The Scarlet Gospels by Clive Barker

zigzagging across the plaster. The bare bulb swung back and forth, making Felixson’s shadow cavort as the phantoms moved around the room, their hunger to destroy this place and Felixson palpable. It was clear that they were working to pull the room apart. Plaster dust was filling the room like a white fog.
    Felixson turned his gaze back at Harry.
    â€œHarry Da More I blame! He pays!”
    Felixson reached for the chain, and Harry watched as the plaster fog was swept aside by a phantom, its descent mirrored by a second phantom coming from the opposite direction and intersecting at the chain. The chain, struck at the precise spot where the ghosts crossed, blew apart, leaving a length of perhaps eighteen inches of loose metal still dangling from the hook. The blow had formed a wound in Felixson’s brow. The magician was unprepared for this. He cursed and wiped away blood from his right eye.
    Then, two more phantoms converged not only on the remainder of the chain but directly onto the hand that held it. Before Felixson could loose the chain from his grasp, the spirits converged on his hand. When they met, fragments of flesh, bone, and metal blew outward. With Felixson wounded and unarmed, the spirits took it upon themselves to continue the destruction of Carston Goode’s den of iniquity. The whole place rocked as the phantoms shook its foundations. The bulb in the middle of the room flared with unnatural brightness and just as quickly burned out.
    Harry realized it was time to move. He was perhaps two strides from the door when the second tattoo Caz had given him, a warning sigil in the middle of his back, sent out a pulse that spread throughout his body. He swung round just in time to throw himself out of the way of Felixson, whose lips were drawn back to expose jagged, flesh-shredding teeth. Felixson’s teeth snapped in the air where Harry’s head had been two seconds before and the momentum of the lunge carried Felixson forward, slamming him into the wall beside the door.
    Harry didn’t give Felixson an opportunity to go after him a second time. He was out through the door and into the passageway. The ghosts were in a crazed state, and they were everywhere, tossing themselves back and forth. They slammed into the walls like invisible hammers. The plaster had been cleared off by now, exposing wooden slats beneath. There was a din of destruction from the other end of passageway, which suggested the stairs were being taken apart with the same gusto as the walls, but the dust and the darkness conspired to limit Harry’s sight to a foot in front of his face and no more. Despite the sounds of unmaking before him, he had no choice but to risk it.
    Meanwhile, the floorboards groaned and twisted, spitting out the nails that had held them in place. Harry ventured over them as fast as he dared, past the sling room, which was now a wall of suffocating dust, and on over the cavorting boards. The wooden slats were succumbing to the strikes of the hammer-bodied spirits even more quickly than the plaster. Harry crossed his arms in front of his face to protect it from the splinters that pierced the air. He was walking blind. For a third time the cool presence intervened, entering Harry and speaking in the blood that thundered in Harry’s ears
    Back! Now!
    Harry responded instantly, and as he jumped back Felixson charged past him, his mouth vast, and from it a solid howl emerged, which suddenly dropped away. The stairs were gone, and something about the way Felixson’s howl had diminished told Harry’s instincts that there was now a void beneath the house into which the Cenobite’s lapdog had been dispatched. Judging by Felixson’s faraway howl, it was deep, and there was likely no way anyone would ever be able to climb out of it if, or rather when, the house folded up and fell.
    Harry turned back in the direction he’d come. He quickly and carefully headed to the back room, trying not to