He who fights monsters should first see to it that they become one.
Lester decided that Boo’s initiation would be in the middle of October, one of the busiest times for the carnival. It would occur during midnight. A powerful passage. A turning. A revolution.
Now, where the smoke of the bonfire had been drifting to the starry sky, something else had taken its place. A black, silty deluge—it was heavy, thicker than silk but weightless all the same. That substance vomited out from a humanoid form rising up from the remnants of the fire. Lester hoped what she was witnessing was some unprecedented awakening. Boo’s dormant powers, lying beneath a childhood of trauma. The years of bitterness from being shunned by society.
What she thought she was seeing were tree branches.
But they were bones. Mangled and shaped, elongated, broken and reformed. They rose up in a crown, the basic size of one of the carnival’s smaller tents. Those horns connected to a skull clawing its way out with innumerable hands, spines, limbs, and an amalgamation of body parts so infinite and grotesque that even Kayn felt out of her depth.
The spire of bodies rose higher still. It screamed with the cries of a thousand voices. Beneath the earth, its soft roots searched through the soil and coiled itself around death. A heartbeat. It found it quickly. The ground vibrated with it. A continuous, rolling thunder.
Boo’s screams were shrinking away as the demon swallowed him. Embraced him like it never had before.
“I won’t let you go!”
“It’s eating him alive,” Cecilia cried into her hand.
“It won’t eat him,” Triste said. “It needs him to survive. For now.”
“For now?” Cecilia repeated.
Triste was too angry to cry, even when the last of Boo’s stifled screams were stripped from this realm.
“Don’t leave me!” Boo sobbed. His bloodied hand was visible just above the mouth all of them couldn’t see. Then it was consumed. All that was left was the sound of the carnival’s excitement behind them. And the crunching. Shifting. The sliding of cadaver parts, disjointed, mangled, heaping on top of one another. A hideous plant whose flowers were severed hands.
Triste turned to Lester, digging her nails into her. “Congratulations, high priestess, on your Rite of Entrance. Even if it had been done with another human, you’d have damned somebody! Every bastard knows these spells must have only one host. One! But now look! Your arrogance! Tossing in a demon with such malice into a ritual of oaths. Of trust. He trusted us! Boo trusted us.”
“That was Boo’s fear!” Lester shouted back. “It had to be included. It was the only way.”
“Boo feared a lot of things. Even words scared him! But this will have all of us.”
“You know what that is?” Cecilia asked.
Lester felt her legs trying to give out under her when she looked again at the spire.
The demonologist nodded. “A Gehenna Gate.” Never had respect sounded with such malice, even reverence.
It had stopped growing. But now a dark fog exuded from it, surrounded it.
And somebody was walking towards it.
Nova was reaching out with her arm as if to touch it, though she was several yards away still.
“Nova get back from that thing!” Ezra’s voice rose out from the forest.
The rest of the coven left the safety of the grove’s edges. Their warnings cried out in a cacophony at Nova.
The witch’s blue eyes were shrouded when she turned to look back at them all.
“It’s so beautiful,” she said. “The starlight …”
“Triste, do something,” Cecilia said. “You know this better than all of us.”
“Nova!” Ylva screamed, shooting out from the brush towards her.
Her footfalls slowed before she reached her. Then they matched that same, steadied pattern. Ylva’s arms were outstretched towards Nova, then they fell limp and her head slumped to the side.
The voices from the tower grew with a hungering excitement. Arms stretched out, grasping with wanton avarice towards Nova.
“I will grasp the stars,” she whispered. A tear slipped over her beaming smile. Delighted laughter escaped her. Then a shrunken arm found her fingers. It crushed her tiny bones. The structure shifted itself, making room amongst its parts. Nova was pulled in head-first into a blackness writhing with varying states of decay.
Only until her foot was the last visible piece of her, could the witches make out her distinct screams, as she awoke within the nightmare of her final moments.
Triste rushed through with her eyes closed and a fierce, white glare emitting from her hands. The creatures at the outer edges of the gate shrunk away from the light as the demonologist yanked Ylva away. She clawed at Triste, drawing blood as she steadily lost the inches gained towards Gehenna.
Scratched and bleeding, Triste left an unconscious Ylva at the outer edge of the circle that the gate commanded as its own.
Then she fell to her knees. She couldn’t feel the sting of her raked flesh in the cold air. She couldn’t see the damp earth beneath her. Or even the tears falling on her hands as she balled the earth beneath them. Squeezed it. Clenched it until it shook.
All she could see was Nova’s final moments.
They were trapped in the suffocating realisation. A nightmare none of them were prepared to conquer. A truth they could never accept, least of all after being made to witness it.
Adene was the first to speak. She knew they didn’t have time to grieve. “The carnival’s boundaries will stifle its growth for now. But that won’t last long.”
“It’s in our home,” Hazel murmured.
“And we’re going to get it out!” Lester shouted.
“It’s already taken one of us,” Cecilia said. “How—”
“Two of us,” Hazel corrected.
None of them wanted to say it. The obvious fact that the gate had devoured Boo and Nova in two very different ways. That one’s soul was trapped in there, and the other, devoured.
“There is always a way,” Ezra said.
“But first,” Adene interjected, looking towards the mountain of tents and glittering lights. “The people. They aren’t safe.”
Like an orchestra suddenly shifting keys, the lighthearted squeals and shouts from within the circus embodied a much different, far more demented tone.
Terror.
