The Devil in Gray

by Graham Masterton

  He looked out of the window. Rainwater was spouting from a broken gutter into the darkened yard below. There was a dazzling flash of lightning and another crash of thunder. It felt as if the storm were right above his head.

  He went back into the bathroom and climbed cautiously into the bathtub. Apart from having to walk most of the way home he had worked a double shift today and he felt bone-tired. He lay back and stared at the ceiling. What would his father have thought of him, if he could see him now? A chef in a family diner, instead of a captain in the marines. Pecan pie instead of semper fi.

  He soaped his hair and plunged himself under the water to rinse it, his eyes screwed tight shut and his fingers in his ears. As he came up for air, he saw that the bathroom door was wide open.

  Odd, he thought. He never left the bathroom door open. His mother wasn’t the kind of woman who would sit on the toilet talking to him while he had a bath. In fact she appeared to find sex and nudity not just embarrassing but deeply distasteful. She called it “that sort of thing.” John occasionally wondered how he had managed to be conceived at all.

  “Mom?” he called out, but there was no answer. She always took two Seconals when she went to bed, so she was probably dead to the world by now.

  He stood up in the bath and reached over to the door to close it. But as he did so he was suddenly taken by the feeling that there was somebody standing in the doorway. He couldn’t see anybody, but he thought he could hear steady, slightly harsh breathing. It was difficult to be sure, because the bathwater was still slopping from side to side, and thunder was still rumbling over the rooftop, but he could sense a tension in the air, a nearness.

  He lowered his left hand to cover himself. “Who’s there?” he said, half expecting his mother to appear.

  No answer. But the sensation that somebody was standing very close to him was even stronger now. He moved his hand toward the door, waving it from side to side as if he were feeling his way in the dark.

  There was an immense explosion of thunder, and at the same time something sharp and pointed jabbed him in the right eye, bursting his eyeball. He let out a high-pitched scream and fell backward into the bath with a loud slap of water, knocking his head against the tiles. He grabbed the handrail and tried to sit up, his hand cupping his eye, and he felt a large blob of optic jelly slither between his fingers and slide down his cheek. The pain was unbearable—as if somebody had stuck a red-hot poker into his eye socket.

  “God-oh-God-oh-God-oh-God,” he babbled, trying to climb out of the bath. “Mom! Mom! Help me! My eye!”

  He managed to twist himself around and get himself up on one knee, but then he was roughly pushed back down again, and he actually felt hands gripping him, hands in coarse leather gloves.

  “Get off me!” he screamed. “Jesus, get off me!”

  But one of the hands gripped his hair and his head was forced under the bathwater. He could hear the watery clonking of his knees against the side of the tub as he struggled to get free, and the crackling of his hair being wrenched out by the roots, but the hand wouldn’t let him go. His whole head felt as if it were caving in.

  Just when he thought he couldn’t hold his breath for a second longer, the hand pulled him up again. He gasped and spluttered and opened his remaining eye, expecting to see who was trying to drown him, but there was still nobody there.

  “Let me go, let me go, let me go!” he begged, and there was a moment’s pause. He tried again to sit up, but then something sharp stuck into his left eye, too, and everything went black.

  “I’m blind!” he screamed. “You’ve blinded me!”

  He thrashed in the bath from side to side, kicking and yammering and letting out whoops of agony. He clawed at the air, trying to find his assailant, trying to climb out, but every time he found the handrail his fingers were pried away from it and he was pushed back into the water.

  “What do you want?” he gibbered, and then whooped again because his eyes hurt so much.

  There was no answer. He tried one more time to get out of the bath, but when he was forced back yet again, he cowered in the water with his hands over his face and just prayed that this was all a nightmare and that he hadn’t been blinded after all and that he would soon wake up and it would be morning.

