Speak of the Devil - 05 Read online

  And was halfway there when my cell phone went off. I’d bought a new one just last month, with all the latest functions, and the letters on its tiny screen spelled out ‘Saul Hobart.’

  “Ross?” he said, as soon as I picked up.

  And I thought I recognized his tone.

  “Here,” I answered rather tiredly, wondering what was coming down on us this time.

  The rain was getting heavier. A young couple was hurrying toward me, not looking properly where they were going, keeping their heads down. And I had to swing out of their way to avoid a collision.

  “A dead body’s been found,” I could hear Saul saying.

  “Sounds to me like purely a police matter. I’m not on the force anymore, remember?”

  “Yeah, but I think you’ll want to take a look at this one.”

  “There’s something special about it?”

  “Yup. Not in any good way.”

  So I asked him where he was.

  A big old yellow dog started barking when I got out of my car, then wandered up and tried to lick my fingers. I let him do that, fondling his head as I surveyed the scene before me.

  We were right out on the edge of Clayton. Behind me were all the trappings of a peaceful, respectable suburb – mown lawns, neat flowerbeds, gleaming cars stationed out front. Lights were on in most of the houses.

  Up ahead was the great forest, the only portion of the outside world that most of us had ever seen outside a movie or a TV show. The tree trunks looked like the bars of some great prison. We were trapped here, just as surely as if we’d been locked away and the keys tossed. And it isn’t that I dislike our town. I like it fine. But I’d be a great deal happier about the place if leaving sometimes was an option.

  A steady pattering reached my ears, heavier than the rainfall. The leafless branches out in front of me were shedding the last of their remaining snow. Nearly all the white was gone.

  There was an ambulance parked to one side, its front wheels sunken in a thick layer of mud. An older man was sitting in the back, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. But apart from him and a paramedic, it was police uniforms out here, some dozen of them. And Saul Hobart, of course, plain-clothed.

  He was off beyond the municipal limits, moveless as a statue, gazing down at something that was lying on the ground. But he finally noticed I’d arrived, unstiffened, and came stomping over.

  Wet dead leaves made smooshing noises under his gargantuan shoes. He had his usual smart suit on, with a thick camelhair coat pulled over his enormous shoulders. Saul has always been a tidy dresser.

  “How about this weather, huh?” he asked me, his face tight.

  “Global warming?” I suggested.

  “I don’t care what’s causing it. It’s washing most of my evidence away.”

  I asked him, “Evidence of what?”

  We started back in the direction he had come, the melt still tapping down around us.

  “Got an I.D. on the corpse yet?”

  “Easily. We had him registered as missing as of two evenings ago. Irwin Maschler. Lived on Kelmer Street.” Which was in my part of town, although I hadn’t known him. “Twenty-two years old and single. His Pa runs a gardening and landscape business, and they do a lot of work up in the richer districts.”

  “Any notion how long he’s been dead?”

  “The examiner reckons twenty four hours.”

  So Maschler had vanished on Monday – due to the peculiar nature of our town, the police don’t wait to file a missing person’s report, but do it right away – and had died on Tuesday.

  Yesterday. It hadn’t taken too long for his body to be found.

  “Looks like somebody’s been pretty careless,” I opined. “He’d have stayed hidden a good while longer if they’d taken him off deeper in the woods.”

  We reached a strangely shaped mound that was covered with an oilskin. All the men in uniform stepped back. Saul was looking very grim, his big jaw jutting out.

  “This ain’t exactly what you’d call pretty,” he warned me.

  Then he pulled the oilskin back.

  And he was absolutely right.

  It wasn’t that thing – not at all.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Judge Samuel Levin let out a tired sigh, then raised his head and listened to the heavy raindrops as they beat against his living room window. He was sprawled out on one of his sumptuous couches with a large book in his lap. It was a biography of Dashiell Hammett. He was nearly two-thirds through it.

  A fascinating story, but he couldn’t seem to keep his mind on it. He was alone in the large wooden house, and was beginning to feel slightly troubled. Fleur was visiting relatives, and neither of the boys was home. And being on his own never usually bothered him. There were times when – both as a judge and as one of the Landing’s most prominent adepts – solitude was necessary. But something had started prickling at the edges of his fine-tuned senses. He was not sure what it was.

  Maybe he had better go and visit his friend Gaspar Vernon, or else Doctor Willets, who’d been living on the lower slopes of this same hill since Christmas. He could blur himself to either house in the blink of an eye – every major adept had the power to do that – and ask them if they were feeling anything similar. But he held back from going that route.

  He could feel a presence getting closer, and he straightened uncomfortably on his couch, setting the biography aside. Levin – a small, dapper man – peered through the big window with his rimless spectacles. He could see nothing out there.

  But then a sudden noise from the darkened hallway brought his gaze snapping around. A floorboard had just squeaked out there. And he’d not heard Fleur unlocking the front door.

  Levin tried to reach out with his inner sight. And to his absolute astonishment, he drew a total blank. He couldn’t even see the hallway, let alone anyone in it. And why should it be that he was blind to the details of his own home? That simply wasn’t right.

