He couldn’t see the bottom of the passage.  Below and ahead of him, he saw Apep.  With his Infernal eye, Eddie again saw the gigantic man with the head of a serpent.  Apep wore an Egyptian-style headdress and simple white kilt, he had sandals on his feet, and he held a curved sword in each hand.  And he was massive—maybe fifty feet tall, though the darkness and the distance might be deceptive.

Through his normal human eyes, Eddie saw an enormous cobra, hood flared—

headed his way.

The flake of sharpened stone in his hand now seemed totally inadequate.  He really wished he had a decent gun.

No, he needed another kind of solution.  What had Irving said?  Sympathetic magic, like produces like.  He was inside the ritual now, inside the summoning spell.  He needed to do something to stop it, like producing like.

He realized that, out of reflex, he was patting his pockets.  What did he have?  The usual stuff.  No hand grenades, sadly.  His fingers found the plastic cup with the game of jacks in it.  He’d bought the game at a gas station because the girls had liked jacks when they were younger, playing it on the stoop of the apartment building when they were supposed to be doing homework, and it had given him something to stare at and reminisce.

He pulled out the cup and ripped the top off.  Could this possibly work?  Or was this more insane than his Funky Chickenesque six-part sistrum performance?

Only one way to find out.

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