Authors: Tony Richards
Dark Rain
DARK RAIN
A RAINE’S LANDING NOVEL
TONY RICHARDS
Dark
Rain
was first published by Eos Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © Tony Richards 2008.
This edition is Copyright © Tony Richards 2014.
Cover by Steve Upham of Screaming Dreams. Cover copyright © Steve Upham 2014.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents and places are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
My thanks to Ann Crimmins and Brian Fatah Steele for their advice regarding this edition.
www.richardsreality.com
www.screamingdreams.com
CONTENTS
The ragged old man moved softly through the night. A storm was brewing, but he barely seemed to notice it. He just kept striding evenly, his footfalls barely making a sound. A rotund shape, a bulldog, trotted at his heels.
He was headed down a narrow country road in Massachusetts, and it felt slightly odd to him, since he hadn’t been back here in a very long time. Trees crackled around him in the wind. There were no streetlights, and clouds covered up the sky. That didn’t even slow him down, though. Darkness seemed to bother him no more than did the storm.
Every so often, he’d raise his head
– the pupil of his left eye glinted when he did that. And sniff at the air, then murmur.
“Strange, Dralleg.” He was talking to the dog. “There is something quite unusual round here.”
He was in the middle of plain nowhere, not a hamlet or farmhouse in sight. Just low, rolling hills, heavily forested, the leaves still green as yet. It was late summer.
He could smell the woodland animals. And hear a stream nearby. But it wasn’t mundane things like those that had captured his attention. He was on the trail of something, now. He had that kind of intent look.
When he lifted his head and sniffed again, his face screwed up with puzzlement a moment. Then, it became thoughtful.
“No, not just strange,” he corrected himself. “Hidden.”
And that last word? He swirled it round his mouth with relish. He was someone who loved digging objects up, revealing them. Learning things that he was not supposed to know.
He stopped at last on the bare crown of a hill, the only open place in all this verdure. Sat down on a boulder and let out a sigh. The bulldog settled in front of him, gazing up into his face. It had very pale green eyes that seemed to shine a little in the gloom.
The ragged man tickled the beast under its jowly chin with his long fingernails. “You can smell it too, can’t you, boy?”
He gazed around.
“Now, what do we have here, exactly? What is someone trying to keep from us?”
His old eyes narrowed, and he stared into the distance, hard. But not even his gaze
– flinty, hawk-like though it was – picked anything out at first. Until …
From the thickest of black clouds above, a bolt of lightning suddenly shot down, thunder following hard on its heels, rolling like a wave.
Its glow brought the landscape into sharp relief.
And, deep within it, had he seen …?
A second bolt confirmed it. The old man stood up, letting out a hiss and gazing to the west.
Now
he could see it. Streets and avenues and parks and squares and tall buildings, and many smaller houses. There was a whole town down there, cradled in a valley. But why had he been unaware of it before?
He gazed at the place for a good long while, trying to understand what he was looking at. And finally, comprehension dawned on him. A grin spread out across his withered face
– a hungry one.
“Why, Dralleg.” He was speaking into thin air by this time, the dog all but ignored. “This place shuns the outside world. Keeps itself to itself. And why? Because it has a secret.”
His teeth parted and a laugh escaped through them. Then, he glanced down at his four-legged companion.
“I love secrets. Don’t you, boy? Let’s go pay these folk
s a visit.”
His smeared his hands down his coat, then continued on his way, heading downhill, the bulldog still trotting obediently behind him.
And went several more miles before he finally passed the signpost. It was wooden, and so old that it was practically falling to pieces. Parts of it were specked with mildew, other parts bleached by the sun. The words that had been carved on it could barely be made out.
But they read,
Welcome to Raine’s Landing
.
The ragged old man didn’t even break his pace. He simply took note of it, then went striding on.
“Evening, Ross.”
“Evening,” I nodded.
It was Jack Stroud, one of the neighbors on my street, out on his beautifully-mown front lawn, doing unpleasant things to an emerging nest of ants. The light was failing swiftly, bleeding the color from everything around me. The white picket fences. The brown-roofed houses. The parked cars. The patterned drapes behind their panes of glass. The low rose bushes, and the ivy on the walls. Lights had begun to glow in a few windows, and the air smelled damp and mossy.
“Helluva storm we had last night.”
“It was indeed.”
“Feel the way the temperature dropped? Like an iceberg just blew into town.”
“It got chilly,” I conceded.
People in this neighborhood are always a little quiet and respectful around me, knowing as they do about my personal history. It’s always made me uncomfortable, to tell the truth. But Jack peered at me curiously, wondering what I was up to.
“O
ut for a stroll? Or is there something happening again?”
“The former,” I told him mildly. “Stretching my legs and clearing out my head is all. There’s no cause for alarm.”
The man grinned ruefully and shrugged. “There’s always cause for alarm in this town, and don’t we all know it.”
“Man, you’ve got that right.”
