Chapter 5: Hell Day

Just after one in the morning as the sun slowly burrowed westward just below the northern horizon, the deep rumble of thunder woke Angie and me. Groggy from sleep, it took us several seconds to realize that the sound came from underground and not the sky. The rumbling rapidly grew louder until it sounded like a thunderstorm was raging directly below us in a subterranean cavern. Simultaneously, the ground started to rock, rapidly shaking harder and harder until the soil beneath our tent was rolling like waves on a stormy Arctic Sea.

"Earthquake," I yelled, redundantly I realized, as by then it was obvious to everyone what was happening. "Everybody up and outside. You don't want to get caught in your tents if there's soil liquefaction."

I heard shouts and curses as Angie and I grabbed our boots and coats and stumbled outside. I looked around and was relieved to see the others were also out. Watching Kowalski frantically trying to pull up his pants, I was glad that Angie and I were still wearing our clothes when we'd crawled into our sleeping bags. The ground rolled us violently back and forth, making it nearly impossible to stick our feet into our boots. Kowalski was trying and failing to walk while the rest of us stayed safely on our hands and knees.

The shaking steadily forced the ground water from the frequent rains and melted permafrost to move higher until the soil beneath us grew wet and soft. By three minutes after it started, we were beginning to sink into the silty top soil when the shaking and deep underground rumbling stopped.

"Everyone okay?" I asked, glancing at each member of my team to ensure that no one was hurt. Everyone seemed fine and just as you'd assume after being woken up unexpectedly in the middle of the night: rumpled clothes, bleary eyed, and sleeping bag hair. Everyone that is except O'Shannon. Somehow she'd managed to crawl out of her tent looking like she's just spent an hour in the bathroom getting ready for a night on the town. Her clothes looked slept in, but her hair and makeup were again flawless.

I was just about to say something when Bill spoke up. "I banged my shin on the damn barrel of my rifle getting out of my sleeping bag. I wacked it pretty good, but I think I only bruised it."

Then, I realized that Jill was shivering. Her red-rimmed eyes wide with fear, she was teetering on the edge of panic. "Jill Starr, give me an estimate of the quake's intensity," I demanded, trying to shift her mind onto an unemotional topic.

"Uh, maybe a seven on the MMI scale," she answered tentatively as she focused her eyes on me. "It's hard to tell without buildings to check for damages."

"MMI?" O'Shannon asked. Kowalski and Bill looked at me expectantly, clearly confused by the geological jargon.

"The Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale," I explained. "When it comes to earthquakes, most people think in terms of the Richter scale. That measures the earthquake's absolute magnitude - that is, the total amount of energy it releases. But you need to know the quake's location to calculate it and that takes several seismometers to triangulate on the quake's epicenter. On the other hand, the quake's local intensity - what you feel and the damage you see - depends on additional factors, like how far away it is, how deep it is, and how solid the ground is. The MMI measures the local intensity of the earthquake, and because it's calibrated to what people feel, it's much easier to estimate, especially now, given that we haven't set up the seismometers yet."

I was just about to explain the soggy ground and soil liquefaction when I was interrupted by the sound of an extremely loud explosion followed by the heat of a blast furnace striking the side of my body nearest the hole.

Instinctively ducking and turning our faces away from the intense heat, we were again knocked off our feet by a blast of hot air that sent us tumbling across the ground. Several of our tents began rolling away across the tundra, the force of the explosion having ripped out their stakes. Dazed, we looked back towards the hole. A huge column of rolling flames and dense black smoke mushroomed hundreds of feet into the air, while enormous flames danced in and out of the billowing smoke. A weak summer wind carried the dissipating column east, while flames rose some 30 feet into the air above the hole. The stench of sulfur mixed with burning oil grew stronger as some of the smoke drifted our way.

"Not good. Not good at all," our reporter said as she stared in awe at the fiery spectacle in front of us.

