Authors: Tony Richards
There were other symbols I could not identify at all, however. Some reminded me of snarling, fang-filled mouths. Of flying animals and creatures that had never been. Who would do that kind of stuff to a beautiful car like that? The world’s ultimate spoiled rich kid, that was who. So insane most of the time, so detached from reality, he treated most events – even ones as terrible as this – as though they were some kind of parlor game, like Clue.
I could already feel my heart sinking and desperation setting in. Things were already quite bad enough without an intervention from the Master of the Manor.
I waited till it had drawn up beyond a squad car. The back of the Rolls was empty, but the driver was there beyond the windshield, in plain view.
You would have needed a white stick and a guide dog if you couldn’t see him. The chassis groaned when he got out. This was Hampton, Woodard Raine’s trusted flunky, and the only person living at the Manor – still human at least – apart from Raine himself.
He took off his cap and gazed at me in a refined, distanced manner that just oozed contempt.
Well?
“Master Raine would like to speak with you, Mr. Devries.”
He had a high-pitched voice for such a large man. And in terms of girth was, literally, as broad as he was long. A hefty butterball of a fellow. Raine had gotten him all dressed up, though, in a tailored chauffeur’s uniform of the same color as the car. There was a trace of perspiration at his collar, from his wattled neck. But otherwise, he looked the very picture of a stern and loyal manservant.
Two more things stood out about him. His face, as round as a full moon’s, was lightly tanned, a pale teak color. And the guy was walleyed, one iris bright green, the other a pale yellow.
I took a step forward, to make myself better heard. And asked him, “What if I don’t want to?”
Hampton remained very still, those mismatched eyes gleaming in his flat pancake of an expression.
“He wishes to discuss with you this evening’s …“
The man looked past me at the humble dwellings, obviously searching for the proper word.
“Unpleasantness.”
Which wasn’t it. That made me angry, and I wasn’t in the mood to bottle any of it up.
“Man, he must be so upset,” I snapped. “He cares so very much about the ordinary people in this town.”
There’s a big divide, you see, between the adepts, mostly born of Salem stock, and everybody else. And Woodard Raine epitomized it.
Hampton let his head drop, peering at his shoes. He hated to hear his master being criticized this way. It occurred to me for a moment that perhaps I was being unfair. Could even Raine be unmoved by a tragedy like this?
The chauffeur’s eyes were burning as he looked back up at me. But he managed to keep his tone reasonable when he piped up again.
“Master Raine’s only concern – which I’m quite certain you share – is to get to the bottom of all of this. He feels a sense of duty, sir. An admirable trait, surely?”
And then he waited for me to respond. I didn’t see what option I was being given. Raine might be a deranged flake, but he had an awful lot of power. Saw things that most other people simply couldn’t, except perhaps the Little Girl.
I sighed and turned back to Cassie.
“Looks like you’re getting
all
the legwork. You okay with that?”
She made another grunting noise. I already understood how much she disliked me having anything to do with our community’s elite.
“I’ll manage.”
I hated leaving her alone out here. Knew how all of this had to be tearing her up inside. But choice can be a heavily-rationed commodity sometimes, in this quaint town of ours.
The back door of the Rolls came open by itself, letting out a chilly gust into the mild night air. Me and Hampton both climbed in. There was no noise at all from the motor as it cruised back through the suburbs toward Sycamore Hill. Was that down to the fine engineering, or did this thing not even run on fuel anymore?
But there was one sound that was irritating me. Hampton can be as oblivious to reality as his master, sometimes. And now, hunched over in the driver’s seat, his stout hands on the wheel, he was humming to himself. Snatches o
f show tunes. On a night like this.
He kept on at it until I told him to shut the damned hell up.
Me and Dralleg sitting in a tree, w-a-t-c-h-i-n-g.
Darn, it didn’t really scan. But the ragged old man smirked anyway.
