The Gates (2009)

by John Connolly

  “Limestone,” said the vicar.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “The rock beneath the church is limestone,” said the vicar. “Limestone preserves bodies. Not just that: it mummifies them. Bishop Bernard has been down there for a long, long time. I suspect that, if you were to touch him, his bones would feel as hard as rock.”

  “I don’t want to touch him,” said Mr. Berkeley. “I really don’t.”

  The burial slab began to move again, but this time it rose and didn’t fall. A skeletal hand emerged from the crack and tried to get a grip on the edge of the stone.

  “You may not want to touch him,” said the vicar, “but I suspect that he would very much like to get his hands on you.”

  Reverend Ussher opened the door of the little room and threw himself on the stone, hoping that his weight would push it back down. His right hand reached out and found the verger’s bicycle pump, and with it he began hitting Bishop Bernard on the fingers. It took four or five strikes, but eventually the bishop was forced to release his grip. The stone slammed back down, and there was silence once more.

  “Quick!” said the vicar to the verger. “Give me some help here.”

  Reluctantly, Mr. Berkeley joined him. In one corner of the room was an old stone statue of St. Timidus. It had fallen from its plinth beside the front door of the church the previous winter, and its right hand had dropped off. There hadn’t been enough money to repair it, or the plinth, so it had joined the old bicycle and the chairs in the storage room. With some difficulty, the vicar and the verger together managed to move the statue onto Bishop Bernard’s marker stone.

  “There,” said the vicar. “That should keep him occupied for a while.”

  The verger leaned against the wall as he tried to get his breath back.

  “But why is all this happening now?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” said the vicar. “I don’t even know what all ‘this’ is.”

  “Do you really think it’s like the monk said: the end of the world?”

  “I think the end of the world is some way off yet, Mr. Berkeley,” said the vicar. He tried to sound confident, but he didn’t feel it. This was all very disturbing: gargoyles running about on the church lawn; Bishop Bernard the Bad attempting to escape from his tomb. If it wasn’t quite the end of the world, it might well be the beginning of the end.

  Bishop Bernard began pounding on the floor once again.

  “Oh, I do wish he’d stop that,” said the verger. “He’s giving me a headache.”

  He knelt on the floor, then put his mouth near the stone. “Now, Bishop Bernard, Your Excellency, be a nice bishop and go to sleep,” he said. “There’s been a bit of a misunderstanding, but we’ll get everything sorted out and you can go back to being dead. That sounds lovely, doesn’t it? You don’t want to be up here in the land of the living. It’s all changed since your time. There’s pop music, and computers, and, you know, you won’t be able to go around sticking hot pokers up people, because that’s not allowed anymore, not even for bishops. No, you’re much better off where you are, believe you me.”

  The verger looked at the vicar, then nodded and smiled.

  “See,” said the verger. “All he needed was for someone to have a quiet word with him.”

  There came a muffled roar of rage, and then the thud of stone upon stone as Bishop Bernard flung himself, hard, upward. The statue of St. Timidus shifted slightly.

  “Oh, wonderful, Mr. Berkeley,” said the vicar. “That was most helpful!”

  Bishop Bernard attacked the stone again, and the statue moved a little more. The verger tried to hold on to it, but it was no use. He gave up and retreated to the window.

  “We should make a break for it,” said the vicar. “Those gargoyles seemed rather clumsy and slow. We can easily outrun them, and my car is parked around the back.”

  But the verger didn’t appear to be listening. Instead, he was looking out of a small side window.

  “I say, Mr. Berkeley,” said the vicar. “Did you hear what I said? I think we should run for it.”

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea, Vicar,” said the verger.

  “And why is that?” asked the vicar, now quite annoyed that his plan had been shot down without even a discussion.

  The verger turned to him, his face white.

  “Because I think the dead are coming back to life,” he said. “And not the nice ones …”

  The Church of St. Timidus had been in its present location for centuries. Much of its grounds were taken up with old gravestones because, for many generations, most of the people of the town had been buried beside the church when they died.

