Jack Templar and the Lord of the Demons (The Jack Templar Chronicles Book 5) (15 page)

T
he door was huge
. I mean, really huge.

It was hard to tell at a distance, but as we got closer, it loomed up over us. The sheer magnitude of the thing was breathtaking. Instead of a gate, it looked more like the outline of a wide skyscraper carved out of the rock wall. Only it was definitely a gate, made of dark metal with thick bands running horizontally through it. In the center, two rings hung like handles on either side of a crease that went through the door’s center. It was hard to imagine anything so massive actually opening, especially since the handles were about ten stories off the ground.

T-Rex looked up. “This must be what ants feel like when they walk up to one of our doors.”

“Actually, while this gate is enormous, it would need to be ten times as tall to compare,” Xavier stated even as he stared open mouthed at the gate.

“It’s still a big friggin’ door,” Daniel said.

“What do you think’s in there that needs such a big opening to come out?” Will asked.

Eva clucked her tongue impatiently. “Come on, you clump of mugwumps. Since when do hunters of the Black Guard go all wobbly-kneed in the face of … a … you know … a …”

Her vampire ears caught the sound before we did. But the second her voice trailed away completely, there was no mistaking the noise rising in the air.

Whirr

Clink

Thump

The sounds of a mechanism opening. The gate shuddered, and dust rose up like when a dog shakes its coat after a roll in the dirt.

Whirr

Clink

Thump

We all stepped backward, I think each of us completely and suddenly aware that if the door fell forward instead of swinging open, we would be smashed into little monster hunter pancakes.

Good thing the door didn’t fall forward. Instead, the crease down the middle of the gate turned into a solid black line. It took me a second to realize it wasn’t a black line but a gap in the door as it swung inward. The other side was dark, and it was impossible to see anything in there.

Eva’s vampire eyesight was a hundred times better than mine, so I gave her a nudge. “See anything inside?”

She shook her head no.

We both turned to look, mesmerized by the movement of this enormous thing and by the prospect of what might come out to greet us. There was no point in running. There was nowhere to go. Besides, this was exactly why we came. Whether coming to the Underworld had been a good idea was questionable, but we weren’t running away now. The fact that escape wasn’t an option made it an easy decision.

“Whatever comes out from that gate,” I said, “we all need to work together to defeat it. Just like the Boros.”

The earth shook beneath our feet.

“What was that?” T-Rex cried.

The earth shook a second time.

“I think those are footsteps,” Daniel said.

Sure enough, the ground shook again, and it was easy to imagine the timing mirrored something enormous walking toward us from the darkness behind the gate.

“I believe this thing might be a lot bigger that the Boros,” Xavier said.

I swallowed hard, my throat completely dry. I didn’t want to admit it, but I was terrified. I looked at the faces of my friends, and they all looked at the opening gate with wide eyes and trembling. Everyone, that is, except Eva. She still had her unnatural calm about her, more curious than afraid. It was easy to chalk that up to the vampire blood in her veins, but even before her transformation, Eva had always been cool under pressure.

“Eva, can you see it yet?” I asked, stumbling as the earth shook violently again.

Eva nodded. “Yes, but just barely.”

“What is it?” Will asked, his sword in front of him.

“See for yourself,” she said. “Here it comes.”

We all turned to the gate as it swung fully open. My eyes locked on the middle of the opening, trying to pierce through the gloom to see what we were up against. I was looking so high, almost a hundred feet in the air, that I missed the creature’s first appearance at the very bottom of the opening.

It was a single creature, about the size of one of us. Standing in the opening, it looked like a tiny fly. odd-looking, nearly humanoid, with two arms and legs and a torso. The really weird thing was that in each of its hands it held a huge eyeball. But more than that, the creature moved its arms back and forth so the eyes could see everything.

The other odd thing was that the head was not much more than a huge mouth with only a small flap of skin above it with a two small slits for nostrils. The teeth were impressive, long, jagged, and overlapping as the upper and lower jaw snapped maniacally in place. All in all, it was an awful looking creach.

“That’s it?” Will said. “I mean, it’s ugly as sin, but I think even Xavier could take it out on his own.”

Xavier shook his head. “Let’s not find out if that’s true or not.”

As I watched the weird little creach wave its arms to look at us, a second one appeared next to it. Then a third. They looked identical, moving their eyeball-hands frantically and snapping their jaws open and shut.

