The Devil's Labyrinth

CHAPTER 50

RYAN LOOKED INTO the gaping jaws of Hell.

Jagged shards of poisonous multicolored razors surrounded him, growing ever closer. If he could only take a giant leap, he could jump over them to safety, but with each breath, they came nearer. He couldn’t get a running start. In fact, they were now slicing into the toes of his shoes, but he couldn’t back up, they were all around. He couldn’t escape them. In a moment, the greedy, bloodthirsty things would carve away his feet until he fell and let them rip him to shreds.

No, wait, this is a dream!

Like looking up through deep water toward the light, Ryan saw consciousness above, and he began to swim toward it, but it wasn’t water, it was some thick, gelatinous stuff that clogged his nose and mouth. He could barely move his arms and legs. As he got closer to the light, he felt colder. He strove to wrap his arms around his chest, to curl up in a cozy position, but he couldn’t move his arms or legs. They seemed to be strapped down.

He heard a low, soothing voice intoning.

Break the surface. Take a breath!

He swam hard against the current that sucked him down, the gelatin smelling of sickening, noxious fumes.

Then something tugged hard from the inside of his stomach, pulling on his naval, and he felt his belly rip open.

He paused in his desperate ascent to consciousness and looked down to see what it was.

A gnarled hand reached out of his gut and sank its claws into his flesh, and began to haul itself out of him.

No! No!

Ryan flailed at it with ineffective hands that seemed to move right through the creature. He thrashed desperately in slow motion, but the creature was with him, of course, it was inside him.

Stop! Think! This is just a dream!

But it wasn’t just a dream. The creature sank back inside before showing his face. But now Ryan could feel it roaming around inside of him. Then it started to inhabit him. It felt as if it were trying him on, as if Ryan were nothing more than a rubber suit.

He felt the thing squeeze into his legs, then his torso. Ryan felt pinched out of his own chest. The creature commandeered his heartbeat, and then it rammed itself inside Ryan’s arms.

But when it started pushing up through Ryan’s neck, he began to choke and gag.

And then he was lying on a stone slab, tied down.

His stomach heaved, and he retched.

Sister Mary David held a cloth to his lips to catch the bile.

Father Sebastian raised a bloody heart high in an offering, and when he placed the dripping thing on Ryan’s naked chest, Ryan thought he was going to throw up again, and his entire being was seized by a terrible dizziness and disorientation. He lay inert for a moment, cold and confused.

And then his mouth opened and a voice — a voice he’d never before heard, emerged from his lips. As the strange voice uttered words he couldn’t even begin to understand, Ryan felt himself slipping into the dark abyss of unconsciousness. He fought against it, struggling against the blackness, but when he opened his eyes, he was faced not with any reality, but a scene from a nightmare that seemed to be suspended directly above him. It was a face, but a face that wavered and changed with every breath Ryan took. One moment it looked like the face of evil incarnate, but the next moment Ryan recognized it as something else.

It was his own face, twisted and contorted into something terrible.

Ryan tried not to look at it, but he couldn’t turn away.

“Get away from me!” he whispered.

The thing suspended above him only laughed, but the laughter seemed to emerge from somewhere deep in his own mind.

He was going crazy — right there, right at that moment, and he knew it, and there was nothing he could do about it.

“No!” Ryan screamed, but even as he tried to banish the vision, he felt the demon becoming part of him.

A part of him he would never be rid of again.

“Dad!” he cried, the word emerging as nothing more than a broken sob. But from a long way off, a tiny whisper rose out of the echoing vastness.

It was his father’s voice — he was sure of it.

“Dad?” Ryan clung to his own awareness even as it slipped away from him. “Dad?”

Again, he heard the whisper of his father’s voice, but could not make out what he was saying.

Suddenly the vision was gone, and above him someone was chanting while someone else smeared blood on Ryan’s forehead.

He had lost. The thing — whatever it was — was inside him now. He tried to struggle, tried to protest, tried to cry out, but all that came out of his mouth was a foul-tasting breath.

Then his mouth opened again, stretching wider and wider until his jaws burned with agony and the flesh of his lips threatened to rip apart, and a bellowing roar came forth from deep within him.

All the strength left Ryan. He lost whatever grip he held on himself and slipped quietly under the evil’s crushing personality.

The battle was over, and Father Sebastian had won.