Nothing happened for a heartbeat after Theresa flipped the red switch. There was a man at the podium speaking about “…service to society…”
Then one side of the gigantic net in the ceiling of the Balloon Ballroom fell away and what was in it rained down into the room.
Dead rats. They were heavier than the balloons and fell like sacks of sand, splatting down all around the ballroom with the balloons floating down gently behind.
At a table shown on the monitor that provided the back-of-the-room view, a man dressed in a furry pink suit and rabbit ears with the Energizer Bunny drum hangin’ around his neck was seated beside an orange-haired, white-faced clown. The couple seated across from them were decked out in matching baggy brown outfits with Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head faces affixed to the front. A dead rat landed with a splat in the middle of the celebration mini-cake in the center of their table, flinging white icing, yellow cake and a smattering of recently defrosted rat blood in their faces.
There was an instant of stunned surprise.
Then Mrs. Potato Head let out a piercing scream and leapt to her feet, knocking over her chair. It collided with the falling chair of the zombie seated behind her, who had jumped up when a rat landed on the head of Gandalf seated across the table from her. The rat slid down off the pointed gray hat, leavin’ a bloody snail trail behind it, and dropped into the wizard’s plate, knockin’ over Harry Potter’s water glass and sendin’ the green mermaid beside him into hysterics.
A few tables away a rat landed in Glinda the Good Witch’s lap. She batted at it to shove it off, but its claws caught in the netting of her pink skirt and hung there. She jumped to her feet, tryin’ to shake it off, shrieking, backing away and crashing into other people who’d also leapt up to escape the creatures raining down on them.
Theresa felt a wave of sympathy for Glenda. Wasn’t nothing in the world worse’n havin’ a rat on you and you can’t get it off.
The front-of-the-room monitor showed a rat scattering Thing One and Thing Two, a carrot and Michael Jackson. In the growing chaos on all the monitors, Minions bumped into Egyptian princesses and Vikings, nuns, Chewbacca and Pippi Longstocking.
It was like popcorn then.
Theresa watched, holding her breath. The man she’d knocked aside got to his feet and never cast so much as a glance at her, just gawked at the spectacle on the monitors. Pandemonium had erupted in the ballroom and it was impossible to tell exactly what was going on in the rain of fist-sized balloons from the ceiling.
Where the rats landed, there was instant hysteria. At the tables not fortunate enough to get a rodent visitation, however, folks was just confused. With balloons falling as well, it was hard to see. Unless they was seated at a victim table, people wasn’t really certain what was going on. There was more than two hundred fifty four-person tables in the room. Six dozen rats was spread pretty thin among them.
Theresa felt sick. It was happening just as she was afraid it would. People was confused, upset, angry, freaked out, revolted and horrified.
But they wasn’t scared.
And they wasn’t runnin’ out of the room.
A man in a red- and white-striped shirt and hat who was either a barber pole or Where’s Waldo, leapt up onto a table and called out for calm, telling people to sit back down.
Theresa bowed her head. The tear that rolled down her cheek added one more drip of moisture to the deluge that had fried the control board.
God, please…
The Javelin missile was propelled from the launcher resting on Sebastian Nemo’s shoulder by a charge that hurled it twenty feet or so out over the water beyond the barge. It hung there, suspended, for an instant. Then its own navigation and propulsion systems took over.
Sebastian watched in what seemed like slow motion as the nose of the long tube lifted until it was pointed straight up. A blast of red-orange fire ignited its tail and the force launched the cylinder up into the sky like it’d lifted off from a pad at Cape Canaveral. It was visible for only a second before the fog gobbled it up.
Even its small trail of smoke dissolved in the fog. There was no sound but the rumble of the tug’s engines far behind.
In his mind’s eye, Sebastian followed the missile’s progress.
The white cylinder rocketed up into the invisible sky.
It reached the apogee of its upward arc.
It paused, hung suspended, then turned and hurled down on a target lit at the four corners with colored balls of light.
The cavern suddenly turned dazzling white, like a flashbulb going off in Daniel’s face. The ugly red glow coming from the cave entrance was replaced by a sparkling brilliance, radiant, a bright warm illumination that lit the tops and bottoms and every angle of every surface it touched. And left no shadows.
Daniel stood with his foot raised to step backward into the chasm. What Comes Behind filled the whole cavern in front of him, all around him, the black tide was inches from his toes.
