Dark Rain

by Tony Richards

  He was brave, admittedly. He carried no weapon, and did not believe in them. All he had were the clothes on his back, a small bundle of supplies, his bible tucked in among them. And his crucifix, his prayers, his faith. However frightened he might be, he just pressed on in a determined fashion. He was going to find some ‘savages’ – that was the word he used – and convert them, to save their souls.

  He began to sing, as Saruak listened. It was all in rhyme, all ‘see’ and ‘be’ and ‘thee’ and ‘me.’ What simpletons these newcomers were. They knew practically nothing about the way the cosmos really worked.

  He didn’t even know where he was going. There was an encampment twenty minutes north of here. From the treetops, you could even see the smoke. But the missionary was heading due west. Why hadn’t he even hired a guide?

  But then Saruak read his mind again, and caught hold of another thought. ‘The Good Lord shall steer me true.’

  It was all too much. And this time, he did laugh.

  The noise rang out among the tree trunks. The Welshman stopped dead in his tracks. Saruak already knew that his laugh did not sound like a normal one, to human ears. It sounded far more like the noise an animal might make, in pain. It chilled them. As he watched, the missionary’s fingers stiffened on the cross. His gaze went darting round. Saruak guessed, at first, the man might change his mind about this whole excursion, turn around, head back the way he’d come.

  But, despite the fact that he was shaking, John Son of John merely stopped a short while, then pressed on.

  His song got louder – ‘be,’ ‘he,’ ‘we,’ ‘sea.’

  He was moving further away, now. Saruak followed him quietly through the higher branches.

  It wasn’t just an idle fascination guiding him by this time. An idea had begun occurring to him.

  Ever since humans had first started living in these forests, he’d considered them fair game. The finest sport he’d ever had, in fact. They were intelligent enough that he could twist it round and fool them. Stubborn enough that they’d not run away. Courageous enough that they would try to fight him even when their cause was lost. And stupid enough that they could never grasp the truth … he’d always win.

  But after several hundred years of this, the Iroquois had become used to his trickery. They had no defense against him, of course. There was none. But when he greeted them with an illusion these days, they saw through it more often than not. When he planted crazy ideas in their minds, they tried to force them out again, ignore them. ‘Dancer in Dreams,’ they would mutter. ‘Take no notice of the evil one.’

  They’d grown wise to him, in other words.

  These interlopers? They had no such wisdom. In truth, with their one-god and their church, they were considerably dumber than the tribesfolk. With them around, he could start to play his deadly games all over again. But a far grander plan was taking shape in Saruak’s ancient mind.

  Stupid though these pale folk might be, there were more of them arriving all the time. They were driven, industrious, and had one quality the Iroquois did not, ambition. He could almost see the way the future, from this point, was going to unfold.

  They would not stop here. They would not be happy with a mere few coastal settlements. They’d press inland and spread out like termites. Go to places on this continent he’d never seen.

  And that was his only limitation. The one thing Saruak had ever been bound by. He resented it. Manitou he was, born out of these woodlands when they had been saplings. And he could not leave them, ever. He was physically tied to this place.

  To see deserts just for once, or mountains. He could smell them sometimes, very far away. To watch the sun set on a different lake, or walk the banks of those enormous rivers that he knew were out there. These newcomers, down the next few hundred years, would do all that. But he?

  They had an advantage, then. It struck him as unfair. It angered him. Unless …

  He toyed gently with the notion.

  Unless he went with them.

  Stop singing a moment, John Son of John.

  The lyrics froze in the Welshman’s throat.

  I’ve become a missionary too, you see. I want to convert you to my own religion. Like yours, there is just one god. That deity is me.

  By this time, he had gotten ahead of the human’s line of progress and was shimmying down a tall pine trunk to intercept him. He had kept himself invisible so far. But not for too much longer.

  John Son of John had stopped moving again, and was clutching the crucifix to his chest, gazing slightly up. Maybe he had heard something, a rustling from the pine needles? Or perhaps he simply sensed that there was trouble on the way? Whatever, his face had gone extremely pale, the lips pressed together and the pallid eyes wide.

  Saruak reached the ground some thirty yards ahead of him, and then began moving toward him swiftly.

  “Who’s there?” the man suddenly called out.

  He seemed to believe he’d found some natives. Because the next moment, he reached into his bundle, pulled the bible out from there. Lofted it above his head, then started to cry out.

  “I bring thee salvation! Yea, I bring thee the good word!”

  “And which good word is that?” Saruak shouted. “Be? Thee? We?”

  He was just ten yards away, by now. The man could still not see him. But the sound of the voice brought his head swinging round. He went entirely rigid, almost lifting himself out of his hard shoes. His features were completely white. His eyes gleamed like a madman’s.

  Saruak’s pace did not slow, not even a little bit.

  “I’ll give you a good word!” he hollered at his victim. “Me!”

  And in that moment, he revealed himself.

  This was not like the other times when he’d possessed a human. Those had been temporary events. Whereas this was going to be permanent, a taking over rather than a borrowing.

