by Tia Reed
The Grotesques
Published by Tyche Books Ltd.
www.TycheBooks.com
Copyright © 2015 Stephanie Schembri
First Tyche Books Ltd Edition 2015
Print ISBN: 978-1-928025-39-9
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-928025-40-5
Cover Art H. Leighton Dickson
Cover Layout by Lucia Starkey
Interior Layout by Ryah Deines
Editorial by M. L. D. Curelas
Author photograph: Dale Smith
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage & retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright holder, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third party websites or their content.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this story are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead would be really cool, but is purely coincidental.
This book was funded in part by a grant from the Alberta Media Fund.
To my parents
Prologue
Rouen 599 A.D.
THE TEMPEST BLEW across the Seine with a ferocity unheard of in the living memory of Rouen. Struggling against the pounding waves, Hubin moored his boat. Like as not the patched vessel would splinter by morning, his entire livelihood gone.
With a frustrated cry, he trudged through the deluge, a firm grip on his meagre catch. He had no hope of forgetting on which night he stalked, not with his thumping heart and crawling skin. The demons skittered at the edges of his vision, shadowy, slippery, and deformed. They dogged his step. They tore at his rags and raked his skin. There was nothing to do but pull his shins from their claws. Shivering, he quickened his step into the screeching wind. By the gods, he would make it home alive.
His chest was tight when at last he reached the looming planks of his tiny hut. He pushed open the door and stumbled into the relative warmth. There he froze, dripping water while gusts whipped leaves past his bloodied legs. Regaining his senses, he braced his back against the door and shoved it closed.
“B-by the g-gods, not t-tonight, woman,” he said, shivering uncontrollably.
“By gods or devils it will be tonight,” the midwife replied, placing a cloth over his wife’s forehead.
Félicité squatted near the bed, swollen belly protruding rudely over bent knees. Her fretful eyes turned to him as she groaned and gripped the midwife’s hand.
“Not yet,” the midwife admonished. “Don’t you push yet,” she said above the howl of wind and whip of rain.
Hubin dropped his fish. His discomfort forgotten, he approached his wife. She was a vision, even with her lank hair plastered to her face. Nudging the leathery midwife aside, he clasped her thin shoulders.
“Hold off, woman,” he growled, more gruffly than he had intended. The gods had to applaud her effort. Her cheeks glistened with sweat despite the scant fire, her clenched teeth peeking through a grimace.
“I’m trying,” she grunted. The cloth dropped to the floor as a contraction wracked her fragile body.
The midwife pushed Hubin away. “You’ve no business being here,” she said, her worried face creased into deep wrinkles.
“If this babe comes tonight, you’ll need me here,” Hubin replied.
“Then you’d best dry yerself off. A sick protector ain’t no use at all. And keep yer eyes to yerself.” With an exaggerated huff, she picked up the cloth.
His wife moaned.
“Any other night, I’d shove a man into the eye of a storm. Any other night.”
“Quiet,” Hubin said as he slipped a dry shirt over his head. “You’re distressing her.”
“Ah, it’s no use. Push, luv.”
“No! It’s early yet.”
“You leave this be. It ain’t no man’s domain.”
Hubin formed a fist. “You see she keeps the babe till the morrow.”
The midwife shook her head as she mopped his wife’s brow. “Keep that anger for the devils outside these walls. This ain’t neither her choice nor mine. The babe wants to enter the world tonight and enter it will.”
The woman did well to scuttle from his stride. “I’ll not have it,” he said, but he calmed as he saw Félicité’s pained eyes and knelt so he could cradle her clammy face in his hands. “Don’t you birth this babe. We’re almost at the witching hour.”
Félicité gritted her teeth. “The angel,” she managed.
“Aye, he promised a son,” Hubin said, though his reassurance grated out of his throat. His enraptured wife had not glimpsed the bloodied fang lurking behind that heaven-sent pledge.
“This is killing her,” the midwife said. “You tell her to have that child.”
“Not tonight.”
His wife gasped through the pain of another contraction. Hubin swung his arm in a futile gesture. It spun him away from the bed. “Do something.”
The midwife turned up her palms. “There ain’t nothing I can do. This is nature.”
“This is devilry.” Hubin slammed a fist against the wall. The sting in his knuckles was nothing compared to the terror gnawing at his innards. Defeated, he rubbed his hands over the hearth, attempting to still his nerves more than ease the itch of the chilblains. Outside, unsecured property banged against wall and stone. His boat was most likely among the missiles. By the cruel gods, he was sure this night would end his life.
His misery dragged into the wee hours. Exhaustion swayed him on his feet, and he let his eyelids droop. In a blurred slit of vision, he saw blue flames twist into a fearsome, writhing dragon. Its throat belched tongues of fire and its wings beat howling gusts.
Hubin jumped. Were it not the night it was, he would have dismissed his foolish dreaming. Instead, he prayed—no, begged—the gods for mercy enough to delay the birth. His boat was theirs, his catch an offering, if they would just dam the child within the womb. More ardent a petitioner they could not have heard. He barely registered the midwife’s banter until she uttered the dreaded words.
