The Trilogy of the Void: The Complete Boxed Set

by Peter Meredith

  The trail she followed was quite obvious to Will, but only when Jim chose to shine the light towards the floor, which was infrequent. Jim was nervous and this was plain to see by the way the flashlight swung in every direction, especially if there was any noise. Of course, with the bones of the place still smoking in spots there was plenty of settling and shifting, and the light seemed more like a spotlight searching for an escaped convict than a device to help them find their way.

  Talitha was just a head of Will and as they came to the stairwell door, she stopped and sniffed at the corners and edges of it with a great deal of concentration. Perhaps thirty or forty seconds went by before she opened it as quietly as she could. However, once it was open, she stopped in the doorway and despite two little shoves from Will, she wouldn't go forward.

  "What's..." Will started to whisper the question, but then he knew what was wrong. He could now feel the bone-chilling cold seeping up from the deep blackness in front of him.

  Ba'al was near.

  The thought sent an electric surge of fright through him and he turned without a word and snatched the flashlight from Jim and shown it down the stairwell. Again, just as in the entrance, the walls were black and not smooth as they had been, but were torn and gouged in spots, but also rippled from the heat in others. Thankfully, there was no sign of the smoking body of the demon, however the cold slowly intensified the longer they stood there.

  He remembered the advice from his father, not to stop or there was a chance they wouldn't be able to get going again and so he gave Talitha a bigger push. She resisted at first, backing into his hand, but then she started edging forward.

  Even though Will kept a hold of the flashlight and used it to peer as far down into the darkness as possible, she still went with exacting slowness, part of which was due to the slippery conditions. Water trickled in from every direction and mixed underfoot with the ash and Will found himself slip on more than one occasion.

  He walked with a hand on her shoulder, not just to keep from falling, but also for reassurance, both for his own sake and for hers. The control she had over her body was not complete; under the large coat of Jim's, her muscles were vibrating wildly in fear and her breath was quick and light.

  Will wasn't immune to this mounting fear either and his own heart rate had escalated to an amazing degree, however he felt an odd relief that he was to die with a bullet in the chest. It was a comforting thought just then to know that his death would at least be natural. Remembering the death of Adrina the gypsy sent a spasm through him and he paused to cling to the rail for a second. When Ba'al killed, the deaths were the most ghastly things—beyond imagination.

  After a moment, he was able to walk again and they had almost made it to the first sub floor when Will, shining the light over Talitha's shoulder, saw the great figure of the demon on the landing at the bottom of the stairs. The brother and sister froze in place at the same instant. Will's first action was not a smart one—he raised the gun to shoot the creature.

  His hand came up in a slow motion blur and even as he sighted down the length of the barrel, he saw that it was in fact not Ba'al, but a huge pile of the old furniture burned and melted into a strange exotic shape. The effect was uncanny and had fooled them both. He was just relaxing, bringing the gun down when Jim, who hadn't seen them stop due to the fact that he couldn't help looking back over his shoulder, barreled into him.

  Will in turn stumbled into Talitha and his body reacted instantly, putting out his left hand to stop his fall. The flash light struck the rail and was knocked from his grasp and bounced away.

  For the second time that day he was plunged into absolute darkness. Everyone froze in place and Will, who was caught between Talitha and Jim, could feel both of their heartbeats against his skin. Talitha's seemed fast, but less so than his own, while Jim's was downright alarming. It was almost as if Will could hear it beating through the man's thick chest.

  For the span of only a few seconds they stood that way, gripped in the natural fear of the dark as well as the unnatural fear of the proximity of a demon. "Get the flashlight," Will said to his sister, giving her the smallest shove forward so as not to unbalance her.

  "I don't know where it is." Her reply confused him. How could she not know where it was?

  "Why are you being like this?" he asked snappishly. "Ba'al could come up here and we won't know it."

  At the mention of the demon's name, she pushed even further back into him and again Will was sandwiched. "You get it, Will." Her voice shook, tremulously.