I wished him a good evening, and continued on my way.
I like to walk long distances, and when I do that I get lost in thought. In memory especially. I never used to be so pensive, and it bothers me sometimes. But then, my life had become so different from the way it used to be.
Anyway, when my surroundings came back to me properly, night had fallen. All the ochre streetlamps had come on. It took me a few seconds to work out where I was. Not far from Union Square, near the corner of Meadows and O’Connell. One of the faintly seedier parts of downtown. The frontages were shabby, needed painting in some cases. There were balls of newspaper and candy wrappers in the gutter. The dully flickering neon signs for bars and cheap eateries surrounded me. Across from me, its window darkened, was a scruffy little store full of rune stones and books on how to use them.
I thought I was alone at first, until I saw a shadow move out of a doorway. It was a woman, tall and slim. She propped herself against the wall and watched as I approached.
Getting closer to her, I felt my jaw tense. She looked otherwise perfectly normal, but had tiny pale-blue globes of light where her eyes ought to be. They were glowing, like they might be lit by electricity. But she didn’t seem to be blind. Because her narrow, high-cheekboned face – reduced to a silhouette – followed me exactly.
She was dressed in a long leather coat and very high-heeled boots. And, when I got within a few yards of her, she let the coat drop open, revealing a black PVC miniskirt and a brassiere of the same material. And nothing more than that. She was very shapely and her skin looked pale as ice cream.
She crooked her right leg forward as if she was trying to stop me with her knee. And met my eyes with those strangely-glinting little spheres.
“Like some company for the evening, Mister?”
Which was a good deal classier, I
had to admit, than ‘wanna date.’ I paused and studied her.
If you discounted the eyes, she was actually quite
attractive. Willowy and finely toned. Long golden hair dropped down across her shoulders in delicate curls. Her small chin had a dimple in it, and her lips looked faintly bee-stung.
But … her age? It was impossible to tell. Eyes give away volumes about a person. Not just their emotions but experience and character, and even time of life as well. Without normal ones, her face was just a pretty, passive outline sketched around an eerie glow.
The globes seemed to be studying me intensely.
“I can make it really good for you,” she told me. “The best, guaranteed, you’ve ever had.”
I wasn’t interested in her services, but wondered what she was talking about. So, “How’s that?” I asked her.
One slim hand came up, its fingers almost touching at the twin blue orbs. “With these? I can see what you really want. All your darkest desires and most secret dreams. The ones you’d never tell another soul about. I can see them in fine detail. I can act them out as well.”
She paused and brushed her lips with the tip of her tongue.
“We can negotiate the price.”
I think I swallowed gently at that point. “And … is that what you wanted, when you used the magic on yourself?”
Her mouth pursed, the muscles at her jaw tightening. Creases formed on her pale brow. Those iridescent globes of hers still gave away nothing. But I guessed that – if she’d still had normal eyes – they would have taken on a distant, haunted look, dampening at the edges.
She glanced down at her boots. Then told me, “No. I wanted men to really love me, not just for my looks.”
She gave a faint shudder.
“In a way, now, I guess they do.”
We’ve had magic in the town – real magic – for more than three hundred years. And although it sometimes works the way it was intended to, it can as easily go wrong. So encounters like that – and worse – are common enough. It depressed me all the same. Who said it? The suffering of a million people is a difficult thing to get your mind around. But the suffering of one can pierce you to the core.
Leaving her to ply her trade, I rounded the corner and went down O’Connell. Crossed Union Square, passing by the huge, bronze statue of Theodore Raine, our beloved founder. It was a pretty big square, as roomy as a couple of football fields. Symbolizing, perhaps, the importance of the Raine family here and the hold that they’d always had over us. My footsteps clacked on the wide flagstones. I made my way to the nearby riverfront, the Iron Bridge, and stopped halfway across it.
There was, again, no moon tonight, no stars, The Adderneck splashed and gurgled below me as darkly as oil. I fished out a cigarette, noticing my hands were shaking slightly. Lit it and took a deep drag. Then exhaled. Then started coughing. Damn it, why did I even bother with these things? I tossed it in the river, watched as it was spirited away.
Rubbed at my eyes, then looked around me. Rooftops of all shapes and sizes met my gaze. We New Englanders are pretty individualistic, don’t you know. And below them there were thousands of rectangular lights, the lit windows of houses.
For a town most people have never heard of and few people visit, ours was a remarkably large one. But there’s a good reason for that. I’ll tell you about it in due course.
Don’t get me wrong – the Landing’s not a bad place on the surface. Everyone has work. There’s a lumber mill and plenty of light industry, much of it high-tech these days. We have good schools, nice parks, public libraries. A transit system – of sorts. A theatre which doubles as a concert hall. All the courtrooms and the office buildings local governance requires, of course.
An average Massachusetts town then, on the face of it. Except … the face is just a mask.
Why?
