“Your wounds were hideous.”
He shrugged diffidently. “Ahh, well, I’ve always been a speedy healer.”
I nodded thoughtfully. “You must be. That scar looks like your head was split in half.”
Gorgol raised thin fingers and traced the old wound. “Pesky man with a battle axe. I ate his liver.”
Cloth rustled to my right. I looked down. Daniel’s fingers thrummed against his thigh. The boy looked small and frail in the oversized shirt.
The thing on the sofa caught the look. He seemed amused. “I would have expected one of those other men to assist you. Perhaps the thin one who wears his hair too long. He seems determined. He would be a good second in a fight and he would die well.”
It was my turn to seem indifferent. “The others weren’t interested.”
“Interested in what?”
“Watching a demon die,” I said coolly. “That’s what you are, aren’t you? A demon?”
Gorgol rolled his eyes in an exaggerated fashion. “Oh my, we’re so dramatic today. No, William, I’m not a demon, at least not in the way you think.”
I stretched as if bored and scratched my head, using the movement to shoot a furtive glance in Daniel’s direction. His fingers played on his thigh.
Okay, not the Devil himself, not Beelzebub, none of those. I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or more worried. At least with the former, I had some ground to fall back upon. I could spout a few Bible verses and sling a cross or two at him. That always worked in the books.
I leaned back against the door and slid down to a sitting position. Daniel joined me a few seconds later. Aside from giving me a better view of the boy’s hands, I needed the rest. The weariness had grown to the point that simply standing took a constant and noticeable effort. The old wood thumped solid against my back. The feel somehow brought a renewed sense of determination. If two hundred year old oak could still stand strong, so could I.
“So, explain it. In what way would I consider you a demon?”
He pulled his lips back in distaste. “I have no time to tutor fools. I offered you a deal, a life for a life. Do you accept it or not?”
I shook my head. “Tell me why you want the deal. You’re getting better.”
Anger twisted on his face as if the emotion itself were alive. Bony fingers clenched and unclenched. The slits in his eyes narrowed to tiny black strips.
He tore his gaze away from me, looked down, and plucked viciously at the bandages with his bloodless fingers. Elsie had taped the gauze to his body. Instead of working at the edges, he ripped at the cloth with thick yellowed nails. White shards of cloth rained down on the floor between us. When he flung the last bit aside, he stood and stretched. I hadn’t realized how tall the man was until that moment. He looked huge in the dim light.
A mottled mass of squirming scar tissue writhed from shoulder to stomach. The skin convulsed and throbbed, pink edges mending and turning white even as I watched. Purple, pink, black, and green swirled on his torso in a kaleidoscopic tornado as bruises turned pale and disappeared. He shifted his weight on to the balls of his feet like a cat ready to pounce.
I reached for the knife and scrambled to my feet. Gorgol watched me, eyes intent and alert. “A tree limb nearly ripped me in half last night. Do you really think that knife will save you?”
I slid in front of Daniel. The boy had jumped to his feet as well and stood with his back pressed tight against the wall. I could feel him behind me, trembling, and wished I’d listened to Elsie. Bringing him had been a bad idea. I’d thought I’d be able to negotiate and use Daniel as my hole card. I’d done nothing but put him in greater danger.
“Why do you want my blood?” I demanded, holding the knife out in front of me. A shaft of light seeping through the shutters flashed on the broad blade. Across the room, the thing eased forward.
“Good and evil are like opposite sides of a magnet, William. You cannot remove one from the other,” Gorgol said. “Break it in half and the two pieces form north and south. Break it as many times as you want. There will always be a north and south. The same is true for good and evil.”
A lewd grin twisted his features. “Even in your heaven. Your learned men will argue differently and in the same breath, teach you that the first war occurred not on earth, but in the heavens, a place where there is to be no strife.”
