Would he actually end this word? Would a hellish gate split apart and spill things into this plane and the next world begin? Would ghosts and evil spirits wander the planet and humans become their misbegotten servants?
Penelope didn’t know the answers, but she knew that since she had stepped into the house on Durfrene Row she had seen things that she would have never thought existed. The seatco, the shadow people, the witch, and the vision she had endured, leaving wounds on her that she had incurred in a dream-like state. Whatever was going to happen wasn’t going to be good.
Anthony had to be stopped. Penelope had her last little trick, and although she wanted to play it, somehow she knew it wasn’t time.
“Do you know what will happen next, thief?” he suddenly asked her. Anthony had moved behind her, whispering into her ear, clearly trying to intimidate her. Penelope didn’t want him to know that he was scaring the crap out of her, but her bravado was quickly fading away.
“You do some kind of ceremony, call up some bad whackjobs, and end the world. Yada, yada, yada,” she said back, closing her eyes while she attempted to regain some of her courage. “They do that every week on TV.”
One of his hands touched her shoulder where he had savaged her flesh in the vision. “Do they? I try not to watch too much.” There was a pause, and she smelled his fetid breath on the side of her face. Anthony was every inch a monster, and he was rapidly de-evolving into something from which he would never be able to return. His hand slithered over her shoulder like a snake and gingerly touched her cheek. “Do the wounds from the vision quest still hurt?”
Penelope didn’t answer but flinched away from his questing fingers. “Go play with one of your things, Anthony. I think they like you a lot better than I do.”
Anthony stiffened behind her. His fingers retreated from her face and settled gently on her injured shoulder. He said softly, “Did your father ever tell you that you’d catch more flies with sugar than vinegar?”
Her eyes snapped open. She wanted to twist herself away from Anthony’s touch. At that moment in time, he was a thousand times worse than Merri. But the grip of the shadow people was like unbreakable ice curled around her arms. Their black fingers dug ruthlessly into her flesh and held her motionless. “My father didn’t tell me that one,” she said promptly. “But he did tell me that some people are like Slinkys. They’re not good for anything, but they make you smile when they inevitably take a tumble down some wicked-steep stairs.”
Anthony’s hand closed firmly and unhesitatingly on her shoulder, and Penelope began to wilt at the pain. He squeezed the bite wound and pressed until she thought his fingers might come out on the other side of her shoulder. She bit back the scream that wanted to escape her mouth, and her vision began to gray.
Abruptly he let go. “It does still hurt. There’s nothing like pain to reveal your darker half.” He stopped for a moment and added slyly, “I wonder what you would do to survive right now. I wonder how far, or how low, you would go.”
Penelope fought for consciousness. All she could feel was the stabbing pain that shot through her entire body like a sword that had been dipped in acid. The shadow people held her up like the boneless rag doll that she had become, and it was only after a minute that her vision began to clear. The brutal pain began to slowly recede like an inevitable tide.
Anthony reached across her shoulder and snatched the leather medicine bag away from her. The cord was yanked across her throat before one end gave. He came around to where she could see him and weighed the bag in his hand. A chilling smile passed over his lips. “Feels like the right weight. It’s an appropriate vessel for something that’s supposed to be the key to ending the third world.” He studied the workmanship of the bag for a moment. “Looks like some of Joseph John’s work. The beadwork is supposed to be enchanted, but it doesn’t seem to work very well, does it?”
Her eyes came up and met with his. Penelope stared at Anthony with all the anger she could muster. The hurt of her shoulder was beginning to die away, but she knew that her pain was only the beginning. She damned Anthony silently. “Maybe it works better than you think,” she said quietly.
Anthony’s smile broadened as he took that statement in. He wrapped the broken leather cord around his wrist and removed a knife from his belt. The blade was flaked obsidian. The handle was bronze and bound with dyed leather. He displayed it for her and said, “Let’s put that theory to the test, shall we?”
