Kids. What can you do?
She got it.
He read on.
“That’s your decision, John. Give him his wife back, maybe he’ll go away. Maybe he won’t. I can only guess. She was afraid of him. She told me to the day when he’d come back for her. She told me what to leave. She told me to scratch the symbols you saw in your box.
“It’s your decision, John, because I’m dead. But know this. SHE WAS AFRAID. She told me to leave you the blood and bone and tooth and hair. He’ll know what to do with them.
“I would have destroyed them, but she left them for you. I hate it. I hate it as I write it, but I know you’ll do the right thing.”
“Well I’m glad he’s got confidence in me. I’m not sure I do.”
“You’re doing all right.”
A compliment from Smiley. John got the impression compliments were as alien to Smiley as the whole concept of Mr. Hill marrying the wife of the rain.
The night was getting weirder by the minute.
“I know you, John. Karen was a mistake. It pains me to say it. That’s my one regret. Not the fact of Karen being born, but what we did. I need you to understand that. I don’t know why it should bother me, what you think of me. Especially as I’m dead by the time you read this letter. But you need to understand this to go on.
“We should never have had a child. Karen was a miracle. The child of an elemental. My wife wasn’t immortal. Not really. But she was something. Can you imagine? The child of a creature of like her and a mortal man — me.
“But we couldn’t keep her. She was like a beacon. We gave her up for adoption. The Johns. You knew them. They’re dead now, I know. They’re spared the pain you know, but they loved her like she was their own.
“A lifetime of sadness for me and my wife, but joy too, because we knew she would meet you and her life would be full of happiness and love. My wife saw you in our daughter’s life, and we were happy. We knew you would love her. But he would find her eventually. Rain would find her. So we hid her. It hurt, but not as much as losing her. But you know that pain, John. I wish I could take that pain from you. I wish you’d never known the pain of losing her.
“I can’t heal the hurt, John. I love you, even though I could never tell you in life.”
John looked up at David Hill’s corpse. He was glad he was hidden under a sheet. The bloody print of the man’s face seemed to be watching John, even though he was dead.
How could he ever live up to a dead man’s expectations?
“I’m sorry, John, I truly am. More sorry than I could ever say in a letter.
“John, I want to thank you. I want to thank you for loving my daughter. Maybe we made a mistake not raising her, but she had a life. She was happy. My wife saw that. You’re unhappy, John. She saw that, too.
“The money isn’t an apology. It’s just that there was no one else in the whole world who we loved like we love you. It’s not like I worked hard for it. I never wanted it. It almost felt like cheating, so I only spent a little of it and left the rest for you. The money didn’t count. My wife knew the future. Enough of it to pick a few shares here and there …
“You all understand just how much she saw. As you read this, you probably think this is something magical. Some kind of trickery. But you believe it. How could you not?
“I have three last things. Remember, John. Blood and bone and tooth and hair. It’s hers. My wife’s. But you’ve got that already, haven’t you?
“More importantly, my wife saw SOME of the future. She knew the day he’d come back for her. But you need to know this: She couldn’t see him. She didn’t know what he would do. So think. Be careful. She was afraid of him. She knew you would be in terrible danger, BUT SHE DIDN’T SEE HIM.
“You’re careful already. Be more careful. He’s powerful and very, very dangerous.
“You’ve found this out already, but I don’t think you understand just how dangerous. He is capable of more than you could ever know. I hope to God you never find out.
“Last thing, John. The most important thing of all. You might want to read this for yourself.”
John nearly read the next part aloud, but then he saw what was written there.
He read David Hill’s words. Words from before the grave, written over twenty years ago. He read them a second time with tears streaming down his face. His shoulders shook.
Mabel put her arm around his shoulder. She pulled him to her.
“What’s it say?”
“The last part was private,” Mabel told Smiley sternly.
“OK.”
Mandy came back and passed Smiley the bottle of scotch and a tub of biscuits. He took a swig of scotch before passing it to Mandy. She drank, gagged. Mabel took it next. John was last. He stopped crying long enough to take the offered bottle and take a long pull. The scotch warmed his insides.
He felt like they were taking communion, the scotch a part in some ritual they didn’t understand, could never understand. But they were bonded. Brothers and sisters in some kind of crazy cult.
Mandy and Mabel and Smiley and John.
David Hill’s wife had seen them. Entrusted them with her remains. The parts of her sitting in the lockbox. He got it now. She was an elemental. Something not of the world, but of its core. The tooth in the jar wasn’t in water. It was her blood. David Hill’s wife. Karen’s mother. Her real mother she never knew.
“There’s some tissue in the kitchen,” said Mandy. “I’ll get it.”
John smiled his thanks to her. He saw she wasn’t shaking anymore. Her eyes showed signs of life. Fascination. He thought that was good, but a little dangerous too.
She went into the kitchen, and the door slammed behind her. They all heard her scream. It was short and piercing, and then there was nothing.
*
Chapter Forty-Four
Someone was crying farther down the long hall. Windows on one side, showing nothing. The dim light of the rain wasn’t enough to see out into the gardens. On the other side of the hallway were seven rooms. The residents’ rooms. There was an exit at the far end of the hall. The end where Jane stood led back to the kitchen, then farther, to the lobby, the stairs. The front door.
