“You killed your wife,” Jeeter said.
Kale nodded dumbly.
“Man, you even killed your own little baby boy. If that isn't His work, then what is?”
None of the shining eyes blinked, and Kale began to identify the emotion surging within him. Elation, awe… religious rapture.
“Who knows what else you've done over the years,” Jeeter said, “Must've done lots of stuff that was His work. Maybe almost everthin' you ever done was His work. You're like me, man. You were born to follow Lucifer. You and me… it's in our genes. In our genes, man.”
At last Kale moved away from the wall.
“That's it,” Jeeter said, “Come here. Come close to Him.”
Kale was overwhelmed with emotion. He had always known he was different from other men. Better. Special. He had always known, but he had never expected this. Yet here it was, undeniable proof that he was chosen. A fierce, heart-swelling joy suffused him.
He knelt beside Jeeter, near the miraculous presence.
He had arrived at last.
His moment had come.
Here, Kale thought, is my destiny.
Chapter 42
The Other Side of Hell
Beneath Jenny, the concrete roadbed snapped with a sound like a cannon shot.
Wham!
She scrambled back but wasn't fast enough. The pavement shifted and began to drop out from under her.
She was going into the pit, Christ, no, if she wasn't killed by the fall then it would come out of hiding and get her, drag her down, out of sight; it would devour her before anyone could attempt to save her—
Tal Whitman grabbed her ankles and held on. She was dangling in the pit, head down. The concrete tumbled into the hole and landed with a crash. The pavement under Tal's feet shook, started to give way, and he almost lost his grip on Jenny. Then he moved back, hauling her with him, away from the crumbling brink. When she was on solid ground once more, he helped her stand.
Even though she knew it wasn't biologically possible for her heart to rise into her throat, she swallowed it anyway.
“My God,” she said breathlessly, “thank you! Tal, if you hadn't”
“All in a day's work,” he said, although he had nearly followed her into the spider's trap.
Just a cakewalk, Jenny thought, remembering the story about Tal that she had heard from Bryce.
She saw that Timothy Flyte, on the far side of the pit, wasn't going to be as fortunate as she had been. Bryce wasn't going to reach him in time.
The pavement beneath Flyte gave way. An eight-foot-long, four-foot-wide slab descended into the pit, carrying the archaeologist with it. It didn't crash to the bottom as the concrete had done on Jenny's side. Over there, the pit had a sloped wall, and the slab scooted down, slid thirty feet to the base, and came to rest against other rubble.
Flyte was still alive. He was screaming in pain.
“We've got to get him out of there fast,” Jenny said.
“No use even trying,” Tal said.
“But—”
“Look!”
It came for Flyte. It exploded out of one of the tunnels that pecked the floor of the pit and apparently led down into deep caverns. A massive pseudopod of amorphous protoplasm rose ten feet into the air, quivered, dropped to the ground, broke ire of the mother-body hiding below, and formed itself into an obscenely fat black spider the size of a pony. It was only ten or twelve feet from Timothy Flyte, and it clambered through the shattered blocks of pavement, heading toward him with murderous intent.
Sprawled helplessly on the concrete sled that had brought him into the pit, Timothy saw the spider coming. His pain was washed away by a wave of terror.
The black spindly legs found easy purchase in the angled ruins, and the thing progressed far more swiftly than a man would have done. There were thousands of bristling, wire like black hairs on those brittle legs. The bulbous belly was smooth, glossy, pale.
Ten feet away. Eight feet.
It was making a blood-freezing sound, half-squeal, half hiss.
Six feet. Four.
It stood in front of Timothy. He found himself looking up into a pair of huge mandibles, sharp-edged chitinous jaws.
The door between madness and sanity began to open in his mind.
Suddenly, a milky rain fell across Timothy. For an instant he thought the spider was squirting venom at him. Then he realized it was Biosan-4. They were standing above, on the rim of the pit, pointing their sprayers down.
The fluid spattered over the spider, too. White spots began to speckle its black body.
Bryce's sprayer had been damaged by a chunk of debris. He couldn't get a drop of fluid from it.
Cursing, he unbuckled the harness and shrugged out of it, dropping the tank on the street. While Tal and Jenny shot Biosan down from the other side of the pit, Bryce hurried to the gutter and collected the two spare cannisters of bacteria rich solution. They had rolled across the pavement, away from the erupting concrete, and had come to rest against the curb. Each cannister had a handle, and Bryce clutched both of them. They were heavy. He rushed back to the brink of the pit, hesitated, then plunged over the side, down the slope, all the way to the bottom. Somehow, he managed to stay on his feet, and he kept a firm grip on both cannisters.
He didn't go to Flyte. Jenny and Tal were doing all that could be done to destroy the spider. Instead, Bryce wound through and clambered over the rubble, heading toward the hole out of which the shape-changer had dispatched this latest phantom.
Timothy Flyte watched in horror as the spider, looming over him, metamorphosed into an enormous hound. It wasn't merely a dog; it was a Hellhound with a face that was partly canine and partly human. Its coat (where it wasn't spattered with Biosan) was far blacker than the spider, and its big paws had barbed claws, and its teeth were as large as Timothy's fingers. Its breath stank of sulphur and of something worse.
Lesions began to appear on the hound as the bacteria ate into the amorphous flesh, and hope sparked in Timothy.
Looking down at him, the hound spoke in a voice like gravel rolling on a tin chute: “I thought you were my Matthew, but you were my Judas.”
The mammoth jaws opened.
Timothy screamed.
Even as the thing succumbed to the degenerative effects of the bacteria, it snapped its teeth together and savagely bit his face.
As he stood at the edge of the pit, looking down, Tal Whitman's attention was torn between the gruesome spectacle of Flyte's murder and Bryce's suicidal mission with the cannisters.
Flyte. Although the phantom dog was dissolving as the bacteria had its acidlike effect, it was not dying fast enough. It bit Flyte in the face, then in the neck.
Bryce. Twenty feet from the Hellhound, Bryce had reached the hole out of which the protoplasm had enapted a couple of minutes ago. He started unscrewing the lid of one of the cannisters.
Flyte. The hound tore viciously at Flyte's head. The hindquarters of the beast had lost their shape and were turning as they decomposed, but the phantom struggled hard to retain its shape, so that it could slash and chew at Flyte as long as possible.
Bryce. He got the lid off the first cannister. Tal heard it ring off a piece of concrete as Bryce tossed it aside. Tal was sure something was going to leap out of the hole, up from the caverns below, and seize Bryce in a deadly embrace.
Flyte. He had stopped screaming.
Bryce. He tipped the canister and poured the bacterial solution into the subterranean warren under the floor of the pit.
Flyte was dead.
The only thing that remained of the hound was its large head. Although it was disembodied, although it was blistering and suppurating, it continued to snap at the dead archaeologist.