Night of Demons - 02

by Tony Richards

  A paramedic started cutting away the sleeve of his shirt and inspecting the wound beneath it. He seemed to take that in his stride. I went across, made myself known. And he recognized me, nodded.

  “Hey, Devries.” He looked very pale indeed, his gaze extremely troubled. “How about this, huh? It couldn’t get worse, dammit.”

  There was genuine emotion in his tone, though he was trying to clamp down on it. Dismay for the most part. His first time in command, and what had happened? These men had been his responsibility. I knew how I’d be feeling, like I had failed them and their families.

  A few more ambulances were arriving. We have plenty of them in the Landing, precisely for incidents such as this. In fact—after Saruak—the mayor had ordered their numbers doubled.

  By the corpses and the body bags, at least a dozen cops had died. I took that in, appalled. Then I asked Vallencourt what had happened.

  “Hanlon and his pals, what else? Except he don’t look human now, and neither do the others.”

  I waited for him to explain. He seemed to be having real trouble putting it into words.

  “Four riders came out of there.”

  Millicent had horses, I remembered. But it turned out they had been transformed as well. They’d had jagged fangs and blazing eyes when they’d emerged. And then he started describing the riders.

  “One of them, its face was shriveled. I think it was wearing some kind of crown. It was carrying a bow and arrows. Another had its face, like, all screwed up with anger. And it had a sort of…burning sword.”

  I sucked in a breath, recalling what Lauren had told me when we had first met. Hanlon’s obsession with the Apocalypse. And my mouth felt dry when I asked him the next question.

  “The third was emaciated?”

  “Skinny, yeah.”

  “And carried a pair of scales?” Lauren asked from behind my shoulder. She sounded pretty troubled too.

  His wound was being stitched up, but the man didn’t even flinch. Instead, he looked at us both strangely, wondering what we were talking about.

  “No,” he replied. “An ax with a short handle, double headed.”

  And an ax wasn’t traditional. But it was close enough, the same general shape.

  “The fourth one had a skull for a face,” he continued. “And a couple of the horses were weird colors.”

  “One was white,” I put in quickly, scarcely believing what I was being forced to spell out. “Another was pure jet black.”

  “The third was red,” Lauren added. “And the fourth, the final one, was a pale, sickly green.”

  I turned to look at her. How had she known that?

  “Catholic school,” she told me.

  She had a perturbed look on her face, like she wished she’d never learned about such legends. Much less find out that they’d been turned into actual fact. But that seemed to be the case. A powerful sense of urgency overtook me.

  “Which way did they go?” I asked the young detective sergeant.

  He pointed with his good arm, and I could make out hoof marks trailing off downhill across a stretch of open ground.

  “But what are you guys talking about exactly?” he asked.

  My face was becoming increasingly stiff, like a freezing wind had blown across it. You see, he hadn’t been describing any four horsemen.

  These were the horsemen. The four in Revelation.

  And if they were loose in Raine’s Landing, then this might turn out to be our personal Apocalypse.

  We’d been fighting demons this whole while. But now, the very worst were here.

  CHAPTER 50

  I wanted to set off after them, if “wanted” is the correct word. In spite of the vast variety of curves our town can throw you, I had never expected anything like this. But an instinct made me look a little harder at the young man sitting in front of me. And I decided to stick around a while.

  His wound was stitched up. But he was still looking pretty gray about the gills. I didn’t believe it was shock—there were none of the usual signs of that. So something else was wrong.

  An idea occurred to me. A pretty awful one. But then—if the Horsemen were here, things were going to get worse than they had ever been, from this point on.

  “Was it the one with the ax who cut you?” I asked him.

  Vallencourt gave me another odd look, still not properly understanding what this was about. But then he nodded.

  And began to double over, his brow creasing up.

  “Man!” he muttered. “I just feel…completely hollow.”

  The shouting of a paramedic brought my focus lurching to the right. There was something wrong with another cop who’d recently been bandaged up. I couldn’t be certain in this lack of light, but it looked like he was succumbing to some kind of disease. Boils were appearing on his cheeks. A few more of the cops who’d only been mildly wounded were wobbling and lurching too. There was a lot more wrong with them than simply being cut or punctured.

  “Oh my God!” Lauren yelped, bringing my attention back.

  Vallencourt’s lean, handsome face was doing more than furrowing. It was growing visibly thinner. Withered lines had appeared on his cheeks, and as I watched they began sucking inward.

  The one with the ax, I knew, had been Famine on its tall, skinny black stallion. The detective’s lips drew back from his gums, and his clothes started looking baggy.

  He seemed to grasp the fact that there was something badly wrong with him, and peered up at us in a startled fashion. There were gaps appearing in between his teeth. And his eyes were sinking away into deeply shadowed hollows.

  He clutched at his stomach…it looked like that whole part of him was drawing back as well. And then asked in an anguished whisper, “What the hell is wrong with me?”

  It wasn’t merely that I didn’t have the heart to tell him. I wasn’t quite sure how it worked. Either some kind of poison had seeped into him, or he’d been subjected to a spell. But either way, Famine had touched him…of that there could be no doubt. He was starving to death because of that. And I didn’t know what could be done to help him.

