Andi and Princess Buttercup scampered up the rockfall like squirrels, hopping from one rock to the next. Now, they stood on the flat area beside the big boulder at the top, looking down at Jack and Crock as they labored to the top.
Jack was next up; Crock was having a hard time of it. He was fifty-eight years old, had a bad knee from an old gunshot wound, and Jack could see that blood had started to seep through the bandage over the wound caused by an eight-year-old boy and a pair of scissors.
“You okay?” he called down to Crock, who had managed to make it most of the way up, but was having trouble negotiating the rock outcrop at the top.
“Do I look okay?” Crock asked, gasping. “I’m too old for this.”
“Moses was eighty years old when he went to Egypt to free his people, and Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born,” Andi chirped. From the moment she’d spotted Princess Buttercup, Andi had been as cheery as if she’d been going on a picnic, her eyes as bright as twin pilot lights.
“Children are to be seen and not heard, little girl,” Crock said, grunting from exertion. “Didn’t you get the memo?”
Jack climbed back down off the outcrop and extended his hand and helped haul Crock up to the top.
“You’re bleeding,” Andi said.
“Catsup. Spilled it. Can’t take me anywhere.”
Jack turned toward the glowing presence beside Andi, unsure how to address her. Princess Buttercup?
“Are we ready?” he asked.
The light dimmed, at least the brightness did, but the glow remained. He looked into her face, an ordinary face with large compassionate blue eyes. Now he could read the slogan on her T-shirt: “That love thy neighbor thing—I meant that.” God. He somehow found a genuine smile on his lips.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
He looked at Crock and they both nodded wordlessly.
“Then,” the angel said, in that voice that would shatter crystal, “let’s roll.”
How did she…?
The angel stepped into the cave and the glow around her was concentrated by the darkness, focused by the black border into a beam of light like a flashlight. She went first, of course, because she was the only one of them who knew the way—though flashes of memory were returning to Jack. He was the last to step through the crack and he suddenly remembered how it looked from inside—a jagged crack of light that had grown more and more distant as the Bad Kids had dragged him farther and farther into the cave’s depths. He also remembered that it was here, in the spill of light from outside, that he saw the first of the creatures that would grow and grow in number until they were crawling and slithering all over each other. Spiders and snakes. Daniel had called them What Comes Behind.
Now, the puddle of light inside the crack was empty. There were no spiders or snakes to herd them forward and block their retreat.
He let out a little sigh of relief.
Up ahead of him Andi gasped.
Jack turned toward the interior of the cave, and in the glow from the angel, he saw them. The walls and ceiling of the cave ahead were black, but that wasn’t the color of the rock. That was the color of the writhing blanket of spiders that coated every surface. Fat, hairy spiders as big as a dinner plate, a kind Jack had never seen before. Wolf spiders and brown recluse spiders and, of course, black widows like the one that had crawled into the cuff of Daniel’s pants and killed his little sister.
He heard the first rattle then, but it was quickly joined by others until the sound echoed off the walls and rocks all around. Snakes covered the cave floor, so thick there was no way to move forward without stepping on them. Copperheads. Timber rattlers. Diamondbacks and water moccasins.
This time, they weren’t behind to herd them forward. They were ahead to keep them out.
At the sight of the spiders and snakes, Crock stepped back involuntarily and bumped into Jack. He turned to Jack, his face pale and panic-stricken.
“Jack, I can’t. I…hate spiders…ever since I was a kid, arachnophobia so bad I ran through a glass door once to get away from a daddy longlegs. I can’t go in there.”
“Don’t look at them. They can’t hurt you, the angel won’t let them. Look at the angel, nothing else. Just the angel.”
Crock was balanced on a knife blade of panic, a heartbeat or two away from bolting. Jack could see the crazed terror in his eyes, the irrational, mindless fear only a phobia could produce. And if he chose to quit now and go back, Jack would step out of his way and let him go. No shame in that. What was being asked of him—of all of them—was way over the top too much. A man could only do what he could do.
Crock’s eyes pleaded with Jack; then Jack watched him grab his fear and wrestle it, struggling with all his strength to get a grip on it. His jaw clenched so tight Jack actually heard his teeth grind together. Then he turned slowly back around toward the interior of the cave—clearly the single hardest thing the man had ever done in his life.
