by N. J. Mercer
Chapter 33
“Are you sure there’s nobody around?” Boyd whispered tensely.
“I was here just before I found you, and it was definitely empty,” Rachel replied.
The pair stood in a small corridor, outside the box room, on the very highest floor of Edward Devilliers’ house. The absence of any outside windows in the narrow passage meant it was very dark. All things considered, it did feel safer here.
The pervasive silence exaggerated every sound they made as they descended the small staircase to the floor below and yet another corridor. They were in the house proper now, albeit the unlived-in part; the scale of everything here was far grander and its appearance more elegant than anything on the top floor, which lay largely within the loft space.
At the opposite end of this longer corridor was an enormous panelled window through which the moon was visible; its light spilled into the house and lit their way. They hurried to the stately wooden staircase beneath that window and continued their descent to the cellar. As they made their way, Boyd noticed the effects of disrepair on the interior. The walls were a patchwork of mildew and peeling paper that in parts exposed the underlying plaster, and the electric lights that were mounted along either side of them had dusty, cobwebbed silk shades. The floor here was covered with a worn, damp carpet that ran along its entire length and was probably the main source of the musty smell that hung in the air.
They passed eight doors, four in each wall, before reaching the next staircase. Just as they were about to take the steps down to the next level, they froze suddenly. There was what sounded like a voice from behind one of the closed doors they had passed; it was very faint. They listened apprehensively. It took a few more seconds before they could work out what it was repeating. “Boyd!” it called, “Boyd!” There was something unwholesome about the muffled, high-pitched speech.
Rachel looked fearfully at her new companion while he carefully eyed the doors, attempting to locate the strange voice that repeated his name. Eventually, his gaze fixed on the second door in the wall to their left, and he started to move towards it; a small hand grabbed his forearm. He turned around to face Rachel.
“Boyd, don’t go there,” she implored, almost at the point of tears.
“It might be something important, I have friends who are on their way,” he tried to reassure her. “They may be sending me a message; no one else knows my name around here, honey. It’s okay, I need to investigate this.”
He gently pulled himself away from Rachel’s tight grip and walked over to the voice. He stopped outside the door and after making sure the girl was out of harm’s way, gripped the round knob and eased it open slowly whilst holding the Pharmacist’s long knife in front of him; there was no ambush, only the voice. With the door ajar, its pitch was noticeably higher and it had an odd clicking quality as it eerily, hypnotically repeated his name. Boyd let the door swing fully open, revealing a bedroom that was lit by pale moon glow from a curtain-less bay window in the far wall. Keeping a safe distance, Rachel also looked inside over his broad shoulder. The smell in here was striking: the mustiness that permeated the rest of the house combined with the stink of rotten meat. Ignoring it, Boyd scanned the room. Everything here was covered in a white powdery mess, a result of ceiling plaster which had crumbled in some parts and come away entirely in others. He looked past the antique dresser and cabinet in the corner until his eyes fixed upon the ornate four-poster bed that extended from the far wall to the very centre of this chamber. He was drawn to it, not because of its great size or meticulously carved bedposts, but because of the large moving bulge that lay beneath its covers; the source of the voice.
Boyd edged further into the room; dagger ready, he moved to the bed. The closer he got, the quicker his name was repeated. By the time he was only a few feet away, the voice was manic. He was mesmerised by the odd chant; without his knowledge, Rachel had slipped into the room behind him. “Let’s get out of here, Boyd!” she begged, vainly attempting to drag him out by the arm, glancing fearfully at the movement in the bed. Boyd pulled himself away from her without even bothering to look back. There was a hypnotic quality about the chant which seemed to be directed, for whatever sinister purpose, towards him; he could not help being drawn to the strange bulge in the bed. Rachel was pulling at his shirt, tearfully begging him to leave the room. All Boyd could hear was the voice; he was under a spell. When he was close enough, he reached over to draw back the heavy bedding; sensing the worst, Rachel slowly backed away. Boyd had only moved the blankets a few inches before the rest were thrown off and sent hurtling across the room, revealing the hideous living form that lay beneath them. Before he could take any further action, he was grabbed by a grotesque limb, one of many. Rachel screamed; all previous attempts at remaining discreet inside this house were forgotten in the terror of the moment.
