“Thanks.” She shivered. “Let’s try it.”
Jarret knelt on the stair, fiddling with the stove a moment before turning on the gas and holding a lighter to the edge. It popped and lit with a blue flame.
He cranked the flame up as high as he could, then hoisted it. After a second, he gestured to Ally and walked closer to the doorway.
Ally chewed on her bottom lip, tense.
He crossed the room about halfway, then heaved the stove forward.
The stove’s flame flickered and Ally gave an involuntary squeal as the mechanism arced and dropped.
Jarret turned and ran back, his sneakers slipping on bloody chunks of meat.
Yellow flame leaped up, and the serpents suddenly, spasmodically, jerked.
The ground jolted, and Jarret lost his footing, stumbling and falling.
Ally ran forward to help him up as the world split open.
XLI
Todd opened the door and found himself standing on the edge of an inferno. For a moment he hesitated, wondering if he’d somehow mistaken a passage back to his world for a doorway deeper into hell. Then he heard a girl screaming and realized he was looking at normal flame.
“Be careful,” he said tersely as he stepped through, angling sideways to avoid plunging into a pit of gasoline-fueled fire.
His soiled loafers slid and he grabbed the wall, looking around to get his bearings.
Two students huddled in the room, on their knees in a slick mess of raw meat and blood. One of them was holding the beam of a torch on him, and he raised a hand to shield his eyes from the glare.
“Stop that!” he demanded, annoyed.
“D-Dr. Todd?”
A hand grabbed his arm and he turned, helping Markham through the door and to the side.
“What is this?” the older man breathed, looking around with horror at the firelit butchery. “Are we on earth?”
“Yes.” Todd turned to the two youths. “Who are you?”
“Uh—Ally? And Jarret? From class?”
Todd turned and saw Amon standing on its back four legs, its front four pressed against its stomach. The devil stared into the fire with a curious intensity. Markham was helping Jack through the door, which immediately collapsed behind them.
Deciding there was no good way to explain how they’d entered the room, Todd went on the offensive.
“Did you start this fire?”
“Yes?”
“Is this where the serpents are lairing?”
“Uh.” Ally looked at Jarret, who was staring at Todd’s bloodstained shirt and tattered trousers with a look of horror on his face. She turned back to him. “I think so. They were, like, squirming around in the...the blood. Uh, is that Professor Markham?”
“Are you the only ones down here?”
Another jolt shook the ground, and dust sifted off the roof.
“Yes. I mean, Peter, my boyfriend, was here, but he left? Before we set the fire? Wh-what—”
“Good.” Todd cut off the question. “You’ve done well. Now get out of here, and we’ll take care of the rest.”
“But, how—”
“Go!” he roared, throwing out a hand and pointing at the stairs.
The two students scrambled to their feet.
When he turned back, it was to find Markham blessing Jack again and Amon slithering through the flesh-covered floor, sliding its body over the gobbets of flesh with degenerate pleasure. It headed toward him, its mirroreyes blank but its tongue eagerly lapping up the puddles of blood and slime.
“Enjoying yourself?” Todd asked, glaring down at the demon with a touch of revulsion. “Have you forgotten why we’re here?”
“No,” it hissed. “But I can do nothing until they are finished.”
“Why did Raphael assist you?”
Amon cocked its head, looking up at him.
“The dragons of רוקניא threaten all of us.”
“It could have stayed for the fight.”
The demon snapped its beak with disgust.
“B'nei elohim! Useless.”
Todd frowned, troubled. But then, the hosts of hell weren’t rallying to the battle, either. That was the problem with the mal'akhim—their thoughts weren’t human thoughts, and their ways weren’t human ways.
Which meant they could be extremely irritating.
He checked the probabilities and saw that they were bubbling as erratically as before, spinning and boiling in macropatterns and minichaos.
Markham finished making the final cross over Jack, who got to his feet, ignoring the gore smeared over the front of his jeans, and walked several paces away from the door and inferno.
