer as they edged toward Alex's throat.
I'm going to die, she realized. It's going to kill me and I don't even know what it is.
The knowledge snapped her out of her paralysis. Like a cornered animal, she flung herself backward, away from the hand, scrambling down the sofa until her back crashed into the lamp on the end table. She continued to push backward until her spine rested against the wall.
Still the hand came on, the fingers curling and uncurling, nails hungry for flesh.
Alex searched desperately for a weapon, but the only thing within reach was a sofa pillow. She grabbed it with both hands and swung it, every muscle in her body behind the effort. When pillow and hand met, the room erupted with a blaze of white light. The pillow exploded, throwing Alex against the wall, the back of her head crashing into it with brain-jarring force. Green sparks flew about the room, bouncing off the walls and landing with small sizzles on the carpet. Alex wasn't sure if they were real or just the products of her rattled brain. But the tiny, hard pieces of debris that hurtled into her face were definitely real. Ice. The pillow had exploded into chunks of ice.
"You'll have to do better than that," she heard a voice say. "You aren't at a slumber party and this isn't a pillow fight."
Two more tendrils snaked out from the cloud, surrounding Alex on both sides, corralling her to the end of the sofa. She had nowhere to go.
The muteness that locked her throat vanished.
"Jaaaaaasoooon," she screamed.
In the corner, Jason raised his head and blinked several times. Confusion registered on his face. What was he doing in the corner? Why was his head so fuzzy? Where was Sarah?
He turned his head toward the couch and a glacier flowed into his stomach. Dear Jesus. Alex. Alex. He saw the blazing silver eyes and a tiny spark burst to life within him. He saw the hand reaching for Alex's throat and the spark became a flame.
"Stop," Jason said softly. The eyes swiveled his way and the hands edging toward Alex stopped. Cackling laughter reverberated off the walls and he felt malice unburdened by conscience cascading over him.
Yet he felt no fear. Instead, as the hatred of the eyes slammed into him, the flame inside him erupted into a bonfire. He felt a hate of equal intensity burning a hole in him. Hate and something else. Righteous indignation. How dare this thing attack him? How dare it threaten the woman he loved?
Anger swelled, violent electricity burned in his veins. It was a madness demanding to be released or his body would rip apart with the depth of his emotions. He felt his body tremble and his eyes rolled up in his head.
Inside the green cloud, the eyes tightened with a look of puzzlement. A flash of uncertainty swept briefly across them.
Still sitting on his knees, Jason brought his hands up over his head and crossed them at the wrist He threw his head back, splitting the air with a deep-throated cry.
Alex felt warm wind blow across her hair. Then the wind turned into a gale. The curtains bucked and danced, standing at right angles to the walls, blown sideways by the cyclone. Although deathly afraid of taking her eyes off the hands, she was unable to control herself and cut her gaze in Jason's direction. Her mouth gaped.
Jason sat within a golden, spinning vortex. The cone spun in a rainbow, throwing off streams of red, purple, orange, and yellow. Sparks flashed in the swirling light. From inside, Jason brought down his hands and opened his eyes. Alex gasped again. There was no white to his eyes, no iris, no pupil, only a blue-white radiance raging in the sockets.
A howl erupted from the green glow as blood sprayed the room, splattering the walls, the furniture, and Alex with its hot drops. She cried out as the thick liquid burned her skin.
Jason fired again and two more bolts tore into arms, slicing their way upward, splitting them with a clothlike tearing sound. The golden light spewed from the arm into the cloud, tinting its green with a pure, gilded glow.
Shades of green and gold rolled and tumbled inside the vapor. The edges bulged as the combatants struggled for domination. With a Herculean groan, a split opened in the side of the cloud and a bolt of radium green crashed into the cone of light surrounding Jason. The cone held, but the strength of the attack threw Jason off balance and he stumbled into the wall.
From the tear in the fog, another hand emerged, palm up, holding a dripping mass of golden sludge. The hand tightened into a fist and the golden mass oozed between the fingers, falling to the carpet in globs. The silver eyes flamed with renewed hatred.
"Good, Medlocke, very good," the voice said. "But you're going to have to do better. I may have underestimated you this time, but I won't again."
The cloud began retreating into the wall like a film in slow-motion reverse. The eyes were the last to go, their malevolence flaring until the final second. When the fog finally vanished, the frigid cold and odor disappeared along with it.
Alex let out a moan and fell forward. She lay on the sofa, her mouth slack and her eyes blank. She looked at Jason and her eyes widened. The cone of gold was slowly dissipating, being absorbed back into his body.
Jason stood motionless, leaning against the wall. His breath came in short gasps. He didn't think he could move. He didn't know if he wanted to move. His brain was unable to accept what had just taken place, what he had done. He felt as if he were standing outside himself, staring at a man he didn't even know and was pretty sure he didn't want to meet.
His hands hung at his sides, clenched into tight fists. As he drifted back to reality, he felt something jabbing into the palm of his right hand and slowly opened his fingers. The disappearing ball trick lay in his palm. A slight golden glow surrounded it.
"I think I'd better call my father," he said.
Chapter 21
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The wind blew cold across the barren wasteland, a gritty wind pushing grains of sand and slivers of ice in its path. To be hit by it was to be nearly flayed alive.
The sun—what little there was—fought its way through layers of dense clouds. Only the barest trace of warmth made it to the ground. Few things grew, only tall, yellow thrush grass and stunted bushes whose blighted, brown leaves made the land seem even worse because they hinted at what might have been.
The land was livened mostly by occasional shades of rust-red iron and splotches of yellow where sulfur rose to the surface. But at the eastern horizon, a line of fire hundreds of miles long burned continuously, turning the low-hanging clouds a bright orange. The fires were disgorged from the land's deepest recesses, flames that destroyed the world at its core, yet never died, never diminished.