"That isn't any methane explosion from natural gas or decaying vegetation," Kowalski said. "I've seen enough oil fires to know that much black smoke means there's crude mixed in with the natural gas."

Drawn like a moth to the flame, we slowly approached the hole. About halfway from camp to the pit, our reporter turned back and started running towards her tent. "I forgot my damn camera," she yelled over her shoulder.

Ignoring her, the rest of us cautiously continued towards the hole until the heat from the flames forced us to stop 20 feet back from the edge.

"Jack, have you ever seen anything like this before," Angie asked.

"I don't think anyone has," I answered. "I can't remember ever hearing about a massive oil fire forming in a sinkhole or..."

I was interrupted by the distant howling of wolves, seemingly coming from somewhere beyond the hole. The deep-throated howls turned into yelping screams that sent shivers up my spine. It sounded as if they were being tortured.

"That sounds similar to wolves, but the pitch is way too low," Bill said, his brows knitted together with puzzlement. "It sounds more like it's coming from something the size of a grizzly, and I've never heard a wolf or bear scream like that before."

We strained to look through the tongues of fire and rippling air rising from the hole, but no one could see any wolves, or any other animal. "Where are they?" Angie asked. "Surely they'll stay away from the fire." She glanced nervously at the rifle in Bill's hands.

"You're quite safe, Dr. Menendez," Bill said. "Wolves will avoid people, especially this time of year when there's plenty of game to eat."

The fire died down, so that the tops of scattered flames only occasionally poked above the edge of the pit. The howling grew louder as we cautiously crept closer.

"What the hell?" I cursed when Bill and I were finally close enough to see the pit's bottom. The bottom of the hole looked like it had dropped another 50 feet, but the increased depth was not what had captured our attention.

A flaming fissure fifteen feet across had opened in the far side of the pit's floor. The shallow lake of melted water from the fire's thawing of the sides of the hole was rapidly draining out of sight, leaving behind a muddy floor dotted with black pools of burning oil.

Suddenly, impossibly, several wolves came into view as they loped around the edge of the bottom of the pit. Several more wolves came running out of the chasm through which the water had drained, their eyes glowing red with reflected light from the fires. The pack circled the fiery floor of the hole, howling and screaming in pain. Their fur appeared to have been burned off leaving nothing but raw red skin.

"Bill, please tell me you can see that," I said.

"I see it," he answered, shaking his head as if that could make what we were seeing go away.

"How in hell did they get down there?" I asked.

"And why the hell aren't they dead?" our biologist added as we watched the wretched beasts circling the crater.

One of the wounded wolves stopped, howled, and ran to the center of the pit. It had noticed Mark's mud-covered corpse. Several more members of the pack joined the first. Growling and snapping at each other, they ripped into his body.

Horrified, I turned away just in time to see the others moving forward to join Bill and me at the edge. "Jill," I yelled. "Stay back! Angie, keep Jill back!"

Angie stepped in front of Jill, holding her tightly until the terrifying sounds from the pit ceased. I turned back. All signs of Mark's body were gone, and the wolves resumed their relentless circling. Several times, they jumped up the vertical walls of the hole only to slide back down, their paws unable to find footholds on the pit's steep slippery sides. O'Shannon returned, carrying her camera, and started taking pictures.

As she circled the pit, her camera clicking, a strong aftershock shook the ground, and parts of the edges of the hole began to drop into the ever-widening pit. We turned and ran as the winch and generator fell into the hole, followed by the pickup truck and its trailer. The crashing roar of the landslide grew louder as more ground slid into the hole.

As we dashed towards camp, a new spectacle suddenly stopped us in our tracks. A large circular plug of earth some 50 feet in diameter started to rise under our two Range Rovers, our supply tent, and the tent Angie and I had just shared. The ground slowly rose, lifting them two, four, six, eight feet above the surrounding tundra. Then the huge cylinder of ground stopped and began to fall, rapidly dropping half of our camp down into a new second smaller hell hole. An incredibly brief flash of brilliant blue light ringed the new crater before it also exploded with a fireball that rose hundreds of feet into the dusky air.

