Dark Rain Page 2

  It chugged to a halt in front of me, its engine idling. The doors hissed open, and I climbed aboard. It moved off again smoothly as I dropped into a seat. There’d been no destination indicated. There were no maps in view, no fixed route. But it would take me exactly where I wanted to go, in the promptest time that could be managed.

  It’s one of our newer services, provided by the good folk up on Sycamore Hill, the guys who really run this place. It was convenient, I guessed. One of the adepts’ better notions. But normally, the things gave me the creeps.

  Not this evening, however. There seemed to be much worse matters, and plenty of them, to worry about by this hour.

  Cray’s Lane was just an average little road – short, not even blacktop on it – out toward the bottom end of town. It was lined with wood-built, single story houses, maybe thirty of them, none of them in mint condition. There was crab grass on the front lawns, dandelions poking through the driveways. Rusty barbeques and swings out back. Most of the cars parked here were more than ten years old. Hardly a special street, in other words.

  A stork had made its nest on a rooftop, I took note. Somebody, presumably a teenage boy, had a bumper sticker that read: Lurv instructor – first lesson free. Otherwise, all totally unremarkable.

  Squad cars were blocking both ends of it, their lights casting red flashes across the entire scene. I couldn’t see any patrolmen though. They had to be indoors by this time. There was only Cass in view.

  She was waiting for me on the first lawn to the right. She’d parked her Harley by the curb, and had a flashlight in her grasp.

  Cass Mallory stands – in her thick-heeled, silver-buckled motorcycle boots – almost as tall as I do, and I’m six foot two. She was wearing her usual baggy, ripped jeans. A sleeveless white tee-shirt. And a Kevlar jacket over that she sometimes puts on and sometimes doesn’t. It’s not much use against magic, but defends against the claws and fangs that we occasionally find coming at us. She’d got the tattoos on her arms, a scorpion and a broken heart, back when she’d been a teenager. They were both faded now.

  You had to wonder why she’d gotten those so early on, vulnerability and deadly violence juxtaposed like that. But then, I knew a few things about her troubled past.

  Cass was fully kitted-out as usual, Glock 9mms strapped to both her hips. Fastened to the Harley were a Heckler & Koch assault carbine on one side, and a pump-action shotgun – a brutal looking Mossberg 590 – on the other. She’d inherited her detailed knowledge of ordnance from her pa, who had taught her to shoot at a very early age, back when he’d still been alive. I also knew there were a variety of blades concealed about her person. Not someone who took chances, then, when it came to dealing with the kind of trouble that we regularly address.

  She nodded to me as I walked toward her. Back when I first met her, she used to wear her jet black hair almost to her waist. But these days it’s cropped closely to her skull, emphasizing her cheeks and long, square jaw.

  Cass believes in going into situations hard and fast and keeping that momentum up until the thing’s resolved. Tells herself she’s doing it because … well, who else would? But the truth is, she’s pretty much like me. She does it to stop thinking about past events. To try and make things right somehow.

  Because she’s lost people that she deeply loved to magic. So have I.

  Both of us shared the same dream as well. To bring the town’s curse to an end. That was another of the things that genuinely kept us going.

  Those eyes of hers – as black as her hair and burning fiercely – were fixed on mine, and were the only part of her that was moving. She could have been a statue, except statues never blink.

  “You took the bus?” she asked me, once I was in earshot. “With this going on?”

  She’d gotten over her initial shock, was trying to sound composed, and was making a half-assed job of it. There was too much stiff discomfort in her voice for her to sound in any way convincing.

  Now that I was closer to her, I could see she looked exhausted. And it wasn’t physical. Standing there in the dim light, she seemed mentally drained.

  “I wasn’t home.” I pulled a tight face at her. “Sorry to have kept you waiting. What’re we looking at here?”

  “A bloody mess, literally.” She had to pause before going on. “Almost all these houses had families in them. Moms, pops, even little kids.”