Boyd snapped out of his trance, only to realise the full magnitude of the horror that now had him. What lay beneath the sheets was a twisted mockery of the human form. The creature was made up of the bulging central torso of an obese man covered in folds of quivering flesh and hideously misplaced sphincteral orifices spewing mucous and ichor. At the very centre of this foul body, where the umbilicus should have been located, there was instead a large, fleshy-lipped mouth; the origin of the voice that had lured Boyd. The thing had no head, and from around its torso there sprouted six warped limbs; human legs that ended in wiry clutching hands where the feet should have been, and each of these disgusting extremities was speckled with outgrowths of fingers and matted hair.
Boyd, his arms held tightly by long, misshapen fingers, tried to pull himself away from the monstrosity. He jerked his entire body backwards by planting his feet firmly against the edge of the bed; it made no difference. Courageously, Rachel wrapped her arms around his waist and used her slight body to try to tug him away; despite Boyd’s straining muscles and Rachel’s concerted efforts, they could not loosen the creature’s grip, it held on with inhuman strength. What they grappled with was the earthly manifestation of a beast that originated in a world light years from planet Earth. Following its accidental passage through the wormhole, it had hastily altered its chameleon body into a form that might give it a chance of survival in this world; the result was a modified approximation of the human body – the abomination that now lay before them.
More deformed limbs flicked out to grip Boyd with huge fingers, and the orifices continued spouting pungent secretions that scalded the skin on contact. “Get back, Rachel!” Boyd roared as his legs were swept out from beneath him. He now hung upside down with each of his own four limbs under the control of the creature. The dangling man was drawn closer to the torso and the hideously positioned umbilical mouth. Bulbous lips curled back into a snarl, revealing rows of sharp teeth and a large wet tongue that flopped out to one side. The creature no longer repeated Boyd’s name; instead, it produced a disturbing gurgle interspersed with high-pitched screams that pained the eardrums.
Desperate to help, Rachel lifted the length of lead piping high and edged forwards, ready to strike the beast. She was almost in range for a swing when Boyd shouted at her to stay away; he had experienced first-hand the brutal strength of this otherworldly creature and did not want Rachel in its grip also. She swung anyway and missed; the remaining limbs that were not holding Boyd grabbed at her, and she just about managed to retreat to a corner of the room out of their range.
“Stay there!” Boyd ordered.
She could only watch as her last hope for surviving this night struggled for his life. The monster continued to coax Boyd towards its terrible mouth, and he resisted with all his might. In his right hand, he still held the long, silver dagger. The creature was either unfamiliar with, or unconcerned about, the danger this weapon posed; it was impossible to say.
As he grappled, Boyd formulated a plan; he eased his resistance and allowed his body, still held above the bed, to go limp. The creature, sensing its prey was no longer fighting, brought him to it
s gaping maw with great relish. Boyd was soon close enough to feel the pungent breath of the beast against his cheek and see the pustules around its open mouth. Just when it appeared that he might have a bite taken out of his face, he whipped his right arm free of the beast’s grip with a sudden snapping motion, and in that same blur of movement, he brought the knife down hard into the mouth, impaling the creature’s flabby tongue against the back of its throat. An unearthly shriek, high-pitched and terrifying, filled the room as a mixture of blood and what looked like pus spurted out from the injury. He felt the grip on his left wrist weaken, and with the same sudden snapping motion, he managed to free it too. With both hands, he withdrew the long ceremonial dagger and brought it down in a series of quick, desperate stabs all over the bloated torso beneath him. He managed to do this three times before the creature, still holding him by the legs, flung him away against one of the walls.
