“No! Lysander! Hieronymus! Stop!”
“What are we going to do?” Dixie asked me.
“Why’s he taking him back there, where we can’t see?” I asked.
“That’s where his altar is,” Samson said. “The one he built to make a virginal offering and summon Avolapek.” After a moment, he added, “The altar’s kind of cool, actually. Very ritualistic. Something like that might be a neat backdrop to design for our show, the next time that Delilah and I start working on a new…oh.” It apparently dawned on him that there might not be a next time.
We heard chanting. It didn’t sound like Latin to me. Greek, perhaps? I didn’t know.
Golly said, “Maybe he can’t do the spell right?”
I said, “We can hope. But I have a feeling that if you’ve got a virgin staked out on your sacrificial altar, a man-eating demon probably overlooks your pronunciation errors.”
Behind me, Alice growled. I glanced over my shoulder to see her pacing nervously. When I looked back into the other chamber, I saw shadows dancing on the walls now. Hieronymus was lighting candles, creating a substantial glow. A pool of light spread gradually across the floor, and the shadows we could see on the wall became more pronounced, more discernible. I could identify Hieronymus moving around while he chanted.
“You’re off-key!” I shouted. “This demon will eat you first, if he comes.”
“I don’t think demons eat their summoners,” Samson murmured, “do they?”
“How would I know what demons do?” I replied. “But I wouldn’t want to bet on Avolapek’s behavior in a new setting any more than I’d want to bet on Alice’s.”
“I think she’s being very good,” Sarah said, “given the circumstances.”
I could see an enormous shape on the shadow-painted wall. Something moved on top of it: Lysander on the altar. Then Hieronymus cold-cocked him again.
“You coward!” I shouted at Hieronymus. “An unconscious, older man? Why don’t you come hit a girl?”
“He did hit me,” said Dixie.
“You bastard!” I shouted. “Why don’t you come try to hit me, you oily, smelly, effeminate, ineffectual little creep?” It didn’t work; he continued his chanting without missing a beat. “We need to break his concentration,” I said to the others. “If only we could get through this barrier!”
“I don’t know if it’ll do much good, sugar,” said Dolly, “but I can scream at a pitch that turns men’s bowels to water.”
“Maybe if we all do that together,” Clarisse suggested, “it would throw him off a little?”
“Give it a try!” I said.
Dolly wasn’t kidding about the pitch of her screams. I thought my eardrums would bleed. Golly Gee and the other women did well, too, but Samson was the real surprise; I never knew any man could hit notes that high. Alice made noises like she’d kill someone soon. I just hoped it wouldn’t be one of us.
Apart from a brief flinch, though, Hieronymus’s shadow showed no signs of distraction. In fact, he was so absorbed in his chanting and his summoning that he didn’t even seem to notice when the body on the altar started moving again. Lysander’s head was shifting restlessly, as if our screams were bothering him, at any rate.
Then—suddenly—fog, steam and spirals of smoke with tiny sparks of fast-dying fire billowed into being, filling the air with multiple explosions of noise and roiling fury.
“My God!” Dolly cried.
“I think the demon is coming!” Samson shouted. He started coughing as shafts of churning smoke, unimpeded by the barrier that restricted us, started pouring through the archway in thick, fast-moving columns.
My eyes stung and I started coughing. I waved a hand in front of my face, straining to see the shadows on the wall, but it was useless now. The air was too thick and murky with mingled smoke and fog. The smoke was hot, dry and smelled vaguely of sulfur. The fog was damp and soft, and it stank like a swamp.
“Avolapek! Avolapek!” Hieronymus cried. Then he resumed chanting, his voice loud and triumphant.
Lysander gave a terrible scream. Then another.
Was Avolapek arriving? If so, maybe that was enough to distract Hieronymus. Hoping his attention was elsewhere and his grasp on this portion of his power was weakening at the moment, I flung myself at the invisible barrier again—and this time flew straight through the archway. I landed in a heap somewhere on the rough stone floor of the other chamber.