“Do you want the dragons here?” he asked, pacing around the room and scraping a wide circle in the blood with the point of his boot. “For sure?”
“For sure,” Todd said, mimicking the man’s phrasing. Jack nodded. He planted his feet right outside the circle and wiped his mouth once on the back of his jacket sleeve. The firelight from the serpent pit created eerie shadows that played across his sharp features. He tossed his braid back over his shoulder and drew in a deep breath.
“I do invocate, conjure, and command thee, dragons of רוקניא , to appear and to show thyself visibly unto me before this Circle in a fair and comely shape, without any deformity or tortuosity; by the name and in the name of Iah and Vau....”
Todd felt the skin on the back of his neck prickle. Jack’s voice had been powerful enough when he’d conjured Raphael, but that was nothing compared to the force that echoed in it now, above and below the range of audibility. This, Todd realized, must be the sword that the archangel had given him, the weapon to wield against their enemies. A sword that emanated from the conjurer’s tongue; a sword of words.
“...by the name Anaphexeton, by the name Zabaoth, by the name Asher Ehyey Oriston, by the name Elion, by the name Adonai, by the name Schema Amathia, by the name Alpha and Omega...”
Space ripped before them, and a ghastly phosphorescent light spilled through, the same unworldly light that had played around the dragons the first time they’d appeared over the north campus field. Todd tensed, watching the spheres and tubes pushing through and pulsing from shape to shape, twisting and stretching as Jack’s words wove a trap around them.
“...I do exorcise and command thee, by the four beasts before the Throne, having eyes before and behind, and by the holy angels of God, I do command thee that thou appearest here to fulfill my will....”
High-pitched shrilling sounded from the room beyond, and a serpent’s head thrust out of the door, jaws snapping, scales burning.
“Apage satanas!” Markham snapped, and the serpent reared back, its head crashing into the low ceiling and sending more concrete dust and broken shards spilling down on top of them.
The creature within the circle—the creatures within the circle—took perceptible form, crammed into the restrictions of three dimensions. They coiled tightly around each other, confined by a barrier too small for them, and Todd was glad for the compression, because they were the most inhuman things he could have imagined. Their edges flickered and shifted in a sickening fashion, passing between dimensions, but what was firmly in this plane was a hideous, unfeasible amalgamation of sensory organs and rending limbs that made Todd’s mind hurt and his gorge rise.
If this was what they looked like “without deformity or tortuosity,” he had no desire to see them in their own dimension.
The ground beneath them rolled and heaved. The serpents had plunged beneath the cellar—fleeing? Putting out the flames? Rallying to their masters’ support?
“For the love of God,” Markham said, sounding horrified, “what do we do with them now?”
“...so I command and abjure thee, that thou give to me thine flesh to eat and thine blood to drink, this very moment, without delay,” Jack finished, his eyes wide and his face taut as he struggled to impose his will over beings he could barely comprehend.
Startled, Todd looked back at
the two dragons and saw them twisting and coiling around each other, talons flashing as they clawed at the barrier, teeth bared in multiple mouths scattered across their improbably shaped torsos.
“Yesssss,” Amon hissed, its belly against the ground and its limbs held tightly against its sides. Its mirroreyes were fixed on the dragons and its narrow body quivered.
“Jack, are you—”
“Give me thine flesh to eat and thine blood to drink!” Jack demanded again, taking a step forward, closer to the circle. Razor-edged tentacles whipped out toward him and fell short, stopped by the circle of magick that constrained the creatures. “Throw that part of thyself out of the circle and then be still!”
Great, misshapen heads thrashed against the commandment. Then, one of the dragons twisted and clawed at itself, one of the mouths along its flank ripping a hunk of membrane from one of its limb-panels. It spat the pulsing, pinkish tissue to the floor, on the opposite side of the roughly drawn circle.