But the instant the light touched the tangle of horror, What Comes Behind disintegrated. The solid mass of snakes and spiders scattered, backing up from the light, scrambling into cracks and crevices in the walls and ceiling, tumbling on top of each other in their haste. It was as if the light burned them, somehow. And maybe it did, a heat that sent them running more frantically than roaches across a kitchen floor when you turned on a light in the middle of the night.
Roaches.
Jeff covered in roaches.
Jeff was dead, had given his life for Daniel.
Not now, no time to think about that now. Andi was up ahead and she was in danger.
In the bright white glow, the walls and floor of the cavern were bare and smooth and Daniel could see so well he began to run—barefoot, his right big toe bleeding from where he had jammed it so hard into the crack in the rock wall of the crevice. He felt no pain from it though or from a dozen other wounds as he sprinted as fast as he could toward the white light. And Andi.
A single horrified shriek silenced all other sound in the ballroom. For a heartbeat after, there was silence, then an instantaneous, panicked hysteria exploded.
Theresa’s bowed head jerked up. On the monitor screen that filled all her vision a huge black rat bounded across the table and began to climb up Where’s Waldo’s leg.
A brown one leapt on the shoulder of the Raggedy Ann doll seated at the same table. When it stuck its hideous face up next to the woman’s rosy cheek, she totally lost her mind.
All over the room, rats—dozens of rats, hundreds of rats, no, thousands of rats were runnin’ across tabletops, jumpin’ up on people, swarmin’ over some of them two or three rats at a time in a frenzy that instilled instant panic in the crowd.
Theresa stared at the scene, stupefied. The rats she’d brought here in a garbage bag in the trunk of her car, the ones she liked to a’had a heart attack hauling up two flights of stairs, the rats she and Becca had tossed into that net above the ceiling was dead. Not just dead, half frozen.
These here rats was alive!
The stampede toward the doors was brutal. People couldn’t get out of the ballroom fast enough. They knocked over chairs and tables and each other and trampled the slower among them in mindless flight.
Theresa’s mind flashed back to that day in the funeral home, snakes everywhere and the only exit blocked. But the back and one side wall of the ballroom were lined with doors, side by side, maybe two dozen of them, heavy fire doors, all of them functioning. There was no backup, no bottleneck of panicked people at a lone exit. The crowd simply leapt up and raced out of the room. It emptied in seconds.
The big doors had closed behind the panicked crowd when they rushed out and it was suddenly eerily quiet. Balloons still bobbed up and down in the air from the motion of the moving bodies, but that was all. Nothing else moved. The crazed rats, running around in a frenzy, jumpin’ and climbin’ and—
Theresa’s mind stopped so dead in its tracks, her thoughts crashed into each other like cars in a pileup on the expressway.
Where was them rats?
The man she’d shoved out of the way to get to the switch found a voice and bleated, “What the…?”
The far left monitor screen showed a rat lying in the middle of one of the celebration cakes. It was dead. Clearly, unarguably dead—it was missing a head. The rats you could see scattered on tabletops all over the room lay motionless.
One of the close-up screens showed a table in the right corner of the room. A black rat was draped over the back of one chair at the table, blood dripping off its mouth onto the white tablecloth.
A gray rat lay on a plate on the other side of the table. His head was crushed, smashed flat, looked like it’d been stomped.
These rats is dead! How—?
The thought was wiped out of Theresa’s mind by a blinding white light on all the monitors. Then a rumbling roar ate up the world.
It began the moment Jack, Crock and Andi turned to face the efreet. Their senses became confused. They could smell the foul language of the beast, see the offensive odor, hear the ugly red light and taste the cacophony of voices. The senses switched back and forth. Colors became sounds; tastes became light.
Three demons appeared, one in front of each of them. They were all grinning. Then their grinning faces were replaced by a human face with a similar grin. Then another. And another. At the speed of a juiced-up kaleidoscope, a succession of faces came and went, one flickering after the other. All had the same grin.
In the motorcade of faces that flashed before Jack, he saw every one of the officers in his New York City Police Department unit who had gone into the towers that day and never come out. He saw the faces of dope dealers and prostitutes, pimps and murderers, pornographers and thieves. He saw the victims as well as the criminals, men he served with in the military, soldiers he’d killed, women he’d loved. Faster and faster they went. Young, old, black, white, Asian, men, women and children. All grinning as maniacal laughter rose up behind them.