I couldn’t see the other hostages through the fog and smoke, so I assumed they couldn’t see me. I hoped they’d try the same maneuver, but I didn’t want to shout out to them; it might alert Hieronymus, and he’d resurrect the barrier. I needed to disable him. Hoping that what worked on a Bengal tiger would work on a demented adept, I took off my shoe again, and crept through the smoke toward the sounds of Hieronymus’s voice and Lysander’s coughing. I got close enough to see Hieronymus, and I stalked up behind him. His back was turned to me. I hit him at the base of the skull with my shoe, as hard as I could.
“Argh!” He staggered away and whirled toward me. “No!”
I dropped my shoe and picked up one of the tall, cast-iron candlesticks that he’d conveniently positioned nearby, then swung it at him like a bat. It caught him on the shoulder. He screamed and stumbled backward.
I shouted to the others, “The barrier’s down! Come get Lysander!” Then I hit Hieronymus with my cast-iron weapon again. He flew into a wall, then slid down to the floor. He appeared to be out cold. I hit him again, just to be sure.
Other people’s screams joined the sound of Lysander’s. I turned around and squinted through the mingled fog and smoke. I staggered toward the noise, trying to find them. “Lysander! Lysander! Where are you?”
Alice growled again, and I flinched at how close she was—until I realized…“That wasn’t Alice, was it?” No one answered me. They were too busy screaming. “Oh, no.”
The thick veil of white mist, that noxious supernatural fog, cleared and melted away as I approached the altar. I found Samson and Dolly trying to remove shackles from Lysander’s hands and feet.
I couldn’t see Sarah, but I could hear her somewhere nearby, shouting, “Alice! Come, Alice! Alice, come! Eat the demon! Aren’t you hungry, sweetheart? Come on, Alice!”
Dixie and Clarisse stood their ground near the altar, each armed with another candlestick. Dixie was screaming. Clarisse was shaking and shiny with sweat. I looked at the thing they were looking at. Candlesticks wouldn’t stop it, not even cast-iron ones. Nor, I suspected, would a hungry tiger.
My heart stopped beating and my lungs stopped working as the thing that Hieronymus had summoned finished shaping itself out of smoke and fog and fire. It rose to its full height—eight feet, I guessed, vaguely surprised I could still think—and grinned at us. Dixie, Clarisse and I all fell back a step with a collective gasp. Its rows of fangs dripped with saliva. Its lumpy, mottled red flesh glowed with inner fire. Its long arms ended in massive claws. When it breathed on us, I smelled death and decay.
“Don’t look at it,” I said to Dolly and Samson.
“Alice! Come eat the demon! Come on!” Sarah urged.
Avolapek growled at us, a deep, menacing rumble that echoed around the chamber. Then the demon saw Lysander. It seemed to swell with delight, and it reached for him.
Without thinking, I brought the candlestick down with all my might on its massive, hideous arm.
This seemed to annoy it.
“Hit it again!” Lysander shouted. “Hit it again!”
“Celibacy was a bad idea,” I told Lysander. “Do you hear me? A bad idea!”
Dixie helped me hit the beast again. With one flick of its arm, it sent us flying across the room. But things could have been worse. It might have eaten us.
“Celibacy!” I said again, picking myself up. “Of course!”
“Huh?” Dixie said.
I tried to get my bearings. The room was still so foggy it was hard to make out shapes. Especially inert lumps on
the floor. But I found the one I was looking for while Clarisse boldly swatted the eight-foot-tall, flesh-eating demon.
“Grab his other arm!” I instructed Dixie. We hauled Hieronymus’s unconscious form off the floor and dragged him over to the altar. “Hey! Avolapek! Look! Uh, vide!” I was fairly sure that was Latin for something like see. Not that I had any reason to suppose Avolapek spoke Latin. “A virgin!”
If Lysander and Max kept themselves “pure,” I’d bet my bottom dollar that a power-obsessed nutbag like Hieronymus did, too. “Virgin,” I repeated. “Nice, clean, pure, virginal, evil lunatic! Right here! Come on, fetch! Just your type. And much younger than the guy staked out on the altar. Yum!”
“Got it!” Dolly cried, finally managing to get one of Lysander’s shackles loose.
“Me, too!” Samson cried, freeing another limb.
Lysander leaped off the altar—and crashed to the floor. He was still shackled to the altar by one foot. “Argh! Get it off! Get it off!”
