The Gates (2009) (16 page)

“Now, Tom!” shouted Samuel.

Tom brought the bat down as hard as he could on the top of the skull. It dropped to the floor, still covered by the towel, and he struck at it until he had virtually flattened it. Samuel, Maria, and Mrs. Johnson joined him, and all four of them stared at the remains of the skulls that now littered the hallway.

“Well,” said Samuel. “I think it’s begun.”

N
URD FELT HIS FINGERTIPS
begin to tingle again, but this time he was ready. He was wearing an assortment of rusty armor, some of the few possessions he had been permitted to retain in exile, to protect himself from any unseen eventualities. As he was about to be torn out of one world and hurled into another, this meant just about every possible eventuality was unseen. Only his head remained uncovered because the helmet no longer fit correctly.

“Maybe your head has swollen,” Wormwood had suggested somewhat unhelpfully as he tried for the third and last time to force the helmet over Nurd’s ears.

Nurd had responded by hitting Wormwood hard on the head with his scepter.

“Now
your
head is swollen,” Nurd had replied. “Leave the helmet. It must have taken a dent.”

The tingling spread to the rest of his body. It was time. Nurd wondered if he would get to see Samuel again. He hoped so. Samuel was the only creature who had ever been kind to Nurd, and the memory of the boy’s company made the demon smile. He was determined to become friends with Samuel, if he could avoid being crushed by household appliances, or hit by trucks.

“Good-bye, Wormwood,” said Nurd. “I’d like to say that I’ll miss you, but I won’t.”

With that he blinked out of existence, leaving Wormwood alone once again.

“Good riddance,” said Wormwood. “I never liked you anyway.”

He looked around at the great Wasteland, which stretched emptily in every direction.

He felt very lonely.

At CERN, the collider was generating impacts at a startling rate, creating a constant stream of explosions. As the collisions released their energy, the collider filled with more blue light.

In the main control room, Professor Hilbert and his team were frantically trying to turn the collider off, to no avail.

“We’re not in control of it,” he told Professor Stefan, who was pacing anxiously in the manner of someone who sees his job about to go up in smoke. Given the amount of energy being given off by the collider, it wasn’t the only thing in danger of doing so.

“If we aren’t, then who is?” asked Professor Stefan.

Professor Hilbert reached for the volume button on the nearest computer, and turned it up to full. The control room
filled with the sound of whispering: many voices speaking in an assortment of ancient tongues. Despite their panic, all activity ceased as the scientists listened, their faces betraying confusion, yet also curiosity. After all, this was fascinating! Dangerous, and very possibly fatal to all of mankind, but undoubtedly fascinating.

Then a single voice rose above the babble, a deep voice filled with eons of loneliness and jealousy and rage. It spoke just two words.

It said:
“It begins.”

“I think,” said Professor Hilbert, his face pale,“that
he
is.”

Nurd popped into existence again in the world of men just at the point where his body felt as though it were about to be crushed to the size of a pea. He immediately began running, wary of standing still for too long after what had happened to him on his previous visits. He got three steps before the ground disappeared beneath him, and he fell down an open manhole and into a sewer.

There was a wail, then a splash, followed by a long, smelly silence.

Finally, Nurd’s voice spoke from the darkness. It said, somewhat unhappily, “I appear to be covered in poo.”

The portal in the Abernathys’ basement was growing larger with every minute. The flying skulls had been followed by more demonic forms. Most were still primitive, and not very smart, but some of them were big and strong, and all of them were frightening to look at. Mrs. Abernathy watched them
stumble forth into the Halloween night to sow terror: a pair of pig demons, their snouts moist with mucus, great boar tusks on either side, their little eyes glinting with menace; three winged creatures with the bodies of lizards and the heads of beautiful women, their fingers tipped with nails of steel; and a quartet of horned devils, their bodies entirely black from shoveling coals into the fires of Hell, their eyes transformed into red orbs from centuries of staring into the flames. There were creatures that looked like fossils come to life, their insides protected by hard exoskeletons, carried along on short, plated legs. Others were warped versions of earthly animals, as though the things emerging had once caught a brief but imperfect glimpse of life on this planet: goat-headed men with long, curved horns; beasts with the heads of dinosaurs and the bodies of mammals; and winged crocodiles with the tails of lions.

