CHAPTER TEN
The Ritual
II
Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…
Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…
Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…
The black cage flew into the circle next. It was yikes big. Wilburn couldn’t see inside. The bars were thick and the gaps between them very thin. The cage was practically a solid iron box. Whoever built the thing hadn’t been taking any chances. And the light falling from the Category-Q only served to cast the interior deeper into shadow.
The cage must have weighed tons. Yet it floated with the same easy grace as the Q, following its path across the temple to the altar, which would have given Wilburn an excellent opportunity to peer in through the bars had he not backed hastily away to edge of the pavilion. This put him uncomfortably close to the chanting people, who were eerily faceless under their striped hoods—all except the Yellow Guy, who was eerily faceless under his yellow hood. He was clearly a man, an ultra-muscular man, like the heroes in the mythic tales Mom sometimes told—Mom was very descriptive about the heroes’ muscles for some reason. Yellow Guy’s yellow robe was a tad too-small for his physique, which made him seem less creepy than the others, like a big kid who’s outgrown his old clothing. The other chanters, though… yeah, those guys were creee-py. Sickos. But they weren’t whatever was in the cage, and that was all that mattered at the moment.
The floor trembled under Wilburn’s bare feet. The stone was almost painfully hot now. This time, the trembling didn’t stop; it wasn’t bad enough to make him lose his balance, but it set every nerve in his body, well, his Astro avatar, to jangling. It was just like standing in a boat—what Wilburn considered a boat most people would’ve called a raft—and the unsteadiness did little to assuage his increasing apprehension that the situation was not under control. Or… not under the control of the good guys, anyway.
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The cage flew up over the altar and began to ascend vertically toward the Q. Wilburn dared a quick glance at the Girl in Black. She wasn’t paying any attention to him now; her dark eyes were fixed on the iron box. She didn’t look nearly as scared as he felt, but there was something in her face… a tiny hint of alarm behind her hard, pissed-off expression. Seeing it made Wilburn extra scared. Anything that posed a threat to her would pose a thousand-times worse threat to him. What was in the cage? He needed to know, and he desperately didn’t want to find out.
Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…
Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…
Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…
Where had the the Girl in Black’s evil bodyguard, the tall, rune-covered demon, gone? Wilburn couldn’t see it anywhere. He hated that—knowing the thing lurked somewhere in the shadows—or maybe it could turn invisible. The demon had left the circle shortly after their encounter. After that, Wilburn had lost track of it. It wasn’t allowed to come inside the circle during the ritual, Alfajean had said… All of a sudden, the circle seemed the safer place to be. Wilburn edged back toward the middle just a bit, even though this brought him closer to the altar and the iron cage floating above it.
The cage blocked out the Q-light now. The temple was very dark. In the moonlight all was colorless. Something big was about to happen. The floor trembled underfoot like a beast awakening from slumber. And the pressure… that restless tension in the air… that feeling of a balloon inflated almost to the point of bursting and still going… still going… but it couldn’t hold much longer. No way. The energy was too intense. The BANG was coming any second now. Any second now.
Any second now…
Wilburn was sweating. His Astro avatar was pitting out. He didn’t think that was supposed to happen.
Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…
Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…
Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…
Three hundred feet above the altar, the cage began to tip. It rotated slowly on a horizontal axis, ten degrees… twenty degrees… thirty… At forty-five degrees, the iron door swung open with a scream of un-oiled hinges. The cage began to shake and pitch, as if whatever monster it contained was scrambling around inside, likely trying to resist the tug of gravity. It was a doomed attempt, for the cage continued tipping, tipping… sixty… seventy… eighty degrees, and then…
BANG