The Scarlet Gospels (38 page)

“You die now is what meaning!” the demon woman said.

The toe of Lana's boot met the demon woman's mouth and the demon flew back several yards, landing in a twisted heap.

“Wrong,” said Lana, rubbing her face to clear it of the last bits of the demon's toxic phlegm. Lana then grabbed Harry's arm and led him into the tent. There was a small fire burning inside, the smoke vented through a hole in the middle of the roof, and by its light she saw Caz and Dale, kneeling with their backs to the fire, staring at the blank wall. Their hands were crossed behind them, as if they were tied, though they weren't. Lana went to them.

“Christ! Guys! Talk to me!”

“Are they alive?”

“Yeah. She has them tied up or … under some sort of trance. But they're alive.”

Lana grabbed Caz's hands in an attempt to establish contact and break the manacles of his mind. A shudder passed through his body by way of response and he made a muted wordless sound, as though talking in his sleep. Lana went down on her haunches with her back against the shack wall and looked at Caz's face. His eyes were wide and his mouth closed tight. He stared straight ahead of her—beyond her—his gaze unshifting.

“Caz. It's Lana. Can you—”

“Hey, you fucking guys!” Harry broke in. “We've got to go. Lucifer is making a hell of a bark and I don't want us to be here when he decides to bite.”

Caz made the same wordless noise he'd made before. Lana moved her open palm back and forth in front of both Dale's and Caz's eyes. Neither of them blinked.

“Assholes. Listen to Harry! You're not tied even up,” Lana said. “That old bitch just got you believing you are. And you're not gagged either. Are you hearing me?”

Again, the muted noise from behind sealed lips.

“It's a trick, that's all,” Harry said. “Some stupid incantation. Caz, your tattoos should be able to get you out of this one.”

Harry and Lana waited for some response. None came.

“Nothing,” Lana said. “What the fuck are we gonna do? We can't carry them out like this!”

“Wait,” Harry said. “Their eyes are open, yes?”

“Yeah,” Lana said. “They're not even blinking. It's creepy as hell.”

“Are they staring at anything in particular? Is something in their line of sight?”

Lana glanced at the wall in front of Caz and Dale and saw that painted on the tattered sheet of canvas from which the wall was made was a quartet of hieroglyphs, arranged so close to one another that they almost touched. Dale's and Caz's eyes were fixed upon the glyphs.

“Ha,” Lana said. “Harry, you're a goddamn genius! There's something painted on the wall. And they're staring right at it. What should I do?”

“Erase them. Wash them off. Obscure them. It doesn't matter. Just make them gone.”

“Can do,” Lana said, putting her hand to her chest wound and wetting her palm with blood.

She went to the wall and wiped the blood over the hieroglyphs, obscuring them completely. The release was immediate. The invisible ropes, gags, and blindfolds all lost their grip on Caz's and Dale's imaginations. The two men blinked, as though waking from a dream, and looked round at Harry and Lana, their faces screwing up in confusion.

“Hey, y'all,” Dale said. “When did you get here?”

“When you two queens failed to show,” Harry said, “we came looking.”

“Good thing too,” Lana said. “A few more minutes and I think you would have been that old demon bitch's dinner.”

“Jesus,” Caz said. “Really? The last thing I remember is getting to the edge of the village and then … this.”

“I'd be willing to wager that old bitch knew some even older magic,” Harry said. “I don't know how else she would have made it past your tattoos.”

“Harold, why aren't you looking at me?”

“It is rather odd,” Dale chimed in. “And where's Norma?”

Harry pursed his lips and gave a single slight shake of his head by way of reply. Dale grabbed Caz's hand and squeezed hard. Caz squared his jaw and took in a deep breath. No words were needed. The message had been received.

“Right,” Caz said. “I'll have my own private apocalypse later. Right now, what's the plan?”

“The plan,” Lana said, poking her head out of the tent, “is to find that wormhole the old bitch was—” But the old demon woman was gone, no trace of her to be found. “Fuck. I should have just killed her.”

“Nah,” Harry said. “It's better that she's somewhere, rotting for the rest of eternity.”

