Devil Sent the Rain

by D. J. Butler

  Now the strand of web was broken, the two ends fluttering in the dank, humid air.

  Was his uncle awake? The door was shut, but that meant nothing. Had his uncle observed him? If his uncle knew what Adrian had been doing, what terrible punishments would he inflict on the boy?

  Adrian eased open the door down to the basement, slipped in and padded down the stairs in the darkness. They were muscular and meaty and they gave way a little to his touch. Dream-Adrian was nervous, and thought he’d be caught. Another part of Adrian found the dream even stranger than usual. What exactly it was that made it so eluded him, but he stretched for it, trying to pin it down with his mind as he opened the door and threw himself onto his ratty old futon bed.

  The futon wasn’t ratty, though, it was warm and wet.

  And also, there was already someone in Adrian’s bed.

  He jumped up and back, preparing for the wolf and his insatiable tongue, and found the cord dangling from the light. It felt like an animal’s tail, and when he pulled it, a swarm of flying mites clouding about the ceiling burst into luminescent glow, showing him his tiny underground cell.

  The futon lay wet and brown in the center of the room, like a giant rotting tongue. On it lay Twitch, Mike, Eddie, and the girl from the club—Mouser. They wore pajamas like kids ready for a slumber party, but the looks on their faces showed surprise and fear. Especially Mouser’s face.

  “What new Hell be this?” she yelped. “Leave me in peace!”

  “This be a Hell of bad grammar,” Adrian shot back. It was a reflex, he couldn’t help himself. But the fact of speaking to someone in his dream felt very strange. Usually he stood inside dream-Adrian, or behind him, and shouted unheard warnings.

  Was this not a dream, after all?

  Eddie sat upright and looked around. “It isn’t Hell,” he said. “Trust me.”

  “This is wrong.” Adrian shook his head. “This is all wrong.”

  Then he noticed that the floor of the room was covered in water. He couldn’t tell where it was coming from, but it was cold and brown and rising.

  ***

  Chapter Four

  “Don’t tell me it’s wrong, Adrian,” Eddie snorted, rolling to his feet. “Tell me how we get out of here.” Pushy bastard. He slapped his hand under his armpit and ground his teeth when his fingers found nothing but pictures of coiled whips stamped on flannel. The glowing flies scattered as he thrust his head into their cloud. “And tell me where my Glock is.”

  “I don’t know where we are,” Adrian said quickly. He reached for nicotine gum and found he was wearing pajamas, too. No gum, no taser, no Eye, just pajamas covered with pictures of little kids … in pajamas. “Are you really here?”

  Twitch groaned and rolled over. Her pajamas were speckled with birds and horses. They were stained with blood on the collar and shoulders, too, and there was blood matted in her hair.

  “This is really me.” Mike stood up. His pajamas were yellow and covered in whisky bottles and sombreros. Just looking at his pajamas made Adrian feel a little guilty.

  “Yeah?” said Eddie. “Prove it.”

  Mike scratched the back of his neck. “What if I tell you something only you and I know?”

  “I’ll still think I’m dreaming.” Eddie scanned the room, and so did Adrian. There wasn’t much here—a single shelf with a few Latin books on it, the futon, and the tail end of the old coal chute, from back when the basement had held a coal-fired furnace and this had been the coal room. Adrian remembered the lingering carbon smell from his youth, but didn’t smell it now. Today the room smelled like the inside of a mouth, badly in need of dental work.

  “Then you can tell me something different that only you and I know,” Mike said, and then trailed off. “Carajo.”

  “A day late, Mike,” Adrian said wearily, “et cetera.”

  “Yep.” Eddie helped Twitch climb to her feet; the fairy leaned heavily on the guitar player, moaning. Her eyes drifted aimlessly and Adrian wondered if she had a concussion. Eddie’s eye wandered, too, for a moment, and he shook himself like a dog shrugging off water. “Whatever this place is,” the guitarist said, “bad things happened here.” He looked right at Adrian as he said it.

  Adrian swallowed, his throat dry and scratchy. “Let’s get out.”

  Mouser stood up and balled her fists on her hips. Her pajamas were covered in red roses. “By Jupiter, this is a queer Hell that aims only to bore me.”

