It couldn’t be, of course. Except it was.
Lyla.
Jack felt everything inside him come loose and begin to float away. Courage, will, resolve. They’d been tethered to the man who was Jack Carpenter, anchored there his whole life with firm, sturdy ropes. Now, the moorings fell away and a great wave carried them all out to sea. Left on the shore was a parched, brittle soul, fragile and frail, strength drained away by the apparition before him.
Then Jack felt sudden joy well up in his chest. He recognized it for what it was—unhinged and mad. But she was here. His precious…
Not Lyla. Not Lyla. Not Lyla! Can’t be.
Her face—animated, not just a photograph—was as beautiful as it had been the last time he saw her. She’d been crying then, too.
When she spoke, her voice was deeper, throatier than the woman he loved. But her words drilled down into his soul. She’d only wanted a baby, she said, but Jack didn’t like children.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t noticed the horror of her body. It was that his mind could attend to one thing or the other—her beautiful face or the carnage below it. Not both. When he allowed himself to take in the extent of her injuries, he was suddenly nauseated, afraid he might actually vomit right there at her feet.
Her body! She had fallen so far.
He felt a grip on his arm, but shook it off and finally found his voice.
“Lyla?” His voice was weak and made a scratchy sound like wind-driven sleet against a windowpane or scarabs on the walls of an ancient tomb. It was how he’d sounded the night he’d wandered through their apartment, calling out to her, crying out in disbelieving agony while dust still hung in the air in the city.
“Jack, that’s not Lyla. Lyla’s dead.”
He could hear Crock, but his words seemed to come not only from a great distance but from another time altogether. From a distant past. Not from now. Now was Lyla.
She turned to Crock and screamed at him to mind his own business, that his turn would come.
Then a black cloud bubbled up behind Lyla, the black-purple turbulence of an approaching hurricane. Its roiling ugliness filled the cavern behind her all the way to the ceiling.
Lyla froze, became a lifeless mannequin.
No, Lyla. Don’t go.
A roar rumbled out of the cloud, ricocheting off the walls. The roaring voice addressed Crock and the force of the words knocked him to the floor. The cloud continued to rumble at him, but Jack’s attention was riveted on Lyla. She looked like a doll—her eyes open but sightless, her face an expressionless mask.
And then she was back! Instantly alive. In his mind’s eye, he saw a little white switch.
Flip it up, Lyla lived. Flip it down…
His heart swelled with joy—demented joy. Unnatural. Then her voice—it wasn’t quite right—spoke aloud the accusations he had hurled at himself for years, the ones that screamed in his head and woke him in the midnight dark.
She told him it was his fault, that if he’d let her go to her doctor’s appointment that morning, she’d be alive.
She was right, of course. Lyla was dead because of him. His eyes were drawn unbidden down her body—he did this to her.
“Lyla…baby…” His voice broke and he could barely finish. “I’m so sorry!”
Crock had gotten up off the floor when Lyla’d started speaking. He grabbed Jack and yanked him around so he was looking full into Crock’s face.
“That’s not Lyla, Jack. Remember what the angel said—he serves the Father of Lies.”
Then the cloud spoke again, but not in a gravel-in-a-blender roar. This time, its voice was smooth and melodious—the kind, reasonable voice of James Earl Jones.
“It’s no lie, Jack. You watched her fall.”
The limp arm dangling to the floor from the hand Lyla held suddenly came to life. It rose as if it were attached to the shoulder of an invisible man. The cloud spoke again, but Crock held Jack firm, wouldn’t let him turn and face Lyla and the cloud.
“She died holding a man’s hand, but it wasn’t some random man, Jack.” The voice paused and then whispered the rest, “He was her lover!”
No! Lyla wouldn’t…
“Those times she told you she was at her sister’s house—she was rolling around in bed with him, making that special groaning sound you thought she only made when you pleased her.”
Jack gasped and Crock yelled in his face, said what Jack knew to be true. That this Lyla was a fake, a reproduction. Then there were more Lylas all around him, each one…did he do that to her? That was how she looked in the grave. He killed her and that was how she—
Crock shouted at him, telling him not to look at the swarm of Lylas.