A procession of the great unwashed flashed before Crock. Fire victims with charred lips, murder victims with slashed throats, bloated bodies hauled out of the Ohio. All their dead eyes were open and they were grinning.
Only two faces appeared before Andi. Her mother and father. One, then the other, back and forth. The grin remained, but somehow the faces looked sad, too, angry and hurt, annoyed and puzzled. Sometimes, the whole right side of her mother’s head was missing and sometimes her father’s face was on a head that wasn’t attached to his body. Sometimes, they looked like they were in excruciating pain, pleading for it to stop, begging her to make it stop. Still grinning, though. Always grinning.
Faster and faster the faces went, dizzying, blurry, and behind it all the rumbling voice spoke with the sound of metal scraping against metal.
“What’s real?” the mocking voice asked. “Death is real. Hate is real. Pain and desolation are real.”
Then the beast began to spew out obscene accusations in a roar of words that was far more horrible than the images. The repulsive charges and disgusting recriminations hammered at Jack’s soul, beat him down, filled him with growing hopelessness.
But Crock didn’t react in any way to the monster’s mockery. As far as Jack could tell, it had no effect on him at all. His face was expressionless.
Then a blackened, bloated face appeared before Crock with clotted blood clinging to its hair and he reflexively turned away toward Jack. He must have seen on Jack’s face the effect the creature’s screaming accusations were having on him because Crock’s vacant expression disappeared. He engaged. He looked past the grinning faces to the roaring monster for a moment, then back at Jack. Suddenly, Crock grabbed Jack’s shoulders and began to sing.
“Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way,” he sang, in a pitifully off-key baritone. “Sing with me, Jack. Loud. As loud as you can! Oh, what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh, hey…”
Jack took up the song, pulled Andi into the circle with him, and Crock and she began to sing, too.
“Dashing through the snow, in a one-horse open sleigh. O’er the hills we go, laughing all the way. Ho, ho, ho. Bells on—”
Sudden silence filled the chamber. Not just the absence of sound but an entity of its own. A thing that gobbled up the words they were singing so no sound made it out into the cavern. It was like going instantly deaf.
The demon unfurled gigantic bat wings that stretched out twenty feet in each direction.
“I cannot harm you,” it roared, “but the others aren’t protected by—”
The demon didn’t say the word angel. Instead, he snarled an epithet in another language, spitting out the unpronounceable syllables as if the taste of the word were foul.
“All your friends are dead,” the efreet roared and the last word echoed through the cavern, reverberating, not growing softer and softer but louder and louder. “I burned them alive. They died screaming.”
Dead, dead, dead bounced off the walls as the efreet leaned toward Andi and sneered at her. “Except your daddy. He couldn’t scream because I chopped off his head.”
“Her daddy’s head is right where it’s supposed to be,” came a voice from the far left side of the cavern.
They all jerked toward it with the perfect unison of a chorus line; then Andi broke out of Jack’s grasp and raced toward the barefoot man in a T-shirt, threw herself at him and almost bowled him over, crying in joy that rocked the walls of the cavern, “Daddy! Daddy!”
It was Daniel. Here. How? Jack had no idea. He shot a glance at the angel, her beauty so overwhelming it was hard for him to drag his gaze away. The angel was smiling.
Between one heartbeat and the next, the Cat in the Hat was transformed into a light without shadows, the brilliance of the sun you could look into without blinking. And in the light, or made of the light—or maybe the light was made of her—was a being of breathtaking perfection. She towered above Becca as tall as the monster, white wings of down moving slowly back and forth, her black hair flowing down her back, her face so beautiful it made Becca want to weep. Perched on the top of her black hair was a red-and-white-striped hat. The hat she’d worn in Becca’s closet all those years ago. The hat that had floated all by itself in the muddy water under a purple bridge.
Suddenly, the beast faltered, seemed uncertain. It turned toward the ballroom.
Its concentrated attention had been a blistering spotlight on Becca, like a kid using a magnifying glass to burn an ant. She only recognized the intensity of it when it was removed.
Then Chapman Whitworth cried out—not the beast, Whitworth. A single, strangled word: “No!”
Around the corner in the gigantic main atrium outside the ballroom two dozen doors flew open at once and a screaming crowd of people poured out, a thunderous stampede of terrified humanity that filled the huge silent space with the noise of their cries and running feet.