“I see the head. Push now.”
“No! Stop.” Hubin scrambled for the offending body part. “Push it back in.” He jostled the midwife aside and hauled his wife onto a chair. Clamping hands on the slimy skull, he pushed.
Félicité screamed. The midwife elbowed Hubin in the neck, scratched his arms until he backed off.
“Ahh, no,” he cried, tearing clumps of hair from his head. He could curse the gods for abandoning him.
“Push. That’s it. We have it now. A boy. You have a boy.”
The babe wailed. For all the King’s gold Hubin could not have brought himself to gaze upon it. “What does it look like?”
“Like a healthy boy, ten fingers, ten toes, human right down to his button nose.”
Félicité arched her back and slipped to the floor. She gasped, then screamed again.
“Here,” the midwife said, urgent as the wind rattling through the cracks. Its caress was all ice. An omen that. “Take the child.” She thrust the babe at him.
He almost dropped it.
“You watch yerself.” Once again, the midwife reached beneath his wife’s rumpled gown.
The babe gurgled. It looked a marvel, this life he had helped create, with its screwed up face and tiny fists. But what devil might lurk inside the soul?
“Push,” the midwife cried, as more contractions gripped his wife’s frail body.
He tore his gaze from his son, watched as time swept by, until the templ
e bell tolled the coming of dawn.
“You have another,” the midwife cried. “Another son.”
Hubin took the wailing child. He was smaller, thickset, and darker of hair. It should have been the other way around, he thought as he brought the boys to Félicité, one cradled on each arm. She did not rise, but turned her head, a small, sweet smile upon her lips.
“They are perfect,” she whispered.
Truly did the children appear unblemished but her gaze was not on them. Hubin, seized by foreboding, fell to his knees.
“What’s wrong?” he asked the midwife, his breath catching as blood pooled between his beloved’s legs.
The midwife shook her head. “She held on too long. It was not an easy birth.”
“What do you mean?”
Félicité’s eyes glazed over. The midwife crossed herself and stared at his wife’s still form.
“Ah, nooo,” Hubin groaned though clenched teeth.
Outside the wind howled in pitiless mockery. The walls of the hut creaked. A heavy weight thumped onto the roof. The midwife glanced up and repeated the sign of the new religion. It was no deterrent at all to the claws scratching across the roof. Hubin raised his firstborn. Blood he might be, but this father would surrender the devil-born without a second thought. The moment a demon punched through the flimsy wood, the child would forfeit his life.
“A useless fool of a protector you are,” the midwife muttered, but when the noises faded, she sighed.
“Here, woman,” Hubin said, trying to offload the suspect child.
She shook her head and backed away. “One son she delivered to you safe with the morn. The other, he looks right enough. Close enough to the new day as to be all right, I say. She did her duty as a mother.”
Did more than that, he’d say. He strangled a sob as he looked upon a body gaunt and pale. They were brutal, callous gods to ignore his offerings and claim her this way. Hot tears ran down his cheeks and dropped, one on each child. His second born renewed his raucous plea for milk. It could only be devilry that his firstborn merely sucked on air. Such evil had no business focusing blue eyes on the mother he would never know. Eyes in which, in the instant before Hubin blinked away a tear, a blue dragon swirled. Chilled to the bone, he shook. It was a small mercy the beast dissolved in the space of his heart’s skipped beat.
The gods help Rouen.
One of her sons had been born on Samhain.
Demons could wreak havoc with such a life.
Chapter One
Adelaide. Present Day.
22nd October. Night.
THE EERIE CRY, half human, half something . . . alien, tore through her self-pity for the second time that night. Ella shivered and closed the lapels of her raincoat against the whipping wind. Her source was late. So late as to make her wonder if he was the one behind the unnatural sound, trying to convince her there really was a story here. Well, he needn’t have worried about that. She was working for the Informer, for God’s sake. With headlines like “Bunyip Devours Infant” and “Opera House Alien Spaceship”, the tabloid would accept any rubbish he cared to dish up. Disgusted, she dug into her bag for a piece of the chocolate she never went anywhere without. Stuff the extra kilos piling onto her hips. She would get rid of them later when, or rather if, her life ever got back in order.
Again the cry pierced her thoughts, a spine-tingling screech, nearer this time. Ella felt the cold prickle of fear on the nape of her neck. She forgot the chocolate and fumbled for the record button on her digital recorder.
A dark shape whizzed past her head. Instinctively, she ducked and turned, her stomach somersaulting into her mouth. The moonless night obscured the alleyway she had traversed to reach the short canal. Shadowy buildings rose on either side, giving cover to anyone—or anything—that chose to lurk. Deep in the gloom, metal crashed. Ella jumped. A hiss and yowl punctuated the dying clangs. A cat sped past her, fleeing into the square. She let out her breath. Stupid woman.
Then it came a fourth time. A screech, birdlike, tormented, followed by the sound of nails clicking the pavement. That was no cat. She felt a flutter of panic and opted out. There was only so much she would endure for a story, especially one for the Informer.
