Night of Demons - 02 (2 page)

There’d been nothing much happening the last few days that genuinely required my attention. No spells gone wrong, nor the wielders of them going berserk. No monsters or such appearing from the ether. No real crises of any kind, in fact. Although, in a town as peculiar as Raine’s Landing, a lull like that usually means there’s serious trouble waiting just around the corner. And I’d already been warned, hadn’t I? The Little Girl had told me. Something new and very bad was headed here. She hadn’t been able to be specific. So the real question was…what?

But waiting for it ground me down. I felt bored and twitchy at first, and then strangely numb. I’d gone for several walks. I’d spoken with Cassie on the phone—she sounded all keyed up, with nowhere to dispense her energy. I’d even considered going fishing on the Adderneck to try and calm myself down. But without Pete—my son—around any longer to go with me, all I finally did was shy away from that idea.

Darkness had closed around my neighborhood. It’s called Northridge, and is a friendly, unassuming place. We were right at the tail end of summer. The air was cooler than it had been a couple of weeks back, far fewer bugs in evidence. Across the street from me in Roger Lym’s backyard, a plume of smoke lifted for a while, I could hear voices back there. It was his traditional late summer cookout. But then the skies started to drizzle gently, and the smoke and chatter died away.

My porch was covered, so I stayed out on it all the same and drank another beer. More time passed. Lights started going out in the windows around me. In another half an hour, almost every house was darkened. In the distance, I could hear the chiming of the clock on the Town Hall.

I felt becalmed. The beer had filled me with a floaty, weightless drowsiness. So I finally headed back indoors, pulled off half my clothes, then flopped down on my bed. It’s something I never like doing because I always have the same unpleasant dreams when I sleep. All of them centered on the same subject. The day my family disappeared.

And it was precisely that way tonight. I wanted to wake up but, as usual, couldn’t seem to manage it.

Jason Goad, a stage magician from Las Vegas, had somehow found out about this weird, dysfunctional town of ours. How the real witches of Salem had fled to this place shortly before the trials in 1692. How they’d blended into our community, gradually taking it over. Until the entire place had gotten all filled up with the arcane and the bizarre.

Goad had managed to get in past the curse which keeps us separated from the outside world. He’d moved into the loft room of the house right next to mine. There he’d taught himself genuine magic. The strongest adepts are born to it, but anybody who lives here can learn.

But he’d done something else as well. He’d coveted my family. My wife especially. Alicia…

I drifted partway back to consciousness, and took in the fact that I was tangled up in my damp sheets. Struggling feebly to get free of them, but I couldn’t get a proper sense of where to go. And my eyes would not come open more than half a crack. I sank into the dream once again. The events in it raced to their terrible conclusion.

They were standing in his room, completely motionless, transfixed. Pete, Alicia, Tammy. He had put a spell on them and drawn them there. Still a cop back then, I was trying to get in through the door. But Goad had conjured up a barrier, and I could not get past it. I beat against it helplessly, the whole while that he rambled on. They were his now, he proclaimed. His family. And he was going to turn them into gods.

That’s the thing with magic, and part of the reason that I genuinely detest it. It partially comes from what’s inside. And if your psyche’s messed up, then it can go very badly wrong.

The light in the room changed, growing so bright that it was painful to look into. My family became reduced to ghostly silhouettes. Then the glow started filling up their bodies. But that didn’t last for long.

The brilliance took on a deeper hue, like bronze. And this was definitely not supposed to happen. Tammy, three years old, let out a shriek. The room went black. And when it cleared…

They were all gone.

The anguish of it had never diminished, despite the fact it had been over two years ago. It never got a tiny bit easier. The dreams were always very painful, horribly intense.

It was partly my fault it hurt so much, and I understood that. Not once had I tried moving on. I hadn’t watched them die, you see. I’d only seen them vanish. And perhaps they were still out there somewhere. That was a hope I constantly clung on to.

I came half-awake again. And the self-same words went through my head that come to me every night. Still out there? But if so, where?

Then I dropped into a deeper realm of sleep, where no more dreams were possible.

A different light was waiting for me there. Not searing white or bronze this time. This one was a pale, electric blue. And at its heart revolved the Little Girl.

This wasn’t any kind of dream. It was a visitation. Because the Little Girl is perfectly real, existing in the here and now. She inhabits the nursery room at 51 Bethany Street, in the Marshall Drive area of town. And she is one of the Landing’s most mysterious denizens.

What she is or how she got there, I couldn’t tell you. I have tried to find out, and can’t. The things I genuinely know about her? She only looks like a small child, about five years old, fair-haired and tiny. No one’s certain what she really is. But—despite the fact she always keeps her eyelids closed—she sees most things that happen here, and some things out beyond our borders. She has enormous powers of perception sometimes, and has helped me before. Since I quit as a cop, I’ve been what you would call a freelance, fighting everything that’s bad about the supernatural. And in that role, quite frankly, I need all the help that I can get, whatever source it comes from. I just wish that some of them weren’t quite so peculiar.

