Devil Sent the Rain (4 page)

“Don’t think it isn’t still an option,” Yamayol rumbled.

“We want
you
, James,” Ezeq’el said, shaking her tail and flicking dirty water in all directions. “With you on our side, Azazel won’t have the will to resist.”

“You make him sound like he has no power anyway,” Jim pointed out.

“Enough!” Semyaz thrashed his tail again in the water, sending up a loud crack and spray. He shouldered into Yamayol and, while the bull-headed Fallen struggled with his balance, snatched Mouser from his hand.

No! Adrian yelled silently. By a supreme act of will, he managed not to swallow the string.

“Don’t!” Jim shouted, but too late.

Semyaz raised the unconscious girl to his mouth and bit her head off in one quick motion. Enraged, lips spraying blood, he hurled her body against the wall. It hit like a wet rag doll and bounced into the flood, blood spattering like shaving cream from an exploding water balloon. Her corpse twitched and jangled for several long seconds in the water.

“Damn!” Adrian gasped, choking on the string.

Jim hurled his sword. It wasn’t a weapon made for throwing, but Jim was really, really good with it, in some surprising ways. He drew his arm back like an atlatl’s throwing-stick of flesh and bone, pommel cupped in his palm, and then launched the blade forward.

Semyaz bellowed, mouth open and blood and hair on his tusks—

and Jim’s sword hit him right in the mouth.

Ichor squirted from the wound and Semyaz staggered back, thumping Twitch against the ceiling again in the confusion. He choked and spat, and Jim’s sword shot from his mouth like projectile vomit.

Ezeq’el the centauress leaped forward, plunging her hooves into the muddy water to trample Jim.

The singer threw himself to one side, scrambling from pillar to table to pillar and groping in the water for his weapon.

Adrian saw his chance and took it. He jumped to the nearest large nexus of ward lines on the wall, pinned the end of the string to its center with his thumb and chalked four quick glyphs around it. “
Per Mercurium vim extraho,
” he murmured, gagging on the string and jamming the Eye over the top of his thumb for good measure. He had to charge his battery before he could use it to get them out.

Fire coursed through him, making the walls shudder and all his flesh pimple up into tingling prick-points of limbic agitation. He felt his ka fill and then flood like the room around him, and he struggled to direct it, raising the Third Eye and pressing it against the chalk marks against the wall and, for good if somewhat irrational measure, against the candle stub.

“
Per Proteum,
” he choked, hearing gunfire and seeing Twitch fall into the water with a large splash out of the corner of one eye. He wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted from the spell, which was a bad deficit when you starting throwing magical power around. Really, he’d be a lot more comfortable if he could be attempting this operation with a little less pressure on him. He needed something shape-changing; something that would transform the trap so that it would restrain the Fallen but not the band would be ideal.

Jim lunged at Semyaz, swinging a length of timber in both hands, and the boar-headed giant snatched him off the ground.

Adrian’s own shadow loomed up large, jaws gaping like it wanted to swallow Adrian whole. It was swollen, too—somehow in refilling his ka, he had poured power into other parts of him. In Adrian’s head, it was hard to tell apart his looming shadow and the giant Semyaz, holding Jim pinned in his grip.

Adrian chanted his name, trying to catch his balance among the five parts. “
Per Proteum
 …”

Mike slammed into the wall next to him, losing all the breath in his lungs in a single
whoosh
that was painful to hear. The big guy dropped his gun and then sank into the water with it.

Adrian’s shadow seemed to him to be another Adrian, only taller and stronger, and grabbing him by the throat.

“
Per Proteum insidias,
” Adrian tried again. He imagined the lines of the wards moving across the wall, reforming to create new wards—

with a sick feeling in his stomach, he realized that the shadow looming large over him, his own shadow, had the head of a cartoon wolf and a long, dangling tongue—
and then the darkness took him—

“
Insidias muto
—”

And he fell.

* * *

Dream-Adrian stumbled through the house of flesh wearily. He’d been up all night on the roof, reading Pliny’s
De Occultata Historia
again and comparing it to his copy of his uncle’s pages. He’d finally managed to ignite the wick of a devotional candle he’d stolen from his uncle’s private chapel, but only after soaking the wick in oil first, and that seemed like cheating. Or if not cheating, then useless—you couldn’t go into combat hoping your enemy would coat himself in inflammable liquid beforehand.

His uncle certainly wouldn’t, and his uncle was the enemy that Adrian imagined defeating, over and over again. Crushing, decapitating, mutilating, and above all, burning to a crisp.

