Everybody took a step back. The Devil raised his hands, palms upwards, as if about to accept a tray. He blinked.
Hannah felt a shiver at the base of her skull, as though something small and insectlike with sharp little feet had run into her ear and tunnelled into the back of her brain.
Nothing happened for a moment.
Then all three pieces of doorframe fell off.
Granddad grasped the handle with one hand and supported the door with the other. ‘Ready?’ he said.
The Devil nodded, and Granddad took a careful step back, pulling the door with him and tilting it towards the wall to reveal what lay beyond.
Hannah’s dad’s voice was a whisper. ‘What on earth is that?’
Hannah knew, and knew also that it was not something of the earth. She’d seen it before at the bottom of a crevasse in the permafrost of Siberia, a thousand miles from anywhere.
It was the gate to Hell.
PART 3
There are heroes of evil, as well as good.
— La Rochefoucauld
Maxims
Chapter 33
An odour came off the gate. Acrid but insidious, the kind of smell that would pick your pocket rather than rob you at gunpoint. The heavy iron gate barred the doorway, securely fixed into the walls either side. The light was better here than it had been at the bottom of the crevasse in Siberia, and you could see how battered the gate was – as if someone or many someones had crashed into it over countless millennia, hurling themselves against it in a vain attempt to escape. You also understood how inconceivably old it was. A faint mist hung about the end of the hall, and the gate’s surface was matted with tiny beads of condensation, as if it stood on a lonely moor.
The gaps between its bars revealed the room beyond. Hannah dropped to her hands and knees and saw that the machine had disappeared from under her bed. There was a phone lying on the carpet nearby.
‘That’s Mom’s,’ she said dismally. ‘Isn’t it?’
The phone’s screen was shattered. It was surrounded by small bits and pieces of machinery.
The Devil flattened his hand and inserted it into the slot in the gate. He turned it, and the gate opened.
‘Wait here,’ he said.
He stepped into the room, slowly, carefully, his eyes passing over every corner, his nostrils twitching. When he’d inspected the space thoroughly – even looking thoughtfully up at the ceiling for a while – he gestured Granddad in with his head.
Granddad walked gingerly into the room. Vaneclaw followed, also looking extremely cautious.
‘Hmm,’ Granddad said.
Hannah saw him looking at her bookcase. The ‘sculpture’ he’d adjusted before they went to Big Sur wasn’t there any more. That was where the cogs and wheels scattered over the floor must have come from, when someone or something had utterly destroyed it.
‘How powerful was that device?’ the Devil asked.
‘A complete barrier to anything below an elder sleepdemon,’ Granddad said. ‘And after the adjustment I made earlier, it would have slowed down anything up to third bar soulcutter. For it to have been destroyed this comprehensively … that’s not encouraging. It suggests one of the Fallen was here, or else a person acting with their sanction, to whom they have loaned great force.’
Hannah’s dad pushed past Aunt Zo and picked the phone up from the floor. Hannah saw that her mother was no longer using the special case her dad had had made for it. He’d had it done online and it featured a picture of the three of them together on the deck of the Crow’s Nest restaurant. She didn’t like that her mom wasn’t using it any more. Why would she stop? In case somebody saw it, someone who was only interested in Mom, not her and Dad?
Her father took the phone and started pressing things.
‘Is it hers?’
‘Think so,’ he said. ‘Well, it’s the right model. I’d need to check the home screen to be certain, but it won’t turn on.’
‘It’s dead,’ Granddad said. ‘The power unleashed in this room will have fused the interior. The cracking of the screen … that might suggest a struggle. Unless the change in temperature and pressure in this room was very large indeed, and sudden, but if so … there would be other signs.’
‘Like what?’
‘Quite a large crater.’
‘A struggle with – or between, or against – whom, exactly?’
Granddad shrugged awkwardly.
‘O-K,’ Hannah’s dad said firmly. Hannah knew this tone. It was the tone of voice that said it was time for her to stop the avoidance tactics and focus on math homework, for fear of YouTube bans of biblical severity. ‘I’m done with the don’t-knows and receiving information in baby chunks, people. Just tell me. What the hell is going on?’
Hannah and her grandfather looked helplessly at each other.
‘So here’s the deal, Steve-o,’ Aunt Zo said breezily. ‘Assuming I’ve got this right, our father has been working for the elderly gent in black for several hundred years. Said dude is, in fact, the actual Devil.’
Hannah’s dad frowned at her. ‘Have they changed your medication again?’
‘Also, Granddad met Johann Sebastian Bach. And makes machines that turn evil into electricity or something. Oh, and there’s an imp on the team who apparently looks like a big fungus, but I can’t see him and so presumably you can’t either.’
‘Fungus?’ said Vaneclaw indignantly. ‘That’s just insulting.’
Hannah’s father jumped, and looked around. ‘Who said that?’
‘You can hear him, then,’ Granddad murmured. ‘Interesting.’
‘And so what’s the smell?’
Zo shrugged. ‘I’m guessing that would be brimstone, bro.’
