by E. G. Foley
Finally noticing him, it stopped abruptly on the far end of the chamber and spun in midair to face him, no doubt surprised.
Since the first question every ghost asked was always a shocked “You can see me?” he volunteered the answer.
“Yes, I can see you,” he informed it. “I’m Jake.”
He expected the orb to turn into a full-bodied apparition so that he could see who he was dealing with, like the other ghosts at the séance.
He would have guessed it was one of the miners coming back to brood over the place of his death.
But the orb did not reveal itself as an apparition. Instead, it zoomed straight over to him, and when he saw it up close, his eyes widened as he realized his mistake. The ball of light was not a spirit orb, technically speaking.
It was a head.
A ghost-head. A skull, actually, its jawbone working up and down like it was trying to talk, but couldn’t.
Jake gulped. Well, you don’t see that every day, he thought. Although the ghost-head was certainly startling, he wasn’t exactly scared of it. He found it rather comical, actually, in a pitiful way, which was probably bad of him.
But at once, he had a strong suspicion of who this head belonged to.
He winced at the memory of the poor Headless Monk stumbling around the chapel ruins, searching all this time for his…
“You wouldn’t happen to belong to Brother Colwyn, would you?”
Floating right before his eyes, the ghost-head nodded in excitement, bobbing in midair while its jaw worked as if to say, I am! Have you seen my body?
Or perhaps: Help!
Poor man. Isabelle must’ve been right, Jake thought. Only dark magic could have done this to the friar. Maybe Garnock had used an enchanted blade or something.
Whatever the case, Jake resolved to help him.
“Really sorry about what Garnock did to you,” he mumbled. How awful for Brother Colwyn to have been stuck in the same tomb with his murderer all these years.
Jake shuddered on the Headless Monk’s behalf, but he was puzzled. “Why didn’t you leave when the others broke out of here? When the miners blew up the wall, I mean?”
The ghost-head nodded toward the wall of shelves, then swept toward it.
Jake followed, torch in hand, as he picked his way among the rubble of broken stone gargoyles.
Arriving at the shelves, he saw what Brother Colwyn wanted to show him—his actual skull. After murdering the monk, Garnock must have set his grisly trophy on display here all those centuries ago.
Now it was nothing but pearly white bone.
He stared at it for a long moment. “I see. Something about the spell he used to do this to you keeps you from straying too far from your actual skull.”
The ghost-head nodded.
“So, er, we’ve got to bring your skull back to where the rest of your bones are buried? Does that sound about right?”
The head cocked sideways as if to say, I think so.
“All right, then.” Jake grimaced in disgust, not at all eager to touch a real human skull, but he knew that, whatever happened, he was getting out of here.
If he left the gross thing behind, Brother Colwyn would never rest in peace as he deserved.
When Jake considered how the monk had helped the Lightriders—and paid such a terrible price for it—returning the head to the body was the least that he could do.
So Jake took off his scarf and draped it over the ancient skull, using the cloth to pick it up. He swaddled it in the fabric, then tied the ends into a sort of satchel so he could easily carry it over his shoulder.
“We’ll have you back in one piece in no time,” he assured the ghost-head. “Say, you wouldn’t happen to know another way out of here, would you?”
The ghost-head went very still, staring at him for a moment. Jake wasn’t sure if it was thinking or just hesitating. At last, it nodded slowly.
Jake immediately brightened. “Really? Excellent! Let’s go, then! Oh, but hold on—I’ve got to tell my Gryphon first.” He dashed off to give Red the good news. His loyal pet hadn’t budged from the other side of the rock pile. “Hey, Red! Guess what?” he called. “Brother Colwyn’s ghost-head is in here—”
“Becaw?”
“You know, the monk who helped the Lightriders? Never mind, long story. The important part is, he knows a way out of here. I’m not sure how long it’ll take or where I might come out, but I’m going to follow him. So go back to Plas-y-Fforest and tell the others not to worry, I’m all right. I’ll see ’em when I see ’em.”
“Becaw!” Red said eagerly. “Caw!”
“Yes, I’ll be careful,” Jake assured him. “Thanks for staying with me, boy. We’re leaving now. See you soon—hopefully.” Then he turned to the ghost-head, which was hovering a short distance behind him. “Lead on, Brother Colwyn.”
The ghost-head glided through the air to the far end of the chamber, where Jake only now noticed the opening into another room.
He lifted the torch and followed, carefully descending a few stone steps carved into the cave floor.
These led down into a smaller, darker chamber, which had been left in more of its natural cave condition. More giant quartz crystals grew out of the living rock in a range of unearthly hues.
But when the room’s main feature came into view, Jake stopped in his tracks.
Straight ahead loomed a huge, ghastly skull statue carved into the cave wall. Its open mouth offered a treacherous-looking doorway.
Where it led to, he barely dared guess.
“What…is that?” he whispered under his breath, staring at the ominous portal.
The ghost-head floated toward it warily.
Again, Jake followed, but only so far, stopping in front of the open mouth. “Through there? Please, tell me you are joking.”
The ghost-head swung back and forth. No.
