Dark Rain

by Tony Richards

  I jabbed at the door with my free hand. And it swung wide open soundlessly. Shadows and the scattered shapes of furniture were all that I could see inside. I went through into the living room, my heart pounding with every step. My surroundings were clean and tidy but threadbare, the hallmark of genteel poverty.

  Of my family? Of Goad, though? Not a sign.

  “Mrs. McGaffrey?”

  I noticed her suddenly, in the corner. She had been like another shadow, until then. Was sitting in a rocking chair, but didn’t move or look toward me, even when I spoke.

  Her eyes were open, but they seemed to be unfocussed. And I thought at first she might be dead. But when I ventured over, put two fingers to her throat, I could feel an even, steady pulse.

  She didn’t respond in the slightest to my touch. Had she been put into some kind of a trance?

  A low creaking took my attention to the ceiling. Leaving the old woman there, I started heading up.

  The only light on in the entire place was up there at the very top. I took the next couple of flights three risers at a time, my chest pounding like an engine, my lungs tight against my ribs.

  Something was completely out of whack. All the years that we’d been neighbors, Mrs. McGaffrey had used energy-saving bulbs. She scarcely had the cash to pay her regular bills. And so the windows of her house had always had this chilly, warmthless, glow.

  Except … this new light that I could see was pale but intensely bright.

  I reached the top, a far more narrow landing. Looked at the scene beyond Goad’s open doorway.

  And my entire body froze …

  “Ross!” Cassie was yelling at me.

  My eyes snapped back open. Jeez, how long had I been dozing? How much time had passed?

  I took in my surroundings rather numbly. The sun had dropped the whole way to the rooftops, scattering them with its reddish glow. A few people were returning from work, and there were more cars on the drives than there’d been earlier.

  Cass was on her feet again and stooping over my scanner.

  “Ross, there’s something going down!”

  Dreams and reality merged for an instant. Then I pulled myself together and sat stiffly up.

  We listened to the babbling coming from the set.

  “Pulling onto Greenwood Terrace.”

  It was Davy Quinn’s voice I was hearing. Greenwood Terrace was a mere half dozen blocks from Cray’s Lane, at the northern edge of Garnerstown. Not there again?

  “There’s people running everywhere!” Davy was shouting. “Some of them are injured. They seem to be coming from the church. Get back-up here, for chrissake!”

  We could hear hurried, crunching footsteps next. St. Nevitt’s was on Greenwood Terrace, I knew. And it had a gravel drive. But … a church? This was a Wednesday

  “There’s dead on the steps here!” Davy yelled. “A lot of blood. Some people really badly injured! I … there’s something moving! Oh my God, what is that?”

  There was a clatter and a hiss, then the transmission went completely dead.

  We both started running, me for my car and Cass for her Harley.

  FOURTEEN

  The light was starting to fail properly, the sky phasing through increasingly deeper shades of vermilion and the shadows growing dense. A few streetlights were coming on, but not casting a proper glow as yet. Everything looked indistinct, half-formed. I squinted through my windshield.

  Cassie had already gone a good long way ahead. But me? My knuckles seemed to almost crack as I worked the steering wheel. I could still get plenty of speed out of my old Cadillac, but I had to jam the pedal down the whole way to the floor to do it.

  All the streets were quiet until I reached the area I was headed for.

  Greenwood Terrace was the precise opposite. There was howling pandemonium every place you looked. Frightened, damaged people milling everywhere. Some were clutching handkerchiefs or even hanks of clothing to their wounds. There were screams and siren wails and urgent shouts. Every emergency vehicle in town seemed to be descending on this spot. Squad cars, ambulances, and even fire trucks were pulling up the whole time. Householders along the way were coming out and trying to help.

  There was plenty of strobing red light, just like yesterday evening. It broke the scene around me into jerking, ragged fragments.

