by Brian Lumley
Demogorgon … The word was like an electric shock in Trace’s mind. It confirmed everything, brought it all together. It was all going to happen – starting now!
Lightning flickered in an ominous white tracery along the underside of the clouds where they boiled directly overhead. Lightning which crackled audibly but as yet produced no thunder. Khumeni looked up and his cowl fell back. His jaws opened like a hound’s and he laughed; and as his ravaged face was lit by the flickering fires above, so he seemed to draw strength from them and his voice became a monstrous bass croaking:
‘Father, I sense your presence in the heavens where you belong. And I know you gaze down on me through the eyes of Demogorgon! So be it! The time has come again when I must descend into the earth, and rise up again to do your bidding, renewed and replenished. So be it! Except we are not alone. There are those who would harmme, and through me, you! As I have kept faith for two thousand years, so now keep faith with me. Unleash the fires of hell, let Demogorgon breathe upon mine enemies!’
‘No!’ Professor Halbstein shouted. He produced a pencil-slim torch from somewhere, fell to one knee and flashed the torch’s beam in a desperate code up toward the hills. A code, a signal, prearranged.
‘Father!’ Amira shrieked, falling beside him. ‘Father – we’re in the line of fire!’ But she, too, knew that it had to be done.
Vittori was closest to the old man and quickest to react. He stepped forward, rabbit-chopped him – but Halbstein’s message had been passed. Tracers arced through the sky beneath the boiling clouds, their light coming split seconds ahead of the chattering explosions which spawned them. Hot steel raked the ruins a little beyond Khumeni’s party, crept closer as the gunners corrected their range.
Trace threw himself flat; Decker, Gabella and Vittori, too. The zombies Khumeni called his sons staggered to and fro, helpless spastics; but Khumeni himself held up his spindle arms to the sky and brayed with laughter as the night was lit with flares which arced ever closer. And high overhead the lightning in the clouds grew more intense, formed a web of white light, converged in a central area – and lanced down!
Trace had seen something like this before, knew what was coming. One … two … three … four … five blinding lances of lightning smashed down from Demogorgon’s living maelstrom; and in those moments when the sky blazed bright as day, it seemed to Trace that a great horned head and face were outlined in the roiling clouds, whose eyes were seething, sentient pools of energy. And at once the machine-gun fire from the hills was cut off, the tracers stuttered, stopped, and exploding steel grew silent. Then five bomb-bursts of light – five deafening concussions – five mushrooms of fire and smoke gouting up in the shattered darkness of the high hills. For a moment on those near-distant slopes, a handful of antlike figures danced and capered, human torches screaming their agony; secondary explosions sent tremors through the air and rock; the sky grew red from the funeral pyres of half a platoon of Israel’s finest.
After that … . the flickering electrical energies in the clouds slowly grew quiescent once more. But they remained alert. Then:
‘Time is wasting,’ said Khumeni, his voice a low growl, the satisfied rumble of a sated animal. ‘Decker, take that old fool’s torch and lead the way.’
But Decker was no longer eager. All of this was beyond him. He understood the unnatural well enough, but the supernatural …? He stood up, tried to brush himself down with hands that fluttered like rags, said: ‘Me? Down there? Maybe Lou would like to – ’
‘Decker,’ Khumeni’s purr cut him off. ‘Shall I talk to the sky again? And should I mention your name to the lightnings I command?’
‘No, no!’ Decker quickly held up his hands. He moved stumblingly to where Amira tended her father, stooped and took up the torch, tested its beam. ‘OK,’ he said then, trying to control his quavering voice. ‘OK, let’s go.’
As Decker began to descend the steps under the slab, so Khumeni turned to his charges. He merely beckoned, and Trace’s ‘brothers’ followed the fat man without protest, wooden in their movements and completely under Khumeni’s spell. Vittori went among them, and then it was Trace’s turn. He made as if to follow – but at the last possible moment grabbed Khumeni’s skinny arm and swung him off balance toward the open vault.
The beast staggered, flailed his arms for a moment, fell into the hole. Falling, he threw his arms wide like a cross so that they slammed down on the rim of the opening to support him, kicked with his feet until they found purchase on unseen steps below. His arms might reasonably have broken, but they didn’t. And secure there, waist deep in the opening, finally he glared at Trace and pointed a madly trembling hand at him. ‘You – ’ he hissed, unable to find words to express his anger. ‘You … !’