  She looked away from me a second, trying to hide the pain and anger in her gaze.

  “All of them butchered with equal vigor,” she continued, the words coming out twisted. “Not a shred of mercy shown.”

  My head reeled as I took that in. We’d had disasters in the town before, usually caused by magic. Fires. Explosions. Creatures being conjured up, or the conjurers themselves going berserk and lashing out around them. The dark arts can be an unpredictable and deadly thing. But there’d been nothing on a scale like this. I couldn’t even start to imagine who might be responsible.

  “Butchered how?” I asked, trying to keep my nerves intact.

  It wasn’t easy.

  Cassie frowned as though her entire face were trying to draw toward the center. “Either knives or talons.”

  My God.

  “Why would anyone do that?” I breathed.

  Although, living where we did, it might just as easily be a ‘what’ as a ‘who.’

  “I’ve not the first idea. There’s not a print that I can find, foot, claw, or paw. No signs of forced entry either.”

  “Someone got invited in?”

  “I’d seriously doubt that.”

  One thing didn’t figure, any way you tried to look at it. I stared around all over again.

  “But … why here? What’s special about this place?”

  Nothing that either of us could see. Cassie let her shoulders jolt.

  Then she drew herself up very straight and asked me if I wanted to take a look.

  Not really. But what was the point of coming down here if I didn’t?

  The front door of the nearest house was open, blank darkness inside We headed for it. Had to skirt around a little pink tricycle on the driveway, ribbons tied to its handlebars. Cass didn’t even glance down at it. She’d seen it before, and obviously wished she hadn’t.

  Her flashlight came back on, revealing faded, stripy wallpaper in the hallway, pink and white. A coat stand, with a baseball jacket hanging from it. A furled umbrella. A rubber plant in a big sepia pot. One of those embroidered Bless This House plaques hanging from a wall. Simply an ordinary home of the low-income variety. A TV was still glowing from the living room, although its sound had been switched off.

  Cass, I noticed, didn’t follow me when I went in there. I reached out, found the light switch, flipped it …

  God. I wanted, straight away, to turn it off again. For time eternal.

  As I had been told, a family. There had been four of them. And, by the bloodstains on the couch and armchairs, they must have been settled around the set when who-or-what had paid them a visit. It seemed to have happened all at once. They’d had the time to jump to their feet – letting out yells of terror, perhaps – before their new visitor had taken them to pieces.

  The worst thing was, apart from the damage and the gore, they looked like they might any moment get back to their feet and start moving around again. Only one thing separates the living from the dead, and that’s intention. Corpses look like people who have plain forgotten what they want to do next.

  My breath hissing in my lungs, I inspected the wounds more closely. Whatever had done this definitely wasn’t human. It was far too strong for that. And the weapons it had used … there appeared to be several of them, tightly grouped and each as sharp as scalpels.

  The question rose again. If not human, then what? Someone must have created the thing. And I wondered who was crazy enough to work any witchcraft quite as dark as this.

  And the same had happened in all the houses on this street, according to Cass. I wondered how long it must have
taken. Hadn’t anyone heard screams, been warned?

  The sickly charnel-house odor was beginning to overpower me. I couldn’t bear it anymore – my stomach started tightening. I backed out of the room, then squeezed my eyes tightly shut. Moisture was pressing up behind the lids, before much longer.

  Although it wasn’t wholly the sights, the smell. A realization had begun to settle over me. As I’d said, we have bad things happen in the Landing all the time. When so many of its inhabitants practice sorcery, it could hardly be otherwise. But something like this, the same awful scene replicated over and over again …

  We were facing something different this time. Possibly a whole lot worse than we had ever encountered before.

  The thought was like a heavy weight, pressing down on me. I wondered whether I was strong enough to face this, whatever it was.

  Cassie seemed to understand. One of her hands went gently to my neck.

  “Take it easy, Ross.”

  “Right. How?” I muttered.

  “Usual drill. Deep breaths.”

