Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy) (41 page)

Tommy ducked under the grape arbor, but the demon slashed through it, uprooting the trellis from the ground and flinging it aside as if it were made of toothpicks. Tommy ran for the tool shed and flipped on the lights.

The Wendigo ripped the door from the shed just as Tommy pulled the starter cord to his chain saw and slashed at the beast. This time he made contact, slicing into the Wendigo’s right arm. It pulled its arm back and howled in pain, spun around, and leapt from the shed.

Tommy went on the offense, chasing after it, but he was careless and
got too close. The demon spun around and lashed him with its tail, snapping it like a whip. Tommy had been blindsided by 350-pound linemen. He’d taken a skull-ringer from a bull in the streets of Pamplona, and he’d belly-flopped from a trestle bridge once as a kid and nearly lost consciousness when he hit the water, but he’d never been hit this hard.

The chain saw flew from his hands as he rolled across the courtyard, bouncing against the chicken coop. He jumped to his feet and dived to his right, just as the Wendigo slashed at him with its talons.

Tommy ran toward the patio, which was more like an outdoor kitchen set up with commercial restaurant equipment. He wondered how many ribs he’d cracked. More than two.

At his barbecue grill he picked up a pair of hamburger tongs in one hand and a long metal spatula in the other; he slashed at the creature with the spatula, a weak defense but the best he could come up with. The creature lashed out and knocked him back again. He was thrown across his patio thirty feet, but again jumped to his feet and glanced around frantically, trying to think of something that would stop the beast. It looked at him, in no hurry to finish the job.

Then he saw it.

Tommy took the gun from his pocket and pointed it at the Wendigo.

“Okay, you nasty freak,” Tommy said. “I’m going to give you one more chance to surrender, and if you don’t, it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy.”

For a second, the Wendigo seemed almost amused as it rose up on its hind legs to tower over him.

“Have it your way,” Tommy said, raising the gun.

He lowered the gun and fired a bullet between the creature’s legs, penetrating the stainless steel door behind which sat the 200-gallon propane tank attached to his grilling equipment—which included a stove with a burning pilot light. The explosion knocked Tommy off his feet, and the ball of fire singed his hair and eyebrows. For a second he thought he was going to black out. He shook it off, waiting for the sparklies in the air to burn away and his
ears to stop ringing, and got to his feet. As the smoke cleared, he saw that the thing was gone.

Then he heard someone shouting. “Tommy—we’re over here!”

The others had heard the warning the chickens put up and had taken refuge in the greenhouse, fleeing out the back of the house as the creature approached from the front. Tommy took Dani in his arms and held her close, relieved to know she was okay.

“You got it?” Dani said, raising the shotgun she was carrying and gazing out into the night. “You have the book?”

“I had it,” Tommy said, looking over his shoulder. Dani lowered the gun. “Until that thing knocked it out of my hands.”

“How did you get it?”

“Leap of faith.”

“Where’s Carl?”

Tommy shook his head.

He looked inside the greenhouse and saw that Villanegre had been mauled by the beast. Quinn was ministering to him as best he could, using a stack of white terry-cloth towels to stanch the flow of blood from the Englishman’s chest. Cassandra stood guard at the window, Ruth’s .45 Colt automatic in her hands.

“Julian was trying to cover for us when we ran for the greenhouse,” Dani said.

“Is he going to make it?”

“Maybe,” Dani said. “A man his age, it’s hard to say.”

Tommy walked into the greenhouse and knelt beside the fallen Englishman. He leaned close to speak to him. “Can you hang on, Julian?” he said. “We need you with us.”

Villanegre looked at him, then at Ruth and Quinn, then back to Tommy. “I shall try my utmost,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m of no use to you at present.”

“Just rest.” Tommy stood. “Is everybody else okay?”

They nodded.

Ben spoke up from where he stood near the greenhouse door, looking out to the courtyard. “Tommy?”

“Are you okay, Benjamin?”

“I’m quite well, thank you. But I think you’d better have a look at this.”