Jake looked again at the yawning maw of the skull door, waiting to swallow him. “At least tell me what’s in there.” The ghost-head’s jaw worked, but of course it couldn’t speak. “Oh, right. You can’t.” Jake’s heart sank. “At least tell me there won’t be any more gargoyles?”
The ghost-head tilted to the side, apparently unable to promise this, either.
Jake closed his eyes. Unfortunately, he knew his options were few. Zero, to be exact.
Brother Colwyn had been stuck here because dark magic had tethered him to his physical skull, but if someone as intelligent as Garnock had not found a way out, then there mustn’t be any other way.
Jake wondered vaguely why Garnock hadn’t used this doorway to leave. Was something even worse waiting on the other side?
Brother Colwyn waited while Jake struggled to resign himself to what had to be done.
“I wish you could tell me what’s in there.”
The ghost-head motioned to him to hurry. No doubt the monk was eager to be back in one piece after all this time.
Jake stepped cautiously into the mouth of the huge, carved skull and studied the massive door before him. “Any idea how to open it?”
The ghost-head descended toward a smaller, pyramid-shaped crystal outside the carving’s mouth. It was only about knee-high. Jake bent to examine it, cautiously touching the crystal.
After much trial and error, he eventually discovered that it actually worked as a lever. When he tilted it back, the door rose up into the skull carving, like a castle’s portcullis being raised.
At once, a wave of heat and a foul sulfur stench blew out of the opening. Jake stood up slowly, staring without a single blink—and disbelieving his own eyes.
A fiery vista had opened up before him.
Emrys’s tale of Garnock summoning demons to serve him rang like doom in Jake’s ears.
Well. At least this solved the mystery of how—or rather, where—the alchemist would meet with his demon allies. Because through the portal, Jake found himself staring into the netherworld.
Hell was huge.
A black city wi
th sinister towers clawed the red, smoky sky in the distance.
Farther off, countless volcanoes spewed flame and ash. Rivers of lava oozed across the landscape, glowing red.
Deep black canyons of despair cut through this unholy ground, crisscrossed here and there by treacherous, craggy footbridges.
Blasts of flame rose at odd intervals from the unseen depths of those gorges. It was an obstacle course fit for a condemned soul.
He blinked a few times, but the nightmarish realm did not disappear. Finally, Jake uttered a low, shocked curse, backing away from it and shaking his head dazedly. “I am not going in there. No, sir!” He followed Dani O’Dell’s habit of making the sign of the cross as he backed away.
The ghost-head nodded eagerly and tried to coax him down the steps that led to an open space atop a cliff.
Jake narrowed his eyes when he saw the stone table near the cliff’s edge. Table?
No, he realized with a chill in spite of the heat that had rushed out. It was an altar.
He swallowed hard, but he still couldn’t understand why Garnock had not escaped through this doorway when the Lightriders sealed him in.
Then the answer came to him as he stared into the distance. Horrible demons as tall as giants were herding chain-gangs of the wicked dead to their eternal punishment. Didn’t Emrys say that Garnock had promised his soul to a demon? Maybe he had regretted the deal once he was finally staring death in the face.
If the wizard had found some magical way to bring himself back eventually in some form—say, maybe as a black fog—then surely he would’ve done all in his power to avoid going down there and handing himself over to pay his debt, as promised.
Had Garnock cheated death and the devil? Was that how he had ended up as a black fog, suspended between life and death? Hmm. Archie’s translation of the Spell of a Hundred Souls was sure to reveal more.
You’re stalling, Jake told himself.
Meanwhile, the ghost-head was floating in the air a few yards ahead of him, staring out at the underworld, as though eager to get their trek over with.
“You’re sure about this? There’s no other way? You want me to sneak through—Hades?”
It bobbed emphatically.
“What if we get caught by one of those demons?”
It swung right to left in a negative fashion.
“What, you think they won’t bother you just because you were a holy man? What about me? I was a thief!”
The ghost-head stared at him as if to say, Trust me.
Jake conceded that maybe after being dead for several centuries, Brother Colwyn probably knew a thing or two about the afterlife.
Still, his stomach flip-flopped with nauseated fear, though the sulfur stink might have had something to do with that.
Perhaps Brother Colwyn’s being a man of the cloth would afford them some sort of divine protection down here, Jake thought. As for him, he was descended from Lightriders. That had to count for something.
He shifted his weight from foot to foot, torn with indecision. “Is it very far?”
The ghost-head tilted side to side. Not really sure.
This is madness, Jake thought, but at the end of the day, he didn’t have much choice. “Fine! Let’s go, then. Before I change my mind.” Bracing himself, and already quite sure that he would regret this, he stepped over the threshold into the underworld and started marching down the hot stone stairs.
He cast a glance full of dread over his shoulder when he heard the portal bang shut behind him.
No turning back now.
The only way out…was through.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Through
And so, they set out.
Jake followed the floating ghost-head, hoping against hope that it knew where it was going. He could not tell how long anything took. There was no time in such a place. A minute, an hour, a thousand years—it was all the same.
He scrambled over wobbly, gnarled bridges that seemed too small and flimsy for the endless black canyons they spanned. They might as well have been made of rotting toothpicks.
