Speak of the Devil - 05

by Tony Richards

  So Vallencourt had taken control quickly.

  “Sir, can you blur yourself out?” he’d asked Kurt.

  And van Friesling had tried it, but with no result.

  Ritchie might have suggested running, but he wasn’t sure how this thing worked. Would the assassins descend only on this place, or could they follow and catch up?

  He came to a quick decision, clamping his free hand across van Friesling’s mouth and dragging him behind a couch.

  “Sorry about this,” he muttered.

  And then, to his colleagues, “Kill the lights, and get back behind cover!”

  There was a squeal of tires on the street outside. And thirty seconds later, two more uniforms turned up. Ritchie told them what he wanted them to do, and they posted themselves both sides of the living room doorway.

  So there were five cops in the place right now, and they all had their weapons drawn.

  Ritchie thumbed his Browning’s hammer back. He knew that there were cloaked intruders coming, but he wasn’t sure how they’d show up. Would they simply come popping out of the thin air in front of him, or would it be a subtler approach?

  Whatever, he decided. Bring it on. He’d dealt with magic more times than he’d had hot dinners, and a shrewd, expectant smile crept out across his face. His breathing got a little gentler, and his senses grew a whole lot sharper. He was genuinely ready for this confrontation, whatever form it might take.

  Only nothing happened. So his gaze drifted around the room.

  Jesus, it was massive, more than half the size of his entire house. The whole front wall was made of glass, and gave out onto a large, kidney-shaped swimming pool, lit up like the Fourth of July and surrounded with statuary and lush, exotic plants.

  And the place looked like a gallery inside, for chrissake, the walls lined with abstract paintings. The furniture was modernistic, and the air carried the scents of pinewood and of lemon.

  This counted as a bachelor pad? When he had first moved out of his folks’ home, he’d wound up in a third floor walk-up over Colver Street. A single room, which had been all he could afford. Not that he hadn’t had his share of female visitors. And he’d believed that he was happy – but he hadn’t realized what that really meant until his wife, Heidi, had come along.

  Dammit, he was letting his mind wander. So he concentrated on the task in hand. Two more patrolmen had arrived, both of them with riot guns.

  Van Friesling had gone very still, his pale blue eyes extremely wide and trying to search the shadows too.

  “Don’t worry, sir,” Vallencourt whispered. “We’ll get you out of this.”

  Whatever ‘this’ might be.

  His eyes were not adjusting to the darkness like they ought to, though. It was the rippling pool lights doing that. They made the shadows in this room keep melding and distorting.

  But then something else occurred to him. He’d been through the reports. When Ross Devries had tried protecting Woodard Raine, his handgun hadn’t worked.

  It had been rendered useless by the same magic that had defused the adept’s powers, presumably. And what was the betting it would be the same this time around? Ritchie stared at his Browning and then turned it over in his fist, the handle out.

  He called out for the uniforms to do the same. And they weren’t too pleased about it, but they turned their shotguns into clubs.

  There, they were as ready for this thing as they were ever going to get. Seven against only three? Ritchie liked those odds. Except his nose had started itching. Why did these things always happen the exact same moment you were trying to stay still? He started reaching up to scratch it. And was halfway there, when he noticed a metallic glint.

  He couldn’t make out anything more than that, at first. But Ritchie managed to take in the fact that these were no longer deep shadows he was looking at. They were figures in black cloaks. And they had turned up here between one heartbeat and the next.

  They paused a second, then began to move in his direction.

  He was on his feet next moment. All the guys in uniform were showing themselves, their weapons swinging back.

  “Stay where you are!” Ritchie yelled. “Hands where I can see them! Drop those blades!”

  He stepped out from behind the couch, advancing quickly on the three cloaked figures.

  But they’d disappeared from view, next instant. He swiveled around on the spot, but there was no longer any sign of them.

  And where’d they gone so fast?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Now I thought I saw it – why we’d punched and kicked the frat boys, and there’d been no faintest mark on them. They had been possessed by evil spirits at the time those injuries had been inflicted, and the supernatural beings inside had simply soaked them up.

  Which made them invulnerable? I hoped not.

  We were closing back in on the Deth House, Willets leading the way. He’d hunkered down and gone as quiet as a widower’s Christmas. The damp turf squelched under his shoes. His whole manner was apprehensive, but that wasn’t making him hold back.

  For my part, I’d drawn my gun again.

  “Put that away,” the doctor whispered, when he noticed. “If there is a devil in that cellar, then I don’t imagine any tiny lump of lead is going to impress it.”

  I ignored him, though. I’m an ordinary human being, and having a weapon in my grasp just makes me feel a whole lot safer.

  “Do you think that we can get down there again?”

  “Using the Portal?” Willets shrugged. “I’d doubt that’s very wise at this precise moment.”

  “Then what?”

  “We’re going to listen, Ross, and carefully. And then deduce. Try to find out what this is really all about, in other words.”