  He thought the water felt hotter than it had before, but that was probably because his injuries had made him more sensitive. Soon, however, he realized that it actually was hotter. Not only that, it was increasing in heat as quickly as the water in a kettle. He sat up and reached blindly for the faucets, but when he found them they were both turned off. The water was heating up spontaneously, and it was already scalding his buttocks and his legs.

  “What are you doing to me?” he screeched. “Let me get out, let me get out!”

  Again he struggled and kicked, but again he was pushed back into the water. It was so hot now that he felt as if his entire body was burning, and he could hear a deep, thick bubbling noise as it rapidly rose to boiling point.

  His agony lasted for less than a minute, but during that minute he discovered hell. He went into total shock, his legs and his arms quivering, his fists gripped tight. He had never thought that pain like this was possible.

  The bathwater came to a rolling boil and for the final few seconds of his life he was cooking alive.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  When Decker walked into his office the next morning, gripping a fifteen-slice pastrami sandwich between his teeth and carrying a cup of espresso and three thick folders under his arm, Sandra and Eunice Plummer were already waiting for him. Sandra was wearing a flowery green dress and a medicine-pink cardigan. Sitting in the corner in a triangle of bright sunlight, she looked simple but saintly. Eunice was wearing a beige pantsuit and a look of irritation.

  Decker said, “Mmm, mmm,” and jerked his head to indicate that they should follow him over to his desk. He took the sandwich out of his mouth and laid it on top of Erin Malkman’s autopsy report on George Drewry. “Good to see you again, Sandra. How can I help?”

  “I asked her not to come,” Eunice said, her brown vinyl purse clutched firmly in her lap. “But she stamped her foot and said she was going to see you whether I liked it or not.”

  “I saw him again,” Sandra said. “The So-Scary Man.”

  “You did? Where?”

  “I saw him at the station. He was going through the door.”

  “You mean Main Street Station?”

  “That’s right,” Eunice said. “She says he crossed East Main Street and walked straight across the sidewalk and into the entrance.”

  “Do you think he might have seen you?”

  Sandra shook her head. “I don’t think so. He looked like he was in a big hurry.”

  “What time was this?”

  “About 4:45 yesterday afternoon,” Eunice said. “Sandra wanted to call you right away but I tried to persuade her not to. I’m sorry, maybe I’m wrong, but I really don’t want her to get mixed up in this.”

  Decker sat down and pried the lid off his coffee. “I don’t blame you, Ms. Plummer. But this kind of information could be really helpful. It means that whoever he is—whatever he is—he’s still in the downtown area. If we can work out his behavior patterns … well, maybe we can find him, and find out how he manages to make himself unnoticed.”

  Sandra nodded enthusiastically and said, “We should go look for him.”

  “No you shouldn’t,” Eunice said. “You should go back home and finish your schoolwork. You’ve told Lieutenant Martin what you wanted to tell him, and now we should leave him in peace.”

  “I think your mom’s right,” Decker told her. “This is a city with nearly a quarter of a million people living in it. Where are we going to start looking?”

  “The station,” Sandra insisted.

  “Just because you saw him at the station yesterday that doesn’t mean he’s going to be there now. And what would he be doing there? It’s all building work and renovations. There wouldn’t b
e any place for him to stay.”

  “That’s where he comes from,” Sandra insisted. “I just know.”

  Decker suddenly remembered the drawing of Main Street Station hanging by the fireplace in Eunice Plummer’s apartment. The dark cloud over it, which looked more like tangled black snakes. And what had Eunice told him? “She calls it the Fun House.”

  “How do you know?” he asked her.

  Sandra touched her fingertips to her forehead. “I can see it. I can see him going up the stairs.”

  “You did a drawing of the station, didn’t you? A very good one. But it had some kind of a cloud hanging over it.”

  “I saw it. Only it wasn’t a cloud. It was a bad thing.”

  “A bad thing? What do you mean by that?”

  “When people do wrong. When people hate people. That’s what it’s like.”

  Eunice said, “I’m sorry, Lieutenant. I really think that this is enough.”