He was high up – maybe forty feet up – in a massive, ancient oak that spread its branches out against the night sky a block down from Cray’s Lane. Had a perfectly clear view of the whole scene from here. The black-and-white cars and the flashing lights. The goings, to and fro, of all these tiny-seeming mortals. He could see them. They could not see him, not even if one of them happened to look at him directly. He had made himself invisible. The furtive pleasure of the voyeur crept through every pore of his decrepit soul.
The tree creaked around him, and its leaves fluttered in the gentle breeze like swarms of tiny wings. He was perfectly comfortable up here. Had been born out of the deep primeval woodlands of New England, after all, long before the place had even had that name. He could stay up here all night if need be, without the tiniest discomfort. The fact was, he had watched the very first humans arrive in the forest from a tall branch such as this. He’d gazed at them wonderingly, it slowly dawning on him what sport these curious, upright creatures might provide him with.
The bulldog was nestled in his lap. It had a squint-eyed, drowsy look, as though it had been busy. Was a terribly ugly example of its breed. The thing looked even older than its master. There was nowhere on its body where its skin was not in thick, uneven folds. Its basic colors were brown and white, in blotches. Except the brown looked more like a dark fungus, and there were rings of black around its eyes.
It was too fat even for a bulldog, its face, between the hanging jowls, all deep distorted creases. Its protruding teeth were snaggled, razor-sharp. Unlike most of its species, though, its tongue never came lolling out.
Something shifted every few moments underneath its skin. Ripples and bulges ran along its spine. As if a second creature was inside it, trying to get out.
Its master rubbed its bulbous head with fingers like dried twigs.
And continued to peer down, his eyes not even blinking. His left pupil – larger than the right – caught the flashing lights below and seemed to shimmer with a strange internal flame.
Cops and more cops. He sneered with contempt. He had known their type, whatever they might call themselves, since these forests had first been populated. People who tried to interfere. Human beings who tried to stop him. They thought their badges, warrants, and the weapons that they carried gave them power.
They were wrong. Had no idea what genuine power was. Hundreds of them down the centuries had learnt that to their cost.
They were temporary. He was ancient and, so far as he knew, forever. Could simply swat them away like insects, any time he wanted.
There were two people down there, however – not in uniform – who interested him rather more.
First, the tall and slightly scruffy woman with her hair cropped like a man’s. When she’d first arrived, he’d thought she was a gawker. A civilian who’d noticed there was something going on and stopped around to watch. He’d quickly come to understand that she was more than that. She had purpose. Was dynamic, driven. Watching her as she scoured around the place was like staring at an acetylene flame, the heart of it penetrating, hot.
She had vulnerabilities as well. He could sense them, almost taste them. And would use them if he could. That was his special skill, one he’d honed down all the centuries. The thing he always did the best. But she was a strong one, and he had to admit that.
Then the tall, gaunt blond man had turned up. They obviously worked together. He was different from the woman. Just as driven, yes, but in his own far calmer and more solid way. There wasn’t so much fire about him, really. More … a rock, standing firm against a swiftly-moving current. He was powerful in his own way.
He would have to keep an eye on these two. Perhaps … test their limits? They seemed far smarter and more resourceful than the cops.
Would they even find, he wondered, the little calling card that he had left for them? Were they as clever as they looked, or simply trying to be?
As for the rest of the town, the ragged old man was fascinated and amused. He’d wandered far afield since taking on a human body. It had been centuries since he’d been back to central Massachusetts. And in all those years of travel, he had never once come across such an unusual place as this.
He’d really no idea such a community existed. They were in
his
business – yes indeed – of conjurement and the dark arts. Were stuck with it, it seemed. It was a path that they had no choice but to follow.
And he’d spent so much time out on the road. Never stopped for too long in one place. But perhaps …? He considered the possibility. Might it be pleasant to settle down after all this wandering? Might he make himself a home in such a town as this?
In which case, the inhabitants would have to get to know him. Understand what he was and bow down to him, yielding to his will. It was the natural order of things. They were merely mortal, after all. And he, despite his aged skin, was so much more than that.