He dropped the pull-down stairs slowly, stopping to give the hinges a touch of oil, as he always did. Only in the dream-state, the hinges were muscular, like the hinges of a jaw, and Adrian oiled them by rubbing them down with his hands. He felt unclean and violated.

Part of him, tucked away, knew that he was dreaming. That part wondered if Adrian was under the river of filthy water on the restaurant floor and beginning to drown. A dream might seem eternal in the few seconds it would take his body to fill its lungs with water and slip into brain death.

The carpet on the floor in the upstairs hallway felt like meat underfoot, squishy and wet, and where his bare feet depressed it, he left behind little puddles of blood. He pushed the pull-down stairs back up into the ceiling and shivered a bit when he heard a
click
that sounded like teeth chomping together. The walls sagged in towards him and ran with rivulets of warm moisture, puddling at the bottom and draining, somewhere, but very inefficiently. The air was thick and humid, and felt already-breathed. Light came from a globe hanging from the center of the ceiling that Adrian knew should be an incandescent bulb behind frosted glass, but instead it looked like a swaying uvula. Adrian ducked to avoid touching it.

Adrian knew to step carefully around the wardrobe, because the floor under it was prone to creaking. It caught him by surprise that the wardrobe doors snapped open and sprang at him, biting with long yellow teeth—

snap! Snap!

He stumbled away and caught himself on the banister around the stairwell down. The wardrobe stayed rooted in its spot, but it gnashed teeth at him and tried to bite, exhaling a nasty mothballs-and-dead-mice smell. The piece of furniture had scaly skin like old, cracked wood that badly needed oiling, only tufts of hair grew out of the cracks.

“Son of a bitch,” Adrian muttered, and crept past. The wardrobe hummed, but didn’t follow.

The bathroom at the top of the stairs was Adrian’s safe place—it was the only room in the house so small that when he was in it, his uncle didn’t fit. It was the size of a closet, with the shower head directly over a smallish toilet, and no sink. The loose brick behind the toilet was warm and soft to the touch, so Adrian didn’t look at it, folding his precious pages and tucking them inside quickly. It was a damp space, which forced him to recopy his pages every couple of weeks, but it was a hidden one.

Inside the bathroom, he could hear for the first time that it was raining outside, cats and dogs. That made him nervous—he had thought from the light in the attic that dawn might still be an hour away, but with the rain cloud cover it might be imminent. And at dawn, the wards of sleeping that kept his uncle from discovering him would end.

It hadn’t been raining when he’d been on the roof, he mused. Sudden storm.

At the top of the stairs he looked where there should have been a window, and saw a membrane. Like an eardrum, he thought, or maybe an eyelid. It was red and thinly veined, but there was definitely grayish light beyond it. The membrane trembled with each raindrop that hit it, and Adrian felt sick. Body, body, everywhere.

“The more things change,” he muttered, “the more I still hate them.”

He nearly slid down the stairs to the ground level, and there he stopped, his heart pounding. Someone was in the kitchen, with a light on. He turned and crept softly down the hall, not looking into the kitchen door on the dream-magic logic grounds that if he didn’t see who was in the kitchen, the person in the kitchen wouldn’t see him.

He smelled blood as he passed, and heard the snuffling of beasts.

At his uncle’s door he stopped, and his heart stopped with him.

He’d built the wards of sleeping over months, carefully writing lines and glyphs behind furniture, inside closets and even between the sheetrock panels of the walls to keep them out of his uncle’s sight. The final line of the wards was a piece he had to put in fresh each night, a length of spider’s web that he collected from the basement—he shared his space with many spiders—and painstakingly stretched from post to post in the frame of his uncle’s bedroom door.

Now the strand of web was broken, the two ends fluttering in the dank, humid air.

Was his uncle awake? The door was shut, but that meant nothing. Had his uncle observed him? If his uncle knew what Adrian had been doing, what terrible punishments would he inflict on the boy?

Adrian eased open the door down to the basement, slipped in and padded down the stairs in the darkness. They were muscular and meaty and they gave way a little to his touch. Dream-Adrian was nervous, and thought he’d be caught. Another part of Adrian found the dream even stranger than usual. What exactly it was that made it so eluded him, but he stretched for it, trying to pin it down with his mind as he opened the door and threw himself onto his ratty old futon bed.

The futon wasn’t ratty, though, it was warm and wet.

And also, there was already someone in Adrian’s bed.

He jumped up and back, preparing for the wolf and his insatiable tongue, and found the cord dangling from the light. It felt like an animal’s tail, and when he pulled it, a swarm of flying mites clouding about the ceiling burst into luminescent glow, showing him his tiny underground cell.