  "Calm down, ok," he used the most soothing voice he could manage, that is to say he snapped at her, but tried not to. "I can't see it or I would."

  "I can't see it either," she hissed at him.

  "Of course you can," he hissed back. They had stayed in one place far too long for his liking and what he had said a moment before about Ba'al coming, began playing on his imagination. He started to see eyes sprouting in the darkness. They would form themselves and dissipate with unsettling randomness. The odd false glows came from all sides and he even put out his hand to touch one, but struck the wall instead, and was so startled by the nearness of it that he jumped a little.

  "I can't," she insisted "I need at least some light to see, but this is complete darkness."

  "Just feel along, it bounced down to the landing," he said.

  "Please, you go get it," she turned, trying to switch positions with Will. It felt odd the way she did this, the stairs were not particularly narrow, but she acted like there was no room at all.

  Will wanted to argue with her, however her voice had an edgy quality that was shrill and so unlike her that he feared she was close to true panic. What's more, Will had done this before. When she squeezed behind him, he bent down to feel the first step below him. It was clear of obstacles and he stepped down onto it. He then gently waved his arms all about the air in front of him, still nothing, so he repeated the process of bending down again, but froze as Jim spoke.

  "Talitha, who am I." His voice was so startlingly deep and loud, and came out of the darkness seemingly from high above them. It made Will, for just a second, think that it was the voice of God.

  When she didn't respond Will felt the hairs on his neck stand up. He had been tricked again by the evil Talitha and he felt sure he would feel a blow coming from out of the darkness, but none came and there was only silence for another second.

  "Talitha!" Jim's voice was sharp, bordering on anger and again God like.

  "I'm sorry, you're...you're Spider Man."

  "Ok good, good," Jim said soothingly and Will could hear them hugging, and suddenly, he was jealous again. It added to the stew of his other emotions and the net result was that the slow simmering anger over his terrible situation began to come to a boil.

  It made him apathetic about dying by some diabolical trap and standing back up, he walked down the stairs holding the rail in one hand and feeling the wall with the other. At the landing, he waved his hands in the air until he found the great twisted pile of furniture and then he bent and scrambled around in the muck, finding the flashlight relatively quickly.

  He hesitated only a second before trying to turn the thing on. He had pictured flicking it on, only to find Ba'al looming over him, but he shook that off as silly, there was no way the demon could be so close without his knowing. Nonetheless, when he turned the switch on, he took a quick glance around, but there was nothing. He did however get to see both Talitha and Jim age twenty years in a second, just not in the way one would normally think.

  When the light came on, he could have sworn he was looking into the faces of a couple of frightened six year olds. They hadn't budged, but were gripping each other tightly. The light dispelled their fears, at least their fears of the dark and they hurried down the stairs like moths to a flame.

  Will wanted to be angry still. He didn't like how they continued crowding him, despite the light and how Talitha now refused to go first, or even the fact that they were all c
overed in black ash, as if they had rolled in it. But his anger had departed and so had most of his fear, and it was with an odd sort of elation that he realized he was now truly his father's son.

  A few seconds earlier, while he had huddled between Jim and Talitha in the dark his fear had been very great, but a little thing like his anger had managed to push it aside, or so he thought at the time. Now he realized that one emotion couldn't push another one about, unless he allowed it. It was such a simple thing, but one that could never be taught, only experienced.

  Right then he knew his fear was his to control, and what's more, he knew he could go on and face Ba'al and then face his own death. He squared his shoulders and made the conscious decision to die just as his father had lived.

  Of course conquering fear didn't mean he would be less cautious.

  He shined the light down the next flight of stairs a long time, checking every corner and tumbled piece of furniture before he started. The feeling that he was descending a stairwell in one of the void's many dungeons grew with each slow step down. And it wasn't the way the paint peeled off the walls, or how the debris began to look more like hunks of charred flesh than anything else, it was how the darkness began to overcome the light of the flashlight, squeezing the energy from it, making it seem feeble and dim.