  A moving smudge in the corner of my vision told me Martha Howard-Brett had arrived. I stepped away, taking her with me. And she listened again as I explained the situation.

  Her lovely face went blank, at first. But she recovered quickly, handling it better than I’d thought she would.

  “I might be able to do something,” she said. “You’d better get going, before there are more like this.”

  I hated leaving Vallencourt this way, but understood that she was right. He was becoming more emaciated every time I looked at him, and getting pretty frightened too. Had already lost most of his strength, his body slumping. Martha went and bent across him, talking to him soothingly. Then she put her hands on his shoulders, and her palms began to glow. Like the others, she couldn’t heal injuries, but could assuage sickness and try to counter spells.

  She glanced at me again, mouthing the word “Go.”

  Except I had no idea how we were going to deal with creatures like these.

  I knew one thing for certain, though. We had to try.

  “You still in?” I asked Lauren.

  “Have been up till now.”

  “Then we’ll take your car,” I told her.

  It was smaller than mine, you see. And if we were going to follow the Horsemen, then we needed something that could go down narrow routes.

  We wove between the residences to the right of Millwood House. None of them were as big as Ms. Tollburn’s mansion, but they were still pretty large. Most of them had palatial grounds. You almost expected to see peacocks on the lawns. There was not a light on anywhere—no one had remained at home. And it felt genuinely odd, seeing a district that had had so much money spent on it lying empty like this.

  Then we headed further down, through small clusters of trees and open stretches of grassland, my heart pounding the entire way. The car bucked over bumps and dips. There was not so mu
ch as a footpath around here. But we didn’t make it as far as the bottom. Other habitations came in sight. They were not quite as impressive as the ones we’d left behind, but pretty decent places. Five or six bedrooms, and big, wide yards.

  These ones were far enough away from the gray barriers they hadn’t been evacuated. Not until recently, that was. And as we drew closer, we could see the inhabitants had paid a savage price for that.

  Fences lay ahead of us. The hoofprints went right up to them, then started again on the other side, trampling across lawns with not the slightest damage to the intervening woodwork. Clods of turf had been thrown up. But the rear walls hadn’t been affected either. Even the windows were intact.

  Although we could make out a jumble of smashed furniture beyond them. And a few dead bodies too. Apparently, these riders could just pass through solid barriers. It was something that I’d come across from supernatural beings in the past.

  The worst of the carnage by a long shot was out front. Most people had managed to get that far before the riders had caught up with them. Corpses were scattered all over the road. Some had actually been killed with a blow from a weapon. Others had much smaller wounds, but had perished all the same. Disease had taken some. Starvation others. My heart sank, looking at them. Sooner or later, we were going to catch up with the things that had done this. And I wasn’t looking forward to that.

  One middle-aged man was sitting on the curbside, with a black-fletched arrow poking from his shoulder blade. It was nothing fatal in itself. But his face was covered with huge welts. Lauren went to stop the car and get out, but I wouldn’t let her.

  I felt really sorry for the guy. But pretty helpless too. We couldn’t go to his aid, since we didn’t even know if this stuff was infectious.

  As we watched, he slumped over. It tore at me, but I pulled my gaze away and kept on studying the scene around me. Trying to remain objective. Understand what we were really up against.

  A few of the cadavers looked like they’d been not so much as scratched. In fact, they looked like they had still been running when they’d dropped. Between one heartbeat and the next, they’d simply fallen dead. And what exactly did that mean?

  “Oh, my good God!” Lauren breathed, just as shaken up as I was.

  But He had nothing to do with the horrors around us. We were at the mercy of far crueler forces by this time.

  The hoofprints ran away from us along the wide verge opposite. And when we looked in that direction, we could see the distant flags on top of the Town Hall.

  These new visitors of ours were headed downtown. Straight into the Landing’s heart.

  If you’re headed in from Sycamore Hill, then the first major avenue you reach is O’Connell. It’s mostly lined with cheap stores, eateries, and bars. And, thank heavens, nobody was in the mood for socializing this particular evening. Because—if it had been busy—then it might have made what we’d left behind look like a good-natured picnic.

  Few folk actually lived here, so there was no militia in this part of town. There’d been a scattering of people on the sidewalks, though. They were still there, mostly on their stomachs or their backs. Disease had eaten away one whole side of a woman’s face. Lauren hissed, and we both looked somewhere else. Anywhere.

  Jesus Christ, what were we getting ourselves into? My breathing was coming with difficulty, and the skin across my face felt very tight.

  The neon signs that lit up the place had been smashed for several blocks. And parked cars had been trampled on. So it appeared the riders and their mounts could be very solid when they wanted, the same way the previous demons had been. That was less than promising. Union Square lay up ahead of us, and we could see dark flickers of movement there.

  Lauren killed the headlights, without needing to be told. We drove to the last intersection, then got out as quietly as we could and went on foot the rest of the way.