The angel and Andi had stopped. Andi was holding the angel’s hand, looking up into her face. When Crock made eye contact with the angel and nodded, she smiled with compassion and reassurance. Then the glow around her instantly got brighter until it formed a puddle of light that extended on both sides and beyond Jack. And he understood that she’d created a no-fly zone—that nothing could harm anyone within that glow.
Jack tried the best he could to take the advice he’d given to Crock, tried not to allow his gaze to stray from the bright light of the angel in front of them. That wasn’t always possible, though. The cave wasn’t a tunnel here. It was fissures in the rock that ran off in every direction, connecting to other fissures and tunnels—a hopeless maze you’d never find your way through without help. As they moved forward, the light was a force that cleared away the tangle of snakes on the floor and spiders on the walls and ceiling like a leaf blower, sending every creature in their path tumbling away. Still, the fissures were so narrow in places that Crock had to turn sideways to pass through, his considerable belly only inches away from where spiders had been crawling only moments before.
When they finally entered a proper cave tunnel, the light dimmed slightly, but became more vibrantly gold at the same time, sparkling, shimmering like glitter, as if it weren’t really one light at all but millions of tiny ones. Here, the mass of spiders and snakes fell back from the glow, the Red Sea parting. Jack never looked back, though. Not once. He knew better. He knew they’d closed ranks and become What Comes Behind, a clotted mass of spiders and snakes crawling and slithering over each other only inches beyond the light.
He, Crock and Andi were committed now, had effectively burned their ships. To turn around and plunge into the darkness beyond the light was to be overwhelmed by pure evil. It flashed through Jack’s mind that that was as good a metaphor for life as he had ever heard, but the thought skittered away as quickly as it came.
The tunnel seemed to go on forever, to stretch out in front of them, a black hole into infinity. He knew that in reality they probably had not been walking long, but time seemed somehow suspended here, as if what happened was not governed by the rest of the laws of the universe. And maybe it wasn’t. Certainly, what they faced stood outside those laws, a creature that had stepped into their world from beyond. Forces for good and evil linked in battle for all eternity would collide here today. He and Crock and Andi were just pawns.
But play the game right and a pawn could take a king.
Then he saw the red glow up ahead, flickering on the cave walls. There was a fire of some kind beyond the next bend and Jack knew what was burning.
The look that transformed Billy Ray’s face took Daniel’s breath away. The wiry little man had sunk to his hands and knees and was fumbling for the knife he’d dropped until Daniel said “murder victim.” Then he froze. Daniel watched his eyes begin to move, to follow the action in a movie in the air in front of him that Daniel didn’t want to see.
Billy Ray’s face turned red, his neck muscles bulged as if he couldn’t breathe and his eyes bugged out of his head—literally. His face squeezed up like the strings on a drawstring bag yanked tight. He began to scream then, his ugly hoarse voice scraping and rasping, a rusty chain dragged across a metal floor. Sound tore out of his throat in one long breath, his prominent Adam’s apple working frantically up and down, and then he stopped screaming abruptly. In the silence, his face sagged, almost like it…melted. Whatever muscles had kept his features in place went limp—a stroke victim—and the angular bony lines reshaped soft and flaccid. The teardrop tattoo beneath his left eye slid down his sagging cheek as if he were crying.
He turned toward Daniel and Jeff and looked at them with eyes as vacant as an empty tomb.
“Billy Ray Hawkins has left the building,” Jeff whispered.
Though the man in front of him was clearly incapable of rational thought, Daniel had to try. “You’ve seen a demon from hell, haven’t you, Billy Ray?”
“I broke my necklace,” he said, looking forlorn. “Cut my chest on the glass when I hit the floor. Isaac’s blood started to drip out and I—”
“Isaac’s blood?”
Billy Ray’s face registered that he actually heard Daniel this time. But his eyes never lost their vacant stare.
“I stood right up next to Bishop at the Derby Festival parade on Main Street, close as you two boys are, ’cept I didn’t touch him. Get the stink of nigger flesh on your hands and you can’t get it off with nothing but lye soap. I said to him, ‘Why, hello, Bishop, you doin’ all right today?’ Nice as you please. And the whole time I had his boy’s blood in a little bottle ’round my neck.” Billy Ray let out a peal of tittering, high-pitched laughter that bounced and echoed off the walls of the empty chamber, creating a crowd of ghosts laughing with him.
