Dean Koontz - The Servants of Twilight

She landed on her wounded thigh and screamed as a hand grenade of pain went off in her leg.

Even as she was collapsing, the torch fell from her hand and landed on the trail of fluid that she had squirted at the huge, ugly man. A line of fire whooshed up, briefly filling the cave with dazzling light, then fluttered and went out, causing no harm to anyone.

Snarling, teeth bared, Chewbacca charged the big man, but the dog was too weak to be effective. He got jawsful of parka, but the giant raised the semiautomatic rifle in both hands and brought it down butt-first into the dog's skull. Chewbacca emitted a short, sharp yelp and slumped at the giant's feet, either unconscious or dead.

Christine clung to consciousness, though tides of blackness lapped at her.

Grinning like a creature out of an old Frankenstein movie, the big man advanced into the room.

Christine saw Joey backing into the corner at the far end of the cave.

She had failed him.

No! There must be something she could do, Jesus, some decisive action she could still take, something that would dramatically turn the tables, something that would save them. There must be something. But she couldn't think of anything.

The huge man stepped farther into the cave. It was the monster Charlie had met at Spivey's rectory, the giant with the twisted face. The one the hag had called Kyle.

As he watched Kyle swagger into the chamber, and as he watched Christine cower from the grotesque intruder, Charlie was filled with equal measures of fear and self-loathing. He was afraid because he knew he was going to die in this dank and lonely hole, and he loathed himself for his weakness and incompetence and ineffectual performance. His parents had been weak and ineffectual, had retreated into a haze of alcohol to console themselves for their inability to cope with life, and from the time he was very young Charlie had promised himself that he would never be like them. He had spent a lifetime learning to be strong, always strong. He never backed away from a challenge, largely because his parents had always backed away.

And he seldom lost a battle. He hated losing, his parents were losers, not him, not Charlie Harrison of Klemet-Harrison. Losers were weak in body and mind and spirit, and weakness was the greatest sin.

But he couldn't deny his current circumstances; there was no escaping the fact that he was now half paralyzed with pain, weak as a kitten, and struggling to retain consciousness. There was no dodging the truth, which was that he had brought Christine and Joey to this place and this condition with the promise that he would help them, and his promise had been empty. They needed him, and he couldn't do anything for them, and now he was going to end his life by failing those he loved, which didn't make him a lot different from his alky father and his hate-riddled, drunken mother.

A part of him knew that he was being too hard on himself.

He had done his best. No one could have done more. But he was always too hard on himself, and he wouldn't relent now.

What mattered was not what he had meant to do but what he had, in fact, done. And what he had done was bring them face to face with Death.

Behind Kyle, another figure moved out of the archway between this chamber and the next. A woman. For a moment she was in shadows, then revealed in the Halloween-orange light of the fire. Grace Spivey.

With effort, Charlie turned his stiff neck, blinked to clear his blurry vision, and looked at Joey. The boy was in the corner, back to the wall, hands down at his sides with his palms pressing hard against the stone behind him, as if he could will his way into the rock and out of this room. His eyes seemed to bulge.

Tears glistened on his face. There was no question that he had been pulled back from the fantasy into which he had tried to escape, no doubt that his attention was now fully commanded by this world, by the chilling reality of Grace Spivey's hateful presence.

Charlie tried to raise his arms because if he could raise his arms he might be able to sit up, and if he could sit up he might be able to stand, and if he could stand he could fight. But he couldn't raise his arms, neither of them, not an inch.

Spivey paused to look down at Christine.

"Don't hurt him," Christine said, reduced to begging." For God's sake, don't hurt my little boy."

Spivey didn't reply. Instead, she turned toward Charlie and shuffled slowly across the room. In her eyes was a look of maniacal hatred and triumph.

Charlie was terrifed and repelled by what he saw in those eyes, and he looked away from her. He searched frantically for something that could save them, for a weapon or a course of action they had overlooked.

He was suddenly certain that there was still a way out, that they were not doomed, after all. It wasn't just wishful thinking, and it wasn't just a fever dream. He knew his own feelings better than that; he trusted his hunches, and this one was as real and as reliable as any he'd ever had before. There was still a way out. But where, how, what?

When Christine stared into Grace Spivey's eyes, she felt as if an ice-cold hand had plunged through her chest and had seized her heart in an arctic grip. For a moment she couldn't blink her eyes, couldn't swallow, couldn't breathe, couldn't think. The old woman was mad, yes, a raving lunatic, but there was power in her eyes, a perverse strength, and now Christine saw how Spivey might be able to make and hold converts to her insane crusade.

Then the hag turned away from her, and Christine could breathe again, and she became aware, once more, of the scaring pain in her leg.

Spivey stopped in front of Charlie and stared down at him.

She's purposefully ignoring Joey, Christine thought. He's the reason she has come all this way and has risked being shot, the reason she has struggled into these mountains through two blizzards, and now she's ignoring him just to savor the moment, relish the triumph.

Christine had nurtured a black hatred for Spivey; but now it was blacker than black. It pushed everything else out of her heart; for just a few seconds it drove out even her love for Joey and became all-fulfilling, consuming.

Then the madwoman turned toward Joey, and the hatred in Christine receded as conflicting waves of love, terror, remorse.

and horror swept through her.

Something else swept through her, as well: the resurging feeling that there was still something that could be done to bring Spivey and the giant to their knees, if only she could think clearly.

At last Grace came face to face with the boy.

She became aware of the dark aura that surrounded him and radiated from him, and she was much afraid, for she might be too late. Perhaps the power of the Antichrist had grown too strong, and perhaps the child was now invulnerable.

There were tears on his face. He was still pretending to be only an ordinary six-year-old, small and scared and defenseless.

Did he really think that she would be deceived by his act, that he had any chance at all of instilling doubt in her at this late hour? She had had moments of doubt before, as in that motel in Soleded, but those periods of weakness had been short-lived and were all behind her now.

She took a few steps toward him.

He tried to squeeze farther back into the corner, but he was already jammed so tightly into the junction of the rock walls that he almost seemed to be a boy-shaped extrusion of them.

She stopped when she was only six or eight feet from him, and she said,

"You will not inherit the earth. Not for a thousand years and not even for one minute. I have come to stop you."

The child didn't answer.

She sensed that his powers had not yet grown too strong for her, and her confidence soared. He was still afraid of her. She had reached him in time.