Reaping the Dark

by Gary McMahon

  Table of Contents

  REAPING THE DARK

  Connect With Us

  Other Books by Author

  Prologue

  PART ONE: DRIVER

  Several Hours Earlier

  PART TWO: REAPER

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  REAPING THE DARK

  Gary McMahon

  First Edition

  Reaping the Dark © 2014 by Gary McMahon

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

  www.darkfuse.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  Other Books by Author

  Nightsiders

  DarkFuse #1

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  For Charlie…always for Charlie

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Mark West for his unfailing enthusiasm, to my wife and son for their endless support, and to whoever was the first person to give or lend me a Dennis Wheatley book when I was a little kid.

  “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

  —Galatians VI (King James Bible)

  Nobody cares about the driver until it’s time to get away

  Prologue

  Magic, like nature, will always find a way.

  There are hidden veins and capillaries running under the skin of the world, and the blood of magic moves through them. If one of these conduits is broken or severed, then the power flows elsewhere, charting a new course towards whoever has summoned it.

  Because magic, especially dark magic, will always find a way to those who need it.

  The tall man in the dirty hooded sweatshirt stooped to walk through the doorway and into the darkened room. Behind him, the early morning sunlight faded as he closed the door. His thin arms rose into the air, the large hands opened; and the man slid back the hood, letting it fall away from his face.

  His name was Hoodoo. He probably had another name once—perhaps even more than one—but he no longer remembered what it was, or who had given it to him. He had been called Hoodoo for as long as he could remember, and it was a name that suited him.

  He was here this morning to perform a ritual, a rite; to summon dark magic. He was not a magician or a shaman—he was simply a man who knew that magic would always find a way to those who called it. He had learned this a long time ago, and had put the theory to the test on more than one occasion.

  Today he was being paid well for his services. He had come to this derelict tenement on a paid errand, and wanted to get things done and leave the place as quickly as possible. The building did not have good connotations. People had died here over the years. The remnants of dark forces dwelled in its corners, filling up some of its empty spaces with a blackness so much deeper than night.

  He recalled the words of his client: It needs protection. Nothing should happen to harm it.

  The group he was working for had a long and grubby history. They were steeped in darkness, and so must he be to carry out their request.

  He glanced up at the ceiling, anticipating before actually hearing the sound of small feet scurrying across the floor above. The sound was strange and disjointed; there were clearly more than two limbs moving briskly over the splintered wooden boards above his head. He closed his eyes and recited a silent spell, protecting himself from those with whom he had no business. He could not afford to tarry with restless spirits. There were…other presences that required his attention, other shades he had come to meet.

  He must not be swayed from his task. The Order had told him what was expected, and he knew he must live up to those exacting standards.

  The windows were boarded over; no natural light penetrated the structure. The walls were charred and blackened in places from the smoke of an old fire, but numbers, letters, and even fragments of words had been freshly smeared into the oily layer. Hoodoo paused to examine some of this crude graffiti as he took off his sweatshirt, folded the garment, and set it aside on a clean bit of floor.

  He ignored the bodies—there were three of them, still lying where they’d been placed after the night’s incident. One of the men had fallen in the room, the other two had been dragged inside after the shootings occurred; the police did not yet know that they were here. He supposed he could use one of the bodies as a Husk if he wanted to, but this job called for swift savagery rather than a slow, plodding attack. This one must be done gracefully, so he had another method in mind.

  The old building groaned and creaked around him, its thick stone walls settling upon even thicker stone foundations. He smiled. Then, opening his rucksack, he took out a clear polythene sheet and unfolded it before laying it down on the floor.

  Hoodoo smoothed out the edges of the sheet and then took a few other items out of his bag: some candles made from the semen and rendered fat of a slaughtered albino bull, a Tupperware container filled with salt blessed by a blind mute, a bottle of cheap whiskey, and a slim-bladed knife in an untreated leather sheaf.

  He removed the rest of his clothes and put them all—including the hooded sweatshirt—into the rucksack before setting it aside. Naked, he squatted down on the plastic sheet and opened the Tupperware pot. Using the salt, he marked out a simple pentagram on the sheet, ensuring that it was large enough to surround him and allow him enough room to move around within its center. He placed one of the candles at each point of the pentagram and unsheathed the knife, which he placed inside the forward vector of the five-pointed star.

  The air grew cold; much colder than it was when he arrived.

  Hoodoo smiled.

  He had been noticed.

  Whatever powers were still hidden here, within the shell of this abandoned building, knew that he was on the premises. And they recognized him.