Jane wanted nothing more than to run for the front door. Her car was outside, parked on the gravel. She could get into her car. The power was out, but there was nothing wrong with her car. Start the car. Drive to the police station. Explain … no. Maybe just tell them to get off their arses and drive over a few streets. She’d spoken to them on the phone earlier. She spoke to someone before the policeman who wasn’t a policeman cut in. Surely they knew something was wrong?
Escape would be as simple as turning the key. She even had the car key in her hand.
The sobbing stopped and started again. Occasional cries of pain were mixed in with the sobs. Someone was in real pain. The worst kind of pain. The kind that came on like the sea. You’d think the trough was heaven, even though the pain down there was just as real, just as hard. When you hit the peak, you’d scream or cry or, if you were able, you’d writhe and scissor your legs, grind your teeth.
The kind of pain when you were dying, it hurt too much to scream when you hit the peak. The pain was just too much. It took your breath away, just like it would if you were picked up by a wave and lifted high into the air, and then it dropped right out from under you.
Jane knew. She’d seen it before. She’d felt it.
Pain was subjective. What one could bear, another couldn’t.
The screamer was being lifted and dropped in the waves. A few more drops and they wouldn’t make it. They need help. Professional help.
Jane swore softly. She was all the help they were going to get.
What could she do, though? She’d seen what the rain could do. It had stripped Wendy to her bones in seconds. Wendy’s death was stuck in her head. She remembered her father’s face, dying of cancer. Crying out in pain.
“Fuckers! Fuckers! Eating me! Fuckers!”
<
br /> He’d shouted that over and over, until the tension and pain had gone from his face. At the end, his face had looked nothing like a man’s. Just bone under taut skin, just like a skeleton.
Certain things stuck in her mind.
The old lady drowning in a dry room. Had that been the start of it?
“She needs you.”
Karen March needs you.
Jane got moving. She moved away from the crying. Down the hall that led to the front door and freedom.
She turned into the kitchen, and the world she was living in hit home like a punch to the kidneys. She put her hand over her mouth to stifle a cry but couldn’t stop a whimper escaping.
George was on the floor. His legs were spread. The seam on his trousers had split, and she could see one of his balls. It poked through the leg of his boxer shorts.
That was way more terrible than the blood. The blood didn’t affect her like it should. The sight of George’s scrotum through his split trousers was infinitely more obscene. A sweet man, he’d never hurt anyone. He came out to the home at any hour. It didn’t matter if he was asleep or sick.
It shouldn’t be this way.
Jane reached around her waist and took her apron off. She placed the apron over George and felt better.
There was a lot of blood. It had sprayed across the cold linoleum floor and up the cupboard doors as he fell. There was a deep cut on his face and a cut in his neck. His eyes were open.
The woman was still crying down the hall.
There was something asexual about true pain. Men could scream like girls when they were hurt, and a woman could make a deep grunt. But this was a woman’s pain.
There was a knife stuck in George’s arm.
Chill fingers stroked the back of Jane’s neck. She knew there was no one there. But the chills remained.
The rain, the thing in the rain … Why would it need a knife?
The only answer was that it wouldn’t. Hot on the heels was a realisation far more uncomfortable. Someone had killed George. A person of flesh and bone who could hold and swing a knife with enough force to stick it right through George’s arm, arms that had worked hard all their life, arms with old wiry muscle that would never lift a hammer again. Someone was in the building, someone who was willing to stab an old man in the neck and keep stabbing until he was dead.
The sobbing started up again. Jane reached down to take the knife from George’s arm. She was suddenly acutely aware that she was alone without a weapon and in the dark with someone crazy enough to kill.
The knife was stuck fast.
“Shit,” she whispered. She stood up, her knees cracking, and crossed the room carefully. The ground was slick. She saw footprints in the blood. More than one set.
“Oh … Oh no. Marion …”
Maybe it was Marion crying out down the hall.
Jane took out the largest knife she could find in the cutlery drawer. Clutching it close to her thigh, she stepped out into the hall. She stopped and looked toward the front door, once. Then she turned the other way and headed deeper into the dark.
*
Chapter Forty-Five
Even with the knife for defence, Jane felt naked. The eerie green light in the hall cast strange shadows, and each window she passed threw her reflection back at her. She couldn’t see out into the garden. Anyone could be hiding in the dark out there, staring back at her while she looked at her sickly reflection.
She stopped looking out after the first few windows and concentrated on the sounds in front of her. She looked straight ahead. In the gloom, her eyes wouldn’t be her ally. She would have to use her ears.
Softly she went. Padding along toward the end of the hall, passing five residents’ doors. She’d come out of the first one. The doors to the rest of the rooms were all shut. Maybe they were all dead. All the residents in the other rooms. Why weren’t they crying out? The home should have been full of howling and hollering. Maybe …
Maybe you’d better stop thinking and start acting.
She held the knife high, beside her head, as she reached the last room. The fire exit was right there, at the end of the hall. Her way out.