“A little help here?” I said to him. “I’m trying to keep a demon from raping you!”
“Oh!” He looked at Hieronymus, who was starting to stir in my grasp, made a few gestures with his hands and shouted some stuff in Latin.
Hieronymus’s body flew out of my grip and straight into the demon’s arms.
“Excellent!” I said.
“That doesn’t solve our problems!” Samson said, trying to help Dolly with Lysander’s final shackle.
“He’s right!” Clarisse shouted, still waving her candlestick at the beast. “As soon as he’s done raping a virgin, he’ll want to eat a few hundred people. And we’re stuck down here with him, with no way out!”
“Goddamn it! It’s always something.” I bit my lip, wondering what to do next.
Dolly got Lysander’s foot free. “Yes!”
“Come on!” I shouted. “Retreat! Retreat!”
Moving en masse, we fell back, rounded the corner, and retreated into the other chamber. I was wearing only one shoe now, and my steps were uneven as I fled. Once we were all in the original chamber, I pointed out to Lysander the writing that covered the top and sides of the archway. “We think he was using those inscriptions to control who can and can’t pass through this doorway. Can you do the same thing?”
“I’m not sure!” He frowned. “I don’t recognize all the symbols. I’m not sure.”
In the next chamber, around the corner and beyond our range of vision, Hieronymus screamed horribly.
“Try!” I insisted. “We’ve got to get something between us and that thing!”
Lysander’s lips were moving silently as he tried to interpret the symbols while Hieronymus continued screaming in the next room.
“I thought a demon wouldn’t attack its summoner?” Samson said.
“Demons are notoriously unpredictable,” Lysander said. “Particularly, the power-granting, flesh-eating ones.”
“Don’t distract Lysander,” I said to Samson.
From the next chamber, the beast made a long, loud noise that was horrible beyond belief. It sounded suspiciously like demonic sexual satisfaction.
“Come on, come on, come on,” I chanted under my breath. There were no more noises from Hieronymus, who had evidently passed out again—or was perhaps dead. I sensed we had only moments left before we became Avolapek’s midnight snack.
Lysander raised his arms to touch the sides of the archway, closed his eyes and murmured an incantation. After a moment, he said, “I think I’ve got it! I think it’s done!”
I stepped forward—and bounced off an invisible barrier. “Good work, Lysander!”
We all screamed and fell back a few steps as the demon rounded the corner and came into view. It looked even redder now, as if flushed with post-orgasmic well-being. I wanted to throw up. This was the thing that Hieronymus had intended to turn loose on a virginal victim. No fate was too horrible for that twisted little creep.
I murmured to Dixie, “Thank God you slept with Barclay.”
“Yeah,” she said faintly.
“Thank God we got this barrier up in time,” Clarisse said.
“Indeed,” said Lysander.
Then Avolapek, looking rather hungry, walked right through the barrier and grabbed me.
CHAPTER
17
I screamed so loudly, even the demon blinked.
“Hah!” Dixie and Clarisse charged him with their candlesticks. He swatted them aside.
Unnerved by the aggressive invasion of a total stranger into the chamber, Alice confronted the demon, her tail twitching and her fangs bared in a snarl. Avolapek paused to look at her. This gave Lysander a chance to distract him by bringing some rubble from the ceiling crashing down on the demon’s head. The beast dropped me. I rolled across the floor, jumped to my feet and scurried out of reach.
“What happened to the barrier?” I shouted.
“Apparently it doesn’t work on the demon!” Lysander said.
“But now we’re locked in here? Oh, nice going!”
“Is this really the time for recriminations?” he shot back.
I never got a chance to retort. Something big and heavy fell straight down on top of me and I hit the ground. I lay there winded and stunned for a moment, seeing spots and unable to breathe. I brushed away the white hair that was covering my face and getting into my mouth…then realized what had hit me.
“Max? Max!” I’d never been so glad to see anyone in my life. “Max!”
“Sorry,” he wheezed. “I’d hoped that wouldn’t happen. But one never knows.”
“How’d you get here?”
“Translocation, of course. But I miscalculated a trifle.”