  He took out a lighter and a piece of paper with secret words written upon it. He set fire to the paper and piled up the ashes in a tiny heap inside the protective circle.

  “Hello again,” he whispered. “It’s been a while since last we talked.”

  He peered into the darkness that seemed to have gathered like a mist in the farthest corner, and something chuckled softly; a response to his little quip.

  “Ah, you’re over there? Then shall we begin?” He lit the candles and shut his eyes, mumbling an improvised prayer. He reached for the knife and made a small cut in his forearm, allowing the blood to drip onto the ashes piled on the floor in front of him. He watched until the flow of blood slowed right down, barely a trickle. Then he added a few drops of candle wax to the mixture, which had pooled in a crease in the plastic sheet.

  “Send me one of your Reapers,” he said, addressing the presence in the corner.

  The chuckling ceased.

  The bloody ashes began to bubble. An odor like rotten fish filled the room.

  Something started to beat softly yet decisively against the floor in the corner, and then built to an excited staccato rhythm. The sound, Hoodoo thou
ght, was not unlike the impatient stamping of a horse’s hooves.

  PART ONE: DRIVER

  Several Hours Earlier

  Clarke sits behind the wheel of the stolen Nissan and stares out at the city darkness.

  He is trying to concentrate but his mind keeps wandering. He thinks about a distinct childhood memory: sun-dappled leaves in a well-kept garden, a group of boys playing football on the short grass, a sense of lightness in his chest… It is an image he often uses to calm himself, summoning it in times of stress or high emotion. The memory is his sanctuary; it takes him back to a happy place.

  Church bells peal somewhere in the distance, a soft and lonely sound that pulls him out of his recollections. He’s always loved to hear the sound of bells, but their droll music never fails to bring with it an odd sense of muted horror, as if they are the precursor for something bad. He’s felt this way since he was a little boy, when he was sent to the state-sponsored orphanage several miles south of the city. The same orphanage from his vision, where sunlight coats the leaves and boys play football on the carefully tended lawns…

  Clarke doesn’t want to be here, on the outskirts of a dodgy inner-city estate in darkness, but he has a job to do. He’s been told to sit tight and wait, and keep an eye on the back door. That’s all; nothing else. Just sit and watch and wait. Then, when they come out of the building, he is meant to get them all the hell out of here as fast as possible, no stopping at red lights, no passing go: just move, move, move, and not stop until they are safe and sound at the prearranged spot a few miles outside of town.

  He turns on the radio to calm his nerves—a local station, with traffic reports every half hour. The streets are quiet at this time of night, but it pays to be careful. And Clarke is always careful. That’s what marks him out as special, a man who can be relied upon to do his job and to do it well.

  He glances again at the old building—formerly some kind of Masonic lodge or temple, and before that a hall that catered for all kinds of social events, none of them meant for the general public. The building has a reputation: it is a place where secret meetings occur. And tonight it is the venue for the most secret meeting of all: a major drug deal.

  The back door remains shut. Nothing moves in the darkness of the alley, but Clarke knows that he has to be ready for that door banging open and four masked men running out. He keeps the engine running, toeing the accelerator every few minutes, just to keep it primed. It’s a nervous habit more than anything technical, but it helps him to keep on edge.

  “Come on,” he says. They are taking too long. He wants to get away from here. The street is too quiet; he can’t even hear a dog barking or the sound of traffic on nearby roads. Something is wrong—or if it isn’t wrong, then it isn’t entirely right either. His senses tell him this, and they have never failed him.

  Clarke has been driving all his life. The first time he sat behind the wheel of a car he was a small child, and his father was still around. The old man had taught him the basics: how to start the engine, how to steer the car and change gear; how to press the pedals with wooden blocks tied to his shoes because his legs were too short to reach. He was always a natural, right from the first. He could drive any car with competence by his early teens, relying on innate skill and instinct. His father, before he died, had always dreamed of Clarke becoming a race car driver.

  Clarke has all the right moves. That’s what his father told him long ago, when he was too young to understand what that meant. He has all the fast reflexes and special sensory quirks to make it big in the racing game.

  He smiles whenever he thinks of this. His actual job is the opposite of racing: a good getaway man has to be able to leave the scene without attracting attention, and certainly without having to race the police to the finish line. That’s strictly for the movies; in real life, professional driving should be about as dangerous as shelf-stacking in a supermarket. He takes them where they want to go, he waits an allotted length of time, and then he leaves, keeping well out of the way of trouble.

