by James Kahn
Taylor looked up. Four heavy-metal punks, two male and two female, were standing in the door: torn Ozzie Ozboume T-shirts, single earrings, silver-studded black leather, hatcheted hair. Not a local tribe.
There was a van parked outside. “I could use a lift,” said Taylor.
The comedian of the clan offered his hash pipe, and they all broke up laughing.
“Which way are you headed?” Taylor pressed. The sun was down already, and he knew tonight was the night.
“Nonstop to L.A., Chief. You on the bus or off?”
He was on. They wove through traffic at record speed when he told them that he had, that night, a rendezvous with the devil incarnate. In fact, they dropped him off at Cuesta Verde, in return for Taylor’s rendition of the Chant of the Dead into their portable tape recorder.
Strange and wondrous, how these threads mesh, he thought. He thanked them and went down into the caves.
There he set up his ritual fire, painted his face, placed his rope, began his incantations. And there, in the fire, he saw Carol Anne, lost, scared. Stalked by the Evil One.
He took his spear from the niche in which he’d secreted it—the spear Sings-With-Eagles had given him. To its already magical point he affixed the fragment of obsidian lance tip he kept in his medicine bag—the lance tip he’d already used to puncture Kane’s newt-filled heart when last he’d confronted the demon in the astral; the chip originally from the lance carried by the first Indian Kane had murdered, back in 1840 in the hills of Cuesta Verde.
Taylor laid the reinforced spear behind him and increased the pressure of his chanting.
He didn’t know how long he’d been there when Steve, Robbie, and Tangina came running up. “I can see her,” he said. “This is the way in, but I’m not sure it’s the way out.”
“Is she all right?” asked Steve. He sounded desperate.
“We have work to do,” Taylor rumbled, ignoring the question. He continued glowering into the fire and resumed his chant.
Carol Anne’s voice floated through the ether once more. “Daddddy! Hellllllp! He’s here! Mommmmmy!”
And Diane’s voice: “Please! Noooooo!”
Steve begged Taylor. “Please,” he whispered.
Taylor stopped chanting. “The entity is with them. They are in grave danger.”
Steve punched the wall, tearing his skin. Robbie wrung his hands around his useless baseball bat.
Taylor continued. “Hold on to each other. When you find them, band together—that will prevent you from crossing over into eternity.” He stared at them meaningfully. “I’ll try to bring you all back.”
“Taylor . . .?” Steve started to ask, but he could not bring himself to finish the question.
“Joined together,” Taylor went on, “your family’s light can defeat him. This is the battle you’ve been moving toward all your life.” He motioned at the magical fire. “The entrance is through those flames.”
Steve and Robbie stared into the blaze, steeled to throw themselves in, when suddenly, from the smoke and flames, emerged a ghost image, congealing into the figure of the Beast.
It wailed, scraping the ceiling, its body a mass of writhing, screaming heads and faces, the tortured mass of souls that comprised it.
And one of the faces was Carol Anne’s.
Steve faltered in horror, Robbie gasped.
Taylor shouted, “This is an illusion! The Beast lies! Go into the flames now! Now!!”
Steve hesitated, staring at the thing. It had writhing tentacles growing from its brain, and the faces that emerged from its rotting torso twisted and winced as the creature whipped at itself.
Kane’s own malignant head sat atop the others. He looked down from the arch of the cavern and spoke to the group of mortals huddled there; his voice was high no longer, but the timbre of the grave: “Cross over here at your own peril, then, and at the peril of this child I claim as mine . . . for if you cross over into my domain, I will surely kill her and spare no pain.”
There was no more time to doubt or contrive. There was only now, and only here. And only each other.
Steve embraced Robbie, fused himself to his love for Diane and Carol Anne, spurned the horror of the image before him . . . and, with his boy, jumped into the blaze.
There was a wild splash of fire . . . and they were gone.
Only Taylor and Tangina remained in the cave, sitting anxiously before the now dwindling flames.
Steve and Robbie found themselves floating without direction in a spaceless land of vapors, light, and shadow. Since there were no spatial dimensions as such, there was no motion—only vague changes in orientation, perceptible through alterations in the ether wind and affected by thought—affected somehow, but Steve could not determine quite how.
He tried to sail this way, but seemed to go that way. Clouds engulfed him, yet the clarity of his vision increased. He could see the back of his head; he couldn’t find his legs.
It was all he could do just to hold on to Robbie. In fact, they gripped each other with a fierceness that projected its own aura in this place, which had its own natural laws.
It was sometime later—though how much was hard to tell, since there was no time there, either—that they saw Diane and Carol Anne, clutching each other, floating amid dozens of vaporous shapes that Steve realized were spirits, just as he realized he’d been seeing them all over and regarding them as wisps of cloud.
Carol Anne saw him at the same moment. “Dadddddy!!” she cried with a strange, muffled echo.
He willed himself toward his child—he hadn’t a clue how he did it, except he focused all his being on that spot, and he was there . . . but upside down and backward with respect to Diane. So there was a lot of frantic grasping and twisting and trying and trying not to try, until finally they were all holding some part of one another and wrestling themselves together and wrapping arms around shoulders and waist, all in a bunch.