  He reached the porch, stepping up very cautiously. Glanced back at me, one hand partially raised. Tipped his head again for a few seconds. Finally he nodded, and I followed him through the front door.

  There was still nobody in the common room, but I could now hear voices too, below us. One of them was definitely Ryan Eastlake’s, speaking in that same demonic tongue we’d heard.

  But then a second voice began to rumble upward. And the instant that I heard it, tremors started going through my spine.

  It was as if my nervous system had been stunned. Like my ligaments and sinews were about to come apart all of a sudden. My head swam and my vision blurred. And Willets stumbled back against me, so he had to be affected too.

  The voice that we were listening to was like enormous slabs of granite being rubbed together. And it came up from the cellar like the opening tremors of a quake. Made the floor tremble, then passed up through the soles of our shoes, so that our flesh shuddered. Each word hit us like a fresh, sharp impact.

  “Uth kann durock.” Its owner paused, sucking in air with a painful-sounding wheeze. “Kabis traivan. Dekk cherkulo –“

  And when it stopped, I got the feeling that it hadn’t really finished. Don’t ask me how – I simply got that intuition.

  And the same thing obviously struck Willets. When his face swung round to me, the crimson in his pupils had expanded.

  So we both knew it at the exact same time. Whatever was down there … it had halted in mid-sentence because it had noticed something. Us?

  “Gotta get out of here!” the doc croaked.

  We turned back to the door we’d come through. But when we did that, three familiar cloaked figures popped out into view. Their faces were still masked in shadow, but their cowled heads swiveled round.

  They oughtn’t be able to see us, but I guessed the rules of that particular game had changed. And were they aware of our presence because something else knew?

  Then I felt it happening. A massive pair of eyes, swinging in our direction. I could feel their sheer intensity, like searchlights homing in on us.

  Willets was raising his forearms again, trying to blur us out. The room was turning to faint streaks. And then the Deth House was below us, and was start
ing to recede.

  When everything simply … halted.

  Stopped. Not merely ourselves, but the whole world around us.

  And a second later, we were no longer above the campus. Nor were we anywhere else in the Landing.

  We had dropped into a dark and hollow vastness, and were sailing around in broad circles, orbiting – not a sun – but a gigantic eye. A yellow one, with a great slitted pupil.

  And every time that we went round it, we moved in a little closer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Saul Hobart was about to park outside his home in Vernon Valley when his radio started blaring, calling out his name.

  Goddamn it.

  People sometimes asked him how he managed this. Switching off the job and going home. Having supper with his wife and reading bedtime stories to his three small daughters while the town was in the grip of an emergency. And the simple answer was, he didn’t always do that. There were times when his duties occupied him for a good long spread of hours. That went for his men as well.

  But when he could go home, he did. When the opportunity presented itself to take a break, he jumped on it with both feet. Because the plain truth of the matter was, whatever paranormal craziness might be bursting out around you, you were still a human being. And that amounted to far more than being made of flesh and blood. Human beings were complex creatures, built of differing degrees of need.

  He needed to rest sometimes. And he needed to smile with unforced delight. He was glad to have Amelia around him several hours at a stretch – she was the only person round whom he could properly relax. And as for his daughters? God, he needed every single minute he could get with them.

  This particular evening, he’d been planning to read his kids the final chapter of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. They’d been wide-eyed so far, listening to it.

  But the radio kept squawking at him. Saul peered at it dismally, hoping that someone else would pick up. Only no one did. He exhaled heavily and snatched the handset from its mounting.

  That lion, that witch, and even that dumb old wardrobe … they were going to have to wait.

  When he reached the woods again, the overhanging branches were still dripping fiercely. The dirt underfoot was loamy, and kept slithering beneath his feet. A thin tea of mud and debris washed around his ankles every time his shoes sank in.

  But he ignored all that and kept on going, making for a small cluster of flashlights not too far from where the second body had been found. He’d had enough experience of policing Raine’s Landing not to let one job divert him from another. So, when it became obvious the adepts were in danger, he’d tasked a lot of his men with protecting them. But not all his people. He’d made sure that a few officers kept on searching through these woods. And now, they’d turned up something else.

  The hole they’d dug was even deeper than the last. Its sides kept trying to collapse, and one of the uniforms was prodding at them with a shovel, doing his best to hold them steady.

  The stench hit Saul first, followed by a glimpse of what was down there. And he clenched his teeth, but then decided against that. It was a much better idea to breathe only through his mouth.

  “Get a light down there,” he grunted.

  And a couple of seconds after that, the corpse swam fully into view.

  It looked as though it had been in the ground for several months at the very least. His best guess was, it had been put down there before the winter had closed properly around this town. The flesh was seriously decomposed. And to make matters worse, something – some wild animal perhaps – had dug down there and made off with the lower jawbone. And many teeth along the upper section had dropped off.

