Laurie nodded, falling into a crouch to minimize her exposure to the wind.
“Charlie, come with me.” Crossing the yard, Harry dug the P’oh Tarhei out of his pocket, his eyes fastened to the demon’s contorted shape. He held the artifact up over his head, coming to a halt only fifteen yards from John.
“Hey!” he shouted. “I got what you want right here! Come and get it, you son of a bitch!”
The demon coiled in upon itself in the frigid air, twisting towards Harry, its huge form losing some of its cohesion to the motion.
“Are you nuts?” Charlie backed off, moving slowly away from him.
“No.” Harry swallowed. “At least I hope not. Go check on John.”
The demon hovered closer, looming over him. He had the terrible sensation of staring into the face of death, the same way he imagined a helpless animal must feel as it stared down its deadliest predator. For just an instant he swore he could make out a ghostly pair of eyes in the swirling snow, eyes devoid of any sense of compassion, of any notion of mercy. They were the eyes of something dead inside, something that could not conceive of anything beyond its own relentless lust for destruction.
Confronting the formless beast now was somehow worse than facing the reanimated tupilaq in the caverns earlier that afternoon. As ferocious as that had been, it had been a solid entity, and anything solid—at least in theory—could be destroyed. This creature, composed of spiraling snow and freezing wind, seemed completely invulnerable.
And it was coming for him.
The motion was so perfectly executed, so smoothly enacted, that at first he couldn’t even perceive it. But in a matter of seconds he understood what was happening. The demon was reshaping itself yet again, merging with the driving snow to conceal its advance.
Harry held his breath, counting off the seconds.
The demon had become all but invisible in the howling storm. Only a disturbance in the blanket of snow on the ground betrayed its coming, a ripple of motion that moved against the direction of the wind.
Harry watched the ground carefully, trying to time his move as precisely as he could. If he reacted too early, his plan would fall apart at the seams; too late and he would be dead before he even had a chance to set it into motion. He waited until the shifting snow was only ten feet away and then hurled the P’oh Tarhei high overhead toward the ruins of the house.
It spun through the turbulent air, falling end over end into the burning debris.
The demon reacted instantly, sweeping past him on a gust of wind so powerful it knocked him flat. He lay in the snow and watched as the shape of the creature reappeared, converging on the rubble to begin its search. It swept over the fallen timber like a wild beast, hot on the trail of the shard of wood and bone that Jha-Laman’s descendants had safe-guarded for generations.
He started to make his way towards John.
Behind him, a triumphant bellow rose into the air. He didn’t have to turn to know that the demon had found what it was looking for.
His first impression was that John was dead, that the demon’s attack had crushed the life out of him in a single blow. Crouching beside him, Charlie looked up when Harry approached. “He’s all right,” Charlie told him. “Wind’s knocked out of him.”
And as Harry knelt down beside him, he saw the dimmest flicker of acknowledgement in John’s eyes. The young man’s injuries weren’t extensive; there just seemed to be a few superficial cuts and bruises, though Harry didn’t know how much more he could take.
“John? Can you hear me?”
John’s head rolled weakly in his direction. “Yes.”
“We’re going to get you out of here just as soon as we can. But first you have to help me. We gave it what it wants, now we have to stop this thing, right here and now. I can’t do it without you.”
John nodded, groaning as he tried to lift his head. Finally, he gave up, settling back into the snow. “You’re . . . you’re going to have to give me a minute here.”
“Okay, just tell me what I have to do. And don’t go dying on me.”
“Not if I can help it.” John winced as a fresh stab of pain racked his body somewhere deep inside. “I think I have an idea, but you’re not going to like it.”
Laurie tensed, shivering in the wind. She watched the wreckage of the house carefully, waiting for any sign of the demon’s resurrection. It had relinquished its hold on the falling snow, had surrendered the driving winds to the forces of nature, all in its longing to regain the P’oh Tarhei.
It could manipulate the wood and bone, Harry had told her, just as it had controlled the natural elements of the storm, altering their properties to rebuild its stolen flesh. The memory of its physical existence was still ingrained within the beast. It had, after all, spent more than two centuries in the impenetrable guise of the tupilaq.
Given the chance, it would surely attempt to regain that form.
Now she saw that Harry had been right. Some sort of bizarre transformation was taking place among the ruins, an impossible act of metamorphosis and regeneration. A hulking shadow began to rise from the clutter of timber and stone, a huge form that seemed as if it might go on forever. A long, thin arm emerged from inside the shadow, taking on shape and substance as it grew.
The demon was reshaping itself one final time, duplicating the substance of the P’oh Tarhei to meet whatever monstrous proportions it had devised to create for itself.
“No,” she whispered, “oh no, no.” She raised her voice, hoping Harry would be able to hear her above the rising wind. “Harry! It’s coming!”
And when she looked down to check the connections on the detonator one last time, she almost screamed. One of the wires was missing completely, its bare end lost somewhere in the thick carpet of snow at her feet.
* * * * *
“I won’t allow it,” Harry said. “Find another way.”
“It’s the only chance we have.”