With all three of our vehicles swallowed by the earth, we were suddenly on foot in a landscape gone mad. Dumbstruck, we just stood there looking, not daring to approach any closer to what little remained of our camp.

Behind us, louder howls erupted from the first hole, now nearly twice its original size. We turned back just in time to see the first creature bounding over the edge of the pit. It was more terrifying than any beast I'd seen in my worst nightmares. It was gigantic, easily four times the size of a normal wolf, but it was neither normal nor a wolf. Its head and jaws were grotesquely large, and it had long yellow fangs that extended a good inch below the bottom of its muzzle. But its most uncanny characteristic was its total lack of fur. Instead, we could see its raw flesh, the color of dried blood and crisscrossed by dark purple arteries and veins. Its massive naked muscles glistened wetly in the light of the flickering flames from the two burning pits.

A dozen only slightly smaller ones quickly followed the enormous alpha male. He spotted us, howled once and deliberately strode towards us, trailed by the rest of his pack.

"Get behind me, everybody!" Bill yelled as he turned to face the hellish creatures. "We'll never make it if we run." He took a step forward to place himself between us and the monsters, brought his rifle to his shoulder, aimed, and fired. The bullet hit the alpha male in the center of its chest. It screamed as it dropped to the ground, twitched, and then lay still. The other wolves stopped and snarled viciously, their reddish eyes looking at us with malevolent hatred rather than hunger or fear.

"Look at the blood," Jill exclaimed. "It's black."

Mesmerized, we watched as the bullet hole slowly stopped bleeding its unnaturally dark fluid. Then, as if pushed by invisible forces, the bullet slowly slid out of the entry wound and splashed into the small puddle of the oil-like liquid.

The wolf struggled to its feet, flung back its head, and howled in defiant fury. Still, when it started forward again, it did so more slowly and cautiously and the other members of the pack followed its lead.

Bill lowered the end of his rifle and stared open-mouthed at the seven-foot long wolf that wasn't a wolf, bleeding blood that wasn't blood. "What in hell is that thing?" he murmured to himself.

"Don't just stand there, Bill," O'Shannon ordered, having stepped forward to stand shoulder to shoulder with our biologist. "Shoot it again, but this time in the head where it will do some good."

Bill glanced at the beautiful woman standing bravely beside him, then turned back and did as she commanded. The second bullet took off the top of the wolf's skull and this time it dropped and stayed down. Snarling and snapping at each other, the remaining wolves took only seconds to select their new leader. They started forward again, more tentatively, though no less viciously.

"How many bullets do you have?" our young photographer asked the biologist.

"Eight. No seven," Bill answered, his eyes glued to the slowly advancing monstrosities.

"Drop two or three more," she commanded. "Let's see if they are smart enough to take the hint."

Bill nodded and dropped two more with headshots that sprayed black blood and brains onto the creatures behind them.

The ten remaining "wolves" spread out to our left and right, encircling us and showing no signs of retreating.

"Damn them," O'Shannon cursed. "I was afraid of that. Hellhounds aren't the smartest of demons."

"What?" Bill asked, briefly glancing away from the horrifying creatures to look at the woman standing beside him. Showing no sign of fear, she reached her right hand down the front of her shirt and pulled out something hanging from its long golden necklace. She held it out from her body, pointing it first at one hellhound and then another, almost as though she were aiming a gun. Now that it was no longer hidden by her hand, I could see that she held a circular crimson crystal ringed by a narrow band of gold.

The hellhounds growled menacingly but paused their advance, their yellow goat-like eyes locked on the crystal as Aileen swung it back and forth. If I could ascribe human emotions to such hellish creatures, I would have said they both hated and feared the thing was that Aileen held in her hand.

"You'd better keep firing," Aileen said as she started to spin around. "This may take a few seconds."