  “You wouldn’t consider letting me take Sandra down to the station for a look around?”

  “You’ve said yourself that this man could be vengeful, especially if he knows that Sandra can see him, and identify him.”

  “Well, you’re right, of course. And the last thing I want to do is expose Sandra to any danger.”

  “I want to look for him,” Sandra said, drumming her heels on the floor. “It would be like hide-and-go-seek.”

  Decker shook his head. “I’m sorry, Sandra. If Mom says no, then it’s no. But I’ll go check the station myself, and if I find anything I’ll tell you.”

  Decker and Hicks climbed the dark stone stairway from East Main Street to the second-floor lobby of Main Street Station, deafened at every step by weird, distorted banging and hammering.

  They reached the lobby itself, where workers in hard hats were digging up the flooring and chipping the walls back to the bare brick. In spite of the noise and the dust and the snaking hydraulic hoses, the lobby was still awesome, with its tall columns and its high arched windows and its coffered ceiling. From here, Virginia’s soldiers had departed for two world wars and Vietnam, and vacationers boarded for Buck-roe Beach, as well as students bound for northern colleges and salesmen heading to new territory out West.

  A short sandy man in blue overalls came over to greet them, carrying two red hard hats. “Lieutenant Martin? How do you do. Mike Verdant, I’m the project engineer. Have to ask you to put these on, I’m afraid.”

  “Thanks,” Decker said. “Quite an operation you’ve got going here.”

  “It’s going pretty good. We should have trains running by December on the eastern side, on the old Chesapeake and Ohio tracks, and then we can open up the Seaboard Line.”

  “History, huh?”

  “Oh, for sure. Amtrak closed this station down in 1975 and shifted all of their rail operations out to the suburbs, because they thought that the interstate was going to kill off rail travel. But … here we are again. Opening it all up. Here, let me show you something.”

  He led them across the echoing lobby to the western side of the station, where workmen in white overalls were drilling up the floor. He picked up a piece of flooring and crumbled it between finger and thumb.

  “You see this flooring? Black cinder ash, from the old coal-burning locomotives. You add water and it holds up pretty well.”

  Decker sniffed and looked around. “Any place here that somebody could hide?”

  Michael Verdant stood up, dusting his hands. “Not sure what you mean. We’ve had a couple of down-and-outs in here lately.”

  “No, I mean any place that somebody could actually live in.”

  “I don’t see how. There’s too much work going on. During the day we’re renovating the walls and the flooring. Over there—you see over there?—we took down all of the terracotta sculptures and we’re having them molded and recast. Then we’re stripping out all of the asbestos, we have to do that during the night, because of safety regulations. Nobody could set up camp here, wouldn’t be possible.”

  Decker breathed in the smell of old plaster and pulverized brick. The lobby echoed with hammer drills and pickaxes, but he was sure he could sense something else here too. The Old South, which had depended on tobacco and cotton and slavery and free opinion, breathing its defiant last.

  Richmond had once been the Secessionist capital. Now it was a tourist attraction, with antique stores and teddy-bear shops and plantation cruises on riverboats, lunch and dinner included, and the only men in gray were the guides at the National Battlefield Park.

  Michael Verdant said, “Come on, follow me.” He led them upstairs, to the fourth and fifth levels, through sheets of dusty plastic and sanded-down doors, until they came to a metal ladder in the corner. He climbed it as swiftly as a big sandy ape, and Decker and Hicks followed. They found themselves out on the balcony of the clock tower, their hair blown by the warm midday wind. Below them, traffic streamed along the interstate, which curved beneath the station only twenty feet away. But off to their right, they could see all the way down the Shockoe Valley, where the James River glittered, and ships were moored, and the woody hills were hazed with summer blue.

  “Finest view of the city there is.”

  Decker turned around. Above him the four clock faces were creeping closer to noon, and he could hear the stealthy creeping of their automated movement.