A little white man on a green background.
She put her hand on the bar. It wasn’t locked. They weren’t allowed to lock the emergency exits.
Why hadn’t they run away? The exit was right there. Why hadn’t they run?
The moaning was coming from the room to her right. The woman wasn’t sobbing anymore. She was running down, like a child’s toy running out of batteries. The injured woman’s cries were warbling and distorted.
What if she hadn’t been able to get out? What if the rain was holding the emergency door shut?
You’re not running, Jane, so it doesn’t matter.
Aren’t I?
The metal bar felt cool, almost cold under her hand. She could push it down. But she didn’t. If she pushed it, whether it opened or not, she’d lose.
Jane took her hand away from the cold metal bar and put it on the brass handle of the resident’s room instead. She pushed the handle down and the door in as quickly as she could. The door slammed back against the wall behind it. She stepped in, looking left, right, ignoring the woman on the bed. Mrs. Greenwood. She wasn’t making any noise. Her throat had been cut right across.
She stepped past the bed. The crying woman’s voice suddenly changed from pain to manic terror.
Jane stepped around the bed and saw the woman. She was on the floor, her head propped against the dead woman’s bedside cabinet.
It was only when the woman began pleading for her life that Jane recognised her.
“Please. No … Please.”
Her voice was mushy. There was blood in her throat. There had to be. A large knife had been rammed through her face. The handle jutted from one cheek. The tip of the blade had reached right through to the other side.
“Oh, Margaret, no … no …”
Margaret was too terrified to recognise Jane’s voice. She couldn’t see it was Jane, either. Not because of the dark, but because someone had cut out Margaret’s eyes.
*
Chapter Forty-Six
Movement was essential. A decision and then, decision made, movement and action. But Jane couldn’t move. Margaret’s injuries were so far beyond anything in her experience. In one night, the world she knew had fallen away to dust and bone. She could hear the rattling in the walls of cockroaches scampering. The rain outside was red. It must be red. The world was no longer full of love, but death and blood.
On the room’s sole window, the rain ran still. The wind blew steady. The world was sleeping, but she knew it was just an illusion. In the darkness of the room, the woman on the bed could be sleeping. The whole town could be sleeping. The world.
She knew it was true. Deep in her heart, she knew the world was sleeping because there was no one left to wake it. No one was left. Everyone was dead, and there wasn’t anyone with a voice to wake them.
The dead woman on the bed was giggling but drowning in her own blood.
She jumped at the sound of laughter and looked around. No one. Just a corpse with a grin for a neck.
At last, she thought. Movement. She waved her hand in front of her face to test it.
For a moment, just a moment, she had wondered if she slept with the world too.
“Margaret.”
Margaret what? What could she say? I’ll get help? It’ll be all right?
“el … ee.”
It was hard to understand the words coming from the woman (the corpse) on the floor.
What else would Margaret say but ‘help me’?
“I will, honey.” She couldn’t cry. She wanted to. But all she could see was red. Red everywhere.
“Take it out. Hurts.”
But something like, “Ach eech aah. Ur.”
“I …”
Can’t, she thought. She fucking could.
She gripped the knife. “I’m going to pull.”
“Ng.”
She took it for assent. She gripped the handle of the knife. Margaret groaned.
“Sorry,” she said. That nearly tipped her over into laughter. She could laugh. Of course she could. Anyone could laugh when they saw a woman with her eyes put out and a knife in her face. But could they pull the knife out while they were laughing? Could they sleep? In the night, when the laughter came calling, could they sleep for laughing?
Her jaw clenched tight, she pulled the knife out. Margaret (The corpse … no! Stop it. Stop.) screamed, her mouth opening, making the cut worse. Blood flowed, and suddenly she was gurgling. The blood poured down her throat.
Jane dropped the knife to the floor and tried to stop the bleeding with her fingers. She plugged the holes on either side of Margaret’s mouth with the first two fingers of each hand. Jane could feel Margaret’s tongue squirming as she swallowed her own blood.
“Margaret, spit! Spit it up!”
The woman, once her boss, gagged as the blood poured down her throat. She was going to choke. She was going to drown in her own blood.
Jane didn’t know what to do. She pulled Margaret forward into her arms and thudded her on the back, where she felt a deep, gaping wound.
The bedside cabinet had been stopping most of the bleeding from the wound in Margaret’s back, her weight pressing the wound against the old wood. Now blood gushed out.
“No … no …” Jane rocked her boss. Right then, Jane understood that it didn’t matter what she did. Even if she’d done the right thing, Margaret would still bleed her life out in her arms. There was nothing she could do. She needed an ambulance, but even if she could have called one, it would never have arrived in time to make any difference.
Jane was holding a corpse, but it wasn’t dead yet. She’d made it happen. She thought corpse and she made Margaret dead.
“No … Margaret … please …”
The bleeding was too heavy. She couldn’t stop it. The flow slowed. Stopped.
The woman on the bed was giggling again.
RAIN/Damned to Cold Fire (Two Supernatural Horror Novels): A RED LINE Horror Double: Supernatural Page 16