Samson, Dolly and Dixie helped us off the floor. The commotion had frightened Alice, who was back in her corner. The demon was stalking toward us, obviously ready for dinner.
I said, “That’s—”
“Indeed,” Max said. “Fortunately, I anticipated this and am prepared.”
He began chanting in an unfamiliar language. Avolapek kept coming closer to us. Lysander prudently stepped behind Max.
“Max,” I said.
“Hush!” said Lysander.
Max kept chanting. The demon was almost within arm’s reach of us.
“Dr. Zadok!” Dixie cried.
Max pulled a small glass vial out of his pocket and held it up, still reciting his incantation. Avolapek reached for him.
“Max!”
He dashed the vial on the floor. The glass broke and a pink mist arose from it to twine around the demon’s feet. Avolapek paused in the act of reaching for Max’s throat. His ghastly jaws parted, and a noticeable quantity of demon drool dripped down to the floor.
“Gross!” said Golly, from the corner where she was huddled. It was the first time I’d noticed her since the demon’s arrival, so I supposed she’d been there ever since then.
A strange gurgling noise rose up through the demon’s massive body. It looked heavenward, stretched out its arms and went stiff as a board. And then it just stood there. Immobile. But that weird gurgling noise kept coming from somewhere deep inside.
It was moments before I remembered to breathe. Then, without ever taking my gaze off the demon, I asked, “Is he dead?”
“No. And he won’t be neutralized for very long, either,” said Max. “So we must act.”
“Act? Act how?”
“Too late!” cried a familiar voice—one that I loathed with every fiber of my being.
Hieronymus stood framed by the archway. He was bruised, bloody, very disheveled and walking in a hunched-over way that suggested the loss of his so-called purity had been extremely painful.
“Your barrier can’t keep him out, either?” I said to Lysander.
“I wonder what went wrong?” he mused.
“Too late,” Hieronymus repeated. “I will take you all with me! You cannot ethcape me now.”
“Where do you get that corny dialogue?” I said.
“Let us end
this like decent men,” Max said quietly. “You know what must happen now. Why harm others? It’s over, son.”
“It ith not oveh! Not until I finish it.” Hieronymus’s bloodied lips parted in a hideous grin. “What ith youh weak element? Oh, yeah, now I wecall…”
He spread his arms and the enclosed chamber burst into flames. Alice howled and jumped toward me. Her weight shoved me against Avolapek, who fell over, still gurgling loudly without moving at all. Dolly shrieked and quickly moved to smother flames that were crawling up the train of Sarah’s gown. Golly Gee was screaming, trapped in her corner by the flames.
Max raised his arms, shouted something in Latin—and water came pouring through every crevice and crack in the ceiling. With another gesture, he took command of the water that was trickling down the far wall, the flow that had served as the hostages’ water supply. Chanting and gesturing, he used his power to direct it like a fire hose, dousing the flames. Golly Gee screamed even louder when the urgent spray of water drenched her. Alice ran all over the room, frantically trying to avoid water as well as flames. Sarah was calling to her, trying to calm her down. Dolly, Dixie and Clarisse clung to each other, just trying not to get killed.
When Hieronymus howled and raised his arms as if to counter Max’s tactic, Lysander shouted, “No!” He raised his arm, finger pointed, and Hieronymus flew backward, as if punched by a heavyweight prizefighter.
“Wow,” I said.
Max trotted forward through the water that covered almost everything and the steam that was rising from the floor to hover throughout the chamber. He stood over Hieronymus’s prone, gasping body and said, “It was a good try. Fire is indeed, as you know, my weakest element. Luckily, water often works well against it.”
“Don’t gloat,” Hieronymus said bitterly. “Do it.”
“I’ll help,” Lysander said, crossing the floor to join Max.
“What are they going to do?” Dixie asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
The two mages bowed their heads and spoke an incantation together in almost perfect unison. Hieronymus’s eyes glazed over and he started breathing harder. As their voices rose, he gritted his teeth and made some strange noises. His body seemed to start moving involuntarily, as if it was becoming wavy and insubstantial. At the last moment, he shouted, “No! Noooo…” It was a pathetic sound, a sad and despairing cry. A plea for mercy that he was much, much too late in seeking.
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