Vars couldn’t breathe. It was like looking at two faces crudely merged into one. He could see it now, unnatural movement under Jake’s skin. The creature was crawling under the surface of Jake’s face, creating shapes with swarms of what seemed like fat larvae.
“It has a mind of its own, Vars,” Jake whimpered in his own voice this time. “It can smell Fane on those things. Out. We need to get out!”
Something thumped in Vars’s ears, and he followed his gut. He grabbed a chair that stood by a nearby wall and smashed it against the display case.
Glass shattered, the sound turning into a screech when the shards fell, breaking into smaller pieces.
Without thinking, he dropped the broken chair and pulled the collar off the plastic bust.
Behind him, a mix of inhuman growls and Jake’s pleas for help created a concoction of sounds so blood chilling Vars had to force himself to stay in place. It turned into a thundering sound that rose in volume while remaining so low its tone was resonating painfully with something inside Vars’s head.
He spun around, but his joints froze in terror when the black slush exploded from Jake’s throat, hitting the floor only to crawl back up his legs, as if it were some kind of diabolical fungus.
The monster inside Jake roared, contorting Jake’s body as if the boy were possessed. The goo was hardening into a shell over Jake’s limbs, trapping him inside. When Jake looked up, his eyes weren’t blue anymore, but a shimmering red that looked as if rubies had been set where his pupils used to be.
Vars squeezed his hand on the collar, taking a step forward despite the fear paralyzing his speech and mind, but the creature forming around the core of Jake’s body reached out for him, and before Vars knew how it happened, Jake’s arm, larger and longer that it should be, had claws.
“Jake...” Vars could hardly breathe, stiff with fear as the monstrous being rose on two legs and spread its wings. They were webbed, like a bat’s, and so broad they knocked over another glass case. In the thick mass of black that hardened over Jake like lava in cool water, his face still remained pale, human, and frightened. His glowing red eyes sought Vars, but when Jake opened his mouth, the only thing he managed to utter was a choked groan. The slime exploded out his mouth and spread over his face like black jelly, forming a new shape over Jake’s handsome features.
The monster was huge, an imposing figure before Vars, and when it straightened its back, its horns knocked against the lamp hanging from the tall ceiling.
Vars had seen it before.
Its very image stood under the old stairs in the clubhouse.
The gargoyle’s features were a picture of deformity. As if a squarish, masculine face had sunken until muscle disappeared, leaving a thin layer of skin resting against protruding bones of a skull, which itself was a chimera of various species, with a double set of sharp teeth under the flat nose.
Vars stepped back, uselessly holding the collar in front of him. There was no way it would fit on a neck the girth of his own thigh. If he could even get close enough to attempt it.
His entire body was so stiff his muscles ached, his heart thrashed in his chest in warning, and his head was a big throbbing mess empty of thoughts. In that moment, he feared so many things: that he was done for, that Jake was gone, eaten up by this monster from hell, that he’d helped to unleash the power of an infernal beast in the middle of Brecon and made the stupid decision of not telling anyone what was really going on.
Now he’d die. They’d both die.
Prayers he’d learned as a small child came back to him, tickling the back of his tongue as he wordlessly faced a being that seemed to confirm the very existence of hell.
Smelling of sulphur, of smoke, of fire, it ignored Vars and turned toward the smashed displays, sniffing like a bloodhound. Vars emerged out of his trance when the gargoyle’s snake-like tail smacked him in the side hard enough to knock him over.
Pain spread across Vars’s ribs, but at least he was no longer stunned with fear. In disbelief, he watched the monster grab the mannequin wearing Fane’s blood-stained clothes. One gargantuan hand was enough to wrap around the waist of the wooden figure, but then the gargoyle threw it to the ground with a roar that shook the walls of the museum.
Behind Jake’s back, a set of doors flew open, spilling in light from the hallway. A middle-aged man in an oversized knitted sweater entered, holding up two small pepper sprays. “Stand down, I already called the poli—” His voice broke, and the twin canisters dropped to the floor. His face turned into a mask of terror as the flush went down his body, leaving his bald head pale as wax.