Daniel twirled his sword. “If no one knows what they are, then I’m calling them chewers. And I say we dispatch these guys before any more show up.”

“Just wait a second,” Eva said. “It’s about to get interesting.”

I didn’t like the sound of that.

“Uh … how are the … uh … chewers floating like that?” T-Rex asked.

Looking at the creature’s feet, I saw that he was right. All three of the chewers hovered a foot off the ground. I looked up into the doorway that rose up like a twenty story building before us. Near the top, I saw a few more chewers materialize out of the gloom. Then some appeared in the middle of the cavernous space.

Then, slowly the entire doorway filled with these creatures. There must have been thousands. Each hung at the end of a thick, skin-colored tentacle attached to its spine.

Behind them, a mass of flesh lurched into view, and the ground shook from the footstep.

The creach filled the entire gateway. The body looked like a muscled, hairless gorilla, walking on two legs, each as big around as a house. Its arms hung down to the ground for balance but, on closer inspection, they weren’t really arms. At the end of each appendage was a gummy, slobbering mouth that picked its way over the ground beneath it. If anything, it reminded me of an elephant’s trunk. The monster didn’t have a head of any kind, just a concentrated collection of tentacles with dozens of chewers dangling from the ends.

The Gatekeeper, which was the only name that came to mind, took one more step out from the darkness, then came to a stop in front of us. It planted its feet wide and squared itself so there was no way to misunderstand the message: if we wanted to get through the gate, we were going to have to go through it first.

As if to add an exclamation point, the Gatekeeper leaned back and then lunged forward with one foot. Every tentacle stretched out toward us, and every one of the thousand chewers opened its jaws to let out an ear-splitting scream.

We held our ears, the sound so loud I physically felt it buffet against me like wind.

Finally, the monstrosity stopped bellowing, pulled back the leg it had outstretched, and stood still.

“Any ideas, guys?” I said, noticing the quiver in my voice. I’m not going to lie, the Gatekeeper had me pretty freaked out.

“M … mm … maybe if we don’t move, it won’t see us. Like a rock ogre,” T-Rex said.

“It has like two thousand eyes,” Will said. “I think it sees us.”

“Xavier?” I asked. He was the smartest of us and had a knack for coming up with great solutions at the last second to save our bacon.

“But isn’t it magnificent?” he said. “Have you ever seen such a specimen?”

“That magnificent specimen is going to eat you in a second,” Daniel snapped. “How about the elephant trunk arms? They’re the only part of the thing that isn’t covered with teeth.”

I looked at the dangling arms. The ends looked big enough to suck in a car.

“We’ve faced worse before,” I said readying my sword.

“Not really,” Xavier stated. “This would technically be the largest and probably most deadly creach any hunter has ever faced.”

We all turned and stared at him. He shrugged.

“Just trying to be accurate,” he said.

“Why doesn’t it attack?” Eva said. “It obviously sees us. So what’s it waiting for?”

She was right. As we argued over what to do, the Gatekeeper simply stood its ground. The chewers writhed and twisted at the ends of their tentacles, chopping their teeth and holding out their eyeball-hands toward us, but the creature itself wasn’t moving.

“You know what I think?” Eva whispered. “I think someone else is watching to see what we do. I think all those eyeballs are like security cameras at a front door.”

“But then who’s …”

My voice trailed off as I put two and two together. Unfortunately for us, in the monster hunter world four often turned into five, but maybe in this case Eva was right and the obvious answer was the right one.

“The Lord of the Demons,” Xavier said next to me, beating me to the punch.

“So what does that mean?” Daniel asked. “How does that help us?”

“Does anyone think we can defeat this thing if we attack it?” No one said anything. “Anyone think we can outrun it and hide?” Silence again. I sucked in a deep breath. “Okay then, I’m going to go talk to it. If the Lord of the Demons can see us through all those eyes, it means he wants us alive for some reason.”

I stepped toward the Gatekeeper.

“But what if you’re wrong?” T-Rex asked.

I looked over my shoulder and tried to give him a brave smile and a wink. “Then it’s been quite an adventure, my friend.”

I turned and took five quick steps forward before I lost my nerve and stumbled to a stop.

The thousand chewers turned their attention to me, straining against the tentacles that bound them and tilting their eyeball-hands so that they were all trained on me.

