Until... | Book 3 | Until The End

by Hamill, Ike

  Ricky darted his eyes over to his brother.

  George seemed to feel his stare and swung his eyes over to Ricky. As soon as Ricky saw confirmation in his brother’s eyes, he turned.

  George spun too.

  The brothers led with their spears. Ricky caught Prescott in the side and George thrust down to take the creature in the leg.

  The ancient monster was wearing a man’s clothing, but that image was a lie. Ricky could tell from the smell that the creature was nothing more than rotted flesh bound together by centuries-old cloth and stitching. At the end of the spear, Prescott laughed. It was amused by their attempts to harm it, even as George drove his spear deeper into the thing’s leg.

  Ricky wanted to pull his spear back and drive it into Prescott’s skull.

  Instinct told him not to. As soon as he pulled back on the spear, he knew that Prescott would be on top of him. One scratch from the thing’s teeth and he would be infected. It might even be able to infect him with a touch of one of its fingers.

  “Step out of the triangle,” Amber said.

  “No,” George said. “The triangle contains the ceremony. We can’t step…”

  “Do it,” she ordered.

  Prescott was pinned with the two spears, but he was too strong to hold for long. Ricky did what Amber said—he took a step away from the fire, breaking their triangle. Smoke swirled around his feet. He felt a strange combination of heat and cold from that smoke and then it moved on. Prescott twisted at the end of the spears as the smoke began to wind around his feet and encircle his legs.

  “Now bring him into the fire,” Amber said.

  “Yes,” George yelled. “I understand.”

  The only way to bring the tips of their spears into the fire was to raise Prescott up. Ricky gripped the shaft with one hand and pressed down hard on the end with his other to use his spear like a lever. George was doing the same thing.

  It took all of his strength and focus. A skinned animal galloped by, but Ricky didn’t flinch. He heard monsters screeching and calling from the woods, but he kept his attention to the task. He and George lifted Prescott and the swirling smoke came with him. Soon, they joined him with the fire and closed their triangle again.

  “Chant,” Amber said. “Do the chant.”

  “It’s too soon,” George said. “He won’t go into the vortex. He’s not from there.”

  Ricky looked between his brother and Amber. She looked surprised by what he said, but didn’t argue. Sparks flew up from the logs as they lowered Prescott into the fire. He seemed unaffected by the flames, but twisted and snarled at the smoke as it swirled around him. Amber’s demon was attacking Prescott, almost like it was doing her bidding. As Prescott thrashed, Ricky almost had the spear torn from his grip. When he tightened his hands around the shaft, he was nearly pulled off balance.

  George was struggling to maintain his grip as well.

  “Hold him,” Amber said.

  “What do you think we’re trying to do?” George asked.

  Ricky wasn’t sure if she was talking to them or to the demon that was tormenting Prescott.

  Amber stepped back from the fire and Prescott tried to lunge towards her. He almost pulled free from Ricky’s spear.

  Amber got her fingers under the wooden door that covered Prescott’s hole. The tendons on her neck stood out as she strained to lift it. As it rose up from the forest floor, Ricky saw the flames and dirt being drawn into the hole, like there was a vacuum down there.

  Ricky realized that he was being pulled in that direction too.

  Once she got the door halfway up, it flew open the rest of the way, crashing into the trees. The pull was undeniable. Amber tumbled to her knees and grabbed a root so she wouldn’t be sucked in. Ricky wanted to help her, but he couldn’t release his grip on the spear—it was the only thing keeping him upright. As Amber clawed away from the hole, the fire, the demon, and Prescott were all being pulled towards it.

  George was kicking at the logs and rocks, pushing everything along.

  The wind made the flames roar. Ricky managed to nudge a few of the logs too. His feet were burning. The bulk of the heat was sucked away. When Amber got to her feet and came around behind Ricky, he shifted to the side and they formed a new triangle. The demon tried to go to her, fighting against the wind, but it seemed like Prescott had a grip on its smoky form.

  They were locked in battle.

  George and Ricky were trying to push everything towards the hole and the monsters were trying to get away from it. Amber picked up a stick and pushed the bones of the fire. A major log, caught in the wind, lifted and tumbled, end over end, before it disappeared down the hole. George moved to the far side. Their triangle became complete again with the three of them roughly on opposite sides of the hole. With every push from Amber, their triangle closed tighter.

  “Chant,” Amber said.

  This time, George agreed.

  He began to recite the lines that would tighten the vortex to a close. Ricky recognized the incantations that were meant to end the Moonlight Ascension ritual. He wanted to yell that it wasn’t right—the ritual would have no affect on Prescott. At best, they were going to send Amber’s demon away again and they would be left to deal with Prescott alone. He was clearly too strong for them.

  But as George said the lines, the wind increased and swirled. It was forming a tornado, centered over the pit. Instead of blowing the flames out, they flared, filling the forest with orange light that sent stark shadows of the trees radiating out in every direction.

  Prescott got his arms around Amber’s smoke demon and tilted his head back to laugh. He pulled free from George’s spear and then Ricky’s a moment later. Rising up, hovering over the hole, Prescott disappeared into the cone of flames. Ricky could still hear his evil laugh over the wind and the sound of galloping hooves around them.