Tommy went to see what Ben was pointing at and saw the Wendigo reconfiguring in the courtyard, apparently as strong and as dangerous as before.

“What’s it going to take?” he asked.

“I told you it was a terrible demon,” Ben said.

Tommy felt a sinking sensation, a moment not of doubt but dismay. He’d tried everything he could think of to kill the beast. He looked around the yard for anything he could use as a weapon and grabbed a baseball bat from a rack near the batting cage. His Taurus was out of ammunition. He took a deep breath. The others gathered around him.

“Okay,” he began. “Here’s the plan . . .”

The Wendigo raised itself up to its full height, leaned back, and roared. It was angry, and in a hurry this time.

“You said you had a plan?” Dani said.

“Right,” Tommy said. He reached into his pocket and handed Dani his keys, isolating one of them. “I’ll see how far I can lure it away from the house. As soon as you can, pick up the pages of the book and then get in the van and drive. Head into town, where there might be people. I don’t know if that will stop it, but it might.”

“Bad plan,” Dani said, hoisting the shotgun and handing the keys to Quinn. “I’m coming with you. Don’t even try to talk me out of it.”

“All right,” Tommy said. “Quinn, you drive. Cass, help him. Are you ready, Dani?”

She smiled bravely. “Not really,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s going to wait until I am.”

Together, Tommy and Dani walked toward the demon, Tommy with the Luger in one hand and a baseball bat in the other, Dani wielding the
shotgun. They’d gone ten paces when they realized Ben was walking beside them.

“I told you I was here to help you, remember?”

Tommy saw there was no point arguing with him. “How many shells do you have left?” he asked Dani.

“How would I know?” she said, keeping her eye on the creature. “I’m not a librarian.”

“How many did you fire?”

“Two.”

“You have two left,” he told her. He closed his eyes to pray. “Jesus, please watch over us and give us the courage we need,” he said. There wasn’t time for more.

The Wendigo approached them more warily this time, sizing them up.

“Spread out,” Tommy said. “Get as close as you can before you fire. Ben, I don’t suppose you have any hand grenades, do you?”

“No,” Ben said, “but I have faith.”

“So do I,” Tommy said.

“Good,” Ben said. “Your faith has been tested. It’s stronger because of that.”

The monster took another step toward them.

“Yeah,” Tommy said. “But is it enough?”

“I also have this,” Ben said. He reached into his pocket to show Tommy what he was holding.

“A Swiss Army knife?” Dani said.

“It has attachments,” Ben said.

In an instant the pocketknife began to glow in his hand, extending until it became a brilliant flaming sword ten feet long, held by a magnificent angel standing where Ben had stood. The angel was no longer disguised in human form nor limited by it. He was almost too beautiful to look at directly, the way looking at the sun hurts your eyes. He was nearly thirty feet tall and perfectly proportioned, draped in satiny silver robes,
and when he spread the massive wings on his back, the light that shone from them flooded the woods in a warm, white glow, illuminating the yard, the courtyard, the house, the garage.

“This is the form you’re probably more familiar with,” the angel said to Tommy.

Then a second angel appeared. It was Charlie, dressed in his familiar motorcycle garb. He too held a small pocketknife in his hand, and then both he and the knife transformed. The knife became a fiery blade, the kind Tommy had been thrilled to read about in the Bible as a child. The biker shed his earthly disguise and took his place beside the Angel Benjamin, both of them equally magnificent yet distinct from each other.

“That’s . . . ,” Tommy began.

“Is
awesome
the word you’re looking for?” Dani said.

“Awesome doesn’t come close,” Tommy said.

Confronted by the pair of angelic warriors, now revealed in their full heavenly raiments, the demon cowered and slunk to the side, head low to the ground like a whipped dog, lips curled back in fear. He snarled and held up a claw, talons extended, in petulant but futile defiance. The Angel Benjamin smiled, raised his sword, and swung it over the demon’s head. The wind from the angel’s sword bent the willow tree at the end of the driveway and sent its branches swaying. The Wendigo swung around to face its foes as Benjamin moved to one side and Charles to the other, cutting off any possibility of escape. The battle, Tommy thought, resembled a bullfight where the angels were matadors, dignified and regal against a senseless beast.