  But more than that, there was the cold.

  It was the dreadfully familiar cold of Ba'al, which could be mistaken for nothing else. Each step down marked a greater temperature drop and it wouldn't have surprised Will to see the end of the stairwell encased in black ice. However it wasn't. That final set of stairs, were slippery with quickly freezing ice sludge, but at the bottom, there was a pool of black water, which it hadn't yet frozen over.

  The water couldn't have been more than a few inches deep, but it gave the impression that it could be of any depth and Will hesitated before stepping down confidently even as his father would have. He turned out to be right, the water being barely two inches deep, but it was shockingly cold and it gave him a jump.

  "You ok?" Talitha asked from a few stairs above him. She and Jim held hands, like a couple of lovers in a coalmine or so they appeared as covered in filth as they were.

  "I'm good, the water is just cold is all," he responded and then waved her down. "Check if you can smell out any of those traps of Luke's."

  Talitha came down and made a great show of sniffing at the edges of the door, even squatting down in the puddle to sniff lower down. Just as she did Jim slipped. The big man came down hard on his butt and Will swung the flashlight back to him.

  "What is it?" Talitha cried softly in alarm.

  "I just slipped, it's nothing." Jim whispered to her as he tried to get to his feet. However, his foot slipped out from beneath him again. "Damn," he grunted still quietly.

  "Huh?" Talitha said from the blackness below. He shown the light at her, but it blinded her and she held up her hand blinking into it.

  "It's nothing Tal. Did you smell anything?"

  "Naw, I'm having a little trouble. The cold is freezing the mucus in my nose," she turned back to the door. "Also I can't catch the scent of another gun, because of that." She pointed to the pistol. "It's overpowering. Put it away or..." she struggled out of Jim's heavy coat, "Better yet, wrap it in this for a moment."

  She held out the coat for Will to take, but Will's hands were full; the flashlight in one and the gun in the other, so she laid the coat out for Will to put the gun into.

  He paused, not just because the girl in front of him wasn't his Talitha, but also because he didn't know what to do about it.

  At some point in the last minute or so, they had switched, the good Talitha for the bad. He knew this not as part of a vision, he just knew it as her brother. It was how she had said, "Naw." It wasn't her style. She disliked using language in such a casual manner.

  But now that he knew, he had to very quickly come to a decision. His choices were limited, in fact it seemed like he had only one choice and that was to force her at gunpoint into the presence of Ba'al, and then...he didn't know what. He hoped they would fight it out, but he came to the sudden realization that they wouldn't.

  It was only a guess, but Will figured that Ba'al would orientate on him as his primary opponent strictly due to the gun and if he did, Will wouldn't last two seconds. However, if she held the gun...

  "Here you go," Will said, placing the gun in the coat. She didn't play around and simply took the gun in her small hand and casually tossed the coat aside. Will felt a ball of ice form in his belly, but ignored it.

  "Thanks for this." She smiled sweetly.

  Jim watched this for a moment with his mouth open, but finally figured it out. "Who am I?" he asked in a hoarse whisper.

  "Is this a trick question?" She looked like a cat eyeing a mouse, while chewing on the neck of a bird. For her it was a happy look.

  "Jim, don't bother, this isn't our Talitha. This is Ba'al Fie-ere; she doesn't deserve the name Talitha." Will explained calmly, eyeing the girl.

  "You bet I don't," she said bringing the gun up for a quick sniff. "It means 'Little Maid' and those kind fellows at the hospital took care of my maidenhood a long time ago. And speaking of maidenhood, Jimbo what happened to your face? Was Talitha not happy with our little surprise?"

  "Go fuck yourself," Jim growled with a hard edge to his voice.

  She brought the gun up, pointing it at him, something that was actually not at all noticeable in the dark, with only a very flimsy light shining across her. "Go fuck myself...very original. Your wit is certainly not as developed as your dick. This would be a compliment if you knew what to do with it."