Below him, the large, dark, fancy car turned up. A manservant of some kind got out and began to talk. And here was something else he’d already detected. How strong exactly was this Woodard Raine?
He continued staring, whistling a gentle, lilting tune under his breath. It was an old song of the Penobscot tribe. He’d learnt it a full hundred years before the first ships from England had shown up.
The blond fellow got into the Rolls Royce and it moved away.
In the old man’s lap, the bulldog seemed to notice that. It sat up, changed shape for the briefest moment, growing larger. For an instant, it was like a massive, green-eyed shadow.
Then it settled down, becoming merely a fat dog again. Made a snuffling noise, lowered its dense head, and began to lick at its front paws.
Which were both caked with drying, sticky redness.
Human blood.
Sycamore Hill lies off to the west of the center of town, rising above the rows of lowlier rooftops like some vast carbuncle. Three of the streets radiating from the square, in fact, take you di
rectly to the twisting, steeply rising gradient of Plymouth Drive.
The Rolls began to climb along it after another while. I’d wound my window down a gap. The air became a little cooler, scented with the light odors of foliage. But it didn’t do too much to ease the mood that I was in. I couldn’t stop thinking about the scenes in those living rooms. All those severed bodies.
There were grander houses either side of us the first half mile of the slope, sporting high stone porches and wrought-iron balconies, with expensive furniture glimpsed through the windowpanes. And then even those melted away, surrendering to open ground. Before much longer, it was high brick walls with spikes on top, and tall, neatly-manicured privet rows. Concealed behind them were the dwellings of the Landing’s elite. Judge Levin lived up here, as did Mayor Aldernay. There were various successful businessmen and women, who managed to keep on getting rich despite the limitations on this town.
But it was old money that really set the agenda up on the Hill. There were families going right back to the Mayflower, the Raines principal
among them. It was they who’d benefited the most when the Salem witches first arrived here. A few of the adepts up here are self-made, the judge himself most prominent among them. But most on the Hill were born to magic, had it in their blood, the descendants of those original refugees.
I’d become a little fidgety in my seat, by this time. And it wasn’t just what had already happened. There are more spells conjured up here than in the rest of the town combined. Powerful transformations are a regular occurrence. That’s the thing about the rich, isn’t it … they have so much already, and they always want some more.
And what if – for whatever reason – tonight’s awfulness had its origins up here as well? It made my heart thump irregularly just to think about it. Could someone be quite
that
crazy? Woodard was a nut, I knew, but I didn’t think him capable of savagery on this kind of scale. I tried to imagine who else it might be, but no one came to mind.
The plain fact is – peculiarly for somebody born in this town – I’ve always plain hated magic. That was true even before what happened to my wife and kids. Maybe it was my upbringing – my folks never used the stuff, understanding the harm it could do. Whatever, since an early age I’d always shied away from using it. An instinct.
Because … the truth of the matter. However you might define it, whatever excuses you might make for trying to harness its powers, magic genuinely amounts to just one thing. Attempting to change reality and bend it to your will. Trying to alter things you shouldn’t, things that were designed to be immutable and fixed.
And that’s asking for trouble to my mind, any way you care to cut it.
My surroundings came back to me dimly.
Occasionally, we’d pass a massive gate and catch a glimpse of the residence beyond. Most of th
em were large but fairly normal looking. But one house that we went by looked remarkably like the Taj Mahal. And behind the barriers to the Vernon estate, a massive dog with three heads was on guard. Old Gaspar Vernon is, among other things, a classical scholar of note, and so I reckoned that made sense.
Raine Manor, of course, was at the very top.
The original wood-built mansion burnt down at the turn of the last century. And was replaced by what must have been, even by the standards of its time, the Gothic monstrosity looming up ahead of me. Viewed sideways on, from the road, it was all dark shapes and shadows. But there were gargoyles at the guttering. Innumerable buttresses. There was a broad, low cupola – in the roof – that seemed to have no purpose whatsoever. And there were more wings than a swarm of dragonflies.