Hannah watched her father as he glared first at Zo, then Granddad, then at the Devil. She was sufficiently familiar with her dad and his imagination to know he wasn’t going to do what people did in movies and shout that he couldn’t believe it, he wasn’t standing for this dashed nonsense, where are the hidden cameras, blah blah blah. Her dad was smart. He could see for himself that an eldritch iron gate had materialized in the doorway to his daughter’s bedroom, and knew that she was unlikely to possess either the tools or patience to have installed it herself. He’d also heard a disembodied voice. His brain was wide enough to accept that something weird was going on, not merely reject it.
He was going to want to understand, though. Grown-ups always did, even when that only pushed the truth further away.
‘Is this true?’ he asked the Devil.
‘Yes,’ the Devil said.
‘But so what happened to my … to Kristen?’
The Devil glanced at Granddad. ‘Take him downstairs, Engineer. Explain enough to forestall further questions. We don’t have time for them.’
‘I’ll tag along on that,’ Aunt Zo said. ‘Not absolutely sure I got all of it the first time around.’
Hannah started to follow them. ‘No,’ the Devil told her. ‘Wait here.’
He waited until the others were out of earshot, then came and loomed over her. ‘We passed through this gate once before, as I’m sure you recall.’
‘I’m not going to forget in a hurry.’
‘Tell me what you saw on the other side.’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘That place is not mine to control. Everyone experiences something different. The gate transports each person to their own version of the Behind, constructed from their history and soul.’
‘The Behind?’
‘Another name for Hell, more accurate when the living are pulled into it. Reality has weakened in this house but it’s still too strong for the gate to suck the structure in. But that could change if the Fallen gain control of the Sacrifice Machine. Tell me what you saw.’
‘I was in a park.’
‘A real park? One that exists in the world?’
Hannah nodded. ‘Ocean View. It’s on the east side of town, the other side of the river.’
‘
Did anything ever happen to you there, in real life? Something … very bad? Of which you have never spoken?’
‘No. Never. It’s a fun place. It was where I grew up a little.’
‘In what manner?’
‘I swung by myself for the first time.’
‘You saw your mother there, in the Behind, yes?’
‘Oh,’ Hannah said quietly. ‘Yes. Well, I think so. I couldn’t see her face. She was shadows. It seemed like Mom. But it was as if I didn’t really know who she was.’
She described what she’d seen up to the point where the bundle of tattered shadows had run past her to the end of the park, leaping into the cloud.
‘And you felt as if she was trying to lure you?’
Hannah had only ever heard this word in connection with warnings regarding strangers offering too-good-to-be-true deals involving drives in their car. She didn’t like hearing it in connection with her mother. She nodded nonetheless, and felt her eyes fill with tears. ‘Is Mom … is she trying to hurt us?’
There was no reply. Hannah wiped her hand hurriedly across her eyes and looked up.
Her mom was standing in front of her.
She was wearing a dress she’d bought in Los Gatos that last time, in a green so dark it was nearly black. Hannah remembered her showing it to Hannah and her dad in their favourite lunch place. Her mom’s hair looked like she’d just come from the salon. She was wearing earrings. She was smiling.
But her eyes were dark. They were black in the centre, but the other part was black too, the bit that was usually blue.
‘Mom?’
Mom didn’t say anything. She cocked her head, smile fixed in place. She looked, Hannah realized, like a huge crow – a crow that had spotted a worm wriggling defencelessly on the ground.
A hungry crow. Or something worse. A dark, feral beast.
Hannah started backing away, her heart thumping … but then her mom wasn’t there any more.
Just the Devil. ‘An image from your mind,’ he said. ‘I dipped into it to try and get a sense of your vision of the park. What you just saw was only a reflection.’
‘Of what?’
‘The fear she’s brought into your life.’
‘But …’
‘Your mother isn’t evil,’ he said. ‘You can trust me on that assessment. It’s what I do.’
‘But …’
‘Concentrate. I can only assume she has fallen into the Behind, dragging the machine with her.’ He looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘Unless it was the other way around – the machine tearing an edge to escape the clutches of the Fallen, or whichever agent of theirs came here tonight. It amounts to the same problem. She and the machine may be together.’
‘What are the Fallen?’
‘Bitter souls, once brutally strong – once triumphant but now lost. There is nothing more dangerous. If you were in that park, in real life, and you were to leap into the cloud you described, where would you go? If you flew in a straight line?’
Flustered, and scared, Hannah tried to think. ‘The boardwalk,’ she realized. ‘Yes. You can see it from there.’
‘Hmm,’ the Devil said, eyes distant. ‘You rode on a machine there once with your grandfather, correct?’
‘Yes – why? How do you know that?’
‘He mentioned it a few days ago. Along with some suspicions he had concerning it. I wonder …’
He turned and walked quickly down the stairs in search of the Engineer. Hannah stayed where she was for a moment, and whispered a quiet message into the emptiness of her room.
Just in case anybody could hear.
Ten minutes later everyone was ready to go. Her father was standing by himself on the front lawn. Hannah went to him and slipped her hand into his.
‘Are you OK?’
He looked down at her. ‘I’m struggling to broaden my mind at a fast enough rate,’ he admitted. ‘And I’m worried about your mother. But otherwise, yes.’