  Unfortunately, not everybody had been buried under the church lawn. Church grounds were known as “consecrated,” which meant that they had been set aside for holy use. But people who committed serious crimes, and were executed for them, were not allowed to be buried on consecrated ground. For that reason, a second graveyard existed not far from the old church, though beyond its walls. No gravestones were placed there, and no markers, but everybody knew of it. The townspeople called it the Dead Field, and nobody built houses on it, or walked their dogs there, or had picnics on its grass during the summer. Even birds didn’t nest in its bushes and trees. It was, everybody felt, a Bad Place.

  Now, as the vicar and verger watched, shambling shapes began to emerge from the Dead Field, their progress lit by the lights of the church grounds. Some still wore the tattered remains of old clothing, although there was precious little of it left. Thankfully, their modesty was preserved by the fact that most of them were just bones. The verger saw one skeleton with part of a rope round its neck, and knew that here was someone who had been hanged. The end of the rope dangled at its chest, so that it looked a bit like a necktie. Another skeleton appeared to have lost both its arms. It tripped on a stone and couldn’t get back up, so instead began to wriggle its way along the ground, like a bony worm with legs. Occasionally, flashes of blue light were visible in otherwise empty eye sockets.

  “I wonder what that blue light is?” said the vicar.

  “Maybe they’ve stuck candles in there,” said the verger sarcastically. “After all, it is Halloween.”

  “Well, we can’t go outside now,” said the vicar, ignoring him.

  “No, we can’t,” said the verger.

  And from beneath their feet came what sounded like laughter.

  XXVI

  In Which Constable Peel Wishes He Had Pursued Some Other Profession, and Dr. Planck Reappears

  CONSTABLE PEEL AND SERGEANT Rowan were debating their options. They could a) let Nurd go, which didn’t seem like a very good idea given that he was, quite clearly, not a human being and also, if he was to be believed, a demon; b) take Nurd back to the police station and wait for someone with a little more authority to decide what should be done with him; or c) and this was Constable Peel’s suggestion, run away, because Constable Peel didn’t want to see Nurd do that thing with his head again. It had made him feel quite ill.

  “He’s a demon, Sarge, and he doesn’t half smell bad,” said Constable Peel. “I’m not sure I want to be driving around with a stinky demon in the back of the car.”

  “Hello,” said Nurd through the open car window. “I can hear you. Less of the stinky, please. I fell down a hole.”

  “You have been driving around with a stinky demon in the back of the car,” Sergeant Rowan replied, trying to ignore Nurd. “Nothing happened.”

  “’Nothing happened’?” said Constable Peel. “His head split open, Sarge. His tongue played a tune. I don’t know how you usually spend your evenings, but in my book that counts as ‘something’ happening.”

  “Careful now, son, you’re getting worked up over …” He almost said “nothing,” then realized this might not be entirely helpful given Constable Peel’s current mood.

  “ … over, um …”

  Constable Peel folded his arms and waited, then said, “Over what, exactly,
Sarge?”

  “…over …”

  “… over, let me see, a demon in the back of the car?” finished Constable Peel. “That about covers it, I think. Oh, and he says the world is coming to an end. That qualifies as ‘something’ too.”

  “Well, there you have it, then,” said Sergeant Rowan. “We can’t just sit around doing nothing while the world is coming to an end.”

  “So what are we going to do, Sarge?”

  “We’re going to put a stop to it, Constable,” said Sergeant Rowan, with the kind of assurance that had kept the British empire running for a lot longer than it probably should have.

  The sergeant walked over to the car and leaned in close to the window, where Nurd waited expectantly.

  “Now look here, sir,” he began, “what’s all this stuff about the world coming to an end?”

  “Well,” said Nurd, “I thought I was the only one who’d come through.”

  “Through from where, sir?”

  “From Hell.”

  “The Hell.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “What’s it like, then?” asked Constable Peel, who had reluctantly joined them.

