The Portal

by Russell James

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Kyler braked his truck to a stop across the street from the hardware store. Oates had really done a number on the place. The shattered front door hung loose on one hinge. The interior was dark. He didn’t like that much, but the chickenshit civilian he was hunting would use the darkness to hide long before he’d use it to ambush.

  Kyler slid out of his truck with his rifle aimed at the hardware store. A show of force would be plenty to get Tackett to move. Instructions were to bring Tackett back alive. Not that the use of a little force was completely ruled out. How much force kind of depended on Tackett’s attitude. Kyler rooted for Tackett to have a bad one. Alive and unharmed were two radically different things.

  Kyler walked across the street and onto the sidewalk. Nuggets of glass crunched under his feet as he made a slow approach to the store. He led with the barrel of his rifle and stepped through the empty doorframe.

  Displays lay in a jumbled pile to one side and a spray-painted red circle surrounded by runes covered the resultant open floor. It looked like some version of the usual hocus pocus bullshit most of Oates’ followers messed around with. Whatever it was, it meant nothing to him. He stepped over one of the runes and into the store. His foot stopped just short of a puddle of blood. He smiled. Wounded prey.

  “Tackett!” he shouted. “You’ve got an audience with Oates. Get your ass out here.”

  Silence.

  “You do not want me to come and get you. I can bring you to him whole or damaged, he doesn’t care.”

  Kyler ripped a burst of bullets into the ceiling and down the main aisle. Acoustic tiles disintegrated into snowy dust. “Get the hell out here!”

  Nothing. A few firecrackers like that generally got a scream or a whimper from the future victim. He second-guessed if Tackett was here. But Oates said he was, and Oates had never been wrong.

  Kyler’s weapons-grade senses, honed by combat, kicked into high gear. Maybe the little jackass had set up an ambush, ready to attack him with a trowel or a paint roller. Bring it on, little man. He made a wary advance down the aisle, scanning the area over the sights of his rifle.

  At the rear of the store, he assessed the stacks of trash cans and snow shovels. Nowhere to hide there. He sidled over to the rear door and threw the deadbolt. No one was going to burst through there once he turned his back. He headed back up another aisle.

  This one was empty as well, and as he reentered the foyer, he began to doubt Tackett was here. The Portal had Oates distracted. Oates could be slipping. Kyler swept the remaining aisles, silently, efficiently. He finished, convinced he was alone.

  He pointed his rifle down and headed back to his truck. Maybe Tackett had gone home, or to the church. He figured he’d better check somewhere else instead of returning to Oates empty-handed.

  He jogged back across the street. He tossed his rifle into the truck’s passenger seat and climbed in. He slammed the door. The cold barrel of a pistol jabbed him hard in the back of the head.

  “Good to see you, buddy,” Milo mimicked. “I was afraid I’d miss seeing you.”

  Kyler’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. That stupid kid cop was resurrected and in the back seat. Kyler wasn’t as shocked as he was angry. When he left someone for dead, they needed to damn well stay dead. Why did Oates have to interrupt his insurance shot?

  “If it isn’t the town rent-a-cop,” Kyler said. “Somehow back from the beyond. I knew I should have put one in your head for good measure.”

  “Make a stupid move and you’ll know exactly what that feels like.” A pair of handcuffs landed on the console beside him. “Put those on, around the steering wheel. You’re under arrest.”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “Yeah, a big part of me was hoping it wouldn’t.”

  Kyler cycled through his options. Rifle too bulky and far away. Pistol at an awkward angle in his holster, ditto the knife in his boot. He could jerk left, deflect the gun up with his shoulder. Dudley Do-Right would shoot and miss. Kyler would have both hands on the gun in a flash, and a split second later he’d have it crammed down the stupid cop’s throat.

  He barely executed a flinch to the left before a bullet tore through his brain.

  * * *

  Milo’s ears rang from the gunshot in the enclosed truck. What was left of Kyler lay against the steering wheel, a small hole in the back of the head, and a gaping, bloody maw where he used to have eyes and a forehead. He’d always imagined he’d feel awful if he ever took a human life. All he felt was relief. Kyler wasn’t quite human.