“Be still!” Jack took another step forward and picked up the envelope-sized piece of flesh, then cried out. He shoved the meat into his leather jacket and rubbed his hands against his blood-slicked jeans, his face twisted with pain. “It’s acidic,” he gasped.
“What are you doing?” Markham sounded appalled. “You don’t think we’re going to eat that, do you?”
“Yes.” Todd slowly nodded. “Of course. How else can we achieve communion with them?”
“It could kill you! It’s not even from this dimension!”
Jack was fishing a pocketknife from his jeans and unfolding the short blade. Amon slid through the gore and stopped a foot away from him, watching like a hungry dog waiting for a scrap from the dinner table.
“I’ll hold it,” Todd volunteered, knowing his numbed nerve-endings wouldn’t register the pain as acutely as Jack’s. The occultist hesitated, then nodded, pulling the membrane out of his jacket and tossing it over.
Todd stretched it taut and Jack sawed it into four roughly equal chunks. A thin liquid oozed from it, and Jack looked down at the darkening metal of his knife, then tossed it aside.
Todd squeezed each chunk in his fist before handing it over, hoping to eliminate most of the acidity with the blood. His palm and fingers stung, and he saw blisters rising on his flesh.
“This is insane.” Markham took the mangled piece of sensory membrane in a shirt-covered hand with obvious horror. “It may even be sinful. Those things—they’re intelligent, aren’t they? Isn’t this cannibalism?”
“It’s no worse than eating an angel’s flesh,” Jack protested.
“The angel gave of itself freely! You coerced those things into obedience!”
“They’re the enemy.”
“Andrew!” Todd held the last two pieces, his and Amon’s, and fixed the laicized priest with a stern look. “You don’t have to eat if you don’t want to. But Jack is right. To understand, we need to partake. The magick of eating another’s flesh for power existed long before Christianity institutionalized transubstantiation.”
“You’re verging on blasphemy.”
“You know your anthropology as well as I do.”
“There’s a difference between that which is given by God and that which is taken by force.” The former priest’s face darkened with anger, and he threw the scrap of meat onto the ground. “I’ll have nothing to do with this.”
“The monsters have eaten human flesh already,” Jack said, nudging the hunks of meat on the floor with the toe of his boot. “Now it’s our turn. But you have to do whatever you think is right, Andy. Just keep praying for me.”
“What good are prayers for somebody who knowingly enters into sin?” Markham asked, bitterly. “Or are you going to tell me later that you’ve repented?”
“Depends on what happens to me after I eat this,” Jack said. “Repenting might be the very last thing I do.”
“Maybe you had better let me eat it first,” Todd suggested, growing tired of the arguments. “I’m less likely to be killed if it’s poisonous.”
“You’re the statistician—what are the odds this is going to work?” Jack asked. Todd glanced at the probabilityscape and shrugged.
“We’re in chaos. The equations are too complex for me to understand.”
The ground trembled again, and a crack began to creep up one of the walls.
“And what’s the probability we’ll all be crushed to death in this cellar?”
“Rather high, if we continue to waste time,” Todd retorted. “How long do you think you can keep those things bound to your will?”
“Guess we’re about to find out.” Jack looked down at the scrap of flesh in his hand. “Let’s do it.”
Todd flipped one of the scraps to Amon, who caught it between sharp teeth and gulped it down with two short jerks of its head. Then he looked up at Jack, and, eyes locked, together they both raised the monstrous flesh to their mouths.
XLII
Jack wasn’t happy about making Andy mad, but he’d done it before and, assuming he survived the night, he’d probably do it again. Andy’s objections were sound; he realized that. But he was certain that this ritual was the secret to communicating between the dimensions; that perhaps it had always been the secret and the ancients had always known it.
He folded the square of flesh and crammed it into his mouth, bracing himself for the pain.
It hit fast and hard: a searing, acidic sensation that made the pain of the previous hour pale in comparison. He bit down once, but that was all he could manage—he had to spit the meat out or swallow it whole, because another bite into the alien flesh would blister his mouth beyond any hope of healing.