Whitworth turned back to her, limitless rage in his eyes. He held out his flip-top cellphone and snarled, “When I punch this button, thousands of other people will die and you can’t rescue them with dead rats!”
His finger moved toward the text button on the phone—and then the world exploded. A percussive fist slammed into Becca and knocked her backward off her feet. A thunderbolt of sound, a reverberating boom, like standing next to an erupting volcano, crashed into her ears. The rumbling roar ate up the world. The ballroom door on the far end blew out and flew across the atrium, mowing down the crowd, a scythe through wheat. But the other doors held and the room contained the blast.
Whitworth stood in place with the red demon behind him and Becca knew that the monster would remain unscathed by a direct hit from whatever explosive device went off in that ballroom. Its diabolical force was unequaled by any weapon. The vile creature possessed the dark power of the universe—limitless and unknowable.
Now, it was the beast that was enraged. The monster jerked its hideous horned head back toward Becca and the light. He let out a roar fueled by consummate hatred and raised the scimitar above Becca’s head.
“You cannot harm her,” the angel told the red monster, her voice as pure as a note that would shatter crystal.
“And you cannot save her,” the beast snarled back. “She stands or falls on her own.”
When Daniel burst out into the cavern filled with white light, he drank in the sight of its occupants. Jack, Andi and Crock were standing together. Had it been his imagination as he ran through the cavern—had he heard “Jingle Bells”?
His gaze gobbled up Andi. She was alive. Unharmed. He almost collapsed on the spot from relief. After that, he allowed himself to pay attention to the rest of the scene and it took him a moment to adjust to what he saw, that it was, indeed, real and not some movie on an IMAX screen.
A horrific red demon towered fifty feet in the air, facing a transcendently beautiful being made of light. Darkness and light. The definition of good and evil.
Between the two stood Jack, Crock and Andi.
The words popped into his head so crisp and real he almost turned around to see if Clayton Abernathy, the church’s elder board chairman, were standing behind him.
When you don’t know what to do, you stand, Daniel. You hold your head up and you stand.
The demon leaned toward Andi and spit into her face that he had beheaded her father.
“Her daddy’s head is right where it’s supposed to be,” Daniel said.
Andi snapped around toward him, her face broke into the most beautiful smile he’d ever seen, and she came running. “Daddy, Daddy!”
He knelt and caught her in his arms, staggered back from the collision and held her close, smelling the little girl smell, feeling her warmth. Then she whispered into his ear, took his hand and led him back to the others.
Jack grabbed him in a bear hug. Crock nodded.
“Liar!” Andi cried at the demon, squeezing her father’s hand tight. “You’re scary and I’m afraid of you, but you’re a liar.”
Jack reached over and took Daniel’s other hand, then turned to Crock and took his, too. The four of them stood facing the monstrosity.
“You don’t belong here,” Daniel said.
“Go back where you came from,” Jack said.
“Don’t let the door hit you on the backside on your way out,” Crock said.
Before Andi could speak, the boiling, bubbling cloud that had concealed the efreet earlier exploded into the whole chamber, unleashing a storm as powerful as a hurricane making landfall right there in front of them. Suddenly, a brutal wind assaulted them—it was black, how could wind be black? It hurled raindrops at them like shrapnel. The rain was black, too, as if it had dissolved the night sky, sucking ink drops of darkness from the universe beyond.
Hammer blows of surf detonated on the desolate, rocky shore, spawning chaos on the ashy rocks, an explosion of deranged movement and sound. The host of demons scrambled for cover in an insectile frenzy, screeching shrill slaughterhouse grunts and squeals. The larger ones pushed the smaller aside, attacking in vicious fury with jagged claws and rows of razor-edged teeth.
Daniel pushed Andi to the floor and covered her with his body to protect her. Crock and Jack huddled close. Thunder boomed like faraway cannons. Pulses of lightning strobed a sea that roiled and heaved beneath bubbling black clouds. The jagged fragments of light illuminated what was forming far from shore. Daniel watched in breathless horror as a greenish-black tornado, a leviathan vortex, snaked down out of the tumult, writhing and twisting, sucking up the shadows and fire to become a swirling torch of flames with a center as dark as the far side of the moon.