Bill shot another three wolves in rapid succession as she chanted words we only partially understood.

"Salva nos a demonibus! Salva nos a demonibus! Salva nos a demonibus!"

"What the hell is she doing?" Angie asked, stunned by the reporter's bizarre behavior.

A stream of tiny crimson lights flowed from the crystal in Aileen's hand, weaving a web that hung suspended in the air like a giant bubble between us and the monstrous wolves. I heard Angie gasp, while I just stood there, frozen with amazement. Sparks crackled between the dense network of lights, and I could smell the sharp chlorine odor of ozone.

One of the mutant wolves jumped forward, only to be thrown back a dozen feet when it struck the electrified barrier. It yelped in pain as drops of black blood dripped from its injured muzzle and fore paws. The odor of burnt meat and the smell of burning sulfur mixed to create a stench that gagged me, forcing acid from my empty stomach up into my mouth. It backed away with its naked rat-like tail between its legs. Several others attempted to force their way past O'Shannon's barrier, but were also driven back. The smell of ozone and burning meat grew stronger each time another tried.

What the hell? I thought, as they began circling us, searching for a break in barrier. The strange object in O'Shannon's hand seemed to have formed a force field around us. Except, no known technology existed that could create such a field. What the hell was it? A device using some kind of super-secret military technology? Oh, wow! Was it alien tech? Was O'Shannon a time traveler from the future? Then I remembered the Latin incantation she chanted as she whirled it around her head. Was it possible that it wasn't a device at all? Could it conceivably be something else entirely? Could it actually be a... a magic amulet? Then again, perhaps Arthur C. Clarke was correct when he wrote that a sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic. Whatever it was, it existed and had created an effective barrier the monsters couldn't cross.

The largest of the remaining wolves howled in rage and frustration, interrupting my harried hypothesizing. Distant howls answered from the north and west. The new pack leader paused briefly to growl at us - the prey it could see but couldn't reach - before turning and loping off to the northwest. As the rest of the pack followed it out of sight, a horrible thought occurred to me. "I think they're headed for Deadhorse and the oil fields around Prudhoe Bay."

"Well, that could have gone worse," O'Shannon remarked, sounding pleased with herself. Still, I couldn't help but notice the sweat on her forehead and the slump of her shoulders.

"What the hell do you mean, it could have gone worse?" I demanded. "We were attacked by some kind of mutant wolves..."

"Hellhounds, Dr. Oswald," she interrupted. "They are called hellhounds."

"Well, whatever the hell they were, we could have been killed..."

"But we weren't, Dr. Oswald," she interrupted again. "We were not killed. I would say that makes the glass rather more than half full, wouldn't you?"

"B-b-but," I sputtered, not caring if I sounded like an old lawn mower. "Who the hell are you?"

"More importantly," my wife added. "What in blazes are you, and what did you just do?"

"I am just who I said I was back in Fairbanks, Dr. Menendez," she calmly replied. "I am Aileen O'Shannon and work as a freelance reporter and photographer for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. As for what I am and what I did, well that - as they say - is another matter altogether."

"Which is?" I demanded.

"Which is what I shall be more than happy to tell all of you," she replied. "But first things first. I don't think we need my protection spell any longer, and it is rather exhausting to keep up. Besides, our biologist looks like he's going to explode if I don't let him out so he can examine the dead hellhounds for himself. Also, I'm a good deal older than I look, and if they haven't completely blown away, there are several folding chairs back at camp that will be much more comfortable than standing here. Recedemus!" she commanded, and the barrier of scintillating sparks winked out with a soft crackling sound. Then she slid the necklace down the top of her shirt so that it was once again hidden from sight.

We walked back to what was left of our camp, all of us that is except for Bill, who remained behind with the bodies of the hellhounds he'd shot. We picked up the remaining lawn chairs, carried them several yards further away from the second hole, and sat down.

"Okay, Miss O'Shannon," I said as I warily eyed the new pit and listened for the howling of hellhounds. "Now that we're all sitting down, I think you owe us an explanation."