A foot away from him, he saw Todd grimly gnawing, dark blood seeping out from between his blistering lips. The pain barely seemed to bother him.
Deciding that the nerve-numbed theologian wasn’t worth trying to impress, Jack grimaced and swallowed.
The dragon’s flesh seemed to fight being ingested—he coughed as its acids etched their way down his esophagus, then swallowed repeatedly as the oversized lump of flesh triggered his gag reflex. It moved slowly inside of him, like somebody ramming a fist down his throat. Imitating the devil at Todd’s feet, he threw his head back and kept swallowing, involuntary tears oozing from his eyes as his body tried to reject the meat.
Then the dragon’s flesh hit his stomach. Excruciating pain blossomed out from the small bolus and lit up every nerve constellation in his body.
With one small part of his mind he registered that he was falling, hitting concrete, feeling flesh squashing under his jacket and blood soaking through his jeans, but the larger part of his consciousness was grappling with the visions that unfolded like an endless array of doors opening down a long, dark hallway. Each doorway revealed a glowing, spiraling tunnel that twisted in Möbius directions, guarded by fire and feathers and symbols. Each tunnel ended in a ruthlessly hungry annihilation—the devouring void that Amon called dragons of רוקניא —the abyss—that which constantly sought entrance into the hall of doors but was eternally repelled by the mal'akhim that guarded heaven and hell.
But the mal'akhim were besieged on both sides: not only did the void hunger for the energy fields of his own universe (could that be the right word, in a space filled with universes?), but there were also beings inside his own—endoverse?—that hungered for the power promised by the void.
Beings like the Gudruns.
Something struck his chest, hard, and Jack drew in a startled breath. His eyes refocused on the world around him, although the dragon’s vision floated at the edges of his sight like tattered veils.
“For the love of God, Jack, get up!”
“What—” the word was slurred, the blisters in his mouth keeping him from speaking clearly. He pushed himself up and felt warm blood ooze between his fingers. The ground jolted beneath them, rising. “Shit!”
He rolled to his feet, half-dragged as Andy hurled them both to one side.
The ground burst ope
n and he threw his arms over his head as chunks of concrete battered down over them.
Down among the dead men,
Down among the dead men,
Down, down, down, down....
None of the rocks crushed him, for which he gave credit to Andy’s fervent prayers and the shield of God. But when he looked up, he saw one of the blind, carapaced serpents tearing at the circle he’d drawn on the floor, obliterating the marks with its blunt head. Blood and dirt were caked between its heavy scales, and he saw dark scars that might have been wounds from the flames. And—
He squinted.
The cilia on the serpents’ scales seemed longer than he’d noticed before. They spun off into translucency but were—connected?—to the dragons within the circle.
He blinked, but the image held.
“What is it?” Andy’s hand dropped on his shoulder.
“They’re attached, somehow,” he said, wincing and spitting as blisters along the side and roof of his mouth burst. He bit down on a blister jutting off the side of his tongue. Tears streamed down his face. He spat out a thin mixture of saliva and blood. Damn, that hurt!
He staggered to his feet, pressing his back against the wall as the floor cracked and shuddered beneath the serpent’s thrashing.
The ecstatic vision of the communion was still with him, a gauzy, torn filter over his gaze that bent corners and stripped away surfaces. Across the room he saw the man-shaped hole that was Edward Todd and the looming shadow of Amon. He saw Andy beside him, his hands blazing with light, and a field of blood beneath his feet.
The serpents were connected to the dragons ofרוקני , preparing the way for the incursion of the void. Each part of the equation was integral to the other.
He pushed himself off the wall and walked unsteadily over the cracking, bucking ground, falling to his knee once, forcing himself back up and lurching toward the broken circle.
Behind him, Andy shouted and scrambled to stand next to him, calling him all sorts of names.
The serpent’s head whipped around as Jack drew close. Its jaws gaped open, its blood-covered teeth silently threatening.
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