RAIN/Damned to Cold Fire (Two Supernatural Horror Novels): A RED LINE Horror Double: Supernatural

by Craig Saunders

  *

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Marion closed the door quietly behind her.

  “Is she sleeping?” asked Margaret.

  “Out like a light.”

  “How much did you give her?”

  Marion shrugged. “Five milligrams of Temazepam. Just enough to send her over, not enough so we can’t wake her up if we have to.”

  “OK,” said Margaret. “What do we do now?”

  Marion almost laughed, but she kept a straight face with some effort. Margaret might be the night manager, but she couldn’t manage a fart in a bath. She could do a mean rota, but that was about the extent of her abilities.

  She’d gone out to find a phone that worked and hadn’t managed that.

  She was sweet enough, though. The girls generally ran rings around her, but no one grumbled, much. She wasn’t a stickler for the rules, and her heart was in the right place. That went a long way with Marion.

  Poor cow, she thought. How the hell do you manage this?

  Marion rubbed Margaret’s arm.

  “I think we have a cup of tea.”

  “The police …”

  “We can’t get through to them. The phones are out. You tried the shop, you tried three houses. You couldn’t even find a person to come and help. You seriously think anyone’s going to come?”

  Do you think there’s anyone left to come? Marion pushed that down. That thought was a little harder than she was prepared to face right now.

  “I’ve got a mobile.”

  “So have I. I don’t think it will do any good. You’re welcome to try. The … ah …” She didn’t really want to say the rain. She wasn’t quite ready to go there. Not yet. “Policeman. The fake policeman. He’s done something to the phones.”

  Something to the people?

  Maybe. Probably.

  “Even the police can’t interfere with the mobiles, can they?”

  Bless her, thought Marion. She was tired and scared, but it wasn’t Margaret’s fault. She didn’t understand. Marion couldn’t blame her for that.

  She took her by the elbow and led her toward the kitchen.

  “I don’t know what the police can and can’t do. All I know is the last time we called them, a psycho turned up and killed Wendy.”

  Margaret let out an involuntary sob. Marion wasn’t far off crying herself, but she’d dealt with her husband’s cancer and a senile mother, and raised five kids on her own and seen them all off to jobs, marriage, and one to university. If she could deal with that, she could deal with this.

  Maybe.

  But she’d learned to worry about one thing at a time long ago.

  “Tea first. Questions later.”

  “Do you think George will be OK?”

  “He’ll be fine,” she said. George was currently boarding up Mrs. March’s broken window. It would probably be useless in keeping the man out, but it might stop the rain coming in.

  Unless the man was the rain …

  But she didn’t want to think about that. They reached the kitchen, and Marion put the tin kettle on the burner and clicked it alight. She busied herself with the cups and tea bags and milk. Whatever she could do to avoid looking at Margaret. She didn’t want to see her falling apart.

  She needed a little time, too, to get her own head straight. She was tired and scared. She knew someone had to deal with this situation, and no one else seemed to be able to do it. It didn’t mean she had to be happy about it.

  The steam from the kettle rolled across the kitchen. It whistled. She poured hot water.

  When the tea was ready, she passed Margaret a cup. She noticed her manager’s hands were shaking. She took out a cigarette and offered one. Margaret shook her head. Marion clamped one between her teeth and rifled through her apron pocket until she found her lighter among her tissues and lipstick and her pills.

  She didn’t bother looking to Margaret to see if she was going to make an issue of her smoking in the kitchen. She really didn’t care one way or the other.

  She took a puff and held it in, savouring the smoke and the small rush as the nicotine hit her tired body and woke it up.

  “Right,” she said.

  Margaret didn’t look up. She just sipped her tea. She held the cup in both hands.

  “Right,” said Marion again. That was as far as she’d got in her head. She had no idea where she was going from there.

  The only thing to do with a crappy job you didn’t want to do was to start it. Follow it through until it was finished. She knew that. She just didn’t know where to start.