  “Not very nice,” said Nurd. “You wouldn’t like it.”

  “There’s a surprise,” said Sergeant Rowan. “What did you think he’d say, Constable? That it was pleasant on a sunny day? It’s not the beach at Eastbourne, you know.”

  “I was just asking,” said Constable Peel.

  “Anyway, back to the issue at hand,” said Sergeant Rowan. “So, you’ve come from Hell, and you thought you were alone, but you’re not.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “And these, er, ‘ladies’ who may have attacked our police station, friends of yours, are they?”

  “No, they came some other way.”

  “How, exactly?”

  “I don’t know how,” said Nurd. “Someone must have opened a portal, and now they’re spilling through.”

  “This portal, sir? What would it look like?”

  Nurd considered the question. “I think it would be sort of bluish,” he said, finally. “It probably started off quite small, but now it’s getting bigger and bigger. And when it gets big enough, then…”

  then …”

  “Then what?”

  “Then he’ll come through. Our master. The Source of All Evil. The Great Malevolence, along with his army. And that’ll be that, really. Hell on Earth.”

  “Do you think you could find this portal, sir?”

  Nurd nodded. He thought that he could already sense it. He felt the presence of the blue energy; it made the hairs on the back of his neck tingle. He knew that the closer he got to its source, the more he’d be aware of it. He was like a walking Evil Energy Detector. Now his hope was that, if he could get near enough, he might be able to sneak back to the Wasteland unobserved. Better yet, if Hell was empty because all the demons had moved here, he might find a way to leave the Wasteland altogether. He could go and live somewhere else, perhaps in a cozy cave with a nice view of some burning lakes.

  “That‘s decided then,” said Sergeant Rowan. “This gentleman will show us where the portal is, and we can set about stopping all this nonsense. Get on the radio, Constable. Make sure everything is fine back at the station, and then tell WPC Hay to alert the army. We’ll need all the help we can get.”

  Constable Peel prepared to do as he was told. Before he could make the call, WPC Hay came on the radio herself.

  “Base to Tango One, over.”

  “This is Tango One,” said Constable Peel. “Is everything all right, Liz? Over.”

  “Those flying women have gone, and we’ve got the doors locked, but now we’re getting calls left, right, and center. People’s houses are being attacked; there are monsters crawling and flying all over the place. And there’s some trouble over at the church. Over.”

  “What kind of trouble? Over.”

  “According to the verger, the dead have started to rise. Over.”

  Constable Peel, who already looked unhappy, now looked very, very unhappy. He’d joined the police to stop bank robberies, and solve the odd murder, neither of which he had yet managed to do as Biddlecombe was rather quiet, and so far the combined total of bank robberies and murders in the town was precisely nil.25 Constable Peel had most certainly not joined the police to fight demons, not unless he was going to be paid overtime, and danger money, and given a great big gun.

  He was about to ask another question, and possibly begin shouting at Sergeant Rowan to call out the air force, the U.S. Marines, the Swiss Guard, and perhaps the pope, vampire hunters, and anyone else who might be able to sort out dead people popping up from the ground, when a bolt of blue lightning shot across the radio. Seconds later the radio exploded in a shower of sparks and went dead. He looked up and saw that the telephone lines along the road were also glowing blue and sparking at their connections. He reached for his cell phone, but it too was dead.

  Constable Peel banged his forehead against the steering wheel. A very bad situation had just got much worse.