She hurried away from the alley, along the short Port Canal. Her heels clacked on the cement path. She wished she had found time to change into trainers. To her left a row of fenced-off gardens walled the square; in front and to her right the church loomed. As she drew level with the bell tower, she paused to listen, but heard nothing over the gathering wind.
A piece of chocolate helped speed the return of her sanity, if not her nerves. Her source was obviously not going to show. The path along the church and into Formby Crescent would take her back to the security of her car. If only two forms were not winging from that direction, their turbulent course angled toward her.
That settled it. Ella jogged the other way, across the width of the canal and around the bell tower. She was grateful to discover a soft light burning through a horizontal slit of glass at ground level. The higher windows gaped like decaying teeth in the face of the stone church. Cursing her stupidity in coming alone, she glanced at the dark copse to her right, certain her rising nausea had more to do with the uncanny sensation she was being watched than the block of chocolate she had consumed.
As she dashed past the back of the church, someone wrenched her bag from her shoulder. She wriggled, trying to worm free of the strap, entirely willing to forfeit her one and only Oroton tote and maxed-out credit card to save a mugging. A hand gripped her wrist as the strap snapped. She screamed and kicked. Her toe connected with shin. She heard a muffled grunt, but her assailant held fast.
“Ella. Ella!”
She finally registered her name, recognised the deep voice as the one on the phone. She stopped fighting.
“I told you not to approach the church.”
“Let go of me.” Her voiced wavered.
“Come on. It’s not safe here.” He released her and strode north.
“You’re late,” she accused. He didn’t answer, whether through stubbornness or an inability to hear her over the strengthening gusts she couldn’t tell. She rubbed her wrist, contemplating her options. Pride be damned. She had waited a chilly hour and been scared half to death. The least he owed her was an explanation. Besides, whatever was flying around probably still skulked nearby. She trotted after him, around the back of the church, then down its side and into the alley, a short passageway that left her wondering how she had ever imagined it contained any depths at all. They emerged on an unlit street and headed for an old green station wagon a few feet from her own Toyota. He opened the door for her. She hesitated only a moment then climbed in, curiosity overpowering her vivid imagination, which was currently flashing alternate images of murdered hitchhikers and her belligerent editor demanding information for copy.
“You’re late,” she repeated, forcing irritation to replace her fear. She played with the broken strap on her bag, more annoyed than she would have guessed that a present from someone she had broken up with badly was ruined. “And you owe me a handbag.” Not that it would be a handbag from her ex, Rob.
He didn’t answer, and she didn’t bother to say anything more. Instead, she concentrated on keeping track of their route, straight down Port Road. She was less than impressed when he pulled the station wagon into West Terrace McDonald’s. He ordered two coffees and nodded toward a table in the corner. Three teenagers, scruffily dressed and loud, were devouring burgers and fries near the front window, soaking up a night’s alcoholic binge by the sound of it.
“Great place,” Ella said, sliding into a chair.
She took a sip of the coffee and studied him over the rim of her paper cup while the warmth defrosted her veins. He was ruggedly attractive, mid-thirties, with thick, blonde hair that topped the body she dreamed of. He obviously worked out, which made her acutely conscious of her extra roll of flab. At least she had managed a hairdresser’s visit last wee
k. The consensus at the office was that the brown, layered look suited her.
“Sorry, but it’s bright so there’s no chance of being observed without our knowing.”
Ella had developed an unhealthy dose of cynicism since working for the Informer. She wanted to tell him to cut the cloak-and-dagger routine but his harried frown jangled her journalistic instincts. She sighed, retrieved the digital recorder from her bag, realised the record button was still depressed, and took another sip of scalding coffee while waiting for him to speak.
He glanced round quickly. “How much do you know about the disappearances?”
She eyed him curiously. He didn’t seem the type to claim alien abduction or flesh-eating-monster. “I think the question is: how much do you?”
“Every disappearance occurred around the Church of the Resurrection.”
Ella leant back. That was not new information, if slightly exaggerated. From what she recalled, of the five girls who had gone missing in the past few weeks, three were last reported in the vicinity of the church. Another had been pulled from the river, her severed torso sporting jagged tooth marks that had prompted the Informer to splash “Mutant Killer Shark Prowls Estuary” across its front page. Disgusted, she had read no further and reached for a Nationwide Daily to fill in the blanks. It had, ironically, proposed an almost identical theory, the only difference the lack of unsupported reference to radioactive industrial sludge mutating great whites.
“Got an alternative theory to man-eating monsters, huh?”
He didn’t react to her jibe. “I think the church is linked.”
Here we go, she thought, satanic cults, fallen angels. “What do you mean by ‘the church’?” Whether building or faith, this conversation was heading for disaster.
“I don’t know.”
“So you have no proof?” This was, she thought regrettably, going to turn out to be another wasted evening. She might work for the most ill-reputed tabloid in the country, but she was not quite ready to sink to the depths of the other journalists on staff.