No more than ten feet separated us. Gorgol bounced lightly on his feet, too nimble, too agile, and too healthy for anything that had suffered the kind of damage he had the night before. Physics had taught me about force, momentum, and collisions. The man should be plastered to a tree trunk in the forest, his insides scattered about him in a wave radiating outward from the center of impact. Flies should be filling his mouth with enough eggs to leave him squirming with maggots in a few days. Instead he balanced on the balls of his feet like a prize fighter ready to cross the ring. Just watching him move made me tired.
He swiped at the air experimentally with his hands. The move looked odd. He didn’t ball up his fists, but clawed at it like a tiger.
“Men have always tried to eliminate the bad. Four thousand years ago, one upset the balance,” Gorgol said without looking up. “He sealed the gates to the underworld with his own blood. His allies helped him, but it was his blood that gave the gates their strength.”
Cloth rustled wildly behind me. I didn’t need to look back to know that Daniel’s fingers were beating against his leg. I could feel the frenzied vibration rising up behind me, carrying not just his assessment of lies and truth, but terror at the approaching figure.
“Do you know what makes you special, William? Do you have the slightest clue?”
Gorgol paused expectantly, one hairless eyebrow raised high enough to carve an arc of wrinkles across his forehead. His lips stretched wide in a grin that looked as fake and hideous as the toothy smile carved into pumpkin faces at Halloween.
“Do you?” he prompted.
My silence turned the grin into a scowl.
“You are as interesting as a lump of coal, as vacuous as a simpleton sitting in the corner with a dunce cap on his head,” he snarled. His nose wrinkled as if tasting something sour in the air. “Unfortunately, that is also your strength. Good and evil are more than concepts. Power exists within them. Your genetic makeup is such that it flows around you, but not through you. You are a void, William, a dead spot between the two.”
He paused, the slits in his eyes throbbing. “Even your religion understands this place. You are the chasm between your hell and your heaven, the great gulf which none can cross.”
“Well, how about that,” I said dryly. “So, am I like lead to radiation or kryptonite to underworld bad guys?”
I nearly laughed at the confused expression on his face. An old anecdote advised that if you couldn’t beat them, then baffle them with bullshit. If need be, I’d bludgeon him to death with it.
He stepped closer. I held the knife up in front of me. He feinted right. I moved with him. In the midst of the dance for position, Virgil slid through my mind. I could almost hear his voice telling me to put down the knife.
“You’re relying on it too much. You’re telling him that you’re afraid of him.”
As much as I hated letting go of the blade, the voice rang true. I’d come trying to force a position of equality between us. Gorgol wanted a trade. I couldn’t negotiate hiding behind a weapon. Standing like a statue while he paced back and forth only cemented my place as his inferior. Somehow, I needed to right the scale that had tipped in his balance the moment he came off the sofa. That wouldn’t happen as long as I cowered in front of him.
Besides, the man had his head split open by a battle axe. A diving knife, as large and beastly as it might be, couldn’t compare.
I sighed and lowered my hand. When it reached my side, I dropped the blade. It clattered on the floor, hard and heavy. Surprise shot across his face only to be replaced seconds later by indecision. The look gave me hope. Gorgol might have face
d a thousand enemies, but few would have put aside their weapons.
“How does a man make a gate out of blood?” I asked. The words drifted out into the silence between us. “I’m curious. First, how would he do it, and second, it seems like a wall would take a lot of blood.”
He looked up, confusion still strong on his face. “The old world exists in your books. What you call myth and say cannot be, once existed. Elves helped your people make the wall. They were your allies. In return, you imprisoned them as well.”
I couldn’t keep the incredulity out of my voice. “You expect me to believe that?”
Gorgol hissed his annoyance. “What more do you need? You have heard of the things that walk the night. Do you think that intelligence began only in the last hundred years? Are you so arrogant to think that your ancestors did not know what stood before them?”
He stretched again and ran his hand down his chest. Scars twisted about on his skin like ropes coiled together, but flesh no longer hung in the open. In another day, the man wouldn’t even be sore.