  The man’s screams echoed through the forest for a good while after that.

  When they finally quieted down again, he was still standing there. But not the real John Jones any longer. His eyes were far more colorless than they’d originally been, and one pupil was larger. His teeth had changed as well, becoming far more like a predator’s. But all his consciousness was gone. There was only his body left, a shell for Saruak to occupy. They were fused, the man’s flesh and his own dark spirit.

  He tried turning back to his original shape, and managed it easily. All he had to do was rearrange the substance of the body that he was in and the clothing round it. But a human appearance suited his needs far better, from this point on. And so he stuck to that.

  He was still holding the bible. Saruak turned it over, gazed at it, then tossed it into the undergrowth. The crucifix went the same way, as did the bundle. Such supplies were no longer required. The suffering of all those he tormented would sustain him well enough.

  West, he had been going. Yes, that seemed a good direction to head. Laughing quietly to himself, Saruak continued on his way.

  The scene hung in his head a moment longer. Then his left eye gave a flicker, and his surroundings returned.

  Poor John. He had perished with the knowledge that his one-god could not save him. His soul had blinked out of existence like a tiny flame. Only his frame was left, only his bones and skin. They had aged very slowly down the centuries, but were still good enough. Occupying this body had set him free, taking him out of the forests at last, moving toward limitless horizons.

  He had traveled with wagon trains, then ridden on steam ones. Sailed on rafts, and then on riverboats. Gone from coast to coast of this vast continent and brought down suffering on humans, everywhere he visited. Fires and floods. Murders and mass-suicides. He had been in San Francisco in 1906. He hadn’t caused the largest quake, but he had been there for the aftershocks. In New Orleans a few years back – the same. And in southern California, several recent summers.

  He had been there, in fact, when a vagrant breeze with the scent of woodlands on it, blowin
g in from the north east, had begun drawing him back finally to New England.

  And now, he was sitting on the high roof of a church on Greenwood Terrace, with his back against the steeple. Dralleg nestled in his lap. There were no tall buildings to overlook him, and the humans passing by below couldn’t see him all the way up here. This was the way he preferred to be – very much present, but completely unobserved.

  His inner vision scoured the entire town. Ross Devries was making himself busy. He’d expected that. The boys in the police department were trying to stretch their limited intellects, and failing dismally.

  As for the rest, the only being that he couldn’t really fathom was this creature with no name, simply called the Little Girl. Every time he looked in her direction, all that he could make out was a brilliant pale blue sphere of light. What genuinely lay within it, there seemed to be no way of telling.

  She’d been passive up until this point, but he would have to keep an eye on her.

  Otherwise, there were powerful magicians here, oh surely. Sorcerers nearly as strong, in their own way, as the shamans of the olden days. But they’d never met his kind before. Had no clue how to deal with him.

  And his strength was already growing. Being fed by all the panicked speculation he’d set flowing through these people’s minds. He couldn’t meet these ‘adepts’ – as they called themselves – head-on as yet.

  But soon he would be able to. He smiled. Very soon. Come evening, he would make his next move, strengthening his grip.

  He reached into his ragged coat, pulled out a silver pocket watch. He’d got it off a merchant he had waylaid by the roadside in the Eighteen Hundreds. It was such a pretty thing. And he watched the second hand revolve, his smile widening into a massive grin.

  For this whole curious township, time was running out.

  THIRTEEN

  There are times when the work that I do these days mirrors, far too closely, what I used to. And the worst thing, always, about working as a cop?

  The waiting.

  We didn’t go back to the office. No, we headed over to my house instead. I got coffee brewing. Cassie made some sandwiches from the odd items I had lying around my fridge. Then we sat out on the front porch, waiting for whatever came down on us next.

  I’d gotten used to it down the years, learning to be patient when I needed to. But Cass had never got the hang of that particular trick. She was an incorrigible pacer, twitcher, fiddler. She kept getting up for no particular reason, looking round, then sitting down again. Sometimes, she would walk the whole way over to the sidewalk and peer down the street, like she was expecting to see something headed in our direction. It was as if she’d rather something bad happened than nothing at all.

  It was fairly exhausting watching her. In spite of which, I sympathized again. I understood her tension and the slow burn in her eyes. We’d both much rather have been direct and aggressive, gone straight after this intruder. But we couldn’t do that when we didn’t even know where he was hiding.

  All that we could do was wait for him to move again. And hopefully, he’d do it before he had got much stronger.

  I’d brought a scanner out and turned the dial until I found the police channel. Nothing much at all seemed to be going on. A placid murmuring, edged with a soft fuzz of static, drifted out across the still afternoon air. Any hint of wind was gone. Birds made short hops from the nearby branches to my roof. You could hear a few kids yelling happily, somewhere in the distance.

  “You’re certain,” asked Cassie, “he’ll attack again?”

  My face tensed up a little. “I’m not sure of anything,”

  “Then …?”

  I thought of that first encounter. The dry confidence in Saruak’s tone. The way those eyes of his had studied and then challenged me.

  “He didn’t strike me as the type to bide his time, that’s all. If he comes at us again, he’ll do it pretty quickly.”