  "Ba'al, why don't you leave him alone," Will stepped closer to her. She brought the gun to his chest and started to slowly pull back the hammer—he ignored it.

  "Because, I don't want to." She shoved him back with the barrel of the gun. "Do you even know what this guy did to your poor little sister? He raped her, Will. Rape is clearly defined as any act of sexual intercourse that is forced upon a person."

  "Actually it was you who did the raping." Will's anger was an emotion that he was having difficulty controlling, so he forced himself to breathe as slowly as he could and it went from boiling to a low simmer.

  She suddenly smiled wistfully. "Yeah you're right, it was genius. And Jim, you played your part, the part of the fool, so well. It gives me the tingles just thinking about it." She sighed dreamily.

  "When you're done with your tingles, we have a problem." Will said in a high voice, one he hoped would be mistaken for fear. "I'm sure you're aware that Ba'al Zubel is near. We should get out of here quick." Jim's eyes flicked to Will, uncertainly, but Will made sure to ignore him completely.

  "Yeah, let's run!" Talitha mocked him. "Will, your plan is transparent. You willingly gave me the gun. You want me to go out there and kill Luke and send Ba'al back to the void, why don't you just say so."

  Will deflated so much so that he sat down on the slimy steps. "You're right," he said in a depressed voice.

  "What are you going to do?" Jim asked the girl.

  "I'm going to go talk with them. Isn't that what you wanted me to do when you thought that putz, Luke was really Ba'al?"

  "Then I guess we can wait here for you?" he said knowing there was no way she'd allow that. It was so ludicrous that she even smiled.

  "No, dear brother. You and Jim are going to be my bargaining chips. You see, I know for a fact that Ba'al hates you with such an amazing passion that he may be willing to give up anything to have you. Even some of those incantations or maybe something more." Her smile was terribly diabolical in that light and Will's new found victory over fear felt at that point to be a hollow triumph.

  "I'm not going," Jim glared down at her defiantly, but Will shook his head.

  "She'll just shoot you and make me drag you along and I'm too tired for that. And besides, this is what we came to do."

  She giggled and the sound was creepy; a snake giggling would sound more human than s
he did. "You two came here to die?" she asked.

  Hearing her say that reminded him of his vision, the knowing that two of them would die, and now the ball of ice was growing, numbing his hands and feet. "I guess so." Will said without much hope and stood to face her again.

  Talitha reached back and not taking her eyes from Will opened the door. It was a door onto a frozen hell.

  The air all around them whipped up and shot through the opening of the door making a high keen sound as it raced into the burned out remains of the building. Replacing the air was a cold that made the staircase feel like a June morning and Will who had just stood up felt the strength ebb from his shaking legs.

  He meant to take a deep breath and follow Talitha out, but the cold stung his lungs so badly that he ended up coughing weakly and heard Jim doing the same thing. His coughing was uncontrollable and for at least a minute he hacked, but finally Talitha yanked him into the destroyed atrium.

  The feeling of descending into the void while on the stairs had been nothing compared to this. No human could have wrought the crazed and malignant shapes that the consuming fire had created in its desire to destroy. The building he had been in earlier was now twisted into a perversion and blackened by greedy flames; it was slick with ice and silent as the far side of the moon.

  Standing there, Will's coughs dried up, and now he barely had the strength to even breathe. But it wasn't the cold and the horrific landscape that sapped him, it was Ba'al. Will felt that horrible buzzing in his head that he had known before and his eyes went in different directions for a few seconds before he was able to control himself.

  Jim took longer to begin thinking clearly; maybe two minutes more and during that time he could only moan softly as if in great pain. As he waited for his friend, Will stole glances at his sister, wondering how he could get the real Talitha back in time to deal with Ba'al.

  In truth, he didn't have any faith in his sister to actually win a confrontation with the demon. Will himself had tried and in a matter of seconds had been crushed to the size of an ant. He started to get the shivers at the thought, but he remembered his father and he gritted his teeth against the onslaught he knew would be coming