  He sprang up to his feet, his narrow face blanching and his small hands tightening into rigid stubs. His eyes were blazing now behind their small ovals of glass. Slight of size he might be, but he was not someone to be meddled with

  Tiny sparks of brightness danced about his knuckles, since his power was already gathering.

  “Who’s there?” he snarled. “How dare you sneak into my house?”

  He was answered with another floorboard creaking. And then all the lights went out.

  He could feel how fast his heart was pounding, but ignored it. Levin unclenched his right hand and waved it at the nearest light switch, murmuring, “Itera lux.”

  Nothing happened. And how could a tiny, basic little spell like that not work?

  Something was closing in on him through the darkness. He could feel that too. And Levin reacted, throwing both of his arms wide. A barrier of magic power suddenly appeared around him, glimmering with a warmthless light that kept on shifting, like the surface of a pond.

  Except it only held up for around three seconds before crumbling to pieces and then vanishing. And he’d willed none of that to happen. Levin’s mouth dropped open and his frame spasmed with shock.

  After that, though, there was no more time for conscious thought. Because his eyesight had adjusted slightly to the gloom. He could make out the vague shape of an intruder, slipping in through his living room doorway.

  Levin wasn’t even convinced it was a human he was looking at, at first. Its outline was hard to make out properly. But then he saw it had an ordinary shape, although distorted by the clothes that it had on.

  This figure was draped from top to toe in what was probably a jet-black cloak. Its head was covered up by an enormous cowl, so deep and shadowy you couldn’t make out any face. The sleeves were very baggy too, the hands and wrists invisible.

  But something was protruding from one of them. The long blade of a curving knife.

  Levin squinted startledly, taking in that detail. There was something curious about the metal, but he
didn’t focus on that now. He stood up very straight, air seething between his teeth. Then held both hands up, palms out flat and wrists bent back. And he attempted to release a ball of sizzling power.

  Once again, nothing happened. His face slackened and his gaze went very wide.

  And then the intruder was shortening the distance in between them, rapidly and with a stolid sense of purpose.

  Levin shouted something – he was not sure what. The knife swung up and then came slicing down. And the judge was not, in normal life, a physical man. But sheer desperation drove him. He grabbed hold of his attacker’s wrist, trying to divert the blade. But the intruder was a good few inches taller than he was, and considerably stronger. And the sharpened steel kept edging down.

  Levin grunted as he kept on trying to push the knife off to one side. And then, an unfamiliar instinct taking hold of him, he lunged forward and kneed his attacker where it ought to hurt the most.

  The man stumbled back a couple of inches, but was not as badly crippled as he should have been. He was fully upright again in a bare few seconds. And a voice came hissing out from underneath the hood.

  “I’m going to make you pay for that, old man. Your death isn’t going to be a quick one anymore.”

  And to Levin’s amazement, it sounded like a normal, rather cultured voice. That apart, he didn’t recognize it.

  The blade flashed at him again, from the side this time. And he barely managed to jerk out of its way as it sang past.

  At least … he thought that was what happened.

  He could feel no pain, at first. But then an unexpected dull ache welled up in his side and started getting worse. And when he reached down, one fold of his shirt was hanging loosely, and a thin trickle of blood had started to ooze out.

  His mental shock turned into something worse. Samuel blinked several times, staring at the man in front of him and fighting hard to make his lips work.

  “But … who are you?” he gasped. “Why in heaven’s name are you doing this?”

  “I’m one of the new rulers of Raine’s Landing,” came the cold reply. “And lame old crocks like you – you’ve lorded it for too long, and we’re tired of you. You’re simply getting in our way.”

  This man came from … here? Sam had never heard anything quite like this, and it totally bewildered him. His face lost its shape altogether, terrible emotion crumpling it up. He could feel tears stinging in the corners of his eyes. This was wholly incomprehensible. Why would anyone behave this way?

  The dagger started lifting again, and he was not sure what to do about it. His mind felt like it was trying to leap off in a hundred separate directions all at once, and he could feel his knees begin to buckle.

  “What is going on here?” came a deep, gruff voice from the far corner of the room.

  The cloaked figure stopped and turned. And when it did that, Sam could see that Lehman Willets and another adept, Martha Howard-Brett, had both appeared.

  Doc Willets took one look at the intruder’s knife. Lifted his right palm. And a bolt of bright red energy came surging out.

  But it only flowed through thin air, skimming past the judge.

  Because the tall, cloaked man was gone.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Standing around in the rain and darkness any longer simply made no sense. We weren’t going to get any further with this ugly business that way. So Saul had the body sent off to the morgue, and that was where we regrouped.

  Poor Irwin Maschler was laid out on the slab, and the new coroner – a roundish guy called Arnold Staves – was hosing him clean and exposing the full extent of the damage to him. Bits of leaf and twig were going down the drain, carried by the flow of water. There was not a scrap of clothing on the body that we’d found. So were we dealing with some kind of pervert? It was something that I didn’t like to think about, but had to.