From behind Trace there sounded a distinctive click – Lou Gabella’s knife!
Then … several things, all coming simultaneously:
Trace turned; Gabella was almost on him, the blade of his weapon glittering in the light of the distant fires; and: ‘No!’ Khumeni’s voice was shrilly fearful. ‘Do not harm him! I want him alive!’ And as Gabella still closed in, threatening, two shadows growing out of Chorazin’s ruins and taking on the shape of men. Impossibly familiar men.
‘Enemies!’ Khumeni rasped.
From below came muffled, quavering queries: Decker and Vittori, panicking. ‘Be quiet!’ Khumeni snarled. ‘Get below and wait!’
Gabella had turned away from Trace to face the newcomers. Dressed in black clothing and with scarves across their faces, they paused – but only for a moment. Then one of them came on, tossed aside his scarf, revealed his face. Khumeni had grabbed up a torch from a ledge under the raised slab; sparks flew from a cigarette lighter in his trembling, knobby fist; ancient, desiccated rags coated in brittle tar burst into life and threw the shadows back. Khumeni held up the torch, took one good look at the face of the man who now closed with Gabella – and his sulphurous eyes seemed to stand out in his face.
‘Kastrouni!’ he croaked.
Gabella lunged, the glitter of his knife making an arc of light. But Kastrouni was no novice where knives were concerned. And now two sharp blades glittered in the light from Khumeni’s torch.
The Greek blocked Gabella’s thrust, drew him closer, drove his own knife in and up. It sliced into Gabella’s heart, and Kastrouni twisted it there just to be sure, then snatched it back. As Gabella sank to his knees and flopped down on to his face, so his life went out of him in a long ‘Ahhhh!’
Khumeni once more drew strength from the flickering lightnings in the clouds. He held up his arms to the sky, cried: ‘Father, I stand in peril. I am surrounded by mine enemies! Now let Demogorgon – ’
Kastrouni drew back his arm, let fly his blade. The knife leaped across the space between, thudded keep into the beast’s right shoulder just below the collar-bone. Khumeni wore an old wound there, a scar he remembered well, and he knew Kastrouni’s aim had been quite deliberate. He reeled, cried out gurglingly, grabbed the knife in his shoulder and drew it out. But Kastrouni wasn’t finished. A second knife appeared in his hand, was drawn back, then hurled forward with all the strength he could muster. And this one was intended for the beast’s heart.
Khumeni covered his breast with both hands and tried to cower back in that position. The knife pinned his hands together but merely punctured the skin of his chest through his robe. Shrieking hoarsely, he jerked his hands apart and sent the knife clattering on the stony ground. Then, blood spattering darkly as he stepped falteringly down and backwards, and taking up the torch again from where he had let it fall, he controlled his agony and once more turned his mummied face up to the tortured sky.
‘Demogorgon,’ he gasped, ‘guard them well. Keep them here to wait on my return.’ And as his voice gathered awful strength and he disappeared into darkness: ‘For they have earned themselves ecstasies of agony beyond compare!’
Trace glanced at the sky, saw the webs of electrical energy forming as before. He f
ound his voice, said: ‘Let’s get after him – while we can!’
‘No!’ a familiar voice denied. The second newcomer had removed his scarf: Saul Gokowski. ‘No, Charlie,’ he repeated, stepping forward, ‘let him go. He won’t be coming back up out of there, be sure. We’ve had this moment planned for quite some – ’ But that was as far as he got.
Unnatural energies were building. The hair on the heads of men and girl stood up erect and crackling, full of static. The sky was patterned with veins of blue light, pulsating there; and falling now like a curtain on all sides, a fine veil of coruscating strands of living energy descended, caging Trace and the others within its sputtering circumference. They were surrounded in a moment by a wall of shimmering blue fire.
Then the net began to tighten, the curtain closing; and as the circle narrowed down to less than a hundred feet in diameter, so lightning ran in crackling rivulets about its rim, warning of the death lurking there should anyone try to cross.