  We clung to the shadows. Crouching low and panting slightly, our guns out in front of us. Although I doubted that they’d be much use. A quiet dread had filled me by that time, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

  The beat of hooves kept ringing out. It sounded like thunder. The tall buildings around the square amplified it, making it echo. And there was something like a painful shriek. Was that human? It was hard to tell.

  We reached the final corner. There seemed to be far less lighting in the square than was usually the case. Maybe I was simply imagining that. The dimness yawned in front of me. I didn’t want to go any further. Every instinct held me back.

  But that was not an option any longer. So, very carefully, I poked my head around.

  Felt my eyes widen. The riders were there, for sure. But some smaller figures were visible too. They were crouched and cowering while the huge stallions lurched around them.

  Mayor Aldernay and about a dozen of his staff had been herded to the center of the flagstoned space, the bronze face of our founder staring down at them.

  CHAPTER 51

  They were still alive so far, which made the situation rather different from the ones we’d left behind. Maybe the riders had plans for them, although there was no telling what exactly those might be.

  What were these people even doing here at this time of the night? I glanced at the ornate, darkened frontage of the Town Hall, and got a partial answer. A lot of windows in the second story were still lit. That was where the mayor and his staff had their offices. They had apparently been working late, helping to coordinate the defense efforts. And I have never cared much for the long-serving mayor of our town. Edgar Aldernay can be hostile, unreasonable and—quite frankly—a pompous ass. But he takes his job extremely seriously—there was no doubt of that. If he was here this late, then it was typical of his persistence.

  But how’d the Horsemen even gotten to them? Then I got a startling demonstration of the abilities they had.

  The four of them were riding in broad circles, hemming in the panicked workers, keeping them all trapped. A lot of the globe lighting around the outskirts of Union Square had been smashed. They seemed to have a real love of destroying things, although that shouldn’t have surprised me. As I watched, one of them—War—rode straight at the bronze statue of Theodore Raine. The creature and its horse went straight into the huge square plinth. Then reemerged smoothly on the other side.

  I stared at them, horrified. We’d had some pretty dreadful things appearing in this town before. You’ll never really know what fear feels like until you’ve faced a Manitou or a Dralleg. But the forces of darkness had outdone themselves this time. The sight didn’t merely take my breath away—it didn’t want to give it back.

  They’re not the real thing, I kept trying to tell myself. They’re only imitations. But it didn’t really feel like that. More like I was watching Chaos and Destruction rendered into living flesh.

  And besides, I wasn’t even sure that was completely true. How far did the powers of the wand extend?

  The riders were wearing flowing black robes. There were wide hoods pulled up almost to their temples. Only their hands and faces were on view. And those had a slightly ethereal look, as if they existed somewhere between being mist and being solid.

  War had an expression like a thunderstorm, his grim features twisted up. His eyes were narrow orange slits that seemed to leave impressions on the night air as he moved. His brow was creased like corrugated metal, his mouth set as firmly as twin plates of steel. Muscles were shifting underneath his cloak as he swung his great sword around. Flames were springing from it, leaving marks against the darkness too.

  Famine—far narrower—looked even more ghostly. The eyes in this case were dead white, like tiny fluorescent lamps. They gleamed from deeply sunken hollows. The cheeks were concave. And the mouth was one big pucker around a sparse few rotted teeth. The bony hands looked barely strong enough to keep a hold of the horse’s reins. But it was managing with one of them. In the right was the ax that I’d been told of.

  As for Pestilence…I don’t think we n
eed to go there for too long. I’d already seen a couple of its victims. The creature was similar, an insubstantial mass of pus and scabs, barely any clean flesh visible at all. The lesions shifted as I stared at them, as if they didn’t have a fixed position. That was the one armed with the bow and arrows.

  And the steeds that they were mounted on were genuinely alarming too. Great dark slabs like something from a quarry that had come alive. Their hooves set up a terrible percussion. Their skulls were oversized, even in comparison with their huge bodies. It was a wonder that their necks could bear such massive burdens. Each face was covered with bony protrusions. The skin on them was twisted. I had never seen a horse with an expression before. And I suppose these had none really—but the flesh was so deformed it looked that way.

  Where there should have been wide, flat teeth, there were jagged fangs instead. Their eyes burned like hot metal, with no pupil remaining.

  My gaze darted to the final rider. Oh Lord. Death himself. He appeared to be more solid that the rest. And I supposed this one was Hanlon, in all his demented glory. Just looking at him, I felt exhaustion creep over me.

  Skeletal hands gripped the reins, in this case. Merely bones, with nothing holding them together. The face was a bare, tissueless skull, with a bony ridge of temple and a crescent of discolored teeth. But like the horses, it seemed to contain emotion in its structure. Not just vicious, this time. Pleased with itself. Gloating.

  Its eye sockets were hollow, but there was a gleam in them. A laughing one, of victory assured. The thing carried no kind of weapon. Didn’t even need one—that was what I figured out. Blades and arrowheads were merely paths for it to travel down. I remembered the people at the bottom of the hillside who had simply fallen in midstride.