Chapter 19

In the largest of the Happy Trails tourist cabins, Dilip Singh rummaged through cupboards and dropped mysterious objects into a backpack. Other bits - herbs, totems, vials of peculiar-smelling liquid - he gathered into a box. He handed the box to Angel and tucked a couple of faded Big Chief writing tablets under his arm, then opened his back door and with a nod of his head indicated to the others that they were to go out onto the patio. "I don't like to cast spells in the house. Things get broken."

Once in the yard they pulled up lawn chairs and the picnic table into a half-circle around the center of the patio, and waited as Dilip knelt on the concrete floor and prepared his magic. He laid out three mummified bird claws and drew a complicated design around them with colored chalk, weaving the patterns with precision and care. Elsie D watched from the far edge of the circle.

"We aren't too far away?" she asked in a whisper, not wanting to disturb him. "Why don't you do this at the Roadrunner, where the...the thing was?"

"Don't want to drop in on top of it." Dilip flipped open one of the Big Chiefs and consulted a page. "The spirit world lies alongside this one; two pieces of paper, one on top of the other. Sometimes one of the papers moves around. Sometimes they both move. Sometimes one of the papers gets punched through." He continued to scan the tablet, murmuring his reply as though he were not really listening to himself. "We go in and follow our noses. Maybe we scare the thing when it sees a slayer."

He looked up suddenly. "Any of you ever been in a hellmouth?"

Shakes of the head from Oz and Nina. Spike uncrossed his arms to raise a finger. "Just long enough to burst into flames and explode."

"Oh. Right." Dilip lifted several small talismans from the box and placed them around his neck and into his pockets. On the picnic bench and table, Kay leaned forward on her plump arms and bosom, eyes wide. "You know, I 've never heard more than just the bare bones of that story. What happened, exactly?"

Nina felt Angel's arm tense at the question, and saw his jaw inexplicably tighten. Spike, too, reacted oddly, with a melancholy look coming over his face.

"Still not sure, exactly. We knew a demon that called itself The First was setting some kind of attack in motion, probably involving turok-hans - proto-vampires. It wanted to destroy the slayer line. Watcher'd gathered all the potential slayers he could find - ones that hadn't been called yet, and hadn't been killed - and brought 'em to Sunnydale for safekeeping, and we found a hellmouth entrance in the basement of the school, an' so Buffy rigged up a plan to take the girls down there and have 'em hold off the turoks until her witch could turn them all into slayers-"

"Wait a minute, wait a minute," Kay interrupted. "...They waited until the girls were down there with the turoks before slayerizing them? That doesn't make any sense. They'd have been sitting ducks! I mean, I'm psychokinetic and I wouldn't trust myself to be able to push back a demon army. Why didn't they give them their slayer powers before sending them down?"

"I didn't say it was a good plan."

"So what was that hellmouth like?" Thu pressed.

"The part we were in? Kind of cavernous. Rocky bits everywhere, and caves and tunnels. Cold, an' had a smell like a charnel house. And there was always a feeling that beasties were watching you from behind the walls." Spike turned back to Dilip. "That sound about like your experience?"

Dilip shrugged. "I never been in one. I just wondered what they looked like."

He stood up and dusted his pants off. "Okay, it's ready." The artwork he'd created covered a good three square feet of space, and looked something like the sand paintings of the Navaho people. Without being told, the group got to its feet. From his box of tricks Dilip withdrew more talismans, strung on cotton cords into necklaces. He handed one to each of them.

"Wear them under your shirts, against your skin. They'll offer some protection. Not a lot, but better than nothing. It depends on how much faith you put in them."

The charms were thumb-sized; queer little carvings with tiny eyes and cunning faces. Angel touched his with a testing finger. "They won't burn you," Dilip assured him.

The mage opened a bottle of pale green fluid and poured a trail of it from the edge of the design out onto the lawn. He held the bottle up to the glare of the porch light's bulb and squinted at its remaining contents, then used what was left to make a thin, wet ring two yards in diameter in the soil at the trail's end. Then he gave the bottle to Fred. "Got the lighter?"

She nodded. "Remember, guys, Illyria didn't seem to think that it was something huge at this point, but that it was serious enough to warrant stopping before it got any bigger. So stay on your toes."

The six - slayer, werewolf, goat-eater, vampires, sorcerer - stepped to one side. Fred knelt beside the design on the patio and flicked the striker of a small plastic lighter with "Souvenir of Marfa, Texas" stamped on its side. A feeble spark winked in the darkness. She scowled, shook it, and tried it again. The lighter still refused to produce a flame. "Piece of crap!" she muttered, banging it on the ground.