Amira’s father had regained consciousness. He quickly took in what was happening. ‘Saul!’ he cried. ‘The second tablet. If this thing comes any closer, we won’t be able to reach it!’
Gokowski drew a deep breath, said, ‘Join me, then. You, too, Dimitrios.’ And he commenced to chant those unearthly words from the second Chorazin tablet, that rite of exorcism Trace had heard once before in the monastery on Karpathos. Halbstein and Kastrouni at once took up the chant, and as their voices joined so the circle of electrical energy pulsated and throbbed, while ripples of furious red ran through its curtain of hellish fire. The sputtering and crackling grew more intense and the light pulsed brighter yet; evil fed upon itself, drew energy from the boiling clouds, redoubled its strength to defy the puny creatures in the circle. And with only the very briefest pause, again the ring began to close.
‘We’re losing!’ Gokowski’s voice was hoarse. He ran to a place where a low, crumbling wall threw black shadows as Demogorgon’s mesh closed in. The curtains of energy encroached on the wall, breaching it even as Gokowski got there. Then –
Gokowski had thrown up an arm, as if to shield himself from the curtain of living energy. His hand made contact and he was at once picked up, effortlessly tossed sprawling in the dust.
But at the same time the energies of the curtain had commenced a wild fluctuation, and its ever-shifting webs were laced with gold now and not the red of anger. Golden waves of light washed outwards, curving round the rippling wall away from the spot where Kastrouni had stood – the place where he had buried the second Chorazin tablet!
And then, weakened, Demogorgon’s mesh drew reluctantly back, wavered, finally kept an even distance while the ripples of yellow diminished and finally disappeared. The curtain threatened as before – an unearthly aurora, localized into this cage of energy – but the buried tablet’s power held it at bay, unable to advance any closer.
Dimitrios Kastrouni ran to Gokowski, went to his knees beside him. Gokowski sat up, his face twisted with pain as he nursed his arm and shoulder. ‘It’s here,’ he pointed at a mound of dust and rubble at the foot of the crumbling wall. ‘I buried it here. Now help me get it up. That monster down there thinks he’s got us trapped, but in fact we’ve got him!’
Professor Halbstein joined them as they dug with their hands, but Amira went to Trace. For at the height of the chanting, suddenly overcome by everything he’d been through, Trace had fainted and crumpled on the earth not far from the entrance to the vault. Now she dragged him away from there, gently slapped his face until he came to. He at once tried to stand.
‘Better stay still, Charlie,’ she told him. ‘At least for a moment or two. Nothing more will happen just now – not until midnight.’
Trace looked across to where the other three men cleared rubble at the base of the wall. ‘I have to help them,’ he mumbled. Despite her protests he got to his feet, limped to them and gave a hand. And in a very short while the second Chorazin tablet came into view, unseen since the day Saul Gokowski had buried it.
The men clawed away more dirt, revealed a stone oblong some five inches thick, almost three feet long by eighteen inches wide. And it was deeply carved with strange glyphs: the exorcism inscribed by Ab’s witch-mother-mistress, the runes of righteousness.
Trace’s fingers touched the tablet and tingled; he felt its power, felt dizzy as an astronaut pin-wheeling against the stars in nil-gravity, felt small in the presence of previously unbelievable supernatural forces and concepts – in which he now believed, for his life.
‘Are you all right?’ Saul Gokowski was looking at him curiously.
‘No,’ Trace answered, ‘I’m sick as a dog! What do you expect? I’m sick from lack of regular meals, from the after-effects of drugs and inactivity, from this bloody electrical thing that’s watching us. And I’m sick with fear!’
‘This “bloody electrical thing” is a demon,’ Kastrouni joined in, getting to his feet. ‘I know because I’ve met him before – three times. It’s Demogorgon, summoned by Khumeni, the antichrist. It is his father’s familiar here on earth. Satan’s watchdog. And it bites! If we destroy Khumeni, it will go back where it came from. That’s what we’re trying to do now: trap him down there, using the tablet, and then destroy him. We have to get the tablet over to the vault.’
‘The landrover,’ Halbstein nodded. ‘The vehicle and its tow-chain. Khumeni had the right idea: it’s how I got the stone out of that place. I lowered tackle over the cliff, dragged it into the caves through a sort of natural window there, hauled the tablet up the face of the cliff using a landrover.’