  That didn’t sound like Mouser; Adrian stared, but saw only the club gopher’s face over rose-printed pajamas.

  “Careful who you go calling queer,” Mike said.

  “Sorry our conversation isn’t snappy enough for you,” Adrian added.

  “This smacks of addle-pated Roundhead theology!” she snorted. “What atonement can there be in listening to the yammering of idiots?”

  “And that, sister,” Eddie agreed, “is exactly why I stopped going to church.”

  “Church?” Mouser harrumphed. “And what gyrating African debauch were you accustomed to call church?”

  “Excuse me?” Eddie glared at her.

  A loud creak sounded upstairs, and with it, the ceiling of the basement bowed in slightly.

  Adrian pulled himself away from Mouser and her bizarre words and poked his head out the bedroom door. He’d passed the cellar on the way down without taking in much, so now he looked more closely. The stairs, sagging against the wall, fell down into a small hall, in which squatted an icebox. Over the icebox hung another uvula-light, this one dim and dark.

  At the foot of the staircase was another room, a storage room that had once held the furnace, and beyond the icebox was a third chamber. In real life his uncle had kept animals in there, for experimentation and organ harvesting. Adrian had lain awake at night listening to the terrified clucking of doomed chickens. He stared at the door now and wondered what horrible thing could be there in this twisted version of reality.

  “I think you’re all really here,” he said slowly, “and I think here is inside my dream, somehow, and I think it’s my fault.”

  “And the idiots yammer yet.” Mouser folded her arms and grimaced.

  Adrian turned on the woman. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I ain’t gonna waste time trying to prove anybody’s who they say they are,” Eddie snapped. “I’m here, dammit, and I wanna be in Chicago. What are the exits?”

  “The stairs.” Adrian stepped aside and pointed. Eddie looked.

  THUMP!

  Warm streams of stinking liquid dripped from the ceiling at the noise. Adrian felt a little sick.

  “Dollars to donuts that’s Semyaz and his bodies, stomping around,” Eddie muttered.

  “I ought to have known Hell’s coin would be Flemish!” Mouser snapped. “Heretics…! What is a donut?”

  Mike stared at her and chuckled. “I guess getting your head bit off really did a number on you.”

  Eddie shrugged the comment off. “She might be a figment.” Then he looked back at her quizzically. “Or she might be someone else. Jim?” he asked cautiously, looking into Mouser’s eyes.

  “I do not know a Jim!” she snapped back. “If you are to torture me for love, get on with it!”

  “She should write lyrics,” Mike grinned.

  “Right.” Eddie returned to his task. “Time to search this place for other exits.”

  Adrian shook his head. “I’m telling you, I grew up in this house. The stairs is it.”

  Eddie cocked an eyebrow at him. “You grew up in a house made out of flesh?”

  “Ah … not exactly.”

  “That’s right,” Eddie nodded slowly. “Not exactly. Now let’s find another way up and out.”

  “Okay.” Adrian took a deep breath, slowly, so he didn’t seem agitated. “Just … be careful. There’s bad stuff creeping around in my dreams.”

  “That’s okay,” Eddie told him. “In your dreams, I still know karate.”

  “What about this?” Mike pointed at the coal
chute.

  “Cemented shut,” Adrian said. His uncle hadn’t wanted him sneaking out at night, when he had first moved in and had still been small enough to shimmy through the hole.

  “Check it,” Eddie ordered.

  Mike lifted the opening over the chute, which was limp and fleshy like a flap of skin. Inside was a gnarled bud of meatiness squeezing tightly shut, resembling the inner curl of a clenched fist. “Uh …” Mike said, at a loss.

  Eddie shook his head. “Check it,” he repeated.

  Mike grimaced and hesitated.

  Mouser laughed. “What pusillanimous devils ye be!”

  Mike raised his eyebrows and pointed at the coal chute. “You do it,” he told her.

  Mouser promptly sloshed across the dank bedroom, moving doggedly but without haste, like someone resigned to taking orders. Flaring her nostrils in small defiance, she shoved her arm in the chute, up to the elbow.