Daniel felt sick. Bishop and Theresa hoping all these years and Billy Ray had…
Billy Ray rolled over on his back, lost in the laughter, slapped the floor and bellowed with glee. “Collected it—” he gasped between peals of laughter “—in a mason jar—” more laughter “—after I cut him up with a chain saw. Him screamin’ and screamin’ until I lopped his head off—”
He froze.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Whitworth. I’ll do it just the way you say,” he said to nobody.
He turned to Daniel and Jeff, his eyes not vacant but deranged.
“It’s showtime, boys!” He snatched up the knife and stuck it in its scabbard and scrambled to his feet. He grabbed Daniel and dragged him to the altar encircled by pentagrams. Then he dragged Jeff and set them up side by side on their knees in front of it. He started digging around in a gym bag he must have brought with him, pulled out a notepad and set it on the altar.
“Billy Ray, listen to me,” Daniel said, his voice urgent but calm, the tone you’d use with an injured animal, one you didn’t want to upset because it could bite your head off. “You saw it—the big red monster—”
Billy Ray put his hands over his ears and shook his head violently. “All a dream—too much whiskey—only wanted to drink that bottle of Maker’s in the cave where it was cool, that’s all.” He took his hands off his ears and continued to unload the gym bag. “Didn’t see a thing, not a thing.”
“Yes, you did,” Daniel said. “You saw the red—”
Billy Ray turned with the speed of a striking cobra, crossed the distance between them in two steps, grabbed a handful of Daniel’s hair and tilted his head back. When he put the knife to Daniel’s throat, he held it so tight against his skin that a thin line of blood formed there and began to ooze down his neck.
“Don’t you tell me what I saw,” he shouted into Daniel’s face. “I didn’t see nothin’. You say I did and I’m gonna”—he moved the knife from Daniel’s neck to his face, digging the point into the skin beneath his right eye—“put out your eyes. Cut ’em out and feed ’em to them buzzards a-circling up there.” He gestured up toward the empty ceiling of the cavern. “Them birds’ll make a fine meal out of ’em.” He stopped. “And out of you, too! Was wondering what I was gonna do with your headless bodies and now I know. I ain’t gonna do nothin’ with ’em. I’ll let the buzzards eat you.”
He returned the knife to its scabbard on his belt and went back to the altar.
“These marks on the floor, the pentagrams—you draw those?” Jeff asked, in the casual way you’d ask a fly fisherman if he made his own lures.
Billy Ray didn’t turn around, but answered just as amicably. “Nah, Whitworth musta done it. Said it was a long time ago. He didn’t get in here past my boxcar, though, I had that puppy locked up tight.”
“There’s another way in? Weren’t you afraid somebody’d come in that way and find your gold?”
Billy Ray turned back to face Jeff, his tone exasperated rather than angry. “You think I’m stupid or somethin’? You don’t think I checked? Only other way in here is through that tunnel over there.” He cocked his thumb over his shoulder at the other side of the cavern beyond the crevice but didn’t look that way. “And the only way to get over that crack in the floor between here and there is to…” He started to giggle then, high pitched like a teenage girl. “Float! The Man musta picked up his own self and—what’s it called?—levitated over to this side.”
“There are five pentagrams, Billy Ray,” Daniel said quietly.
Billy Ray glanced around. “Yeah, I guess. Five.”
“Billy Ray, do you realize that when you drip blood in those pentagrams, the same thing is going to happen that happened in the cave the night you broke your necklace,” Daniel said.
Billy Ray froze in place with his back to them.
“Only this time, Billy Ray, there won’t be one monster, there will be five—”
“I’ve about decided I’m not even gonna plant pole beans in my garden next spring,” Billy Ray said as he consulted the notebook and took objects Daniel couldn’t see and placed them on the altar. “Lots of tomato plants, though. Then I’ll have some for fried green tomatoes. Mama got mad when we let ’em all get ripe this year, so next year…”
Billy Ray continued to prattle on about gardens and planting and building a henhouse as he arranged the artifacts on the altar. Then Billy Ray lifted each in a Lion-King-hold-the-baby-to-the-sky pose and began to read what sounded like gibberish off a page of the notebook he’d laid on the altar. The first three artifacts were ancient stone statues. One was small, fit like a baseball in Billy Ray’s hand. The other two were larger. Even from where he sat, Daniel could tell that the faces carved into the rock were monstrous.