"Here." Spike tossed a large, heavy, burnished gold lighter to her with a smile. "This should work."

Fred recognized it as the one she had given him for Christmas. She quickly struck a bright, strong flame with it, touched the fire to the design, then closed the lighter and kissed it and lobbed it back to Spike with a smile of her own. "Bring it back to me."

The fire hissed and began to follow the lines of the chalk as though they were soaked in kerosene. When it completed the pattern, it hit the green fluid and raced along it until it reached the liquid circle. The ground inside the circle split in neat lines radiating out from the center, and then curled inward and collapsed, revealing a pool of wet, muddy brown. Smooth and oily and uniformly dull, it had the look of potters' clay, or of old whey forgotten and souring in an abandoned milk pan. Reflections from the ring of fire danced on its surface, until the flames died down and went out. A dank smell rose from it, bitter and mildewy.

The group stared at the pool for several seconds without speaking. Finally Spike sighed. "Got to jump into that, I suppose."

Thu looked up at Dilip hopefully. "Couldn't you, like, part it?" She leaned over the pool and yelled down, "THE PHARAOH'S CHARIOTS ARE COMING!"

The pool burped up a solitary bubble.

"Ahhh, damn it," Paloma groaned, and rolled up her sleeve. She squatted, grimaced, and shoved her arm into the pool and began feeling around. The pool barely rippled; it seemed to be made of a very foul flavor of pudding. When she withdrew her arm, she wore an expression of vast relief. "It's only a foot or so deep, and there's empty air underneath it." She held her arm up, clean and dry. "Look, none of it even stuck to me."

"If you'd waited, I could have tried to drain it out," Kay reminded her, but Dilip shook his head.

"No. It's supposed to be like this." Before anyone could stop him, he stepped off into the pool and sank below its surface, vanishing from sight.

There was no splash; the pool simply closed over him as smoothly as if he'd never been there. The little group gave a collective gasp. Several of them dropped to their knees and thrust both arms in, searching for a hold on the man. The chupacabra shouted and flopped onto her stomach and plunged under completely from the waist up.

"DON'T!" Thu grabbed at her ankles and tried to pull her out, but Paloma kicked her away.

Seconds later the chupa's head popped back up again. "He's all right. There's a floor, and breathable air. He said to come on if you're coming." She scooted forward into the pool like a salamander and disappeared.

There was another round of silence.

Thu looked dubiously at the pool and at the others. "Eww, eww, ewwwwwww..."

She clamped her hand over her nose and mouth, squinched her eyes shut tightly, and dropped in.

Spike gave Fred a quick kiss and followed the slayer over the side with a smirk at Angel and Oz. "Off we go, boys. Don't want to keep the ladies waiting." Elsie D felt a warm hand gently squeeze her fingertips, and then Oz was gone, too.

"Your turn, Big Guy. Knock 'em dead." Nina patted Angel on the shoulder. He looked up to see her smiling for him - a bright, tremulous smile. It occurred to him that he wanted nothing more at that moment than to tuck her away in a tall, safe tower.

He went into the pool instead.

The remaining six, shivering in the winter night, turned their coat collars up against the wind and waited.

Hell was pink and glowing, and it gave a little under one's feet. Its walls curved upward to a vaulted ceiling, and if you didn't look directly at them but only from the corners of your eyes, those walls gave one the uneasy impression that they had a pulse. High up the side of one of the walls, at about the height of a second-story window, was the muddy brown portal that lead to the terrestrial world; it lay pasted there like a dark ulcer on pink, glowing skin. The walls opened in one direction only, to another chamber or a tunnel or a (gullet.) Oz thought suddenly of the ulcer in Elsie's stomach, and of the microscopic protozoa and bacteria whose universe is a human body.

"This is under your lawn?" Thu murmured. Her eyes in the bordello-pink light were enormous.

"No. Dig with a shovel, you'll just get dirt. This is another world. Another piece of paper." Dilip pulled a snippet of green felt from one of his pockets and held it quietly between his fingers as he closed his eyes and appeared to meditate. Silence fell over Hell and its visitors. There was no sound anywhere but the soft whisper of human breathing; no movement but the slight shiftings of hips and feet. The air here was warm, and thick as taffy. The demon hunters began to squirm uncomfortably in their coats.

Finally Dilip opened his eyes again. "Mike says to go this way." He tucked the little piece of felt back into his clothes and walked across the chamber into the tunnel, then turned left and around a corner and out of sight. One by one the others followed him. As they stepped into the tunnel's maw Oz glanced up at the ceiling, half-wondering if he would see a gigantic uvula.