The knife went up and back as Anthony hefted it into place. Penelope began to struggle in earnest. Her legs kicked at anything within range. She reached nothing. He was just out of her reach and kicking the shadow people was like kicking air.
Grinning a wicked grin, Anthony surveyed her thrashing form for a moment, savoring the anticipation of her eminent death. He said, “One innocent for each direction. North. South. East. West. One brave warrior for the fourth world. And a powerful one with magicks for the underworld.” Then his callous eyes shifted from her form to Will’s.
Anthony took exactly ten steps, and then, using the entire force of his weight, he stabbed the knife into Will’s chest.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Friday, July 18th
Shiever (slang, origin unknown, probably 1930s American) - double-crosser
The things that held onto Penelope’s arms wouldn’t let her go no matter how much she pulled and yanked. Their cold grasp was resolute and implacable. As she reluctantly and temporarily gave up the ghost, two of the children’s breathless sobs turned into pitiful shrieks of pure terror, framing the event in a way that emphasized its unrelenting ghastliness.
Anthony bent over his brother, well-satisfied with the act of murdering his only sibling. His merciless countenance stared downward and assiduously studied his downed opponent. Penelope couldn’t do anything except watch as Will’s blood spilled down his chest and over the sides of his abdomen. Will gave a last hoarse groan, and then his eyes shut forever.
Penelope knew that Will was dead. His chest had hitched once and then became still. It didn’t rise again. Icy tendrils of anguish wrapped around her heart.
Anthony touched his hand to his brother’s steaming blood and held it up to the skies. She saw that the eclipse had begun. The moon was beginning to glow with an unearthly redness that showed the shadow of the Earth was beginning its pass over it. The shadow started on the right side, replicating the curve of the bigger planet.
There was an eerie silence. Even the children abruptly stopped making noise, as if they thought their lives depended upon it. The shadow people seemed to press forward expectantly, waiting for something they knew was coming, something that had to be inevitable. Even the pair holding Penelope tilted to the front anticipatorily. She gradually looked around, only just realizing that the air was still and dead. The wind had stopped blowing, and the normal movements of night had ceased as if caught in a frozen frame of a movie picture.
The world had ceased to be.
Anthony’s voice came to her, filling in the gap in singsong. He was chanting in the language of his forefathers. He touched the blood to his cheeks and his forehead. Then he smeared a line down his nose. Finally he deliberately splattered Will’s blood across the ground using the obsidian knife to flick the still-warm life’s blood in a pattern that only he determined.
Her breath seemed to hold fast in her chest. Penelope glanced at the moon, and it was as if the eclipse was faster than it should have been. The shadow moved across the lunar face like something about to ghoulishly engulf all in its path. Her analytical self said that an entire eclipse could last up to and past an hour. It typically took up to twenty-five minutes before the moon would be totally obscured. Whatever the elapsed time had been, it wasn’t even close to a complete half-hour and Penelope trembled at the implication.
A wobbling of the ground started as a gradual quiver that could have easily been mistaken for something innocuous. She looked down and saw that dirt and rocks were starting to fall from their p
laces. One rock scooted to the side in fits and starts as if trying to make a run for the border.
“No place to hide,” she told herself. The shadow person on her right side hissed warningly at her at the sound of her voice.
Time to play that ace, Pen, the inner voice said pleadingly.
“Not yet,” she said back. The thing clinging to her arm made another warning noise at her. Penelope paused to bare her teeth at it. She thought it backed away for a moment, but its attention went back to Anthony’s performance.
The earth shuddered in a way that made it seem as though Chicken Little had been right about the sky all along. Perhaps Chicken Little was around when the sky god fell, suggested her inner voice fretfully.
Anthony’s voice became louder and louder, and it was obvious that he was demanding something to happen. Penelope previously had her doubts, but she didn’t doubt now. Will’s younger brother was causing something incredible to happen. He waved the dripping knife into the air and began to repeat the same phrase over and over, increasing the timbre of his voice.