“Hello …,” I said, my voice cracking from fear. I cleared my throat and tried to muster as much courage as possible. “My name is Jack Templar,” I shouted. “I am here to seek an audience with the Lord of the Demons. I have business to discuss with him.”

I wasn’t sure where that last part came from, but I thought it sounded good. Better than
I’ve come to steal something from him
.

The two elephant trunk arms stretched out on either side of me, moving like giant snakes. They were about thirty feet on either side when they turned so the open ends gaped wider. Hot gusts of putrid air blasted at me from both sides, making it hard to stand. I don’t know what that thing ate, but it needed a breath mint in the worst way.

I held up my sword toward all the eyeballs perched over me.

“If you can see me, if you can hear my voice,” I shouted. “I ask that you agree to meet me. And don’t worry; you don’t have to fear me.”

The two trunks blasted me with hot air, and I thought I heard a deep, grumbling laugh.

Suddenly, the trunks arched up in the air, quick as snakes striking. They both stabbed down and smashed the ground behind me … right where my friends stood.

The trunks lifted, and Daniel and Eva were gone.

They stabbed back down again, swallowing T-Rex and Will, then jabbing again to eat Xavier.

“No!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, running to the trunk nearest me.

I swung my sword, but the trunk lifted up in the air as I swung, and I missed it completely.

The thousand chewers screamed at me.

Looking up, I saw the trunk poised above me, the center a dark, moist hole. I held up my sword and braced myself, not quite believing that this was how it all ended.

Then the trunk slammed down and swallowed me whole.

I
don’t remember
how long I was inside the Gatekeeper. In fact, I wish I couldn’t remember anything about it at all. After the creach swallowed me, I found myself in a warm goo that smelled ten times worse than the hot breath that had come out of the trunk. I panicked, kicking and struggling to get out. But soon, I realized it was pointless.

I tried to take a deep breath to calm myself, but I couldn’t. It was the same sensation I’d had in the lake when we first fell out of the hole from the monastery, only I didn’t feel like I was running out of breath. In fact, even though I wasn’t breathing, I felt fine.

This started a whole different kind of panic. If I didn’t need to breathe, it could only mean I was really dead, not just separated from my body. But the panic quickly passed because I just couldn’t accept that I’d done anything bad enough in my life that my punishment was the terrible stench all around me.

No, I decided I was in the Gatekeeper’s trunk and that I was still alive.
Kind of alive
, I heard Xavier’s voice in my head correcting me. I felt a surge of hope that the others were in the same condition as me and still alive in this trunk or in the other.

I kicked and clawed at the goo around me, thinking maybe I could crawl up the trunk toward them. But no matter how hard I struggled, I didn’t move. All I did was exhaust myself.

I tried to force my body to relax, comforting myself with the thought that the Lord of the Demons must want us alive. Otherwise we would have been dinner for the chewers. But how long we had to sit inside this creach and wait was a whole other matter.

Without needing to breath, and by nature of only being
kind of alive
, I suspected we could be stuck there for weeks. Or months. Or even years if the Lord of the Demons wanted it that way.

It all depended on whether the Lord of the Demons was worried about Ren Lucre’s rise to power. If so, I guessed he would want to hear what I had to say sooner rather than later. If not, it was going to be a long, stinky, wait. Too bad my sense of smell didn’t take a break when my breathing stopped.

Fortunately for us, it didn’t seem that long, maybe an hour, before the trunk started to shudder and vibrate. It had crossed my mind during the wait that my spot in the trunk might just be a holding area in the Gatekeeper’s digestive tract, kind of like the spot where a gigantic anaconda snake holds a rat it swallowed. I figured if I moved higher in the trunk, I was headed towards the stomach and a pretty gruesome death. If I slid down in the direction of my feet, then I was getting out.

Unfortunately, the shudder and vibration around me seemed to be edging my body and the goo surrounding it a little higher. Just before I could panic too much, it felt like a trapdoor opened, and I fell downward, whooshing down with all the goo as if I were sliding down a tube at a waterpark.

Then I was out, flying through air, arms flailing. As I hit some liquid, my need to breathe came back in a hurry. I swam to the surface and sucked in a lungful of air while I treading the surface. Real water, I think. I squinted from bright lights that shined on me from all directions. Looking up, I expected to see the trunk above me and hopefully some of my friends falling from the sky like I’d done. But it was only the same white light.