"I am what you might call a sorceress, although we do not use that word amongst ourselves. And please do not call me a witch; far too many of my people were murdered due to that unfortunate label. More formally, I am a curatrix, a guardian of the Tutores Contra Infernum, the ancient and noble order charged with protecting our world from the infernal demons of Hell."

"Demons?" Angie asked. "Hell? As in the hell of the Bible?" Like most scientists (myself included), my wife was a secular humanist. Neither Angie nor I had believed in the Christian god - or any other deity for that matter - since we were teenagers old enough to seriously question the religious dogmas of our parents and pastors. Even after what we had just witnessed, neither of us was prepared to admit that we could be so incredibly mistaken about religion and the existence of the supernatural.

"Yes and no," Aileen answered cryptically. "Our Order has no knowledge of any heaven, and we do not believe in the god, devil, and demons of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. On the other hand, these demons are quite real as you yourselves have just witnessed, and they come from a place we have, for lack of a better word, chosen to call Hell."

"Unbelievable," Kowalski said, shaking his head in disbelief.

"Mr. Kowalski," O'Shannon said, "you will find that demons do not care whether or not you believe they exist. It is enough that they most definitely know you exist and will kill and eat you if given half a chance." She stared at the oil company representative until he was forced to look away. "Unfortunately, Hell is the home of a whole hierarchy of demons. Low demons, like hellhounds and gargoyles, are merely the mindless beasts of Hell. Far deadlier are the high demons, such as imps, fiends, and devils. High demons are humanoids, thinking beings with the ability to use dark magic."

O'Shannon paused briefly to let the full import of what she'd said sink in. "So you see, Mr. Kowalski, the hellhounds that attacked us are some of the most minor demons: relatively weak and totally lacking in intelligence and guile. They did not come here on their own; the devils that rule Hell sent them."

"But if all of these demons exist, then why doesn't everyone know about them?" Angie asked, not yet willing to leave the topic. "Why are we just hearing about them now?"

"Because the Tutores Contra Infernum does not wish that knowledge to be known," O'Shannon replied matter-of-factly. "For thousands of years, demon-fueled fear has caused your ancestors to blame us for the evil the demons wrought and to persecute us for their crimes." She paused and sighed. "You did not know because until now, demon incursions have been rare and easy to contain. For millennia, they have only occasionally risen out of Hell, and even then only a few at a time. Unfortunately, devils can make themselves much harder to recognize; they can glamor themselves to look like us and can even cause people to ignore or misinterpret their stench of burning brimstone. You did not know because we discovered and killed the demons before they could cause more harm than we could cover up."

"But now," I started to interrupt.

"But now," she continued, "after hundreds of years of relative peace, the situation has dramatically changed. Over the last year, captured devils and imps have informed us that their Supreme Leader, their so-called Empress of a 144 Worlds, was planning a great invasion to begin in the far north. She has gathered her armies from her subjugated worlds and set her hungry eyes on Earth. And now she plans to make it the demons' next feeding grounds."

"One hundred and forty-four worlds!" Kowalski exclaimed in dismay. "Just how big is her army, and what chance do we have if the demons have already conquered so many planets?"

"Actually, we think that the number is an exaggeration."

"Why's that?" I asked.

"Devils don't count in base ten like we do; they count in base 12."

"Really?" Jill asked, probably curious because she had minored in mathematics as an undergraduate. "Do you know why?"

"Probably for the same reason we use ten," Aileen answered. "Anatomy. Devils have four fingers on each hand, and because they have cloven hooves, only two 'toes' on each foot. Add them together and you get a total of 12 fingers and toes."

"I see," Jill said, nodding her head. "Twelve times twelve is 144."

"Exactly," O'Shannon continued. "Saying their Supreme Ruler is the empress of 144 worlds would be like one of us saying that someone was the empress of a hundred countries. Such a round number seems too unlikely to be true."

