Hellhole: An Anthology of Subterranean Terror

1

“LOOK AT THE spiders,” said the guide.

The American diplomat, James Mercer, did not look up. He stood staring out over the rim of the fiery pit.

“It’s been burning for over forty years,” Mercer murmured, but the guide did not react. Both men were caught up in their own thoughts, as if they were in different movies playing at the same time.

The guide, a thin young man named Çariýar, stood on a piece of rock and kept turning in a slow circle, looking down. “Look at them, sir,” he said in a mixture of fear and fascination. “There are so many spiders—”

“Everyone thinks this was an accident,” said Mercer. “A mistake made by employees of a drilling company.” He smiled. His eyes were completely unfocused as if he wasn’t really seeing the tongues of flame licking at the sky.

The hole had a diameter of seventy meters and plunged to a depth of twenty meters. Big, deep, ablaze. The stink of methane filled the air and soft columns of gray coiled upward like snakes coupling in an eternal and erotic dance. It fascinated the diplomat, riveting him to the spot.

There was no one else at the site. Tourists did visit the pit, drawn by the lurid news stories or YouTube videos of the place known as the Gate of Hell or the Door to Hell. Turkmenistan did not see a lot of tourist dollars, and so encouraged the visitors. Today was an off day, though. Cold and cloudy, with a biting wind out of the northeast. The young guide shivered in his anorak, and the diplomat — a senior assistant to the American ambassador — wore a heavy coat, hat and gloves. He, however, was sweating. Not from the heat, which was considerable but from blood pressure that had risen steadily since coming here.

A third man, the embassy driver, sat in the car with the heat on and the radio tuned to a station featuring dutar and anbur music. The late and very great musician, Abdurahim Hamidov, was currently working his way through a classic tune and the driver was lost in the melodies. He was not paying attention at all. He did not see the spiders and could not have cared less about a big pit of fire that was the result of a bunch of stupid decisions made by natural gas miners years before he was born.

The wind blew past the car and past the two men near the pit, on into the deeper desert.

The diplomat had a bulky briefcase with him. More of a small suitcase, really. Heavy with the burden of what was inside. It took real effort for Mercer to turn away from the flames. They were so beautiful and they spoke such lovely things to him, the smoky wind whispering in a language that Çariýar could never hope to understand. But Mercer managed to wrest his attention from the flames and down to the briefcase, which stood a few feet away. He felt a catch in his throat when he thought about what he was here to do. The honor of it was nearly too much to accept. To be chosen for this — for this — was incredible. It was the kind of thing the people in his group dreamed of, prayed for, ached for with every fiber of their being. There were older members, more important members, people of staggering importance, and yet this task had fallen to him. This undertaking. This gift.

He lowered himself to his knees and carefully placed the case on its side. His fingers trembled so badly that it took five tries to spin the dials of the locks. The click was so soft that he knew only he heard it. He took a breath and then opened the case to reveal the book.

The book.

Good god, how beautiful. He mouthed the words but did not say anything aloud. It was bound with heavy wood covers wrapped in skin. There was no writing on the cover, no title or author given. Instead it was engraved with spiders of every kind, including some Mercer had only seen in dreams. Vast, ponderous monsters with three legs instead of eight. Most, though, were kinds he knew well; like the kind that held the guide in such horrified awe. Jumping spiders and orb weavers and cellar spiders and wolf spiders. Beautiful animals. Perfect in their clever cruelty and wise in endless patience.

Mercer bent and kissed the book, making sure first that Çariýar and the driver were not looking. The kiss lingered and to him it was like kissing the thigh of a beautiful woman. Warm and yielding, as if the skin was alive. He felt himself grow hard. Ending that kiss was so difficult. It hurt him, but this was not his to linger over and he knew it. After all, they were watching. They were waiting.

He took off his gloves and then removed a small sheathed knife from his coat pocket. It was not much larger than a steak knife, and the silver metal with its razor edge had been properly blessed and seasoned, tasting only the blood of infants before now. He murmured a prayer in a language not spoken in this place in thousands of years. Then he gripped the handle in his left hand and drew the blade across his right palm, making three long cuts that formed a bloody star. Then he switched the knife to his right and repeated the action on his left hand. He placed the knife carefully in the open lid of the case and pressed both hands to the front cover of the book. He winced as the book drank his blood.

It took a lot but not too much because he had so much work still to do.

Mercer opened the book to a page marked with a lock of hair he had cut that morning from his little daughter’s scalp. She would not need the hair any longer. A small part of his mind idly wondered if they had found the bodies yet. Daughter and wife, maid and cook. They were there to be found. He didn’t care when or by whom.

Then he shook the thought from his mind and concentrated on his sacred task. The page was written in a dead language, but it wasn’t dead to him. It was so completely and thoroughly alive. Each word burned in his mind, flooding him with love and hope and purpose. Tears ran down his cheeks and his mouth curled upward in a smile of the purest joy.

The next action took the greatest effort and actually caused him pain despite being absolutely necessary. It felt like sacrilege as he took the corner of the exposed page and tore it from the book. The page did not cry out, but Mercer did. A guttural gasp of agony as real as if he had cut off his own hand.

“Bless me,” he said. “Forgive me.”

The torn edge of the page glowed as if somehow fire burned in its fibers. The page was not consumed, though, and he rose with it in his hand. He did not forget to take the knife, too.

Çariýar was still staring in fascination at the dozens of spiders that wandered out of the desert and crawled along the edge of the pit. Some scuttled over the edge and fell; others attached webs and lowered themselves into the hellish heat.

“I don’t understand,” said the young guide for maybe the tenth time. “Mr. Mercer, you should really see this.”

“I can see it,” said Mercer. Çariýar jumped and turned, surprised that the diplomat was there, and that he’d come up so silently. It took the young man a moment longer to register all of the things about Mercer that were wrong.

The spiders that climbed up the older man’s clothes, and inside trouser cuffs and beneath his coat. One crawled across Mercer’s smiling face. That smile was wrong, too. The guide frowned at the torn book page and the small knife, unable to process all of these strange things at once. Worse still was the blood that was so bright it seemed to scream. Mercer’s hands were soaked with it, and there were spatters on the man’s brown topcoat and shoes.

“Mr. Mercer, sir,” gasped Çariýar, “have you cut yourself?”

“Yes,” said Mercer. “I have. Here. Take this.”

He reached out quickly, slapping the page against Çariýar’s chest and, before the guide could properly react, pinned it there by driving the knife to the hilt in the young man’s chest. The angle of thrust was something Mercer had practiced for years and despite his trembling hands, he did it exactly right. The blade punched between ribs and muscle and into Çariýar’s heart.

“I love you for this,” said Mercer as the guide coughed once and dropped to his knees. Çariýar looked at him with a confusion that was profound, and then his eyes rolled up and he fell sideways, one arm flopping over the edge of the pit. Several spiders immediately crawled over him and raced to the ends of his fingers, stood for a moment, and then dropped off into the fires below.

Mercer let out a ragged sigh that was nearly orgasmic. Then he turned and walked quickly over to the car, approaching from what he determined was the blind side, and circled around to the driver’s side, effectively positioning the car between him and the corpse, drawing attention his way. He reached beneath his coat for the second weapon he’d brought with him. It was a small automatic, a Glock 42, with six rounds single-stacked into the magazine. As soon as the driver began rolling down the window, Mercer emptied the magazine into the man’s face. It was very loud and very messy, and the body flopped back with very little of the head left intact.

“I love you for this,” Mercer told him. He dropped the pistol, went over to the briefcase and removed the book, giving it a loving kiss and a covetous lick before walking over to the pit.

No one was left to see him step over the edge and drop into the mouth of hell.

2

I AM NOT a very nice guy. That’s not my job. They don’t call me when they want to make people happy.

Same goes for the two guys sharing the ride with me — First Sergeant Bradley “Top” Sims and Master Sergeant Harvey “Bunny” Rabbit. Like me, they were ex-US military. Like me they didn’t work for anyone in the US of A anymore. Like me they weren’t all that nice.

We’re good guys, but “nice” isn’t a job requirement. For what we do. All three of us were big men, though Bunny abused that privilege and towered over us at six and a half feet. Top was an even six and I was six-two. Bunny could bench press both of us and have some room for one or both of the Dakotas. Big moose of a kid from Orange County. Sandy blond hair, blue eyes, a surfer’s lazy smile and a good heart, unless you got between him and his mission objective.

Top was the old man of the team, clocking in somewhere north of forty and lying about it. He wasn’t slowing down much that I could see, and the only evidence of all those hard years was the network of scar tissue — old and new — patterned across his dark brown skin.

My girlfriend likes to tell people I look like the guy who played Captain America in the Marvel movies. I don’t. He looks like a pretty nice guy and I seriously doubt he’s ever drawn blood with bullets, blades or hands. I have. Sure, I’m a blond-haired, blue-eyed all-American boy from Baltimore, but when people look me in the eye their gaze tends to shift away. The ones who don’t are either bad guys making poor life choices, or fellow soldiers who have walked through the valley of the shadow.

We were on my private jet crossing Turkish airspace on the way to Turkmenistan. I’ve been all over the world — all three of us have, separately and together — but none of us had been there. And we didn’t know why we were going there.

There was a soft bing-bong and the pilot’s voice said, “Captain Ledger, the big man is on line.”

Bunny reached over to the high-def screen mounted on the wall. The cabin was sound-proofed and we all had cold beers.

A face filled the screen. Church is a big, blocky man with dark hair going gray. He wears tinted glasses because he prefers not to have people read him — and eyes are a common “tell.” His suits are more expensive than my car and he wears black silk gloves to hide severe frostbite damage from a previous case.

Once upon a time Church was some kind of high-level field operator. A shooter and a spy. I don’t know all the details, but from what I’ve been able to piece together he was a true and legendary badass. He scares the people who scare me. So, even guys like us sit like school boys and pay attention.

“Gentlemen,” Church said, “are you familiar with this?”

The screen split so that a new image appeared, showing a large, round hole clearly blazing with fire.

“Yeah,” I said, “that’s a bathroom selfie of me after Rudy made that chili with ghost peppers.”

A beat. Church said nothing. The weight of his disapproval was crushing. Bunny stifled a grin and Top gave me a slow, sad shake of his head. I am nominally the boss, but Top’s usually the adult in any given room.

“No,” I said contritely, “I don’t know what it is. Other than a burning hole, what is it?”

