Dark Weather

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  Dark Weather

  Sequel to Fair Weather

  Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  Copyright © 2016 by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  All Rights Reserved, no part of this book may be

  Reproduced without prior permission of the author

  except in the case of brief quotations and reviews

  Cover design by

  Grady Earls

  For all those who have been waiting to hear the next instalment of Vespasian and Molly’s story, the first of many I hope.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  It woke me. I was alone and as the sleet pelted on the window, I heard the crash of the face smashing against the glass.

  I leapt up but the rain was so heavy and dark, it hid almost everything except the thunder. I had seen the huge nose splayed out, the eyes wide open and the forehead a pale jagged stone. Yet now, my own faced pressed against the inside of the window, I couldn’t see the face outside and I couldn’t see blood, but I could see that the glass hadn’t broken.

  Before racing outside to discover what on earth had happened, I galloped the stairs down to find Vespasian. He was stretched on the long sofa, reading, with Randle curled on his lap. He smiled at me over the book.

  “It seems they have found us at last, my love,” he said, his voice soft but lacking all emotion. “I shall have to build a barrier.”

  I sat down and stared at him. “Who? Burglars? Do we have to build a wall?”

  Randle sighed and climbed from his father’s lap, settling back down on the cushions while Vespasian stood and reached out one hand. I took it, his long hard fingers closing firm around mine, as he led me outside.

  The long terrace, partially roofed, sheltered us from the rain but the drip, drip drummed over the edge of the PVC. But I stood back for another reason. The icy cold and the sluice of damp were uncomfortable but there was also an alien chill and a draught of something strange, seeming far more threatening than any winter storm.

  I was clinging to Vespasian’s hand and he did not let me go. “I can barricade our home and ourselves. There’s no danger, little one,” he told me quietly, but the danger I felt was malicious and unmoving. Ice dripped down the back of my neck but this time it wasn’t rain. Yet no injured body lay beneath our window and no splatters of blood showed where the crash had occurred.

  Looking up at Vespasian, I whispered, “You know what it is, don’t you? So tell me.”

  Still holding me, with his other hand he pointed out beyond the terrace into the soaking darkness of our garden. I saw little except the trees blowing in the rain sodden wind. And then, staring unblinking as though hypnotised, I realised the wind had subsided. There was no wind nor even a breeze to blow at our trees so viciously. Lightning stabbed through the bare branches and reflected in the lake, but something else reflected too, sharp and distinct.

  Our garden was haunted.

  Unreadable shapes swirled their faded colours. Two – three – more than three. Ghostly wisps stared with black eyes from the treetops and the freeze of penetrating threat. Transparency thickened into solid blackness and the eyes glowed through it.

  Narrowed eyes, heavy lidded, gazed back with hungry malice and Vespasian said, “Be gone. Be gone into the darkness. You are not permitted here.”

  The fleeting shapes shrank, darting back amongst our trees. Yet an ancient voice, bodiless, throatless, cackled like chestnuts breaking under boots. “You are not my master. I go where I choose.”

  A whisper floated on the wind. “Don’t you pity us? Yet it was you who set us free. You might become our master since you destroyed Lilith.”

  “I am no master of demons nor do I trade in cruelty,” Vespasian murmured, “and I cannot pity the inhumans looking to spread misery and pain in a world already suffering.”

  The shadows clarified. Shapes became arms, fingers reaching, and legs, feet pointing. Faces formed around the eyes but snarled, spitting or snapping. Some, becoming clearer, were coiled serpents, heads darting forwards with eyes red and teeth like fangs.

  In the pause, while I watched the horror mounting, turning the beauty of our garden to terror, Vespasian spoke two more indecipherable words and then looked down at me.

  “The barrier is complete,” Vespasian told me. “I have built what will remain impassable at the edge of the terrace. These creatures cannot harm us. They cannot touch us. But one by one I will destroy any who remain to challenge us.”

  He led me inside, but I couldn’t sit or think of other things. Few now believed in demons and that was a salvation of sorts. But I had been with Vespasian when he had destroyed Lilith. I had even been able to help him. I knew the truth of demons, and I knew what they could become. These pitiful things were separate and although hideous, I knew each solitary thing was, in itself, a thousand times less hideous than Lilith had been. Yet wickedness, malice and venomous hatred in a haunted garden was a nightmare. I felt haunted myself. I walked quickly back to the bedroom to the window where the face had crashed. I dressed in a hurry.

  The slam of the rain on the glass panes had diminished. The rain was turning to ice and gradually shimmered into crystal flakes of stunning beauty. It was snowing. The fairy white dither fell from the trees, and the haunting shapes blurred, disappearing into the night.

  Vespasian stayed silent and motionless. For some moments our room smelled of dark suspicion and the furniture had disappeared. All I could see was the window, the floating of snow outside, and Vespasian’s tall shadowed back.