Harry hadn’t expected John to propose this sort of plan, never would have thought such an act might become necessary. But in the end, necessity had become the bottom line.
According to John, they simply had no alternative.
And his logic held up, the pieces of his argument falling into place a bit too smoothly for Harry’s liking. It all stemmed from Harry’s decision to give the demon the artifact it had attacked the house for: the P’oh Tarhei. With the demon once again gaining physical form, they had the chance—slim though it might be—to destroy the tupilaq and return the demon to its imprisonment beyond the sky. But only if Harry was willing to play by John’s rules, only if he was willing to let John go through with the plan he wanted to put into action.
“Harry, we can do this. I can do this.”
“Not if I don’t let you.”
“It’s beyond that now. We’re past talking about morals and ethics here. This is bigger than that.” John sighed. “We’re talking in circles now, all right? I already told you there’s no other way.”
Harry felt his resolve crumbling. The sounds of the demon’s resurrection were growing louder every second. The longer they stood here arguing about it, the less chance they would have of succeeding at all. But still, what John was proposing . . .
“I can’t let you do it, I just can’t. Christ, I’m a police officer. You’re talking about suicide.”
“Not suicide. Sacrifice. Think about it. Jha-Laman gave up his child. So did the men he traveled with. And Slater, he tried to give up those children, but he couldn’t work the magic that was supposed to go with it. It begins with death, just like Mahuk warned. To open a passage, a gateway to the other side of the sky, a spirit must be set free to pass through.”
“John, look—”
“I’m willing to be that spirit. I’ve got nothing left to lose. It’s my destiny, Harry.”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it.”
“I can feel it. It’s what Mahuk was getting at. If I was meant to come here, to fight Wyh-heah Qui Waq, and if I
was meant to die in the process of banishing it forever, then so be it. It’s bigger than me. Bigger than both of us.”
Harry considered another tactic, another moment of protest, but in the end, as a chilling howl began to rise from the wreckage of his home, he finally gave in, knowing John was right. There was no other way, at least none that he could imagine. But allowing a man to give up his life, to stand by and just let it happen . . . it ran against everything he stood for. Everything he believed in.
“I still don’t like it,” he said at last. “I still wish there was something else we could try—”
“There isn’t.”
“I know.” He stared hard at John for a moment, trying to think of something to say, some words of final comfort he could offer the young man. But there was nothing. What could he say that wouldn’t sound hollow? What could anyone say at a time like this?
“Listen, I—”
“Be well, Harry. Take care of your wife, your friends. Never forget what we did here today.”
Harry nodded, hoping his expression said everything he couldn’t put into words.
John grinned weakly, a glint of fear in his eyes despite the confidence in his words. “Now get the hell out of my way and let me get to work. Just don’t forget about those explosives. I’m going to need every bit of help you can give me.”
John looked past him, toward the house. And then he closed his eyes, his lips moving softly around an incantation that Harry knew was an invitation to death, a summoning to the spirits to come and claim his soul.
Charlie grabbed Harry’s arm. “You can’t let him do this.”
“I have to, Charlie,” he said. “Believe me. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”
Harry turned toward the house, just in time to see a shape beginning to emerge from the darkness. It was huge, a blackness within the shadows that he couldn’t tear his eyes away from.
And it was still growing.
Laurie fell to her knees, searching desperately for the second detonator wire. She stripped off her gloves, pushing the snow aside in huge handfuls; the fierce bite of the frigid air on her skin was a small price to pay if it meant making a better contact with the missing lead.
She started to crawl back towards the house. The wire would have to be in that direction, she reasoned. If it had fallen off after their run from the cellar, it would have wound back up toward its source.
Three frantic minutes passed this way, but still she couldn’t turn up the missing strand in the sea of blowing snow. And then, only twenty feet from the house, a terrible sound snagged her attention. It was the sound of wood groaning, of natural elements stretching beyond their boundaries, the sound of supernatural chaos creating itself from the order of reality.
She looked up slowly, towards the house’s crooked, crumbling peak. A huge shadow was beginning to grow there, taking shape from the ashes of its past.
Laurie froze, her mind reeling, her eyes refusing to close, her hands stopped dead on the ground, six inches from the exposed copper end of the missing red wire.
Whatever shape Harry might have envisioned for the demon’s resurrection, it couldn’t compare to the sight that greeted him as the terrible spirit finally made its appearance. The towering form of Wyh-heah Qui Waq reared up from the ruins of the house, howling in rage. Its features had changed somehow, in ways too subtle for Harry to put his finger on, but the results of the mutations were easy enough to assess. The demon looked more ferocious now, the tupilaq’s form more threatening than the one Harry had first glimpsed in the caverns.
Its eyes burned with greater fury, its maw opening to reveal a sneer more malevolent than any Harry had ever seen before. It was almost as though its recent period of formlessness had only fed its outrage, and now, once more in solid flesh, the beast had become twice as deadly.
The memory of its shape had been altered, either through pain or through rage, in the end corrupting its shape even further. It took one shuddering step in Harry’s direction, its eyes falling coldly upon him as it advanced. They were as black as coal, filled with the promise of coming death, with an unspoken threat of approaching damnation.
