I was intact. Time seemed to go still. With the flames flaring and dying, the creature closer to the light than it had been, I could make out the fine detail, even with peripheral vision. I could tell that it had eyes that were less eyes and more slits in the darkness. Bright without being light.
I was already turning to run, feeling how uncooperative my body was. How slow.
Limbs caught me. Fat, brutish ones, like fingers that could bend in any combination of directions, and being so disproportionately long didn’t make them any less fat or brutish. They hooked between my legs and into the flesh of my belly, trapping one arm against my side. Clutching my body. My feet were lifted clear of the ground.
A flutter of wings. Evan flew right between the demon and me. As he’d cast the snow aside at the morgue window, the movement had an uncharacteristic force to it. Enough to dislodge the fingers, to lift me momentarily free.
I fought, and there was too much to fight off to allow me anything but flailing, weak flailing with my current state. I managed to get loose enough to slip my head free, and I toppled and dropped to the floor, my face mere inches from the ignited gasoline.
I flipped over, grabbing at the gasoline can. I didn’t bother with the wreath. The creature’s limbs and bulk were crushing it. Decimating it. A waste of time, putting that together.
It was clutching, limbs grasping one after another in Evan’s wake, reaching in awkward ways to stay out of the light and away from the flame, zig-zagging around the barrier with bends in places that shouldn’t have bent, as if it was breaking arms so those arms could work their way past the barrier.
I averted my eyes. I was coming dangerously close to looking, and it was all too easy for this demon to sinuously slide into my field of view.
When Evan was clearly out of the reach of the hands, coils fell away from the walls where the demon had suspended and hung them. A falling curtain, the closing portcullis.
Evan found his way through the gaps between the coils, segments and half-formed limbs, momentarily ceasing all flapping and continuing forward with momentum alone, so he could make himself small enough.
I was already moving. Sluggish compared to Evan and the demon both. I hopped over the flame, meager as it was, stumbled and crashed to the floor.
It loomed to the side, and I twisted my head away before I could look, twisting my arms around as well, can in hand. The contents sloshed out, touching the short patch of dying flame that still remained. It exploded to life with light and violence.
The demon was burned as if the flames themselves had touched it.
It recoiled, more like a snake than anything. The silhouette wasn’t so different from a cobra, top heavy, supported on too small a lower body.
The darkness consumed it.
I wasted no time in working on my new circle. Another splash-
It reacted. On the ceiling, trying to slip by, it recoiled once more, rearing back like a horse might, limbs flailing.
My gaze fixed on the ground, I wasn’t ready or aware enough to see what it was doing. It lunged again.
This time, it simply crashed into the wall of flame. The fire did far more damage than it should have. Incinerating mountains of flesh, torching bent limbs and digits.
In its death throes, it clutched. One claw blindly reached a foot over my head, me, only to disintegrate as it passed further into the space. A ‘hand’ reached out to the side, then jammed itself into the thing’s yawning mouth.
Guillotine teeth severed the hand. Blood flowed forth. Not the demon’s.
This time I was ready, repairing the barrier with splashes of gasoline.
A naked, jawbone lined with yellowed, uneven fangs clattered to the ground, gums included.
I couldn’t wrap my head around any of it, and that wasn’t helping my mental state. My hand shook so violently from fatigue and fear both that I dropped the gasoline. Depositing a pool right in front of me. Dangerous and wasteful.
It was destroying itself, feeding more and more of itself into the fire.
If there were hints or clues as to why in the creature’s behavior or body language, I couldn’t see it.
I grabbed the gasoline and righted it, then mopped up what I could with the torch’s head, drawing out more of a line. Two splashes of gasoline closed the circuit, setting the flame alight.
This wouldn’t burn forever.
My eyes fell on the ruins of the roof, on lengths of what had to be too-damp wood.
But still wood.
Outside of the circle. Beneath reams of the demon’s flesh that had yet to be fed into the fires.
“Blake!” Rose screamed.
I turned, but all I experienced was disorientation. I couldn’t search for Rose, because the demon was leveraging its sheer mass to make it impossible to look anywhere without risking looking at it.
“Rose!”
My careful and furtive glances around me showed that the demon had cut itself off. This part of itself that it was feeding into the fire was dead. Like a worm cut in two, it had grown another head.
That head had thrust its way into one window, high above. Nothing in the neighboring windows suggested that it had left that same windowframe. It had gone in, it hadn’t gone out.
It was in Rose’s domain.
Rather than risk moving my eyes across the intervening space, I closed my eyes until I was looking straight down.
“Blake! Please!”
I struggled to find my feet, swayed, and nearly collapsed into the fire. Or, worse, over the other side of the circle.
Was it a trick? I couldn’t imagine it was.
I dropped the gas can and torch, reached into my pocket and withdrew the small mirror. I held it straight overhead, covering it with my other hand, and faced it straight down.
“Here!” I shouted.
I moved my eyes along my body, a safe territory, up my arm, and to the mirror.
Reflected in the mirror, safe within the circle, was Rose, curled up on the ground, so she could remain small enough to be entirely within the reflection.
The demon’s strategy and form had both changed, though it remained a sinuous thing, a centipede of spidery, grasping limbs at the top end and an endless snake body fashioned of oversized intestine, spine and segmented insect parts at the bottom. A bulbous, tumorous mass three times as wide as a window hit the wall, squeezing through with enough force that fluids leaked forth, streaking the wall beneath. The fluids encroached on my circle of flame, but stopped short of interfering with it.
The demon’s reflection was it, as much as any part of it. It passed in and out of windows and unrusted patches of metal without traveling the intervening space. It kept extending, spreading, claiming all of the darkness. Becoming the darkness.
It chose only the windows shrouded in enough shadow that I couldn’t see if there was glass or not, metal in the gloom. At times it bubbled before it erupted forth, seeping in. Other times, it simply lunged out. When the clouds shifted and a window saw more light, the demon simply abandoned that section of itself, letting it blister, boil, and die.
I could only hope there was no angle or means by which it could enter the mirror I held.
I heard a scream, and my thoughts turned to Evan.
No. Trickery?
Not trickery either. Blood spattered windows, and the creature used the resulting gloom to occupy more territory. The light that filtered through the stained glass was red.
There was the light of the circle, faint moonlight that came in through some windows and around the collapsed section of roof, and darkness.