  I could see, out beyond the church, Hobart’s dark blue Pontiac approaching. Cassie had her shotgun ready and was advancing steadily toward the building’s gaping doors.

  I clambered out. It looked like a bomb had gone off here.

  All the windows in the building had been shattered, except there was very little glass on the surrounding verges. Had the windows shattered inward … what could have caused that?

  Faces stared up desperately at me. A lot of the injured were just sitting on the ground by this time, some of them waiting for help, others unable to stand. A few had passed out, or maybe worse. But the paramedics and cops were moving quickly. The worst cases were already being attended to.

  I leaned in a couple of times to see what damage had been done. And was once again surprised. From my fight with the Dralleg, I’d been expecting clean straight cuts in almost every case. Parallel rows of them. But that was not what I was looking at. These people had jagged wounds, uneven lacerations. One poor guy had had a lump of flesh the size of an apple torn out of his scalp and was clutching it, still conscious, groaning.

  “What happened?” was the question being asked by the authorities.

  But they didn’t seem to be getting any coherent answers. These folks were either babbling or numb, trapped at opposite ends of shock’s narrow spectrum.

  Whatever had come down on them, I felt pretty certain it was not the Dralleg this time.

  A middle-aged woman was having a large shard of glass pulled out of her wrist. A friend of hers was trying to soothe her. Which provided me, at least, with a partial answer. I started wondering if those smashed windows were the only wreckage here.

  I checked my gun before returning it to my pocket. Then I headed for the porch myself.

  But I didn’t quite make it. Saul Hobart came flashing across my field of vision, moving very fast for such an obviously ungainly man. There were corpses up ahead of us, as Davy’s last report had said. Except that, by this stage, there was one in uniform as well.

  Something heavy formed in my gut. Davy Quinn had joined the victims he was trying to help. And we’d gone out for beers together maybe twenty, thirty times.

  His radio was lying by one open hand, the fingers curled. And there was his gun, still in his grasp. He’d gone sprawling backward on the steps. His face was tipped to one side and his eyes were wide, reflective. His expression was frozen.

  There was something of a pale brass color sticking out through the middle of his chest. And I thought at first it was a knife, until I realized it had no proper handle.

  It was a narrow crucifix. My eyes stung, looking down.

  Saul knelt over the man, feeling for a pulse. And then his mouth came open. I guess he groaned. There was too much noise around us to be sure.

  A pair of paramedics was approaching, but he waved them back. His head stayed down. Perhaps he just didn’t want anyone to see his face.

  I tried to think of something to say, but it wasn’t only my throat that had gone rigid. It was everything, even my mind.

  In the end, I simply reached down and touched the man on the elbow.

  He didn’t respond, at first. But then he suddenly stood up, easing back his shoulders and then straightening his tie. His eyes were damp around the edges, but he didn’t even try to wipe them.

  “Okay,” he muttered quietly. “Let’s find out what did all this.”

  Cass was at the doorway but, unusually for her, had not gone in. She was standing stock still on the very threshold, peering inside. What had stopped her?

  We went up to join her, picking our way through the bodies and the debris. There was plenty of the latter, a great deal of
scattered glass. One of the cadavers nearest the entrance looked like a porcupine, there were so many shards protruding from it.

  This was not the time to focus on details like that. I tried to keep my feelers out and take in my surroundings. One thing, I was sure of right away. This was dissimilar to last night in several aspects. In the first place, there were plenty more survivors. There had been no walking wounded in Cray’s Lane. And second, all these victims seemed to have been felled by objects, rather than a living thing.

  There was a big pewter goblet lying by a woman’s head. Her skull was partly crushed. Had Saruak simply hurled it at her?

  Another victim had a narrow metal curtain rod jammed in between his ribs. It looked to me like every inanimate object in St. Nevitt’s had, somehow, come alive.

  Behind us, an RLKB television crew was rolling up. But … were we still in any danger? I took my gun out again, Saul following my cue.

