Lamb The Gospel According to Biff Christs Childho - By Christopher Moore Page 0,82

miles away from here by the time he gets here from the other side."

"No!" She swept my feet out from under me and I landed flat on my back on the stone floor. By the time I was on my feet again she had run through the front chamber and was hanging out the window. As I approached her she held her finger to her lips. "It's down there, waiting."

I pulled her aside and looked down. Sure enough, the beast was looming in front of the iron door, waiting to grab the edge in its claws and rip it open as soon as we threw the bolts.

"Maybe it can't get in," I whispered. "It couldn't get through the other iron door."

"You didn't understand the symbols all over that room, did you?"

I shook my head.

"They were containment symbols - to contain a djinn, or a demon. The front door doesn't have any on it. It won't hold him back."

"So why isn't he coming in?"

"Why chase us when we will come right to him?"

Just then the monster looked up and I threw myself back from the window.

"I don't think he saw me," I whispered, spraying Joy with spit.

Then the monster began to whistle. It was a happy tune, lighthearted, something like you might whistle while you were polishing the bleached skull of your latest victim. "I'm not stalking anyone or anything," the monster said, much louder than would have been required had he been talking to himself. "Nope, not me. Just standing here for a second. Oh well, no one is here, I guess I'll be on my way." He began to whistle again and we could hear footsteps getting quieter along with the whistling. They weren't moving away, they were just getting quieter. Joy and I looked out the window to see the huge beast doing an exaggerated pantomime of walking, just as his whistle fizzled.

"What?" I shouted down, angry now. "Did you think we wouldn't look?"

The monster shrugged. "It was worth a try. I figured I wasn't dealing with a genius when you opened the door in the first place."

"What'd he say? What'd he say?" Joy chanted behind me.

"He said he doesn't think you're very smart."

"Tell him that I'm not the one who has spent all these years locked in the dark playing with myself."

I pulled back from the window and looked at Joy. "Do you think he could fit though this window?"

She eyed the window. "Yes."

"Then I'm not going to tell him. It might make him angry."

Joy pushed me aside, stepped up on the windowsill, turned around and faced me, then pulled up her robe and peed backward out the window. Her balance was amazing. From the growling below, I gathered that her accuracy wasn't bad either. She finished and jumped down. I looked out the window at the monster, who was shaking urine from its ears like a wet dog.

"Sorry," I said, "language problem. I didn't know how to translate."

The monster growled and the muscles in its shoulders tensed beneath the scales, then it let loose with a punch that sent its fist completely through the iron skin of the door.

"Run," Joy said.

"Where?"

"The passage to the cliff."

"You cut the ladder."

"Just run." She pulled me along behind her, guiding us through the dark as she had before. "Duck," she shouted, just a second after I realized that we'd entered the smaller passageway by using the sensitive stone-ceiling-sensing nerves in my forehead. We made it halfway down the passageway to the cliff when I heard the monster hit and curse.

There was a pause, then a horrible grinding noise so intense that we had to shield our ears from the assault. Then came the smell of burning flesh.

Dawn broke just as Joshua and Balthasar rode into the canyon entrance to the fortress.

"How about now?" Joshua asked. "Do you feel the demon now?"

Balthasar shook his head balefully. "We're too late." He pointed to where the great round door had once stood. Now it was a pile of bent and broken pieces hanging on what was left of the huge hinges.

"What in the name of Satan have you done?" Joshua said. He jumped off his horse and ran into the fortress, leaving the old man to follow as best he could.

The noise in the narrow passageway was so intense that I cut pieces of cloth from my sleeves with Joy's dagger and stuffed them in our ears. Then I lit one of the fire sticks to see what the monster was doing. Joy