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John wasn’t sure that he’d ever walk the same again.
Instinctively, he had tried to catch himself while falling back, but his ankle
could no longer support any of his weight, and he fell screaming into the mud.
Flames shot through blown-out windows and through the small
creases in the blockaded doorway to the porch. The heat was intense. Even from
twenty feet, John’s cheeks became flushed with a tepidness that was getting
hotter with every beat of his racing heart. He had to back up, but the pain
radiating in his foot retarded the retreat. He could only crawl, and even that
was excruciating and slow.
As he scratched his way through the cold muck still clutching the
gun, he looked back for anything fleeing the inferno but saw nothing but flames
indulging in a dervish dance. He feared the priest had not made it out, but the
creature hadn’t escaped the dwelling’s fiery embrace, either. It too must
have succumbed to the pyre. If the priest was right and though the physical body
died, the soul lived on, then the soul of that incubus was now an inhabitant of
the very prison it had tried to free. But sadly, the priest had paid the
ultimate price for that conviction.
John tried once more to pick himself up from the numbing ground,
but the pain kept him shackled to the sodden carpet.
Ian was hurt severely. The force of the blast had propelled him
onto the porch and through the railing in a fraction of a second. He now lay in
the drizzling darkness just below the porch.
He could hear John Walker crying in agony and cursing to himself,
but he couldn’t see into the soaked, fire-lit night. His eyes, as well as his
face and arms, were burning and what shapes he could make out were painful
obscurations. He couldn’t yet cry out to let John know that he was okay, or at
least he hadn’t blown up with the house, because the force in which he was
propelled through the railing and the subsequent fall from the porch had knocked
the wind out of him, and it was all he could do to not pass out.
Ian listened with what it seemed the only part of his being not
affected by pain. He heard no other noises arise from the structure save the
chewing and satiated moans of the gorging fire as it went from room to room,
searching out more fuel to quell its appetite. The Watcher was still inside. It
had been too self-absorbed to know of the danger, too contemptuous of its
sovereignty over a lesser creation to think it could be stopped. It was more
human than it could ever grasp.
Exhausted, he just lay there now, half-conscious, half-breathing,
half-delirious, knowing that the link to Hell had finally been broken. For him,
that was all that really mattered. His job was complete.
The rain gave no relief in squelching the fire, and it seemed only
to burn more intensely, like a giant welding torch ignited to fuse shut the
breach that had been made in the spiritual door that held the netherworlds in
their rightful place.
A lifetime, John thought as he felt that coalescence behind him. A
lifetime reduced to rubble in a matter of moments as the house was consumed in
the flames like a fallen Viking hero being burned on a misty eve and buried at
sea. He was saddened and wanted to watch, but there was no time to pay last
respects to the dying structure. Besides, he thought, what that kindling house
represented--a multitude of lives given a second chance to live and experience
the pain and joy of the life re-given them, another opportunity to make
amends to those they’ve wronged and say the things needing said to those who
mattered most--made waxing melancholy about his heritage seem infantile. The
Walker House would suffer a fervent fate for the entire world.
As he stole glances back at the massive bonfire, he thought he
caught a glimpse of something writhing like an oily snake in the shadows below
the porch, but intense heat and glaring, fiery feelers that were now clawing at
the second floor prevented a more meticulous search of those raven spaces. He
could only retreat to more cooling air farther from the conflagration. His whole
night had been reduced to events of extreme that were quickly wearing him down.
Abruptly, headlights bouncing down the drive and the thrum of a
Magnum V-8 caught his attention. Sandy had found the truck. His assumption had
been correct. John let himself smile as the mud-spattered Ram began to slow down
as it neared the end of the driveway.
Arteries of lightning pulsed across the sky directly above. This
was a fourth of July fireworks of sorts. The firmament was celebrating the
downfall of a creature that would have taken away their rule of the tempest sky
and replaced it with an eternal, stormless heaven filled with the glow Gahenna.
The night, it seemed, was crying tears of joy rather than sorrow. With the pulse
of a strobe light, several more staircases of lightning connected earth and
heaven. The jubilating trumpets of thunder followed. But although the lightning
strikes were intensifying, the rain was now withering to a slight drizzle,
having wept herself out. The tailing edge of the low, clotted cloud cover was
scudding past, and stars along the horizon began twinkling once again.
Suddenly, a macabre elegy within the burning house stole John’s
attention from the approaching truck. In the living room there was movement
contrary to the hungrily lapping flames. They were purposeful unlike the
indiscriminate destruction of the blaze.
As though finding an ill-tasting morsel in its consumption of the
house, the dragon of fire spit out a huge fireball without warning. It landed in
the yard and rolled--no, not rolled, ran, ran away from the burning residence.
It couldn’t be! The temperature inside that furnace had to be
several hundred degrees. But there it was--and it was clutching the key!
The burning Watcher stopped in the mired yard about twenty yards
from John, the remnants of fire slowly being extinguished from the drizzling
rain. The area within five feet all around the creature became distorted as
though it was within an immense bubble. It held onto the key like a delicate
flower between its spaghetti-like forefinger and thumb and seemed mesmerized as
it held it at eye-level, admiring it like an exquisite gem. It teetered as if
unoriented, making queer sounds, low phlegmy gurgles. The world inside the
bubble must have been going through its topsy-turvy gyrations.
Then suddenly, the same as in the attic, a pin-point of crimson
light broke through from another, more mysterious and infinitely more terrifying
realm. It was as though someone had taken a needle and poked a hole in the
curtain that separated the two realities. And with that, the eerie way the light
seemed to warp when it encroached on the invisible sphere around the beast
vanished. The mysterious bubble seemed to pop.