  When I stepped forward, something crunched under my heel. Staring down, I saw a crystal on a narrow length of cord. It had been dropped in all the panic.

  They were scattered all over the place, when I looked closer, as were all the stones and amulets that people employ when using magic. The good folks of Raine’s Landing might still worship at the altar of a single God. But they bring along these trinkets too, since God is not the only power they believe in.

  We joined Cass, either side of her. All three of us stared in.

  With no moon up yet, the interior was pitch dark. All the lights had obviously been switched off, or else been smashed. But there was just enough illumination filtering in through the high, shattered windows that you could make out shapes after a while.

  There were plenty more corpses in here. I thought one of them might be wearing the robes of a pastor. And not one of them so much as twitched – there was not the tiniest moan. They were covered with an even frosting of glass, for all the world like sugar sprinkled on them. And the smell in this place. Once again, I found myself trying to avoid breathing through my nose.

  But there was more than that, and even worse. The entire pulpit had been ripped away from the far wall. A figure was lying underneath it, obviously crushed. And the body next to that one had apparently been brained with a statue of the Virgin Mary.

  My mouth got very dry, but I felt so numb that I didn’t even try to wet my lips.

  “See anything?” I asked Cassie.

  “Plenty,” she replied.

  “Anything moving?”

  “Huh-uh. There’s no Dralleg here.”

  “What?” Saul blurted. But we just ignored him.

  I was still trying, furiously, to figure all this out. Why on earth attack a church? And why, come to that, had there been so many people in it early evening of mid-week?

  My gaze drifted to a poster nailed to one side of the door.

  THIS EVENING, 6 P.M., it read. PRAYERS FOR OUR GOOD NEIGHBORS IN CRAY’S LANE, WHO THE LORD TOOK TO HIS BOSOM LAST NIGHT.

  It hadn’t been the Lord at all, responsible for that. But I stared round urgently at Hobart.

  “Jesus Christ Almighty, Saul! Is this the only place?”

  “Speak English. What only place?”

  “Where they’re holding a memorial service this evening?”

  He gawked at me like he was wondering where I had been all day.

  “Hell, no. They’re happening all over town.”

  And this was absolutely perfect for our new visitor. We’d gone and played right into his hands. I thought about it. Hundreds of ordinary citizens, all clustered together in a single place. Thoughts elsewhere but on the present, heads bowed blindly as the axe began to fall. How could a creature like Saruak resist the temptation?

  If this wasn’t stopped immediately, Cray’s Lane would look like a mere overture in his grand opus, his symphony of destruction.

  “You’ve got to break them up!” I yelled.

  Saul took a step backward, squinting.

  “Are you serious? Why?”

  Cass was staring at me too, but in a more receptive way. And maybe it was just a hunch, but my spine was prickling by now, and my thoughts racing.

  “This?” I told them, gesturing at the carnage. “It’s going to happen again, that’s why.”

  FIFTEEN

  The amulet was a small, round iron one, with a creature called a griffon engraved on its face. His father had given it to him on his fifteenth birthday.

  Ike Mackenzie grasped it between his forefinger and thumb, savoring its coolness, as the memorial ceremony went on around him. An organ was playing, its doleful chords echoing through the confines of the church. And Ike hated sad occasions. Which was why, perhaps, his thoughts had retreated back into the past. He was remembering when he’d been a teenager – the day that his father had given him the gleaming piece of metal he was holding.

  At first, he’d squinted at it dubiously.

  “Is it for good luck, Pop?”

  And his father had smiled.

  “Oh, partly. But it can do much more than that.”

  “Like what? Make magic? Conjure me up stuff?”

  Which got a sharp cluck from Pop’s tongue.

  “Objects like the one you’re holding have to be used wisely, son.”

  “And how do I know what ‘wise’ is?”

  “Well, that amulet? It has a voice.” His father’s smile became a little tighter. “You don’t believe me? Listen to it very carefully – you’ll learn how in good time.”