And then there were those that bore no resemblance to any living thing that had ever existed, pale, nightmarish visions consisting of little more than legs and bone and teeth, with no urge other than to consume.

“Go,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “Begin our master’s work. Kill and destroy until there is no building left standing and nothing left alive. Turn this world to blood and ash. Make it smell of death!”
²³

They lumbered away, and Mrs. Abernathy resumed her vigil at the portal. Through the mists, she could see more forms approaching, more demons sent to prepare the way for the Great Malevolence. Soon, the gates would disintegrate entirely, and then their master would be free at last, free to lead his great army into this world.

Nurd climbed from the sewer, unpleasant substances dripping from his armor. He had also managed to hurt his head, and there was a large lump behind his left ear, but at least he was still in one piece.

He looked to his right and instantly forgot his aches, and the nasty smells that were troubling his nostrils, and his plans to take over this place and rule it. In front of him was a sign that read B
IDDLECOMBE
C
AR
S
ALES
. It stood on the roof of a building filled with a number of the small, fast metal things that ran on wheels. One of them, a blue one with stripes along the sides, was particularly lovely.

Nurd ran toward it with great joy, and smacked his face hard against the glass of the showroom. He stumbled back, his hand pressed to his nose. It was bleeding. The pain made his eyes water.

“Right,” said Nurd. “That’s it. No more Mister Nice Demon.”

Using an iron-booted foot, he smashed the glass. Somewhere a bell began to sound, but Nurd ignored it. He laid his hand on the fast blue stripy thing and stroked it lovingly, concentrating hard, trying to come to an understanding of what he was touching.

Car, he thought. Engine. Fuel. Keys.

Porsche.

He explored its workings in his mind until they became clear to him. There was a locked box in a small office at the back of the dealership. When he touched it, he knew that it held the keys to the cars. He ripped the door from it and instantly found the ones he wanted.

Porsche. Mine.

Minutes later, with a screech of tires and the smell of burning rubber, Nurd was in car heaven.

A
LL ACROSS THE TOWN,
some very strange things were starting to happen.

While Tom used flying skulls for cricket practice, a pair of old ladies were called rude names by a dark-eyed entity that appeared to be living in a drain. One of the old ladies poked at it with her umbrella until it gave up and went away, still calling out rude names, some of which she had never heard before but which, she was certain, were meant to be offensive. In her statement to local police some time later, she claimed that it “looked and smelled like a big, diseased fish.”

Two men on their way to a Halloween party dressed as schoolboys—only grown-ups think that it’s fun to dress up in school uniforms; young people, who have no choice in the matter, don’t think it’s fun at all—reported that a hunched
shape resembling a lump of frog spawn, albeit frog spawn with arms like trumpets, was squatting on the roof of the hardware shop and “absorbing pigeons.”

A taxi, or something that had taken the form of a taxi, stopped to pick up a young lady on Benson Road and subsequently tried to eat her. She escaped by spraying perfume into its mouth. “At least,” she told a puzzled street sweeper, “I
think
it was its mouth.”

Meanwhile, in a house on Blackwood Grove, Stephanie, the babysitter so unbeloved of Samuel, heard noises coming from the wardrobe in her bedroom. She approached it warily, wondering if a mouse might have become trapped inside, but when she opened the door she saw, not a mouse, but a very long, very thick snake. A snake, oddly enough, with elephant ears.

“Boo!” said the snake. “Er, I mean, hiss!”

Stephanie promptly fainted. For a moment the snake looked pleased, or as pleased as a demon in the form of a snake can look, until it noticed that the girl had not been alone. There was now a large young man staring angrily into the wardrobe. The demon tried to discover some creature of which the young man was frightened in order to transform itself into the relevant animal, but the young man didn’t appear to be afraid of anything. Instead, he reached out and grabbed the demon by the neck.

“It’s the ears, isn’t it?” said the demon. “I just can’t seem to get those right.”

The young man leaned forward and whispered something threateningly into one of the ears in question.

