But the real monster was below. Soon it would emerge.
Gogmagog.
8
I remember what happened next with heartbreaking clarity. I saw it all from where I was standing, maybe a dozen steps above the abandoned palanquin, and still see it in my dreams.
Radar was barking but I could barely hear her over the constant maddening drone from the Dark Well. Leah raised her dagger and with no hesitation plunged it deep into the feeding-sore beside what had been her mouth. Then, using both hands, she raked it across the scar, right to left.
“ELDEN!” she screamed. Blood flew from her re-opened mouth in a fine spray. Her voice was hoarse—from her feats of ventriloquism, I supposed—but the first word she’d spoken without having to project it from deep in her throat was loud enough for her wretched brother to hear, even over the hum. He turned. He saw her, really saw her, for the first time.
“ELDEN, STOP WHILE THERE’S STILL TIME!”
He hesitated, that forest of tentacles—more of them now, many more—waving. Did I see love in those bleary eyes? Regret? Sorrow, maybe shame that he’d cursed the only one who had loved him along with all those who had not? Or only the need to preserve what was slipping away after a reign that had been all too short （but doesn’t it seem that way to all of us, when the end comes）？
I didn’t know. I was running down the last steps, past the palanquin. I had no plan in mind, just a need to get her away before the thing down there could emerge. I thought of the giant cockroach that had escaped into Mr. Bowditch’s shed, and how Mr. Bowditch had shot it, and that reminded me—finally—that I still had his gun.
Leah walked into that waving glut of tentacles, seemingly unaware of the danger they posed. One of them caressed her cheek. Elden was still looking at her, and was he crying?
“Go back,” he croaked. “Go back while you can. I can’t…”
One of those tentacles wrapped around her blood-streaked neck. It was clear what he couldn’t do: stop the part of him that had been possessed by the thing below. All those books he’d read in the palace library—had none contained the most basic story of all cultures, the one that says when you deal with the devil you make a devil’s bargain?
I grabbed the tentacle—one that might have been part of an arm when Elden first made his bargain—and yanked it free of her throat. It was tough and coated with some kind of slime. Once it was no longer choking Leah, I let it slither out of my grip. Another wrapped around my wrist, a second one around my thigh. They began to pull me toward Elden. And the opening well.
I raised Mr. Bowditch’s gun to shoot him. Before I could, a tentacle curled around the barrel, jerked it away, and sent it spinning across the rough stone floor in the direction of the abandoned palanquin. Radar was now standing between Elden and the well, all her hackles up, barking so hard that foam flew from her jaws. She lunged to bite him. A tentacle—one that had been part of Elden’s left leg—snapped out like a whip and sent her sprawling. I was being dragged forward. The monster might have been weeping for his sister, but it was also grinning in anticipation of some awful victory, real or imagined. Two more tentacles, small ones, emerged from that grin to taste the air. The derrick was still pulling the hatch, but something else—something beneath—was pushing it as well, widening the gap.
Another world down there, I thought. A black one I never want to see.
“You were all part of it!” the flabby, green-faced creature shrieked at Leah. “You were all part of it or you would have come with me! You would have been my queen!”
More of Flight Killer’s tentacles seized her—legs, waist, once more around the neck—and dragged her forward. Something was coming out of the well, an oily black substance stippled with long white thorns. It hit the floor with a wet slap. It was a wing.
“I AM the queen!” Leah cried. “You aren’t my brother! He was kind! You’re an assassin and a pretender! You are an imposter!”
She plunged the dagger, still dripping with her blood, into her brother’s eye. The tentacles fell away from her. He staggered back. The wing rose and gave a flap that sent a nauseating gust of air into my face. It wrapped around Elden. The thorns impaled him. He was dragged to the lip of the well. He gave a final shriek before the thing plunged its hooked thorns into his chest and dragged him in.
But having its puppet wasn’t enough to satisfy it. A bubble of alien flesh rose from the well. Huge golden eyes stared at us from what was otherwise no face at all. There was a scraping, grinding sound, and a second thorn-covered wing emerged. It gave an exploratory flap and another gust of putrescent air struck me.