“It’s called the Gates of Hell.”

“Sounds right,” said Bunny.

“It’s also known as the ‘Door to Hell’,” said Church. “The official name is the Darvaza gas crater. It’s located near the village of Derweze in the Karakum Desert of Turkmenistan, roughly two hundred and sixty kilometers north of the capital city of Ashgabat. This pit is what’s left of a natural gas field that collapsed into an underground cavern. The collapse released clouds of methane. The team of geologists apparently believed that the methane could easily be burned off, and so they ignited it in hopes of reclaiming the natural gas deposit. That was one of a number of strikingly ill-considered decisions and the pit has been burning continuously since 1971. It shows no sign of burning out anytime soon.”

“Well now, that’s a level of stupid all its own, isn’t it?” said Top sourly.

“It creates a challenge to sympathy,” admitted Church.

“All that said, why am I looking at… this? What do you want me to do with a giant fire pit? Shoot it? Try and piss in it to put it out?”

Church reached out of shot and returned with a cookie. He always had a tray of cookies, mostly vanilla wafers. Once in a while he’ll add some Oreos or, if he’s in a particularly jocular mood, animal crackers. He bit a piece of the wafer, chewed it, studied me. Then he picked up his narrative without actually answering my question. “The site draws a fair number of tourists each year and has become something of a bucket-list item for world travelers.”

“It’s not on my bucket list,” Bunny said.

I nodded. “And you still haven’t told me why we’re going there.”

“Three days ago, a key American diplomat, James Mercer, went missing at the site,” said Church. “He is ostensibly the senior aide to the ambassador but is actually with the Agency. His brief is to track illegal shipments of technology and other items passing though that region.”

Top held up a hand. “Don’t mean to be contrary, but are we working missing persons cases now? Can’t the CIA mind its own missing sheep?”

“The situation is much more complicated than that, First Sergeant,” said Church. “Two bodies were discovered yesterday at the rim of the crater.” He explained about the murders of a local guide and the diplomat’s driver. “The embassy’s security team was able to take ownership of the scene thanks to a little Agency bullying. They did a quick forensics workup on the knife used to stab the guide and the handgun used on the driver. Both had clear fingerprints, and both sets match those of James Mercer. And Mercer’s blood was all over the handles of each weapon, so it’s clear he was injured as well. There is no sign of a struggle in either case. Just clean kills.”

“Um—” began Bunny, then shook his head. “Nope, got nothing.”

“Have local police been involved in a search?” asked Top.

“Yes. And the military police — theirs and ours. Bug and his computer team have done deep searches on Mercer. None of his credit cards have been used and facial recognition hasn’t picked him up on airport cameras. There are no traffic cams in Turkmenistan, and very few CCTV cams, so Bug is limited there. It seems clear, though, that Mercer has either gone to ground somewhere or—”

“Or maybe jumped into the fire pit?” Bunny suggested, and Church nodded.

“If he’s toast,” I said, “they don’t need us there. So, you’re thinking he’s in a bolt hole or safe house somewhere?”

“We have to accept that as a possibility.”

“Does the Agency think their man’s been turned?” I asked.

“Unknown. I’ve pulled some strings to have the case taken away from them.”

“Why?”

“Because of this.” A new image flashed onto the screen. It was of a large page that had been torn from a book. There was one ragged edge and a slit in the middle. Blood mostly obscured the page, thickest near the slit. Church explained that the page had been pinned to the dead guide’s chest with the knife.

We all leaned forward to study the page. I’m really good with languages, but it looked like chicken scratches.

“What language is that?” asked Bunny. “It’s all Greek to me.”

“It’s not Greek, Farm Boy,” said Top.

“I know that. It’s just an expression.”

“The language is part of the reason I asked for this case,” said Church quietly. “It is an extremely rare subdialect of Sumerian. An attempt by later writers to modify cuneiform.”

“Really,” said Bunny again, “I got nothing.”

“The page is believed to have come from this book,” said Church, and another image filled the screen. A very large book lay in a niche in a stone wall, its covers secured with heavy chains and ancient padlocks that looked to have been welded permanently shut. “The book was part of a private collection overseen by Islamic and Eastern Orthodox clerics. A very special kind of shared conservancy, and it’s a stewardship that dates back centuries.”

I felt my heart go cold and sink to a lower and darker place in my chest. Top and Bunny came to point like hunting dogs, but not happy ones.

I said, “You’re going to tell me that this is one of those books, aren’t you?”

Church did not smile. He didn’t actually move.

“The Unlearnable Truths,” whispered Top in a hollow voice. “Fuck me—”

We logged a lot of silent miles before any of us spoke. The Unlearnable Truths was like a hex to us. They were books belonging to a very specific list of works that have been deemed “dangerous.” There was a larger list, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, also known as the Pauline Index, named for Pope Paul IV back in 1559. Most of the titles on the Index were merely heretical or viewed as contrary to the politics and agenda of the Catholic Church. However, there was a second, shorter list that was never shared with the public. Word leaked out, of course, but secrets are like that. This second list became known as the Unlearnable Truths. Many of the titles on that list were individually known to the public, but once leaked there was a pretty effective campaign by church spin doctors to make people think they were entirely fictional. Books like the Necronomicon, which is widely believed to have been created by the pulp fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft, and is part of 20^th century horror fiction history. Except it wasn’t. That book, and many others, are real.

Now, whether these books are literally dangerous was an open question for a while. They’re supposed to be books of magic. Yup, actual black magic. Couple of years ago I’d have laughed at anyone who said that magic was a real thing. Not so much anymore, though I don’t believe much in the supernatural. What’s changed is that I’ve come to believe that a lot of what people called magic is actually some aspects of a science we haven’t really begun to understand. My lover, Junie, calls it the ‘larger world.’ I call it Freaksville.

When we went up against a group using the Unlearnable Truths, very bad things happened. People I cared about died. And some stuff happened that hurt all of us. Top, Bunny, and me. Hurt us bad. Nearly destroyed us, leaving scars on body and soul and mind.

“I’ve called in an expert to advise,” said Church, bringing me back to the moment. “Dr. Elizabeth Corbett, formerly of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale.”

“Corbett? I’ve heard that name,” I said. “Wasn’t she the one that found the Templar treasure a couple of years ago?”

“A large part of the treasure, yes,” said Church. “She’s a rare book scholar of some note and an expert on ancient languages. She was in Syria working with a team to acquire and preserve artifacts targeted by ISIL. She’ll meet you at the airport.”

“Does she know about the Unlearnable Truths?” asked Top.

Church sliced off a thin sliver of a smile. “Yes,” he said, and disconnected the call.

3

SHE WAS STANDING there at the bottom of the stair-car as we deplaned. Thirty-something, bookish, medium height, with lots of frizzy ash-blond hair that framed a pretty face. Big glasses, bright blue eyes and firm chin. If you didn’t look closely, and if you were the kind of lout prone to sexist and belittling assumptions, you might call her a nerd girl. And she probably was nerdish, but so what? So was Junie. So, in fact, was I at times. But as she stepped forward to offer her hand, I saw past the scholarly disguise of ubiquitous khakis, button shirt and many-pocketed vest, Hogwarts wristwatch, and New Age jewelry, and saw deep intellect in those eyes. It radiated like heat. Not just knowledge but the promise of wit and insight.

And Church trusted her, so that spoke volumes.

“Captain Ledg—” she began but cut herself off and flushed. In a whisper she asked, “Sorry, should I use some kind of code name?”

I grinned and shook her hand, which was thin and strong. “I don’t think this is a combat callsign kind of gig. Joe Ledger, pleased to meet you.”

“Lizzie Corbett,” she said, giving me a final pump before letting go.

I introduced Top and Bunny, and she gave Top a longer and more lingering appraisal than she did Bunny. He has that effect on some people. He’s no Idris Elba, but he’s not a cave troll, either. The women who take particular notice of him tend to be more educated and more complex than the surfer gals who drool over Bunny. I noticed that Top dialed up the wattage on his smile. Not a lot, but it was there.

“I have a car,” she said. “We can go directly to the site.” She glanced past me to where the flight crew were unloading several metal cases. “Luggage?”

“Toys,” I said.

Ten minutes later, we were driving toward the Door to Hell.

Lizzie drove fast but not well. While the miles rolled past, she talked.

“Mr. Church said that you guys know about the Unlearnable Truths,” she said, “so we don’t have to cover that ground. I have to ask, though… do you believe in what they are?”

Bunny said, “We’ve seen some shit. Far as I’m concerned, I’m keeping an open mind.”

“And a loaded gun,” added Top.

“Hooah,” Bunny agreed.

Lizzie studied them for a moment in the rearview mirror.

“You have a problem with that?” asked Top.

“Not as much as you’d think,” said Lizzie. “I’ve seen some stuff, too.”

I smiled. “You were going to say ‘shit,’ weren’t you?”

She gave me a small grin. “I won’t ask what you’ve seen because I assume it’s classified.”

“That’s complicated,” I said. “It was classified while we were working for Uncle Sam. We don’t do that anymore. We’re building a new outfit. Unaffiliated and international.”

“So I heard. Very hush hush. Very Mission: Impossible but without the politics.”

“Close enough.”

Cars whizzed by. Apparently fast and reckless driving was the standard here in Turkmenistan. Fun. Wish I had a bottle of Jack Daniels and a sippy straw.

“The book,” I prodded.

“The book,” she said, nodding. “The book itself has no actual title, though it’s informally known to certain scholars as the Book of Uttu, named for the Sumerian goddess of weaving, who is often depicted as a spider. The text on that page matches some on file.”

“Wait,” said Bunny, leaning forward between the front seats, “I thought it was, like… bad… to even open those books. Isn’t that why those monks kept them locked up? The picture Mr. Church showed us was of that book chained up, and it didn’t look like anyone’s opened it since the tenth century.”

“Close,” said Lizzie, jerking the wheel to avoid a goat standing in the middle of the road playing chicken with high-speed traffic. “That photo was taken four years ago, when the book was rescued from a temple overrun by ISIL. The monks were killed and many of the artifacts destroyed or sold to the black market. A Turkish black marketer named Ohan has a deal with some ISIL leaders to discreetly obtain and sell certain items, with the profits going back to fund ISIL’s activities.”

“Ohan’s not doing that shit no more,” said Top.

She turned to glance back at him. “How can you be sure?”