Woodard Raine’s great-grandfather designed the place himself. So it’s possible insanity always did run in the family.
The gates – both of them topped with a curlicued R – were wide open. In truth, they were rusted into that position. He doesn’t exactly look after the place, our Woodard, and his sole employee was Hampton here. But the Rolls could only take us to the start of the broad driveway and no further. Roots from the surrounding trees had pushed their way up through the gravel everywhere you looked. There were thick saplings climbing through it. The whole thing was impenetrably overgrown.
My door swung open, by itself again. Hampton simply sat there, his peculiar eyes studying me in the mirror. He was waiting for me to make myself scarce. Lord, I hated coming up here, but I got out all the same.
The Rolls moved off a moment later. I looked back the way I’d come.
I could see fully half of the town from here. The center, with its statues and its spires and the wide, elegant bulk of the Town Hall. The northern and the eastern suburbs – I lived in the north – with their parallel rows of streetlamps and their postage stamp sized yards.
Churches and schools and movie houses. A hospital. A fire station. And the river running through it all, a darkly silvered snake, just like its name. A wholly ordinary provincial town, to the naked eye. Rather larger than it properly should be, but quite unremarkable apart from that.
If only that were true. I lit a cigarette. Took one drag from it, wheezed, and threw it down and stamped on it.
Then I turned around again and started heading for the Manor.
Back when Woodard’s father had been running things, this had been a beautiful garden, manicured to the last blade of grass. By way of a patrician thank you, he’d invited us boys in the department up here once a year, for lemonade and crustless sandwiches on the lawn. There’d been a pagoda, a massive greenhouse, and even a bandstand. None of them remained in view save for faint skeletons, dim, ivy-covered outlines these days. Almost like they had been slowly scoured away. They were entirely overgrown.
Every single tree, and there were hundreds of them, used to have a small brass plaque screwed into its trunk that told you what it was and which part of the world it had originated from. I
imagined that they were still there, but thick dark moss had covered them completely.
All the branches were deformed and spindly. There was not a single leaf. As though some poison had seeped up through the earth into them. Swarms of huge mosquitoes span around beneath their barren branches, setting up a dismal whining.
It turned out bigger creatures were abroad as well. There was a sudden, heavy crackling from the dense undergrowth to my left. I caught a glimpse of something the size of a Labrador and the shape of a potbellied pig. It was, doubtless, neither. All kinds of bizarre things here just come oozing out of Raine’s imagination, taking root, of a sort, in reality.
And this was obviously one of them. But was it dangerous? I caught a glint of something off it that was probably a beady eye. But thankfully, no sign of claws or fangs. It moved parallel to me for a while but got no closer, so I mostly just ignored it. I felt glad, however,
for the Smith & Wesson snuggled underneath my coat.
The creature peeled away after a while, without revealing itself. I was still breathing slightly heavily, but for a different reason this time. The house itself was bobbing more clearly into view. And, as was usually the case, its owner had made a few more changes to it.
Not the west wing. That always remained the same. Half its windows were open to the night air, the glass in them shattered, heavy black soot stains above them. That was where the blaze had started that had killed his parents six years back, a death as mysterious as any in this town. He’d not touched the place since then. Simply from respect for them, or out of guilt? I’d always wondered. Had he anything to do with it? There was no telling, either way.
Whatever, their passing had marked the start of Woodard’s descent into total gibbering lunacy.
He had always been a wild kid, drugs and booze and sports cars, girls. A selection of dreadful friends. I’d even busted him myself a couple of times, although he never remained in the tank for very long. His family had too much influence for that to happen. But once his parents’ wiser, calming influence was gone …
Well, you only had to look at this place to see what had happened to his mind.
Once, it had simply been a sprawling, ugly mansion house. But there was now, incongruously, a high spire on the building, just like on a church. Instead of a crucifix, the letter W stood at the very top. He hadn’t built it in any conventional sense. He’d simply made it appear one day, on a whim, which was the way he generally did things.
