The Altar (25 page)

And here he was, an English teacher who had taken a year of Martial Arts while in College so very long ago. He didn’t even no where to begin the fight. If the sharp rock didn’t hurt the thing, what could he be expected to do without any weapon?

The monster rushed at him with fists flying. Somehow Erik managed to duck under the assault and slip behind him.

“Just come and get it and I’ll make it easy on you,” the demon said. “There’s nowhere to run.”

Erik had to admit that the landscape held no possibilities for escape, but something about him just refused to give up. He turned and kicked the demon in the side. It was like kicking a cement wall and only made his foot hurt.

The demon laughed. “No, I don’t think that will do,” it said. “And your Bible and your God can’t help you here. This is my domain. And you came here of your own free will. You belong to me now.”

“I don’t obey you,” Erik said. “None of us obey you.”

“Oh, you will! Make no mistake about that.”

Then it stepped forward and leveled its fist at him. Erik tried to dodge the blow, but the demon was quicker. It felt like a hammer had crashed into the side of his skull as he staggered backwards. Then he felt his head go light as the blood drained away and his feet collapsed under him. He felt himself land on the loose sand and then darkness came down like the curtain on the final act.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

-1-

Erik woke up to a blinding headache. He sat up and tried to get his bearings, but everything seemed to be moving, as if he were on one of those thrill rides that toss you upside down and around in circles until everything becomes a blur. His stomach felt like he was on a thrill ride, too, as it jumped up and down as if on a trampoline.

“Just relax.” It was Dovecrest’s voice. He felt the Indian’s hand on his shoulder. “You’ve taken quite a whack to the head. We both have. Just close your eyes for a minute and let it come back slowly.”

“Where’s Vickie and Todd?”

“I don’t know,” Dovecrest replied. “I guess it took them again.”

Erik felt all of his hope disappear once again. He opened his eyes and waited for the world to stop spinning. Eventually, it did.

He found himself sitting in the middle of a sand pit that was perhaps fifty feet deep and about the size of an average living room. There were no rock outcroppings, no stairs or ladder—no way out short of scaling up the soft sand walls.

“I already tried it,” Dovecrest said, anticipating his question. “There’s nothing to hold on to. The sand just slides out from underneath your feet. We can’t climb out of here.”

“So it’s left us here to die?”

“That’s the real hell of it,” Dovecrest said. “Pardon the pun. We won’t die.”

“What do you mean?”

“Think about it for a minute. When was the last time you ate? Or drank?”

“I don’t remember. It must have been hours.”

“Are you hungry? Thirsty?”

“No. Not the least. But I should be. I should be, shouldn’t I?”

Dovecrest nodded. “We should be hungry. We should be thirsty. We should be tired. Look at my face. I should be dead.”

Sure enough, the Indian’s skull was cracked and broken. The injury should at least have landed him in intensive care, if not the morgue. But here he was standing there talking like it was nothing more than a scratch.

“You see, we can’t die. We’re already in the world of the dead. That means we’re either already dead, or else we can’t die, not as long as we’re here, anyway.”

“So that’s why the demon didn’t kill us.”

“Exactly. We are as immortal as it is—at least while we’re here.”

“So now all we have to do is get out of this sand trap and find the demon again. Only we still don’t know how to stop him. And why did it keep Vickie and Todd? What’s it got in mind for them?”

“I don’t know. But we’d better figure a way out of here if we expect to find out.”

Erik sat in the middle of the pit and pondered the problem.

“Give me a boost,” he said.

Dovecrest knelt down and he stood on the Indian’s shoulders at the edge of the pit. He was still nowhere near high enough to escape. He reached out to grab what edge there was, but it just collapsed. There was nothing to hold onto. It just crumbled away at his touch.

“This isn’t going to work,” he said. Then he climbed down from the Indian’s shoulders.

“Maybe we could make a rope out of our clothes,” Dovecrest suggested.

“Maybe. But I don’t think we have enough to make a rope that long. And we’d have nothing to hook it on to at the top.”

“You’re right. I’m grasping at straws.”

“Yeah, me too,” Erik said. “I don’t suppose we could dig ourselves out.”

Dovecrest forced a laugh. “I think we’re already as far down as we want to go.”

“I’d hate to think what’s down deeper than hell.”

“Wait a minute,” Dovecrest said. “Suppose we don’t dig down, but dig up.”

“Dig up. What do you mean?”

“When you stood on my shoulders and dug at the side, what happened?”