1692. I’m sure you’ve heard of Salem. The witch trials. And you’re correct if you think nineteen innocent people were taken to the gallows, hanged.
But the fact is, there were
genuine
witches in Salem too. Clever and precognitive, they saw that there was trouble brewing months before it came. Decamped from that town, and moved here instead. They married into the local population, picking husbands and wives from the wealthier families wherever that was possible. And Raine’s Landing has never been the same since then. All kinds of weird things happen here.
By one means or another, these days, I usually find myself right at the center of it.
My cell phone began vibrating in my pocket. It was Cass.
“Trouble, Ross,” was all she said, but that communicated volumes.
You see, in a place like this, there’s minor trouble all the time. So common an occurrence that, after a while, you hardly even bo
ther to comment on it anymore. So when somebody – and
particularly
someone like Cassandra Elspeth Mallory – pronounces those two brief syllables, then what it means is ‘big trouble.’ Something pretty bad.
Her voice was breathless, like she had been running hard. And pretty shaken up as well. Which w
as unusual for Cassie, and worried me all the more.
“Where are you?”
“Garnerstown.”
Which was one of the older suburbs, to the south of here.
“And?”
“Something really ho
rrible’s gone down. There’s a lot of dead here.”
A lot of
what
?
I stiffened and my head came up. This hadn’t felt, originally, like an evening when death came visiting. But you can never be entirely certain.
“No telling exactly how many, yet,” Cassie was continuing, “but it’s got to be in good high figures. Something, possibly not human, went from house to house and took out an entire street.”
Everything around me seemed to bleed into the distance for an extended few seconds. A jolt ran through me, and my mouth and throat went very dry.
“Ross?”
Cass sounded as shocked as I felt. That was hardly surprising. We’ve put in the hours and seen a lot, most of it not good. But if what she was telling me was accurate, this was the closest we had ever gotten to an absolute catastrophe.
There was a strong emotional quaver to her tone as well. So far as I knew, she had no friends down in Garnerstown. Which could only really mean one thing. Her one weak point, her Achilles Heel. An entire street had to include no few children. And, given her own history, that had to hit her where it genuinely hurt.
Me too, come to think of it. My head had already started pounding, but I tried to keep calm and listen to what she was telling me.
“Mayhemberry P.D.’s here.” Which was her name for the police department. “They stared. A few of them puked. And now? They’re waiting for somebody to tell them what to do. You’d better get down here.”
Not that I was a cop anymore. But the guys in the department listened to me readily enough. They knew that I’d a good track record, when it came to dangers of the supernatural kind.
“Okay?” she added, in a slightly desperate inquiring tone.
Then she rang off, unable to continue any longer.
All my thoughts were spinning. I tried to steady them. My car was back at the house – it would take too long to get there, even if I ran. And there were no cabs in sight. So, my head and heart both working overtime, I retraced my steps to Union Square, and waited by the bus stop. That might seem a curious thing to do, given the circumstances. But not in a town like ours. I wanted to get down there as fast as I could, and this was the best way to do it.
I was alone. There was no reason for anyone to come here at this hour. The big public buildings had their doors all shut, and their shadows fell around me like great solid slabs of black. The glow from the streetlamps barely seemed to penetrate the gloom tonight. Or perhaps that was just the mood that I had fallen into. What was happening to us this time?
Within less than a minute, a vehicle turned up, as if somebody had read my mind. Perhaps somebody had. The bus was bright and clean inside, its windows shining with fluorescence. But there were no passengers. And no one at the steering wheel either. The thing was completely empty.
It chugged to a halt in front of me, its engine idling. The doors hissed open, and I climbed aboard. It moved off again smoothly as I dropped into a seat. There’d been no destination indicated. There were no maps in view, no fixed route. But it would take me exactly where I wanted to go, in the promptest time that could be managed.
It’s one of our newer services, provided by the good folk up on Sycamore Hill, the guys who really run this place. It was convenient, I guessed. One of the adepts’ better notions. But normally, the things gave me the creeps.
Not this evening, however. There seemed to be much worse matters, and plenty of them, to worry about by this hour.
Cray’s Lane was just an average little road – short, not even blacktop on it – out toward the bottom end of town. It was lined with wood-built, single story houses, maybe thirty of them, none of them in mint condition. There was crab grass on the front lawns, dandelions poking through the driveways. Rusty barbeques and swings out back. Most of the cars parked here were more than ten years old. Hardly a special street, in other words.
A stork had made its nest on a rooftop, I took note. Somebody, presumably a teenage boy, had a bumper sticker that read:
Lurv instructor – first lesson free
.
Otherwise, all totally unremarkable.
Squad cars were blocking both ends of it, their lights casting red flashes across the entire scene. I couldn’t see any patrolmen though. They had to be indoors by this time. There was only Cass in view.
She was waiting for me on the first lawn to the right. She’d parked her Harley by the curb, and had a flashlight in her grasp.