The Harrowers headed back the way they came while Lana told them what Pinhead had done to Harry and Norma.

“I can't believe it,” Caz said.

“Neither can I,” said Harry. “But we can't focus on that right now, or we'll never do what it is we have to do.”

“Which is?” Caz asked.

“Find a way out of this place,” Harry said. “That old demon woman said there was a way out.”

“She also said she'd help us,” Caz said.

“Maybe she meant turn us into helpings,” Dale said. “Old cow didn't exactly have a grasp of the language.”

No sooner had the words escaped his lips than a bright light illuminated their entire field of vision. The ground shook and the stones beneath their feet rattled.

“What the fuck was that?” Harry asked.

“I don't know,” Caz said, “but it was bright as shit.”

The Harrowers headed off between the trees, swallowed up by darkness in a few strides.

“That's gotta be Lucifer again, right?” Harry asked.

They came to a clearing and the source of the light suddenly became all too evident.

“Oh Jesus God,” Dale said.

“Lucifer isn't in the cathedral anymore,” Lana said. “He's glowing.”

“Glowing?” Harry asked.

“And he's floating over the lake,” Dale said, “kicking up the waters something fierce.”

“I think I knew that…” Harry said. “My ears seem to be making up for my eyes. I can hear the water going crazy.”

“Crazy is right. He's…” Caz stopped. “Wow.”

“What?” said Harry.

“He's flying now. Up. Fast,” said Lana. “And that fucking sea beast—”

“The Quo'oto?” Harry said.

“That's the one!” Lana replied. “It's coming up after him. Goddamn it's big. It's riding a reverse whirlpool or something. Fuckin' A…”

The words to describe the sight seemed to fail them all. It was too immense a spectacle: the circling waters in a foaming frenzy, the massive serpentine form of the Quo'oto rising out of the vortex empowered by its spiraling energies, and the light from Lucifer's body growing brighter as he climbed the air, with the Quo'oto following close behind him. The creature was defying the limitations of its anatomy with this flight, but Lucifer had it hooked by some invisible barb and drew it up from above just as the waters had cast it skyward from below.

Harry stared sightlessly at the spectacle, doing his best to make sense of all the commotion.

“Guys? What the fuck?”

“I never thought I'd say this, but my words are failing me,” Dale said.

“How about trying? Anyone? I want to
see
!”

“The Quo'oto's the size of ten trains, I swear,” Lana said.

“And it's following him,” Caz followed.

“Going?”

“Out of the lake and up.”

“Why?”

Before anyone could venture a guess, Lucifer answered the question for them.

 

2

Lucifer, the Fallen One, the star of morning, had lived and died in his underworld beneath a hated sky. God had set it in the heavens above Lucifer's prison kingdom as a stone might be rolled in front of a tomb, to seal in the dead's corruption so that it could never befoul the world.

Now, finally, rather than take his battle inward, Lucifer reacted outwardly for the first time in millennia and struck out at the stone ceiling, his strength fueled purely by rage. The Quo'oto was still rising up out of the vortex, its body far vaster than even the Lord of Hell had anticipated. Yet he drew it up without effort, though it roared its displeasure at being ejected from its natural habitat; its breath stinking of the dead meat in its entrails, it wanted Lucifer in its belly more than anything its hungry eyes had ever settled on, and for that reason alone it didn't fight to free itself from the hold that had been placed on it. Soon it would catch up with the Morning Star and swallow him whole. He was so close, just a tiny distance beyond its gaping maw. Any moment it would have him.

But no. Lucifer kept rising, and the Quo'oto came after him, coil upon coil rising skyward from the vortex now a thousand feet below.

On the beach the Harrowers who still retained their sight watched the spectacle in silence. At that moment all the commotion, those layers of sound that had steadily escalated as Lucifer prepared to start the waters spinning—now ceased. Even the roar of the vortex became remote. The hush lasted two, three, four heartbeats. Then Lucifer drove the Quo'oto into the sky's limit and the beast crashed into the surface. Upon its impact, there came a single thunderous boom, which started some distance away and then reverberated across the heavens. The Quo'oto loosed an unholy chthonic cry of pain—its last living act—and died, plummeting from the sky toward its watery grave.