  But she knew if she didn’t do it, the man … the rain … would be back. He had unfinished business.

  With Mrs. March.

  She couldn’t think about the rain. She couldn’t think about something that could turn to water or water that could turn into a person. She couldn’t think about a thing that could strip the flesh from Wendy in an instant, something that terrified Jane until she was incoherent. She believed it was the rain. Impossible though it might be, she didn’t waste time on disbelief. But her mind shied away from it every time it loomed.

  But she could think about Mrs. March.

  Whatever was going on, Mrs. March was the key. Everything else flowed from there. The night started there. The night would finish there. She knew it instinctively, but on a higher level too. It was like a Sudoku puzzle or a crossword. You pared away the parts you could do before you built on what you knew. The rain wanted Mrs. March, and from there, the rest of it would follow.

  She pulled her second cigarette from her packet and smoked it in quiet thought.

  Maybe they could give him what he wanted?

  “No.”

  “Marion?”

  “Sorry. Thinking aloud.”

  “About what?”

  “Just give me a minute,” she said. She was aware of Margaret nodding, but she was in deep thought again.

  Giving him what he wanted wasn’t an option. So how was she going to stop him?

  Hide her?

  A darker thought flitted across her mind. She shook her head. Margaret looked at her questioningly. Marion didn’t acknowledge her.

  If Mrs. March were dead, would he go away?

  No. She couldn’t do that.

  But of course she could.

  She’d done it before. Was it any different to giving a resident a little medication? When their wives, their husbands, asked her to? Not out loud, but with their eyes …

  That was different, though. They were suffering.

  Was it different? Jane, Marion, even Margaret. They were suffering because of Mrs. March.

  She shook her head again. Fighting it. She didn’t want to do it. Mrs. March hadn’t done anything to deserve it. It wasn’t her fault.

  But then, it wasn’t Marion’s fault either. Why should she die protecting a woman who didn’t even know she was alive anyway?

  “No,” she said again.

  “Marion? Are you OK?”

  She nodded. “I’m fine,” she said. But the thought wouldn’t go away.

  *

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  John opened his eyes. His head was resting on his chest. He must have fallen asleep. He lifted his head gingerly, because he knew it was going to hurt.

  It did. The pain in his neck from resting at an uncomfortable angle woke up the pain in the rest of his body. As he breathed in, his ribs grated. His teeth felt loose. He reached up a hand slowly, trying not to shift his ribs, and felt a large lump along his cheekbone. There was a scab across the lump where the skin had split. He didn’t think it was broken, but it might be. It hurt like hell, but not as much as his feet.

  The candle he’d lit earlier was halfway down. He had no idea how long a candle burned for. It was a fat candle, but it must have been one of the low-wax ones. The outside of the candle was higher than the middle part, but lower than it had been. The flame was flickering in the wind from the broken window. It was a miracle it hadn’t gone out.

&
nbsp; With the wind making it burn faster? Maybe an hour. Maybe two.

  He didn’t want to look at his feet, but he knew he had to.

  He could see a pool of dark blood around his left foot. He’d been out long enough for the blood to congeal and for the bleeding to stop.

  He didn’t know if there was enough light to see his feet properly, but he couldn’t face the journey into the kitchen to get another candle.

  The smashed window had let in the rain. It was still raining heavily. The wind was blowing the curtains up. They went up, billowing, then fell down again. The curtains were heavy and soaked, but the wind was still strong enough to lift them.

  There was a trail of blood through the living room to the kitchen, where he’d crawled earlier.

  The lockbox was still there. He could see the shape of it under a black plastic rubbish sack. More, he could feel it.

  It was waiting. It felt alive to him, somehow, in a way that it hadn’t earlier.

  Maybe it was more real to him now he knew what it could do.

  He pulled his right foot toward him, putting off looking at his left foot. He bent his leg in, knee out, foot toward his crotch. Steeled himself and looked at it.