  His voice sounded muted and softly rhythmic as though he was chanting. “Lilith has diminished into the ether for many years to come. But the demons of Samhain come in her place. They wake when she sleeps. She will sleep for a hundred years to come, and hundreds more if I can hold her destruction true for as long as I live.”

  “I didn’t know,” I whispered, “and I only knew Lilith was gone. Are you saying these things are like her children? Born of evil? Did you ever tell me any of this? I never understood.”

  There was a great deal I didn’t understand, but Vespasian had not explained. When he appeared so gloriously in my modern world, it was all me explaining to him. Explaining about hot running water and flush toilets, explaining about cars and buses, planes and telephones. Moving from the simplified to the matters I barely understood myself, I had presented the television, music and theatre. Finally, I had presented the computer, something I didn’t have a hope of understanding anyway. My new beloved swallowed, tinkered, and began to understand more than I ever did.

  He'd said, “Many of the unseen can pass through the ether. Now humanity has caught up, it seems. I find it logical that your telephones and computers can speak through space.”

  But it was now a modern life, and nearly a thousand years since he had slaughtered Lilith and all her power. I had never known, never been told, of the complications that might remain.

  Lilith would eventually return. The dead becoming undead. Yet in the meantime, the power she had concentrated within her was free to take back its separate shapes and challenge where it wish
ed.

  The ice swept our room and the fury remained. The malice sucked at the corners, a ghostly haunting of moving shadows.

  I was trembling, unable to stop. The fear ate into me. But Vespasian turned from the window to the darkness where I now sat with Randle, hugging him as tightly as I could, and spreading both arms wide, Vespasian spoke and something sparked. The lights sprang back, and once more, our room was the comfortable space I had decorated just a few months ago.

  Randle was still cheerfully absorbed in his book, and I realised that only Vespasian and I had seen the haunting and the black threats. That, at least, was some small consolation.

  The snow dither turned from the magical hush to the fierce ice of hail and then, after only moments, back to rain. Even that seemed less than before.

  I was searching for my gloves. I told Vespasian, “I need the Post Office.” It wasn’t worth driving, since this was tucked into a corner of the local chemist, just three minutes down the road at the edge of the village. “I want fresh air too,” I added. “And since I can’t go out the back, I might as well go out the front.”

  Forehead puckered, he stared at me. “If they are here, they could also be elsewhere. And it is, as no doubt you have noticed, snowing, hailing and sleeting. At the least, take the car.”

  Actually, I wanted to suffer anything at all that might banish that other nightmare from my jumbled thoughts, so I told him no, I’d walk. And he nodded, returning to his book and Randle’s outstretched arms.

  I had always thought the village lanes deliciously beautiful. Ancient cottages cuddled beneath their thatches, windows squeezed into crooked walls and tiny doors squashed between their lintels. Flint brick sank behind the bare knots of wisteria, others nestling behind the ivy. Trees were a fantasy of entwined black arms, curling, crawling and outlining the glimpses of sky between. I breathed out what had horrified me and breathed in what I loved, even though the rain was soaking my hat, scarf, gloves, coat and boots.

  Two minutes from the chemist, shaking off the sluice of rain from my shoulders, I saw the next nightmare. Vespasian had said the ghost creatures would be in places other than our garden, but this might have been caused by demon, or man.

  The body lay by the side of the lane, partially hidden by bog, by mut, by undergrowth and by puddles. At first, thinking it some poor homeless soul who had collapsed where the shelter of the bushes might help him for the night, I approached the two large feet appearing from the shadows. Well shod and trousers of heavy tweed then denied the possibility of some wretched beggar, and I pushed my head beneath the sedge and thorns.

  Calling, “Excuse me. Can I help? Are you hurt?” I thought of a car accident, fumbled for my phone and rang both police and ambulance. Not wanting to wait since the rain made me feel I was walking the swamps, I called out again, “There’s an ambulance coming. Someone will be here to help any minute,” but then as a last blink of hopeful curiosity, I pushed my head further, bending beneath crooked branches. Immediately I wished I hadn’t.

  Dead and mutilated, this was the body of a middle-aged man, and what was left of his face seemed vaguely familiar. But I vomited into the slush and stood there, bent over and heaving.

  Although shaking and barely breathing, I ran to the chemist and pushed open the door, dripping water on their tiles and gasping. The girl from the Post Office hurried over. I told her what I’d seen, and the chemist came to my shoulder with a dozen questions.

  “I don’t know,” I said in a garbled stutter. “Either a car accident with a driver that didn’t stop. Or murder. It’s – absolutely – horrible. But I phoned for the police and ambulance, and I think I can hear a siren already.”

  The ambulance took away the oil-clothed body-shape and the police, after plodding, searching and talking for an hour, found us in the chemist’s and talked to us for another hour. In the middle of this, Vespasian phoned, worried that I’d not returned. He was about to get out the car, but would have to bring Randle with him since no one else was there to watch him.