The futon lay wet and brown in the center of the room, like a giant rotting tongue. On it lay Twitch, Mike, Eddie, and the girl from the club—Mouser. They wore pajamas like kids ready for a slumber party, but the looks on their faces showed surprise and fear. Especially Mouser’s face.

“What new Hell be this?” she yelped. “Leave me in peace!”

“This be a Hell of bad grammar,” Adrian shot back. It was a reflex, he couldn’t help himself. But the fact of speaking to someone in his dream felt very strange. Usually he stood inside dream-Adrian, or behind him, and shouted unheard warnings.

Was this not a dream, after all?

Eddie sat upright and looked around. “It isn’t Hell,” he said. “Trust me.”

“This is wrong.” Adrian shook his head. “This is all wrong.”

Then he noticed that the floor of the room was covered in water. He couldn’t tell where it was coming from, but it was cold and brown and rising.

***

Chapter Four

“Don’t tell me it’s
wrong
, Adrian,” Eddie snorted, rolling to his feet. “Tell me how we get out of here.” Pushy bastard. He slapped his hand under his armpit and ground his teeth when his fingers found nothing but pictures of coiled whips stamped on flannel. The glowing flies scattered as he thrust his head into their cloud. “And tell me where my Glock is.”

“I don’t know where we are,” Adrian said quickly. He reached for nicotine gum and found he was wearing pajamas, too. No gum, no taser, no Eye, just pajamas covered with pictures of little kids … in pajamas. “Are you really here?”

Twitch groaned and rolled over. Her pajamas were speckled with birds and horses. They were stained with blood on the collar and shoulders, too, and there was blood matted in her hair.

“This is really me.” Mike stood up. His pajamas were yellow and covered in whisky bottles and sombreros. Just looking at his pajamas made Adrian feel a little guilty.

“Yeah?” said Eddie. “Prove it.”

Mike scratched the back of his neck. “What if I tell you something only you and I know?”

“I’ll still think I’m dreaming.” Eddie scanned the room, and so did Adrian. There wasn’t much here—a single shelf with a few Latin books on it, the futon, and the tail end of the old coal chute, from back when the basement had held a coal-fired furnace and this had been the coal room. Adrian remembered the lingering carbon smell from his youth, but didn’t smell it now. Today the room smelled like the inside of a mouth, badly in need of dental work.

“Then you can tell me something different that only you and I know,” Mike said, and then trailed off. “Carajo.”

“A day late, Mike,” Adrian said wearily, “et cetera.”

“Yep.” Eddie helped Twitch climb to her feet; the fairy leaned heavily on the guitar player, moaning. Her eyes drifted aimlessly and Adrian wondered if she had a concussion. Eddie’s eye wandered, too, for a moment, and he shook himself like a dog shrugging off water. “Whatever this place is,” the guitarist said, “bad things happened here.” He looked right at Adrian as he said it.

Adrian swallowed, his throat dry and scratchy. “Let’s get out.”

Mouser stood up and balled her fists on her hips. Her pajamas were covered in red roses. “By Jupiter, this is a queer Hell that aims only to bore me.”

That didn’t sound like Mouser; Adrian stared, but saw only the club gopher’s face over rose-printed pajamas.

“Careful who you go calling
queer
,” Mike said.

“Sorry our conversation isn’t snappy enough for you,” Adrian added.

“This smacks of addle-pated Roundhead theology!” she snorted. “What atonement can there be in listening to the yammering of idiots?”

“And that, sister,” Eddie agreed, “is exactly why I stopped going to church.”

“
Church?
” Mouser harrumphed. “And what gyrating African debauch were you accustomed to call
church?
”

“
Excuse
me?” Eddie glared at her.

A loud
creak
sounded upstairs, and with it, the ceiling of the basement bowed in slightly.

Adrian pulled himself away from Mouser and her bizarre words and poked his head out the bedroom door. He’d passed the cellar on the way down without taking in much, so now he looked more closely. The stairs, sagging against the wall, fell down into a small hall, in which squatted an icebox. Over the icebox hung another uvula-light, this one dim and dark.

At the foot of the staircase was another room, a storage room that had once held the furnace, and beyond the icebox was a third chamber. In real life his uncle had kept animals in there, for experimentation and organ harvesting. Adrian had lain awake at night listening to the terrified clucking of doomed chickens. He stared at the door now and wondered what horrible thing could be there in this twisted version of reality.

“I think you’re all really here,” he said slowly, “and I think
here
is
inside my dream
, somehow, and I think it’s my fault.”

“And the idiots yammer yet.” Mouser folded her arms and grimaced.

Adrian turned on the woman. “Who
are
you?” he asked.