  Milo climbed out of the back seat. His dark blue Kevlar vest showed through the two holes in the back of his shirt. The shooting in the cruiser had thrown Milo against the steering wheel and knocked him unconscious, but his composite savior had kept him very much alive.

  He’d revived to find that the Portal, Oates, and Kyler were gone. He returned to the church to warn Scott and Allie but the place was empty. He’d guessed maybe they went to the hardware store. When he hit Main and spied Kyler’s truck two blocks up, he took the opportunity to chalk one up for the good guys.

  He could only think of one place Scott and Allie might be, the one place he most certainly wished they weren’t. The area around the old Rogers farmhouse. Whatever was going to happen with the Portal would be happening near there. He holstered his pistol and jogged down an alley to his parked cruiser.

  He paused at the door and took a deep breath. Minutes ago, a roiling mass of threatening dark clouds had replaced the blue afternoon sky, the accretion so thick it blocked the sun. The clouds spun in the shape of a huge evil eye. The eye looked centered right over the Greenes’ burned-out house.

  The Portal must be opening, Milo thought.

  He had to get there fast.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  A red beam of light blasted up from the Portal and set the clouds in the sky boiling. Allie had to close her eyes to slits against the bright light only feet away. A force locked her knees in place on the ground, just a foot from the circle the coven formed.

  Oates stood in the grass outside the witches’ chain. He gazed upon the glowing circle with a look of reverie. The glow of the Portal’s beam bathed him in ocher. He stretched out his arms and began to transform. His pudgy body contracted and elongated as his skin darkened to an unnatural crimson. His fingers stretched and narrowed and his fingernails blackened into the sharp claws Allie remembered from her nightmare. His eyes danced in anticipation and he smiled to reveal a mouth full of teeth, tips sharpened like a shark’s. Points sprouted from his ears as the lower lobes stretched down and curled, like melting wax. A bony crest swelled on his forehead.

  Was he knowingly shedding the Oates persona as no longer necessary? It seemed more like his focus on the ritual consumed him and he simply lost control of the illusion of Oates with which he had been masking himself. Either way, he would open the door to his realm in his true form.

  Allie shoved the handful of stolen pills into her mouth. She was about to swallow, and paused.

  Scottie would come. White knight rescues were what he did. He wouldn’t let this happen. He’d find a way. She had to give him that chance before she killed herself.

  She tongued the pills down into her cheeks.

  Horrific creatures in the Portal’s corners snarled and snapped as they struggled to pull themselves free from its face. The shriveled husks of the witches still stood, their empty skins like dirty clothes pinned to a circular clothesline of blazing alabaster light. They had to be dead, but in some way she could sense they weren’t.

  Satan turned to face her. “Your time to shine, dear Allison. Greed is a terrible thing to waste. The Portal’s open for me to enter, but I need it open long enough for those beneath to escape. Cue your sacrifice.”

  Satan stepped forward and spoke a short, unintelligible incantation. Then he plu
nged his red, clawed hand into Allie’s chest. She felt like she swallowed the sun. The inside of her chest seared like a steak on a grill. The pain turned the world white. She closed her eyes and screamed in a voice so high it sounded alien.

  Satan pulled her heart from her chest. The pain stopped. She waited for death, but it didn’t come. She opened her eyes. Satan held her bloody, beating heart in his hand. She could still feel her pulse hammer in her neck, but her heart wasn’t there to pump that blood. Satan gave it a squeeze. Allie’s chest constricted and she gagged.

  “A beating heart of the damned will keep this open forever. Why go down for the party, when I can invite everyone up here? There’s a reason God separated your world and the demonic. You’re all easy prey.”

  Satan laughed and faced the Portal. He passed his free hand over her heart and began a second incantation.

  Scottie isn’t coming to the rescue, she thought. She wasn’t some kid in a crappy Mustang on the side of the road. She was an adult on the brink of the end of the world.

  Allie tongued the pills she’d stuffed in her cheeks up into her mouth. There had to be over twenty of them. She chewed until she’d pulverized them, then swallowed.

