by J. L. Doty
Paul was not a small man, and he was in good shape, had been working out again, but he bounced off that thing like a small child running headlong into a concrete wall. Again, a blinding flash erupted from the point of contact with the monster, hammering Paul to the ground. But where Paul’s momentum failed to have any effect, the flash made the monster stagger drunkenly and fall.
Paul tried to get to his feet, made it only to his hands and knees where a dizzy wash of power and strength prevented him from rising further. The vampire flapped about aimlessly on the ground paying no attention to Paul or Katherine. She still hadn’t moved so Paul crawled toward her, and his movement drew the vampire’s attention. It looked at Paul with blood-red goat-slitted eyes, then turned and loped away with an uneven gait. Paul reached Katherine on his hands and knees and collapsed in the dirt next to her.
The Lord had fed on It. Twice! Trogmoressh hadn’t fed on the Lord; the Lord had fed on It, badly weakening It and damaging one of its wings. No mortal should be able to do that, and It dare not approach him until It understood more. No, It would bide Its time, find a moment to feed on the young witch first and gain the strength It needed to battle the Lord.
Paul lay next to Katherine in a stunned daze, his cheek resting on the reddish-brown dirt, warm dirt, uncomfortably so. He hurt everywhere, was bleeding in a dozen places. And yet, he felt an odd strength flowing through him, a strange, almost giddy sensation unlike anything he’d ever experienced. It was as if touching that vampire, demon-thing had energized him.
He struggled to his hands and knees and tried to take in his surroundings. A nearby building bore only the slightest resemblance to the hospital, though after careful consideration Paul decided it did appear to be the hospital. But it was a twisted, blasted, crumbling hulk, with only the vaguest outlines to hint at what it had once been. He looked again at the dirty brown sky with the hot wind howling overhead, blowing gusts filled with reddish-brown grit.
“Mr. Conklin, you mustn’t dally.”
Still on his hands and knees, Paul rolled to one side and sat down on the dirt, found a tall, handsome man with coal-black skin standing over him. “I just need a minute. Don’t know what’s going on.”
“Don’t take too long,” the man said. “You and the young lady need to find hallowed ground, and quickly.”
Paul nodded impatiently. “Ok, Dayandalous, ok. But why hallowed ground?”
Dayandalous squatted down to be more on a level with Paul’s eyes. “Again, you remember. That you remember anything, even just my name, is most unusual.”
Paul shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. “And every time you leave I forget.”
Dayandalous smiled pleasantly. “Yes, that’s the way it must be. But don’t forget how you got here? You’ll need the memory of that if you hope to get back with your soul intact. And if I might offer a bit of advice . . .”
Paul looked into Dayandalous’ eyes. The pupils were fiery red vertical slits, like those of a cat, not the horizontal slits of a goat-eyed demon. “I’ll take any help I can get.”
Dayandalous said, “Look not into the demon eye, mortal. Look through the demon eye.”
Paul closed his eyes, lowered his head and ran a hand through his hair. His hand came away caked with the reddish-brown grit that permeated everything here. He was tired of riddles and supernatural bullshit. He opened his eyes, about to deliver an impatient retort, but the man had vanished. He scanned his surroundings quickly, opened his mouth to shout the man’s name, but couldn’t remember it. And then a moment later he couldn’t remember why he thought he should be shouting someone’s name.
Hallowed ground. He did remember that. And you and the young lady. He remembered that too. Katherine!
She was still lying on her back, head turned slightly to one side, arms and legs sprawled haphazardly, her dress torn in a dozen places, her hair frazzled and wild, a few twigs and such tangled in the strands. He knew he wasn’t supposed to move an injured person until they could determine how badly she was hurt. But he was no doctor, and he couldn’t tell if she was breathing so he dropped to his hands and knees and pressed his ear to her chest to see if he could hear a heartbeat. He was listening carefully, hoping desperately she was unhurt. Then suddenly she took a breath and spoke groggily, “Is that how you get your jollies, sneaking a look down my blouse for a boob shot?”
He suddenly realized that part of her blouse had been torn completely away and his face was pressed against an almost bare breast, and he could see into her blouse, could see most of the other breast quite clearly. He snapped his head up and said, “I uh . . . I wasn’t . . . uh. I mean . . . I didn’t.”
She laughed quietly, waved his complaints aside impatiently. “I know you didn’t, Conklin. But it’s so easy to toy with your little mind. Help me up.”
He helped her to a sitting position where she sat for a moment with her face buried in her hands. Then she leaned back, opened her eyes and took her first look around. And as she did so her eyes slowly widened and her face filled with horror. “Oh shit!” she said, scrambling frantically to her feet. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!”
Paul scrambled up beside her. “What’s wrong?” He had to shout to be heard above the howl of the wind.
She turned on him and shouted. “We’re in the Netherworld. We’re in the Netherworld. How did we get in the fucking Netherworld?”
“Netherworld?” Paul pleaded. “What the hell is the Netherworld?”
“Exactly,” she shouted. “It’s hell, or at least what hell in most mythologies is loosely based on. Why did you bring us here?”
“I didn’t bring us anywhere. I just hit that fucking vampire on the chin.”
