Karl Wagner - Why Not You and I?

The night about them flickered, as if from distant lightning. The skies were cloudless.

Kirsten’s face twisted in fear. “John! That’s the way it came upon us last night!”

“Will walls hold the thing out?” Wells broke in. “These logs are a foot thick or better, and seasoned hardwood.”

“No protection from a fire-elemental!” Chance advised bleakly. “But Kirsten’s Solomon’s Seal may slow it for the moment.”

“Against a salamander!” Kirsten scoffed. “We’ve no choice! We haven’t a chance if we try to run! Inside, quick!”

Silent lightning flashed again. Closer.

Together they retreated into Wells’s cabin, dragging the snarling Plott hound with them. At the threshold, Chance paused to study Kirsten’s Solomon’s Seal. He nodded approval. The girl had constructed it carefully despite her haste — using some old paint Wells had saved to draw the erect triangle in red and the inverse triangle in blue. In the center she had drawn a crux ansata. Chance pulled an artist’s pencil from his shirt pocket and hurriedly added certain Names of Power in a circle about the ankh. Stepping around the figure, he joined the others and helped bolt the heavy door.

“Got a rifle or a shotgun, whichever you like,” Wells told him. “Maybe honest lead won’t do nothing against this salamander-thing — but I’m sure for giving it a hard try.”

Chance thanked him, not bothering to explain that shooting at the salamander would be about as effective as tossing mudballs at a tank. But at least having a gun in your hands made things appear less hopeless.

“Kirsten, we might try forming a large pentacle on the floor here,” he suggested. “One we could stand in as a sort of redoubt.”

The girl stooped to lay out the angles with practiced skill. It would keep her occupied, Chance figured. With his entire library at his disposal — along with access to all manner of esoteric paraphernalia, and the entire night to work in — they might contrive a protective pentacle of the necessary potency to withstand a salamander.

But they weren’t going to have all night. A sudden electric glare shone eerily across the clearing about the cabin. The salamander was getting nearer, writhing up from the nether abysses whence Dread’s sorcery had compelled it.

Chance groaned inwardly, cursing his own unpreparedness. He should have taken precautions the very instant he first had suspected Dread’s involvement in the wave of inexplicable events that had recently centered on this mountain region. Bitterly he considered the deadly salamander sigils he still clenched in his fist. Little chance of returning these messengers of death to Dread now — although he was certainly out there in the dark, exulting over his trapped enemies as they helplessly awaited death. Chance only wished Dread would show himself to them now — no feat of mesmerism would hold Chance’s finger from the trigger.

Chance looked again at the shotgun Wells had offered him.

“That’s a ten-gauge, right?”

Wells nodded from where he peered through the window. “Had her a long time, and I wouldn’t trade her for any two of your twelve-gauge pumps. She’ll just about tear your shoulder off, but both barrels together will sure clear off the front porch.”

“You got rifled slugs for it?”

“Box in the drawer bottom of the gun cabinet there,” Wells indicated. “Nothing like them big slugs of lead to cut through brush for a sure knockdown on a deer.”

Chance dove for the cabinet drawer, dug out the box of shells. There were half a dozen left. More than enough either way — whether this mad scheme worked or not. He broke open the shotgun, extracted the buckshot shells — then pulled open his pocket knife and sat down on the floor with the box of rifled slugs.

Another blast of lightning. Chance tensed, expecting thunder that never boomed.

“Oh, Lord!” Wells gasped. “It’s here!”

Kirsten leapt to her feet, too terrified to continue her efforts on the pentacle. The threat of fire would make a mad thing of her, Chance knew from experience.

“Kirsten! Keep working on the pentacle! Don’t look outside!” he shouted, snapping her back from panic. Her face a marble mask, the girl bent back to her hopeless task — fear making her usually nimble movements clumsy.

At the window, Wells yelled defiance. His.45–70 boomed deafeningly in the tiny cabin. Again and again he levered new shells into the Winchester’s chamber, firing at the thing he saw in the cabin yard. White light glared through the windows, stabbed past chinks in the log walls. The Plott hound howled and flung itself at the door.

Desperately Chance broke open the crimping of the shotgun shells and dug out the heavy rifled slugs from two of them. The Solomon’s Seal would hold the fire-elemental for only a moment — while it gathered into itself power to overwhelm and then to cross its protective barrier.

Wells stubbornly reloaded his rifle, unable to convince himself of its uselessness. Or perhaps it was that final defiance that makes a cornered animal turn and fight against hopeless odds. The.45–70 opened up again.

Not wasting a glance outside to see what he knew must be out there, Chance carved into the inverted conical bases of the rifled slugs. His pocket knife gouged out fat slivers of the soft lead. The ten-gauge slugs were massive blobs of about an ounce-and-a-half of lead — their sides rifled so that they would pick up spin in passing through the shotgun’s smooth bore. Charged with these, the huge ten-gauge was in effect a hand-held cannon.

Forcing his fingers to work swiftly despite his growing panic, Chance inserted the fingernail-sized carnelian sigils into the hollowed-out bases of the two slugs. Carefully he jammed torn wadding over them to protect the deadly bits of carved stone and secure them in place.

Needles of hellish-bright incandescence pierced the cabin’s front wall in a thousand stinging rays — seeking past every crack and loose chinking. Ben retreated from the door and backed to the wall with frothing jaws.

Kirsten, wild-eyed as the maddened hound, abandoned her distracted attempts to complete the pentacle. Her fists pressed to her chin, she crouched in abject terror, staring at the door.

Wells swore and mechanically reloaded his rifle — pivoting toward the door from his post at the window.

The door was beginning to exude smoke.

Frantically Chance replaced the modified slugs in their cardboard shells, reset the crimping.

The thick planks of the door were warping and sagging from intolerable heat. Cracks edged in glowing coal opened with fatal progression. Streamers of blue-white brilliance stabbed past the crumbling barrier — a dozen too-bright searchlights to pick out the tableau of fear within.

Chance jammed the shells into the double-barrel, slammed shut its breech. He brought the weapon to his shoulder.

On the threshold the power of the Solomon’s Seal crumbled beneath the relentless onslaught of the fire-elemental. The cabin door collapsed in a tumble of glowing ashes.

Across the open doorway crouched the salamander — a squatting lizard-shape larger than a lion, as it drew into itself the limitless power of elemental flame. Its fat tail lashed in anger, and its eyes were blinding coals of wrath. Great wreaths of blue-white flame bathed its obscene bulk, somehow not scorching the wood of the porch. Incandescent spittle drooled from its wide jaws — as the elemental opened them to feed…

At point-blank range, Chance fired both barrels into the opening maw. The recoil sent him backward against the wall.

In that instant of horror when time slowed to eternity, it seemed they could see the massive lead slugs as they blasted into the elemental’s opening jaws. A pair of flashes marked the instantaneous transmuting of solid lead to molten to vapor. Two bright bits of red continued their path into the waiting throat.