“She went to him because you wouldn’t give her what she needed,” the cloud said. Then a sound like a dog’s snarl twisted and distorted the melodious voice. “She was carrying his baby, Jack, their love child—because you hate children!”
“I’m real,” Crock said, not shouting but in a deep, intense whisper. “They’re not!” He gestured toward the pack of jackal Lylas. “They’re evil in human-being suits. I’m your friend. Look at me.”
The black cloud bellowed in a rumbling, inhuman roar. “Your turn, fat man!”
Crock didn’t cringe or cower, though, just ignored the words and focused all his attention on Jack.
But when a form materialized next to Crock, he let go of Jack and turned toward it.
It was clear to Crock that Jack was losing it. Why would God send a man like him on such a mission? He was broken, had known so much pain, had lost his wife and thirty-one friends, every man he served with, survived when they all died in a rumbling roar heard around the world. Why Jack? Then it occurred to Crock in a flash of thought that was there and then gone as fast as it had come. Maybe Jack hadn’t been sent here to expel this demon but to exorcise demons of his own. Maybe he’d been sent to heal his own soul.
Crock felt the percussion again and saw Andi cringe closer to the angel’s side. The voice must be bellowing. Likely at him. He probably ought to look at the cloud, pretend to listen, but not looking was working for him right now, and until there was a compelling reason to do so, he didn’t intend to change that strategy.
Then Billy Bickerstaff was standing beside him. Empty air one second; Billy Bickerstaff the next. He let go of Jack’s shoulder and turned reluctantly toward the boy with blood all over the front of his shirt and leaking from the corners of his mouth.
When Crock had taken his own fearless moral inventory—brief though it had been given that he didn’t find out he was going on this little expedition until a couple of hours ago—he’d known Billy would eventually show up. Had to. Rookie cop, chasing a guy who’d just held up a liquor store through yards and alleys in a suburban neighborhood, gets him cornered and…
The little boy was about ten years old, red hair and freckles and a hint of buck teeth. He’d stepped out of nowhere in an alley with a gun trained on Crock, and Crock’d fired. It was self-defense, of course…or would have been if the kid hadn’t been holding a water pistol.
True, the statute regarding the use of deadly force required only that you had “reason to believe that your life was in danger.” It didn’t require that you actually were in danger. Internal affairs cleared him and gave him back his gun and his shield. And every few months since then, Billy Bickerstaff paid him a visit as he slept. Just to talk over old times.
The little boy with the gaping bullet wound in his chest was talking to Crock, who did the best he could to act like he heard and understood what the child was saying. Apparently, the result was not pleasing the big dude in the black cloud because there was more percussive yelling and more of Crock’s “victims” appeared. One by one.
The crazy old woman who’d wrenched herself out of his grasp and raced into her burning house to save her cat. Only enough of her revealed on the charred body for him to recognize her.
And Bonnie. Of course, Bonnie. His sister was fifteen years older than he was, got married when he was three and moved to England. He hardly knew her. But when he was a junior in high school, she divorced and moved back home, and by the time he was a freshman in college, she was a raging alcoholic with a thousand-dollar-a-day crack habit she supported by stealing, shoplifting and engaging in the world’s oldest profession.
About once a month, she called his dorm room in the middle of the night, drunk, high and threatening to kill herself. It would take him until dawn to talk her off the ledge—sometimes literally as well as metaphorically. He stood it for six months, then announced to family and friends alike that his grades were in the tank from too many late nights and he would no longer answer the phone after ten o’clock. No exceptions. Three weeks later, the phone woke him at midnight. It rang again and again—and he sat looking at it, doing nothing.
Crock was the one who found her body, went to her sleazy apartment to check on her because their mother begged him to. Bonnie was lying naked in a bathtub full of bloody water, both wrists slashed to the bone. She’d been dead several days, her face was black and distorted, her body bloated. He’d heaved for hours from the stink. The sight of her here in front of him shook him to the core—didn’t even matter that he couldn’t hear what she was saying.
Enough!