He landed on the floor, winded. The room filled with more blood-curdling wails from the monstrosity. The same thick mixture of bloody pus that had gushed from the mouth wound now oozed from each of the new penetrating injuries he had inflicted. Surely, the beast must die now, he hoped. He did not intend on hanging around long enough to find out. Still winded, he picked himself up off the floor and ran for the door. Rachel was standing nearby, open-mouthed and transfixed by the horror of what she had witnessed; he scooped her up by the waist on the way out. Using his free arm, he slammed the door shut behind him. Just before he left the room, and out of the corner of his eye, Boyd managed to see the creature raise itself shakily onto its six deformed limbs.
In the musty corridor, he put Rachel down and dragged her by an arm back towards the staircase; she stumbled and fell but was able to get back onto her feet again without any help. The inhuman shrieks from beyond the door and the thumping of heavy limbs against the floor would let neither Boyd nor Rachel forget the evil of what they had just seen. There was a loud banging, Boyd turned around; the creature was trying to leave the room. Every contact it made with the closed door resulted in an inexplicable blue flash around its edge. Puzzled by this phenomenon and far too afraid to find out what it was, he dashed breathlessly with Rachel to the staircase. Their tribulations, however, had not ended; more voices started to call from behind other closed doors, from this floor and also from the ones below. This time, they beckoned Rachel along with Boyd. Some of these doors even started to demonstrate the strange flash of blue light. Things were looking very bad; Boyd had no doubt that more alien beings dwelled in these other closed rooms, and if they did not get them, there was every possibility that the noise would draw the unwanted attention of the house’s other equally undesirable inhabitants, the Disciples of Disorder.
Boyd’s faith allowed him to keep his wits about him, and he even found a few words of encouragement for the girl as they made their way down the broad, wooden staircase to the next level. Just like the floor above, there were voices from behind the doors; fortunately, on this level there was no need for them to cross the corridor – the next set of stairs lay directly beneath the previous one. They were grateful for this small mercy.
Muttering memorised wards of protection from the First Grimoire, he ushered Rachel down. As they descended, he caught sight of movement at the far end of the corridor; a giant oily shape like a massive slug, bigger than a man, was very slowly edging towards them across the floor, moonlight reflecting off its slick body. He turned to look at Rachel; the girl had not yet seen this new horror so he hastened their descent to the ground floor.
The pair found themselves in another of the house’s stately corridors. Wide and high-ceilinged, this one was the longest so far; just like its parallels on the upper floors, there were rows of doors along it on either side; thankfully, there were no voices.
“Which way to the coal cellar, Rachel?” Boyd asked, panting. She pointed to a nearby passage; it lay within the shadows and led off towards the right. They both hurried to it. Boyd was hoping they would find a few moments to regroup and muster their strength once they were in the abandoned cellar. Even though he had never seen it, it had taken on a mythic quality: a haven of safety, deep in enemy territory, a place to reach at all costs, a place of sanity in this madhouse. In truth, it was only an objective, something to focus the efforts of the mind upon. Focus the mind or lose it; that was the stark choice they faced in here.
The malformed creature trapped in the bedroom by Disciple trickery was only one example of the myriad demons that had slipped through the gateway opened by Edward Devilliers’ underground ceremony. It was only a matter of luck that Boyd and Rachel had not opened any more doors or encountered more vile beings on their way to the coal cellar – luck that would soon run out.
Chapter 34
Branches from roadside trees thumped against the sides of the speeding motorhome. The vehicle was almost too big for the narrow lanes surrounding the Devilliers’ mansion; this did not deter Sascha from driving extremely fast. The engine roared as he shifted up through the gears. The road was still damp from an earlier spell of light rainfall, and on more than one occasion, Johnny’s heart leapt as he felt the vehicle slide through another of the tight bends. Even his recently enhanced psychic ability could not predict which way the erratic motorhome would swing next; he did not complain, they were in a hurry, and he had full faith in his friend’s road-craft. Baccharus hovered just behind Sascha, one little hand anchoring his floating body to the driver’s headrest so that his airborne form would not end up in the rear of the vehicle. The cherub was acting as an extra pair of eyes, desperately calling out instructions which were duly acted upon: “Slow down!” or, “Speed the heck up, man!” or, “Start turning now, for the sake of all that’s good!” His direction was interspersed with warnings about oncoming obstacles he was convinced Sascha was about to drive into.
