Bentley Little - The Summoning

"Yes!"

"They must be here for Jesus' rebirthl .... "They decided to skip it."

Someone else's beam, maybe Woods's, maybe siter's, lit upon two dark crumpled forms half hidden b hind the irregular" bone legs of the throne. Sue knew instinctively what the flashlights had discovered even before her mind recognized the figures. Corrie. And Anna.

No, she thought, willing the beams to move on. That's what it wants.

That's why it brought them here.

But the lights remained in place, trained on the hunched and blackened forms. Another beam, Buford's, joined the other two. It was obvious now that the figures were dead and nude and female. The woman's face was shoved obscenely into the girl's crotch.

"Your wife. Your daughter." The whisper came from nowhere, came from everywhere. Rich stopped swiveling the mirror.

"NoI" Sue said. "Don't listen to it!"

"Pastor Wheeler sucked out their blood and drank it. He fucked them first. He really liked the girl."

Rich screamed. It was supposed to be a word, suppos to be "No," but was far more powerful, a loud primal negation, a full-throated denial that came straight from the depths of his soul The bahtgwa slipped from his grasp, and the up hugirngsi loomed out of the blackness, step ping into the flashlight beams as the mirror shattered on the ground. As hard as he could, Rich threw his spear at the monster, but it flew sideways and clattered impotently on the floor.

Wheeler was already upon him. He leaped at Rich's head, and the two of them fell hard on the floor at Sue's feet while Robert, Woods, Rossiter, and Buford rushed for ward to help. The two of them rolled in the broken mirror glass. Wheeler was attempting to pull the jade ring from

Rich's finger, yanking back the finger itself, breaking it.

One of us will die.

Don't let it be Rich, Sue thought, but she was not sure it was a thoughL She was not sure of anything. It was all too confusing, was happening too fast. As if in a drug scene from a sixties movie, everything seemed to be crazily off center, seen through the strobe of the flashlights and the weird angles of the shattered baht gwa. She was dimly aware that her grandmother was speaking to her, yelling at her, but amidst the other screaming she could not hear what her grandmother was saying.

The cup hugirngsi stood before them, looking just as it had in the videotape, its horridly ancient baby face twisted with hate and a sickening sort of glee. The whiteness of its skin seemed suddenly phosphorescent, lit from the matetial of its substance and not from the weak beams of the flashlights.

Rich's scream spiraled upward in intensity, shifting from anger to agony, and was cut off suddenly as Sue's flashlight hand was hit with an unexpected wash of liquid warmth. The preacher had bitten into Rich's neck, into the artery, and was vainly trying to drink the spurting blood.

Rossiter and Buford pulled the screaming Wheeler off Rich's spastically convulsing body, and without a word, without a sound, without a second's hesitation, Robert stabbed the preacher through the chest, ramming in his spear as far as it would go, pushing it in farther with the weight of his body as he leaned on it. Wheeler stopped screaming, his eyes bulged, and blood pumped from the skin around the spear and from his still open lips. : This wasn't tight. This was not what was supposed to happen.

Sue faced the cup hugirngsi, spear thrust outward, dimly aware that her grandmother was doing the same. It was chaos in here, no one knew what they were doing. They were all going to die. Rossiter was shooting.

He had brought a gun, against her grandmother's specific instructions, and he was firing it at the cup hugirgsi, the reports echoing painfully in the chamber and blocking out all screams, all other sounds. The first slug tipped a hole through the monster's stomach, and for a brief millisecond there was a glimpse of red, a liquid swirling within the hole, and then the opening was gone, skin covering it up as if it had never existed. The slug immediately after it went through the monster's eye. There was a red hole, and then the eye returned. The other bullets, through the forehead and chest, created equally short-lived wounds that disap

Woods was on one knee, bending over Rich, pressing down on his convulsively jerking body.

Sue pointed her flashlight at the cp hugirngsi. Perhaps it had been playing with them. Perhaps, as her grand mother had suggested, it wanted to make its presence known to the world. Perhaps it had merely been bored and wanted a challenge. Whatever the impetus behind its decision to lure them here, it was not playing now. There was demonic purpose in its eyes, determination in its malevolent expression.

And yetw i : wit was afraid.

She knew it, knew it instantly, clearly, perfectly. It was not an insight or a revelation, not something that she discovered or that blossomed within her mind, it was simply there, in her brain, as though it was something she had always known.

D/Lo Ling Gum.

She was aware now, also, of the streams on the surface above them. She could feel the power in the twin flows of water even through the layers of dirt and rock above their heads. The streams were weak; beginning to drift at this point, but they were still there and still flowing east.

And they ran in converging paths on either side of the

The monster could move neither to the left nor to the right. It could only move toward them or away from them. It was trapped. :: Her grandmother was aware of it, too. Neither of them had spoken, but each was aware of what the other thought and felt, and it was as if they were one mind with two bodies as, willow spears extended, they stepped forward.

Sue sensed that something had been planned, that something big had been about to happen, and that they had stopped it before it started. They had thwarted the

But it was even more frightened.

The cup hug/rngs/hissed. All pretensions of humanity had fled. There was no charismatic dulcet-toned voice, no face or form borrowed from human minds, there was only this spitting, hissing thing, this ancient monster with its hate-twisted baby face and strange skinny body with its long growths of unnatural hair. Inside the terrible mouth, double rows of too many teeth chattered and clicked.

Sue felt pressure in her mind, as though her thoughts were surrounded by a wall, and something huge and powerful was butting against that wall, but it seemed surprisingly easy to keep that pressure at bay. She shoved her spear forward, tried to stab the cup hug/rgs/.

It backed away, hissed again, a sound like wind, like water.

This close, she could feel the coldness radiating from the monster, waves of increasingly arctic air that felt painful on her skin and made her want to flee, get away.

It was afraid of them.

Her grandmother stepped forward, tried to spear the cup hugirngsi, but her weapon swung on a slight arc to the left, and before she had a chance to adjust, to pull back, the creature's long, thin hand swiped toward the old woman's head.

A spear embedded itself in the cup hugirngs's upper arm, causing it to yank the arm back with a tortured scream. '

Another spear flew through the air, hit it in the face.

Rossiter,

Buord

Sue rushed forward, through the cold, the screaming wind water sound so loud that it hurt her ears, and with all of her might she shoved her sharpened branch of willow into the monster's stomach.

Blood exploded, flying outward, splashing everything, everyone. The monster's body crumpled, its form instantly losing shape, skin flapping like a deflated balloon as the crimson tide sloshed onto the ground in a truly amazing flood. There were no bones inside the body, no organs, only the blood, an astounding amount of it that continued to flow out of the sinking figure in a seemingly endless stream. It bubbled on the hard floor, boiling, percolating downward through the rock, but on Sue's body it felt cool and flat and dead, and as she glanced quickly around the chamber, she saw that the blood was not hurting or affecting anyone else either.