“Hey, you!” He addressed the black cloud that bubbled and boiled in the air in the back of the cavern. “Why don’t you take your monstrosity circus on the road. Clowns and elephants are way more entertaining. Or jugglers. You got any jugglers?”
He spoke with more sassiness than he felt. His knees were Jell-O and he couldn’t feel his legs below them at all. It had taken every sinew of his determination, every morsel of his will to get the sarcastic remark out past his lips, and if he were called upon for any more heroic deed here this day than just being a smart-ass, he was definitely not man enough for the job.
The black cloud was not pleased with his response, and in the blink of an eye everything in the cavern changed. The walls, floor and ceiling were no longer milky swirls of rock, polished and shiny. The cavern was black, dirty and sooty and smelled like burned flesh. The room was no longer filled with flickering red light from candles on the walls. It was lit by the flames of a burning lake that extended away into the distance as far as the eye could see.
Andi couldn’t breathe. Not at all. Couldn’t draw in a single breath. But she had to be breathing, didn’t she? You’d pass out or die or something if you didn’t breathe. She wasn’t, though.
She held onto the angel’s hand with both of hers, was huddled up against the angel’s body—would have hidden in the angel’s skirts if she’d been dressed as Princess Buttercup instead of wearing jeans.
The angel was warm and Andi could feel the steady thump, thump, thump of the angel’s heart on her cheek. That was more comforting than the hand she clutched or the warmth she felt. The angel’s heart wasn’t pounding. Andi’s was! It was hammering inside a gigantic hole in the middle of her, a hole in that place where scared lives. Scared was gone, had run away screaming. What she saw in front of her—what only she and the angel could see—had chased it away.
Demons. Everywhere. Every shape and color, hideous and angry—they all looked so angry!—so full of hatred for everything and everybody that she shrank back in horror and revulsion. All the monsters from a lifetime of nightmares were collected in this chamber, making horrible growling sounds she didn’t know if the others could hear or not, and fighting in vicious tangles of violence. Creatures rolled around on the charred rocks, tearing at each other with claws, biting with horrible jagged teeth, trying to rip each other apart for no reason that Andi could see.
She recognized some of the monsters—the one made out of wasps that had killed Miss Lunde and Mr. Bishop that day at school, so long ago it might have happened in another lifetime. The lizard-faced demon with tentacles and red eyes with no black spots who rode the back of the man who shot Mommy. The green demon with oozing red blotches she and the angel had driven out of Ariel Murphy and the small, sticky-looking one with legs all up and down its sides that had ridden Ossy across the street and made him attack her.
And she could tell how they must look to the others because some of them wore a filmy, gauzy, see-through shape like a mask, only as big as a person. The demon who’d killed Mommy wore the shape of a pretty black woman who was torn up like she’d been run over by a bulldozer. The monster made of flies from the school wore the body mask of a little boy with freckles who yelled at Mr. Crock that the officer had “murdered an innocent.”
But the black cloud that boiled and bubbled and filled the whole top and back of the cavern cloaked something Andi couldn’t see. The voice out of it hurt her ears and she wanted to put her fingers in her ears so she couldn’t hear it. But to do that she’d have to let go of the angel’s hand and she feared if she did let go, all the ugly evil she could see would swallow her up.
Then Mr. Crock said something about clowns and elephants and the cloud vanished and Andi could tell that the others could see now what the cavern really looked like. A lake of fire where masses of demons sat on the burned shore.
But when the black cloud went away, she could see what had been hiding in it, the thing in the lake.
It roared and Andi screamed.
Daniel heard the echo of a rumble from the cave on the other side of the crevice, a roar, something like the sound of the lion before an MGM movie, only louder, meaner and angrier. The roar was followed by a scream, the voice of a child. That scream sliced open his heart and laid his soul bare. It was a little girl’s scream.
It was Andi!
There was no way he could know that, but he did. It could have been any child, maybe even a little boy. There was no voice in a shriek to recognize. But he knew it was her all the same. At the sound, something had thrummed in Daniel’s chest like a bowstring releasing an arrow. It was Andi, and Andi was terrified.
