The Dark Portal (The Gryphon Chronicles, Book 3) (34 page)

“Becaw!” Red said eagerly. “Caw!”

“Yes, I’ll be careful,” Jake assured him. “Thanks for staying with me, boy. We’re leaving now. See you soon—hopefully.” Then he turned to the ghost-head, which was hovering a short distance behind him. “Lead on, Brother Colwyn.”

The ghost-head glided through the air to the far end of the chamber, where Jake only now noticed the opening into another room.

He lifted the torch and followed, carefully descending a few stone steps carved into the cave floor.

These
led down into a smaller, darker chamber, which had been left in more of its natural cave condition. More giant quartz crystals grew out of the living rock in a range of unearthly hues.

But when the room’s
main feature came into view, Jake stopped in his tracks.

Straight ahead loomed
a huge, ghastly skull statue carved into the cave wall. Its open mouth offered a treacherous-looking doorway.

Where it led to
, he barely dared guess.

“What…is that?” he whispered under his breath, staring at the ominous portal.

The ghost-head floated toward it warily.

Again,
Jake followed, but only so far, stopping in front of the open mouth. “Through there? Please, tell me you are joking.”

The ghost-head
swung back and forth.
No.

Jak
e looked again at the yawning maw of the skull door, waiting to swallow him. “At least tell me what’s in there.” The ghost-head’s jaw worked, but of course it couldn’t speak. “Oh, right. You can’t.” Jake’s heart sank. “At least tell me there won’t be any more gargoyles?”

The ghost-head tilted to the side, apparently unable to promise
this, either.

Jake closed his eyes. Unfortunately, he knew his options were few. Zero, to be exact
.

Brother Colwyn had been stuck here because dark magic had tethered him to his physical skull
, but if someone as intelligent as Garnock had not found a way out, then there mustn’t be any other way.

Jake wondered vaguely why Garnock hadn’t used this doorway to leave. Was something even worse waiting
on the other side?

Brother Colwyn waited while Jake struggled to resign himself to what had to be done.

“I wish you could tell me what’s in there.”

The ghost-head
motioned to him to hurry. No doubt the monk was eager to be back in one piece after all this time.

Jake stepped cautiously
into the mouth of the huge, carved skull and studied the massive door before him. “Any idea how to open it?”

The ghost-head descended toward a smaller
, pyramid-shaped crystal outside the carving’s mouth. It was only about knee-high. Jake bent to examine it, cautiously touching the crystal.

After much trial and error, he eventually d
iscovered that it actually worked as a lever. When he tilted it back, the door rose up into the skull carving, like a castle’s portcullis being raised.

At once, a wave of heat and a foul sulfur stench blew out of the opening. Jake stood up slowly,
staring without a single blink—and disbelieving his own eyes.

A fiery vista had opened up before him.

Emrys’s tale of Garnock summoning demons to serve him rang like doom in Jake’s ears.

Well.
At least this solved the mystery of how—or rather,
where
—the alchemist would meet with his demon allies. Because through the portal, Jake found himself staring into the netherworld.

Hell
was huge.

A black city with sinister towers clawed the red, smoky sky in the distance.

Farther off, countless volcanoes spewed flame and ash. Rivers of lava oozed across the landscape, glowing red.

Deep black canyons
of despair cut through this unholy ground, crisscrossed here and there by treacherous, craggy footbridges.

Blasts of flame rose at odd intervals from the unseen
depths of those gorges. It was an obstacle course fit for a condemned soul.

He blinked a few times, but the
nightmarish realm did not disappear. Finally, Jake uttered a low, shocked curse, backing away from it and shaking his head dazedly. “I am not going in there. No, sir!” He followed Dani O’Dell’s habit of making the sign of the cross as he backed away.

The ghost-head nodded eagerly and tried to coax him down the steps that led to an open space atop a cliff.

Jake narrowed his eyes when he saw the stone table near the cliff’s edge. Table?

No, he realized
with a chill in spite of the heat that had rushed out. It was an altar.

He swallowed hard, but he still couldn’t understand why Garnock had not escaped through this doorway
when the Lightriders sealed him in.

Then the answer came to him as
he stared into the distance. Horrible demons as tall as giants were herding chain-gangs of the wicked dead to their eternal punishment. Didn’t Emrys say that Garnock had promised his soul to a demon? Maybe he had regretted the deal once he was finally staring death in the face.

If the wizard had found some magical way to bring himself back eventually in some form—say, maybe as a black fog—then surely he would’ve done all in his power to avoid going down there and handing himself over to pay his debt, as promised.

Had Garnock cheated death and the devil? Was that how he had ended up as a black fog, suspended between life and death?
Hmm.
Archie’s translation of the Spell of a Hundred Souls was sure to reveal more.

You’re stalling,
Jake told himself.

Meanwhile, the ghost-head was floating
in the air a few yards ahead of him, staring out at the underworld, as though eager to get their trek over with.

“You’re sure about this? There’s no other wa
y? You want me to sneak through—Hades?”