He grinned, showing a lot of teeth. “Reliable sources.”

Lizzie thought about that, shrugged. “No great loss to humanity. He was a slimeball. Anyway, he sold the book before — whatever happened to him happened — and it went through several other hands. The photo of the book chained and sealed was taken by Ohan and used during his sales process. One of the people who had the book briefly, an Iranian, removed the chains and opened the book. He was a scholar of Sumerian and Babylonian history and had very noble intentions. He scanned the pages and put them on a scholarly site, with access only to select experts. His plan was to form an international team of language experts to decrypt and translate the text.” She paused and chewed her lip for a moment. “That’s where I came into this. One of my… friends… contacted me after translating a partial chapter. He knew that I was more comfortable with a variation of Sumerian used by Mesopotamian priests. My friend could read their entries, which were written in the margins as warnings to anyone who attempted to translate the original text.”

“I do not like where this is going,” said Bunny.

“No,” she agreed. “Reading the warnings in straight translation is moderately easy for an expert, but they are heavily couched in metaphor and symbology specific to their sect of the priest class. You have to get into their heads and know a lot about their culture and practices to understand the importance of the warning, which means it was written only for others of their sect to ever read.”

“You’re taking the long way around the point, doc,” I said.

“No,” she said, “I’m not. It’s important to know this, because there have been historical references to a lineage of those priests. I once saw a record that covered most of eighteen hundred years, and there’s one in London that lists an unbroken lineage going back to the Akkadian Empire, which was founded in 2350 BCE, and that list referenced an even older one that goes back to the founding of the Sumerian culture. If all of that is true — and I have reason to believe it is — then the priests tasked with guarding that book have been at it for nearly forty-four hundred years and, if I’m correct, possibly as far back as the Sumerian proto-literate period. We’re talking six thousand years ago. Who knows how much farther back it went before the development of cuneiform?”

“And what does all that mean?” asked Bunny.

“It means that people have dedicated their lives to keep the information in that book secret and have kept it sealed since the dawn of civilization,” said Lizzie. “And Mr. Church had someone named Bug — who I assume is your computer guy?”

“Yeah,” I said, grinning.

“Bug did a deep background on James Mercer. He is not European but actually Iranian. Not a spy or anything, just in terms of heritage. The Iranian branch surname is Mehregan, and variations of that name go way back, to versions established well before the rise of Islam. Thousands of years before, actually. So, Mercer’s family is very, very old. His branch has been in America for only three generations, but there is an ancestor of James Mercer mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is the first known major piece of writing.”

“So… what’s Mercer’s connection to the book?” asked Top.

“The last known sale of the Book of Uttu was by a third party working on behalf of James Mercer. Mind you, this is stuff I’ve found out with help from some of my own contacts, but Bug was able to verify it. James Mercer purchased the book, but what I don’t know is whether he opened it out of curiosity or opened it because he was following some other agenda.”

“What agenda?” I asked.

Lizzie drove for almost a mile before she answered. The clouds were thick and gray over the desert, but it didn’t feel like rain. Just dreary and sad. Maybe ominous, too, but I wasn’t trying to spook myself out. Lizzie was doing a pretty good job of that.

“If there is a group trying to protect something,” she said, “it kind of suggests that they are trying to protect it from something else.”

“Yeah,” said Bunny, “but the stuff on that Pauline Index is mostly supposed to be naughty shit. Stuff the Church doesn’t want people to know. Like the fact that they’ve edited most women out of old biblical stories, and that maybe we should all stop feeling guilty and enjoy getting laid.”

Lizzie grinned. “Well phrased. Some of it is that, actually… and I may quote you on my next paper. But that doesn’t account for the Unlearnable Truths. Those books are flat out dangerous. They aren’t banned because they promote free and independent thinking, sexual equality and general tolerance. They’re books of very dark magic.” She paused. “If you believe in that sort of thing.”

“Keeping an open mind,” Top reminded her.

“Me too,” she said, though she did not elaborate. “ISIL killed the clerics guarding the book. Ohan sold it, a scholar bought it and began scanning it, and then James Mercer bought it. Not sure how he found out about it, though I suspect he had informants in the right places throughout various church groups and all through academia. He bought it, and I think he brought it to the Door to Hell. He killed two people and used a sacred knife to pin a key page to the body of someone he forced into the role of a sacrificial victim.”

“To what end?” I asked.

We passed a sign that said: Darvaza Gas Crater in Turkmen. Beneath, in spray paint, was Door to Hell. A small weathered-stained sign was hung in front of the words, partly obscuring them. CLOSED.

“Remember I said that the title of the book was incorrect? It’s called the Book of Uttu, but that was a guess because the cover is decorated with stylized spiders. However, the book is not about Uttu. Not really. Uttu, though a Sumerian goddess, was a benign figure. The goddess of weaving and of dry goods. In the translated pages, there is only a passing reference to her and instead another name is used. And that’s what troubles me so deeply. The name mentioned over and over again is Atlach-Nacha.”

“Who?” we all asked at the same time.

“Atlach-Nacha is a gigantic spider god with a humanlike face. In the stories, it comes from another planet and has become trapped here on Earth, forced to live in caves beneath a fictional mountain range in an equally fictional Arctic kingdom. Neither place is real.”

“You lost me on that,” said Top.

She held up a hand. “Getting there. Bear with me. In the story, Atlach-Nacha is trying to reconnect with her home. Not through physical space but via a spiritual pathway. Call it an interdimensional gateway for convenience’s sake. She is trying to spin a web of some kind that will connect Earth with her world. And — just to make this all even less sane — that connection will exist in a dream world, and once formed will allow her armies to come out of dreams and into our waking world.”

“So—” said Bunny slowly, “whoever cooked that up was smoking serious crack.”

“This is sounding familiar to me,” I said. “Dream worlds. Do you mean the Dreamlands? As in the fictional place from the Lovecraft stories?”

“Yes,” she said, as she pulled off the main road onto a side lane that curved around toward the massive firepit. “Though in the case of Atlach-Nacha, the story was written by August Derleth, one of Lovecraft’s friends. Lovecraft allowed and even encouraged his friends to write stories using the gods, monsters and locations he came up with. He encouraged them to create their own and expand it. After a while it was like people were filing field reports from other worlds. They call it Lovecraftian fiction or Cthulhu Mythos. And thousands of writers contribute to it all the time. Even Stephen King has done Lovecraft stories.”

“Yeah,” I said softly.

“When I spoke with Mr. Church,” continued Lizzie, “he told me about a theory that you all played with, that the pulp fiction movement of the twenties and thirties, as well as the surrealist movement of the same era, might have had less to do with imagination and more to do with people having visions of other worlds.”

“Other dimensions,” I suggested. “And yeah. That was a theory, and it explained some elements of our case. It explained how things like the Necronomicon and other Unlearnable Truths wound up in Weird Tales magazines. It explained some of the images from Salvador Dali and others.”

“If so,” she said, pulling to a stop one hundred feet from the edge of the pit, “then that’s something that may have been happening for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. People having genuine visions of other worlds, other dimensions, and writing them down as stories or religious visions.”

We started to get out, but she stopped us.

“There’s another way to look at it, too,” she said. “If there are creatures from other worlds trapped here, and if they have somehow managed to invade the minds of certain people and fill their dreams with visions, surely it suggests a purpose. An agenda.”

We looked at her.

“Mr. Church told me that one of your cases dealt with a young man, a genius really, who found some kind of mathematical code in the Unlearnable Truths and used it to build and program a machine to take him to one of those worlds. That he was from there, or at least a descendant of people or beings from there. Church said that other people you’ve met may share the same connection to other worlds.”

Top cleared his throat, and Bunny looked away.

“It’s possible,” I said.

“So, if that young man used information to open a doorway to go home,” said Lizzie slowly, “is it really so far outside the realm of possibility that someone else might want to open a door to let someone or something come into our world?”

Bunny closed his eyes. “Well… holy shit.”

We got out of the car. The first of our equipment we unpacked was the guns.

4

THERE WERE SIX US marines standing watch over the site. They eyed us warily and a sergeant came over to meet us, giving my team a thorough up-and-down appraisal. We were not wearing uniforms or insignia of any kind.

“This is a restricted area,” he said. He was a lantern-jawed guy who could have come from Central Casting. His parents might as well have enrolled him in the Corps as soon as he was born.

“Your boss told you we were coming,” said Top.

The sergeant’s eyes narrowed, and I knew he wanted to ask for identification but had no doubt been told not to.

“I’m Mr. Red,” I said, then nodded to Top. “He’s Mr. White. The big guy is Mr. Blue. The lady is Dr. Corbett.” I read the sergeant’s name tag. “And you’re Brock.”

No one shook hands.

I looked past Sergeant Brock to where the car sat inside a circle of traffic cones. Guess they didn’t use crime scene tape here. More cones were set in a couple of places closer to the edge of the pit.

“Walk us through the scene,” I suggested.

Brock nodded and did so.

“The forensics team has been all over everything,” he said. “They left the car and other stuff in place for you but transported the bodies. Oh, and they took the murder weapons. So there’s not actually a lot to see.”

I made no comment.

The car was pretty much what I expected. Blood and broken safety glass on the seats, bullet holes from where Mercer’s rounds went through the driver. Small flags pinned to spots where rounds had been removed for ballistics.

“Window’s rolled down,” observed Bunny. “He didn’t know what was going to happen.”

“He had a Glock 26 in a shoulder rig,” said Brock, “but there was no indication he’d attempted to draw it.”

“Driver was American?” asked Top.

“Of Turkmeni extraction,” agreed Brock. “Guess that’s why he got the gig. Spoke the language.”

We stepped away from the car and he led us over to a heavy-duty briefcase that lay open on the ground.

“He’d have brought the book in that,” said Lizzie.

There was a blood smear inside and spatter all around. Before I was a special operator, I was a detective in Baltimore and had worked enough murder cases to be able to read a scene pretty well, but before I could explain what I was seeing, Lizzie spoke up.

“Mercer probably used a ritual knife to cut himself,” she said. Brock shot her a look, but I held up a hand to encourage her to continue. “It would be appropriate to the kind of ritual he was attempting. Historically accurate. It’s a sign of humility and commitment. Blood of the faithful. That smear inside the case is probably where he set the knife down afterward, while he opened the book and selected the page to tear out.”

“Pardon me, miss,” began Brock, “but how do you know all that?”