“I ain’t gonna waste time trying to prove anybody’s who they say they are,” Eddie snapped. “I’m here, dammit, and I wanna be in Chicago. What are the exits?”

“The stairs.” Adrian stepped aside and pointed. Eddie looked.

THUMP!

Warm streams of stinking liquid dripped from the ceiling at the noise. Adrian felt a little sick.

“Dollars to donuts that’s Semyaz and his bodies, stomping around,” Eddie muttered.

“I ought to have known Hell’s coin would be Flemish!” Mouser snapped. “Heretics…! What is a
donut?
”

Mike stared at her and chuckled. “I guess getting your head bit off really did a number on you.”

Eddie shrugged the comment off. “
She
might be a figment.” Then he looked back at her quizzically. “Or she might be someone else. Jim?” he asked cautiously, looking into Mouser’s eyes.

“I do not know a
Jim!
” she snapped back. “If you are to torture me for love, get on with it!”

“She should write lyrics,” Mike grinned.

“Right.” Eddie returned to his task. “Time to search this place for other exits.”

Adrian shook his head. “I’m telling you, I grew up in this house. The stairs is it.”

Eddie cocked an eyebrow at him. “You grew up in a house made out of flesh?”

“Ah … not exactly.”

“That’s right,” Eddie nodded slowly. “
Not exactly
. Now let’s find another way up and out.”

“Okay.” Adrian took a deep breath, slowly, so he didn’t seem agitated. “Just … be careful. There’s bad stuff creeping around in my dreams.”

“That’s okay,” Eddie told him. “In your dreams, I still know karate.”

“What about this?” Mike pointed at the coal chute.

“Cemented shut,” Adrian said. His uncle hadn’t wanted him sneaking out at night, when he had first moved in and had still been small enough to shimmy through the hole.

“Check it,” Eddie ordered.

Mike lifted the opening over the chute, which was limp and fleshy like a flap of skin. Inside was a gnarled bud of meatiness squeezing tightly shut, resembling the inner curl of a clenched fist. “Uh …” Mike said, at a loss.

Eddie shook his head. “Check it,” he repeated.

Mike grimaced and hesitated.

Mouser laughed. “What pusillanimous devils ye be!”

Mike raised his eyebrows and pointed at the coal chute. “You do it,” he told her.

Mouser promptly sloshed across the dank bedroom, moving doggedly but without haste, like someone resigned to taking orders. Flaring her nostrils in small defiance, she shoved her arm in the chute, up to the elbow.

“Chicken,” Eddie said to Mike.

Mike shrugged. “She practically volunteered.”

“What do you feel?” Adrian asked. For his part, he felt like throwing up. Strangely, he didn’t feel the slightest bit sleepy.

Mouser shrugged. “I have played midwife to more than one of my father’s cows. This is much the same.”

“Deeper,” Eddie told her, and she shoved her arm in up to the shoulder. “And now?”

“No calf’s head,” she said. “All womb.”

Mike shuddered. “If that had looked like a womb, I’d have stuck my own arm inside.”

“Enough,” Eddie told the girl, and she pulled her arm out. “Who are you?”

Mouser looked at each of them in turn, her eyes skeptical. “I am Elaine Canning,” she said. “Which of the Princes of Hell do you serve?”

“We don’t serve any Princes of Hell,” Mike murmured. He looked astonished.

“We don’t serve
anybody
,” Adrian added.

Twitch was standing upright under her own power now, rubbing her eyes.

“You’re in Hell,” Eddie said. It wasn’t a question.

“I am a murderess. Ought I be elsewhere?” She pulled her arm out of the sphincter in the wall and shook off a thick film of yellowish goo.

“What year did you die?” Eddie furrowed his brow.

THUMP!

“Not sure we have time for this,” Adrian hissed.

“The Year of Our Lord sixteen hundred forty-five. I was taken by a Roundhead cannonball while walking the ramparts of my family home and watching for the man I loved.”

Eddie hesitated. “Did you love a man named
James?
” he asked.

Elaine Canning, or Mouser, or whoever she was, looked like she had been punched in the face.

“Come on!” Adrian lost patience and charged out into the basement, the others following.

Eddie came at his shoulder, silent and thoughtful-looking.

Adrian pointed. “Two rooms.”

Eddie kept his voice down—the sound of bodies moving about on the floor above was louder out here. “Mike, Twitch!” He pointed at the room in the corner, and dragged Mouser with him into the room at the foot of the stairs.

Adrian made to follow Eddie, but the guitarist stopped him with a glare and pointed at the icebox. Adrian nodded, his heart falling into his boots as his companions disappeared behind various doors, leaving him alone.

