Beautiful Chaos

Demon Door

Abraham lifted The Book of Moons, and the pages began to turn again, flipping so fast I was sure they would tear. When they stopped, he ran his fingers over the pages reverently. This was his bible. Framed by the black smoke behind him, Abraham began to read.

“ON DARKEST DAYS, WHEN BLOOD IS SPILLED,

A LEGION OF DEMONS TO AVENGE THOSE KILLED.

IF A MARKED DOOR CANNOT BE FOUND,

THE EARTH WILL OPEN, TO OFFER ONE FROM THE GROUND.

“SANGUINE EFFUSO, ATRIS DIEBUS,

ORIETUR DAEMONUM LEGIO UT INTERFECTOS ULCISCATUR.

SI IANUA NOTATA INVENIRI NON POTUERIT,

TELLUS HISCAT UT DE TERRA IPSA IANUAM OFFERAT.”

I didn’t want to hang around to see the legion of Demons that Abraham was calling to finish us off. The Vexes were enough for me. I grabbed Lena’s hand and pulled her up, running from the fire and Lena’s dead mother, from Abraham and The Book of Moons and whatever evil he was summoning.

“Ethan! We’re going the wrong way.”

Lena was right. We should have been running toward Ravenwood, instead of through the tangled cotton fields that used to be part of Blackwell, the plantation that once stood on the other side of Greenbrier. But there was nowhere else to go. Abraham was standing between Ravenwood and us, his sadistic smile revealing the truth. This was a game, and he was enjoying it.

“We don’t have a choice. We have to—”

Lena cut me off before I could finish. “Something’s wrong. I can feel it.”

The sky darkened above us, and I heard a low rumbling sound. But it wasn’t thunder or the unmistakable screams of Vexes.

“What is that?” I was dragging Lena up the hill that used to lead from the road to Blackwell Plantation.

Before she could answer, the ground started moving beneath us. It felt like it was rolling under my feet, and I struggled to keep my balance. The rumbling sound was getting louder, and there were other noises—trees splitting and falling, the strangled symphony of thousands of lubbers, and a faint cracking coming from behind us.

Or below us.

Lena saw it first. “Oh my God!”

The earth was cracking down the middle of the dirt road, the split heading right for us. As the crack spread, the ground opened up, and dirt poured into the fissure like quicksand being sucked into a hole.

It was an earthquake.

It seemed impossible because quakes didn’t happen in the South. They happened in places out west, like California. But I’d seen enough movies to recognize one.

The sound was as terrifying as the sight of the ground consuming itself. The black streak of Vexes above us reared back, heading straight for us.

The ground behind us was splitting faster, tearing like a seam.

“We can’t outrun it! Or them!” Lena’s voice was ragged. “We’re trapped!”

“Maybe not.” I looked over the side of the hill and saw the Beater skidding across the road below us. Link was driving like his mom had just caught him drinking in church. There was something in front of the Beater, moving even faster than the car.

It was Boo. Not the lazy black dog that slept at the foot of Lena’s bed. This was a Caster dog that looked like a wolf, and ran faster than one.

Lena looked back. “We’ll never make it!”

Abraham was still standing in the distance, untouched by the winds swirling around him. He turned to look over the side of the hill, where the Beater was racing along the road below.

I looked down, too. Link was hanging out the window shouting at me. I couldn’t hear him, but whatever he was urging us to do—jump, run, I didn’t even know—there was no time.

I shook my head silently, glancing back at Abraham one last time. Link’s eyes followed mine.

Then he was gone.

The Beater was still moving, but the driver’s seat was empty. Boo jumped out of the way as the car sped past him, ignoring the curve in the road. The Beater flipped, crashing down onto the road over and over.

I saw the roof cave in at the same time I heard the rip—

A hand fumbled for my arm. I was pitched into the black void that transported Incubuses from one place to another, but I didn’t need to see to know it was Link’s hand digging into my skin.