  Then I swung my gaze away from her, across the rooftops of the town. It pained me to see how normal looking it all was. On the surface, another extremely pleasant day. Sunlight dappled the houses and the sidewalk, fading a little every so often. I looked further up. The sky was littered with small, fluffy clouds. But they were barely moving either, drifting only very slowly, like abandoned little boats in some calm harbor.

  A bee went humming past. So placid, the entire place. Just like any other quiet New England town. I’d never been to any others, so I had to take a guess at that. But everything seemed so serene.

  Except … that might not be the case a few hours later on. I shook my head, scarcely able to believe that anything as bad as last evening might bear down on us once again.

  Obviously bored out of her skull, Cass had got back on her cell phone and was talking to Pam again. Who – of course – wanted to know what was going on. And to give Cassie her due, she was non-committal about that. The same happened when she phoned up Bella, one of her close-knit little coterie of girlfriends.

  What, you thought she only had me? She’d have probably gone crazy a long time ago without her small clan of bosom buddies.

  You could hear the faintest hum of traffic from downtown. Very tiny in the sky, a jet plane was going overhead. They pass by every so often, always quite high up. I could hear its engines, like a soft murmur of thunder from a continent away.

  I wondered if they could see us when they looked down. Watching those occasional planes, knowing that I’d probably never ride on one, always made me feel slightly lonely, lost and cut adrift.

  There were more pressing things to worry about now, however.

  Saruak had to be looking down at us, as well. Of that there was no doubt. And with precisely what intention?

  The sun dropped lower. All the shadows round us stretched, and the gentlest of breezes finally began to blow. The scanner kept murmuring in the background, but it had nothing significant to say. There was no trouble.

  The calm before the storm. It put me in mind of another afternoon, not unlike this one. I’d been driving watchfully down Crowland Street, still a cop back then.

  I dropped back a little in my chair, letting my head settle. Then my eyes drifted shut.

  And it was all there, flooding through my memory again.

  It was four months after Goad had arrived. And it seemed as though his presence here had triggered something. We in the P.D. had never been so busy for the past few weeks. People, casting spells, had simply vanished, or turned into things that they’d not wanted to. One middle-aged couple had set half their street alight, and we still weren’t sure if it was just an accident. The Circe girl, who had been locked up months ago, had managed to conjure herself out, and it had taken us nearly a week to find her. And a certain Mrs. Carey, up on Johnston Avenue, had decided that a basilisk would be the ideal pet for her backyard.

  “It’s just a small one,” she kept telling us.

  The Landing had become a pretty frantic place for those in law enforcement. And nobody had ridden double-handed to a car for days. There were too few officers for that, and too much going on.

  Except the hubbub had all died away, this particular afternoon. Things had, without warning, settled down. It was as if all the previous mayhem had never taken place. I was quietly cruising around, taking a grateful breather.

  I was about to turn right onto Vine, when my radio gave a crackle.

  “Ross?”

  The dispatcher was Elvie, who I liked to kid around with. I picked up my handset.

  “Talk to me.”

  “We’ve got reports of a possible disturbance.”

  Possible?

  “Can you try to be more specific? What’s that mean?”

  “Nothing seems to have happened yet. But some sort of weirdness might be going down.”

  I said, “Surprise me”. And was smiling gently, till she gave me the address.

  I hit my brakes, dead in the middle of the pavement, and a pick-up truck behind me hooted and went past.

  �
�That’s your street, isn’t it?” Elvie was asking me nervously across the ether, her voice blurry-sounding and unreal.

  My head was spinning by this time. Because it wasn’t only my own street. It was the house next door to mine.

  And my very next thought was, Goad!

  I didn’t even put my siren on, but was screeching up in front of my house several minutes later. Slamming my wheels across the curb, then stumbling out. My hand was on my holster, but I didn’t draw my weapon straight away. I had two small kids to think of, didn’t I?

  “Alicia?”

  No answer came. I stared around. The entire block was silent, with no signs of anything amiss. But then I peered a little closer at the front door of my house. It was slightly ajar, and my wife never left it open.

  “Tammy? Pete?”

  Someone came out clumsily onto his own porch, at that point. Joe Norton, two houses down.

  “What’s happening?” I yelled at him.

  His face was like a porcelain mask, and it occurred to me that maybe I was frightening him.

  “It might be nothing, Ross, but we thought you ought to know. Some half hour back, Alicia and the kids went into Mrs. McGaffrey’s place. There was something weird about them. And they haven’t come out yet.”

  I could only stare at him with pure frustration, wondering what was going through his head.

  “Why take so long reporting it?”

  “It didn’t seem … to be actual trouble as such. Just peculiar, that’s all.”

  When I looked over at my neighbor’s front door, it was open too. So I forgot all about Joe and his lack of action, at that point

  Hurried toward it at a crouch, drawing my firearm carefully. I kept half of my attention on the windows. Was I being watched? But there was no sign of any movement beyond them. Jason Goad’s room, I reminded myself, was out back in the loft.