Christopher Golden - The Nimble Man

"Can you feel it, abomination? Can you feel your prison calling you back?" Conan Doyle snarled between gritted teeth.

He used his magick to strengthen limbo's grasp on The Nimble Man. The emerald energy that he wielded wrapped itself more tightly around the damned one and Conan Doyle tried to force The Nimble Man back into the dimensional doorway.

The Nimble Man began to laugh. He glared at Conan Doyle with savage eyes and bared his hooked, ebony fangs.

" Arrogant speck. You will exhaust your power soon enough. Mine only grows. When the one outweighs the other, we will have a reckoning, you and I."

Even with Conan Doyle's assistance, the gray clutch of limbo was not enough to draw The Nimble Man back through the portal. It seemed he would need a bit of a push.

"I think not," Conan Doyle whispered.

Surrendering to the pain that threatened to crack his skull, he sank to his knees. Swathed in the power of the greatest mage in the history of the world, with that mystic strength surging through him, he threw back his head and muttered a string of words in Gaelic. The Eye of Eogain burned in his face, as though his skull was on fire, and he released all the churning magicks within him in a torrent of warring colors, a stream of boiling energy that struck The Nimble Man in the center of his chest.

The damned one screamed in rage and pain and staggered backward. He glanced down at the magick that pounded into him over and over. Gray wisps of limbo encircled him, constricted him, binding his arms and wings. Conan Doyle screamed as the magick scraped the inside of his skull, scouring his eye socket. It pulsed as it jetted from the Eye of Eogain, pummeling The Nimble Man, knocking him back further. Closer to the doorway, to that slit in the fabric of reality.

The Nimble Man was smaller now. Shrinking.

It seemed to happen almost in an instant, then. Gray matter erupted from the doorway, sliding over The Nimble Man like a shroud, or a birth-caul. One of his arms broke free and those long, terrible claws grasped at the air, found purchase in the wood floor, and then scored long gashes in the wood as limbo swallowed whole this creature who had been cursed and damned by Heaven and by Hell.

There was a sound like paper tearing, and then The Nimble Man was gone, lost inside that limbo realm, gray clouds gathering at the doorway, obscuring any view within.

Some of his pain had subsided, but not all. The magick erupting from the Eye of Eogain ceased, but Conan Doyle could not rise from his knees. He barely managed to lift his hands and whisper. " Goddef yr brath iachu," he said in Welsh, exhausted. And then, as he crumbled to the floor, he added a Gaelic curse. " Go n-ithe an cat thu is go n-ithe an diabhal an cat."

The doorway closed.

The roiling energies in that room began to subside. Brilliant colors faded to nothing, and the room was enveloped in darkness. Conan Doyle blinked several times and then through his one good eye he found he could see light.

Moonlight, coming in through the windows.

Beyond the glass the crimson fog had departed.

Wincing with every movement, he glanced around. Morrigan was dead. The ghost of Dr. Graves hovered above her corpse, and Ceridwen knelt there, beside the remains of her aunt. When Conan Doyle looked at her, she smiled.

Clay sat against the splintered mirror glass of the far wall, recovering. He held in his hands the wing The Nimble Man had torn off, but even as Conan Doyle watched, it merged into his malleable flesh and he was whole again.

Eve lay on the floor, blood in a pool around her. Conan Doyle had seen her take terrible punishment before, and it always left him heartsick. Her arms were broken and her throat had been torn out. But even as he watched her, she twitched. An hour or so and she would be mostly whole. A handful of hours, and she would be herself again.

The one that concerned Conan Doyle was Danny. A demon he might be, but there was no telling what The Nimble Man's attack had done to him, what might have been damaged within him. He lay crumpled against a wall, and though the moonlight was dim, Conan Doyle thought the boy's chest rose and fell with new breath. He would need their attention, and quickly, but he was a demon. Conan Doyle did not think Danny could be killed that easily.

One hand fluttered up to his bloody eye socket, where that silver ball rested now. None of them had emerged from this conflict unscathed. But they had survived.

"You ridiculous, stupid little man," a voice whispered in the gloom behind him.

Weakly, Conan Doyle turned.

Lorenzo Sanguedolce stood above him, newly emerged from the shattered remnants of the amber chrysalis that had hidden him away from the world for more than half a century. Sweetblood had not aged a day in that time. His swarthy features were made sinister by the thin beard he wore, a style gone out of fashion long ago. His eyes were heavy with disdain.

"Hello, Lorenzo," Conan Doyle whispered.

No one else said a word. With a quick glance around, Conan Doyle saw that the rest of the room had been frozen, as though Sweetblood had pulled the two of them out of time, or trapped them in a stolen moment.

His former mentor crouched in front of him. Sweetblood reached out to grasp his head and Conan Doyle was too weak to resist. The arch mage bent to whisper in his ear.

"You little fool. You could never surrender yourself to mystery, Arthur," he said, in a hiss accented with centuries of European influence. "You could never leave well enough alone. This is why I severed our relationship, why I refused to continue to be your teacher. It may be that I would have been found without your interference. But neither of us will ever know the truth of that.

"So let me tell you what you and the Fey bitch Morrigan have been a part of, both of you unwittingly."

Conan Doyle shivered, the dread in his former master's words too much for him to bear. Sanguedolce was afraid, and that was something Conan Doyle did not think possible.

"I first felt it in the year Sixteen Hundred and Twenty Seven," the mage went on, whispering, sharing these secrets only with Conan Doyle, as he had done when they were teacher and student. "It was more powerful than anything I had ever encountered. Have you heard of the Demogorgon?"

Conan Doyle nodded, dazed, heart thundering, throat dry. The Demogorgon was a demon of legend, one of the oldest such references in ancient texts, but even so references to it were scarce. Lactantius in the fourth century. Milton. Dryden. Several others.

"Every myth has a source, Arthur. As you've come to know so well. The Demogorgon is a god-eater, a thing of power even beyond my imagining. Your Nimble Man would be a mote in its eye, that is the extent of its power. It dwells in the terrible abyss, or so the stories say. But they do not define this place.

"Well, I have found it. Or, rather, it has found me. For more than three centuries, I searched for answers. When I discovered them… The Demogorgon had been here before. That is the source of the myth. But it left this place long, long ago. When I touched it, when I sensed it, out there in that terrible abyss, in a place at the farthest reaches of the universe… it felt me. Just as I sensed its power, so it sensed mine. God-eater, yes. And magick-eater as well.

"From the moment its mind first touched my own, on that long ago seventeeth century night, it has been coming this way, making its slow but certain progress across eternity. It is coming here, Arthur. And if it reaches the Earth, no force in all of Creation will stop it. The world will not be overrun with monsters, it will not be cast into darkness, or its civilizations crushed. It will be over, you understand? Over.

"For my own protection, and for the sake of this entire damnable world, I hid myself away, shielded my magick and my presence, so that the Demogorgon could not sense me anymore. It had lost interest once before. I hoped I could make it lose interest again.