It
bobbed emphatically.

“What if we get caught
by one of those demons?”

It swung right to left in a negative fashion.

“What, you think they won’t bother you just because you were a holy man? What about me? I was a thief!”

The ghost-head stared at him as if to say,
Trust me.

Jake conceded that maybe after being dead for several centuries, Brother
Colwyn probably knew a thing or two about the afterlife.

Still, his stomach flip-flopped with
nauseated fear, though the sulfur stink might have had something to do with that.

Perhaps Brother
Colwyn’s being a man of the cloth
would
afford them some sort of divine protection down here, Jake thought. As for him, he
was
descended from Lightriders. That had to count for something.

He shifted his weight from foot to foot, torn with indecision. “Is it very far?”

The ghost-head tilted side to side.
Not really sure.

This is madness
,
Jake thought, but at the end of the day, he didn’t have much choice. “Fine! Let’s go, then. Before I change my mind.” Bracing himself, and already quite sure that he would regret this, he stepped over the threshold into the underworld and started marching down the hot stone stairs.

He cast a glance full of dread over his shoulder when he heard the portal bang shut behind him.

No turning back now.

The only way out…
was
through
.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Through

And so, they set out.

Jake followed the floating ghost-h
ead, hoping against hope that it knew where it was going. He could not tell how long anything took. There was no time in such a place. A minute, an hour, a thousand years—it was all the same.

He scrambled over wobbl
y, gnarled bridges that seemed too small and flimsy for the endless black canyons they spanned. They might as well have been made of rotting toothpicks.

Each spindly bridge rocked precariously in the hot, smoky, sulfur winds of the netherworld that blew so strong over those yawning gulfs. Jake looked over the bridge’s
side in wide-eyed terror. What lurked at the bottom of these pits, he did not want to know.

Every now and then he could just make out the hideous shapes of huge chained things in the darkness that had been there, groaning
in pain—but still hardened by the same hatred and rebellion—that had landed them there after the original war in heaven.

Wh
en Jake cleared the other side of the canyon, he looked around and could have sworn that he had just ended up somehow, diabolically, back in the exact same spot from which he had started out.

He nearly
panicked, but thankfully soon realized this was just one of the underworld’s illusions, and somehow, Brother Colwyn was able to steer him through.

The floating ghost-head bobbed along before him like a beacon; Jake focused on it against swirling confusion that was increasingly building in his mind, along wi
th a sense of lost desperation.

The very air down here was like a poison gas that messed with his mind.
By turns, he wanted to scream in rage or sit down and bawl his eyes out for no apparent reason.

It was a terrible place that
played terrible tricks on a person. But that was the whole point, he supposed.

Y
et every time he heard one of those distant devils let out a sinister belly-laugh at the horrified screams and suffering of all his new arrivals, he nearly jumped out of his skin.

Jake shuddered. Any thought of ever stealing anything from anyone
again melted in the river of lava he had to cross next.

He hopped from shifting stone to stone, sweating profu
sely in the impossible heat. It rose in shimmering waves from the fiery flows, making him feel as if he were one of the dwarves’ gold bars, thrust into the furnace to have the impurities burned out of him.

How he ever ma
de it to the other side, he’d never know.

Brother
Colwyn’s head waited patiently, letting him catch his breath when he reached the jagged black cinder beach of the far shore.

“
What’s next?” he panted, his lips parched and cracking.

His heart sank as t
he ghost-head indicated the mountain before him.

The way up was liberally sprinkled with broken glass.

The master of this place had really thought of everything.

Jake sighed, then wiped the sweat off his brow with a pass of his forearm. “How much farther?”

He wasn’t sure how much more of this he could take.

The ghost-head glided ahead and back several times, urging him to look up
ward. He did. Way, way up at the top of the mountain, Jake saw a small door plunked up against the red sky.

He furrowed his brow.
That’s odd.
On second thought, why expect anything logical, under the circumstances?

And
for that matter, maybe Garnock wasn’t so smart, after all. What sort of nitwit made bargains with the lord of the underworld? No wonder he had preferred to put that Spell of a Hundred Souls
on himself to try to cheat death.

Better to be trapped for centuries in an underground cha
mber and end up as a black fog—anything to avoid being sent down here.

Not that Jake felt sorry for Garnock
after what he had done to Brother Colwyn. The wizard had made his choice long ago and would not be able to escape his just desserts forever.

Bracing himself
for the last leg of his journey, straight up a barren mountain without a tree or shrub in sight, Jake nodded to Brother Colwyn’s head. “Ready.”

The climb was steep and tedious and awful. Any stumble meant a shard of glass in the knee or the hand, and the scent of blood lured nasty half-crab, half-spider creatu
res that lived among the rocks.

Again and again, Jake had to kick them away or use his telekinesis to zap them off. Meanwhile, the dizzying illusions of this place made him swear that either the path stretched
ever longer as he climbed it or the mountain itself grew.

Every time he thought he was halfway up, he found he had
the same distance still to go. The frustration almost made him give up. He would never get there.

