Phantoms

of her.

Screaming, she tried to pull free of them — and found that it was surprisingly easy to do so. The thin, wormlike tentacles fell away. Lesions broke out along the length of them; they split open, and in seconds they were reduced to inanimate slime.

The disgusting mass that burgeoned out of the barroom was also succumbing to the bacteria. Gobs of foaming tissue fell away and splattered the sidewalk. Still, it continued to gush forth, turning tentacles, and the tentacles weaved through the air, seeking Lisa, but with the tentative groping of something sick and blind.

Tal saw the Towne Bar and Grille's windows explode on the other side of the street, but before he could take one step to help Lisa, windows shattered behind him, too, in the lobby and dining room of the Hilltop Inn, and he turned in surprise, and the front doors of the inn flew open, and from both the doors and the windows came tons of protoplasm that pulsated (Oh, Jesus, how big was the goddamned thing? As big as the whole town? As big as the mountain out of which it had come? Infinite?) and roiled, sprouting a score of lashing tentacles as it surged forth, marked by disease but noticeably more active than the extension of itself that it had sent after Bryce in the pit, and before Tal could raise the nozzle of his sprayer and depress the pressure-release lever, the cold tentacles found him, gripped him with dismaying strength, and then he was being dragged across the pavement, toward the inn, toward the oozing wall of slime that was still rapturing through the shattered windows, and the tentacles began to burn through his clothing, he felt his skin burning, blistering, he howled, the digestive acids were eating into his flesh, he felt brands of fire across and arms, he felt one fiery line along his left thigh, he remembered how a tentacle had beheaded Frank Autry by eating swiftly through the man's neck, he thought of his Aunt Becky, he—

Jenny dodged a tentacle that took a swipe at her.

She sprayed Tal and all the snaky appendages — three of them — that had hold of him.

Decomposing tissue sloughed off the tentacles, but they didn't degenerate entirely.

Even where she hadn't sprayed, the creature's flesh broke out in new sores. The entire beast was contaminated; it was being eaten up from within. It couldn't last much longer. Maybe just long enough to kill Tal Whitman.

He was screaming, thrashing.

Frantic, Jenny let go of the sprayer's hose and moved in closer to Tal. She grabbed one of the tentacles that gripped him, and she tried to pry it loose.

Another tentacle clutched at her.

She twisted out of its fumbling grip and realized that, if she could evade it so easily, it must be swiftly losing its battle with the bacteria.

In her hands, pieces of the tentacle came away, chunks of dead tissue that stank horribly.

Gagging, she clawed harder than ever, and the tentacle finally dropped away from Tal, and then so did the other two, and he collapsed in a heap on the pavement, gasping and bleeding.

The blind, groping tentacles never touched Lisa. They receded into the vomitous mass that had poured out of the front of the Towne Bar and Grille. Now, that heaving monstrosity spasmed and flung off foaming, infected- gobbets of itself. “It's dying,” Lisa said aloud, although no one was close enough to hear her. “The Devil is dying.”

Bryce crawled on his belly for the last few, almost vertical feet of the pit wall. He reached the rim at last and pulled himself out.

He looked down the way he had come. The shape-changer hadn't gotten close to him. An incredibly large, gelatinous lake of amorphous tissue lay at the bottom of the pit, pooling over and around the debris, but it was virtually inactive. A few human and animal forms still tried to rise up, but the ancient enemy was losing its talent for mimericry. The phantoms were imperfect and sluggish. The shape-changer was slowly disappearing under a layer of its own dead and decomposing tissue.

Jenny knelt beside Tal.

His arms and chest were marked by livid wounds. A raw, weeping wound extended the length of his left thigh, as well.

“Pain?” she asked.

“When it had me, yeah, a lot. Not so much now,” he said, although his expression left no doubt that he was still suffering.

The enormous bulk of slime that had erupted from the Hilltop Inn now began to withdraw, retreating into the plumbing from which it had risen, leaving behind the steaming residue of its decomposing flesh.

A Mephistophelian retreat. Back to the netherworld. Back to the other side of Hell.

Satisfied that they weren't in any immediate danger, Jenny looked more closely at Tal's wounds.

“Bad?” he asked.

“Not as bad as I would've thought.” She forced him to lie back, “The skin's eaten away, in places. And some of the fatty tissue underneath.”

“Veins? Arteries?”

“No. It was weak when it took hold of you, too weak to burn that deep. A lot of ruined capillaries in the surface tissue. That's the cause of the bleeding. But there's not even as much blood as you'd expect. I'll get my bag as soon as it seems safe to go inside, and I'll treat you for infection. I think maybe you ought to be in the hospital for a couple of days, for observation, just to be sure there's no delayed allergic reaction to the acid or any toxins. But I really think you'll be just fine.”

“You know what?” he said.

“that?”

“You're talking like it's all over.”

Jenny blinked.

She looked up at the inn. She could see through the smashed windows, into the dining room. There was no sign of the ancient enemy.

She turned and looked across the street. Lisa and Bryce were making their way around to this side of the pit.

“I think it is,” she said to Tal, “I think it's all over.”

Chapter 43 Apostles

Fletcher Kale was no longer afraid. He sat beside Jeeter and watched the Satanic flesh metamorphose into ever more bizarre forms.

Gradually, he became aware that the calf of his right leg itched. He scratched continuously, absentmindedly, while he watched the truly miraculous transformation of the demonic visitor.

Restricted to the caves since Sunday, Jeeter knew nothing about what had happened in Snowfield. Kale recounted what little he knew, and Jeeter was thrilled. “You know, what it is, it's a sign. What He did in Snowfield is like a sign tellin' the world His time is comin'. His reign is gonna begin soon. He'll rule the earth for a thousand years. That's what the Bible itself says, man a thousand years of Hell on earth. Everyone'll suffer — except you and me and others like us. 'Cause we're the chosen ones, man. We're His apostles. We'll rule the world with Lucifer, and it'll belong to us, and we'll be able to do any fuckin' outrageous thing to anybody we happen to want to do it to. Anybody. And no one'll touch us, no one, ever. You understand?” Teer demanded, gripping Kale's arm, voice rising with excitement, trembling with evangelical passion, a passion that was easily communicated to Kale and stiffed in him a dizzying, unholy rapture.

With Jeeter's hand on his arm, Kale imagined he could feel the hot gaze of the red and yellow eye tattoo. It was a magical eye that peered into his soul and recognized a certain dark kinship.

Kale cleared his throat, scratched his ankle, scratched his calf. He said, “Yeah. Yeah, I understand. I really do.”

The column of slime in the center of the room began to form a whiplike tail. Wings emerged, spread, flapped once. Arms grew, large and sinewy. The hands were enormous, with powerful fingers that tapered into talons. At