His fingers went numb and the scimitar he was holding dropped to the cavern floor, bounced once and then plunged into the black depths of the crevice.
It had freaked him out just to touch the blade when he’d used it to saw through the layers of duct tape that bound him. He’d gotten a pretty nasty cut on his arm from its razor edge and had been terrified for a moment when he saw the blood dripping onto the stone floor. But he hadn’t been murdered. Neither had Jeff. He’d given his life—for Daniel.
And someday, he would think about that. He’d puzzle it through in his head, figure out how he felt about it, what it said about Jeff and about the nature of a God who worked things out in ways no one would ever dream. And he’d think about battery acid and concrete and how Jeff had figured out you could destroy the base of Billy Ray’s gate and escape.
Later. He’d think about all that later. Right now, the whole universe was condensed into one little girl’s voice.
Daniel’s heart began to hammer blood through his veins in powerful bursts that rocked his whole body. He was gripped by a far greater terror than he’d felt at the prospect of getting his head chopped off.
How could Andi be—?
Had Chapman Whitworth kidnapped her like he had Daniel? Had he taken her to the efreet? To…kill her, some awful kind of sacrifice? But he didn’t need her blood to summon efreets. He had Daniel’s. And the additional pentagrams were in this cavern, not the other one.
Then it occurred to him that maybe Chapman Whitworth hadn’t taken her to the cavern at all. Maybe Jack and Theresa and Becca had. Maybe the others had figured out that the efreet was in that cavern and had gone in after it. But why take Andi with them? She was a little girl, only ten years old. What possible reason could there be?
Still, that seemed a more likely explanation. But either way, the result was the same. His precious little girl was in the cavern on the other side of this crevice with a prince of demons. How she got there really didn’t matter. She was there and he had to get her out.
Take good care of Emily’s little girl.
But how could he possibly get to her across the crevice? At its narrowest point the crack in the cavern floor was still close to thirty feet wide. Maybe Chapman Whitworth could levitate over it, but he couldn’t.
Rope!
Billy Ray had used rope to tie the lanterns around their necks and to tie the two of them to each other. None of the pieces of rope was long enough by itself to stretch across the chasm, but maybe he could tie them together, put the skill he’d learned as a Boy Scout to use.
He ran to the pile of discarded ropes, grateful that he hadn’t mindlessly kicked the rope into the crevice in a frenzy of revulsion along with the duffle bag and all the artifacts Billy Ray’d set up on the pentagrams. The lantern ropes were only four feet long—too short. It would take the whole length of them just to make the proper knot. But the two longer ropes—the one Billy Ray had tied around their necks and the one he’d used as a lead rope—yes!
An overhead knot. No, a double fisherman’s knot. If he tied it right, a double fisherman’s knot would hold anything.
Swell, so he had rope. How could he use it to get across the crack?
The stalagmites. There was one very near the edge of the crevice on both sides! The one on this side was about ten inches in diameter and about four feet tall. The one on the other was shorter and smaller—six by three. If he could stretch the rope between them, he could—what? Hand over hand above a bottomless chasm? His mind recoiled from that prospect, the reflex of a finger on a hot stove. But desperation shoved fear aside. Dangle above a bottomless chasm or off the top of a skyscraper—it didn’t matter. He would do whatever he had to do to get to Andi.
He tied the pieces of rope together carefully. Untying them and then retying them to make sure he had the knot right. The combined ropes stretched maybe thirty-five feet. It’d be close. He made a noose in one end of the rope, stood on the edge of the chasm and pitched it across, trying to lasso the stalagmite on the other side. It fell short and dropped into the darkness. He pulled it back up and tried again. And again. Over and over. It was like pitching a ring at a milk bottle in a carnival—looks easy, but isn’t.
And then the rope finally looped over the top of the stalagmite and hung there. He shook it a couple of times, working the noose farther down on the column of limestone it’d taken a hundred thousand years to create, one drip of water at a time.
He pulled the rope taut and the bottom fell out of his stomach. There wasn’t enough rope. It was long enough to reach the stalagmite on this side of the crevice but not long enough to wrap around it and tie.