Except Carol Anne was just hanging on to Steve’s wrist, a little apart from the rest.
“What’s happening?” whispered Tangina.
The fire had rapidly burned down to coals, smoldering red in the blackness of the cave.
Taylor stared ferociously into the embers. “They’ve found one another,” he said.
Her heart jumped. There was still hope of its working out, then. “Oh, God, can you bring them back? Taylor?” Then another skipped beat, and it was: “Taylor—what’s the matter?”
Taylor saw something in the glowing charcoals that worried him, so he didn’t spend any energy answering her. Instead he tightened the sorcerer’s rope snugly around the firepit, tight enough nearly to singe it, and then he began to chant.
Steve felt a tugging at his waist and realized Taylor’s rope was somehow in place there, binding him to Robbie. He loosened it enough to loop it over Diane’s head and shoulders, so it was now fast around the three of them; but as he tried to draw Carol Anne in closer to encompass her, too, a shadow passed over them all. Steve looked up.
It was the shadow of the Beast.
The thing was enormous, far bigger than all of them. The face that looked as if it had once been Kane’s face was deformed by sores that bubbled, jaws that could not close. Its body, too, was horribly defiled, erupting with the faces of the souls it had eaten. And it was still hungry.
It moved toward them as they struggled to hold together, unable yet to tie Carol Anne onto their tether. It moved toward them with its mouth opening wider and wider, growing blacker and blacker in its greed to engulf them all.
For a moment they froze in shock at the sheer image of it. But Robbie realized he was still gripping his baseball bat inscribed with Taylor’s protective symbols—and he threw it with all his might into the creature’s reeking teeth.
The bat broke half a dozen of the Beast’s fangs and lodged upright in its mouth, preventing its jaws from closing.
It gagged and shrieked, its broken teeth bleeding and spurting some foul ooze, and it thrashed in pain so
wildly that the Freelings were thrown far away, to a different part of the universe.
It was still full of mists there, but in the distance they could see the Light.
“Don’t look,” instructed Diane. She forced calm on herself, but she was afraid. “I’ve seen it before. If we go in there . . . we don’t go home again.”
But that wasn’t their immediate concern. Their immediate concern was the Beast, now hovering above them nearly blind with vengeance, its torn gums leaking venom. The baseball bat was gone.
The thing parted its jaws wide enough to take them all in and grabbed Carol Anne by the neck in a claw-hand at the end of one of its tentacles—grabbed her, wringing her from her father’s grip.
“I told you I would kill her,” laughed the beast. His claw squeezed tightly around the little girl’s neck.
Her face first paled, then quickly began to rot. Her body went limp as he brought it up to his gaping mouth.
Taylor saw the girl in the fiend’s grip and knew he could wait no longer. Slowly, meticulously, he pushed the point of the spear into the fire; then he altered its direction sightly and plunged the shaft of the weapon deeply through the parallel dimension.
“What is it?” said Tangina. She saw the sweat beading on his forehead; she felt her heart go cold.
Taylor didn’t speak, though. He thrust the spear into the fire, following even with his own hand, up to the wrist, burning his skin before withdrawing. Leaving the spear beyond.
Steve reached desperately out to his daughter, who was disintegrating in the grip of the Beast. He nearly turned away, the sight was so painful, so horrid . . . but he kept looking, kept stretching—
And the spear appeared. Hanging in the ether, just beyond his hand. A spear for him to use; it could be nothing else. A spear for a warrior.
It glowed as he brought his hand near it; glowed brightly when he stretched further than he’d thought possible and grabbed it.
Kane was too engrossed in his imminent feast to notice what was happening, but neither did Steve give him much time. In a single motion he leveled the spear and harpooned the Beast in the neck.
Green electrical discharges crackled from the point of contact, mingling with the deathless creature’s own gurgled wails . . . leading suddenly to a tremendous explosion.
The force of the blast was so great, it tore Carol Anne from the thing’s flailing tentacles and propelled her into the ether. Toward the Light.
And the other spirits, within the Beast, were likewise torn from it—freed at last to migrate to the Light from which they’d been so long withheld.
And the Beast—spear in throat, annihilated by Taylor’s wizardry—was blown away by the power that ripped from his core all the souls he’d imbibed over the years, and the fiend was expelled, howling, into a black void from which there was no known return.
In the cave, the fire exploded in white light, knocking Taylor and Tangina against the wall. As they picked themselves up a howling wail rose from the flames, sending a black chill through their spirits.
“The beast is expelled,” said Taylor. “His flock is free to pass over.”
“They’re moving to the Light?” Tangina asked.
But Taylor was again preoccupied, entranced, chanting the Way of Return.
All the freed spirits were floating toward the Light—some passing directly into it; some spinning into orbit around it a few times and then flowing into it, merging with it as their orbit degenerated; some dancing about in a fierce ecstasy of approach and then plunging through with a gush of light; some gloating, slow and stately; others nearing the Light ceremoniously, gingerly, humbly.
And in the midst of these passing spirits was Carol Anne—turning end over end, disoriented in the concussion caused by the Beast’s destruction, drifting slowly closer to the potent radiance beyond.