As the tornado hurled across the sea at them, the beast began an odd babble. Roaring above the sound of the wind, it pronounced the first few syllables of words slowly, like a tape on half speed, a totally alien sound. But Daniel’s mind couldn’t help trying to understand the words. Every syllable echoed, though, and the echoes blended together. All the previous sounds hit his ear at the exact instant that the beast went on to the next syllable, which Daniel’s mind tried to process amid the echoes of the first.
The twister was closing on them, the wind battering them as they huddled drenched on the floor. Daniel felt dizzy, light-headed, his mind whirling and spinning. He couldn’t think with pieces of words bouncing around, lighting the inside of his skull like a pinball machine.
Theresa’s voice spoke clearly in his head.
“He’ll do anything to distract you from what you’s there to do. That beast will bewilder and confound you, keep you tied in knots—upset, scared, confused—so you won’t have no strength to use against him.”
With jaw-clenching will, Daniel clamped down the cacophony in his head and silenced it. He refused to look at the twister bearing down on them, ignored the storm.
Then he got slowly to his knees. When he did, rain and wind pelted Andi and she curled into a ball on the cavern floor, squeezing her eyes tight shut and cringing away from the drenching gale. Daniel reached out and lifted her face and she squinted up at him through the torrent of rain. Then he put his hands tight over her ears, muffling sound. He leaned close and looked deep into her frightened, bewildered eyes—sea green, the same color as Emily’s.
There was Andi. Only Andi. He gently kissed her forehead, both cheeks, the tip of her nose and her chin. He mouthed, “I love you!”
At the end of all things that was what mattered. Love.
Andi’s face relaxed. The terror drained out of her eyes, replaced by—what? Peace. Then a spark flickered there. Not peace, anger. She staggered up, leaning into the wind, and faced the beast. Daniel noticed for the first time that the angel stood untouched in the tempest.
Andi cried out at the efreet, her little-girl voice somehow loud enough to carry over the din of the storm raging around them and the beast’s growling words.
“Stop it!”
The beast instantly silenced. The wind stilled. The tornado sank down into the flaming sea. The rain stopped. Echoes of thunder died away and it was eerily quiet. Jack stood, put out his hand and helped Crock to his feet. Then they linked hands again.
An endless lake of fire still boiled within the pentagram Chapman Whitworth had drawn in black chalk on the rock floor twenty-six years ago. The efreet he had summoned from hell towered there, fifty feet tall, with black batwings raised in a canopy above it.
The creature snarled at them in defiance. Or was that…fear?
Andi reached up with the hand not clutching Daniel’s and lifted the cross that hung on a silver chain around her neck. It had been her mother’s necklace. At Emily’s funeral, his wrist in a cast, Daniel had handed the necklace to Jack and watched him fasten it on Andi. As far as Daniel knew, Andi had not taken it off since.
The little brown-haired girl held the small cross out toward a creature that had stepped into time from forever.
“It’s not just us,” Andi whispered in the silent stillness. “God doesn’t want you here, either.”
She squared her shoulders.
“Get out of our world,” she said. When Andi spoke again, her tiny voice reverberated through the chamber as if it were echoing down through the centuries, through the millennia.
“Go!”
The beast vanished.
Andi, Daniel, Jack and Crock stood together in an empty cave warmed by a brilliant light that cast no shadows.
Becca got to her feet slowly, reached out and took the angel’s hand. And stood.
“This isn’t your world,” Becca said, her voice a whisper on a breath. “Go away and leave us alone. Go!”
The red form that had risen up around Whitworth was suddenly gone. Like the flame of a candle, it left a little puff of smoke in the air to mark its passing.
The light was suddenly gone, too. The shadowless glow instantly became a little sparkle like a soap bubble.
Chapman Whitworth fell to the floor, a glove with the hand suddenly removed. His energy, his life force gone, he lay on his back, stunned and disoriented. Becca walked slowly over to the man—and he was just a man—and looked down at him. The hatred that transformed his features when he looked up at her was not the glare of a demon from hell. His was the rage of a man who had everything he wanted within his grasp…and then had it snatched away.
“You…” he growled menacingly and struggled to get to his knees. Becca put out her foot and shoved him and he collapsed onto his back again. Then she leaned over and picked up the cell phone that had flown out of his grasp when he fell. She flipped open the cover.
“Did you ever pull the wings off a fly?” she asked him.
He looked at her, uncomprehending.
She held out the phone and snapped it in two. Then she dropped the two pieces on the tile floor and stomped them. Again and again. Just like she had the rats.