  “Chicken,” Eddie said to Mike.

  Mike shrugged. “She practically volunteered.”

  “What do you feel?” Adrian asked. For his part, he felt like throwing up. Strangely, he didn’t feel the slightest bit sleepy.

  Mouser shrugged. “I have played midwife to more than one of my father’s cows. This is much the same.”

  “Deeper,” Eddie told her, and she shoved her arm in up to the shoulder. “And now?”

  “No calf’s head,” she said. “All womb.”

  Mike shuddered. “If that had looked like a womb, I’d have stuck my own arm inside.”

  “Enough,” Eddie told the girl, and she pulled her arm out. “Who are you?”

  Mouser looked at each of them in turn, her eyes skeptical. “I am Elaine Canning,” she said. “Which of the Princes of Hell do you serve?”

  “We don’t serve any Princes of Hell,” Mike murmured. He looked astonished.

  “We don’t serve anybody,” Adrian added.

  Twitch was standing upright under her own power now, rubbing her eyes.

  “You’re in Hell,” Eddie said. It wasn’t a question.

  “I am a murderess. Ought I be elsewhere?” She pulled her arm out of the sphincter in the wall and shook off a thick film of yellowish goo.

  “What year did you die?” Eddie furrowed his brow.

  THUMP!

  “Not sure we have time for this,” Adrian hissed.

  “The Year of Our Lord sixteen hundred forty-five. I was taken by a Roundhead cannonball while walking the ramparts of my family home and watching for the man I loved.”

  Eddie hesitated. “Did you love a man named James?” he asked.

  Elaine Canning, or Mouser, or whoever she was, looked like she had been punched in the face.

  “Come on!” Adrian lost patience and charged out into the basement, the others following.

  Eddie came at his shoulder, silent and thoughtful-looking.

  Adrian pointed. “Two rooms.”

  Eddie kept his voice down—the sound of bodies moving about on the floor above was louder out here. “Mike, Twitch!” He pointed at the room in the corner, and dragged Mouser with him into the room at the foot of the stairs.

  Adrian made to follow Eddie, but the guitarist stopped him with a glare and pointed at the icebox. Adrian nodded, his heart falling into his boots as his companions disappeared behind various doors, leaving him alone.

  He faced the icebox, squatting ominously in the near-darkness. It hummed, but not with the low, crackling hum of electric devices. Looking at it now, Adrian saw that the icebox didn’t have a power cord, anyway. Instead it had what looked like a segmented, vaguely scaly tail, like you might see on the backside of an armadillo, lying in the cold water on the floor. Its hum was the hum of discontented appetite, the belly rumbling of a man about to sit down to a meal that he already knew would not be sufficient. It reminded him, all in all, of the wardrobe upstairs that had unexpectedly attacked him.

  There was no good way to die, but being eaten by a fleshy refrigerator in the basement of your own mind seemed like a particularly humiliating one.

  Adrian bit back curses, grabbed the handle and yanked open the door.

  The icebox didn’t bite him, and opened. Warm, wet air washed over him, like the steam from a sink full of dishes billowing into an already dank and hot kitchen. The steam came rich with a rotting stink of meat, and Adrian sucked in air through closed teeth to try to control his gag reflex.

  Inside the icebox, in a puddle of water, lay a tongue as long as his arm.

  Adrian stared at it and felt like crying. This was no dream. Something terrible was happening, and it was happening to him. It felt like it was happening inside him.

  The tongue twitched—

  Adrian swung the door closed, and it stuck shut with a wet squelch.

  “Mierda.” Mike stumbled out of the back room, Twitch behind him. The bassist held his hand over his face like he was trying not to throw up.

  “The room is a latrine,” the fairy explained matter-of-factly. “Or at least, the bottom half of one.” A cloud of cloacal stink followed behind them.

  Footfalls passed over Adrian’s head and he froze. They sounded like they were heading for the top of the stairs.

  Eddie appeared in the doorway of the third room. “There’s a way out,” he hissed. “Hurry!”