She looked around desperately. “We have to find hallowed ground.”
“You mean like a church?”
“Ya, church, or graveyard, anything like that. You know this part of San Francisco better than me. Is there anything like that nearby?”
Paul couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “But this isn’t San Francisco. You just said that yourself.”
“But it is,” she said, grabbing him by both shoulders and shaking. “In a twisted, hellish sort of way, it is. The Mortal Plane and the Netherworld are connected in many places, so the reality of the Mortal Plane leaks into the Netherworld, producing counterparts everywhere. Look around.”
He scanned the twisted and tormented cityscape about them. Something had blackened and burned all of the buildings, a few so badly little more than rubble remained, and there appeared to be the flickering reddish glow of massive fires on the horizon. The dry wind howled constantly, a scorching hot air laden with a noxious combination of sulfur and wood smoke that made it difficult to breathe. An almost continuous thunder rumbled in the background, constantly waxing and waning with a vibration he could feel through the ground at his feet. But this twisted and tormented city did bear a certain resemblance to the San Francisco he knew, so he tried to recall the local layout.
“I think there’s an old church about three blocks from here,” he said tentatively. “But I’m not sure. I’m not really religious, not a church goer.”
She shrugged. “Most wizards aren’t.”
“I’m not a wizard.”
“Sure,” she said. “We’ll talk about that later.”
Paul and Katherine moved carefully, but quickly, down the street. The structures on either side had once been the classic San Francisco nineteenth-century, wood-frame houses with three or four stories of bay windows. But then Paul wondered if anything in this hell had ever been whole, if perhaps everything here was created in a state of destruction. Their condition varied from abandoned, derelict hulks, to piles of mere rubble, and everything in between.
They crossed through an intersection and the street dropped down one of those steep San Francisco hills. They’d gone about a block when Katherine suddenly said, “Wait, stop.”
“What is it?” Paul demanded.
She pointed to the top of a pile o
f rubble that had once been a three-story Victorian. “I thought I saw that Tertius, but without the glamour. It’s following us, and I think it was limping.”
Paul quickly told her about his brief battle with the demon when he’d first awakened. When he finished she looked him over carefully, then stepped in close, intimately close. “That was very gallant of you, Mr. Conklin.”
He suddenly became conscious of her torn blouse and the serious cleavage it exposed. She had small breasts, and she seemed to be teasing him with them. And he realized he was staring at them.
She said, “And you need to get your mind out of the gutter, Conklin, get it back on finding us some hallowed ground.” She turned and started walking down the street.
He wanted to protest, tell her she was being unfair. She was the one who’d stepped in intimately close, had practically shoved her cleavage in his face. But all he could get out was, “Why hallowed ground?”
She looked over her shoulder impatiently. “Of course, hallowed ground. We’re in the Netherworld.”
He pleaded, “There’s no of course for me. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
She stopped and turned back to face him. “You really don’t have a clue, do you?”
He lifted his hands in a prayer-like gesture. “Not the vaguest.”
She turned around and continued marching down the street. He followed while she spoke. “Ok, crash course in demonology. I told you about the vampires, and how they’re a human possessed and warped by a demon. There’re three main demon castes: Primus, Secundus and Tertius. Beyond that there’re non-caste demons like imps and succubuses and incubuses, kind of a fourth caste, the least powerful of them all. By the way, the one that attacked us in the hospital was clearly Tertius caste, maybe one or two hundred years on the Mortal Plane.”
He interrupted her. “How do you know that?”
“If it’d been a Secundus, when it fed on me the effect would’ve been far more devastating. And a Secundus wouldn’t feed on me on the spur of the moment, not like that. Besides being more powerful, Secundus demons are far more calculating and patient. A Secundus vamp would likely have tried to enthrall me first, take me to its nest and feed on me at its leisure.
“In any case, demons cannot, by themselves, cross between the Mortal Plane and the Netherworld. They have to be summoned by a mortal or Sidhe sorcerer.”
“Sidhe?” he asked.
“Ya, you know, Faerie.”
“No, I don’t know any fairies.” He couldn’t hide his frustration and his words tumbled out in a rush. “Well, I do live in San Francisco, but that’s not the kind of fairies you’re talking about, is it?”
She’d been marching along like a storm trooper; again she stopped suddenly and turned back to him. “Who’s been teaching you? Who’re you apprenticed to, that they’d leave you so ignorant?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She frowned and opened her mouth to say something but the ground beneath their feet started to shake, threatening to drop them both on their butts. They were in the middle of the street with no tall buildings looming overhead, so they faced no danger of injury by falling debris. But Paul couldn’t help thinking of an earthquake in an old low-budget movie, opening a giant crack in the ground and swallowing them both, then closing completely. He tried to ignore his own vivid imagination.
As suddenly as it started the shaking stopped, the wind died and utter silence descended on the city about them, an eerily complete silence that felt wrong and out of place. Something in the distance cried out a high-pitched screech. Similar screeches quickly answered it, baleful, inhuman cries.
Katherine looked his way as she said, “This is scaring the shit out of me. We’d better run for that church.”