The shadow people began to hiss with bated breaths. The end was approaching, and even Penelope could feel the lull in the air that preceded its arrival.
When the ground tore apart with a deep ripping groan, Anthony suddenly ceased chanting and yelled a chilling cry of triumph that overlapped every other sound. The splitting of the earth followed the path of the blood and stopped at Will’s body. The earth ripped apart like a huge eye opening, the ends stayed tight and narrow and the middle spread wide. Penelope expected fire and brimstone to spew forth from the crack, but instead it was an explosion of the darkest blackness that had ever been seen. It was a spiraling cloud of opaqueness that obscured all in its path. It curled around Anthony and Will, and twisting strands reached for them.
This was the doorway to the underworld. Anthony had opened it up with the sacrifice of his only brother. Blood had brought impenetrable blackness.
When the things that were similar to the shadow people she had seen started to climb from the fractured earth, Penelope knew the situation had gone from bad to worse.
Duh, said her inner voice. You’re just now figuring that out?
*
John Rife stopped his truck beside where Penelope Quick had parked her Jeep. His headlights revealed the still vehicle and the fact that no one was around. He knew that he was nearly a half-mile away from the silo. In past years, he came in the daylight chasing down a stray calf before it got itself mysteriously disappeared, but once in a while he was drawn here at night, knowing about the stories that people told. The man Penelope had talked about, Anthony Littlesoldier, might have brought unnatural things with him, but for some other reason, a few of them had been here for much longer.
Perhaps they were drawn here as well, John thought to himself and wondered why that would be so before deciding that he really didn’t want to know the reason.
One of the elderly men who ate at Jack Bryne’s place in Flute was a WWII veteran by the name of Vic Miller. He had served in the Pacific theater and reputedly killed as many Japanese soldiers as he could count. Before Vic had gone to a retirement home in Abilene, he had once told John that he shot one of the red-eyed things back in the days just after the war. Vic had thought since he had survived a Japanese prisoner of war camp, a little supernatural nonsense wouldn’t bother him a bit. Of course, Vic admitted over coffee that he had been dead wrong. He had come to the crater and waited on a desolate night of the new moon. One of the monsters that bizarrely haunted this locale had come for him. Vic didn’t know if he had killed the thing he shot multiple times, but it had gone down, and he had taken the opportunity to flee the area. As a matter of fact, Vic rather thought that he hadn’t killed it.
Vic had told John with a tone that was more serious than a Baptist preacher’s on Sunday, that he sincerely wished that he hadn’t gone over to the Grumbrell ranch that night. His specific preferences were that he would have rather gone back to China and been back in the POW camp waiting to see if his neck was going to be introduced to the sharp edge of a Japanese sword.
And Vic Miller was one of the toughest son-bitches that John had ever known. Right up until the point in time where the octogenarian had broken his hip, the man could give back ten times what he got and with a wicked grin on his face.
Someone cleared his throat and interrupted John’s reverie. It was Charlie, one of John’s ranch hands, who sat in the middle of the bench seat of the old Chevy. He shifted nervously and said, “Say, John. We stopping here or what?”
Charlie was in his forties with next to no hair on his head and an affinity for fast women and tequila. With warm blue eyes that charmed more often than not, he considered his employer as the older man sat numbly behind the wheel of the Chevy. Then he switched his gaze to Jeep Wrangler that was centered in the headlights. Then Charlie added, “This the girl’s Jeep you were talking about?” He shifted on the seat and adjusted his grip on the rifle he held in his hands.
“This the Gumbrell ranch, John?” the other man in the truck asked nervously, but it wasn’t quite a question. With wildly red hair and green eyes, Jake was about ten years younger than Charlie and twice as big around in the gut. He liked the same kind of things that Charlie did and got in three times as much trouble on a regular basis. His positive points included that he was always back in the saddle come the crack of dawn, and he never let John down when it came to ranching. Despite his nervousness, Jake adroitly held a well-maintained Smith and Wesson revolver that was older than John’s grandfather and was ready to use it at John’s behest.