“I got sand all over you.”

“Exactly. And that sand fell to the bottom of the pit. If we dig at the sides, it’ll fill in the bottom. Eventually, we can fill in the hole enough to be able to climb out.”

Erik thought for a minute. “It might work. But it’ll take forever, won’t it?”

“I don’t know. But do you have anything else to do to pass the time?”

Erik shook his head. “Unfortunately, I don’t. Let’s get started.”

-2-

Todd found himself lying on an open stretch of sand next to his mother, who was breathing furiously and fighting back the pains of her labor. He opened his eyes and looked around. The demon sat nearby, as if waiting. Todd couldn’t imagine what it was waiting for, unless it was for the baby to be born. Maybe he had something in mind for the baby.

“Where’s Dad?” he asked.

“I have taken care of the intruders,” the demon said. “They won’t be bothering us any more.”

He looked at his mother, then back at the demon. “What are you going to do with us?”

“Oh, I have plans for you. I have plans for you all. Don’t you worry. You and I will be going back to where you came from. We will have a great time together.”

“And my Mom?”

“That depends on how well you cooperate,” the demon said. “Right now it could go either way.”

Todd thought for a moment. It looked like the thing had killed his dad. But he didn’t have the energy to think about that now. That would come in time, but right now he had to think of his Mom. His mom and the new baby.

“Ok,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”

“Ah, that is so much better. We can work together, you and I. First, I want you to stay with your mother and don’t try anything foolish. Don’t try to run away or fight me. There’s nowhere to run and, as you can see, you can’t defeat me.”

Todd could see the logic in that. “Ok,” he said.

“Your mother is going to have her baby very soon. I need you to help her.”

“I’ll try,” he said. “But I don’t know what to do.”

“It’s ok, Honey,” his mother said. “I’m ok. Everything’s going to be all right.”

But his mother didn’t look all right. She was pale and gray-looking. His hands were clammy and she was having great trouble breathing.

“Mom, remember how they told you to breathe?”

“Yeah, Todd. I do.”

“Well you’re not breathing that way, Mom. It’s not sounding the same. You’re gasping for air. You’re not breathing it.”

“Ok, Todd. You’ve got to help me. You know how Dad would count along with me when I practiced?”

“Yeah.”

“Well you’ve got to do that now too.”

“Ok.”

“And one other thing. When the baby comes, I’m going to need you to help take her out.”

“Mom, I can’t deliver a baby. Why can’t he do it?”

“Todd, do you really want a demon delivering your little sister? You don’t want that, do you?”

“But I don’t know what to do.”

“Have faith. You will know what to do. Just do your best.”

Her breathing started again, erratically this time too.

“Slow down, Mom,” he said. “Just listen to me and follow along.”

He breathed the way he’d seen his mother doing when she was practicing, and his dad had been helping. He had listened to these breathing lessons for the last three months until he literally knew them by heart. His Mom and Dad had practiced them in the next room, and he’d thought it was fun to listen in at first. After awhile, though, it had become boring. Todd had learned it better that either of his parents and had used it on himself late at night when he was having trouble sleeping. It was ironic that he was so good at this and his parents were the ones who took the lessons.

His mother looked at him and forced a smile through her pain and he saw that she was watching him. Already her breathing was getting stronger.

-3-

Erik had never worked so hard in his life. His body couldn’t die here in this place, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t feel pain. He had Dovecrest scratched and dug at the sand around the pit for what seemed like hours. All they had to use were their bare hands. The sand scraped painfully and lodged under their nails until their fingers bled.

“This is not any fun.” Erik said. “What I wouldn’t give for a shovel.”

“I’d settle for a teaspoon,” the Indian replied.

Still, they appeared to be making progress. The hole slowly filled in around them, allowing them to stand on the new sand as it fell in. Just a little more and Erik knew he would be able to stand on Dovecrest’s back and reach the edge of the pit. Then he could push in more sand from the top with his feet until he could reach in and pull his friend out.

“What time do you think it is?” Erik asked.

“I don’t think this place has time. Though if we were still back home I’d guess it would be the middle of the night.”

“My watch stopped working when we got here.”

“There’d be no way to keep time here anyway. There’s no sun. No moon or stars either.”

Time did seem to stand still here, he thought. It was never light or dark—everything was simply black and illuminated by an unchanging reddish glow. He wondered if that was how the mythology of the black and red colors of evil came about.