  “How about the lower levels?” he asked. “Any chance that somebody could be hiding themselves there?”

  Michael Verdant led them back down to the gloomy, echoing train shed, 530 feet long, the size of a zeppelin hangar, with a gable roof. “This is where the Greyhound buses are going to be coming in. Not sure about the second level, though. It’s like three football fields put together.”

  They went back down the stairway to the East Main Street entrance, and Michael Verdant unclipped a flashlight from his belt and showed them a deep excavation of rubble and old brickwork. “We’re putting in a ramp here, for wheelchair users, and people who lug their bags on wheels. We found this old brick foundation when we started to excavate, and at first we thought it could be a wharf, because the old Shockoe Creek used to come in here.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “No, it used to be deep enough for fishing boats. But this wall is probably later than that, 1920s or thereabouts. A whole lot of different building work has gone on here, over the years, levels on top of levels. It’s like opening up Tutankhamen’s tomb.”

  Decker peered into the darkness. “Is that a basement?”

  “No, there’s no basement. I guess the original planners were too worried about floods, this close to the river. There’s a crawl space, but that’s it.”

  “You think anybody could hide in there?”

  “Pretty unlikely. It’s damp and it’s dark and it’s suffocating. And you never know when the tide’s going to come pouring in.”

  “Okay,” Decker said. “Thanks for showing us around.”

  Michael Verdant gave him a dry, strong handshake. “Glad I could help. Make sure you come back when we’re open for business. You won’t believe this place, I can promise you.”

  As they walked back to Decker’s car, Hicks said, “You want to tell me why we came here?”

  “I don’t know. I was given a tip-off, that’s all. I just wanted to check.”

  “What tip-off?”

  Decker turned around and looked up at the clock tower and the dormer windows with their red terra-cotta tiles. The station looked more like a palace out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales than a twentieth-century railroad terminus.

  “Do you get any vibrations out of that place?” he asked.

  “Vibrations? You mean apart from jackhammering? Like what?”

  “Like—I don’t know. Like something very bad is hiding there.”

  Hicks shook his head. “You should ask Rhoda. She’s the one who’s into vibrations. Me—well, you know me, Lieutenant. I prefer procedure to witchcraft, any day.”

  “In that case, you definitely won�
��t be happy about where we’re going next.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  He parked outside Moses Adebolu’s building and shouted, “Come on, Hicks! You should find this very instructive. It’ll take you back to your ethnic roots.”

  “What ethnic roots? I was born in Fairview Beach.”

  The same kids were playing with rat bones on the steps. Decker took out a pack of fresh-mint gum and gave them a stick each. “Watch my car, okay?”

  “So who’s this we’re going to see?” Hicks asked, dubiously.

  They climbed up the creaking stairs. Somebody on the floor above was having a shouting match, and there was a clatter like saucepans being thrown.

  Decker said, “You’re going to meet Moses. He’s a santero. One of the best, according to Jonah. Yesterday we sacrificed a rooster and today he’s going to give me my omiero.”

  “What the hell is an omiero?”

  “It’s my magic antidemon potion. Rooster blood and herbs. I have to take a bath in it and then the great god Changó might forgive me for whatever it is I’ve done to piss him off.”

  They had reached the second-story landing, under the headless image of John the Baptist. Hicks stopped and said, “Wait up a second, Lieutenant. Are you serious about this?”

  “Never more so. You saw that image of Cathy that Rhoda conjured up. Whatever’s happening here, it’s supernatural, whether we like it or not. Or at the very least it involves some pretty weird influences. So it’s no good trying to hunt it down with procedure. It’s Santería magic, and that means we’re going to have to use Santería magic to find it.”

  “Have you talked to the captain about this?”

  “Cab? Uh-huh. It’ll only make him sneeze.”

  “Well … I know what I saw when Rhoda did that séance, and I’ll agree with you that it was something extremely strange. But what are we really talking about here?”