“They were trying to warn us.”
Evan choked and coughed, feeling the strange tickling in his throat again.
“The doll, the body in the lake, everything. They were trying to scare us away before it was too late.”
Abel’s form writhed as though in ecstasy, the skin opening with sores, bleeding before healing, a scar there and then gone.
Evan slowly stood, waiting to fall back to the ground, but didn’t.
Their weak imprints meddle with my destiny, but they are only husks, hollowed out of the life I took from them. They are nothing but shadows and mist.
“The hair was from you,” Evan said, coughing again. “From Selena, or Allison. You couldn’t help leaving a little trace of your own as you guided me, kept me working and hoping I could go back.”
Every soul comes with a price.
“You give me my son back, right now.”
Evan’s voice shook, and tears sprang to his eyes. He knew the thing before him was laying out a path, but he didn’t want to follow it, he knew where it led to. The creature advanced on him, glided toward him without walking. Its chest opened in a vertical mouth from neck to groin, the blackened ribs beneath splitting, forming teeth, its organs melding into a giant lapping tongue.
Evan retreated, his shoes squeaking on the ebony floor. The crescent moon’s shining eye spotlighted him like a star on a stage. The pendulum cut the air now as the chunking of gears and sprockets above him meshed. The clock was beginning its work.
TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK.
Time passing became the loudest sound in the world, and Evan turned to run, to flee from the gliding horror Abel had become, but tripped and fell, his hands barely catching himself before he bashed his face into the floor. He rolled, trying to regain his feet, and saw what he’d stumbled over.
Shaun lay on the floor, his eyes partially open.
Evan’s heart stopped dead in his chest; sound peeled away until silence burned in his ears. He saw nothing but Shaun lying there, one arm twisted at his side, his skin pale alabaster. Unmoving.
Evan crawled toward him, touched his skin and felt the coldness of it, the pliancy gone.
“No,” he pleaded, his throat tightening against a moan.
He ran his hand up to Shaun’s shoulder, pulling himself closer, closer to his son, his boy. He pressed his face against Shaun’s cheek, feeling the first tear break free. Reaching around, he got an arm beneath his son’s back, curling his small body into his lap. Shaun’s head lolled on his neck, and Evan cradled it, the memory of the first time he held him coming back so clean and clear he could have lived in it forever. He heard Elle saying weakly from her hospital bed to support his head, and he was. He would never let anything bad happen to him, not ever. He would die for him; he would protect him and never let him suffer.
Evan rocked as he held Shaun’s body, silent sobs racking him as he breathed in the smell of his boy’s hair, the shampoo they always used. A sound of pure agony came from deep within him, and it was a breaking, the tearing of something that couldn’t be repaired.
The Abel-thing paused in its movement and then continued, stopping only a few feet away from where Evan sat.
I have enough power to live again, for through their collected energy I will conquer death, and you will be my vessel for life. I will be free of this place and walk again, fully alive within your skin.
Evan clenched his eyes shut, his jaw spasming so hard he heard several of his teeth crack. He vibrated with loss so deep he thought he would simply rip open and bleed grief onto the black floor until he faded away—away like his wife, and now his son.
Gently, so gently, he laid Shaun back on the floor, putting his palm over his son’s cool eyelids to close them. He brushed back his hair one last time.
My beautiful boy.
Evan stood, facing the gaping maw of the Abel-thing. The clank and rattle of the gears almost twenty feet above him drew his gaze upward, and he watched their turning progress, interlocking and spinning with perfect timing. The clock’s hands ticked backward, and the pendulum slashed the air in swaths, counting off the seconds. Time, delicate and powerful, turning, changing, flowing.
Evan reached into his pocket, drawing out the long, black key, its heavy steel in his hand comforting somehow. He looked down at Shaun’s lifeless body and gripped the key so hard he thought it might snap in his fist. Evan exhaled a long breath, and he opened his palm, hefted the key—everything has a purpose—and lobbed it upward into the twirling gears.
There was a screeching whine of steel binding, then an explosive bang that echoed through the infinite space of the clock. A haze of brass shavings came down like sharp party streamers, fluttering with golden flashes. The pendulum stuttered and then stopped, cocked to one side, holding its position before another massive boom.
The pendulum began to swing again, the hands running forward now.
The giant mouth in Abel’s front bellowed an incomprehensible word—maybe something in the language that brought everything around them to life—and the creature rushed forward, shrieking so loud Evan almost covered his ears.
Another earsplitting roar filled the cavern, and Abel stumbled with the sound, but it recovered at once and was upon him. Its hands grasped his arm, yanking him off his feet. He flew through the air and slid several yards on his back, then sat up to watch it approach.