“No days of the week here,” Erik said. “No Mondays. That’s probably the only good thing about this place.”

“Definitely the only thing. If I never see another grain of sand in my life it will be too soon.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to go to the beach again.”

They continued the small talk for some time, mostly to keep their minds off their misery.

“So,” Erik asked, “How do—or did—your people view heaven and hell?”

Dovecrest laughed. “That’s a very complicated question. I don’t know if I have a simple answer.”

“There is no simple answer to anything, is there? That’s why God made the world so complex. So we’d have things to worry about.”

“In that respect, the world of my people probably is simpler than your world. My people—and most of the tribes of this land—never thought of themselves as powerful people, as conquerors. My people were simple. They lived off the land and prayed very simple prayers. For a good harvest. For a mild winter. For plentiful shell fishing. For health and fertility. We consider ourselves to be humble, pitiful people whose lives depend upon the creator’s mercy and bounty.”

“That sounds like a very Christian way of life.”

“That depends. I know of your history. Your crusaders thought of themselves as Christians.”

“Good point. But Christ preached humility. The meek shall inherit the earth.”

“Yes. And so they shall.”

“So what is your concept of hell?”

“Since my people are God’s people, they would not go to hell.”

“Yet you believe in demons.”

“Yes, demons spawned by the evil one.” Dovecrest laughed. “Do you know: the greatest demon that the tribes spoke of most was the white man. The ‘white devil’.”

“I guess I can understand that.”

“No, you probably can’t understand that. But I appreciate the attempt.”

The Indian was right. He had no idea what it must have been like. He felt suddenly ashamed of himself and of his race. Even if he hadn’t been personally involved, he was ashamed of what had happened just as a fellow member of the human race.

They were getting very close now. As they dug and filled in the hole, the outer rim widened, making the angle less steep. Erik figured that they’d soon be able to crawl their way out.

“Looks like we’re almost free of this pit,” he said. “What’s our plan once we get out?”

Dovecrest stopped digging and looked at him directly. “My friend,” he said. “I have absolutely no idea.”

-4-

The demon sat back on its haunches and watched, fascinated by this whole birthing process. The ritual it had begun had been interrupted by the two intruders, but that was no matter. It could finish the ritual later, as soon as the baby was born. It wouldn’t work to complete it until the victim was ready, so it would be better to wait. This baby didn’t look like it was in any great hurry to be born. Actually, given the details of where it was about to begin its life, the decision to come late was a rather good one for the baby’s sake.

The baby would sure have a quick entry and exit from the world. It would take its innocence immediately, before it had the chance to become corrupted by earthly sin. Taking a blameless, innocent soul was always a victory, and he felt about to be victorious now. The blood of an innocent was sure to sharpen any spell and take it to the limits. The trouble was, there weren’t many innocents left in the world. His colleagues on the sin team had been victims of their own success. Now the pure material, needed for only the most powerful spells, was very scarce, almost extinct.

But this one would do very nicely. It might even bring her up to the altar stone itself and kill her. It could do it right here, of course, but something about returning to the original scene just seemed so damned poetic.

He wasn’t an expert on human births by any means, but this one seemed to be going particularly slow. And he was getting impatient. He could remove the child forcibly—but that would end the innocence. But if something was wrong and the baby killed her mother, that would destroy the innocence as well. He’d just have to be patient and watch very closely, he thought. It wouldn’t be unlike the mother to try to trick him again. Of course she was probably in too much pain and under too much stress to even think of a plan, let alone use it. But still, something told him not to ever trust this woman.

He watched as the woman screamed in pain and tried to control her agony with some sort of regular breathing method, which her son was coaxing her through. It was almost comical. He wondered why these people feared hell at all—there seemed to already be so much pain and suffering on the earth that there really didn’t need to be a hell, in its humble opinion. No, take that back, it thought. Humility was definitely not one of its trademarks. And neither was patience, for that matter.

Fortunately, fascination was one of his strong suits, and he had to admit he was fascinated by this birth concept. He’d seen and had taken part in the end of countless numbers of lives. But this was the first time in all of these millennia that he had ever seen a new life being born. This was something different, worthy of study.

No, he wouldn’t rip the infant from the womb, though he was quite capable of doing so. Instead he would wait this thing out and see how it went. He expected that as an added bonus, she’d learn about suffering as well. The mother would surely suffer when her newborn was killed. She might be able to keep it together until she learned that the demon was going to steal her son’s body, and that she would have to take him home and care for him as her own child.