‘What did Granddad tell you?’
‘What Zo said. But in more detail. He also told me about your adventures. You’re up on me, pumpkin. I’ve never been to Russia. And he told me a little about this thing that’s gone missing.’
‘The Sacrifice Machine.’
‘Right. But that’s not how he explained it. He said it was more like a one-way pipe, to keep the power of bad things in the world flowing in the right direction, away from here to … some other place. That it’s what keeps this world safe.’
‘And … you believe him?’
He father shrugged. ‘I guess so.’
‘Do you really, Dad? I think … I think it’s going to be important that you believe.’
‘Really,’ he said. ‘He’s my father, and if your father tells you something – however crazy – and appears to be serious, you should believe it. In this family, anyway.’
‘So … when I was small and you told me lots of times there was a flock of wildebeests flying past my bedroom window, to get me to come upstairs because it was bedtime, but they’d always gone just before I got up there?’
‘OK,’ he admitted. ‘Not that.’
The Devil came out of the house. ‘Can I assume that you’ve been brought up to speed?’
‘I believe so,’ Hannah’s father said. ‘You’re the Devil. And you’ve lost something my father made for you.’
‘Both of those statements are true.’
‘Not so much a deus ex machina, then, as a deus sine machina.’
‘What?’
‘A god … without a machine. It’s Latin.’
The Devil stared at him. ‘I know what it means. But do they pay you for that kind of thing?’
‘Only intermittently.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
‘On the other hand,’ Steve said, ‘I haven’t just mislaid the device that keeps the walls of reality in place against the howling void, so I guess we’ve both had better days?’
The Devil glared at him. ‘It’s time to go.’
Chapter 34
At first it all felt so familiar that Kristen didn’t realize anything was wrong.
She was sprawled face down in a bed, in knickers and her sleeping T-shirt. The sheets smelled clean. There were lots of pillows. The bed was so luxuriously wide that when she stretched, none of her extremities poked off the edge. Cradled in that moment of just-awake, she felt rested and comfortable.
Then she frowned, and rolled over on to her back.
She was in a hotel room.
In itself that wasn’t surprising. She spent a lot of time in hotel rooms. So much so that their standard layout – bed, nightstands, fancy lamps with non-obvious switches, desk that’s never quite deep enough to actually work on, flat-screen TV, coffee maker, closets, bathroom with marble floor and heated towel rail and array of fancy unguents – felt like home.
But she shouldn’t be in a hotel room. She should be at home – or the place that used to be home, at least. She’d left the London hotel, hadn’t she? Got up in the small hours, booked a ticket, flown back to SJC and then cabbed to … yes. She had.
She remembered getting to the house in Santa Cruz and making coffee and noticing Steve had bought a different brand, wondering whether he’d always secretly preferred it or if he’d grabbed the jar in the market because it was right there or on offer, and in that beat of the unknown realizing how wide some of the gaps in her life had become. She remembered trying to get hold of him on the phone yet again.
But then … something else had happened.
Somebody had come. Men. She remembered running upstairs to try to get away from them. And then …
Blank.
She sat up.
So where the hell was this?
The walls were in one of those nameless pale hues that interior decorators think are soothing, and so she would have been hard pressed to say whether it was different or not – but the picture on the wall definitely didn’t look the same. The proportions of the room were different, too.
/> The blinds on the wall were down.
Kristen got quickly out of bed and went to the window. The mechanism was awkward, and it took several seconds of fiddling to get one of the blinds to release. It zipped up with disconcerting speed.
She didn’t recognize the view. It was night. There were big trees. A grassy area. A picnic bench. Swings. She couldn’t place it immediately, though it felt familiar – enough to make her feel guilty and lost.
She turned back to the room, looking for more clues. Hurried to the desk. Her laptop was there. It was charging. She followed the cable with her eyes and saw it was plugged into the socket with an adaptor. The socket was one of the big ones they had in the UK, with the three stolid-looking rectangular holes.
So was this London after all? Just a different hotel?
But why would she be in a different hotel?
She went to the wall near the bathroom and flicked the light switch down. The light came on. That proved it. Lots of people didn’t even realize in Europe you flipped a switch down to turn something on, rather than up, the way it was at home. Didn’t matter how many times you got it wrong, it never quite internalized. A little beat of foreign.
That meant this had to be London … unless it was some other place in Europe where they had the same plugs. Germany maybe? She couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter. She shouldn’t be here, wherever ‘here’ was. She should be in Santa Cruz, where light switches worked the way God intended.
She peered into the bathroom. It looked neither familiar nor unfamiliar. It could have been in America, Singapore or on Mars. Her wash-bag was not by the sink.
She looked in the closet. No clothes. No suitcase, not even her carry-on. An ironing board. A mini-fridge. Two robes. She grabbed one of these and wrapped it round herself.
The television blinked on.
She jumped. But they did that, sometimes. Tech-savvy hotels often had a wake-up system via the TV, with blaring sound and a big-ass time indicator that you could read from right across the room. Kristen had no recollection of setting this one, however. She never did. She used her phone like any normal person.
Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence Page 20