Darkfall

eyes of which Jack Dawson had spoken, those eyes of silver-white fire.
    Carver found the strength to move. He hitched himself backwards across the floor, grasping in exhaustion and wincing with rediscovered pain, leaving a trail of blood in his wake. He came up against the wall almost at once, startling himself; he’d thought the room was bigger than that.
    With a thin, high-pitched keening, the worm-thing came through the archway and scurried toward him.
    * * *
    When Lavelle jumped off the porch roof, he didn’t land on his feet. He slipped in the snow and crashed onto his wounded arm. The explosion of pain almost blew him into unconsciousness.
    He couldn’t understand why everything had gone so wrong. He was confused and angry. He felt naked, powerless; that was a new feeling for him. He didn’t like it.
    He crawled a few feet through the snow before he could find the strength to stand, and when he stood he heard Dawson shouting at him from the edge of the porch roof. He didn’t stop, didn’t wait passively to be captured, not Baba Lavelle the great Bocor . He headed across the rear lawn toward the storage shed.
    His source of power lay beyond the pit, with the dark gods on the other side. He would demand to know why they were failing him. He would demand their aid.
    Dawson fired one shot, but it must have been just a warning because it didn’t come anywhere close to Lavelle.
    The wind battered him and threw snow in his face, and with blood pouring out of his shattered arm he wasn’t easily able to resist the storm, but he stayed on his feet and reached the shed and pulled open the door-and cried out in shock when he saw that the pit had grown. It now occupied the entire small building, from one corrugated wall to the other, and the light coming from it wasn’t orange any longer but blood-red and so bright it hurt his eyes.
    Now he knew why his malevolent benefactors were letting him go down to defeat. They had allowed him to use them only as long as they could use him, in turn. He had been their conduit to this world, a means by which they could reach out and claw at the living. But now they had something better than a conduit; now they had a doorway to this plane of existence, a real doorway that would permit them to leave the Underworld. And it was thanks to him that they’d been given it. He had opened the Gates just a crack, confident that he could hold them to that narrow and insignificant breach, but he had lost control without knowing it, and now the Gates were surging wide. The Ancient Ones were coming. They were on their way. They were almost here. When they arrived, Hell would have relocated to the surface of the earth.
    In front of his feet, the rim of the pit was continuing to crumble inward, faster and faster.
    Lavelle stared in horror at the beating heart of hate-light within the pit. He saw something dark at the bottom of that intense red glow. It rippled. It was huge. And it was rising toward him.
    Jack jumped from the roof, landed on both feet in the snow, and started after Lavelle. He was halfway across the lawn when Lavelle opened the door to the corrugated metal shed. The brilliant and eerie crimson light that poured forth was sufficient to stop Jack in his tracks.
    It was the pit, of course, just as Carver had described it. But it surely wasn’t as small as it was supposed to be, and the light wasn’t soft and orange. Carver’s worst fear was coming true: the Gates of Hell were swinging open all the way.
    As that mad thought struck Jack, the pit suddenly grew larger than the shed that had once contained it. The corrugated metal walls fell away into the void. Now there was only a hole in the ground. Like a giant searchlight, the red beams from the pit speared up into the dark and storm-churned sky.
    Lavelle staggered back a few steps, but he was evidently too terrified to be able to turn and run.
    The earth trembled.
    Within the pit, something roared. It had a voice that shook the night.
    The air stank of sulphur.
    Something snaked up from the depths. It was like a tentacle but not exactly a tentacle, like a chitinous insect leg but not exactly an insect leg, sharply jointed in several places and yet as sinuous as a serpent. It soared up to a height of fifteen feet. The tip of the thing was equipped with long whiplike appendages that writhed around a loose, drooling, toothless mouth large enough to swallow a man whole. Worse, it was in some ways exceedingly clear that this was only