Steve, Diane, and Robbie watched her go, unable to move themselves, able only to wish and to weep.
They watched her get caught up in a cluster of spirits, all moving along a shaft of light that emanated from the greater luminosity, which glowed brighter all the time, brighter with every soul that entered.
They watched this crossing over with awe, with a wonder that silenced them; and then with a great sadness as they saw Carol Anne pass over, through the Light, into the Light, beyond the Light, to the other side.
Tangina felt it, like a constriction in her chest, like a terrible and irremediable loss.
She stared into the fire. “Taylor,” she whispered. “Bring her back.”
Taylor only continued chanting, shaping the smoke with his hands.
“Taylor!” she repeated loudly. “Carol Anne is in great danger! Bring her back!”
His chant grew louder.
“Taylor!” she cried, near tears, “please bring her back! She is near lost!” Or maybe it was already too late.
He merely shook his head. The moment was not right. The pattern was not harmonious. He could lose them all if he was not careful, if he tried to rush the ordered progression. A weaver could not pull the final warp without the proper thread.
Tangina sobbed. “Oh, please, please . . .” But the tears filled her words, and she let go, finally, of all hope. “She’s gone.”
This was her worst fear realized. This innocent little girl, who’d believed in her and depended on her—gone. Tangina could neither help nor control nor sacrifice nor salvage. She could only witness and feel.
And the girl was gone.
Diane tried to move forward, to throw herself into the Light, but she could make no headway. “Oh, my God, my God,” she whispered.
They were all in shock.
“Come back, Carol Anne!” Robbie called; but no one came back.
In fact, all the spirits were gone—passed beyond.
And the Light itself was beginning to fade.
Steve, Diane, and Robbie were alone. Tears streamed down their cheeks as they hugged one another, burying their faces in one another, lost in grief, shrouded by twilight.
“My baby’s gone,” wept Diane. “She’s gone.”
But then another spark appeared, like a distant, burning star. It grew rapidly brighter, a benevolent coruscation blasting away the darkness . . .
And at its center, two figures appeared.
They moved toward the family, wafting down on the heavenly glow, closer and closer until it was quite apparent that one of the figures was Carol Anne.
Diane gasped. “Baby . . .”
They held hands, these two spirit forms; and then at some point the one released Carol Anne’s hand, and the child drifted purposefully into Steve’s and Diane’s outstretched arms.
They hugged, all of them, tenderly and mightily.
And then Carol Anne pointed back out at the other figure, the spirit who’d guided and released her. “Look, Mom!” she said.
And the others could see—it was Gramma Jess floating before them, smiling with the peace that surpasses understanding.
“I must go now,” said Jess. “I love you all.”
At which she receded into the light and was no more.
“It’s time,” said Taylor. Tangina watched him intently as he pulled the rope delicately through the fire.
Above them, the air began to take on a dull red glow, seeming to draw its energy from the surrounding dark.
The rope burst into flame in Taylor’s hands; he pulled tighter, ensnaring the flames, meeting resistance, setting the strength of his weight and spirit against the winds of the ether.
The glowing red spot grew brighter; it contained the figures of four people, darkly outlined, insubstantial . . . and then the red scintillated, and the family burst forth in a rush, tumbling to the muddy cave floor beside the fire, where they looked up to see Taylor and Tangina staring at them.
“Thank God! It’s a miracle!” Tangina’s lips trembled.
Taylor clapped Steve on the back. “Some battle, huh?”
“Yeah,” said Steve, still too stunned to compreh
end.
It was over.
And in another dimension that surrounded their own, there were mists; there was shadow; there was a Light that sometimes grew bright but now was quiet; there was the soft clay of dreams.
But there were no spirits weeping or waiting. For all therein had passed to another place.
They climbed from the caverns at daybreak and walked past the fenced-in area to the street, to fresh air, to life without fear, to the growing up of children.
Tangina hugged them all good-bye, though they protested her going. She’d faced her fear, though, and accepted it about herself; things of the spirit were beyond her power to control. So be it, and so it was. She owned that knowledge of who she was, owned her self. She could go on with her life. And she would.
And she did.
She walked off into the wilderness of the ghost town and beyond. To find the rest of her life.
A noble goal for all of them.
As they approached the half-demolished station wagon Taylor touched Steve’s shoulder. “Uh . . . your car . . .”
Steve smiled. “It’s happy?”
“Not yet.” Taylor frowned.
“How’re we gonna make it happy?” Steve asked. He wanted everyone and everything to be as happy as he was. He was in control of his life once more.
Taylor paused, uncertain how best to tell him. “It wants to go home with me,” he said.
“You asked it?”
“Yes.” Taylor left no room for doubt.
“It’s sure?” Steve pressed. If there was ever a car that could have an identity crisis, this was certainly the one.
Taylor nodded his certainty.
Well, I came into the world with nothing, thought Steve. “Okay, take it,” he said, handing Taylor the keys.
Taylor nodded acceptance, got in the car, and drove slowly toward the main road.
Diane tapped Steve on the arm. “Steven—we need a ride home.”
“Hey, Taylor,” Steve called out.