The Book of Doom - By Barry Hutchison Page 0,42
lot of you!”
Zac sidled along the wall to the now unprotected door. He didn’t hear the faint sloppy schlurp the eyeball on the ceiling made, or see it slowly swivel to look at him as he knelt down beside the door handle.
After a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure the bouncer wasn’t coming, Zac slid the pick into the waiting lock. Before he could find the first pin, the door opened with a faint click.
Zac gave it a cautious push. It swung inward, revealing a long dark corridor. A stale breeze breathed at him from deep within the darkness.
“Come, Zac Corgan,” it said. “I have been expecting you.”
NGELO STOOD OUTSIDE Eyedol with his back pushed firmly against it. The flickering neon glow of the sign washed the surrounding area in shades of red, but he’d discovered that if he pressed right up against the wall he could tuck himself up in a pocket of shadow, out of sight of the rest of the underworld.
His breathing was steady now and he was no longer sweating. He thought he could probably do with going to the toilet again, but it wasn’t a pressing emergency quite yet.
He felt stupid. That was the worst part. He’d been scared by the sights and the sounds in the nightclub and he’d made a fool of himself in front of Zac and Herya. In front of his friends.
He thought about praying, but he didn’t know if anyone would hear him from way down there in the underworld. Then again, with God gone, he’d never been really sure if anyone was even listening any more.
He prayed anyway.
“Hello, it’s me, Angelo,” he said into his pressed-together palms. “I’m in Hades, so this might be a bad line, but if you can hear me, please look after my friends. They’re the only ones I’ve got. So, um, yeah. Love to everyone. Amen.”
There was a sound of breaking glass from over by the front entrance. Someone big and heavy came crashing through the doors before they had a chance to swish all the way open. The monstrous figure landed heavily on its misshapen torso, dragged itself back up on to all four feet, then plunged once more into the club.
Angelo squashed himself further into the shadows as the sounds of battle rang out through the broken doors of Eyedol. He tried to think about Batman, lurking in the dark just like he was. Batman wouldn’t be scared. Batman wasn’t scared of anything.
But he wasn’t Batman. And he was terrified.
“An. Gel. Lo.”
His name came as a whisper, broken into three syllables by a voice that sounded parchment dry. Angelo froze exactly like Batman wouldn’t.
“An. Gel. Lo.”
The voice seemed to come from nowhere in particular. It was just there, loitering around his ears, up to no good.
“An. Gel. Lo.”
“Um, h-hello?” he whimpered. “Who... who’s there?”
“An. Gel. Lo. An. Gel. Lo.”
“Stop it. I’m w-warning you. I know karate.”
There was a soft giggle from the darkness. “No, An. Gel. Lo,” said the whispers. “You don’t.”
And with a rustle, the night snapped shut around him.
Zac stepped into the corridor and the door blew closed, cutting off what little light there had been. He heard the lock slide into place, and knew that there was no going back.
He took a moment to replace his lock-picking tools, before he went for another pocket and pulled out a short plastic tube about the size of a marker pen. It gave a krik as he bent it, and a weak green glow spread along the tube’s length.
The walls on both sides of him blinked in the emerald light. Literally blinked. Hundreds of eyes, each the size of a marble, were embedded into the plaster. They stared at Zac, and Zac stared back. He brought the glow-stick closer to one wall and watched the pupils dilate in response.
“I can see you, Zac Corgan,” said the voice from along the corridor. “Can you see me?”
The voice sounded like it was close to laughter. There was an accent to it too. Greek, probably, considering which underworld they’d ended up in.
Zac stepped away from the wall and peered along the corridor. The green light only extended a metre or two along it, leaving the rest behind a curtain of impenetrable black.
Watched from both sides by countless tiny eyes, Zac pushed on into the darkness until he came to a smooth metal door set into the back wall of the corridor. It opened with a ding, revealing a windowless metal box. There was