Her tone was rather echoey, as usual. As if several different voices were overlapping every time she spoke. And you could see her eyeballs moving underneath her delicate lids, the lashes shivering gently.

“Hello, Mr. Ross,” she said.

She always calls me that, and will not be corrected. Ross is actually my given name. My surname is Devries.

I heard myself murmur, “Don’t you ever sleep?”

Her edges became blurry, and she sounded slightly distant when she answered back.

“I’m not really sure, but that’s beside the point. I’m here to warn you.”

“Okay, then. Do that.”

“Something new has arrived. I told you it would.”

I felt the bedsheets tighten around me.

“What exactly?”

“A very bad man indeed, for the moment. He is headed for the center of town, but has his eyes on Sycamore Hill.”

Which was where most of the richest folk here lived, a great deal of the power in the Landing being concentrated up there. Gaspar Vernon, Samuel Levin, Kurt van Friesling, many others like them. But it didn’t worry me too badly. They could look after themselves for the most part.

The Little Girl had used the strangest choice of words, though. “A very bad man…for the moment.” What precisely did she mean by that?

I could have asked her, but already knew that she could read my thoughts. She understood what the question was before I even voiced it. So I simply let her carry on.

“He will still be very bad in a few minutes’ time. But not a man any longer, Mr. Ross. Something far more dangerous than that.”

“In what way?”

Her face became rather strained, and her voice dropped to a rasping hiss.

“It’s difficult to tell. I’m not sure what he’ll become. It is all bound up with secrets, you see. And secrets are such personal things.”

She often spoke in riddles, and tonight seemed to be no exception. So I was left struggling to get the gist of what she was trying to convey to me.

It didn’t take very long to realize that was pointless. She seemed to be rather confused herself. What was going to happen from this point on? She didn’t even know.

Which was unlike the Little Girl, and that worried me badly.

“I didn’t think there were any secrets,” I pointed out to her. “At least, not from you.”

She turned that over carefully before replying.

“Oh,” she whispered. “You’d be surprised.”

The blue light started to fade, and she diminished with it until she disappeared. After that, I hung in pure darkness for a while.

And then I woke up sharply. Because the phone beside my bed started ringing.

It was Cass.

About an hour earlier, Cornelius had been heading in.

Voices had been sounding in his head for quite a while. And they were not the ones that he was familiar with, those heavy, breathless murmurs. For a start, these were mostly female. Their accents were strange, old-worldly. And they did not try to comfort him or reassure him, the way the Old Ones usually did. They were hostile, hissing at him in an urgent tone.

“Stay away from here, you fool!”

“This is no place where you are welcome!”

“Turn around!”

“Go back! Go back!”

He wasn’t sure whose they were exactly. But they didn’t really bother him. He had been hearing people speaking in his mind since he’d been eight years old. They were as unremarkable to him as the sight of his own hands. And the fact that these voices were brand-new ones made no particular difference.

As for what they kept on telling him…well, they were talking to precisely the wrong person. Thanks to the ceremonies he’d performed, he was becoming very special, and could do almost anything he wished. He’d be transforming before too much longer. Becoming something more than human. Just a few more sacrifices ought to do the trick. So he wasn’t going to be scared off by any vague warnings.

Cornelius chuckled, shaking his large head. And, after a couple more minutes, they simply faded away. He had already driven well inside the town.

The rain had stopped a while ago, leaving everything around him shimmering with damp. The streets were broad and empty, with nothing to slow him down. A sleepy place, which was what you would expect in this part of the world. He passed through suburbs, mostly filled with wood-built houses, not special in any way. Except…his gaze kept flitting to a high, bumpy hill that rose against the night sky on the western side of the town. There seemed to be some much larger residences on the crest up there. And that intrigued him.

Ahead, some slightly taller buildings came in view. The avenues grew narrower. There were more stores and restaurants than there had previously been. He kept on heading in, ignoring the stoplights. And finally wound up at the central square.

“Union Square,” a sign informed him. It was pretty large for a community of such apparent insignificance. And was full of shadows, in spite of the way it sprawled.

It was surrounded by globe-shaped lamps, shining like little amber planets. At the center was a huge bronze statue of a stern-faced man. By the way that he was dressed, he’d lived a very long time back. Some hero from the Revolution, maybe?

Cornelius didn’t stop. He cruised around the square’s perimeter. Most of the buildings surrounding him, on closer inspection, turned out to be offices, all their windows dark. The river that he’d spotted flowed nearby, a sturdy metal bridge running across it.