He’d hung wind-chimes everywhere. But – there was still a soft breeze blowing – not one of them made a sound. A thin veil of mist clung about the place. None of the dozens of windows had an interior view beyond them, there was only darkness. And up at the guttering – I squinted – some of the gargoyles seemed to have changed position since the last time I’d been here.
As I watched, one of them abruptly straightened up a little. Then leaned forward and peered down at me, its stone face contorting.
Christ.
That had never happened before. But a few more of them seemed to be trying to do the same. My heart slammed up against my ribs. I jogged the final few yards to the porch, went in through the open front door, and banged it shut behind me before the damned things got it into their heads to come on down from there.
Darkness folded its grasp around me and I sucked in a breath.
Something scuttled across my foot. It seemed to make a faint chittering noise as it retreated. I didn’t like to imagine what it was.
My eyes fought to adjust to the gloom. There was an extremely weak sheen of pale light coming down the stairway from the floor above. Heaven only knew what its source was. But it cast about enough illumination to make out the dim outlines of antique furniture around me. Chairs that looked like Louis Quinze, a little table in the same style with a lamp on it, but not switched on. Were those crossed swords on the wall? Crossed muskets? Could that large bulk be a precious vase? I edged slightly away from it, worried that it might start moving too.
Woodard Raine’s fruity tones came swirling to my ears, next moment. Not from any particular direction, you understand. From the thin air, so that they reverberated.
“In the ballroom, sport.”
Another door came open at the far end of the hallway, a faint glow – yellow this time – emanating from it.
My footsteps echoed as I went on through. It wasn’t only the floor that was wood, all the walls were paneled. It was a candle casting this more palatable light. A solitary black one on a plinth, not nearly bright enough to make clear the details of this massive, vaulting section of the house. The faint glitter above me, when I looked harder, turned out to be a crystal chandelier. And the silhouettes looming around me on the walls were portraits of Woodard’s ancestors. But that was all I could make out.
Of the master of the house, there was no sign at all.
I felt more relaxed in here, though, than I had outside. Woodard Raine might be a nutbag with the power to squash me like an ant. But he had, curiously, picked up one concept from his father that he clung to almost religiously. That of ‘hospitality.’ Don’t ask me why that one had stuck. Don’t ask me why he arrived at any of the conclusions that he did. But if Raine invited you into his home, he would do you no harm while you were his guest there.
At least, that had been the case so far. Today? Tomorrow? Who knew?
But the truth is, if I don’t use the arts myself, then I’m not much intimidated by their practitioners either. I could see no sense in being scared of something when I didn’t even quite know what form it was going to take. My attitude to the whole business was, let the cards fall where they may and play the game from there. Perhaps Raine, in his own peculiar way, respected that, and it was why he gave me so much leeway, letting me get away with things that others wouldn’t dare.
I picked up the candle and approached the far wall. And there it was, carved into the dark mahogany, the Raine family tree.
Almost at the very top was Theodore Raine’s only son, Jasper, who had married twice during his eighty years in Massachusetts. His first wife, Mary, had died mysteriously just short of her thirtieth birthday, and had borne him no children.
But his second wife, who’d more than helped him continue the bloodline … I stared at the lettering. Sephera McBryde, originally. And she had hailed from Salem.
This was not what I was here for, I reminded myself. I turned round, peering through the gloom.
“Where are you, Woody?”
He hated being called that. So I hoped it would provoke him into finally showing himself. Other folk
s are deferential around him. Not me, not ever. I rarely felt anything but disdain for the man. Or maybe the correct word is repugnance. I never use magic, as I’ve said. He never uses anything else.
“What is this, Woods? Stop playing games!”
Just beyond the plinth that I had snatched the candle from, a pair of eyes suddenly blinked open. And I have to admit, it made me jump. Had he been standing there the entire time, and I’d passed close enough to touch him?