  Adrian shuffled across the floor, really wishing he had shoes on his feet. He was the last into the room, and entering it, he stepped down into deeper water, swirling with warm and cold currents. As he passed through the entrance he saw the door at the top of the stairs crack open. He didn’t wait to see who was coming, and shut the door behind him.

  He expected this room to be lit by a naked 40-watt bulb, pulled on and off by a chain. Instead, in the warm water in which he stood swam five-foot-long eels whose entire bodies but for their bulbous heads glowed yellow-green in the darkness, casting a sickly phosphorescent glow upwards. Lit from beneath, everyone’s faces looked cracked and cadaverous, with hollow pits for eyes above green slab cheeks. Adrian expected twisted steel shelving, stacked deep with jars, cans and boxes of food, all well past their expiration dates and yet months away from being eaten. Instead, there were piles of bodies.

  Human bodies.

  And he knew some of them.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “Shh.” Eddie pointed up at a hole in the corner of the ceiling. “Old furnace vent,” he whispered. “It’s got to lead up to the other rooms.”

  Only it didn’t look like an old furnace vent. It looked like an open toothless mouth, just big enough to swallow a human being whole.

  Twitch must have read the uncertainty in Adrian’s face. “I’ll go,” the fairy volunteered. She turned to face the vent in the corner, leaped forward—

  and plowed headfirst onto the pile of corpses.

  “Mab’s shiny belly!” she spat.

  “Twitch can’t change shape.” There was a note of panic in Mike’s voice.

  “Yeah,” Eddie said, “and you’ve lost your superpower of deep insight. This time, you first.”

  He half threw the bassist across the room and Mike started scrambling up the mound of bodies. His bare feet slipped on bellies and crushed heads, turning their necks away at impossible angles.

  “Fundillo,” he grunted.

  Adrian stared down at the eels, tears stinging his eyes. At the top of the pile lay the body of his father.

  “Oh, man.” Mike lingered at the top of the stack on all fours, staring up into the dark hole.

  “Pretend it leads to a womb,” Twitch quipped. “If that’s your preference.”

  The staircase outside creaked.

  “Go!” Eddie hissed. The guitar player scissor-punched Mike in the butt, pushing him forward into the darkness. Then he shoved Mouser up the pile.

  Adrian watched them step on the bodies. He was fascinated, horrified and sick. He recognized faces from his childhood. There were neighbors, kids who had gone missing, a survey taker who had really made his uncle angry one day. He did
n’t know why their bodies were piled here. Had his uncle actually killed them?

  Or was this some twisted invention of his own dreaming mind? Did Adrian wish that he, Adrian, had killed all these people?

  But then why was his father on top of the pile?

  Twitch stepped onto his father’s chest and sprang up lightly into the vent. Adrian couldn’t be sure, but he thought the opening of the vent constricted a little bit around the fairy as she went into it, like a mouth closing over a morsel.

  Creak.

  “You next,” Adrian said to Eddie. He wasn’t sure he could do it.

  “Nope,” Eddie contradicted. “I got the karate, remember?” He shoved Adrian up the stack.

  Adrian closed his eyes just before his bare foot came down on the shoulder of a woman he recognized. Eyes shut, hands and feet scrabbling up a ladder of flesh and bone, he tried to remember where he had seen her.

  In the living room. Once. Early after moving in with his uncle, he realized, and he had an image of the woman and his uncle drinking tea and laughing and then Adrian had gone to bed. He’d never seen her again. Had his uncle murdered her?

  His uncle was a villain, a monster for what he’d done to Adrian, but could he possibly be that bad? Or was this just Adrian’s suspicion, manifesting inside himself?

  Adrian hit a concrete wall with his head and shoulder simultaneously. The stinging force of the blow forced him to open his watering eyes, and he found himself perched on top of his father’s corpse, staring into pitted green caverns where there should have been eyes.

  His father had been the better sorcerer. He’d known it as a point of pride when he was a small child, and when his father had died in an unspecified catastrophe involving a demonic summoning gone wrong, he’d guessed his uncle had been behind the mishap. Adrian tried to hold himself steady. His father’s appearance here was only another manifestation of Adrian’s own suspicions, and not proof of anything.

  A gurgling from the floor jerked his attention away from his dead father’s face. The water was rising.