Katherine had ditched her spike-heeled shoes in the hospital and was in her stocking feet, so the best they could manage was a jog. Paul led the way and the creatures—demons—cried out now in a chorus of excited screeches and howls. The sound they made had an oddly human timbre to it, disturbing and frightening at the same time. Paul could hear them advancing up the streets on either side, flanking them, moving much faster than he and Katherine could manage.
Up ahead something crawled out of an alley and he and Katherine slowed their pace. It appeared to be no more than a black smear oozing across the ground, a dark blot of nothing that broadcast hatred and loathing to assault his senses. He staggered under the attack, stumbled to his knees and vomited, thought of the stupid heroine in some cheap movie who fell for no reason just as the evil villain was chasing her, and you wanted to kick her for being so clumsy. Katherine too was on her hands and knees vomiting. He struggled to his feet and helped her to hers, felt as if he carried an enormous weight on his back. Supporting each other, they staggered around the black smear, knew they mustn’t let it touch them. They staggered on, and the farther they got from it the less its malevolence affected them.
They’d lost precious moments eluding the black smear, could hear the cries and screams of whatever was chasing them all around them now, and knew the creatures had surrounded them. They could run, but there was no place to run, and it was clear they couldn’t hide.
Something loped out into the street in front of them, a misshapen, distorted form of human being. It scrambled forward on its hands and knees as fast as any dog might move and stopped in the street not twenty feet from them. It stood on its hind legs, lifted its arms high and cried out in triumph from a human mouth warped by rows of needle-like teeth. It had the genitalia of both man and woman, though they were disgustingly swollen, and like the rest of the creature badly distorted.
Paul looked over his shoulder and saw a half-dozen similar creatures had come to a stop in the middle of the street behind them. To both sides more of them yipped and shouted and jumped up and down on the rubble that remained of old houses. Paul moved slowly, reached down and lifted an old board that he could use as a club. It probably wouldn’t do much good, but he wasn’t going down without a fight.
Katherine fumbled in the pocket of her coat and said, “I’m going to clear us a path.”
She lifted something out of her pocket, raised her closed fist to her mouth and spit into her palm. Whatever she had cupped in her hand began to glow with a harsh, blue light and spears of radiance escaped between her fingers. She turned toward the pack of creatures behind them, lifted her glowing hand high above her head and waved it like a sword. The intensity of it grew steadily and the creatures cringed and backed away.
She turned toward the lone creature standing in the street in front of them, probably their leader. She charged at it and screamed like a banshee. Paul charged after her, caught up with her and shouted, “Hope you know what you’re doing.”
The creature in front of them suddenly dropped to all fours and charged. But in that instant Katherine threw the glowing thing she held directly at it. When it hit the monster loping toward them it exploded with a thunderclap and enveloped the thing in a ball of incandescent fire, with swirls of electricity discharging at its edges. The concussion kicked Paul in the gut and slammed him to the ground.
Get up, he told himself. Get up. Get up. Get up.
Katherine helped him stagger to his feet and said something about, “ . . . sorry . . . didn’t have time to protect you . . .” but his ears were ringing too much to hear it all.
“What the hell was that?” he asked.
“A little spell I prepared in advance. I don’t have many left so we’d better move.”
Katherine’s fireworks display had scared off the pack of distorted humans so they staggered on, leaning on each other heavily. When they got to the bottom of the hill he turned left, trying to recall the exact location of the church. His vague memories told him it should be in the middle of this block, but there was no church visible.
“Why are you stopping?” she demanded. “We can’t stop now.”
He pointed at a pile of rubble. “I thoug
ht the church was here, but clearly it’s not.”
Katherine slowly turned a complete circle, scanning the horizon. Paul wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but then she stopped and pointed past his shoulder. “Look.”
He turned and saw the crumbling remains of a steeple rising out of the rubble one block further on. “The steeple is symbolic,” she said, “and symbols contain power. That’ll be the last thing to fall.”
The silence that descended earlier continued as they both started running, the only sounds that reached their ears the patter of her bare feet, the clop of his shoes, and their own struggling breaths. Using the steeple as a guide they made it to the end of the block and turned right, but as Paul rounded the corner two strides ahead of Katherine he heard a painfully familiar screech behind them.
He looked over his shoulder as he ran, saw Katherine behind him doing the same, the vampire-demon thing about a hundred feet behind her and loping toward them with an ungainly gait. Katherine stopped looking over her shoulder and shouted at him, “Ruuuuun!”
Paul did exactly the opposite. He slowed a bit to let her pass because, in her stocking feet, she was slower than him even though she was sprinting like a madwoman, obviously ignoring any pain she felt.
The church was still half a block away. Paul kept glancing over his shoulder as they ran, and they were gaining distance on the demon because it just wasn’t made for running. And then it flapped its leathery wings, and within two strides took to the air, rose to a height of about ten feet and swooped down toward them. Paul looked ahead to the church, realized they weren’t going to make it, recalled that he’d been able to have some sort of effect on the monster, so he swerved to the edge of the street and dug his heels in near a pile of rubble, came to a stop, bent down and picked up another club. He turned and stepped into the middle of the street to face the monster.
“What are you doing?” Katherine shouted.