Top, who squatted down beside Lizzie, swiveled his head around and gave the sergeant a long, silent stare. The sergeant looked briefly contrite and straightened, clamping his mouth shut.

Lizzie gave him a brief, almost apologetic smile, then scowled down at the case. “Once Mercer tore out the page he would have needed to make his sacrifice. He took the page and the knife and would need a good spot to—” She looked over her shoulder for a likely spot. Brock cleared his throat and pointed to a small cluster of traffic cones near the edge. Lizzie added, “That’s where he sacrificed the guide.”

I saw Brock’s lips silently repeat that word. Sacrificed. He was going to have a lot of unanswered questions. As an NCO, he was probably used to some level of that.

“Hey,” said Bunny, who was scanning the area, “look at that.”

We all turned to follow where he was pointing. A line of spiders was running toward the edge of the pit.

“Yeah,” said Brock, “that happens. Spiders are always coming here. No one knows why. Maybe it’s the methane smell or something.”

“Or something,” Lizzie said quietly.

She met my eyes. I nodded, though a chill rippled up my spine, like someone walked over my grave.

Spiders. Shit.

We straightened and followed the spiders to the edge of the pit and looked into the mouth of hell.

It was twenty meters deep — not a single mass of flame but rather patches of it, as if fire was burning through the skin of the Earth to expose burning wounds. It looked like cancer and it stank of shit.

“Door to Hell don’t really cover it,” said Top quietly.

Bunny came up beside him. “More like the ass of Hell.”

Sergeant Brock cleared his throat again. “A lot of people have been all over this site, but I was one of the first Americans to arrive after we got the call. There’s something maybe you should see.”

We followed him a dozen yards along the curving lip of the crater and then stopped as he squatted down and pointed. At first all I saw was a cluster of spiders a bit heavier than elsewhere on the rim; and at least a dozen different kinds. But that wasn’t what he was pointing at.

Although partly obscured by scuff marks from what I presumed were police and forensics people, there was a line of footprints that led from the pit to this spot. I got up and backtracked, then walked the scene quickly to verify what Brock found.

“Those are Mercer’s prints,” I said. “Same prints go over to the car and back, go to where the guide was killed and back, and then from the briefcase to the edge.”

“Yeah,” said Bunny, “but I don’t see any prints coming back from the edge.”

“That’s ’cause he didn’t come back, Farm Boy,” said Top. He got down nearly into a push-up position and peered at the print closest to the edge. “See here? This one’s a little deeper, right at the sole. Like he pushed off right there.”

“Pushed off?” echoed Lizzie. “But that would mean—”

The last print was right at the edge. There was only one direction to go in, and that was down.

Top got up and dusted his hands off. He cut me a look. “Probe, Cap’n?”

“Do it,” I said.

Bunny went over to one of our equipment boxes, opened it, and came back with what looked like a pigeon made from plastic. In his other hand, he held a small controller.

“Surveillance drone,” Bunny explained when Lizzie and Brock looked expectantly at him. “Specially made for scouting combat environments. Durable, covered in flame-retardant and heat-resistant polymers. You can send one into a burning building and get good video feeds from up to a mile.”

Bunny pressed a button on the pigeon, then handed it to Top, who held it ready over the edge. Then Bunny powered on the controller and gave a nod. Top hurled the pigeon high into the air and it immediately deployed its wings, flapped around until its internal gyroscopes and guidance were synched, and then dove into the smoke.

“Nice,” said Brock. “Haven’t seen that model.”

“And you’re not seeing it now,” I told him. He nodded.

“If Mr. Mercer jumped down there,” said Lizzie, “what do you expect to find except charred bones?”

“Don’t know,” I said. “If we find bones, then this investigation shifts lanes and goes looking for answers elsewhere. If not, then we reassess what we know of Mercer.”

She nodded, accepting that.

While the drone flew, Bunny frowned at the small video display on the control unit. “Lot of smoke. Shifting through the spectrum to see what I can see.”

A few seconds later…

“Wait, I think I see something.”

Then…

“Holy fucking shit,” cried Bunny. “Guys!”

We ran back to him. Bunny held the control device up and we crowded around to see the image. Top, Lizzie and Me. Brock stood to one side, unsure if he was invited but also clearly alarmed at Bunny’s tone.

On the screen the picture was hazy because of the smoke, but we could still make out what it was. It’s just that it made no sense.

It’s just that it was impossible.

It’s just that it sent a thrill though me that was not revulsion at seeing a burned body, or any other normal emotion. What I felt was an absolutely ice-cold knife of real terror stab its way straight through my heart. Lizzie grabbed my wrist in a hand gone icy; her grip was vise-hard. Top made a sound that was part gasp and part cry of strict denial.

James Mercer was down there. He was at the bottom of the burning pit. His clothes had all burned away. His flesh was cracked and splotched with brick red and charcoal black. His hair was gone.

But he was alive.

He knelt, naked and cooked alive, holding the big book out in front of him, reading from it even though blood and pus leaked steaming from his eyes. His cock was erect, and the skin bubbled with blisters that swelled and popped.

Spiders — tens of thousands of them — crawled all over his body, and swarmed around him, and scaled the side of the pit. And before Mercer, as if opened like a wound in the world, was a cleft. A kind of doorway. Light poured through it, brighter than the fires that flickered around him.

Through the speaker on the monitor we could hear the rustling of the spiders, the crackle of flames, the hiss of smoke and steam, and the constant, droning, inexorable mumble of James Mercer reading his prayers from the ancient book. The light from the cleft bathed Mercer in a hellish glow, and it showed us what all those spiders were doing down there.

They were eating the dirt — clawing at the living rock, dragging tiny bits of it away on either side of that obscene cleft. I stared at it on the screen and felt as if the whole world was tilting under my feet. Mercer, driven to madness, kept alive through some means that could not make sense in any way, not in the wildest, warped reinterpretation of reality as I knew it. And the spiders. Milling with constant energy. Tiny creatures trying to tear open a wall of solid rock. For those small monsters it was a labor assigned in the deepest pit of insanity, and the spiders worked with tireless diligence to widen the crack.

No.

They worked — as Mercer worked with the prayers his cracked lips recited — to open a door.

But… to where?

5

“WHAT’S THE PLAN, Boss?” asked Bunny. His voice was full of cracks. “’Cause if you don’t have one I have a suggestion.”

“Does it involve dropping a big fucking bomb right over there?” asked Top, pointing. “Because I’m all over that idea.”

“No!” cried Lizzie. “You can’t.”

“Why the hell not?” I demanded. “Right now it seems both poetic justice and good common sense to hit this whole area with a whole bunch of Hellfire missiles. I’m pretty sure — foreign soil or not — I can arrange that in under fifteen minutes. One, maybe two phone calls and it’s done.”

“No,” she insisted, her face going from flushed to deathly pale, “if you do that you’ll kill us all.”

“We’d actually drive away first,” said Top, forcing a smile onto his face despite the fear in his eyes.

“You don’t understand,” she said, “if you blow up the pit, if you destroy that book, then you let it out.”

“Let what out?” asked Bunny. “No, don’t tell me because I probably don’t want to know.”

She pointed to the pit. “Mercer tore off one page of the book and look what happened. That page, that small bit of damage to the book, did something down there. It opened a door. You can see it on the monitor clear as day.” She looked from Top to Bunny to me, her eyes wild. “Why do you think this book was guarded for all these centuries? For millennia? These books aren’t bullshit church politics or contrary doctrinal points of view. These are books of power. Real power. The darkest power you can imagine.”

We said nothing.

“If you’ve dealt with the Unlearnable Truths before, then you have to know how dangerous they are. How dangerous this book could be?”

“Wait… could be?” I bellowed. “You don’t even know if we can safely destroy it or not? Is that what you’re telling me?”

Brock and his marines, drawn by our raised voices, began hurrying over, but Top stepped to intercept them, arms wide, shaking his head. Brock slowed and gave us all an uncertain look. He retreated with great reluctance.

I leaned close to Lizzie and lowered my voice. “You don’t know?”

“No, Captain, I don’t,” she snapped, moving so close I could smell the fear in her sweat. “And because I don’t know, I can’t let you go off half-cocked and just bomb the hell out of the pit. We need to recover that book. We need to seal that — rift, or doorway, or whatever it is. We need to stop whatever Mercer is doing. Maybe then I can figure out how to seal the book again. Or, maybe I’ll find out that we can destroy it. But I’m telling you right now that your plan has a lot more ways to go wrong than mine.”

“You don’t actually have a plan,” I snarled.

Again, she pointed to the pit. “Sure I do. You need to go down there and get the book.”

Bunny said, “Fuck me.”

I closed my eyes.

“Jesus H. Christ,” I said.

6

BUNNY BROUGHT THE pigeon drone up and landed it on the rim, where it squatted, steam rising from it. We all ran for the car.

The equipment Church recommended we bring included Dragon fire-suits. The company makes a line of body armor for combat in virtually every possible circumstance, from deep Antarctic winter to cities on fire. The fire-suits were ultra-high-tech, costing over a million dollars per set. Lizzie and Brock watched as we stripped to our underwear and began pulling them on.

The fire-suits are similar to the Hammer suits we wore when going into biological hot zones. They were flexible and durable, perfect for agile movement and physical combat. The skin of the suits was made from a blend of synthetic carbon fibers mixed with spider silk. That irony was not lost on me, by the way. But, fuck it. The suits could stop an ordinary bullet shy of armor-piercing rounds, and the network of air distribution tubes allowed us to regulate temperature.

“Will those things be enough?” asked Lizzie, clearly skeptical of suits that fit like gloves instead of the bulkier garments worn by firefighters or volcanologists.

“That’s what it says in the catalog,” said Top as he buddy-checked Bunny’s seals. The answer did little to reassure Lizzie.

Brock said, “If you have another one of those, I’d be happy to—”

“Thanks,” I said, “but no. We brought enough for us. But, thanks.”

He nodded and then lowered his voice. “Look, Mr. Red… I couldn’t help but overhear a lot of this stuff and I know it’s above my paygrade and all, but if something happens and you need some muscle or an extra shooter, then I’m here. I didn’t get an embassy posting because I don’t know which end of a gun goes bang. Three tours in Afghanistan, one in Iraq. Been to a lot of loud parties. I don’t want to just sit up here and play with my dick the whole time.”