Somehow he found the
strength to press on, and then the mountain got even weirder.

The path looped so that
at one point, he was actually crawling upside down on his hands and knees. Apparently gravity had no more sway down here than linear time.

When he slipped and fell back down the trail about ten feet, cutting his hands again and slicing open his shin, he
came to the point where he simply couldn’t do it anymore. He put his head down on his arm and gave way to tears of futile fury and absolute despair.
I’m going to be stuck down here forever. What’s the point?

The ghost-head floated back to him and worked its jaws, as though to give him a bracing pep talk. “Go away! It’s no use!
I can’t do it!”

The head zoomed around him, backing off the spider-crabs.

It dawned on Jake that they were probably scavengers that would pick his bones clean the moment they determined that he had given up, or was either dead or too weak to fight.

Ugh!
Well, they weren’t gargoyles, but the renewed threat of being eaten was enough, finally, to make Jake get a hold of himself and shake off his despair.

He gritted his teeth, narr
owed his eyes, and ignored the cuts and bruises and burns all over his body, and vowed that he was getting out of here. With a rush of determination, he got up one last time and kept climbing.
You’re not keeping me here, devil.

All of a sudden, the sound
of vicious barking filled the air. The ghost-head spun toward it in alarm.

Clinging to the side of the mountain, Jake looked over
his shoulder and promptly had to stifle a scream.

Whatever demon
was on security duty must have realized someone was trespassing and had loosed a pack of huge, monstrous dogs to hunt them down.

Hellhounds?
Whatever they were, they made the gargoyles look like sweet little kittens, and with the way they came racing over the landscape toward him, they’d be upon him soon.

Instantly, Jake
redoubled his efforts, rattling off a few silent prayers as he scrambled up the rest of the path as fast as humanly possible.

Somehow he made it to the top
.

But
now he had to jump up and catch hold of the bottom of the doorway so he could pull himself up and go through it. He tried a few times with no success as the barking grew louder. The hellhounds were at the bottom of the mountain. Jake swallowed hard and tried again.

H
is legs were so wobbly and weak after that climbing that he stumbled and nearly fell back down the path. He caught himself mid-tumble, but his hands were bleeding from the sharp rocks and broken glass.

As he lifted his gaze, half ready to give up, he wondered if
putting an exit door right here—almost in reach, but not quite—was just another torture.

Please help me.

With every last ounce of his strength, Jake found the will to get up one more time. He rose to his feet, walked up the slope to the top again, and jumped with everything he had left, catching hold of the bottom of the doorway.

His heart pounding, he climbed up precariously, bracing one foot on the threshold while his free hand flailed for the doorknob.

With a sense of victory, he grasped hold of it and turned it.

Miraculously, t
he door opened; the ghost-head zoomed through while Jake threw himself over the threshold.

Behind hi
m, the devil-dogs were racing easily up the mountain path. Jake glanced back at them in terror, then slammed the door on that terrible realm.

In the place they had come to, it was pitch-dark.

He could still hear the monster-dogs howling on the other side of the door. They rather reminded him of the Fire Wolf from his last adventure.

His heart still pounded with lingering terror.
Where am I?
“Brother Colwyn?” he whispered. “Are you here?”

The ghost-head gave off just enough of an astral glow to let Jake see the small, cramped proportions
of the room he was standing in.

It was only the size of a shed, but, oh, the smell was horrible. As his eyes began adjusting to the darkness, he sensed hollow alcoves or shelves or something on the sides of the
walls.

Gooseflesh rose on his arms.
The smell of death.

“How do we get out of here?” Jake’s
anxious question came out muffled as he used his sleeve to shield his nose and mouth from the tainted air.

Brother
Colwyn showed him. The pale glow of the ghost-head led him a few steps forward to a thick door. Out of patience and fighting panic, Jake blasted it open with his telekinesis and pushed his way out blindly, gagging from the rotting-body smell and gasping for air.

He came stumbling out of an elegant white marble
mausoleum in the cemetery across from the Harris Mine School.

T
he ghosts socializing in the graveyard before dawn screamed and fled from him, flying off in all directions.

“Who is that?”

“No idea!”

“Is he dead or alive?”

“I-I can’t tell!”

After his trek through the
underworld, Jake wasn’t sure himself.

He rushed down the few front steps of the small, st
ately white building and halted; pulling for air, he leaned forward, resting his hands on his knees.

The ghosts
warily ventured closer.

“Isn’t that the boy from the séance?”

“Lord Griffon? Yes! He’s the one everyone’s talking about!”

“Sorry, everyone,” Jake said in a sha
ky tone. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Young man, what were you do
ing in there?” a matronly ghost demanded.

“
Uh, just passing through, ma’am.”

The ghosts
stared at him in bewilderment.

When he had finally caught his breath, Jake straightened up and turned, looking around to try to get his bearings.

Sunrise was only just beginning to glimmer in the east.

To the south
was the very intersection where he and his friends had waited for the funeral procession to pass, just a few days ago.