Hans Mueller's eyes bored directly into us as his skinhead helpers stared up into the shadows that hid us, trying to see what their leader saw. Some took off for the stairs that led up to where we hid. They had guns.
Sammy Moapa and I pulled ourselves to our feet, out of the dust. Philip Castler tried to melt into the shadows behind us. I reached for my 9mm. Sammy brought up his sawed-off shotgun.
Mueller's eyes flashed. Not metaphorically. Not reflectively like a cat's. Sparks of actual light glinted in his eyes, and Sammy and I flew back into the wall behind us as if gravity had abruptly changed direction. The air flew from our lungs and the guns dropped from our hands.
Sammy pried himself off the wall and rolled his shoulders, limbering them up for the brawl ahead.
"Sammy," I coughed. "We're outgunned. And Mueller... we don't know what he can do. We can't fight our way out."
He looked at me as if he were trying to parse that last sentence in a foreign language.
Gun muzzles popped up the staircase, followed by shaven heads. There was silence for a few seconds. All except for the sound of Castler trying not to hyperventilate.
"Bring them down," Mueller said.
The guns motioned us down the stairs. We complied slowly, keeping our hands visible.
The skinheads formed a circle around us and drew us out in the center of the floor where Mueller met us. He glanced once at Castler quaking in his boots, and turned his head dismissively.
He took a longer look at Sammy, gazing him up and down as if assessing the destructive capabilities of a powerful inanimate object.
He saved me for last, and his lip twisted slightly in a humorless smile that seemed alien on his rigid face. Then he backhanded me with a blow that sent me sprawling.
I caught myself hard on the hands just before my forehead connected with the concrete warehouse floor.
"I've owed you that," he said, "ever since you tried to steal the book. And sicced those Mexican bastards on us."
"Great," I said, hauling myself up and wiping the bloody corner of my mouth with my thumb. "Now that we're settled up, I guess we'll be on our way."
He didn't bother to answer that. "Ropes," he said to his lackeys. "Electrical cords. Find something to tie them with."
The skinheads scurried around to comply, finding packing twine and appliance cords to tie our wrists tight behind us. I could see their tension rise as they surrounded Sammy to restrain him, even though he showed no signs of resistance. Then they sat us on the floor and tied Castler's right ankle to Sammy's left, and Sammy's right to my left. We were seated facing the doorway built in the center of the floor, a captive audience to the night's festivities.
"Time for more light," Mueller said. A couple of skinheads lit torches made from two-by-fours and set them in shoddy little holders placed around the circular design on the floor.
The construction work, I could see, was nearly done. Most of the skinheads puttered around, then retired against the nearest wall. A couple put some finishing touches to the doorway and the asymmetrical assemblage around it, straightening boards or touching up the pattern on the floor with spraypaint.
Mueller picked up the satchel he had brought into the warehouse with him, unzipped it, and brought out the huge leather-bound book that had started this whole colossal mess. He cradled in the elbow of one arm as he flipped the pages. When he found the one he wanted, he moved to a certain spot in the pattern on the floor, an eddy in the swirling lines that surrounded the doorframe.
He pulled a straight razor from his back pocket, opened it one-handed, and laid it in the valley of the book's bound pages.
He said, "Most rituals -- those of any real and binding power -- require a sacrifice of life. A blood sacrifice. Thomas, come help me."
A young man with a blond buzzcut, smoker-skinny and dotted with amateurish tattoos, detached himself from the wall and came to stand by Mueller. He smiled at us with sunken, malicious eyes.
"You three came along just when we needed a blood sacrifice," Mueller said.
Thomas smiled wider, exposing thin yellowed teeth.
Mueller pointed at Castler, who tried to shrink back ineffectually. "You, especially, should spill your blood here. You betrayed the cause. You made a commitment for something you believed in, and you ran scared -- not because you didn't believe any more. Because you just didn't have the guts to follow through on what you started."
Mueller picked up the straight razor.
"But I want you to see it," He said. "I want you three to see what you tried to stop and couldn't. I want the last thing you see to be something that tears your sanity apart like maggots eating through a dead rat. I want you to be here when He comes through. So..."
And with a single smooth motion, he slashed the razor deep across Thomas' throat.
The smile didn't even have time to drop from his face before blood was spurting out between fingers that clutched to hold closed what all the pressure of a pounding heart was forcing open. He gasped and gurgled, as some of the blood flowed back down his severed windpipe and into his lungs.
Mueller stepped back as Thomas collapsed to his knees and bled vigorously into the small whirl in the circular pattern framing the doorway.
Beyond Sammy, I could hear Castler retching. Against the wall, the tough and stringy skinheads were frozen wide-eyed, clutching each other like schoolgirls.
And then there was an electric tingle in my hair, like static electricity. The air was dry and alive, stinging my eyeballs. I could feel a wind in the enclosed airspace of the warehouse, and see the whirlwind pattern in the scuffed dust of the floor as it circled, slowly at first, around the doorway built in the center. A roaring began in my ears, greater than the wind alone could cause. The air pressure in the room was changing. I could feel it in my sinuses.
Mueller stood looking at the doorway,with a look on his face I had only seen in old footage of American teenagers waiting for the Beatles to step off the plane. It was an expression of pure worship.
And following his gaze, I looked to the doorway. I blinked, but the haze wasn't in my dry eyes. The empty air framed by the wooden posts of the doorway wasn't empty. Not exactly. It was becoming translucent like eyeglasses steaming up on cold night. Something was coalescing between the posts.
Something was going to come through.