I smiled at him. “I appreciate that, Sergeant, but we really do have only these three rigs. If you want to help, though, watch over Dr. Corbett. She’s important and I need her safe. If things go south, get her the hell out of here and call the number she’ll provide. Talk to my boss. His name is Church. Whatever he says to do, you do it. Can you do that?”

“Yes, sir, I can,” he said.

I started to lift my helmet to put it on, then paused. “Tell you what, Sergeant,” I said, nodding to the pit. “We have two cases of weapons and loaded magazines. Lots of fun toys. If you see anything come over the edge of that fucking hole that isn’t one of us, kill it.”

His eyes turned cold and he gave me a nod. “Yes, sir… I can do that, too.”

He turned and walked over to his men. I saw them immediately begin checking their weapons. Bunny, who was a former Marine Recon, nodding approval.

“Semper fi,” he said quietly and then put his helmet on. He opened a canvas gear bag and began taking out long guns. His weapon of choice is a drum-fed combat shotgun that he lovingly calls “Honey Boom-Boom.”

Top had another of our cases open and was removing rappelling gear.

Lizzie touched my arm. “Joe,” she said, “is there any way that drone of yours could get close enough for me to see the book?”

“Maybe. Why, though?”

“If I could see what he’s reading then maybe I can understand what he’s trying to accomplish.”

“Does that matter?”

“Yes. The page he took out first was a kind of spell,” she said. “It’s intended to both summon Atlach-Nacha and also begin something described as a ‘ritual of opening.’ I think we’ve seen what that looks like. But he went down there, and he’s clearly in some kind of trance. And he’s done something that is preventing him from being consumed completely by the heat. Call it magic or weird science or whatever you want, but he’s been down there for days now. Whatever spell or ritual he’s performing must be very complex. If I know what it is, then maybe I can figure out the best way to stop it.”

“How about I put three rounds into the back of his head?” I suggested. “Wouldn’t that stop it?”

“I actually don’t know if that would work anymore.”

I stared at her, waiting for the punch line, but she wasn’t joking.

Beside me, Top said, “Well fuck me blind and move the furniture.”

To Lizzie I said, “Have you ever worked a drone?”

“Sure. My group works in areas where ISIL could be hiding anywhere, so I use them all the time to assess a site.” She named a few commercial and professional models she’d used.

I picked up the controller for the pigeon drone. “This is a lot like those.”

She was quick and was able to launch and manipulate the drone with ease.

“If that one burns out,” said Bunny, “there’s two more in the case.”

I said, “Lizzie, we’re all wearing earbuds. There’s a microphone on the controller. See? Right there. Leave it turned on. The speaker’s good, so you’ll be able to hear us, too. If you can get eyes on that book and read what Mercer is reading, let us know.” I raised my forearm to show small flexible-panel computer screens. “You can send the video feeds to us on these. But we won’t be watching those feeds unless it’s something important. We’re probably going to be busy. So, pick your moment.”

“I understand,” said Lizzie. “I promise not to distract you.”

“You’re not a distraction,” said Top, and she actually blushed. Bunny rolled his eyes so hard I’m surprised he didn’t bruise his brain. Then, in a more serious tone, Top said, “Let us know when we can end that evil motherfucker down there, feel me?”

Lizzie nodded. “God… be careful. Please.”

Top gave her a grin. “It’s all good. Just another day on the job.”

We put our helmets on, grabbed our guns, and walked over to the edge of the pit. Brock and two of his men helped anchor us for the rappelling maneuver. I adjusted my suit’s environmental controls one more time, cut looks at Top and Bunny, then nodded to Lizzie.

“Good luck,” she told us, and again her eyes lingered on Top’s.

Bunny turned to Top. “‘Just another day on the job?’ Seriously? That’s the worst pickup line in like… ever.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“I can actually hear you,” said Lizzie.

Bunny blew a kiss at Top, who shot him the finger.

And then we were over the edge.

7

NO MISSION EVER goes off without a hitch. Not in my experience.

You try to make it otherwise. You gather as much intel as possible, you plan, you train, you theorize to predict variables, you allow for things to change as the mission unfolds. You even stay mentally flexible in case of mission creep — which is when an operation changes substantially in nature while you’re in situ.

But things always go a little wrong.

Sometimes the situation twists in your favor. Or, so I’ve heard. My luck doesn’t tend that way.

Sometimes thing change and you can easily roll with it. You call in back up, or throw some extra ordnance downrange, or otherwise deal with shit.

And sometimes nothing is what it seems.

Case in point…

8

WE WENT DOWN into the pit.

Twenty meters is nothing when rappelling. You drop down on a rope, kicking off from the wall every few meters to slow the rate of fall and keep yourself from gathering enough momentum to slam into anything. The walls of the pit were sloped, so we also had to shove off to keep dropping. Fires burned all around us. Even with the cooling system in the suits, I could feel the heat.

How the hell could Mercer still be alive down here?

My mind rebelled at the thought of actual magic. This had to be some kind of science. But… what kind?

Over the last few years, I’d run into all kinds of things. Genetically-engineered assassins designed to approximate vampires. Lycanthropic super soldiers. Transgenic soldiers amped up with ape DNA. The God Machines built with science that came to its designer from dreams of other worlds. Doorways into other dimensions opened using mathematics from the Unlearnable Truths. So, yeah, I’ve had to expand my mind or go crazy. Maybe it’s fair to say that because I’ve been forced to expand my mind I’ve gone crazier. A case can be made for that. And yet in each case there was science behind it. Every single time. Weird science, to be sure. Radical, possibly alien, certainly beyond my understanding, but science nonetheless. If there was something that fit the literal definition of supernatural, then I haven’t hit it so far.

But how could science explain how a man with no protective garments survived for days in an actual inferno? How could anything make sense of that?

We dropped and dropped.

I looked down at the floor of the pit and saw something else that made no fucking sense at all.

The floor of the pit seemed to be… receding?

“Boss?” called Bunny, his voice crystal clear through the high-tech earbuds we all wore. “Are you seeing this?”

We paused, toes touching the slope.

“Cap’n,” growled Top, “either I’m losing my shit or that floor is dropping.”

We watched, looking for signs of structural collapse, for cracks in the ground, for sudden releases of trapped gas, for the tumble of boulders and debris. All of that should have been happening if the pit floor was falling inward.

That’s not what we saw.

It’s just the floor was farther away, as if the pit itself had been somehow stretched.

“I can’t be seeing what I’m seeing,” said Bunny.

“Keep your shit wired tight, Farm Boy,” snapped Top. “If that’s what’s there, then that’s what’s there. So nut up and deal with it.”

Bold words. Probably as much for himself as for Bunny. Meant for me, too.

I checked the line, making quick calculations. “We’re going to have to hit the slope twenty feet above the bottom and walk down.”

“What if it keeps… um… getting deeper?” asked Bunny.

“Then we figure it out on the fly,” I said.

“Hooah,” said Top, and after a moment Bunny said it, too. “Hooah” was the Ranger catch-all phrase for anything from “yes, sir” to “fuck you,” and right now both seemed applicable.

We kept dropping.

The floor receded more and more.

“Fuck this,” I bellowed and hit hard on the slope, unclipped and ran into the pull of gravity. I heard thumps and curses behind me as the others did too. The slope was steep, and gravity wanted to kill us, but we ran into its pull, angling our bodies for balance and to slough off the acceleration. For a wild moment I thought we would keep running and running until we reached Hell itself. The actual hell. The devil and his demons and all of that biblical bullshit.

This was close enough.

Goddamn, it was close enough.

And then the floor was there. Hard and rocky and real. It was stable, too. I don’t know how the bottom got deeper, but whatever it was seemed to have stopped. It was ordinary ground under my feet. I wanted to kiss it.

Bunny and Top came running down to where I was, and then stopped, trembling, panting — more from fear than the exertion.

Top unslung his weapon, a Heckler & Koch MP7 with a forty-round magazine, and he had a Milkor MGL 40mm six-shot grenade launcher slung over his shoulder. He had not come to screw around. Bunny had his shotgun in his big hands and was sweeping the barrel around the perimeter.

He froze, looking behind me, and I whirled, drawing my Sig Sauer fast and bringing it up in a two-handed grip. Top turned, too, and we realized that the pit floor wasn’t the only thing that had gone off its rails.

“What the?” was all Bunny could manage.

The drone descended and hovered about his shoulder.

“Lizzie,” I said hoarsely, “are you seeing this, too?”

Her answer was an inarticulate croak.

We were all seeing it.

I don’t know where we were, but it wasn’t the same pit we dropped into. It couldn’t be. Even with the ropes still dangling above us and the drone having followed us here.

We stood on a flat space of ground that was much wider than the opening of the pit above. No idea how that was possible, but it wasn’t the weirdest or worst thing about this moment. James Mercer, naked and burned but alive, knelt a dozen paces away, the Book of Uttu in his hands, his blind eyes clicking back and forth across the pages as his lips read words aloud in a dead language. Beyond him was the wall we’d seen in the drone’s camera, with the obscene vertical slit from which poured an unnatural and lurid red light. There were the legions of spiders gnawing at the opening.

All of that was what we expected to find. Kind of.

But not the rest.

Not the dozens of people down there. Thirty or forty of them, dressed in robes of white and red and gray. Robes set with jewels and metals I could not identify. Men with muscular, bare arms and long plaited beards, like priests from some old temple carvings. Except they were very real and they held tools — axes and sledgehammers. All of them had swords and knives in leather scabbards at their hips.

They all stood in attitudes of surprise, frozen in their act of attacking the wall.

Even that wasn’t the worst.

Far from it. Give me enough whiskey and I could work out some logic to them being down here. That, at least, was close enough to sanity for me to postulate something I could force myself to accept.

But the spiders? No. Not them.

And I’m not talking about the thousands of small ones that had survived the hellish heat to climb down here from above.

There were other spiders here.

Big ones.

Strange ones.

Some the size of rats. Some the size of dogs. A few as big as wild boars. Massive, bloated monsters that quivered on hairy legs.

And the others.

Ponderous and improbable abominations with speckled red and black bodies that stood not on eight legs, but on three. Tripodal spiders with too many eyes and mandibles that snapped and clacked and dripped with steaming drool.

I knew for sure — without the slightest doubt, without needing to lie to myself — that nothing like them had ever before walked on this green Earth. I had no idea where they were from, or how Mercer had conjured them into this place, but they didn’t belong in this world.