  Whatever damage these things were going to do, they’d better do it fast.

  * * *

  The closer Scott got to the Greenes’ house, the more certain he was that his hunch was correct. The red beam that had started sending the sky into apocalyptic convulsions had to be coming from there. He pulled in behind the house next door, jumped from his truck, and stopped at the edge of the O’Reillys’. He crouched and peered around the corner.

  The Greenes’ yard glowed like some landing alien spacecraft. Five women he assumed were Oates’ witches, or what remained of them, stood in a circle around the glowing Portal. The Portal seemed to hover a few feet off the ground and the wide pulsing red beam at its center was the one lighting the sky afire. Bizarre, radiant creatures, like hideous gargoyles, pulled themselves free from the Portal’s corners.

  Just inside the circle stood Satan, scaly, sinewy and bright red, hands studded with long black claws, knife-edge teeth pointing from his grinning mouth. In one hand he held what looked like a bloody, beating human heart. His Oates persona must not have been needed anymore. Perhaps he wanted to experience his triumph in his natural form. The sight of the true Devil brought up in him a deep, inner terror, worse than seeing Oates, a universal fear implanted in mankind’s subconscious at the dawn of time.

  Any fright this scene engendered disappeared when he saw Allie. His hope that Oates had been lying about her having a role to play in this evaporated. Just outside the circle, practically facing him from behind Oates, she knelt in a position so awkward it had to be forced. Blood coated both of her arms and a red circular spot stained her upper left chest. He had to get her out of there.

  The weapons he’d brought were useless, even ridiculous. What could he do in the face of this much pure, evil power?

  On the ground ahead of him, he saw the bloodstained linen he had used to wrap the Portal. A stanza from the scroll popped into his head:

  The Portal’s opening can only be blocked

  Sealed closed by the blood of descendants of Snow.

  Reverend Snow’s blood soaked the altar cloth. A million-to-one-shot interpretation of how to shut the Portal sprang into his head. But it was the only shot he had.

  Satan thrust the heart into the center of the beam from the open Portal. The beam brightened. The opening spread all the way to the portal’s outer edge. The glowing creatures expanded.

  The beating heart in Satan’s hand slowed. The beam dulled. It retreated from the Portal’s edges.

  Satan pulled the heart from the stream. It managed a few irregular, feeble beats. He placed his other hand over it. Red light flared from between his cupped palms. He pulled his hand away. The heart beat even slower. He spun around and stomped over to Allie at the circle’s edge. He stared down at her in a towering rage.

  “What are you doing to this?”

  The realization that the heart in Satan’s hands was Allie’s made Scott’s stomach clench.

  Allie forced a weak smile to her lips. “Everything I can.”

  In fury, Satan curled his fingers around her heart and tried to crush it. It stayed solid as stone. He squeezed with both hands. No effect.

  “You whore!” he screamed at Allie. “Redemption through the selfless sacrifice.”

  He snarled in frustration and threw down the heart. Allie collapsed on her back.

  Scott saw his chance. He ran for the Portal. He scooped up the bloodstained altar cloth on the run. He passed through the surging white band of power between two of the witches. The charge blasted through his chest like high voltage. His legs went weak. His head reeled. He staggered forward the last two steps. Satan whirled around.

  “You?” Satan shouted at Scott. “You’ll burn in Hell with me forever!”

  Scott squinted against the blinding glare of the beam from the Portal. The ground below and the sky above pulsed a deep red. Contorted arms pulled the misshapen, repulsive creatures from the Portal’s face. A gryphon head to his right swiped at him and missed by inches. Scott grabbed an edge of the altar cloth and flapped it out over the Portal.

  The blast from the beam should have brushed the altar cloth aside, or the energy set the linen ablaze. But the cloth snapped into a rigid plane, cut the beam like an axe blade, and hovered over the Portal. Above the cloth, the beam disappeared, as if absorbed by the linen. The cloth’s dark, splatted bloodstains flashed bright yellow. The swirling magenta clouds above froze in place.