“You know,” said the demon in reply, “I don’t think you can flush something all the way to China from here.”

As it turned out the demon was right: you couldn’t flush something all the way from Biddlecombe to China.

Still, he had to give the young man credit.

He certainly tried.

Over on Lovecraft Grove, Maria’s mum, Mrs. Mayer, was washing the teatime dishes when she saw movement among the rosebushes in her back garden. The rosebushes were her husband’s pride and joy. Mr. Mayer was not a man with very green fingers. In fact, he was the kind of man who, by and large, couldn’t even grow weeds, and yet something strange and wonderful had happened as soon as he put his mind to the cultivation of roses. When he and Mrs. Mayer had bought the house on Lovecraft Grove, there had been a solitary, sad-looking rosebush at the end of the back garden. Somehow, it had survived neglect, bad weather, and the deaths of the other rosebushes that had, judging by the rotting stumps, once grown there. Mr. Mayer seemed to find a soul mate in that rosebush, and was determined to save it. Mrs. Mayer didn’t hold out much hope, given her husband’s previous forays into horticulture, but she held her tongue and did not suggest that he try a cactus instead.

So Mr. Mayer had bought every book on the cultivation of roses that he could find. He consulted experts, and haunted garden centers, and lavished the little rosebush, Mrs. Mayer sometimes felt, with more care and attention than he did his wife and children.

And the rosebush began to flourish. Mrs. Mayer could still recall the morning that they had woken to find the first bud poking tentatively from its branches, soon to be followed by others that burst into bright, red bloom. It was the only time she had ever seen her husband cry. His eyes shone, and a pair of big, salty tears rolled down his cheeks, and she believed that she had loved him more in that moment than ever before.

Over the years, other bushes had been added to the garden. Mr. Mayer had even begun hybridizing, creating strange new flowers of his own. Now it was the experts who came to Mr. Mayer, and he would make them mugs of strong tea and they would spend hours in the garden, in all weathers, examining the rosebushes. Mr. Mayer was generous with both his expertise and the flowers themselves, and rarely did a visitor leave the garden without a cutting from one of the roses in his hand. Mr. Mayer would watch them go, happy in the knowledge that the sisters and brothers of his roses would soon flourish in strange new gardens.

Only one bush was not permitted to be touched, and that was the original one that Mr. Mayer had found in the garden. Now big and strong, its flowers were the brightest and prettiest in the beds. It was Mr. Mayer’s pride and joy. If he could have taken it to bed with him each night to keep it warm in winter, then he would have, even if it meant being pricked occasionally by its thorns. That was how much Mr. Mayer loved the rosebush.

Now there were shapes moving through the beds. It was foggy out, so Mrs. Mayer could not discern precise forms, but they looked big. Teenage trick-or-treaters, she thought,
pretending to be monsters. Silly sods. Her husband would have their hides.

“Barry!” she shouted. “Bar-eeeeee!”

Oooh, he’d teach them a lesson, make no mistake about that.

Upstairs the Mayers’ son, Christopher, was putting together a model aircraft at the desk by his bedroom window. Actually, he was sort of putting it together. He had been distracted by a message from his sister on his cell phone. It had been a bit garbled, but a few words had stood out. Those words had been “monsters,” “Hell,” “demonic horde,” and “warn Mum and Dad.”

Christopher had not, of course, warned his mum and dad. He might have been younger than his sister, but he wasn’t stupid. If he started babbling about demons and Hell to his dad, he’d be locked up, or at the very least given a sound telling off. Still, Maria had sounded very serious about it all. If it was a joke, she’d clearly been doing her best to convince her brother otherwise.

He was mulling over all this, and wondering how he was going to separate two parts of a tank that had accidentally stuck to each other, when he caught sight of the figures in the rose garden. Christopher’s eyesight was very keen and, aided by a brief break in the fog, he had a different impression from his mum of the beings currently trampling his father’s beloved bushes. They weren’t trick-or-treaters, not unless trick-or-treaters had somehow found a way to grow seven feet tall, add spectacular horns to their heads, and contrive to make their eyes glow a deep, disturbing red.