  I tried a couple, but they didn’t even go down halfway.

  “Why’s it always us,” I asked, “who have to deal with all the really lousy stuff?”

  Her voice was still troubled, but was trying to sound practical.

  “I could have just ridden away. You could have just hung up on me. It’s gotta be someone, mister. What would you rather do, leave it all to the authorities?”

  As if to prove her point, two of my old colleagues – Matt Chalker and Davy Quinn – had emerged onto the street when we came out again. They were slumped against a squad car. Had their caps tipped back, their faces white as flour. Their hands were on their hips. And they were staring about them with wide, glassy eyes, like they were trying to imagine they were dreaming all of this.

  They’re not bad guys, and not entirely useless. It takes a lot of guts, let’s face it, to try and serve as a peace officer when the normal rules are all blown to hell. But guys like Matt and Davy – they’re not quick-witted or adaptable enough to deal with the way life here has become.

  Because the truth is, there may have always been strange happenings in Raine’s Landing. But they’ve gotten more frequent, the last few years. No one was sure why, but it was undeniable.

  It’s a handful of private individuals who really make a difference, these days. Myself. Cass. DuMarr. Willets, when he can be bothered. And, of course, the Little Girl. If anyone can keep a lid on things, it’s us. But the lid just kept on popping up, every time you turned your back.

  Matt Chalker finally noticed me, and called out, “Christ, Devries? Do you believe any of this?”

  Then he went back to his glassy staring, hands still on his hips.

  “Is Saul here?” I asked Cass quietly.

  And she nodded, her gaze steely by this time. As has already been noted, she doesn’t have an awful lot of time for most cops. But she respects a few, and he was one of them.

  “Fifth house on the left.”

  So I went across to consult with the Landing’s best and most reliable detective lieutenant.

  TWO

  Think of Peter Boyle in Young Frankenstein and you’ve pretty much got the measure, physically at least, of Detective Lieutenant Saul Hobart. Everything about him overly large and apparently ungainly. Big thick fingers. Massive feet. Shoulders you could rest a dishwasher on each of, and an enormous, bald domed head with stick-out ears and tightly packed, Chiclet-sized teeth. I am tall, but standing he tops me by several inches, except he’s always slightly hunched.

  He wasn’t standing now, however.

  He was sitting in the half-light of another living room, not dissimilar to the one I’d left. Same ordinary furniture, same extraordinary carnage. God Almighty, what on earth had hit this street? And was gazing at something in his broad palm. His head was bowed. He seemed entirely lost in thought, a saddened, brooding giant.

  He was dressed as smartly as a man that size could manage. A charcoal pinstriped suit. A knitted woolen tie of the same color. A crisp white shirt, and a pair of gleaming black shoes the size of miniature kayaks.

  The thing in his hand was a plastic doll with a sweetly smiling face, clad in a miniature pink frilly dress. Its owner … I looked quickly round me … wasn’t here. So she had to be upstairs in her bedroom, in her nursery. I already knew that no one had been spared. And so the little girl who owned the dolly, whatever her age might be, wasn’t going to get any older from this point on.

  Saul had a wife and three daughters up in Vernon Valley, so this kind of thing had to get to him as badly as me and Cassie.

  I struggled to think what to say around awfulness like this. My head was pretty blurred by this time, but that wasn’t the reason that I couldn’t come up with the right words. There were none. There never have been. No language had yet been created to express the feelings that a tragedy like this leaves you with. A rock hard lump formed in my throat.

  I felt for the man and his anguish, of course. But Saul had been my superior once. And so I stood there, waiting for him to make the first move.

  For a while, I didn’t think that he was going to notice me at all. But then his head came up a little and he greeted me in a voice far hoarser than was normal. There was a heaviness to it that spoke an awful lot about the crushed way that he felt.

  “Hey, Ross. Noticed the dyke snooping round earlier. I thought you’d show up.”