  Our victim’s eyes were wide open and green, though glazed. His lips were blue, his face a grayish version of off-white. He’d taken quite a mauling before he had died. His whole body was covered with small cuts in precise, sometimes complex shapes. And that was leaving out the very clear and obvious larger wound.

  Saul peered at the smaller ones disgustedly.

  “Pre- or post-mortem?”

  “Pre,” Staves shrugged. “He more than likely felt it happen.”

  Who would do that? I felt sour bile rising in my throat.

  “A demon of some kind?” Saul was suggesting. “Or some monster, like the Dralleg?”

  “Try a human being,” said a third, much lighter voice.

  We hadn’t noticed, up until then, that the double doors of the examining room had come open behind us. Lauren Brennan was standing there, gazing at the corpse with a professional eye. Oh, did I forget to mention? She works in Boston P.D.’s homicide division.

  She stepped forward, chewing on her lower lip as she walked slowly round the body.

  “Yeah, I’ve seen this kind of thing a few times.” One of her slim fingers began jabbing. “Ligature marks around the wrists and ankles.”

  “Right. We got that.”

  “And look at his mouth, the way its corners are contused – he was gagged brutally for quite a while.” She indicated some of the thin scars across his stomach. “Here we have a little pentagram. And the rest are other ritual symbols, some of which I recognize.”

  Which might have made her sound a little know-it-all, but she was only trying to help.

  “What’re you even doing here?” I asked her, baffled as to how she’d found us.

  “Cassie needed to rest up. I wanted to find out where you’d gotten to, and so I flagged down a patrol car. When I explained who I was, they told me what was happening. And I’ve been in this place before, remember?”

  When she had first come to this town, in point of fact. But then she stared back at the corpse.

  “The straight fact of the matter? You’re looking for either of two kinds of perp. The first is working on his own, a morbidly-obsessed potential serial killer.”

  And we’d never had one of those before, unless you counted Cornelius Hanlon, who had come here from the outside world.

  “That,” she was continuing, “or it’s more than one person. Possibly some sort of cult.”

  She glanced across at Staves. “I take it from the larger wound his heart has been removed?”

  I wasn’t sure about Saul, but my mind had gone decidedly fuzzy while she had been talking, and my face felt numb. I could hear the words emerging from her mouth. But what in God’s name was she on about?

  She noticed how bewildered I was looking, at that point. A thin, deep crease appeared on her brow and she lost some of her confidence, becoming slightly flustered.

  “Oh, come on, you guys! You must get these kinds of lunatic from time to time? Except it’s far realer here, right?”

  And Lauren stared from face to face, expecting a response. She looked astonished when it didn’t come.

  “Hey, am I in the right place here? I thought this was Witchy Town.”

  And that was when it started occurring to me what she was trying to suggest. And was she genuinely saying …?

  “You’re talking about … black magic?” I asked her.

  And she nodded, her gaze searching mine.

  “Yeah, you know. Secret rituals. Incantations. Calling up the dark and spooky forces of the underworld.”

  I never use any kind of magic, and she knew that. Although I’m firmly placed in the minority on that – most people in the Landing do. But …

  “Lauren,” I explained to her, as carefully as I was able, “nobody round here goes in for any of that kind of stuff. They only use the paler versions of the supernatural arts.”

  “Really?” And she faltered. “I’d always assumed …”

  And then her voice trailed off.

  So it was left to Saul to finally pick up the ball she’d started bouncing. And I have to hand it to our town’s top cop – he was willing to accept this new idea a
whole lot easier than I was.

  “What you said might need rephrasing, Ross,” he grumbled, throwing me a sideways look. “We never used to have anyone practicing the darker arts. But ‘used’ is in the past tense, ain’t it?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It was sinking in, but only very slowly. And was troubling me worse than anything I’d come across in ages, since it went against plain everything I thought I knew about our town. I mean, sure, we occasionally get someone who goes slightly – or completely – crazy and starts using magic for bad purposes. But to do that thing methodically. Deliberately. Coldly. Perform a certain ritual. Make a gory sacrifice, and chant specific spells …

  Here? It made my mind start boggling, and then do even stranger things than that.

  I tried calling Lehman Willets, but I couldn’t raise him. So – starting to put two and two together, some ten minutes later with the rainfall getting heavier – I set out across town in my beloved old Cadillac. My windshield wipers scythed against the downpour, and my tires kept on throwing up great hissing fans of spray.

  Lauren, who had come along, was peering out in a bewildered fashion at the raging weather.

  “This is really weird,” she said. “There’s still snow and ice in Boston, and it’s not that far away.”

  Which only confirmed what I’d already been suspecting. Whatever else this was, it wasn’t natural.

  “I’m sorry about before,” she added. “Hope I didn’t offend you.”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s just, the whole idea of this has got me really …”

  “Bugged?”

  “Yeah, that.”

  And we fell silent for a while.

  Lauren was looking noticeably pale and drawn in the yellow glow of the passing streetlamps. And when she started blinking tiredly, I was reminded just how hard she often worked. With her blond hair and her heart-shaped face, she reminds me awfully of my missing wife, who was lost years back to magic gone as badly wrong as it can ever get. And that made me even more sympathetic to her.