"So how many worlds have the devils conquered?" Kowalski continued.

"It is hard to know for sure. Devils are basically immune to torture: it's almost as though they relish the pain because of their shame over letting themselves be captured. Imps on the other hand are none too bright, especially when it comes to numbers. However, both love to brag, and since they are fearless, they see no reason to lie. So far, they have mentioned 68 worlds by name. Given what we know, we estimate the number to be somewhere between 80 and 100."

"That's still a damn lot of worlds," Kowalski complained, not the least reassured by O'Shannon's explanation.

"Do not worry, Mr. Kowalski. All is not lost, and it may not be as bad as it sounds. From what we have been able to learn, all of the worlds they have conquered had pre-industrial societies. Our technology gives us weapons they have never dreamed of. And their arrogance makes them greatly underestimated us.

"Anyway, once we learned of the hell holes, my superiors decided to send someone to investigate. As the nearest member of my Order, they sent me."

"You lied to me," I said, finally realizing that the local Fairbanks Daily News-Miner could never afford to have sent one of its reporters to Russia, especially for a story having little if any relevance to Alaska. "Why should I trust you now?"

"Yes, Dr. Oswald, I lied. You know as well as I do that much of the North Slope is leased to the oil companies. One cannot just roam about freely up here. It requires permission, and that is hardly something they would grant a reporter under the current circumstances. Besides, it is not safe to travel alone this far north, even in the summertime. I knew that an oil company would call in outside expertise, and you were the closest. I don't know whether it was fate or luck, but I found you in your geology building just as Mr. Kowalski called. The rest - as future chroniclers will hopefully survive to say - is history."

"And that phone call you made outside the restaurant in Deadhorse, when you were speaking Latin," Angie added "Those spells of yours sure sounded like Latin to me. You told us you were talking to your younger brother, who's studying to be a priest at the Vatican. That was a lie too."

"That was no lie," O'Shannon countered forcefully, "although I will admit I was happy to let you believe Mr. Kowalski's mistaken assumption. I was talking to a member of the Tutores Contra Infernum, a young novice I sponsored. He is still learning Latin, a language he will need to master, both for speaking incantations and for reading the many books and scrolls in our library. And the High Council of my order sits in Rome, just not in Vatican City."

"Forget that," Kowalski interrupted. "I don't give a damn what was a lie and what wasn't. What did you mean when you said invasion? Surely, you don't mean there is going to be more of those creatures coming out of that hole?"

"Exactly that," O'Shannon replied. "The demons have long coveted our world, and now they have apparently finally found the means to come in sufficient numbers to take it. This is clearly only the first wave of a full-scale invasion, meant to sow fear and panic. They will be followed by the enemy's main forces, probably over the next few hours or days. I am afraid that this is the Armageddon that was foretold several millennia ago, and humanity's very survival is at risk. More powerful demons will undoubtedly follow these hellhounds, which is why we must leave this accursed place as soon as we can. Trust me when I say that we do not want to be here, alone and unprotected, when the high demons arrive. There are much worse fates than being eaten alive."

"But where are they coming from?" I demanded. "The Earth isn't some hollow ball or riddled with gigantic caverns inhabited by hordes of demons. Below its thin crust, the Earth has a solid rocky mantle surrounding a core of molten iron. The immense temperatures and pressures prevent any deep void from forming. The very idea of a subterranean Hell filled with demon armies is preposterous and disproven by the evidence of tens of thousands of seismic readings."

"You are of course correct, Dr. Oswald," she agreed. "While we once believed Hell to be a physical place at the center of our planet, modern geology has made such beliefs untenable. For that and other reasons, we now believe Hell to be somewhere not of this world but rather connected to it via underground portals. With their wormholes and parallel universes, physicists and science fiction writers may have come far closer to the truth than have all the theologians and philosophers who preceded them. Hell is not the mythological place described by religions. It is quite real and so is the threat it poses."