I was still spiraling through the void when I felt his fingers slipping. Then I was falling, and the world came back into view. Slices of the dark sky and flashes of brown—

My back hit something hard, more than once.

I watched the sky pull farther and farther away as I got closer to the ground. But my body slammed against something solid, and suddenly I wasn’t falling anymore.

Ethan!

My arm was caught, and the pain tore up my shoulder. I blinked. I was trapped in a sea of long, brown… branches?

“Dude, are you okay?” I turned slowly toward the sound of his voice. Link was standing at the base of the tree, staring up at me. Lena was beside him, completely panicked.

“I’m trapped in a tree. What do you think?”

Relief spread across Lena’s face.

“I think I just saved your ass with my superpowers.” Link was grinning.

“Ethan, can you get down?” Lena asked.

“Yeah. I don’t think anything’s broken.” I untangled my legs from the branches carefully.

“I can rip you down,” Link offered.

“No, thanks. I got it.” I was afraid of where I might end up if he gave it another shot.

It hurt every time I moved, so it took me a few minutes to climb down. As soon as I hit the ground, Lena threw her arms around me. “You’re okay!”

I didn’t want to mention that if she squeezed me any tighter, I wouldn’t be. I could already feel what little energy I had left draining out of me. “I think so.”

“Hey, you two are heavier than you look. And it was my first time. Cut me some slack.” Link was still grinning. “I did save your lives.”

I held out my fist. “You did, man. We’d be dead if it wasn’t for you.”

He tapped his knuckles against mine. “I guess that makes me a hero.”

“Great. Now your head’s gonna be even bigger, if that’s possible.” He knew what I was really saying—thanks for saving my ass and the girl I love.

Lena hugged him. “Well, you’re my hero.”

“I did sacrifice the Beater.” Link looked over at me. “How bad was it?”

“Bad.”

He shrugged. “Nothin’ a little duct tape can’t fix.”

“Hope you’ve got a lot of it. How did you find us, anyway?”

“You know how they say animals can sense tornados and earthquakes and stuff like that? Guess it’s the same for Incubuses.”

“The earthquake,” Lena whispered. “Do you think it made it to town?”

“It’s already hit,” Link said. “Main Street split open right down the middle.”

“Is everyone okay?” I meant Amma, my dad, and my hundred-year-old aunts.

“I dunno. My mom took a mess a people down to the church, and they’re holed up in there. She said somethin’ about the foundation and the steel in the beams and some show she saw on the nature channel.” Leave it to Mrs. Lincoln to rescue everyone on her street with educational programming and a talent for ordering people around. “When I left, she was screamin’ about the apocalypse and the seven signs.”

“We have to get to my house.” We didn’t live as close to church as Link did, and I was pretty sure Wate’s Landing wasn’t built to withstand earthquakes.

“There’s no way. The road split right behind me as soon as I turned off a Route 9. We’re gonna have to go through Perpetual Peace.” It was hard to believe Link was volunteering to go into the cemetery at night, in the middle of a supernatural earthquake.

Lena put her head on my shoulder. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

“Yeah? Well, I’ve had a bad feelin’ since I got back from Neverland and turned into a Demon.”

When we walked through the gates of His Garden of Perpetual Peace, it was anything but peaceful. Even with the glowing crosses, it was so dark I could barely see. The lubbers were going nuts, buzzing so loud that it sounded like we were in the center of a wasps’ nest. Lightning cut through the darkness, cracking the sky the way the earthquake had cracked the earth.

Link was leading the way, since he was the only one who could see much of anything. “You know, my mom’s right about one thing. In the Bible, it says there’ll be earthquakes at the end.”

I looked at him like he was nuts. “When was the last time you read the Bible? In Sunday school, when we were nine?”

He shrugged. “Just sayin’.”

Lena bit her bottom lip. “Link could be right. What if Abraham didn’t cause this, and it’s a result of the Order being broken? Like the heat and the bugs and the lake drying up?”