  The altar cloth turned flaccid and settled over the underworld creatures like a collapsing parachute. As the cloth touched each one, it howled in pain. Claws made sharp jabs against the linen, pop-up pointed tents that should have rent the cloth to shreds. But the cloth merely stretched like an opaque shrink wrap, then contracted and forced the demon underneath back. The bloodstains flashed again. The four demons went still, and shrank back into the disk. The altar cloth settled over the Portal. The surging beam beneath the Portal cut off. The white energy beams from the witches stopped flowing, and the Portal dropped off the inverted cross. The satanic diagram on the ground went dark.

  The five witches collapsed like marionettes with cut strings. Their bodies lay lifeless around the dead circle.

  Satan roared and reached for the Portal. His black, clawed fingers touched the altar cloth and blue fire enveloped his hands. He yanked them back. He reached again for the Portal. This time, the flames met him halfway. He recoiled, face twisted in pain. He stared in frustrated fury at the Portal, then down at Scott. He transformed back into Oates, but his pupils stayed red flames.

  “This ain’t over, not even close,” Oates snarled. “The rest of your life? Gonna be nothing but pain.”

  Oates disappeared.

  Scott staggered over to Allie. Her heart lay at her feet, still managing one slow, labored beat each second. Her chest rose and fell in shallow, hitching breaths. Scott knelt beside her. He slipped his hand around to cradle her head. Her hair still felt like silk. Her eyes fluttered open.

  “Scottie.” She barely managed the whisper. “Did we win?”

  “Hands down. Hang on for me, Allie Cat.”

  He wondered how she could. Her heart lay outside her body. The beats were two seconds apart. Her eyes rolled up into her head. Her skin went from pale to ashy.

  A hologram window like the one the Summoner created opened up beside him. Oates’ face leered at him from the cockpit of the Killin’ Time as the boat cut past the breakwater at the harbor entrance. The wheel spun itself a course correction at the empty helm.

  “Trouble, little Scottie?”

  Scott wished he could reach through the window and strangle the bastard.

  “Kind of looks like dear Allison’s a goner, huh?
”

  Scott touched her neck. Rage mixed with sorrow as Allie’s pulse faded against his fingertips. He gritted his teeth in frustration.

  “I could save her,” Oates said in an offhand way.

  “As if you’re God,” Scott said. Tears welled in his eyes.

  Oates’ face darkened. “As if I’d want to be, jackass.”

  Allie’s heart disappeared from the ground and reappeared on her chest, over the red blotch on her left rib cage. Scott pulled his hand from her neck in shock. The heart beat twice.

  “Dark magic pulled it out,” Oates said, “and dark magic can put it back. It’s up to her to keep it beating after that. Or let God intervene. She’s his again now, anyway.”

  The question was out of Scott’s mouth before he’d formed the thought. “Your price?” The panicked tone of his voice betrayed that the cost was immaterial.

  “Your soul for her life. And you better deal fast, while she’s still got one.”

  Allie’s skin lay flaccid and gray. Scott remembered her vibrancy, her warmth, her happiness at finally turning her life around. He felt the ache in his heart and the impending emptiness if he let her, again, leave his life, this time forever.

  “You know you’re gonna do it.” Oates said. “It’s in your genes, little Scottie. Like father, like son. Just say we have a deal. Close the inevitable circle. In another second, it’ll be too late.”

  Scott caught his breath at the horrific realization that Oates was indeed right. Whatever dark reason his father had for murder, he’d stood on the edge of this same abyss Oates now offered, and jumped. Scott could do no less for Allie. He looked Oates in his malignant eyes. A yes formed on his lips.

  “No deal,” croaked a voice to his right.

  Camille raised herself off the ground. She looked at Allie with eyes shriveled as raisins, suspended in blackened eye sockets. Her once-thick raven hair now framed her face as wispy, frazzled gray curtains. Leaden skin stretched over her bones like desiccated parchment. Not an ounce of muscle or fat remained, yet somehow she crawled across the ground to Allie’s side, goat’s head staff in her right hand. Each twist of her joints sounded like sandpaper on stone. She touched the staff to the now-dark circle on the ground.