John Saul - The Devil's Labyrinth

A black figure emerged from the shadows of the far corner of the room and stepped into the glow of the candlelight. “Come in, Ryan,” Father Sebastian said, his voice soft, soothing. “A gift awaits you.”

Beads of perspiration erupted on Ryan’s face as he struggled against the forces that were compelling him to step into that room.

“It is through my blood that you exist and you are bound to my bidding,” the black-clad priest intoned.

The words reached out to Ryan, combining with the force inside him and the power that seemed to fill the room itself, and he knew he was not going to be able to deny Father Sebastian.

He felt his fingers slipping from the doorjamb.

“I command you to submit,” the priest said, the words belying the softness of his voice.

Ryan felt his feet move, inching closer to the threshold.

“Submit,” Father Sebastian instructed, a little more forcefully.

Ryan’s left foot slipped over into the room, and instantly an eerie calm washed over him.

Suddenly he felt as if he had come home.

He looked at Melody and Sofia. Both of them were smiling at him.

Smiling in welcome, as if a family — a family of just the four of them, three children and a father — were now complete.

But that wasn’t true.

The priest wasn’t Ryan’s father, and Sofia and Melody weren’t his sisters. Something was wrong — something was very, very wrong.

“Excellent,” Father Sebastian crooned. “Please take your place.”

Ryan’s whole body trembled as he struggled to resist each step that led him to the third entrance of the intricate maze that had been drawn on the stone floor, but his mind seemed to have lost control over his body, which seemed now to be obeying only the commands of the strange presence — the thing— inside him.

The thing, and Father Sebastian’s hypnotic voice.

As if he had somehow been forced out of his own body, Ryan watched himself move to the third entrance to the labyrinth.

Father Sebastian laid a small bundle on the lid of the sarcophagus, then ceremoniously untied the scarlet ribbon and folded back the black velvet. A glint of silver flashed from the dark material, and then the priest picked up a large silver crucifix, holding it almost as if he were offering it to Ryan. But then he turned it upside down and Ryan saw that it was more than simply a crucifix.

It was also a dagger, and as the priest closed his right hand around the head of Christ, he pressed the stiletto-sharp point of the cross’s base to his lips, kissing it.

Candlelight glinted off the blade, and cold sweat began to trickle down the side of Ryan’s face.

The priest laid the holy weapon on the cold marble of the coffin’s lid, and turned again to the black velvet, opening its last fold. Now he lifted up an ancient scroll, its edges tattered, its dowel worn. Father Sebastian carefully unrolled it and began to read in Latin.

After a few words, first Sofia and then Melody began to recite along with him.

And then, even though Ryan had never heard the words before in his life, the verses began to emanate from his lips as well.

He not only spoke them, but he understood them.

They were uttering a prayer for unity.

A prayer for power.

Their voices began to rise into a chant, and though the candles seemed to grow brighter, Ryan felt the room beginning to fill with something else.

Something dark.

Something evil.

All the resistance he’d felt as he entered the room melted away, and as their chanting continued to rise, he and Melody and Sofia began moving slowly through the chalked labyrinth, weaving first one direction, then another, approaching close to one another, only to turn away at the last moment.

Back and forth Ryan walked, one slow step at a time, as if in a dream. Melody and Sofia kept passing him, each treading her own path, never touching him or each other, their courses never crossing. The strange ballet went on, the chanting rising ever higher as the three of them drew inexorably closer to the center of the maze.

Closer to Jeffrey Holmes’s cold tomb.

Their voices rose together into the howling crescendo, as if all the demons in hell had unloosed their bonds, and as the last note sounded all three of them stood at the center of the maze, separated only by the marble coffin. With the echo of their voices still reverberating in the chamber, Father Sebastian raised the heavy silver crucifix once more. He held it high, the stiletto’s point aimed at the ceiling. His voice rumbled as a new invocation rose from his lips.

He handed the desecrated cross to Sofia.

Without hesitation, Sofia drew the point of the blade across her palm, then let the blood from her wound drip onto the white marble as she passed the crucifix to Melody.

Melody repeated what Sofia had just done, and her blood, too, fell onto the sarcophagus.

The blade was passed to Ryan.

Against his own volition, he took the blade from Melody, and the instant their eyes met, Ryan saw that the light in her eyes — the light that had first drawn him to her — had completely gone out.

Something in Melody had died, and as he took the crucifix from her hands, Ryan knew that something was about to die in him, too.

But he was powerless to stop it.

He held the point steady above his wrist. Then, just as he was about to plunge it into his own flesh, a vision flashed before his eyes.

It was his father. His father clad in his full-dress uniform. A silver crucifix hung around his neck, and he was looking Ryan squarely — lovingly — in the eye. “Do not be afraid,” he heard his father say. “I have a gift—”

His father’s words were suddenly cut off as the blade bit into his flesh.

The vision vanished.

His blood flowed from the wound onto the stone lid of the coffin, and as the blood of the three of them mixed together, the white marble turned to mist, then vanished completely.

Now their blood was pooling on the rotting flesh of Jeffrey Holmes’s corpse, and as Ryan watched, the flesh itself began to bubble.

“This is my body,” Father Sebastian whispered, his voice low and raspy. “And this is my blood.”

“Eat of my body,” Father Sebastian commanded, but now it was no longer Father Sebastian at all, but only a face — a face that Ryan recognized at once.

It was the face of the darkness that had filled the room, the face of the thing inside him, the face of the thing that had come to inhabit Melody and Sofia as well.

It was the face of pure evil.

The face of the Devil himself.

“Drink of my blood,” the voice commanded.

Silently, unable to summon any resistance at all, Ryan McIntyre and Melody Hunt and Sofia Capelli obeyed the commands.

They dipped their fingers into the bubbling putrefaction that had once been Jeffrey Holmes, and completed the blasphemous communion.

“It is finished,” Father Sebastian said. “Now sleep. Sleep, and forget until you’re summoned.”

† † †

Ryan awoke in his bed, in his darkened dorm. Clay Matthews stirred in his bed on the other side of the room, then was still.

A nightmare…it had to have been a nightmare!

But a moment later, as every detail of the dream came flooding back to him, a great wave of nausea rose over him. He scrambled out of bed and raced toward the bathroom, the vomit spewing from his mouth even as he dropped down in front of the toilet. When it was over he found himself gazing down into a vile mess of what looked like entrails mixed with fresh blood.

A mess that smelled not like vomit, but exactly like the rotting corpse he’d beheld in the dream.

His gaze shifted from the toilet to the palms of his trembling hands, and as he stared at the blood-red marks where the stiletto had cut into his flesh, he knew the truth.