Each spindly bridge rocked precariously in the hot, smoky, sulfur winds of the netherworld that blew so strong over those yawning gulfs. Jake looked over the bridge’s side in wide-eyed terror. What lurked at the bottom of these pits, he did not want to know.
Every now and then he could just make out the hideous shapes of huge chained things in the darkness that had been there, groaning in pain—but still hardened by the same hatred and rebellion—that had landed them there after the original war in heaven.
When Jake cleared the other side of the canyon, he looked around and could have sworn that he had just ended up somehow, diabolically, back in the exact same spot from which he had started out.
He nearly panicked, but thankfully soon realized this was just one of the underworld’s illusions, and somehow, Brother Colwyn was able to steer him through.
The floating ghost-head bobbed along before him like a beacon; Jake focused on it against swirling confusion that was increasingly building in his mind, along with a sense of lost desperation.
The very air down here was like a poison gas that messed with his mind. By turns, he wanted to scream in rage or sit down and bawl his eyes out for no apparent reason.
It was a terrible place that played terrible tricks on a person. But that was the whole point, he supposed.
Yet every time he heard one of those distant devils let out a sinister belly-laugh at the horrified screams and suffering of all his new arrivals, he nearly jumped out of his skin.
Jake shuddered. Any thought of ever stealing anything from anyone again melted in the river of lava he had to cross next.
He hopped from shifting stone to stone, sweating profusely in the impossible heat. It rose in shimmering waves from the fiery flows, making him feel as if he were one of the dwarves’ gold bars, thrust into the furnace to have the impurities burned out of him.
How he ever made it to the other side, he’d never know.
Brother Colwyn’s head waited patiently, letting him catch his breath when he reached the jagged black cinder beach of the far shore.
“What’s next?” he panted, his lips parched and cracking.
His heart sank as the ghost-head indicated the mountain before him.
The way up was liberally sprinkled with broken glass.
The master of this place had really thought of everything.
Jake sighed, then wiped the sweat off his brow with a pass of his forearm. “How much farther?”
He wasn’t sure how much more of this he could take.
The ghost-head glided ahead and back several times, urging him to look upward. He did. Way, way up at the top of the mountain, Jake saw a small door plunked up against the red sky.
He furrowed his brow. That’s odd. On second thought, why expect anything logical, under the circumstances?
And for that matter, maybe Garnock wasn’t so smart, after all. What sort of nitwit made bargains with the lord of the underworld? No wonder he had preferred to put that Spell of a Hundred Souls on himself to try to cheat death.
Better to be trapped for centuries in an underground chamber and end up as a black fog—anything to avoid being sent down here.
Not that Jake felt sorry for Garnock after what he had done to Brother Colwyn. The wizard had made his choice long ago and would not be able to escape his just desserts forever.
Bracing himself for the last leg of his journey, straight up a barren mountain without a tree or shrub in sight, Jake nodded to Brother Colwyn’s head. “Ready.”
The climb was steep and tedious and awful. Any stumble meant a shard of glass in the knee or the hand, and the scent of blood lured nasty half-crab, half-spider creatures that lived among the rocks.
Again and again, Jake had to kick them away or use his telekinesis to zap them off. Meanwhile, the dizzying illusions of this place made him swear that either the path stretched ever longer as he climbed it or the mountain
itself grew.
Every time he thought he was halfway up, he found he had the same distance still to go. The frustration almost made him give up. He would never get there.
Somehow he found the strength to press on, and then the mountain got even weirder.
The path looped so that at one point, he was actually crawling upside down on his hands and knees. Apparently gravity had no more sway down here than linear time.
When he slipped and fell back down the trail about ten feet, cutting his hands again and slicing open his shin, he came to the point where he simply couldn’t do it anymore. He put his head down on his arm and gave way to tears of futile fury and absolute despair. I’m going to be stuck down here forever. What’s the point?
The ghost-head floated back to him and worked its jaws, as though to give him a bracing pep talk. “Go away! It’s no use! I can’t do it!”
The head zoomed around him, backing off the spider-crabs.
It dawned on Jake that they were probably scavengers that would pick his bones clean the moment they determined that he had given up, or was either dead or too weak to fight.
Ugh! Well, they weren’t gargoyles, but the renewed threat of being eaten was enough, finally, to make Jake get a hold of himself and shake off his despair.
He gritted his teeth, narrowed his eyes, and ignored the cuts and bruises and burns all over his body, and vowed that he was getting out of here. With a rush of determination, he got up one last time and kept climbing. You’re not keeping me here, devil.
All of a sudden, the sound of vicious barking filled the air. The ghost-head spun toward it in alarm.
Clinging to the side of the mountain, Jake looked over his shoulder and promptly had to stifle a scream.
Whatever demon was on security duty must have realized someone was trespassing and had loosed a pack of huge, monstrous dogs to hunt them down.
Hellhounds? Whatever they were, they made the gargoyles look like sweet little kittens, and with the way they came racing over the landscape toward him, they’d be upon him soon.
Instantly, Jake redoubled his efforts, rattling off a few silent prayers as he scrambled up the rest of the path as fast as humanly possible.