“Yep,” John said. “This is the girl’s Jep and this is the Gumbrell spread. Boys, if it glows in the dark shoot it. I think something’s awful wrong here, and it’s up to us to put it right.”
Both of the younger men liked that. They had been drinking most of the night, but a pot of Andrea’s coffee split between them had perked them up just fine. The three men exited the truck and started on their way to the missile silo.
They started down the little valley and came up to the site before ten minutes had passed. John looked at the air ventilation unit that he had told Penelope Quick about and saw that the cap had been removed. Over the horizon was a warm blush of an actively burning fire. He could hear the distant sound of voices as the noise carried over the hills, but he wasn’t very interested in seeing what the new occupant of the silo was doing.
Charlie said, “Ain’t we going to see what’s up, boss?”
“I don’t think we want to see, Charlie,” John answered earnestly. He pointed at the ventilation shaft. “That’s the way I told that girl to go, and I reckon we need to see if she got stuck or what.”
Jake stared at the shaft. “That’s a black hole, boss. There’s things I don’t do. I don’t do fat women. I don’t eat jalapeños. And I sure as hell don’t go climbing into black fucking holes.”
John sighed. “Fine. Stay up here. Just remember what I said. If it has red eyes that blaze at you, shoot the motherfucker.”
Both Jake and Charlie had heard the stories over the years but neither gave it much credence. After all, ranch hands told the tallest tales of all, and critters that moved like shadows and had red shining eyes didn’t sound like much of a story. They looked at each other, and Jake shrugged.
Jake watched as Charlie and John descended into the vent. Jake thought that he probably wouldn’t fit in there anyway. He looked up into the sky and saw that the moon was as full as a woman gone nine months pregnant. But that wasn’t what bothered him particularly. It was the shadow of blackness that was inching across the moon’s precious features like a bizarre growth. The moon was beginning to take on a crimson cast that made Jake think about old teachings that he thought he’d forgotten.
“Blood on the moon,” he muttered, gripping his revolver tightly. His granny had taught him a Bible passage every day of his life until he was twenty-one years old and had his first drink of alcohol. “‘And I beheld when he had op
ened the sixth seal, and lo, there was a great earthquake;’” he whispered, pausing when he had to think about the rest of the Biblical quotation. “Oh, yes, ‘And the sun became as black as sackcloth, and the moon became as blood.’”
Jake suddenly had an urge to pray because he remembered to what event the passage was referring. The apocalypse. He shook visibly and held onto his weapon more tightly than he had ever held onto anything before in his entire life.
After they were gone for about ten minutes he heard the children screaming from across the hill and knew that black holes weren’t as bad as he had reckoned.
*
John and Charlie found Penelope’s trail without much ado. She had kicked in the false wall and crawled through, leaving a pile of debris that a blind man could follow. John’s flashlight showed her footprints in the fine dust that covered the stairs. When they got further down, they saw her steps through the mud. Finally, they saw that she had managed to get the steel door open. The hinges seemed to have been snapped cleanly off, and John knew that he had underestimated the pretty and young Penelope.
She had pushed the door back into a semblance of propriety so that it appeared to the casual observer that it hadn’t been tampered with. John simply gave it a pull and pushed it to the side. He didn’t give a damn about propriety.
Charlie said, “This is the missile silo, boss?”
“Yep.”
Looking into the hallway, they saw the remnants of what looked like several dead people decomposing on the floor. Charlie covered his mouth and nose with one hand and muttered, gagging, “Christ Almighty. We should be calling the police. Looks like three or four bodies there, and it smells mighty bad.”
John looked down and was glad that the bodies were mostly hidden in shadows. When he saw the Mickey Mouse watch on one of the decaying arms, he knew that one of the sets of remains was George Gumbrell’s, which would mean that the circumstances had been much more serious than he imagined for a lot longer than he had reckoned. He made a mental note to himself that George’s lawyer was probably one of the other sets.
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