A pile of charcoal briquettes was set afire on the portable grill, and those above ground warmed their hands over it and discreetly wiped their drippy noses. They watched the pool, and they also watched Michael, who occupied one end of the picnic table. His bony shoulders and round, pockmarked face bent down studiously over a shred of green fabric, twin to the one that Dilip carried. Both bits had been cut from the Roadrunner's haunted billiard table. Now they were serving as homing beacons. From the way that he held the swatch and the barely discernible movement of his lips, Michael looked as if he were a man at prayer, counting his rosary beads. He was passing directions to Dilip.

"They've found the path. It won't take them much longer to reach the meadow. I still can't quite make out what lives there." He took a sip of the coffee that Gunn handed him, and rubbed his eyes.

Elsie D watched the red, burning coals in the grill throb and crumble. "...They're not really in Hell, are they?"

Gunn shook his head. "Nah. A hellmouth's just a kind of gateway to other dimensions. It's like a bus station. ...A really, really evil bus station. With a lotta evil bums and winos and chicken hawks who live in the evil bus station and wander out onto the street a lot to steal your purse and cut your throat and invite all the other evil people to come live in the station, too."

He looked at the pool again.

"Damn, I can't wait to fill in this thing."

The underground six walked single-file along the hellmouth's fleshy-warm corridor. Thu Kheim was near the rear. Her eyes were narrowed with concentration; her little brow wrinkled. Her lips were moving as Michael's had done. As she caught up to Spike and Paloma, they were able to make out her words: "...There once was a vampire, toothy / Who dated a woman werewoofy / Their children must shun / Both the moon and the sun / dadada dadada dadada I can't think of an ending."

"For God's sake, Thu! Pay attention!" Paloma hissed. "This is serious shit we're wading into. We don't have time to play."

"Sorry. It's just been bugging me for days."

"Well, figure it out later. Right now you just need to be thinkin' about what's around us. Listen with your whole body."

The chupacabra gave her a stern warning look, fearsome in the bizarre rose-colored lighting, and then moved on. Thu sighed and fell in step behind her. A few paces later, she heard Spike's low voice at her back: "Poofy."

"Huh?"

"Toothy. Woofy. Poofy."

Thu repeated his three words, mouthing them soundlessly, and beamed with delight.

The meadow appeared so suddenly that they almost fell into it. No light from its false sun penetrated the cave to alert them; they'd simply rounded a corner and suddenly there it was, smelling of daffodils and awash in green and gold and blue. There was no breeze - in their rush to create the meadow the wraiths had forgotten to stabilize parts of their spells, and so the breeze didn't always function - but the tall grasses bent and swayed anyway. The six hunters dropped behind them and crept out into the meadow on their bellies.

Through the cover of the grasses they spotted a brook, and a cloud of vapor hanging over it. The vapor was roiling, curling, separating into wispy puffs - and now the puffs took the shapes of human beings. Ill-formed and ghostly, the puffs rose into the sky, with soft, whispering voices trailing in their wake. Suddenly they shot forward all in a body and careened over the heads of Angel and the others. In the blink of an eye the vapor clouds entered the cave that the demon-hunters had just exited. In another blink they disappeared into its depths.

The telephone rang in Dilip's apartment cabin, and Fred scurried to answer it before its racket disturbed Michael's visions. She Hello'd into the receiver and heard her father's voice: "Hey, Darlin'! I called over at your place and no one answered so I thought maybe y'all might be in the office. How's every little thing?"

Fred couldn't help but smile. "Just fine, Daddy."

"That little fella doin' okay - the little werewolf?"

"Yeah, he's doing fine, too. His cousin gave him his first transformation training yesterday, and he did really well."

"Well, that's good. I'm glad y'all got some doctors out there that know about all that stuff. I was kinda worried that he might catch the Parvo."

"Oh, they stay pretty much on top of that-"

Something was happening out in the yard. A commotion of some kind - Fred craned her neck to see through the tiny kitchen window. "Daddy, I'm going to have to call you back. I think a little emergency's come up." She dropped the phone on the countertop and barreled out the back door.

Nina was sprawled on her back in the grass, her legs stretched out in front of her, and she was straining and yelling and pushing against the ground with both hands. Charles had his arms locked around her middle, and he appeared to be struggling as well. They had crashed into the barbecue grill and tipped it over, and ash and live coals were strewn across the patio. Michael and Kay and Elsie D were rushing in now and grabbing at her legs and arms. It took several seconds of staring at that lunatic scene for Fred to realize that Nina was being dragged toward the pool by something invisible.

Invisible, and very strong.

Then the breath was knocked out of her as phantom hands suddenly curled around her ankles and jerked her feet up and slammed her onto her side, and dimly Fred felt herself being hauled to the pool alongside Nina.