In an instant the opening was bigger. Then bigger still, bigger
than it had been in the attic. It was half the size of the beast but still
growing.
With as good a sitting stance as he could muster, John aimed his
shotgun at it and fired a round with the kick knocking him onto his back. It was
a glancing shot that hit the crown of demon’s head, sending matter flying into
the night, but the Watcher never even flinched, didn’t even seem to miss the
part of its cranium that was now splattered on the ground. It only stood
enraptured, gazing into the gateway, the deadly key now held at its side.
The heat was becoming unbearable issuing from both the house and
now the Hadean cleft-between-worlds. Finally, John had to try and manage himself
back to cover. A sick feeling welled up from his stomach. All he could do now
was watch.
Through the jarring bumps and potholes as she spun down the drive,
Sandy could see John in the grass as he slowly tried to pulled himself back from
the burning structure to the looming oak tree. A sigh of relief escaped her. At
least he was alive.
But abruptly, she shuddered in terror, almost making her foot slip
from the accelerator when a hideous monstrosity jumped from the fire and was now
in the yard with little flames still flickering along its arms and its tiny,
leather-like wing nubs. It seemed only milliseconds before the other-worldly
portal opened up in front of it with the skin of that Hell swelling rapidly like
a balloon. Molten-red waves of heat issued from it like the inside of a smelting
furnace. It had to be ten feet high by six feet in diameter. The creature was
putting its arm inside, up to its elbow then shoulder, reaching, grabbing at
something.
It was happening just like the priest had said, but being told of
the foreboding events couldn’t compare to actually witnessing them. It was
like being placed in front of a firing squad without the blindfold, watching
each member slowly chamber a round in their rifle, aim the deadly tubes at your
heart and watch the tension in their fingers as each slowly pulls back on their
trigger--and you without a cigarette!
She felt nauseous. Her wet hands shook uncontrollably and slipped
along the smooth steering wheel, making maneuvering difficult. But through that
terror and dreadful sickness in the pit of her stomach, in an instant, she made
a decision. It was the one and only thing that she could think to do. She
pressed down hard on the accelerator.
Ian was burning up, both literally and with a boiling rage he’d
never felt before. An anger that consumed his soul with no less an intensity
than the burning house. Through his stinging, blurred vision, he saw the
creature leap--almost a taunting leap--from the porch directly overhead.
Now, though the particulars were lost to his failing sight, he
knew what was happening in front of him. And he knew, if not prevented, who
would be the first through that doorway--the very Prince of Demons himself; the
Overseer of all that is corrupt. Once that happened, there would be no stopping
perdition’s relocation.
His body was seared making even breathing painful, he couldn’t
move his right arm at all, his stomach hurt like someone had taken a sledge
hammer to it, and he tasted gobs of coppery blood in his mouth. But short of
death, he was still in the game.
Somehow, he managed himself up to an unsteady stance. Tidal waves
of intense heat rushed at him, and tentacles of fire carried in those crushing
currents, lapped at him, ready to snatch him, too, if he’d just stay put a
little longer.
He reached under his shirt and pulled out a chain with a medallion
on it of Saint Andrew, Scotland’s patron Saint. It wasn’t a crucifix but any
port in a storm . . . He kissed it and made a sign of the cross with his good
hand. After tucking it back, he then reached into his chest pocket and pulled
out a wet and muddied picture. The picture of Fiona. That, he also kissed, held
it, looked upon it one last time with eyes that could no longer see her. Until
now, there always existed in the back of his mind the possibility of seeing her
again. He would never let himself dwell on that possibility because that was
relying too much on hope. He couldn’t dare let himself hope. And this moment
was precisely why.
The words that the ghost of Lou Maxwell uttered to him echoed
through his mind. “Oh, God’s forgiven you, all right, but penance has to
be paid. I suspect you know what your penance is going to be.” Painfully
aware.
Without haste, he ran as fast as his burned and battered body
would allow towards the beast.
As the house burned, sparks jumped and fizzled from the melting
electric line connected just above the porch roof, creating its own
mini-fireworks display.
The thought of a live electrical wire falling on him made John
move all the more faster, and that made the jack hammer pain in his ankle all
the more unbearable. The shotgun was useless and hindered his mobility, so he
tossed it aside and crawled and scratched and did all he could not to cry out in
agony as he sought temporary refuge from the heat back behind the tree. If he
could only make it that far.
The pickup began to surge faster through the mud and gravel, and
he waved his hands, cried for her to stop the truck, but the headlights of the
Ram had tunnel vision, and the demon and doorway to Hell seemed all that was at
the other end.
His heart lodged in is throat, preventing him from swallowing for
he instantly knew what she was going to attempt.
At that instant, a serrated arm of lightning whiz-cracked from the
sky and struck the house’s antenna, and a slower, little brother followed
closely behind, searing a hole into the attic roof with a deafening explosion.
John fell flat onto his belly and covered his head as wood and debris, like a
fiery meteor shower, rained down on him. His ears ached and rang from the
thunderclap’s hit like the inside of a tolling cathedral bell.
As he lay flopping in the waterlogged yard like a tadpole on a
muddy bank, a singular hopelessness began ripping out his insides as painfully
and completely as the Watcher ever could have.
John attempted to crawl his way into the path of the
truck, but that came to an abrupt halt when a piece of splintered wood from the
exploding inferno fell onto his head.
©2004 StoriesByEmail.com
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