From his passenger seat, it looked like the inside of a rally car to Johnny, driver and co-driver giving it their all to win the race. Sascha followed Baccharus’s frantic instructions to the letter, and Johnny could see that this had prevented a collision on more than one occasion. He glanced at the satellite navigation screen; even though Sascha had studied the maps and recognised many of the landmarks en route, there would be no room left for human error tonight.
“We’re nearly there,” declared Johnny; they were about twenty minutes into the drive.
“Better slow down then, Sasch!” suggested Baccharus, tired of being thrown around the interior of the speeding vehicle. Sascha eased off the accelerator until the motorhome was cruising slowly at the sedate pace for which it was designed.
The route appeared narrower and more twisting now than at any other point in the journey, and except for the occasional, distant mountain peak, Johnny could not see anything beyond the woodland on either side of the road. What he wanted was to have a look, right into the heart of the enemy; so, as Sascha drove, he meditated on Theodora’s words, and he reached out further with his mind’s eye. His senses were overloaded with the aberrant psychic energy that had drawn them here to the Highlands in the first place; with a supreme effort he saw through this confusion, to the portal and then to the cancerous wormhole within it. There he caught an instantaneous glimpse of the realm to which it was connected, a place of fire and abstract symmetry; one of the chaos worlds of Disorder, the source of all the bad energy presently around them. It was from here that beings like the blue-skins had been brought via the wormhole. It was their passage that had caused the short-lived energy peaks that first drew the attention of the Council; tonight, it was going to be impossible to hide the enormous amount of power being unleashed – the wormhole was fully active and awaiting the passage of Orbok, Demon King.
Johnny altered the focus of his psychic perception to detect the individual auras from dozens of Disciples within the house itself, both human and demon. Their numbers worried him. There were also other disturbing and malevolent presences he could sense from within those damned walls; the picture in his mind was not clear enoug
h to discern their exact nature. Unknowingly, he had detected the vile aliens from the worlds of Disorder that had accidentally passed through the open portal this evening.
Baccharus noticed the concentration on Johnny’s face. “What do you sense?” he asked his keeper gently. Unlike Johnny, the familiar was not able to feel any living auras from the house at this range; his psychic capability, effective though it was, could not come close to that of Johnny’s and even if it did, it would take something really special to see through the confusing haze of ambient aberrant energy.
Johnny’s perception returned abruptly to the world of five senses although he spoke as if his mind was elsewhere, and his eyes looked at nothing in particular. “So many psychic signatures, and all of them followers of Disorder,” he said finally, speaking quietly, more to himself than Baccharus; the familiar heard him.
“A lot of them, huh? Well, you know what? When you take all those guys out, it will make our victory taste that much sweeter!” said the cherub nodding away confidently, once again demonstrating a familiar’s unshakeable faith in its keeper. Johnny smiled at the display of bravura; it was impossible not to. The motorhome decelerated to a walking pace.
“I think we’re as close as we can get to the Devilliers’ mansion without giving ourselves away so look for a place to stop,” Sascha said. A few minutes of painstakingly gradual progress brought the vehicle to a section of roadside which was devoid of trees and hedges and just about wide enough to drive onto; everyone agreed that it was as good a place as any to stop. Sascha turned off the road to park; the motorhome bounced up and down on its suspension, rocking the friends inside it gently back and forth. There was an instant when the wheels spun freely, churning up the soil, and it looked like they had grounded themselves, until their faithful transport lurched forward and was free once more. It was a good spot; the vehicle appeared to be adequately concealed amongst the surrounding woodland. Baccharus proclaimed it to be a positive sign for what lay ahead. The friends unbuckled themselves from their seats and prepared to enter the enemy stronghold. So near to the Disciples now, Johnny depended more than ever on the Qrwshan amulet Boyd had left for them.