“What the fuck was that?!” Harry screamed, his hands going to his ears.

“Jesus. It … uh, hit the sky,” said Lana.

“The stone?”

“Hard,” said Caz. “And there's a crack opening up. More than one, actually. A lot more. Fuck. There's cracks spreading over the whole damn rock.”

“And where's Lucifer?”

“He's right up against the stone, forcing the cracks open with his light.”

“And the Quo'oto?”

“Dead. Falling. I've never seen anything like it.”

“I got the picture,” Harry said.

“He's going to crack the sky open,” Lana said.

“Are we going?” Dale wanted to know. “Or are we waiting for the musical number?”

“We're going,” Caz said. “Right, Harry?”

“I've seen all I want to see,” Harry replied, unsmiling.

“So let's get gone,” Lana said.

“Lead me to Norma,” Caz said. “And we're as good as ghosts.”

There was a fresh fusillade of noise from overhead as new cracks opened in the stone, spreading from the fissures that were already gaping in the surface. A litter of fragments dropped from the cracks, seeming inconsequential for the first few seconds of their descent but rapidly revealing their true immensity. It wasn't only their size that was deceptive; so too was their course. The relation between the fracturing stone above and the lay of the land below was misleading. Shards of stone that seemed certain to fall on the beach near (if not directly upon) them fell many miles back, somewhere in the vicinity of Pyratha, or thereabouts, while pieces that seemed destined to land a long way off came down in the water close to the shore. The largest of these slivers—a piece of rock the size of a dozen houses or more—hit the water a hundred yards out from the shore, the impact sufficient to throw up a plume of water that challenged the cathedral for height.

The drizzle of falling shards was rapidly becoming a deluge, as Lucifer's inquiring light pressed deeper into the fractured surface of the sky, breaking off more and more fragments of Heaven. One slab, easily as big as a car, headed straight for the beach where Harry and company were currently standing

“You've got to be shitting me,” said Caz.

“What's—”

“No time for questions!” Lana barked as she shoved Harry out of the way. The slab sailed past D'Amour's head, missing his scalp by a whisper, and disappeared, without a sound, into a line of trees behind them. Everyone stopped dead in their tracks.

“Whoa,” said Harry. “That felt big. Where the hell was the crash?”

The car-sized slab of sky had sufficient size that its landing would have been enough to make every tree sway from its roots up to its topmost branch, shaking down leaves as it did so. Instead, the slab sailed over the heads of the Harrowers and was swallowed whole as though it had never existed.

“Did y'all see what I just saw?” Dale said, his jaw slack.

“No,” said Harry. “And I'm starting to think you guys are doing this on purpose.”

“Holy shit,” Lana said. “Harry, I think we found our way out.”

“Holes of worms, leading the way home! Fuckin' A!” Caz said. “Wormholes, Harold! You were right! That's what the old bitch was talking about. We have our way out of this! Come on!”

Lana led the way to Norma's body. Upon seeing his friend's crushed and lifeless body, Caz faltered for a moment but stayed the course.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “I wasn't ready for that.”

“This was never in my dreams,” Dale said, his voice shaky.

After a moment of recalibration he bent over, picked up his old friend, and draped her corpse over his left shoulder.

“Let's do it,” Caz said. “We said we wouldn't leave without her.”

Together they marched out across the inland edge of the trees and into a landscape of piled obsidian boulders. Here the deteriorating heavens shattered with loud cracks as they struck the obsidian. The shrapnel that sped off in all directions from these bits was potentially lethal, ricocheting off the black boulders like bullets. Heads down, the Harrowers wove among the boulders to find their wyrm hole.

“Jesus,” Harry said. “How much longer is this gonna keep up?”

“From the looks of it, I think he aims to flatten all of Hell,” Caz said.

“That does appear to be the plan,” Dale agreed.

On the heels of Dale's reply came three monstrous thunderclaps, louder by magnitudes than anything that had preceded them. They echoed back and forth between earth and sky, their volume not diminishing with each echo but instead becoming still louder, echoes of echoes of echoes soon so numerous they birthed an almost single, solid sound.