I knew she felt responsible, but this wasn’t caused by a Mortal End of Days. This was a supernatural apocalypse. “And Abraham just happened to be reading about cracking open the earth to let all the Demons out?”

Link looked over at me. “What do you mean, lettin’ the Demons out? Lettin’ them outta where?”

The ground started to tremble again. Link stopped, listening. It seemed like he was trying to determine where the quake was coming from, or where it would hit next. The rumbling changed to a creaking sound, as if we were standing on a porch that was about to collapse. It sounded like a thunderstorm underground.

“Is another one going to hit?” I couldn’t decide if it was better to run or stand still.

Link looked around. “I think we should—”

The ground underneath us seized, and I heard the asphalt splitting. There was nowhere to go, and not enough time to get there, anyway. The asphalt was crumbling around me, but I wasn’t falling down. Pieces of the road were jutting up toward the sky.

They scraped against each other, forming a crooked concrete triangle, until they stopped. The glowing crosses started flickering out.

“Tell me that isn’t what I think it is.” Link was backing away from the dead grass, dotted with plastic flowers and headstones. It looked like the headstones were shifting. Maybe another aftershock was coming, or worse.

“What are you talking about?” The first gravestone came out of the dirt before he had time to answer. It was another earthquake—at least, that’s what I thought.

But I was wrong.

The gravestones weren’t falling over.

They were being pushed up from underneath.

Stones and dirt were flying into the air and coming back down like bombs being dropped from the sky. Rotted caskets forced their way out of the ground. Hundred-year-old pine boxes and black lacquered coffins were rolling down the hill, breaking open and leaving decaying corpses in their wake. The smell was so disgusting, Link was gagging.

“Ethan!” Lena screamed.

I grabbed her hand. “Run!”

Link didn’t need to be told twice. Bones and boards were flying through the air like shrapnel, but Link was taking the hits for us like a linebacker.

“Lena, what’s happening?” I didn’t let go of her hand.

“I think Abraham opened some kind of door into the Underground.” She stumbled, and I pulled her back to her feet.

We reached the hill that led to the oldest part of the cemetery, the one I had pushed Aunt Mercy’s wheelchair up more times than I could count. The hill was dark, and I tried to avoid the huge holes I could barely see.

“This way!” Link was already at the top. He stopped, and I thought he was waiting for us. But when we made it up the hill, I realized he was staring out into the graveyard.

The mausoleums and tombs had exploded, littering the ground with hunks of carved stone, bones, and body parts. There was a plastic fawn lying in the dust. It looked like someone had dug up every grave on the hill.

There was a corpse standing at the far end of what used to be the good side of the hill. You could tell it had been buried for a while by the state of decay. The corpse was staring at us, but it had no eyes. The sockets were completely empty. Something was inside it, animating what was left of the body—the way the Lilum had been inside Mrs. English.

Link put up his arm to keep us behind him.

The corpse cocked its head to one side, as if it was listening. Then a dark mist poured out of its eyes, nose, and mouth. The body went slack and dropped to the ground. The mist spiraled like a Vex, then shot across the sky and out of the graveyard.

“Was that a Sheer?” I asked.

Link answered before Lena. “No. It was some kinda Demon.”

“How do you know?” Lena whispered, as if she was afraid she might wake more of the dead.

Link looked away. “The same way a dog knows when it sees another dog.”

“It didn’t look like a dog to me.” I was trying to make him feel better, but we were way past that.

Link stared at the body lying on the ground where the Demon stood only moments ago. “Maybe my mom’s right and this is the End a Days. Maybe she’s gonna get a chance to use her wheat grinder and her gas masks and that inflatable raft after all.”

“A raft? Is that what’s strapped to the roof of your garage?”

Link nodded. “Yeah. For when the waters rise and the Lowcountry floods and God takes his vengeance on all us sinners.”

I shook my head. “Not God. Abraham Ravenwood.”

The ground had finally stopped shaking, but we didn’t notice.

The three of us were shaking so hard, it was impossible to tell.