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wood floor, inside the pentagram of Solomon, but the polished wood floor came to an end at the edges of Siri’s dried blood. Beyond lay a fallen temple. Great gray stones, enormous and bearing the marks of claws that had ripped them loose from mountains, tumbled and thrown carelessly, rose up around Chris. And out of the shadows something came toward him.
    It slouched and dragged its arms behind as it came out of the darkness. When the flickering illumination from the candles struck it, Chris felt sick to his stomach. He clutched the paper with Siri’s words as if it would save him.
    Surgat came and stood with the point of one goat-hoof almost touching Siri’s blood. Chris could smell where it had been and what it had been doing when he had interrupted its dining. He felt faint and could not breathe deeply because of the smell Surgat had carried from its mess hall.
    The head of the demon changed. Toad to goat to worm to spider to dog to ape to man to a thing that had no name.
    “Open the lock of the casket,” Chris yelled. He had to yell: the sound of wind was overpowering, deafening, insane.
    Surgat kicked the bahut. Chris had left it, as Siri had instructed, outside the pentagram. Surgat kicked it again. No mark was put on the coffer, but where the demon’s foot had rested in the dust of the fallen temple’s floor, a cloven footprint burned and smoked.
    “Open the lock!”
    Surgat leaned forward and shrieked. Words poured forth. They made no sense to Chris. They were from a throat that was not human. If a hyena had been given the ability to speak with the tongue of a man, it would have sounded less guttural, less deranged, less terrifying.
    Siri had said the demon would be troublesome, but would finally do as bidden. It had no choice. It was not that important or powerful a spirit. When Chris remembered that assurance, and perceived just how staggering was the sight before him, he trembled at the thought of one of Surgat’s masters. “Open it, you goddam ugly sonofabitch! Open it right now!”
    Surgat vomited maggots that hit an invisible plane at the edge of the pentagram. And babbled more words. And reached out a lobster-claw that stopped just outside the invisible plane. It wanted something.
    Then Chris remembered the hair from Siri’s head. It will want the hair of a fox, she had said. Forget that. It will try to get a hair from your head. Whatever you do, don’t let it have one. All of you is contained in each hair; you can be reconstructed from a hair; then it has you. Give it mine.
    He extended her long, thick strand of hair.
    Surgat screamed, would not take it. Chris extended it through the invisible plane. Surgat pointed to Chris’s head and pulled long strips of bleeding flesh from its body and threw them against the fallen stones where they plopped with the sickening sound of meat against concrete. Chris did not move. The hair hung down outside the invisible plane.
    Surgat screamed and capered and tore at itself.
    “Take it, you disgusting sonofabitch!” Chris yelled. “Take it and be damned, she died to give it to you, puking garbage dump! Take it or get nothing! Nothing’s worth this, not even that thing she looked for all her life! So take it, you crummy piece of shit! Take it or go back where you came from and let me alone!”
    The words Surgat spoke became very clear, then. The voice modulated, became almost refined. It spoke in a language Chris had never heard. He could not have known that it was a tongue unspoken for a thousand years before the birth of Christ: Surgat spoke in Chaldean.
    And having spoken, having acknowledged obedience at the threat of being dismissed without the proper license to depart, the threat of being trapped here in this halfway place of fallen stones, and the wrath of Asmoday or Beelzebuth, the lock-picking demon ran its tentacle forward and took Siri’s hair. The hair burst into flame, the flame shot up toward the shadowed ceiling of the fallen temple, Surgat