At the north end—dominating the whole place—was an edifice that took up that entire side of the square. It rose four stories, and its stonework was ornate. There was a flight of wide steps leading up to the front door; a matching pair of statues, seated lions, were on either side of it. And a massive clock hung above them. He was in no doubt that this was the Town Hall. There was a motto carved above the doorway—VALOR IN EXTREMIS. But no indication, still, of where he had wound up.

Directly to the south of it, there was another large building with Doric columns on display out front. A theater apparently, by the posters on the wall. The play currently on show was
The Crucible
by Arthur Miller. And there was a matinee this weekend.
Brigadoon.

A street to his left had some gaudy neon signs, for eateries and bars. And there’d be people there, for sure. But not the kind that he was seeking. He preferred clean-living, decent folk for his ceremonies. Homebody types, for whom a glass of eggnog was a sinful pleasure. The spilling of their blood—after all—pleased the Old Ones so much more.

He found himself cruising by a post office. And, by the sign beside its shuttered entrance, finally discovered where he was.

Raine’s Landing? Cornelius had never even heard of the place. But there were so many towns dotted through this part of Massachusetts, hidden by the woodlands from the outside world. And so he shouldn’t be surprised.

Special fun, though? Fun, fun, fun? Where could he go to find him some?

Back in Boston, he had favored the well-heeled districts for his little visits. The Back Bay and Beacon Hill. He preferred to visit educated folk. They were better equipped, surely, to appreciate the subtleties of what he did. The clever classical references, especially when he carved the symbol into them. But where did such people live around these parts?

His gaze lifted to the hill again. It was not too far away. And this time, when he looked at it, he seemed to feel a tugging deep inside of him. Almost as if something were drawing him that way. It was not simply an instinct. The old, familiar voices, they were talking to him once again.

Cornelius swung the car around, and headed off in that direction.

The weirdest thing happened, a couple of minutes later. He had found the main road leading to the hill, and was about to start climbing the gradient, when a bus went by. It was painted green, and brightly lit inside. And there were a couple of drowsy-looking passengers on board. But he couldn’t see the driver. How could that be?

He had obviously not been looking properly, or in the right direction. His pulse bumping faintly, he continued up.

Plymouth Drive, this street was called. And it got so steep in some places that the motor of the aging Chrysler growled. There was a succession of hairpin bends, some of them giving him superb views of the whole township, lit up in the darkness like a Christmas tree. The size of the place struck him all over again. This ought to be some dinky little burg but, for some reason, wasn’t that. Then he was among the massive residences that he had seen from below.

Disappointment started to worm through his bulky frame. The folks up here seemed to be terribly particular when it came to the matter of security. Each of these places had big, high walls or dense, towering privet rows protecting them. The gates were firmly locked, and in most cases you could barely see the actual dwellings. Trees got in the way.

But the couple that he could make out…they genuinely made him gasp. One was a vast, sprawling pale stone manor, Grecian pillars—not unlike the theater’s—around its portico. And another—quite bizarrely—was an exact reconstruction of the Taj Mahal. How crazy was that? For Pete’s sake, how much money did these people have?

Looming high above him, at the crooked peak, was another mansion that looked—if anything—even stranger. Caught in silhouette against the moon’s glow, it was the last word in brutal, ugly Gothic. Its grounds were overgrown, the branches of countless trees twisting against the night sky. And the place had a huge spire, like a cathedral. Insane!

Even crazier, instead of a crucifix, there was a massive W on top. It had to be the owner’s initial. That was taking ego to its very furthest limit, wasn’t it? Cornelius felt pretty sure he didn’t want to go up there.

But he was still being drawn as if by a magnet. The instinct was tugging at him from the left hand side. So he turned at the next corner, found himself on a much smaller lane. There was no sidewalk. The pavement was ill tended and broken in parts. Bushes scraped against the body of the car as he progressed. The branches of sprawling elms and oak hung overhead, and were dripping from the recent downpour. It was as dark in here as a coal mine. The white tail of a rabbit flashed in his headlights before vanishing.

Finally, he reached another pair of wrought-iron gates, much smaller than the ones he’d passed. They looked slightly rusty. And a chain and padlock hung there, but not fastened. This homeowner, apparently, was not as careful as the rest.

Cornelius grinned, killing the engine and the lights. And without making a sound—he was so very good at that, despite his size—he clambered out.

There were a few small conifers beyond the gate, and then a broad, rolling lawn that glistened moistly. He moved across it swiftly, lightly, silently. That was why the newspapers had all dubbed him The Shadow Man. The only thing that witnesses had ever seen of him? A brief glimpse of his silhouette, in somebody’s backyard.

He’d been getting tired of Boston anyway, he thought to himself. It was time to spread his work to regions new.

And this seemed an excellent place to start.