I heard a sound, a high-pitched whimper, and prayed that it wasn’t coming from my own throat. Though it probably was.

In my ear, I heard Lizzie’s hushed and horrified voice. “Joe… is this real? Am I seeing it?”

“You tell me,” I said quickly. “You’re the expert.”

“Not… god, not in this,” she gasped. But a moment later she said, “Those men, they’re dressed like Sumerians. It’s like they stepped right out of a bas-relief carving from one of the ancient temples.”

“Those fucking spiders, Doc,” asked Bunny nervously, “you got anything on them? What are they?”

“I don’t… I don’t know.”

The spiders and the armed men stared at us, surprised for a heartbeat — and that was all it was — by our presence. Of aliens in their sacred place.

Then, with a ululating howl that tore the air, they all swarmed toward us.

9

I GENERALLY LIKE to know who the hell I’m fighting. I’m a long damn way from the concept of “kill ’em all and let God sort it out.”

Most of the time.

This wasn’t one of those times.

10

THE PRIEST — AND I had to accept that it was what he was — closest to me raised an adze and swung it at my head. I shot him in the face. Twice. Because I really meant it.

The back of his head exploded and showered the priests behind him with red-blue and gray brains.

Top shouted, “They can bleed.”

Bunny yelled back. “Fuck ’em.”

The priests swarmed toward us, and as they did so they ran to put themselves between us and Mercer. Two of them swung their weapons in the air, and through the pall of smoke I saw that they were aiming at the drone, but Lizzie steered it sharply away.

Bunny and Top fell back a few steps to give the attackers a long run. It wasn’t because the priests were particularly hard to kill — they had no armor, no advanced weapons — but because there were so damn many of them. If we were all in the belly of a Black Hawk helicopter, hunkered down behind a minigun, then maybe this would be a quick fight. This was a different kind of fight. We had the best weapons and we had enough ammunition, but there was no guarantee at all that we had enough time to kill our way to Mercer and that damn book. Now the sheer number of people we needed to kill exceeded the time it would take to do that.

Which was bad enough. And then the spiders stopped chewing at the wall and attacked. The little ones moved like a black carpet across the ashy floor, swarming through and around the feet of the priests, climbing over the bodies that fell as Bunny fired blast after blast of his shotgun and Top burned through one magazine after another with his rifle.

I pivoted and fired over the carpet at the first of the big spiders, hitting it with three clean shots. Pieces of its carapace blew off and green muck vomited from the wounds, but the three heavy legs propelled it forward. It screeched, though; the sound was eerily like that of a child in pain. As it barreled toward me, I lowered my gun and aimed at the cluster of blazing eyes and fired again. Once, twice, three times, blowing those eyes apart but not stopping it. Not even slowing it. It was the fourth shot that hit something vital. The creature suddenly canted forward and collapsed, its momentum and weight sending it into a clumsy, broken tumble.

I tried to replay that last shot to identify exactly what I’d hit because two more of the brutes came at me. I backpedaled and fired until the slide locked back. The last bullet killed another and it fell clumsily as the third tripped over it. By the time the beast clambered back up, I had a new magazine swapped in and shot it from three feet away. Two bullets and it fell. Maybe the first killed it. I’ll never know.

More of them were coming and the pit was filled with the thunder of gunfire and the horrific cry of the monsters. I holstered my sidearm and swung the MP7 from my back, switched the selector switch to semi auto and began firing in short, controlled bursts. Top was still hosing the priests, but I needed more precision to kill the spiders. Four of them were circling the priests to try and get behind my guys. I whirled and fired.

The creatures died. The priests died.

And we kept losing ground because we were trying to use buckets to stop a tsunami.

“Cap’n,” huffed Top as he fired, pivoted, fired, “I can get Mercer from here. I have the grenade launcher. I can blow that asshole all the way into orbit.”

“No,” cried Lizzie. “Not while he’s holding the book. Not until I can see what he’s reading.”

I shot a spider in the head and needed two bursts to knock it down. “Lizzie,” I yelled, “how do we end this?”

The drone flew over my head and over the heads of the throng of priests. They swatted at it, but she kept it moving, dipping and swooping and dodging.

“Shit,” she hissed. “I can’t get a clear image.”

“Listen to me,” shouted Bunny. “There’s a green button on the lower left. It’s a Steadicam feature. Hit that and then hold the blue button to take high-speed high-def pics. Oh… shit—”

I saw him turned and kick a priest in the groin and then chop him across the face with the stock of his shotgun, then wheel right and fire three times at the men behind him. The shotgun was loaded with double-ought buckshot that tore ragged red holes and set priests screaming away as they clutched stumps of arms or tried to plug gaping wounds in their stomachs or chests. It was a dreadful thing, though, to see that most of them somehow managed to fight past the immediate reaction of pain and fear, and stagger forward again. Christ. Even knowing they were dying they kept attacking. I heard Top and Bunny both make sick sounds because it was immediately clear to all of us that wounding our enemies was not going to be enough. We had to kill them all. They were either fanatics or they were insane. Or both.

And killing requires a lot more precision — and often more ammunition — than wounding. It takes a fragment of each second to aim with precision, and we didn’t have that time to waste.

Nevertheless, Top roared, “Center mass, god damn it.”

“I am shooting center mass, Old Man,” complained Bunny. Then he saved the rest of his breath for fighting.

11

LIZZIE CORBETT KNELT in the ash at the edge of the pit, holding the drone controls in both hands. She followed Bunny’s instructions and fired the high-def camera over and over, playing with both optical and digital zoom functions. Images popped onto the screen and she froze one, discarded it because it was still too blurry; repeated the process. Again and again.

And then, on the tenth try, the image of the page popped up as clear and readable as if she held the book in her own hands.

She bent over it, eyes inches from the screen, lips moving as she worked. When doing translations, it helped her to mouth the words as she read them. It somehow made them more real.

The process of interpretation and translation was something that would normally take days or weeks, even for someone who knew the language and understood quite a bit about the culture. What confused the process was that the writing on the page was not all in a single language. There were blocks of text that were in Sumerian, but the style of the translation suggested that the translator was Akkadian. Other sections were in Latin and some short phrases, scribbled in the margins, were written in Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya, and Hebrew. She fumbled her way through it, digging deep for the right words and meanings.

She stumbled through it, feeling the terrible burden of seconds burning off as Joe Ledger and his men fought for their lives down in the pit. The sounds of their battle rose with the smoke, though it was oddly distorted, as if their battle was a mile or more away.

Sergeant Brock leaned over the rim, coughing and using his hand to fan away the noxious fumes. He held a pistol in his other hand, and the other marines stood nearby, all of them looking as helpless and impotent as Lizzie felt.

“I can’t see a fucking thing,” complained Brock. “I mean… I should be able to, but I can’t.”

Lizzie hit a section of the text that suddenly jumped out at her. She yelled into the microphone. “Joe, Top… they’re trying to open a gate down there.”

“No shit,” growled Bunny’s voice. “It’s already half open.”

“Can you see what’s inside?”

“Red light,” said Top. “Can’t see more than that.”

“Listen to me,” she said urgently, “I thought that this was an attempt to invoke an ancient goddess, Uttu or Atlach-Nacha. But it’s not. Everything on that page is about numbers. It’s not a spell… it’s a series of mathematical formulae.”

“The fuck…?” said Bunny.

“I think I know what this might be, but I need to know what’s on the other side of the gateway. If it’s a cavern with glowing moss, then we have to handle it one way. If that’s all it is, then I think I know how to destroy the book. If it’s somewhere else, then we need to get the book and bring it up here. But I have to know one way or the other. We need to know. Can you get closer to the opening?”

“Not a chance,” said Ledger. “We’re falling back—”

“No! You have to tell me what you can see through the gateway.”

There was a heavy rattle of gunfire, screams, shouts and curses. Through it all, Ledger managed to spit out some words. “Use the… fucking… drone—”

Lizzie wanted to smack herself upside the head. Of course!

She took the controls again and went to work.

12

I SAW THE drone go sweeping overhead, moving in a straight line toward the cleft, which seemed to be swelling as more of the intense red light pushed through from the other side.

And I realized what I was seeing. This wasn’t just the priests and spiders trying to break through from the pit — something over there, on the other side of the wall, was fighting to get out. To break free.

To come here.

I shifted to my left to get a better view, but had to shoot my way there, killing a priest and three more of the tripodal spiders. Smaller spiders were climbing all over me, and I could hear them scratching at the fabric of my Dragon suit. The material would stop a bullet, but, like most fabric body armor, it wouldn’t necessarily stop a blade. Or a claw.

I paused to slap at the little bastards, squashing several and brushing dozens to the ground, but they immediately swarmed back up my legs. Top and Bunny were likewise covered with the little monsters.

A big one — much bigger than the others, nearly as large as a baby elephant — came scuttling toward me, with two priests flanking it. I switched to full auto and burned through the rest of my magazine to cut them down. As I swapped in a new one I crabbed sideways to try and get a better look at the cleft. The light was blinding, making it difficult to see anything clearly, but I thought I saw shadows. Small and large. There were more of the tripodal spiders, but also larger shapes. And stranger ones, but none that I could identify. They crowded the entrance and I knew that if they broke through, we were lost. Me and my guys. Maybe more than that.

Maybe the world.

Every fiber of who I was, and all of my instincts told me that was not an exaggeration.

Top and Bunny had backed all the way to where we’d first come down the slope. There was nowhere else to go. I was separated from them by a running sea of spiders. No matter how many of the little freaks I killed, there were always more. Were they somehow squeezing through the cleft? Or had Mercer conjured them from some nightmare reality? I didn’t know and wasn’t sure I wanted that answer.

The priests tried to swat the drone out of the air. They jumped up and swung their weapons at it, but Lizzie was sharp. Damn, she was sharp. The pigeon wings flapped, and the little machine tilted and dipped and swooped and even though the axes and mauls and waving arms came close, they could not not tear it down.

The opening was still narrow, though. A few inches, though the spill of light created the illusion of it being larger.

“The drone won’t fit,” I warned.

“I know,” she snapped. “I’m going to try something.”

The drone accelerated, the wings becoming blurs as it shot forward toward the wall. A priest climbed onto the shoulders of two others and leapt at it, trying to grab it and pull the machine down.

He missed, but only just.

The drone smashed into the wall.

No. It smashed into the cleft. The head buried itself into the narrow opening and lodged there. The wings snapped and the body sagged down.