  It wasn’t as bad as he was expecting. There was a big cut on the pad of his toe, but nothing that would stop him walking. A cut on the tender part inside. His heel was unmarked. If he had to, he could put his weight on the heel.

  He couldn’t see any glass in the cuts. They looked clean.

  He slid his right foot out straight and pulled his left foot inward.

  “Shit.”

  There was a big piece of glass stuck right in the middle of his foot. It was covered in dark blood, made darker in the candlelight.

  There were a few shallower cuts. He could live with those. He wasn’t worried about those.

  The one with the glass in it needed stitches. He didn’t have any medical training, but if a cut had a big piece of anything stuck in it, he figured stitches were a no brainer.

  But he wasn’t going to get stitches, was he?

  He didn’t know what was happening in town, but he couldn’t hear any sirens; there were no people noises. It must be two, maybe three in the morning. The quietest time, but there would be cars. He could see the flickering orange of a big fire in the distance. Fire engines should be around. There should be emergency services.

  It wasn’t a big town, but it wasn’t tiny either. The power should have been back on by now, rain or no rain.

  No. He didn’t think he’d be getting to hospital anytime soon.

  So? Deal with it. Stop being a pussy.

  He tried to think around it. He knew a little first aid. Probably about the same as most other ordinary people. Less than someone who’d done a first aid course. More than someone who didn’t read a lot of novels. You pick things up, reading novels. Of course, plenty of it was made up. But some of it wasn’t. He knew the glass was probably stopping the worst of the bleeding. The cold had probably helped too. His feet had gone numb. Circulation would take some time to get going again, but even with the cold, if anything really drastic had been cut, he’d have bled to death while he was asleep or passed out … whatever it was.

  John sat that way for a while. Foot pulled in toward him, cradling it in his hands. Thinking.

  He pulled himself across the living room floor again. Earlier, he’d crawled, but he didn’t want to crawl this time. Just pulling. Trying not to use his feet at all. Now he knew the state he was in, he didn’t want to make anything worse.

  He took the medicine chest from under the sink in the kitchen, along with some more candles. The medicine chest didn’t really contain anything useful. There was a bandage that he’d used to wrap his knee a long time ago, when he’d fallen down his stairs after getting pretty drunk. A couple of plasters floating about loose, a roll of plaster that you had to cut to size, three gauze pads, one out of the packet with a square cut out of it. A bottle of hydrogen peroxide. What he wanted more than anything else was on the top shelf, next to the whiskey.

  But he wasn’t getting that until he’d sorted his feet. He’d have to pull it while he was dry.

  He wanted to light the candles, but he didn’t want to go back into the living room for the matches. John took a few deep breaths and pushed himself to his knees. The room swam in and out of focus for a few scary seconds, but then everything solidified.

  He turned the hob on until he heard the hiss of gas escaping, then hit the starter button. It clicked a few times, tiny sparks flying, followed by the low down whump as the gas caught.

  He thought it would keep him warm, and it gave a little more light, so he left it on after he lit the candles, one by one.

  The candles he set in a rough semicircle by his feet.

  He flipped the lid off the top of the bottle of disinfectant, then gripped the glass in his foot and tried to yank it, but it slipped though his hand, slick with his blood. All he succeeded in doing was shifting it in his foot. Blood ran along the length of glass.

  He was dimly aware he was whimpering. It was a pitiful sound, low enough so he couldn’t hear it, as such. It was little more than a feeling in his throat.

  He pulled a tea towel from the handle to the oven door and wrapped it around the shard before gripping it again. He gripped as hard as he dared in case he snapped it off and really fucked his chances of walking again. Then, with a shout that hurt his throat, he yanked it straight out.

  Blood poured out of the wound. He splashed the disinfectant all over it before he could lose his nerve. It hit the wound and started to hurt. It began to fizz. Then it really hurt. He gritted his teeth and groaned, holding his foot and rocking back and forth on the floor as if rocking would make it hurt less, even though he knew it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.

