tore its own lips as it licked them.
Dizzied, dispirited, and weakened by the unbearable stench of death that rose from the gaping mouth, Jack shook his wounded hand above the apparition, and a rain of blood fell away from his weeping stigmata. “Go away,” he told the thing, choking on the tomb-foul air. “Leave. Go.
The face receded into the furnace glow as his blood fell upon it. In a moment it vanished into the bottom of the pit.
He heard a pathetic whimpering. He realized he was listening to himself.
And it wasn't over yet. Below, the multitude of voices became louder again, and the light grew brighter, and dirt began to fall away from the perimeter of the hole once more.
Sweating, gasping, squeezing his sphincter muscles to keep his bowels from loosening in terror, Jack wanted to run away from the pit. He wanted to flee into the night, into the storm and the sheltering city. But he knew that was no solution. If he didn't stop it now, the pit would widen until it grew large enough to swallow him no matter where he hid.
With his uninjured right hand, he pulled and squeezed and clawed at the wounds in his left hand until they had opened farther, until his blood was flowing much faster. Fear had anesthetized him; he no longer felt any pain. Like a Catholic priest swinging a sacred vessel to cast holy water or incense in a ritual of sanctification, he sprayed his blood into the yawning mouth of Hell.
The light dimmed somewhat but pulsed and struggled to maintain itself. Jack prayed for it to be extinguished, for if this did not do the trick, there was only one other course of action: He would have to sacrifice himself entirely; he would have to go down into the pit. And if he went down there… he knew he would never come back.
The last evil energy seemed to have drained out of the clumps of soil on the altar steps. The dirt had been still for a minute or more. With each passing second, it was increasingly difficult to believe that the stuff had ever really been alive.
At last Father Walotsky picked up a clod of earth and broke it between his fingers.
Penny and Davey stared in fascination. Then the girl turned to Rebecca and said, “What happened?”
“I'm not sure,” she said. “But I think your daddy accomplished what he set out to do. I think Lavelle is dead. “ She looked out across the immense cathedral, as if Jack might come strolling in from the vestibule, and she said softly, “I love you, Jack.”
The light faded from orange to yellow to blue.
Jack watched tensely, not quite daring to believe that it was finally finished.
A grating-creaking sound came out of the earth, as if enormous gates were swinging shut on rusted hinges.
The faint cries rising from the pit had changed from expressions of rage and hatred and triumph to pitiful moans of despair.
Then the light was extinguished altogether.
The grating and creaking ceased.
The air no longer had a sulphurous stench.
No sounds at all came from the pit.
It wasn't a doorway any longer. Now, it was just a hole in the ground.
The night was still bitterly cold, but the storm seemed to be passing.
Jack cupped his wounded hand and packed it full of snow to slow the bleeding now that he no longer
The wind was barely blowing now, but to his surprise it brought a voice to him. Rebecca's voice. Unmistakable. And four words that he much wanted to hear: “I love you, Jack.”
He turned, bewildered.
She was nowhere in sight, yet her voice seemed to have been at his ear.
He said, “I love you, too,” and he knew that, wherever she was, she heard him as clearly as he had heard her.
The snow had slackened off. The flakes were no longer small and hard but big and fluffy, as they had been at the beginning of the storm. They fell lazily now in wide, swooping spirals.
Jack turned away from the pit and went back into the house to call an ambulance for Carver Hampton.