On the western horizon rose the peaks of a huge, primeval mountain range, cutting off the land like a fortress wall. Several pinnacles towered more than thirty thousand feet, their tips lost in the grimy clouds. The peaks that could be seen were covered with murky, dun-colored snow.
Every so often, a reptilian bird soared across the purple-gray sky, emitting a skittering screech as it looked for its food, which mainly consisted of the tiny lizards that scurried over the sand and rock. The birds neither knew nor cared that the lizards were close cousins, only a few million years further down the evolutionary ladder.
Neither did the birds notice the rock-hewn structure sitting at the edge of the wasteland. It was the only building as far as any eye could see, yet it blended almost perfectly with the surroundings. It sat at the entrance to a dead riverbed, off to one side to avoid the wind which picked up speed as it rushed between the narrow rock walls.
The building was hardly more than a hovel, rectangular in shape, a doorless opening near the far end of one of the long walls. There were no windows. A hole in the center of the thatch roof vomited a thick column of gray smoke.
Anyone coming near the building—few ever had—would have heard a loud voice coming from inside, a voice tinged with anger.
"So, Medlocke," the voice said. "You've more powers than I thought. That makes things interesting."
Anyone looking inside—few ever had—would have seen a large, golden beast squatting beside a small fire. With bright silver eyes, the creature looked at its wounded hands. Large holes gaped from the palms, and jagged gashes ran upward to the elbow, exposing bone and muscle. A wide pool of blood soaked the dirt floor.
The beast stared at its wounds for several minutes, then clenched its fists tightly. The crunch of bones and severed tendons could be heard and a spout of blood arched through the air, splattering one of the walls. The beast only grunted.
A greenish glow enveloped the arms, obscuring them from view. The emerald glow rippled and swayed, as if something were fighting inside. Within a minute the glow faded and the creature held up its arms, palms inward. The wounds were gone. Only scars, still glowing green, were left.
"Power," the beast sneered. "You don't know the meaning of it, Medlocke."
The creature moved to the doorway of its hovel and stared at the flames in the distance. They were closer now than they had been a few days earlier, and closer by far than a few weeks ago. The destruction of its world was increasing in speed. Only a short time remained before the fires would erupt through the rock and earth and completely engulf the land, destroying all life, what there was of it.
"Yes, my world is dying and I must move quickly," the beast said to itself, "but there is another world still wonderfully alive, still available if one had the skill."
The beast had tasted that world and enjoyed its flavor. It wanted to gorge itself on its offerings.
It could move between the worlds easily enough. Whenever one of the humans who thought himself an experienced sorcerer or avowed satanist called upon the so-called lords of the netherworld to send them a creature of destruction or vengeance or power, the doorway between the worlds opened. The beast could step through at that time. And there certainly was no dearth of such callings since there was no dearth of stupid humans attempting things they should best have left alone.
But the beast didn't breach the other world each time a call came through; others of its kind answered some of them. No, it bided its time, entering only when it thought itself ready, only when it had thoroughly plotted its revenge.
Others of its kind had tried, as it had, to establish footholds in the living world, but they were weak and stupid and had failed miserably. Yes, its previous attempts had failed, too, but it was not its fault. It was the cursed Medlockes. If not for that hated clan, it would be there now, saving its cadaverous world and its brethren.
One of the beast's hands reached up and touched the M-shaped scar gouged across its left cheek. The beast snarled. A Medlocke gave that to it, the first one, Glendon. The pain was not great, but the humiliation was unbearable.
Ah, but this time its plan would work. It knew it. Decades had been spent in its formulation, in its fruition. The time was near.
It was true that staying in the other world caused its race physical pain, made the skin burn as if the fires of their world were licking it. Yet bathing in human blood helped relieve that agony, and it was no small part of its current plan that such blood was plentiful each time it entered the other wo
rld. It found it both interesting and amusing that the blood of innocents helped alleviate the pain for the longest periods of time.
Once the damned Medlockes were out of its way, it would position itself in ultimate rule of the living world, throwing wide the gateways between it and its own. Once it and its brethren had control, there would never be any shortage of blood, it vowed. They would domesticate the weakling humans, force them to breed and multiply like the inferior animals they were.
"Others will follow and obey me because I was the one to lead them out of this dying world," the beast said.
A low rumble shook the building and the beast grimaced as it looked out the door. A storm was approaching from the eastern horizon. Great black clouds lanced lightning across the sky. A huge dust storm preceded the storm, its walls of thick, choking dust rose thousands of feet high. The beast knew the dust carried the heat of the hellfires that burned in the distance.
A series of long, low howls trailed over the roof of the house. They came from the hills running along the edge of the dead river. A look of concern crossed the beast's face. The howls were the sound of the three-headed Cerebrians roaming in deadly packs around the wasteland. They were running before the storm, trying to catch whatever was unlucky enough to come across their path. They killed as much for pleasure as for food.
The beast listened for a few seconds, then turned and went inside. Waving its right hand, a green doorlike barrier formed over the opening. Its powers were great, but a pack of the tri-heads caught up in the bloodlust might be able to bring it down and tear it to ribbons before it could protect itself.
We are tough, resilient creatures, the beast thought. We must be to live.
Then it sneered.
"Live," it said. "Mostly we just struggle for survival.
"You humans are matchsticks before my flame," it said to the air. "Evil, you call me. Your concept of evil is a horned demon with cloven hooves and a pitchfork. A fallen angel of your so-called god. So be it. In your world I can be a god for two races. The savior to mine and the devil to yours. I'll be your Lucifer. I'll show you hell. "And I'll build my throne from Medlocke bones."