  It was not exactly what they needed at a time like this. Another obscure section of a grim, troubling puzzle. Saul rubbed at his chin thoughtfully, then started wondering if Ross Devries had come up with anything yet.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Me and Willets kept on spinning round, drifting ever closer to that massive, jaundiced orb. It didn’t blink as we approached, and I could see no eyelids or surrounding face. Only that colossal yellow globe, the pupil at its center flickering like living flame.

  Where’d we even gone to? I tried to look out past the eye, but couldn’t manage, which made little sense. It seemed to fill this entire world. By the expression on Willets’s face as he went hurtling past me, he was as bewildered as I was. But it definitely looked like we had left normality behind and been dragged off to someplace else. And nowhere very good.

  My feet kicked, but could find no purchase. I snatched out, but all that my hands came back with were big palmfuls of emptiness. We were in the grip of some irresistible force, and it was hauling us inward.

  Yellow light came streaming out across me, emanating from the iris. And – far more powerful than sunlight – it began to blind me. I raised a hand to shield my face, except the glow was passing through it too, my whole arm lit up like a neon tube.

  It was about that point that I became aware of something else. It felt like another consciousness had gotten inside my head. There were thoughts in there that weren’t my own. Something was intruding in a heavy-handed manner, rummaging through my memories like they were reams of paper in a filing cabinet.

  And when Willets grabbed his temples and yelled out, I guessed the same was happening to him. So maybe this creature was trying to find out what we knew.

  If this was a devil, it had taken us inside its kingdom. We’d been yanked into some kind of hell dimension, with no gravity, no normal laws. And this beast’s will – it had to reign supreme here. It could do anything it liked to us, and we were at its mercy.

  “Can’t you do anything?” I yelled out to the doc as he went somersaulting past me for the dozenth time.

  He opened his mouth to answer, but then tumbled over in mid-air. I’d never seen the man so scared.

  I was so close to the eye, now, I could make out every detail. Just this massive, curving wall of yellow, patterned with faint veins and glistening with shifting fluid. Then I noticed that the bright pupil was spreading and expanding.

  It looked like there was nothing covering it. No cornea or lens. So it was actually the opening to a tunnel. And there really were flames down there, great swirling masses of them.

  I could feel the heat that they were giving out. It was like getting closer to the doorway of some giant furnace. Go in there, and we’d be burnt to ash.

  And so I tried to pull myself away. But pull away with what? The temperature was rising by the second, scalding hot air washing up against my cheeks.

  We were being sucked inside. And there was nothing we could do to stop it.

  Then I heard another voice. It was coming out of thin air, and was wholly unexpected.

  “Where are you?”

  A human voice, a local one, male, but gentle and concerned. And I thought I recognized it. I’d been wondering when he’d show up.

  “What’re you doing there?” it asked

  “What does it look like?” I yelled back.

  “Okay, good point. Let me think.”

  “Think fast, man!” Willets bawled.

  So he could obviously hear the same stuff I was hearing.

  “You’ve been captured by a first-rank demon of the third echelon. Those can be extremely tricky.”

  The fine hairs on my wrists were starting to curl up. And so I wasn’t sure that I was interested in that kind of detail.

  “And you’re right, Ross. You are in its world, because it’s not allowed to enter ours, except its voice.”

  “I don’t care about that! Get on with it!”

  “Right.”

  There was a brief pause. Then a spell began.

  “An eye that sees but cannot know. A mind that thinks but does not grow. You may not steal these people from their world. Back into the lower depths of Hell may you be hurled.”

  The last time that I’d encountered this guy, he’d not used rhyming spells. But perhaps he�
��d picked that habit up from his half-brother, Woodard Raine.

  I felt a motion on the air, like some vast bulk had just passed through it. Then the pupil in front of me abruptly contracted. The whole eye began swiveling around, trying to find the source of this intrusion. Which meant that its attention was no longer focused on myself and Willets. Which maybe was the point.

  And then the spell took effect. In another instant, the eye started to withdraw, taking the heat and searing light with it, becoming less threatening as it dwindled off. It shrank to practically a pinprick, hung there for a short while longer, and then popped out of existence altogether. My lungs emptied with relief.

  A pure, impenetrable darkness claimed us, in the moments after that. Then gravity took hold of us again, and I felt myself falling.

  Only … falling where, I did not know.

  I hit something soft and bounced. Then rolled, dropping off the side of whatever I had landed on.

  Heavy wads of paper began sliding down on top of me. It took my startled mind a little while to figure out that they were copies of the Landing Ledger. I peered about, seeing that I’d wound up inside my own home. To be even more accurate, I’d landed on my couch.

  Willets had arrived here too, but had been considerably less lucky. His fall had been broken by my coffee table, which was very solid and was still intact.

  He slithered off it, sat down on the floor and grunted. Then his head came up.

  “Was that who I thought it was?” he asked.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  It felt weird, like she lived here.