He felt a nameless fear inside, something primal, ingrained so deeply into his psyche that it couldn’t be denied. This was the fear that held its roots in man’s first stumbling steps into the unknown at the dawn of humanity, the fear that whispered from the first graveyards in the dead of night. And this was the fear that would freeze him in his tracks and push his mind into permanent darkness, unless he could look away before it was too late.
With every ounce of will he had left, Harry forced his head to turn in Laurie’s direction, his mouth opening around words that were already beginning to seem senseless to him in the chaos of his mind.
He took a breath and shouted as loudly as he could. “Hit it!”
Laurie barely heard him, struck nearly deaf by the distance between them, by the terror she felt in the shadow of the rising demon. But somehow the words reached her, breaking through her fear just enough to let her respond. She felt her head turning in Harry’s direction, but couldn’t remember initiating the motion. And when she caught sight of him through the flying snow, another part of her came back to the present, a part of her that knew she’d been given a job to do, a responsibility that could not be ignored.
She turned her eyes back to the ground, her hands already starting to push their way through the drifting snow. She had to find the wire. It was what Harry needed her to do, what he was desperate for her to do.
But she couldn’t see a thing. Between the falling snow and the darkness spreading out around her, it was impossible to make out anything in detail. And if she didn’t find the wire out here, if she had to go back into the black mouth of the cellar . . .
“Oh, please, please . . .”
Tears stung her eyes, freezing on her cheeks and in her lashes. But no sooner had she started to cry in desperation than her right hand brushed against something lying in the snow. She seized it, dragging it towards her, praying silently that it was what she’d been looking for.
It was the wire, its exposed end still curled in on itself where Harry had twisted it around the detonator’s terminal.
She went to work on it right then and there, not bothering to put more distance between herself and the house. That could come later, when she was sure the wire was going to hold.
* * * * *
Harry counted the seconds, waiting for the blast, watching the house and the moving form of the reanimated demon.
“Come on, come on,” he whispered.
Beside him, John was still spitting out the words to his spell, his voice hoarse in the freezing wind. He looked different somehow, his features pinched, his body hunched in pain. Harry could almost believe his words were already working, that the young man’s soul was being pulled slowly away from him, leaving his body to suffer a slow and painful death.
A flash of light flickered in the sky above them, growing steadily wider each time it flared into view. Harry stared up at it, transfixed, watching in awe as it split the darkened sky from beyond the barrier of reality.
John’s spell was working; that much was clear. His efforts were proving successful, his sacrifice forcing open a tiny hole in the sky, one that was stretching wider with every passing second.
“Oh, God . . .”
Harry turned toward the sound. Charlie stood to his right, his eyes on the demon, sweat pouring off of him in rivulets. He was murmuring softly, trying to talk himself out of what he was seeing, issuing a tumble of words that Harry couldn’t quite make out. His head moved back and forth in complete denial.
“Charlie,” Harry said. “Charlie, listen to me.”
The younger man didn’t respond. His attention was riveted to the impossible sights before him.
“Stay with John. Can you hear me? I have to go check on Laurie, see what’s—”
Harry turned to look at him and stopped short. Charlie’s pupils seemed
to be shivering in their sockets, flicking back and forth too swiftly for Harry to follow. His face was covered in sweat, his mouth opening into a wide grimace of pain.
“Charlie, what is it? What’s the matter?”
Charlie moaned, a low and pathetic rumble in his throat. A fleck of blood appeared at the corner of his mouth, his head turning slowly in Harry’s direction. The flow of words stopped completely, but the tics and spasms that wracked his body seemed to grow even worse.
“. . . Harry . . .”
The name was forced out in a gasp, barely perceptible. But Harry heard it nonetheless. And when he stepped closer, his hands held out to offer Charlie some help, he heard the rest of it.
“Run. Harry . . . run . . .”
“What are you talking about?” Harry moved to Charlie’s side, placing a hand on his shoulder to steady him. He looked back at the house, just for a second, just to be sure the demon hadn’t cleared the debris yet. It hadn’t. It was still making its way over the fallen timbers, its huge hands pushing the wreckage out of the way in its desire to be free.
But it was coming. Slowly and steadily. It would only be a matter of time.
“Charlie, look. You’re going to be fine. We’re going to—”
Harry jerked his head back, his eyes coming to rest on Charlie’s face, on the terrible changes that were beginning to take place there. The deputy’s face had gone an ashen gray, his skin pasty and still gleaming with sweat.
“Holy shit.” Harry shook the younger man, trying to get a response. Charlie’s head lolled on his shoulders. “Don’t you go dying on me, too, damn it!” he screamed. But it was clear Charlie couldn’t hear him, far beyond the point of understanding.
His body began to tremble uncontrollably, and at a point just above the collar of his jacket, his throat began to bulge outward. The flesh beneath his chin crawled with motion, as if something beneath it was coming to life, stirring slowly in its cage of skin and sinew.
Primal Fear Page 28