John Connolly - The Gates

The portal in the Abernathys’ basement was growing larger with every minute. The flying skulls had been followed by more demonic forms. Most were still primitive, and not very smart, but some of them were big and strong, and all of them were frightening to look at. Mrs. Abernathy watched them stumble forth into the Halloween night to sow terror: a pair of pig demons, their snouts moist with mucus, great boar tusks on either side, their little eyes glinting with menace; three winged creatures with the bodies of lizards and the heads of beautiful women, their fingers tipped with nails of steel; and a quartet of horned devils, their bodies entirely black from shoveling coals into the fires of Hell, their eyes transformed into red orbs from centuries of staring into the flames. There were creatures that looked like fossils come to life, their insides protected by hard exoskeletons, carried along on short, plated legs. Others were warped versions of earthly animals, as though the things emerging had once caught a brief but imperfect glimpse of life on this planet: goat-headed men with long, curved horns; beasts with the heads of dinosaurs and the bodies of mammals; and winged crocodiles with the tails of lions.

And then there were those that bore no resemblance to any living thing that had ever existed, pale, nightmarish visions consisting of little more than legs and bone and teeth, with no urge other than to consume.

“Go,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “Begin our master’s work. Kill and destroy until there is no building left standing and nothing left alive. Turn this world to blood and ash. Make it smell of death!” [23]

They lumbered away, and Mrs. Abernathy resumed her vigil at the portal. Through the mists, she could see more forms approaching, more demons sent to prepare the way for the Great Malevolence. Soon, the gates would disintegrate entirely, and then their master would be free at last, free to lead his great army into this world.

Nurd climbed from the sewer, unpleasant substances dripping from his armor. He had also managed to hurt his head, and there was a large lump behind his left ear, but at least he was still in one piece.

He looked to his right and instantly forgot his aches, and the nasty smells that were troubling his nostrils, and his plans to take over this place and rule it. In front of him was a sign that read BIDDLECOMBE CAR SALES. It stood on the roof of a building filled with a number of the small, fast metal things that ran on wheels. One of them, a blue one with stripes along the sides, was particularly lovely.

Nurd ran toward it with great joy, and smacked his face hard against the glass of the showroom. He stumbled back, his hand pressed to his nose. It was bleeding. The pain made his eyes water.

“Right,” said Nurd. “That’s it. No more Mister Nice Demon.”

Using an iron-booted foot, he smashed the glass. Somewhere a bell began to sound, but Nurd ignored it. He laid his hand on the fast blue stripy thing and stroked it lovingly, concentrating hard, trying to come to an understanding of what he was touching.

Car, he thought. Engine. Fuel. Keys.

Porsche.

He explored its workings in his mind until they became clear to him. There was a locked box in a small office at the back of the dealership. When he touched it, he knew that it held the keys to the cars. He ripped the door from it and instantly found the ones he wanted.

Porsche. Mine.

Minutes later, with a screech of tires and the smell of burning rubber, Nurd was in car heaven.

ALL ACROSS THE TOWN, some very strange things were starting to happen.

While Tom used flying skulls for cricket practice, a pair of old ladies were called rude names by a dark-eyed entity that appeared to be living in a drain. One of the old ladies poked at it with her umbrella until it gave up and went away, still calling out rude names, some of which she had never heard before but which, she was certain, were meant to be offensive. In her statement to local police some time later, she claimed that it “looked and smelled like a big, diseased fish.”

Two men on their way to a Halloween party dressed as schoolboys-only grown-ups think that it’s fun to dress up in school uniforms; young people, who have no choice in the matter, don’t think it’s fun at all-reported that a hunched shape resembling a lump of frog spawn, albeit frog spawn with arms like trumpets, was squatting on the roof of the hardware shop and “absorbing pigeons.”

A taxi, or something that had taken the form of a taxi, stopped to pick up a young lady on Benson Road and subsequently tried to eat her. She escaped by spraying perfume into its mouth. “At least,” she told a puzzled street sweeper, “I think it was its mouth.”

Meanwhile, in a house on Blackwood Grove, Stephanie, the babysitter so unbeloved of Samuel, heard noises coming from the wardrobe in her bedroom. She approached it warily, wondering if a mouse might have become trapped inside, but when she opened the door she saw, not a mouse, but a very long, very thick snake. A snake, oddly enough, with elephant ears.

“Boo!” said the snake. “Er, I mean, hiss!”

Stephanie promptly fainted. For a moment the snake looked pleased, or as pleased as a demon in the form of a snake can look, until it noticed that the girl had not been alone. There was now a large young man staring angrily into the wardrobe. The demon tried to discover some creature of which the young man was frightened in order to transform itself into the relevant animal, but the young man didn’t appear to be afraid of anything. Instead, he reached out and grabbed the demon by the neck.

“It’s the ears, isn’t it?” said the demon. “I just can’t seem to get those right.”

The young man leaned forward and whispered something threateningly into one of the ears in question.

“You know,” said the demon in reply, “I don’t think you can flush something all the way to China from here.”

As it turned out the demon was right: you couldn’t flush something all the way from Biddlecombe to China.

Still, he had to give the young man credit.

He certainly tried.

Over on Lovecraft Grove, Maria’s mum, Mrs. Mayer, was washing the teatime dishes when she saw movement among the rosebushes in her back garden. The rosebushes were her husband’s pride and joy. Mr. Mayer was not a man with very green fingers. In fact, he was the kind of man who, by and large, couldn’t even grow weeds, and yet something strange and wonderful had happened as soon as he put his mind to the cultivation of roses. When he and Mrs. Mayer had bought the house on Lovecraft Grove, there had been a solitary, sad-looking rosebush at the end of the back garden. Somehow, it had survived neglect, bad weather, and the deaths of the other rosebushes that had, judging by the rotting stumps, once grown there. Mr. Mayer seemed to find a soul mate in that rosebush, and was determined to save it. Mrs. Mayer didn’t hold out much hope, given her husband’s previous forays into horticulture, but she held her tongue and did not suggest that he try a cactus instead.

So Mr. Mayer had bought every book on the cultivation of roses that he could find. He consulted experts, and haunted garden centers, and lavished the little rosebush, Mrs. Mayer sometimes felt, with more care and attention than he did his wife and children.

And the rosebush began to flourish. Mrs. Mayer could still recall the morning that they had woken to find the first bud poking tentatively from its branches, soon to be followed by others that burst into bright, red bloom. It was the only time she had ever seen her husband cry. His eyes shone, and a pair of big, salty tears rolled down his cheeks, and she believed that she had loved him more in that moment than ever before.