Then Billy Ray lifted a book very carefully. It was in tatters, the cover all but falling off, many of the pages loose and all of them yellowed with age. He picked up a ring. The gold of the band glinted in the lantern light and the black stone as big as a walnut in the setting cast shards of refracted light in shiny arrows around the room. If that was a real diamond—of course it was a real diamond! A black diamond that size would be worth…it truly was priceless.
Billy Ray placed the ring on the ring finger of his left hand after he offered it up to the darkened ceiling, where imaginary buzzards circled overhead. He picked up a necklace and fit it over his head. It hung almost to his waist. Its chain was fashioned of alternating gold and silver links and a gigantic gold pendant dangled from it. The pendant was covered with runes and pictographs and the black diamond in the center of it was bigger than a golf ball. One by one he blessed them—clay pots, a mortar and pestle, two tablets with hieroglyphics—or some other ancient writing—on them. Daniel counted thirteen different items.
With the pendant necklace around his neck and the ring on his finger, Billy Ray put the other items back into the bag and carried the bag to the bottom point of the five-pointed star to their left. He took the small statue out of the bag, placed it on the point of the star, then stopped to consult his notebook. Then he stepped back and shook his head, put the small statue back into the bag, rummaged around, and came up with the largest statue. It appeared vaguely human, with a potbelly and legs, but three long horns protruded from the forehead of a hideous skull. He placed that one on the star point instead, eyed it and seemed satisfied, then began to read more gibberish from his notebook. He took out the tattered book and appeared to read a passage from it, his Kentucky accent rendering the words ludicrous—the sound of Charlie Brown’s teacher. He went to the second point of the star and repeated the process with the small statue he’d mistakenly put in the place reserved for the biggest one.
“Look at the wall over there,” Daniel said, and gestured with his chin to the cavern wall on the other side of the floor crack. There was a red glow that hadn’t been there before coming from the cave entrance on the wall.
“The light, you mean?”
“I’m betting the efreet’s there.” He paused for a heartbeat. “That must be where we misplaced it.”
Jeff looked appropriately chagrined.
“Chapman Whitworth’s father was a ‘sticky-fingered’ anthropologist, pilfered artifacts from the Middle East for years, and Chapman either stumbled on—or maybe went looking for—how to summon a demon with them. So he decided to try his luck, drew a pentagram on the floor of a cave and did all the rest of it—but nothing happened. Either he didn’t know about the blood or couldn’t find anybody with the mark of evil to murder.”
“Becca wasn’t sure what ‘the mark of evil’ part meant,” Jeff said. “She just said if Bishop’s theory about it was right, she’d be a prime candidate.”
“Bishop thought it might mean someone who’d actually seen a demon—because seeing pure evil leaves a mark on a person’s soul.”
“Somebody with the knowing, then—like Becca. Did Isaac Washington—?”
Daniel nodded, then felt another piece slip into place.
“Milkstone! That must be where the cave over there comes out—the Bad Kids went there to drink that Sunday night. And somehow the efreet herded them into a cave nobody knew was there—probably used his eight-legged and no-legged friends to do it. Then they came out and went looking for the ‘summoner’—that’s what Becca said they called the person who’d drawn the pentagram—located Whitworth and he got himself absorbed by the efreet—”
“And the efreet wanted to bring all his rowdy buddies to the party, so—”
“Whitworth needed somewhere big enough to draw more pentagrams and this cavern was it. But the Three Musketeers stopped him before he had a chance. Now, he plans to finish what he started twenty-six years ago.”
“That’s a plausible scenario except for one thing—he can’t use our blood. We don’t qualify.”
“You don’t qualify,” Daniel said. “I do.”
“You don’t have the knowing.”
“No, but when I was twelve years old, I saw the efreet. That left the ‘mark of evil’ on me.”
“So I’m just—what? A practice shot?”
“I was prepared to die. I’d made my peace with that. But five more efreets! No! I can’t let him do that.”
“You planning on stopping him?”
“I’m the only one who can.”