  He tore the packets of pads open with his free hand and his teeth and pressed all three against the wound. They soaked through almost instantly. He kept pressing down, took the tea towel from around the piece of glass he’d removed, and pressed that down, too. The blood kept coming.

  If he wrapped it now, he wouldn’t be able to get his shoes on. He thought about trying to burn the wound shut, like someone in an old war movie. Cauterize it. But he didn’t really know how to do it. He thought maybe you needed pitch. So he sat there, rocking, pressing the wound.

  He pulled the tea towel away after what he reckoned was about ten minutes. He didn’t look at the wound. He didn’t want to take the pads away. He wrapped around the instep with a roll of plaster, then the bandage, then plaster to hold the bandage on. He poured the disinfectant on his right foot, wrapped what he could with the remaining plaster. Bit down and stood up. He wobbled, feeling lightheaded. The things he wanted were on the top shelf. He didn’t waste any time fighting with himself about it. An old pack of co-codamol and a half-empty bottle of whiskey. He washed down two tablets with a hefty gulp of whiskey. He thought about it, then took another two for good measure and washed them down with the rest of whiskey.

  His stomach burned, and his eyes watered, but he was sure the pain was fading. Not completely, and most of it was probably in his mind. The pills shouldn’t work that quickly. He didn’t care if it was in his mind or not. Anything to take the edge off the pain.

  He was good at taking the edges off the pain.

  No, that wasn’t right. The whiskey was good at taking the edge off his pain. It’d been doing a sterling job since Karen’s accident.

  He sliced some bread, lathered some peanut butter on it, mashed it up and swallowed it. It was pretty dry, but he felt better.

  The linoleum in the kitchen was slick with blood. He didn’t know if the wound in his foot was still bleeding, but there wasn’t anything else he could do about it.

  He stumped into his bedroom and pulled his trousers off, put a fresh pair of jeans on. They were thick and stiff, because he hardly ever wore them. He struggled to get his arms over his head, but managed to get a dry jumper on. He didn’t bother with a t-shirt.r />
  He put a sock on his right foot, then slowly pushed his feet into a pair of trainers. The left felt slippery with blood as soon as he’d put his foot in. He figured he wouldn’t bleed to death. But he didn’t know. He didn’t know enough about wounds to be sure. There wasn’t anything he could do about not knowing, just as there wasn’t anything he could do about his foot filling his trainer with blood. He just had to get on with it.

  What he did know was that it wasn’t over. He could feel it in the rain. The glowing rain running down his bedroom window. It was watching him. Waiting.

  He’d pissed it off and won a reprieve. But something was coming. It was in the silence under the rain, where traffic noise should be. A whispering on the wind.

  He took his jacket from the hanger on the curtain rail in his bedroom. Then he took his keys and the box and the key to the box from the floor. With the box wrapped tight in the black sack and safely under his arm, he went to the stairs.

  Looked at the stairs.

  “You can do this,” he told himself. He didn’t believe it.

  “You can,” he said.

  He took the stairs down, threaded carefully through the glass that littered his shop floor, then went out into the night and the rain.

  *

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The rain was halfway up the wheels of John’s car. His feet were already soaked, the rain and blood sloshing through his trainers in a pink swill.

  He opened the car and slid in. The interior was dry, apart from a heavy mist covering all the windows. He sat with the box in his lap and the engine running, set the heater to blow at the front window and flicked the switch to clear the rear window. He watched the hot air eating up the fog on the windscreen. He felt foggy himself. Mix in a heavy dose of shock, a shot of whiskey, and a handful of painkillers. He was lucky he wasn’t just passed out back in his flat.

  But if he let himself slip into sleep now, he’d never know what was going on. The policeman wasn’t the kind to give up. He didn’t think the box had killed him. He didn’t know why, because he really was in the dark about the whole thing. He tried to play it out in his head while he waited for the car to clear.