“Shit,” cried Bunny, but I understood what Lizzie was trying to do. She needed to see what was on the other side. The cameras were in the drone’s small head.

I heard a sound, though. From Lizzie.

She cried out as if in physical pain.

At the same time, Bunny glanced up, probably to judge how far above them the ends of our rappelling ropes were, and I saw him stagger. Actually stagger, as if someone had hit him. His knees began to buckle and he had to visibly fight to keep standing.

“Jesus Fucking Christ on the cross,” he breathed.

I looked up, too.

I wanted to scream.

No, I wanted to lay down my weapons and sit down and cry. And let the monsters get me, because there was no reason to keep fighting. The world was broken. Everything was broken.

Above us should have been the slopes of the pit. Above us should have been the ropes and the smoke rising into the air over the Turkmenistan desert. Above us should have been the world.

That’s not what Bunny saw. It’s not what I saw.

Above us there was darkness.

Above us there were stars.

It was like looking up from the surface of the moon.

The sky was gone. And the world was gone and where in Heaven or Hell were we?

“Joe,” came Lizzie’s voice. “Look at your computer screen.”

“Not now,” I said, firing and firing.

“Joe… you have to see this.”

I backpedaled and took a grenade from my belt. “Frag out!” I bellowed and rolled it like a bocce ball beneath the closest of the giant spiders; then I spun, crouched and covered my head with my arms. The blast, even muffled, was like thunder, and I was splashed with green ichor. I cut a look to see that everything in the blast radius was dead and it gave me a few seconds to check the screen.

If I thought it was going to be as bad as seeing the stars above us on a clear afternoon, I was wrong.

It was worse.

So much worse.

The computer screens we wore were small, but they were ultra-high-definition and the colors were accurate to an incredible degree. I gaped down at the image fed to me from Lizzie. The image of what the drone was seeing through the cleft.

There were thousands upon thousands of figures on the other side of that wall. But it was not a cave or cavern over there. It was not anything on Earth at all.

Through the proxy of the drone’s video camera eyes, I looked onto the landscape of another world. I saw vast stretches of sandy, rocky ground and towering mountains. It was all painted a lurid red. Sand and rocks and blowing grit. All red.

Filling much of that landscape was an army.

It was the only way to describe it. An army. An invasion force. Countless thousands of them. I saw hundreds of the three-legged spiders, some of them as small as the ones I’d been killing, but most many times bigger. Bigger than full grown bison. And people. If they were people. Bipedal, with round, erect heads and large eyes in dark sockets; their bodies fitted out with armor like exoskeletons, as if their limbs were unable to support themselves. They marched forward like slaves being forced into battle.

Behind them were other creatures and it was instantly clear that they were the masters of these combat slaves. They rode in devices like a kind of chariot, with flat bases and lots of devices whose nature I could not begin to guess. These chariots moved nimbly on mechanical legs. Three legs.

Worse still were the things that towered above them.

Monsters made of glittering metal that stood a hundred feet tall and walked on three titanic legs, many flexible metal tentacles whipping with furious agitation in the air. Behind each, bolted to its body, was a massive steel net, and with each step jets of green gas erupted from its joints. Each tripod had a clear dome and inside I could see the masters of this ungodly army. They were hideous, with octopoidal bodies, and massive heads with bulging eyes and v-shaped beaks. Smaller tentacles framed their mouths, twitching and obscene.

My mind felt like it was cracking, breaking apart, and taking the last of my sanity with it. I knew these things. These metal monsters. I’d read about them as a kid, saw them in movies. They weren’t real. They were the creations of a British science fiction writer from more than a century ago. They were fiction.

Except that they weren’t.

And I immediately understood why this was real. How it could be real.

Just like H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth writing about Elder Gods, the Great Old Ones and other cosmic horrors, HG Wells had not created the Martians in his novel, War of the Worlds, from whole cloth, but had seen these horrors in dreams or visions. He had glimpsed the terrors of another world and knew, on some conscious or subconscious level, that these creatures coveted our blue world and had, in literal point of fact, drawn their plans against us.

Here was proof.

Right here, in this pit. Monsters from that world had already slipped through. These spiders. And in a flash of terrible insight, I realized that perhaps the spider goddess Atlach-Nacha was very real. Maybe she was one of those monsters who had come through a similar crack thousands of years ago and had become trapped here. She, and the mad priests who worshipped her, had labored all these millennia to help her open the door, so that her masters could come through with their armies and their fighting machines to make war on humanity. To conquer and own this world and leave their own dying world.

I had no proof of that, but I believed it. I knew it.

And I had to stop it.

Somehow.

Jesus Christ.

Somehow.

13

LIZZIE CORBETT HAD seen some very strange things in her life. Most of them over the last few years, since discovering a vast portion of the lost treasure of the Knights Templar and then being recruited into the Library of the Ten Gurus. That group, run by Sikhs, fought a bizarre war on two fronts. The public face of their group worked with the United Nations and UNESCO to preserve artifacts, religious items, and books that were targeted for destruction by extremist groups like ISIL.

The other arm, which was smaller and much less passive in important ways, worked to reclaim books like the Unlearnable Truths. To take them away from whomever had them and make sure they were protected and properly locked away. She had not shared this part of her life with Joe, Top and Bunny. Only Mr. Church knew about it, and he had provided funding and material support for the Library’s work.

It had been Church who brought her into this matter, and who had warned her that the Book of Uttu might not be what it seemed. She did not know how Church acquired this information, but her Sikh friends knew of him and said that he could be trusted. Church had told her she could trust Joe Ledger and his team, and she did.

Church had warned her that this matter could be dangerous, but even he did not seem to know how dangerous. How could he? That awful book had held its secrets for so long. The priests and imams who had protected it had kept the world safe from its potential.

And now it was all falling apart.

The Sikhs were too far away. Church was too far away. Joe and his men were at the bottom of an impossible pit. Maybe not even truly on this Earth, or in this dimension. She couldn’t even start to understand it all. How could she? How could anyone?

All Lizzie had to work with was her knowledge of books like this — and with what was written on the two pages she had photographed with the drone. There was so much there, written in a dozen different hands, in half a dozen languages. And the text itself was conflicted, confusing. It was a mathematical formula written as a conjuring spell. It must have been meaningless to the priests who recorded it. Though maybe not. The Sumerians were known for an exceptional mathematical brilliance, for having developed high math skills with no recognizable backtrail of development. As if the knowledge sprang suddenly into being within a generation or two. Scholars and historians had puzzled over it for years, but now Lizzie thought she understood. It was Atlach-Nacha. Somehow that creature was no mere spider, not even a monstrous alien spider. She — it — was sentient and intelligent and somehow able to communicate to those ancient Sumerians. She had taught them advanced math, and engineering and other skills. But then something happened to break that process. Atlach-Nacha had become lost, trapped in the earth. Possibly some natural disaster, or the actions of another culture. Perhaps sanity prevailed within the group of priests and there was a rebellion in order to save their world. Lizzie did not know how that happened, or why. Probably no one would ever know because there was no record of it at all. The Sumerians went into decline and the planned invasion was forestalled. The knowledge had been recorded in a book, and that book hidden away and guarded fiercely for thousands of years.

Until now. Until ISIL and Ohan and Mercer.

Until an act of murder cracked open the world and the invading army mustered, ready to complete an invasion eight thousand years in the making.

The gunfire and explosions from below were continuous. There was no sign of the battle slacking, but Lizzie knew there was only one way for it to end. Joe, Top and Bunny would run out of ammunition, and then they would be overwhelmed. Then Mercer and the priests would finish their ritual to open this world to the horrors of another.

Lizzie read over the page again and again looking for some clue, some hint. Some hope.

Then, suddenly, she turned to Sergeant Brock.

“How much rope do you have?”

“What?”

“Rope. How much? Can you reach them?”

He looked at the three lines that went down into the nothing below.

“They’re too short.”

Lizzie shook her head. “Pull them up.”

Brock gaped. “What?”

“Pull them up, Sergeant. Do it now.”

14

I GOT CAUGHT in a deadly pinch when I reached for another magazine and found that there were none left. Three priests rushed at me, two swinging pick-axes and one with a sledgehammer.

There was no time to draw the Sig Sauer. None.

I faded left, ducking in and under one pick-axe, and chopped upward with my forearm. Even insane ancient Sumerian priests have balls, and I hit his real damn hard. He let loose with a whistling shriek that hit the ultrasonic. I straightened fast and took the pick-axe from his hands, shouldered him into the sledgehammer guy and swung the axe at the third priest. The spike of the big tool punched a big wet hole in his solar plexus. I let go as he fell, taking his pick-axe away, following it with a ballet pirouette and slammed the spike into the crotch of the sledgehammer priest. He sat down and fell back, screaming something in a language I didn’t know. Maybe calling on his god. Maybe calling for his mother. I didn’t give much of a fuck.

I moved to the priest I’d clubbed in the nuts and he looked up as I came at him. He had no time at all to block the kick to his throat.

I drew my pistol and fired at two more of them, killing one with a single shot through the face and knocking another down with a sucking chest wound.

In my ear, Lizzie was yelling at me. “Get the book, Joe. We need it.”

“Get it and do fucking what with it?”

The answer hit me across the shoulders and I slapped it away, thinking it was a snake. It wasn’t. It was one of the rappelling lines. I looked up and saw that far above me it was knotted to a second line. And, I presume, the third far above that. Smart lady, that Lizzie Corbett.

A moment later something thumped down hard behind me and I spun. It was a big canvas equipment bag. My equipment bag. I fired six shots at some spiders and then rushed to it, tore it open and nearly wept.

Fifteen magazines for the MP7s. Grenades. More magazines for sidearms.

I don’t know if that was Lizzie’s idea or Brock’s, but one of those two was going to get a big wet kiss.

“Echo Team,” I bellowed. “Ammunition. On me.”

Bunny and Top shot looks at me, saw the bag and the dangling rope. They understood. They began sliding along the wall, firing with renewed frenzy. Top’s MP7 was slung, probably empty and he was using the grenade launcher. There were dead bodies everywhere. Dozens of them. It was a slaughterhouse. It was what we call a target-rich environment, except that usually doesn’t mean that the shooters were likely to lose.

But now we had a chance. I laid down covering fire with my MP7 and lobbed a few grenades as party favors. They ran. We all reloaded and stuffed the magazines into our pouches.