That sucked for me. In another day, my options ran between comatose and dead.
“Why do you want my blood?”
He shrugged indifferently. “Among us, your ancestor is the most hated human that ever lived. To have the blood of his descendant would be a marvel. ”
From behind came a steady thump, thump, thump. I didn’t have to look to know what it meant. Nor did I need any special ability. That one stood out like a gravy stain on a white shirt. The man might as well have been standing in a forest and denying that trees stood nearby.
“If I have this straight, we went for an evil-free world and committed an evil,” I said opting for a different tack.
Gorgol nodded in agreement. “Your race never learned that good and evil are forever joined. Like the magnet, you upset the balance and, in the end, became what you tried to erase.”
The man talked enough, but didn’t give much away except for his dislike of humanity in general. I started to tell him that demons had some surprisingly human characteristics. I would have had to explain that statement and draw the connection between assholes and arrogance for him. I figured I could do that easily enough. We had a mirror in the bathroom. He could go stand in front of it. With his obviously superior intelligence, I was certain he could make the connection.
He drew up in front of me, only a few feet away. “What is your decision, William?”
“What about the others? If I accept this deal, will they survive The Fever as well?” I shot back.
Light from the slats behind him wreathed his figure in a glowing luminescence, drawing his silhouette in stark lines but leaving his face dark and unreadable. His voice rose from the shadow. “I already told you. The others don’t matter. Let me show you.”
He moved with blinding speed, angling to my right and reaching for Daniel. I hit him with an overhand right that might have killed a lesser being. The blow caught him halfway through his leap, smashing his head backward as if it sat on hinges. His momentum carried his body forward, but his head looked as if it had run into a wall. His feet flew high and Gorgol crashed to the floor on his back.
Dust puffed off the old floor at the impact.
I squatted and waited as he crawled backward and rolled over. He pushed himself up on one hand and raised the other to probe the spot near his temple where the punch had landed. Black, oily blood lay smeared across his fingers when he pulled his hand away. A lump already grew from his pale skin.
“If you go for the boy again, I’ll kill you.” I told him.
The man grinned, the expression so evil that I nearly sat back in surprise.
“You don’t know how,” he hissed through yellow teeth. “Pick up the knife. I’ll show you.”
I glanced down at the blade lying between us. A diving knife is a monstrous piece of work in today’s world. Unlike the little lock-back blades most carry, the thing had been made of thick stock and stretched almost a foot long.
“Pick it up, William. You can pretend you’re defending the boy like you should have defended your son.”
I jerked my head up and looked across at the sarcastic and smug smile flitting across his lips. Gorgol climbed to his feet.
“Oh, do quit wasting my time, Wee Lee Um. The boy needs to know he can’t trust you.”
Rage grew with every taunting word that spilled from his lips. I knew he was baiting me, but the rational side of my brain couldn’t overcome the need to shut him down.
“Pick it up. Just for a minute. It won’t matter. Then you can go back to thinking that anything you say or do matters.”
I jerked the knife off the floor and moved toward him. He stood without moving, chest bared, one hand motioning in a come-on gesture. Behind me, Daniel moaned. I heard the sound and underneath it the odd thrumming of his thumb against his leg.
Before my brain could register the warning, Gorgol’s writhing chest touched the point of the blade. He stood so I could feel the heat of his breath. It washed over me like the dusty, dead air of a tomb. For one long, agonizing moment, we stood frozen. Daniel keened the high-pitched whine of a choirboy. In front of me, the thing stood with the knife pushing against his chest.
Gorgol moved with blinding speed, hand shooting up like talons and wrapping around my wrist like shackles locked into place.
“And now,” he breathed, “the moment of truth.”