  The driver takes a smaller slice of the action, but his job comes with certain stipulations, at least as far as Clarke sees things: he does not wait longer than the agreed time, he does not carry a weapon, if he sees anything that might potentially sour the operation, he sounds the horn twice, waits an agreed length of time, and then he leaves.

  Driving, he often muses, is all about the leaving rather than the getting there.

  He checks his watch. They have seven minutes left. After that, he will sound the horn once—it’s a simple code: once for the late warning, twice to signal danger—and wait sixty seconds before driving slowly and calmly away.

  He tries to think about nothing but the job when he is in these situations—the rules, the agreed timings, the lay of the land and the escape routes he’s already chosen and set down to memory—but tonight he allows himself to imagine Martha, sleeping at home in their bed, probably lying on her side with both hands clutching her belly.

  He smiles.

  Before, he has done this only for himself, but now he does it for her—for Martha. She is all he has to keep him going, a reason to get out of bed every day and try to pretend that he is a normal human being. He guesses that he loves her for that. At least for that…

  The door of the building opens and three men run out into the night. Only one of them is still wearing his mask; the other two are bare-faced, and their skin is as white as porcelain—he can see this from a distance, and it worries him.

  Clarke slips off the handbrake.

  He hears a single gunshot.

  “Wait!” screams one of the men—the one at the front; looks like McKenzie, the organizer. “Don’t go!” He is terrified.

  Just then, when Clarke is stuck in the moment, caught uncharacteristically between staying and leaving, another figure runs out through the open doorway. It’s a large man. He is wearing a long black coat and holding a handgun. He isn’t waving the gun in the air, like a teenage gang-banger; nor is there any suggestion of panic in his movements. This man knows what he is doing. He is a professional, just like Clarke.

  The man stops running, sets his feet shoulder-width apart, and takes careful aim.

  There is another gunshot—surprisingly soft in all that silence—and the man at the back of the small fleeing group goes down hard, his legs twitching.

  That leaves two of them.

  McKenzie has reached the car. He pulls open the back door and throws a black courier bag inside. “Shit, shit, shit! They’re dead!”

  Another gunshot, and when Clarke glances out of the side window, he sees the last man fall, blood spraying in a dark parabola from the left side of his head.

  One left.

  That’s it. Rules are rules. He can delay no longer.

  He slams his foot down on the accelerator, trusting that McKenzie will be quick and alert enough to jump inside the car as it begins to move away. He hears the organizer yell his name, and when he shoots a quick glance at the rearview mirror, he sees the rear door swinging wide and McKenzie sprinting in the opposite direction, stumbling as he loses his footing against the curb.

  The large man in the black overcoat walks stiffly to the side of the road. He ignores McKenzie for the moment and stares at the car, lowering his gun. He is too far away to get off a good shot, and the car is moving too fast anyway.

  A true professional, Clarke guesses that the man doesn’t want to waste bullets or draw more attention to what’s going on.

  So he stands and he stares.

  Clarke has the disconcerting thought that the man might be smiling. He can’t see the man’s features in any great detail, of course, but the feeling is strong enough to convince him that it might be true.

  When he turns the corner onto a narrow one-way street that will take him towards the outskirts of town, Clarke stops the car and reaches over the seat behind him, grasping for the door handle. He can’t reach, so he gets out and closes it from the outside. Then he jumps back inside and puts
his foot down, trying to put as much distance between himself and what has happened back there as he possibly can.

  The bag is not on the backseat, where McKenzie tossed it. The bag has slipped off the seat and fallen into the rear foot well. He wonders exactly how much money is in there, and if it’s worth the risk that he is about to take.

  Clarke opens the door and walks into the apartment. He isn’t sure how long he can stay here now, but he has to think fast and come up with a plan. He dumped the Nissan on a patch of waste ground about a mile away and walked the rest of the way home. He couldn’t risk stealing another vehicle this close to where he lived and the walk helped clear his mind.

  He puts the courier bag down on the kitchen table and turns on the overhead lights. Then, calmly, he walks to the cupboard and takes out an unopened bottle of whiskey. He breaks the seal and pours half a glass, drinking it down in one swallow without even feeling the burn. The second glass he sips more slowly, enjoying the taste.

  “Okay,” he says. “Let’s see what we have here.”

  He walks back to the table and sits down. Reaching out, he pulls the courier bag towards him. It’s black leather, an expensive item.

  He pauses for a second, just to settle himself, and then flips open the bag. There are a lot of used bills inside, held together with red plastic bands—the kind that postmen use. Each fold contains what looks like ten grand in fifty-pound notes, and there are at least twenty-five of these bundles. That makes two hundred and fifty grand, then—not bad for a night’s work.