He faced the icebox, squatting ominously in the near-darkness. It hummed, but not with the low, crackling hum of electric devices. Looking at it now, Adrian saw that the icebox didn’t have a power cord, anyway. Instead it had what looked like a segmented, vaguely scaly tail, like you might see on the backside of an armadillo, lying in the cold water on the floor. Its hum was the hum of discontented appetite, the belly rumbling of a man about to sit down to a meal that he already knew would not be sufficient. It reminded him, all in all, of the wardrobe upstairs that had unexpectedly attacked him.

There was no good way to die, but being eaten by a fleshy refrigerator in the basement of your own mind seemed like a particularly humiliating one.

Adrian bit back curses, grabbed the handle and yanked open the door.

The icebox didn’t bite him, and opened. Warm, wet air washed over him, like the steam from a sink full of dishes billowing into an already dank and hot kitchen. The steam came rich with a rotting stink of meat, and Adrian sucked in air through closed teeth to try to control his gag reflex.

Inside the icebox, in a puddle of water, lay a tongue as long as his arm.

Adrian stared at it and felt like crying. This was no dream. Something terrible was happening, and it was happening to him. It felt like it was happening
inside
him.

The tongue twitched—

Adrian swung the door closed, and it stuck shut with a wet
squelch
.

“
Mierda.
” Mike stumbled out of the back room, Twitch behind him. The bassist held his hand over his face like he was trying not to throw up.

“The room is a latrine,” the fairy explained matter-of-factly. “Or at least, the bottom half of one.” A cloud of cloacal stink followed behind them.

Footfalls passed over Adrian’s head and he froze. They sounded like they were heading for the top of the stairs.

Eddie appeared in the doorway of the third room. “There’s a way out,” he hissed. “Hurry!”

Adrian shuffled across the floor, really wishing he had shoes on his feet. He was the last into the room, and entering it, he stepped down into deeper water, swirling with warm and cold currents. As he passed through the entrance he saw the door at the top of the stairs crack open. He didn’t wait to see who was coming, and shut the door behind him.

He expected this room to be lit by a naked 40-watt bulb, pulled on and off by a chain. Instead, in the warm water in which he stood swam five-foot-long eels whose entire bodies but for their bulbous heads glowed yellow-green in the darkness, casting a sickly phosphorescent glow upwards. Lit from beneath, everyone’s faces looked cracked and cadaverous, with hollow pits for eyes above green slab cheeks. Adrian expected twisted steel shelving, stacked deep with jars, cans and boxes of food, all well past their expiration dates and yet months away from being eaten. Instead, there were piles of bodies.

Human bodies.

And he knew some of them.

“Son of a bitch.”

“Shh.” Eddie pointed up at a hole in the corner of the ceiling. “Old furnace vent,” he whispered. “It’s got to lead up to the other rooms.”

Only it didn’t look like an old furnace vent. It looked like an open toothless mouth, just big enough to swallow a human being whole.

Twitch must have read the uncertainty in Adrian’s face. “I’ll go,” the fairy volunteered. She turned to face the vent in the corner, leaped forward—

and plowed headfirst onto the pile of corpses.

“Mab’s shiny belly!” she spat.

“Twitch can’t change shape.” There was a note of panic in Mike’s voice.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, “and you’ve lost your superpower of deep insight. This time, you first.”

He half threw the bassist across the room and Mike started scrambling up the mound of bodies. His bare feet slipped on bellies and crushed heads, turning their necks away at impossible angles.

“
Fundillo,
” he grunted.

Adrian stared down at the eels, tears stinging his eyes. At the top of the pile lay the body of his father.

“Oh, man.” Mike lingered at the top of the stack on all fours, staring up into the dark hole.

“Pretend it leads to a womb,” Twitch quipped. “If that’s your preference.”

The staircase outside creaked.

“Go!” Eddie hissed. The guitar player scissor-punched Mike in the butt, pushing him forward into the darkness. Then he shoved Mouser up the pile.

Adrian watched them step on the bodies. He was fascinated, horrified and sick. He recognized faces from his childhood. There were neighbors, kids who had gone missing, a survey taker who had really made his uncle angry one day. He didn’t know why their bodies were piled here. Had his uncle actually killed them?

Or was this some twisted invention of his own dreaming mind? Did Adrian wish that he, Adrian, had killed all these people?

But then why was his father on top of the pile?

Twitch stepped onto his father’s chest and sprang up lightly into the vent. Adrian couldn’t be sure, but he thought the opening of the vent constricted a little bit around the fairy as she went into it, like a mouth closing over a morsel.