Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(26)
It was time to put a stick in their spokes.
There wasn’t any need to think about it: Amber had ordered me to slay the demons, so I was going to do it. These weren’t living bodies the demons had possessed but rather fresh corpses they were inhabiting, like hermit crabs squeezed into shells. But while dwelling in human form, the imps were subject to at least some human limitations. Before I passed through the gross doorway, I placed one hand on top of the imp’s head and the other underneath his chin and jerked it violently to the side, snapping his neck. He might get out of his shell soon, but he wouldn’t be charming anyone else until he did.
As he crumpled I yelled, “Go back! They’re killing people in here!” The “what the (bleep)s” multiplied, and I hoped that their sense of self-preservation would win out over curiosity. The carnival goers were quite confused, because they hadn’t precisely seen me kill the imp, but they did know that something had gone horribly wrong and someone had been severely injured. Some of them pulled out cell phones and dialed 911, and at least a couple expressed a loud desire to get out of there and headed back up the stairs.
The orifice was wet and smelled fishy and I had to sort of slither through it, since it was a slit cut into a quivering wall of protoplasm; I felt as if I’d been squeezed out through a pastry chef’s frosting gun. Dubbing it the Anchovy Gate due to its odor, I decided, for my own sanity, not to dwell on whether its substance had been secreted or shat or otherwise spawned from unsavory origins. It was a kind of gelatinous, semi-translucent slab of dead lavender sludge that filled the space completely from floor to ceiling, a tight sphincter sealing one environment off from another. Its function was clear: Without the protections it provided against smells and sound, nobody would want to continue onward, for the stench on the other side of it made me gag and the howls of people dying ahead filled me with fear for Granuaile and Oberon.
What’s happening? I asked my hound.
<Atticus, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.>
Nonsense. I can still hear you.
<They are killing people in here. Granuaile kind of woke up and figured out we’re in trouble. But so did everybody else.>
Almost there.
<Hurry!>
Everyone ahead of me had been charmed. Their need to get through that next gate was the call of a siren. If the first one had been the Anchovy Gate, this was the Needle Gate, I suppose. It was designed like those tire-shredding devices: You were fine to go through it one way, but try to back up and you’d be punctured with slivers of steel.
Still, whatever was happening on the other side, people were opting for the needles and trying to push backward through them, getting cut up in the process. Pelting through the charmed victims until I reached the gateway, I drew on the earth’s power for enhanced speed and strength.
The Needle Gate was a mass of hinged, bloody steel spikes, doubtless constructed in chunks and then assembled here, like the tent and the rides and everything else. The metal didn’t burn my skin—in fact, it was quite cool, as one might expect metal underground to be. The fabled temperature of hell wasn’t in play here; the horror of it was.
I pressed through the clacking hiss of needles and came through low onto a killing floor, rolling out of the way of a desperate middle-aged man whose face was streaked with snot and tears and spattered with blood. He tried to stick his arm into the gap in the gate I’d just vacated and wound up puncturing it on all sides. The needles must have had wee barbs on the outer sides so that as one passed through the gate they wouldn’t snag; but once you tried to back up, you’d be not only stabbed but hooked. There were at least a dozen other people crowding the gate, trying to get out as I was trying to get in, and some of them had caught their hands and arms on needles in their desperate attempts to escape. Now they could either tear free or remain stuck, but either way they had pain to deal with on top of their terror. Two people—a man and a woman—had been pushed into the needles by accident or design and were now wailing in agony, unable to win free. It looked as if others, in the frenzy of their fear, might be more than willing to tear them loose forcibly or even use their bodies to wedge the gate open if it meant escape. Thankfully, Granuaile wasn’t one of those crowding around the gate.
Oberon? I’m through the door.
<Go to the right and help us with this thing!>
I squeezed through a couple more rows of panicked citizens and emerged into an abattoir. The floor was cheap, splintery wood laid over the earth. The ceiling was surprisingly high—we had descended deeper than I thought. The reason for the height lay at the far end of the room, which was about the length of a high school cafeteria: Ghouls had stacked bodies nearly to the top and were adding more rows of fresh kills, presumably for later consumption. A demon with a scythe was supplying the freshness, and right then he was after Granuaile.
He wasn’t the actual grim reaper but a demon that had assumed the likeness; enough people associated a robed skeletal figure with hell that it made sense for a demon to take that form. It was certainly working on the psychological front.
The reaper had on the iconic long black robe but had pulled back the cowl, exposing the rictus of a merciless white skull. Tiny fires blazed in his eye sockets, and he appeared competent with the scythe, whirling it around by the little handle halfway down the shaft. Granuaile was leaping over or ducking under his swings and was losing steam, but she would have been dispatched long ago if she hadn’t trained the last six years with me in tumbling and martial arts.