I swam forward and quickly came to an edge that looked like the rim of a swimming pool except that it was made of grass. Grabbing the side, I lifted myself out of the water, thankful to have all the goo rinsed off me.

The second I was out of the water, the bright lights disappeared. Now I could see exactly where I was. I spun in a circle, not quite believing my eyes.

The house looked exactly as I remembered it. The hedges and rosebushes were perfectly trimmed. The trellis on the side of house was covered with ivy all the way to the second floor roof. A forest of pine trees stood silent vigil in the back of the yard.

It was my Aunt Sophie’s house in Sunnyvale. But it was repaired, back the way it was before the monster horde led by my creach principal, Ms. Fincher, destroyed it. Before Hester sacrificed herself to the zombies chasing us when the trellis was about to give way and pull both of us off the roof. Before Ren Lucre arrived and turned my Aunt Sophie to dust.

Their two deaths haunted me, and the reason was simple. I’d watched both of them die and not done anything to stop it. As Hester hung on the trellis, she let go of my hand and fell back into the zombie horde … and I just watched as they devoured her. Then Ren Lucre forced Aunt Sophie to kneel before him, first in her devil-werewolf form, before she chose to appear in the human form the way I’d known her since I was a baby. And during the whole thing, I’d just watched from the roof above, too scared to move. Too much of a coward to stop it from happening.

“What could you have done?” came a voice from the house.

I spun around and saw my Aunt Sophie. She wore my favorite dress of hers, a simple blue summer dress with yellow flowers, tied at the waist with a ribbon. It was the dress she wore the day she’d come to father-son field day at school, and together we’d won every single event. I took a step toward her, but I stopped myself. Alarms were going off in my head. This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. Still, I felt myself drawn toward my Aunt Sophie, wishing that it just might be her.

“Is that you?” I asked. “Really you?”

Aunt Sophie smiled. “You’ve grown a bit since I saw you last,” she said. “Not only your age. But things have happened to you. I can see it in your eyes.”

“How is it possible?” I asked. “I saw you die. I … I watched while it happened.”

“That’s what you were just thinking about,” she said. “How you should have done something to save me.”

A pang of guilt tore through me. “Yes, I should’ve. I’m so sorry, Aunt Sophie. I should’ve … should’ve …”

“Should have what?” she asked.

“I should have jumped down and fought him,” I said. “Right there and then.”

Aunt Sophie nodded. “My brave boy. And what would have happened?”

“I could have saved you,” I said. “I could have –”

The world spun around, a dizzying swirl of color and sound. Then it jolted to a stop. When it did, I was on the roof looking down onto a backyard filled with creach. Ren Lucre strode through the crowd toward my Aunt Sophie who lay on the ground, held in place by creach guards. I knew this scene. It was right before Ren Lucre killed her. It was happening all over again.

“No!” I shouted.

I jumped from the roof, landing hard on a group of goblins under me. I rolled off them, grabbing one of their spears as I did. Then I was on my feet, yelling. I chucked the spear at Ren Lucre … and he swatted it away with his sword like a pesky fly. He sneered, then nodded to the goblin next to me.

“Kill him,” he said.

The goblin reared back with his sword and swung it right at my midsection. The second it would have hit me, the world spun again, the whirl of color and sound. And I was back on the roof watching Ren Lucre enter the backyard below.

It was like my first attempt to save Aunt Sophie had never happened. Almost like I was playing a video game and the screen reset when I died.

Ren Lucre closed in on Aunt Sophie. This time I jumped at an ogre to the right of the goblins I’d used last time to break my fall. But as I jumped, the ogre spotted me. He swung the massive club he held in his hand and timed it just right to smash me as I reached him. The second he struck, the world spun, and I was back on the roof, the game reset.

Again and again, I tried to save her. I jumped to the left. Only to have a troll spear me. I climbed down the trellis and got four arrows in the back. Next, I snuck into the attic to creep down the stairs, only to be attacked and eaten by a flock of harpies. Over and over, I tried to save her only to die in the process. A dozen times. Two dozen. A hundred.

Finally, I lay on the roof, my head down, defeated.

“There was nothing I could do,” I muttered. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Then the world spun, a swirl of color and sound, and I was in the backyard again, standing in front of Aunt Sophie. She smiled, but there was such sadness in it that tears sprang to my eyes. At that second, I knew it really was her.

“Good boy,” she said. “I knew you could do it. You passed the test.”