  I explained. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. They’ve promised me a lift. No need to come, especially not with Randle.”

  Vespasian was standing outside the front door under the porch, waiting for me. The police explained the situation to him, but had to get away and report back at the station so Vespasian led me inside, bringing me a towel for my hair while I discarded every sodden item of clothing by the coat hooks in the corridor.

  We went into the kitchen, not willing to discuss such matters in front of Randle so I put the kettle on and Vespasian made tea. “Murder? Or accident?”

  “Murder,” I said. It honestly couldn’t have been anything else.

  “And who do you know within this area, who would be susceptible to demonic occupation?”

  “Oh shit.” I couldn’t think. “There’s a rude old man who collects the trolleys for the supermarket but I don’t know anything else about him. There’s the postman. He’s unpleasant but again – I don’t know him personally. There’s the woman who calls herself a brewster at the cafe in the main square. Do women do things like that? Do you actually mean one of those shapes from our garden could be – instigating – such things?”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not. These things travel.”

  I was slurping the tea, burning my tongue but not caring. I knew my nightmares would now be doubled. I had started staring out of the front windows, needing to avoid our back garden. I seemed to need the natural, unspoiled and tranquil. The pelting sleet had stopped, and the other lane leading away from the village was gleaming beneath the palest sheen of the sun.

  Along the laneway, on the side where the late sun now angled, the roadsides were green grass, shimmering with the memory of the rain. But on the other side where the sunshine had not reached, the grass was white with frost. The lane itself was just like a stream, so wet it reflected both sun and shade.

  I turned back to Vespasian. “I don’t think I can cook anything grand for dinner.”

  He smiled back. “You make the custard. I’ll make the dinner.”

  We had frozen pizza which they both liked but I didn’t, and I made chocolate brownies with custard and Randle jumped up and down and said I was magic.

  That was a word I found troubling now and shook my head. “Just human,” I said.

  “Just Mummy,” Randle said.

  I plodded over to shove the dirty plates in the dishwasher, and knew I was never going to sleep well again.

  Chapter Two

  “It’s time for bed,” I whispered to Randle, trying to control my breathing and my voice.

  He nodded and clutched his book, looking down suddenly and kissing the illustration of the fluff covered rabbit on the open page.

  “Night-night, Daddy,” he said softly. “An’ night-night, bunny.” He had only recently turned three, but our son’s reading ability was improving. But then, as I tucked him up in bed, he added, “I don’ like them wotsits, Mummy. I doesn’t want them in my cupboard.”

  I opened his wardrobe door, showing the lack of demon presence.

  “Fanks, Mummy,” Randle said, curled up and promptly fell asleep.

  We had not lived long in this house. It was old but we were recent. Vespasian had bought it for me just six months ago and we’d moved into the huge spacious comfort early in the summer, choosing new furniture as I spread out all my old belongings into this two-storey dream. I even employed a gardener to look after our tiny forest, the huge wooden deck which overlooked it and the vines and twisting avenue of lilac, wisteria and jasmine. The battleground of perfumes would welcome any visitor to the house, leading from kitchen to lake and the little forest beyond.

  The village of Wethawand, small, deliciously pretty and very old, nestled in a countryside just as lovely. I’d made a point of getting to know the shop keepers, and the locals I met in the one small cafe. Vespasian walked with me more often than you might have expected, but he made no effort to encourage friendships.

  Then the
sun bright weather had swung from sweet to vicious and the end of October felt more like the middle of January. All Hallows Eve and the bleak magic of Samhain had increased the freeze and now the snow hung from the bare tree branches like Christmas decorations.

  It was too cold to walk on the terrace and too cold to wander beneath the trees, but it was not the winter freeze which bothered me. For the eyes that still watched us were ice too, colder than the snow, and a white so brilliant it had seemed like a fire of silver luminescence.

  ‘They cannot enter our home,” Vespasian had told me, and he said it again. Yet I heard whispers in the night and the electricity flickered, blinking out sometimes and pitching me into a blackness beyond the dark of the night.

  I went out once to watch the stars when the sky was free of cloud. And there was another reason. I wanted to show Vespasian and the whispering demons and myself too, that I was not intimidated. Yet as I stood, looking up to the sky which was as glorious as I had imagined with its milky spangle of starlight, the moving of the trees without breeze reminded me of my panic. I ran back indoors.

  Vespasian looked up from his book. “Call me next time, my love.”

  So I needed his hand just to go out from my own back door.

  I cooked, I cleaned, though without much energy, I read endlessly since losing myself in someone else’s world was the best of all, and I went to bed, making love to my husband. That was when I forgot any fear or any dark moving shadows. Life continued. Yet when I had slept, and then woke, startled, I heard the whispering outside our bedroom window.