Hell's Door Opens

Prologue

She looked into the dazzling sphere of glass, her vision blanketed by pulsating waves of blue radiance.

‘Father, my stomach churns…’

‘It is the malignancy,’ said the old black-skinned man, his palms pressed against the sphere. ‘It reaches into you. Fetch a little more of the powder.’

The girl, her honey-black skin and long hair alternately dulled then brightened by the sphere’s light, filled her palm with silver grains from a leather pouch, like sand but radiating a metallic light of their own, and scattered them upon the sphere’s cerulean surface.

The globe pulsed, scintillating shards of silver luminosity shot across the chamber, lighting its heavy oak furnishings, illuminating the features of father and daughter – the one aged, his face wizened by years of sun and study, the other fresh, beautiful and sensuous.

The father closed his eyes, bright despite his advanced years. He concentrated, furrows forming in his wrinkled forehead. ‘Now Jessela, what do you see? Can you find him?’

The girl gazed into the lambent globe, seeking to look beyond its blue light, through its sapphire core, in deeper, and thus beyond and away into the world outside her father’s manse. ‘I sense him, a light, a silver spark, near gone, near extinguished by a great weight of crimson…no, not crimson, not a colour, an absence of colour, a clot, a foulness beyond the most fetid contagion…there is something unclean and unnatural wrapped about and within him. Oh father…it sickens me even to sense it!’

‘Hold now on to what you feel Jessela,’ her father said, ‘I shall channel a redemptive energy into you. Pass it through the globe, free him of this malady, for if he is lost then so are we all.’

The girl nodded, unable to speak, so strong was the sense of affliction. She could feel it seeping towards her, like ill-smelling fluid in a sewer pipe, a glutinous mass of wickedness, something beyond uncleanness, alien and hateful. ‘It has him tightly bound father, it has sewn itself into him.’

Beyond the cloying evil she sensed the true man: vibrant, resilient; she felt loneliness and a restrained, thoughtful mind – yet one coupled with strength and savage resolve. Unbidden, something in the depths of her responded, an inner chord chiming in answer to what she glimpsed beyond the tightening veil of horror holding the man enwrapped.

‘Even the closest stitching can be unpicked,’ her father was saying, and then he gave voice to a mantra, a litany of spells, of words clean and wholesome, of names of power, of pure sounds. It was as if his voice had become an instrument, a toning bell. The air shook to the rhythm of his words. A pulsating, vibrating energy grew within the pit of Jessela’s stomach, rose up in her, drove out her feelings of sickness, welled up and spilled out of her. It poured into the sphere, washing away the rising putridity, flowing like a cleansing river, a mighty torrent, towards the man she sensed, towards the ruler of her city, towards Calgus, Prince of Sept, bound by sorceries, entwined by evil, madness and death.

She fell then, consciousness drifting, and in her swoon-state dreamed she was a goddess, dreamed that before her knelt the very Prince whose malady she had lifted. He shivered, his head bent, blond hair tousled, dishevelled and besmirched by blood and sweat.

In her dream he was close, and yet she felt as though she were atop a mountain looking down upon his slender well-muscled form, he was mouthing words, entreating her for help.

‘He must come to me,’ Jessela thought, ‘he must come to my sanctuary,’ and she dreamed the goddess spoke, and she was the goddess, and yet she was Jessela too, and then her dream became the steady light of the globe and the soothing words of her father.

(The prologue and first two chapters of HELL'S DOOR OPENS are available on Wattpad. If you enjoy the story, it is available at all leading eBook retailers. Please visit http://joncreffield.com/where-to-buy-hells-door-opens)