‘I’ll get the vehicle,’ Trace said.
He limped to the landrover (his bloody leg again, only worse than ever), started it up with difficulty, drove it jerkily back to where the others waited. Demogorgon’s mesh was interfering with the firing of the plugs, causing partial engine-failure. Then he turned the vehicle in a tight, bumpy circle and revved the motor while the others fitted the chain around the tablet. Finally Kastrouni jumped into the passenger’s seat, said:
‘OK, Charlie, let’s go. We’ve got twenty minutes to midnight. But things are due to start happening any time now!’
Trace drove back to the vault and beyond it, a distance of maybe twenty yards. Not a great distance by any means, but it would have seemed a mile to men carrying the massive granite tablet. Braking to a halt, Trace said: ‘Things will start happening? Isn’t enough happening right now?’
‘You remember what I told you about the flies, the locusts?’ Kastrouni shouted over a renewed burst of crackling and hissing from the mesh. ‘Well, apparently there’s more. It seems I missed the worst of it that night. There’ll be frogs, too, and lice. So Saul thinks.’
‘What? And we’ll see these things?’
‘Oh, yes! You remember Khumeni warned that thug he’d see things to frighten him? I heard the conversation from the shadows; anyway, that’s what he was talking about. Well, whoever that killer was, he won’t be seeing anything now – but we will!’
Kastrouni joined Professor Halbstein and Saul Gokowski Where they wrestled with the tablet, laying it lengthwise across the twenty-four-inch width of the vault’s entrance. It left gaps at both ends, but that couldn’t be helped. Finally they stood back. And:
‘That should do it,’ said Gokowski, satisfied. ‘He won’t be able to come up through that. Its weight would never stop him, but its power should.’
It was quarter to midnight. The flickering, hissing, crackling mesh formed its unbroken curtain all around; the sky was still convulsed with writhing clouds; partly obscured by the mesh of demonic energy, the Israeli corpses and weaponry still burned on the dark hillside. And Trace’s flesh crept with a monstrous expectancy.
The others felt it, too.
‘It’s coming,’ said Gokowski, his voice a croak.
Trace tugged at the sleeve of Kastrouni’s night-suit. ‘One thing I have to know before “it” comes: I saw you die.’
‘No,’ Kastrouni’s face was a sheen
of blue light reflecting from cold sweat as he shook his head, ‘you saw a London taxi struck by lightning – destroyed by Demogorgon. But I wasn’t in it. I saw that thing stalking me down the road. When the taxi cornered I went out of the door, rolled, hit the grass verge just as the taxi exploded. The blast did the rest. I was thrown into bushes, knocked unconscious. Demogorgon couldn’t smell my fear, thought I was dead. You, too, apparently. Ambulance sirens woke me up and I crept away from there. As for the poor taxi-driver and his other passenger – ’ he shrugged. ‘What can I say? Their deaths were my fault.’
‘Or mine,’ said Trace. ‘You came to warn me, remember?’ And then: ‘What other passenger?’
‘Someone who flagged us down on our way to your place,’ Kastrouni answered. ‘I never knew him and I’m glad for that, at least. Anyway, I laid low for a day or so, then went to Karpathos. Saul had had you watched. I got in just after you left with Amira and the fat man. Saul was ready and we followed on immediately. Since then we’ve been busy.’
‘Twelve minutes,’ Professor Halbstein came to them. ‘I think we should get back from the vault a little way now.’ Even as he spoke, small shapes began to squirm up from the gaps at the sides of the tablet where it lay across the hole. All five fearful people got back, huddled behind the landrover, watched.
‘Frogs?’ Trace gasped. Kastrouni had warned him, but still it was hard to accept. ‘But where do they come from? What the hell …? Thousands of them!’
‘A twisted version of the plagues called down by Moses on Egypt,’ Professor Halbstein explained. ‘Because of the plagues, the Children of Israel were enabled to flee Pharaoh’s bondage. This is Khumeni fleeing the bondage of his crumbling flesh – taking on new flesh, just as the Children of Israel took on a new lease of life. It is a blasphemous distortion of a biblical theme.’