  Which unstiffened me a little. Hell, he always calls Cass that, although there’s never any perjorative in it. He jumped to that conclusion when he first met her, and has stuck to it ever since. So far as I know, he’s wrong. I understand quite a lot of stuff about the ragged tatters of Cass’s personal life, and it may have run in some unusual directions down the years. But toward her own gender isn’t one of them.

  Me, I was trying to breathe through my mouth and not my nose. Trying to keep my gaze away from the ruined bodies on the carpet. These ones hadn’t been sitting down. They’d obviously heard yells from a neighboring house and got up, moving for the window. But had not even reached that. Not even gotten halfway.

  Hobart looked so far gone that he wasn’t even taking in the view and odors anymore. And you could hardly blame him.

  I stared across at the shabby mantelpiece. Family photos, china cats. A cheap vase with a plastic rose in it. Nothing of significance at all – give this stuff to a thrift shop and they’d throw half of it away. So what had brought the Reaper down on these folks in such a vile, tempestuous fashion?

  It’s no use holding in a question, unless you’re around somebody like Willets or the Little Girl. So I asked it out loud.

  Saul’s head didn’t lift any further, but he stared up at me through his beetling brows. His eyes looked wet and very distant.

  “That’s the thing, ain’t it? Motive? These were all regular citizens, so far as we can tell. Heads-down, mind-your-own-business, get-on-with-your-life types. Hell, we’ve found a few crystals and rune stones, always do, in tool sheds or in bedrooms.”

  Most people in town used a little magic now and then, in other words. Most of them but me. I seem to make a habit of being the odd one out.

  “But we’re talking minor peccadillo stuff,” Saul was continuing. “There are no adepts here. So what was this about?”

  He looked down at the doll again and stroked its nylon hair. Then tucked it very gently in his pocket.

  “We’ve about seventy people dead, possibly more. And however rough things have gotten in the Landing, they’ve never been as ugly as this.”

  “Cass said no survivors?”

  It was a question I asked with a very heavy heart indeed.

  “Not that we can tell as yet.”

  “How about the neighboring streets?”

  “No damage at all. Only this one.”

  “Didn’t they realize what was happening? The people on the other streets?”

  Hobart’s eyebrows lifted and his expression became a little number.

>   “That’s the other really weird thing. Nobody claims to have heard anything in the slightest.”

  With all this mayhem going on? It seemed to confirm what I had already suspected. There was heavy magic, really powerful stuff, behind this.

  “No witnesses, then?”

  He shrugged. “None.”

  “So, what are you going to do?”

  Hobart finally sat fully upright. It was an experience not dissimilar to watching an old sunken ship rising, prow first, from the depths. The gleam in his eyes had turned peculiar and doleful, slightly luminous. And the tautness of his features didn’t slacken by an inch.

  “I’m going to make sure everything gets bagged and tagged,” he said. “I’m going to take a good number of trips down to the coroner’s office, I’d guess. I’m going to identify every victim and inform their nearest kin, where that is possible. I’m going to do my job in other words. That might take a while because, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m pretty short-staffed.”

  And was that an accusation … did he feel that I’d abandoned him when I had quit the force? Nothing could be further from the truth.

  I’d quit because I couldn’t go on the usual way, once my family had disappeared. I had to do something more than simply follow procedure and routine. I needed to take a different course, one with fewer boundaries. But I was still quite firmly on his side.

  I was waiting for more than the little speech he’d just delivered. He could see that, and his cheeks got flushed.

  “Other than that? I’m mostly going to pray that this was just a one-off. Just the worst example yet of magic that went really badly screwy. Because my family? Live on a street pretty much like this one. And if anything like this happened again, anywhere near them …?”

  His frame gave a shudder and that haunted look of his grew even worse. And then a hand went to his brow.

  “I’m barely functioning, Ross. I know that. Perhaps it might be best if I just found a quiet corner, sat there for a while.”

  He took the doll out of his pocket again, and became oblivious to me.