The roaring in my ears was like the ocean heard in the world's largest conch shell. Hans Mueller turned his worshipful eyes from the doorway in the center of the warehouse floor and smiled at the three of us, tied to each other and immobile.
He smiled and pointed up at the skylight, where the darkness of night had crept over the sky.
"The stars," he said triumphantly, "are right."
The blood pooling under the throat of the skinhead started to run, not following any slope in the floor, but crawling along the multicolored curves that grew from the assemblage in the center, like mice trying to reach the center of a maze. The skinhead didn't care. His open eyes stared lifelessly at the concrete.
Mueller turned toward the doorway in the center again and read from the book he held open in front of him. The sounds that came from his were harsh and wrenching and vowelless and bore less resemblance to a human voice than to a bulldozer splintering young trees.
"Sammy," I said. I had to say it again louder, trying to be audible to him but not to Mueller. "You still have your .38, right? They didn't frisk you when they tied us up."
"Uh-huh," he said, like he had been waiting for me to remember the revolver tucked in the back of his pants.
"All right," I said. "How're we going to do this?" My hands were tied behind me, as Sammy's were behind him, and Phillip Castler's were behind him. Our ankles were also tied to each other, ready for the world's most difficult three-legged race. Could I wriggle up to Sammy's back and get the gun out from under his coat? And could I do it without being seen?
I tried to scoot up closer to Sammy's torso, but his legs were too much longer than mine; the rope at our ankles meant I could have sat on his thigh, but that wouldn't help us.
I froze as Mueller moved, but he just turned a page and kept up his barrage of croaking pseudo-language. I didn't look at the doorway. I could see enough out of the corner of my eye -- a strange blurry grayness that sucked all the color from the light around it -- to know that I didn't want to focus directly on it if I could help myself. I didn't want to risk seeing what was coming from the other side.
"We've got to get to your gun somehow!" I hissed.
"Working on it," Sammy grunted, and I glanced over to see sweat starting on his upper lip. The muscles in his shoulders were taut and flexed. He was trying to burst the electrical cord that bound his wrists.
"Sammy," I said, "you can't pop that cord. You'll break your wrists!"
"It's stretching," he said between clenched teeth. "If it gets loose enough, I can pull one wrist out --"
Mueller barked a staccato syllable loud enough to burst through my pressure-deadened eardrums, and before I could stop myself, I looked up.
The space between the two-by-fours of the doorway was neutral and gauzy, as if filled in with the work of a thousand spiders. But it didn't stop at the edges of the doorway; the grayness was spreading its capillaries into the open air beyond, shimmering like a mirage.
But in the center, beyond the dimension-spanning haze, was something else. Something maddeningly indistinct, but still staggering with the unexplainable impression of a being, an entity, alive and intelligent, but too unlike anything human to be a "somebody". Simple personhood didn't describe it. It was immense, in ways that simply couldn't be expressed.
All this from a single glance through a merciful obscuring layer of haze. I had to drop my head and close my eyes until they stopped stinging and tearing.
I looked up at Sammy. The whites of his eyes were turning red from the breathless strain he was putting on the electric cord. His eyes were aimed in the direction of his shoes. On the other side of him, Castler was slumped forward dejectedly. He hadn't raised his head since the invocation began.
Then there was something missing. Mueller's voice. The rushing air was still swirling faster and faster around the portal, but the incantation was over, and Mueller came to stand in front of us.
"That's all I need to do," he said. "My Master is coming, and nothing can stop it. You have just enough time left to wish that you had never been born." He looked at Sammy. "You can stop trying to free your hands."
He kicked Sammy hard in the jaw, and Sammy's head snapped back.
Mueller grabbed Castler by the hair and aimed his bleary eyes at the gateway.
"Look!" he snarled. "Look at what's coming to eat your soul, Philip! Maybe you'll be thanked personally for your help before your mind gets sucked into that!"
All that came from Castler's lips was a sob. Mueller shoved his head back down in satisfied disgust.
Mueller looked over to the wall of the warehouse, where his helpers, a dozen skinheads, stood or sat, wide-eyed and frozen with fear. Not a one of them had moved since Mueller had slit the throat of one of their number for sacrificial blood. Blood which was working its way around the complex spiral to the portal at the center.
"Are you going to welcome your Master?" he jeered. "This is what you worked for, you know. You knew it! I told you! A great, expansive god for all your hate and rage! A power that could work all of the destruction you longed for! Now that it's coming, aren't you glad? Aren't you eager? It's just what you always wanted!"
He dropped the heavy book to the concrete floor, and the skinheads all jumped at the sharp thud that resounded even in the storming air. I saw dark stains spreading out across the front of a couple of pairs of pants.
"Look at it!" he commanded. And they looked. And I did too.
The gray translucence of the gate was stretching taut, like a bubble. Something was pushing, straining its way through from another world into ours. And I could see... eyes. Something I recognized as eyes, that simultaneously flashed and opened onto the deepest, darkest shadow I could imagine. The air in the room all sucked toward the doorway. The decompression made my ears pop.
Hans laughed, and it sounded like the rattle of chains. "It's the end of everything you ever knew! It's the very end of the world! It's on the doorstep, and it's coming in!"
"A little premature, don't you think, Hans?" asked a clipped, precise voice. And for an instant I believed that it had been in my head, because there was no way that Ernst Vielstich was in that warehouse.
But he was. He stood at the top of the steps leading up to the warehouse floor from the loading area, his hands stuck casually in his pockets, looking smaller a nd more wizened than ever before.
For a moment, even the mighty demon-possessed Mueller was at a loss for words.
"You have intruded upon my home in the past," Vielstich continued as calmly as if he were waiting at the bus stop. "I felt it appropriate to return the courtesy."
"You're too late, old man!" Mueller screamed, his fists balled. "Everything's been set in motion! It's inevitable from here on out!"
"No, I don't think so," said Vielstich. "It has been many years since I read the book that you stole from me, but little by little, salient details have returned to my mind. For instance, I remember why the role of the herald is so important. Your role, Hans. The essence of the heralding spirit anchors itself to the human host, and then the greater demon anchors itself to the herald. Until it has broken through into this world, it has no purchase except for the herald.
"Which means that I can disrupt your grand scheme fairly simply."
And at that, Vielstich pulled a gun from his pocket and fired.