He lunged forward, impaling himself on the long blade. His body twitched and jerked in a death dance of convulsing muscles. A long shudder rippled through his torso. He stared down at the handle of the knife protruding from his chest. Stringy yellow drool leaked from the corner of his mouth, stretching downward in slow motion until it dropped hot and slick across my arm.
The pressure on my hand eased slowly. When he had released his grip, he spread his hands victoriously wide. Black blood seeped from the new wound as the jellied flesh writhed around the blade. I watched in stunned horror as the skin latched onto the steel and formed a seal. The man was healing at the point he should have been dying.
The look on his face bordered on exultation when he lifted his head.
“See?” Gorgol chortled. “Your puny weapons are useless.”
I stared down at the knife, my brain in a stupor.
He jerked forward, grabbed my head and pulled his face close. “You fool. I didn’t come here to kill you. I need you to live.”
His hot fetid breath filled the air, choking with its intensity.
“There are two things that will ensure my superiority in the coming world. One is your offspring. The other is the key to the gate. You can provide them both.”
He threw his head back and roared with laughter. “Oh my, such a good day on such a pitiful strip of land. I will even deliver your allies, spawn of the very seed that wove blood into iron and built a gate through which none could pass.”
I fought with him, but the man’s grip clamped down like a steel vise. He brushed away every effort to push him away or create any distance between us as easily as he might swat away a fly. Gorgol opened his mouth wide. Spiked teeth glistened in the dark cavern. Inside, the fat gray tongue flattened out. Behind it, pink tonsils pulsed and quivered. A single strand of black poked up from the opening and lifted its pointed end as if sniffing at the air.
He grinned again and spoke. The words came out sounding like he had a mouth full of cotton.
“I just want you on my side.”
Slowly, inexorably, he twisted my head sideways. I could feel the tendons bulging along my neck at the strain. He worked my head around with a cruel strength, unmindful of ligament and bone, stretching and twisting until my cheek lay flat against the door.
I felt it crawl along my ear. The fear that ripped through me had no name. It wasn’t borne of the will to live, didn’t come from the fear of pain. It felt as if my very soul stood on the brink of annihilation. I fought with every ounce of strength I had. I shoved down on the knife and sliced through his stomach. Hot
black blood spilled down my legs.
He jerked, groaned, and twisted but his grip on my head remained firm. I heard myself screaming as the thing slid inside my ear. It crawled down, pierced my ear drum and then started up through my nasal cavity. As God is my witness, it felt like a drill bit had been forced inside my head, as if the thing bored away bone and flesh in its eagerness to reach my brain.
Blinding pain shot through my skull. In the instant it pierced my thoughts, my body fell limp. I no longer had control. I could barely even think.
Somewhere in the moments that followed, a hand snaked up between us. Daniel’s voice rose high and strong.
“STOP!”
Gorgol howled. His body jittered like a wind-up toy bouncing across the floor. The thing in my head latched on to something. A second later it began to feed.
I screamed. Gorgol shuddered.
Daniel stepped between us. No room existed for him to be there, yet he managed. I could see him in my mind, thin shoulders trembling, figure silhouetted in a brilliant light. He threw his head toward the sky and roared out his demand.
“I said STOP!”
The air detonated. I have no other words to describe the feeling. It was as if the boy filled the air with gas and lit a match. The force threw Gorgol across the room and ripped the worm free. A blazing arrow of pain lanced through my skull, burning a path from shattered eardrum to brain.
I could hear Daniel’s voice, but couldn’t make out the words. Through blurred vision, I watched him stalk the man. Gorgol cringed away from him, but the boy followed his every move.
People will tell you that in the final moments, a great light appears, beckoning and welcoming. Those who have visited Death’s door often say there is peace and comfort in the light. Some even talk of a reluctance to turn away.
I saw the light. It rose from the boy standing over the thing called Gorgol. The unearthly brilliance swelled around him in a massive ball, radiating spikes of blue, white, and yellow. Daniel clenched his fists close down against his sides.
The Island - The Final Chapters Page 9