  “And what … what’ll it tell me?”

  “How to use it well. And that’s what wisdom is.”

  Pop had been right. Down the twenty-one years that had followed, he had learned how to detect that voice. And the amulet had benefited and enriched him.

  It had helped him find his wife, Ethel, now standing by his side with their three children. It had transformed their home into a dream one, without the expense and inconvenience of workmen. And it had brought good fortune into every aspect of his life.

  Neither the other Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost had managed anything like that, which was why he barely ever came to church. But this was a different matter. He had known some of the people who had perished on Cray’s Lane last night. Two of them, in fact, had been employees of the landscaping company he owned. Mark Breville and Sarah Whiteman. Jesus Christ almighty!

  “Hymn thirty-seven, from your books,” Reverend Swain was announcing, from in front of the altar. “’Nearer my Lord to Thee.’”

  Ethel had a pleasant and harmonious voice when it came to this kind of singing. Surprisingly, so did all his children. None of them seemed to have inherited the dying bullfrog gene he carried around inside him. Ike had actually known people frown and try to edge away from him, when he was in full voice. So he flipped to the correct page, but only mouthed the words. It was a better deal for all concerned.

  His amulet slipped tightly into the palm of his left hand.

  Looking round him, he could see that plenty other of the congregants had brought gewgaws of their own. Medallions winked and crystals glittered. Ike smiled briefly and then had a thought.

  He read extensively these days, non-fiction mostly. And especially about the world beyond this town, the one he’d never known. And yes, there was a parallel between the way the people of Raine’s Landing went to church, and other strange religions. The slave ones in particular, voodoo and Santeria.

  They looked quite like Christianity on the outside. But there were other beliefs – older, darker – hidden deeply in them.

  The hymn trailed to an end. Then the Reverend began reading out the names of last night’s victims. And Ike stiffened, recognizing some.

  “Clarice Kilpatrick. Martin Howell.”

  “Ike Mackenzie,” came a completely different voice.

  What?

  That wasn’t the Reverend. No, someone else had cut across him, his tone dry and crackly, and cold, and faintly mocking. The voice was emerging from nowhere in particular. But it reverberated just as
loudly around the church as the organ music had been doing a few seconds back.

  “Ethel Mackenzie,” it continued.

  His wife.

  “Irving Trevellian.”

  Who was sitting there two rows away. Ike watched the man get to his feet with a gasp.

  What on earth was this? People’s heads, the whole way along the rows of pews, were jerking round alarmedly.

  “Margaret Krause. Samuel Hamner. Peter Fynch.”

  They were all the names of people in this church, for heaven’s sake! And this might have been a joke, a very bad one, if it hadn’t been for what had happened on Cray’s Lane last night.

  The Reverend was flapping his hands, trying to keep everybody calm, but not succeeding very much. A ripple of horror went through the whole congregation.

  There was a sudden, whooshing noise in mid-air, like a vacuum sucking inward.

  And that was when every lightbulb in the place exploded.

  Somebody wailed, obviously cut by flying glass. There was such utter, pitch darkness that it seemed to drain the breath out of Ike’s lungs. Then something even more startling began to happen.

  Up until now, there had only been the electric lighting on. There were plenty of candles scattered round the church. Till this point, they’d not been lit.

  But then a tiny point of yellow brightness, dazzling to look at, appeared near the front doors of the building. Every last head swiveled round to gawp at it. Before the congregation’s gaze, it danced rapidly from wick to wick like some demented firefly.

  Little flames started to grow and waver all around them. Shadows overlapped each other, trembling like phantoms. A few people started shouting worriedly. A little boy let out a squeal.

  “This part of the service, Reverend?” someone up at the front called out, although that seemed to be a case of wishful thinking on his part.

  Reverend Swain didn’t even answer. He could only watch like everybody else, his face so frozen and his eyes so glassy he looked almost hypnotized.