  • • •

  Mrs. Abernathy stood in the garden of 666 Crowley Road, her arms outstretched, blue energy flying from the tips of her fingers and out of her eyes. She was smiling as she brought down all communications within a ten-mile radius of Biddlecombe. She felt the power surge through her as she set about creating a barrier around the town, invisible to the naked eye but completely impenetrable. It would remain in place until the Great Malevolence himself emerged, and then he would unleash himself upon this miserable planet. Behind her the walls and roof of the house expanded, as though the whole structure had taken a deep breath, and then most of it fell to pieces, to be replaced by a great tunnel of blue light twenty feet across from which more and more creatures began to pour: imps and small dragons, hooded serpents and hunched gnomelike figures armed with axes and blades. And those were just the ones that could be described in recognizable terms: there were other things that bore no resemblance to anything ever seen or imagined on earth, monstrous things that had lived so long in total darkness they struggled to accommodate themselves to their new environment, creatures that had never had a form because there hadn’t been any point: it would have been too dark to see them. Now they were trying to construct shapes for themselves, resembling balls of fleshy dough from which arms and claws and tails and legs occasionally emerged before retreating again, accompanied by the odd eyeball to enable them to see what they were becoming.

  Mrs. Abernathy turned to face them as they streamed past. She stared into the portal and saw the gates were now almost half gone, a huge hole gaping at the heart of them.

  Soon. Soon he would be here, and then she would receive her reward. But first, there was one small matter to attend to. She turned to Mr. Abernathy, now a toad, and the spider demon by his side, the one that had, until recently, been crammed into Mr. Renfield’s skin, and instructed them to find Samuel Johnson.

  To find the interfering boy who was frightened of spiders and suck his insides dry.

  Tom was keeping watch on the street, and Maria and Samuel the back of the house, when Dr. Planck appeared at the front gate.

  “Mrs. Johnson,” called Tom, “there’s a man coming up the garden path.”

  “Are you sure he’s a man?” asked Mrs. Johnson.

  “Pretty sure,” said Tom.

  Dr. Planck hadn’t seen the huge flies, but the flies had seen him. With a loud buzzing they descended upon the scientist, but so intent were they that they didn’t notice the front door opening, and Maria and Tom emerging, each with a can of bug spray. Before the flies could get within chomping distance of Dr. Planck they had fallen to the ground, writhing and spitting, then had ceased moving entirely before they, like the other demons who had run afoul of their intended victims, vanished.

  Samuel joined Mrs. Johnson as she approached the front door, clutching a broom handle. Tom waited at the living room door, his cricket bat at the ready.
r />   “Hurry up,” Mrs. Johnson told Dr. Planck. “We don’t know what else is out here.”

  As if to confirm her worst suspicions, a batlike shadow flew over the house. Seconds later, a creature the size of an eagle, but with spines instead of feathers and a head that consisted of dozens of wriggling worms with a single eye at the end of each, got tangled up in the telephone lines and fell crashing to the ground. Boswell, who had been watching it suspiciously, barked with delight.

  Dr. Planck looked upon its demise with relief until the door slammed shut, cutting off his view and almost cutting off his nose as well. “Thank goodness,” he said. “That thing has been chasing me ever since I locked the skull in a shed.”

  “Right,” said Mrs. Johnson, waving the broom handle in a threatening manner. “What’s going on? None of your scientific nonsense, now. Keep it simple.”

  Dr. Planck kept it very simple indeed. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, fat lot of good you are, then,” said Mrs. Johnson.

  “Actually, I was hoping Samuel might be able to help me in that regard,” said Dr. Planck.

  Samuel stepped forward. “I’m Samuel.”

  At that moment the lights went out as Mrs. Abernathy deprived the town of its power. Samuel and Dr. Planck sat at the kitchen table while Mrs. Johnson lit candles and Samuel told him of almost everything that had happened, from the time that Samuel had gone trick or treating at the Abernathys’ house to the battle with the flying skulls. Dr. Planck said nothing until Samuel was finished, although he did raise his eyebrow when Samuel described Mrs. Abernathy’s tentacles, then sat back and tapped an index finger against his lip.

  “It’s incredible,” he said at last. “Somehow, the power of the collider has been harnessed to create a rip in the fabric of time and space. I mean, on one level it’s wonderful. We’ve proved the existence of other dimensions, even if it was by accident, and we’ve discovered a way to travel between them. On the other hand, if this Mrs. Abernathy creature is right, and it is a gateway between this world and, for want of a better word, ‘Hell,’ then we’re in a lot of trouble.”