  Ricky looked at his brother just in time. George finished reciting a line and pointed. Ricky’s mouth opened and he began speaking immediately. The shouted words tore from his throat on their own. George said another couple of lines and then pointed at Amber. She appeared shocked as her own mouth opened and more words spilled from her.

  The three of them spoke in unison. Ricky remembered George telling him what to say, even though he could have sworn that everything had been forgotten.

  As they reached the crescendo of the ceremony, the flames flared, sputtered, and flickered out. The logs had already fallen into the pit. Amber’s smoke demon was gone. All that was left was Prescott, hovering over the pit.

  His mouth opened again and Ricky smelled death in the air once more as Prescott laughed.

  As he watched, Ricky realized that he had been wrong. He thought that Prescott had teeth in his head, but he didn’t. They were actually fangs—not like the long teeth of a dog, but rows of needle-thin spikes in its mouth. The scaly lips were parted and a long tongue ran over them. Ricky’s attention didn’t stay on the mouth for long. His eyes drifted up to Prescott’s eyes. Each eye held a glowing planet, rotating and orbited by sparkling moons.

  They were the most beautiful things he had ever seen. Ricky wanted to fly into those eyes and explore the boundless universe contained within them. It was all his to discover. He could spend infinite lifetimes in that glory.

  “Hey, Prescott,” George said. “You dropped this.”

  When Prescott looked away, Ricky fell to his knees in sorrow. The one thing he cared about—gazing into Prescott’s eyes—had been stripped from him. Everything he cared about and everything he loved was now lost, but it was only a few feet away from him.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Ricky saw George drop something and then Prescott was gone, down into the hole.

  Ricky stumbled forward after him.

  Forty-Two: Amber

  As they said the final words of the ceremony, Amber felt the demon pulled from her again. This time, its departure tore a deep hole in her. She felt like she was losing a connection to her past. It was ripped r
ight from the center of her soul and it left a gaping wound. Amber looked down at herself, thinking that the pain was so real that it must be true. Her headlamp revealed nothing—no blood, no hole.

  “Ricky,” George shouted.

  Amber blinked and looked up at George. He was yelling at his brother. The fire had collapsed in on itself and tumbled into the darkness in the center of the circle. Amber remembered that they had moved the fire over the hole—Prescott’s hole—and that’s where the swirling vortex had gone.

  Ricky didn’t seem to hear as his brother shouted.

  Amber saw why. Ricky was entranced by Prescott. The creature was hanging above the pit and slowly moving closer to Ricky.

  Amber shouted too. Ricky didn’t even flinch at the sound of their voices. She could see the reflection of Prescott’s gaze in Ricky’s eyes. That alone was almost enough to make her sink into hypnosis. She knew that if she tried to get closer to Ricky, she would just be captured by the creature as well.

  “Ricky! Look away,” George said.

  Again, the plea fell on deaf ears. George crouched down to dig in his bag. Amber found her spear and tried to reach Prescott. She couldn’t get close enough to stab him. That was almost a relief. She knew that stabbing him with a spear wouldn’t do anything. The brothers had already tried that and, at best, they were only able to hold Prescott at bay for a bit.

  Now that Prescott was focused completely on Ricky, Amber could see the monster for what it was. It was sinew and bone, barely contained by moldering old clothes and rotting stitches. Tufts of white hair poked out from its scaly scalp. It reached one of its claws towards Ricky, who looked like he was hanging from invisible threads, attached to his eyes. The rest of Ricky’s body was limp. There was no life in him except for the light reflecting in his eyes.

  George stood up, holding something in his hands.

  Amber squinted and finally recognized it when her headlamp reflected off of it.

  The thing George held was the rearview mirror that she had broken off of Romeo’s truck.

  George was holding it out like a crucifix.

  “Hey, Prescott,” George yelled. “You dropped this.”

  It seemed like an impossible miracle that Prescott turned to look at what George held. The monster immediately began to move towards George and Amber realized that George had just traded one disaster for another. Even if Prescott was entranced by the mirror, he would be close enough to strike. It would be silly to think otherwise.

  George dropped the mirror.

  Prescott changed direction, following it as gravity pulled it down. The mirror tumbled and Prescott nearly grabbed it, but then raced after it as it descended into the hole.

  Ricky dropped to his knees and then began to pull himself forward to follow Prescott.

  Amber raced to grab him. He was already picking up speed—falling into the hole—by the time she grabbed onto Ricky’s leg. He kicked, trying to free himself from her grip so he could follow his master.

  George grabbed her and Ricky’s other leg.

  Together, they were able to pull him back from the edge.

  Ricky started to sob.

  # # #

  Amber inched closer to the hole.

  “Ricky, snap out of it,” George said.

  Amber found her flashlight and pointed it down. The edge of the hole was sloped. She feared that she couldn’t get close enough in order to see down inside it. She was too afraid that she would lose her footing. Worse, Prescott’s hand might snake out from the darkness and drag her down.

  “Help me, George,” she said.