The priests and the spiders kept coming.

There were still so many of them.

I picked up the empty bag and pointed to Mercer. “We need to secure the book and send it up on the rope. All other considerations secondary, hooah?”

“Hooah,” they said.

“Grenades,” I said. “Blow these fuckers up. Buy me time.”

Bunny and Top stood their ground and as Top fired, Bunny hurled one fragmentation grenade after the other. They set a pattern, tossing the grenades just over the front rank so that the priests and spiders in front shielded them from the shrapnel. It was a rinse and repeat method, but we knew it couldn’t last. It just had to last long enough.

I threw a pair of grenades underhand at the killers and monsters between me and Mercer, making sure not to over-throw. Lizzie didn’t say that I could kill Mercer. Which sucked, because I really, really wanted to.

The pit was filled with lightning and thunder as the grenades detonated. Cracks appeared in the walls. Even worse, the cleft was widening — either from the concussions, or the spell, or the diligence of the spiders in this world and the aliens in the next. It was madness down there. Total madness.

I don’t know how long it took me to kill my way to where Mercer knelt. Ten seconds? Ten years?

Time was meaningless. Hope was a nail hammered into the center of my chest. Hate filled my head with thorns. I was deafened and screaming at the top of my lungs.

As the spiders and priests died, I saw Mercer again. With all of the violence and madness around him, he had not moved. Never even looked up, as if he existed in a space apart from this hell hole.

I switched from grenades to knife, not wanting to risk accidentally shooting the prick. There were four priests between me and Mercer, and they tried to form a protective wall.

They tried.

They had big weapons. My knife is a Wilson Rapid Response folding knife with a three and a half inch blade. They should have won, at least in the way they would have calculated the odds. But the math works best for who wants it more. They were fanatics, but I’m actually crazy.

Batshit, monster-in-the-dark crazy.

They tried to keep me from saving my world. They tried hard.

I cut them to pieces.

As the last one fell away, his hands clamped to what was left of his throat, I stepped up to Mercer. He knelt there, his skin steaming with heat like a roasting pig. His dick was still fully erect as if in the throes of the most intense and existential of sexual encounters. I was very tempted to use my knife on him, because this son of a bitch deserved it. But not yet.

Instead, I put my knife in my belt pouch and reached for the book.

Yes. I thought it would be that easy.

Fuck.

15

TOUCHING THE BOOK was like touching a live electrical power cord. Not a little one, but a big one. The shock was so intense that my hands clamped onto the covers and I suddenly felt as if I was on fire. My body went totally rigid except for my hair, which stood straight as needles from arms and scalp. The pain was off the scale. There’s pain, and then there’s agony, and then there’s a level that is so big, so comprehensive that you can almost stand back from it and watch. Like seeing your house burn down and take everything you own with it. You’re aware of the pain, but it seems somehow unreal.

That kind of pain.

I don’t think I screamed. Pretty sure I couldn’t at that point. Nor could I move. All that was left for me was to experience it. And to feel myself die.

They say your life flashes before your eyes. That’s not true. I’ve been out on the very edge too many times, so I know.

What happened — at least to me — was that I saw the things I haven’t done, the life I had yet to live and would not get to live. I saw my lover, Junie Flynn, running through a dying world as monstrous fighting machines burned the city around her with heat weapons. I saw my brother, Sean, and his family, tangled in the big baskets on the back of one of those tripods, caught like trout and devalued to nothing more than food. I saw my friends and allies, and my fellow soldiers, fighting a losing war against an unbeatable army. Wave after wave of jets and helicopters going after the legions of fighting machines, and then falling like spent fireworks from the sky. I saw the green earth become choked by red weeds, in which the last free people suffered and starved and died.

I saw that.

It was all going to come to pass because of me. Because I’d failed in this task. To take a book away from a man who was not even able to resist.

Because I was not strong enough to do even that.

I wanted to scream. To beg for mercy from everyone who I’d failed. To cry out to Junie and my brother, and all of them.

The heat burned me, and I knew I was dying.

Except…

Maybe it was the Dragon suit that saved me.

Maybe it was that I saw a smile form on Mercer’s face, blossoming like a flower of hate in a blighted field. Maybe it was that. A last insult. The sting of mockery, the gloat of triumph.

I don’t know what it was. I’ll probably never know.

But my hands became mine again. Mine to use, mine to choose. Mine to move.

My thumbs lifted first. And then each finger in a slow — bitterly slow — choreography of obedience.

And then I was falling. Free of the book. Not free of the pain, though. That came with me as I collapsed. I dropped to my knees. The world was full of thunder and I could feel something warm leaking from my nose and ears. Blood, probably. I coughed and could taste it in my mouth as well.

Mercer turned his head slowly, focusing his blind eyes on me. “Your world will fall.”

“F — fuck you,” I gasped. I coughed again and spat more of blood into the hood of the Dragon suit. It painted the visor with viscous red, partly obscuring him. All I could see was that smile.

“Joe?”

The voice was in my ear and for a moment I could not tell if it was Junie or my dead mother or…

“Lizzie?” I whispered.

“Joe,” she said, “listen to me.”

“I—” But really, that was all I could manage.

“Joe,” said Lizzie as if from a million miles away, “all we need is the book. Do you understand?”

I mumbled something. Not even sure if they were actual words.

“We just need the book, Joe. Can you hear me?”

“B-b-book—” My vision was dimming. The world was turning red as the edges of the cleft began to crumble. Mercer’s smile became a laugh.

“Joe,” yelled Lizzie, “we don’t need Mercer.”

She shouted those words. Over and over again. Trying to reach me. Forcing me to understand.

I spat again. The visor was totally blocked now.

My hands, swollen and burned and nearly useless, rose as if from their own accord. Finding my hood. Finding the seals. Fumbling their way through. Tearing the hood off.

The air was so hot. Like an oven. Like hell.

But I could see.

And I could see James Mercer’s fucking smile. That smug, superior, malicious, evil goddamn smile. I wanted to wipe it off his face.

One hand dropped to my lap.

The other dropped to my waist. To the pouch. I could feel the hardness of the folded knife there.

I think maybe I smiled, too.

Mercer stopped smiling when I cut his lips from his face.

16

THEY PULLED ME away from him.

Top and Bunny.

What was left of Mercer — what I had left of him — slumped down in red ruin. And as he fell it was as if time caught up with him all at once. His skin immediately caught fire and burned, the fats and oils sizzling and popping and steaming away as he withered to a blackened husk.

I shook free of the hands of my friends and saw that Top had the canvas bag the ammunition had come in. I tore it from his hands and pushed him away from the book, which had fallen to the ground.

“Don’t touch it,” I wheezed. “Don’t.”

I wasn’t able to do the job, though, so Bunny took the bag from me and used it like oven mitts to nudge the book inside. Then he zipped it up.

When I looked around I saw that the priests were dead. All of them. While I’d fought with the power of the book and with the evil of James Mercer, they had been doing awful work in the cavern. How many dead were there? I don’t know. Fifty? A hundred?

The last of the big spiders had retreated and were tearing at the cleft, which was now twice as wide as before.

“We need to get this to Lizzie,” I said, trying to stand. They caught me, and we staggered together to the dangling rope. Top took the bag and tied the handles to the rope and shouted for Lizzie to take it up.

The rope shivered and trembled, and then the slack went taut and the Book of Uttu began to rise. We three turned and faced the cleft. With palsied hands, we reloaded and stumbled across the death pit, firing at the spiders. Firing through the cleft. Waging war against the invaders for as long as we could. The pit got hotter and hotter, making it hard for me to breathe without my hood.

Then I heard Lizzie yelling.

“I have it. Get out of there. Joe, Top, Bunny… get out.”

“How?” asked Bunny bleakly, but then he turned and looked behind us. “Guys… guys. Look!”

We turned.

The rope was back. But instead of one, there were three. And fires burned more fiercely all around us. Fires that had not been there before. The mounds of priests were already starting to burn.

The wall of the pit had changed, and when I looked up there were no longer stars above us. Instead, through the gas and smoke, I saw the cloudy afternoon sky of Turkmenistan. The walls were no longer impossibly high. Up there, twenty meters above us, I could see Lizzie and Brock and a bunch of US Marines. And above them two Black Hawk helicopters.

I looked at Top and Bunny. We all glanced at the cleft and then at the ropes.

“Fuck this,” I said, and we ran for the ropes.

17

AS IT TURNED out, sealing the book was a process. A bastard of one, but Lizzie said she could do it. We lay sprawled at the edge of the pit. Burned, sweaty, half deaf, scared, watching her work. Not understanding a single damn thing of what she did. Trusting that she knew what she was doing.

Then she looked up, flushed and sweaty, with blue eyes as bright as a summer sky. She glanced at the helicopters and down at me.

“Do they have some kind of missiles or rockets or something?”

The Black Hawks had ESSS systems, which are stubby wings loaded with things that go boom. I grinned. “Yeah. They have all of that. Sixteen Hellfire missiles each. How many do you need?”

She chewed her lip for a second. “All of it?” she asked.

I made a call and then we started running away from the pit.

In the brief pause between my order and the execution, Lizzie said, “Hellfire?”

“Yeah,” said Top.

“Seems weirdly poetic.”

“Yeah,” he said.

And hellfire it was.

18

THE HELOS HIT the pit with all thirty-two missiles.

Then four choppers from the Turkmeni army came and threw in their own party favors. Four hours later — when we were all at a safe distance — a CIA black ops bird flew over and dropped a fuel-air bomb. Nothing survives that. The pressure wave kills anything organic and the fire cleans it all up. It’s the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in existence.

They’ve since done ground-penetrating radar. There’s nothing down there. Nothing moving. Nothing alive.

We survived our wounds. Time will tell if we would survive the memories, and the knowledge that there is an army waiting for us somewhere. Is it actually Mars? I don’t know. Certainly not the Mars we know. But I’ve learned that there are many worlds, and many versions of each world.

That army is out there somewhere. Now we know it.

And… now we’re ready.

I hope we’re ready.

ISIL is still out there destroying sanctuaries and churches and sacred places where things like the Unlearnable Truths have been stored and protected. We got lucky with this, but Lizzie said that there are many more of those books out there. A lot of them are in lands torn by war. In Iraq and Iran, in Syria. Elsewhere. Even in America. The Library of the Ten Gurus is searching. So are we. So are select friends.

We need to find those other books first.

We need to.

We need to.