The demon tried to run. The Angel Benjamin flew forward in the blink of an eye to cut off its retreat. When the demon tried to run a second time, the Angel Charles leapt in front and spun to deliver a blow to the head that sent the demon sprawling. The angel bounced on his toes like a boxer, circling and cutting the demon off until he had it backed up against
the side of the garage, where it cringed, shielding its eyes from the whitehot heavenly light.

The Angel Benjamin lifted his sword high above his head.

The demon sprang forward, lunging for the Angel Benjamin’s throat.

The angel jumped to one side with the grace of a martial arts master and swung his sword down and through, neatly decapitating the monster. At the same time, Charles swung his mighty sword to split the body in half, as easily as splitting a piece of dry wood with an ax, and then, perhaps to hasten the process of decomposition, Tommy guessed, he split the halves in half before stepping away from the putrid corpse. He looked down on the slain demon as its corrupted fluids drained into the dirt, exchanging a brief but satisfied glance with his heavenly counterpart. A moment later the demon’s body parts seemed to calcify, then turned to ash, crumbled, and blew away.

In an instant the night grew dark again and the angels transformed back into Ben and Charlie. As Ben walked toward Tommy and Dani, he folded his knife and put it back in his pocket.

“We told you it had attachments,” he said.

“Will the demon be back?” Dani asked.

“No,” Charlie said. “This is permanent. He’s gone forever.”

“You were here all along,” Tommy said.

“You can trust in Christ,” Charlie said, nodding. “All our power comes from him. The things you see in this world, the forms and frames, don’t last. The love of Jesus is eternal. Everything else will fade away.”

Quinn, Cassandra, and Ruth came cautiously from the greenhouse. They all gathered around the angels. Charlie let Ben speak for both of them.

“I took this form to tell you something you needed to understand,” he said. “When I arrived, I didn’t know what my task was until you found the book.” He held out his hand to Cassandra. “Do you have it?”

Cassandra had picked up the book and gathered up the loose, unpaginated sheets of calf vellum, now pressed between her two hands.
She handed all of it to Ben, who took the book and the loose pages and then handed the book back to her, bound and collated and protected again by its cover. Cassandra looked at the restored book in her hands, slack-jawed.

“If you ever want a job at the library, let me know,” Ruth said.

“Do you know what’s coming?” Dani said to Ben.

“No, we don’t know the future,” the angel said. “But we’ll be there. And there are many more where we came from. Many who are far more powerful than either of us. We can’t tell you what to do, but use what you’ve learned. The strongest faith is the kind forged by challenge. Sometimes you just don’t know how strong your faith can be until it’s tested.”

“‘Then I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels around the throne, and the living creatures and the elders,’” Tommy quoted. “‘The number of them was myriads of myraids, and thousands of thousands.’”

“There’s a reckoning coming,” Ben said. “You’ve been chosen to do the Lord’s work. Failure is not an option.”

They heard a noise behind them and turned to see Otto crawling out from under the porch.

“You’re not very brave,” Quinn said to his dog, “but you are smart.”

When they turned around again, Ben was there, and Charlie was there, and then both faded from view.

38.

At St. Adrian’s Academy, twenty-one boys waited in the rotunda of the commons. Above them a mural, a 360-degree panorama, depicted the history of civilization, conceiving it as an unbroken sequence of wars and battles led by kings and generals, with a few scientists and thinkers (all male) and a handful of mechanical inventions added to the composition. Closer scrutiny by anyone trained in historical analysis would reveal that the inventions, suits of armor, rifles and airplanes and missiles, all had military applications or were developed in response to military needs. Close examination would also discover that next to each king or general or thinker there was a second man, smaller but in close proximity, ready to give advice.