  George moved quickly to her and grabbed her arm, trying to pull her away from the edge.

  “No, I mean help me look down there.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Are you?” she asked, turning on him. “You think we can just ignore Prescott because we can’t see him at the moment. He could be anywhere, George.”

  He clenched his jaw, holding back whatever it was that he wanted to say.

  “Stay there,” he said.

  George moved to his bag and he began to rummage through it again. Amber turned her light towards the woods around them. She was listening for the sound of galloping hooves. Minutes before, when Prescott was above ground, she had heard them.

  “Where did they go?” she whispered.

  George returned and wrapped a rope around her waist. He tied it and then looped it around the trunk of a tree in order to belay her.

  “Stop worrying about me. Take care of your brother,” she said. Still, she was glad for the tension he provided on the rope as she moved forward.

  There was a light down in the hole. Amber thought back to the previous morning so she could remember the layout. The hole descended like a funnel, ending about ten feet down before it struck off in a horizontal direction, back toward the graves. The light on the sides of the dirt hole was faint, but it frightened Amber.

  “Get ready to pull me back,” she said to George.

  She inched forward. It was a soft, orange light, almost like…

  “Firelight,” she whispered.

  Then, she saw it. Some of the flames still swirled down there in the hole. They turned lazy circles in a tiny tornado around Prescott.

  Amber opened her mouth to scream at George to pull her back. She shut it again, holding her tongue. He wasn’t mesmerizing her. He wasn’t even looking in her direction. Prescott’s stare was directed down the tunnel, toward the graves. Amber pictured it. She remembered what they had left at the end of that tunnel and she saw the light coming from Prescott’s eyes. That hypnotic light would be traveling all the way down his tunnel to the mirror that she and Ricky had propped up. He was transfixed in his own gaze.

  Amber took note of one other thing before she tugged the rope to signal to George.

  He pulled her away from the hole.

  Ricky was sitting up now, leaning back against a tree with his hands covering his face.

  George crouched next to him.

  “Ricky? You okay?” George asked.

  Ricky pulled his hands from his face and looked at his own hands in the light from his headlamp.

  He nodded slowly.

  “Prescott is staring at the mirror,” Amber said. “He’s not moving.”

  “Good,” George said. He stood up and began to walk away.

  “Where are you going?” Amber asked. The triangle that the three of them made between each other was important. Panic shot through Amber when George began to break that shape by walking away. Remembering that she had just moved away from the brothers a minute before, Amber managed to take a deep breath and settle her heart a bit.

  “Be right back,” George said.

  Amber took Ricky’s damp hands.

  He looked into her eyes and then his eyes darted away quickly.

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “I had everything. Everything. It was taken away from me.”

  Squeezing her fingers hard, Ricky’s expression turned angry for a moment and then faded back to sadness.

  “Amber,” George said. “Give me a hand.”

  He was carrying one of the mirrors that they had dragged into the woods. It was covered with leaves until George turned it upside down and shook it. George took it towards the pit and then grabbed one of the long branches they had cut for the fire.

  “I want to put a couple of branches across so we can position this mirror above the hole. In case he looks up.”

  Amber nodded. It seemed dangerous to leave Ricky on his own. Amber kept a close eye on him as they worked. She saw George watching his brother as well. When the sticks were in place, Amber put the rope on again and George gave her enough slack so she could lay the mirror face down over the hole. Prescott was still down there, staring intently at the mirror at the end of his tunnel.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “We wait until dawn,” George said.

  # # #

  R
icky shut his eyes. They danced beneath his eyelids as he slept. George made another small fire. One of Amber’s flashlights strobed and pulsed before the batteries gave out. With a knife, she occupied her hands by making a dozen stakes and setting them up like pikes around their position.

  The hours passed slowly. They shivered around the fire. She and George discussed walking back to the car and then decided it would be safer to stay put. As dawn approached, and the forest began to wake up, it was clear that creatures of the night were fleeing back to where they hid. Amber heard screeches and pounding hooves. When the first rays of morning lit the sky above, she was afraid to look, afraid that the light might hypnotize her.

  The sun rose over the hill and a few beams of light cut through the morning fog.

  George stood up and tied the rope around his own waist.

  “Can you…”

  “Sure.”

  Amber took up the slack that was looped around the tree. As she let loose enough rope for George to go near the pit, she heard Ricky open his mouth and work his tongue around.

  “What’s… What is he…”

  “He’s going to check on Prescott,” Amber said. She immediately regretted giving Ricky that information. All night, he had been pining for the escape that he had found in Prescott’s eyes, and she had just told Ricky where he might find that salvation again. Ricky didn’t run off for the pit, and Amber was able to breathe again.

  “A little more,” George said after he peered down into the hole.

  He grabbed the corner of the mirror and tilted it up. Amber realized what he was doing. The mirror caught a sunbeam and reflected it down into the hole. When George angled it just right, the beam shot straight down. She heard a horrible sound from the pit and nearly dragged George back.

  He must have felt the tension on the rope, because George said, “It’s okay. Hold steady.”

  The sound intensified and the pitch rose.

  “He’s looking,” George said, turning his own head away.