Devil Sent the Rain (6 page)

His eye hurt from the strain of seeing these things.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, and then he felt sleep sloshing over him in thick waves. “
Per Volcanum ignem mitto.
”

He stretched out his hand and light and fire erupted from it. The blast struck the nearer half of Uncle-wolf square in the chest and obliterated him, shattering him into tatters of darkness that wisped away in the corners of the room.

The heat in the room instantly became almost unbearable, and it also dried the air out. Adrian felt warm and that made him feel sleepy, though he also felt like he could breathe freely for the first time since coming to this dream-place. His throat and chest were tight, and blackness crowded in around the edges of his vision.

The further half of Uncle-wolf dodged the firebolt, bounding around and under it as Adrian blasted away. The shelves flattened themselves to avoid the beam and the books wobbled into the air like fat, awkward birds, flapping their covers to get airborne.
Don’t hate us!
Adrian scorched as many of them as he could, but he couldn’t see well and his aim suffered. He swiveled his body and turned his aim to try to catch the wolf.

It knocked aside Elaine Canning and raced for the door. Adrian slammed his firebolt on the door tightly, swelling the channel of power to bursting and filling the doorframe with heat and light. The ka-energy felt good running through him and he wondered where it came from. When the beast turned back on him he was ready, and shot straight for its chest.

At the last moment, it turned to the side and sprang for the wall—

Adrian scorched a furrow of charcoal-burnt flesh out of the wall following it—

and the wolf disappeared with a splash into the wall vent.

Adrian snapped off the firebolt. He rolled back and forth on the balls of his feet and his vision yawed. “
That’s
the way of the wizard, bitch.”

Then he collapsed.

* * *

Adrian crashed to the floor in a puddle of cold water and woke up.

“Ungh,” he groaned, wiping his face and dragging himself up onto his elbows. “Where am I?”

“
You
tell
us
,” Mike said.

His uncle’s eye popped out into his palm, and Adrian forced himself to look around without it. Mike, Eddie, and Twitch looked even more mangled than he remembered, and were dressed in kids’ pajamas again. Eddie’s arm where Uncle-wolf had chewed on him looked particularly bad. Elaine Canning was there, too, looking like Mouser again. All four of them had tired and nervous looks on their faces.

Two things that might have been a top-loading washer and dryer squatted in a small room, opposite a teetering set of shelves. The washer and dryer were pot-bellied and covered with scales, though, and they
literally
squatted on taloned legs, in several inches of water. The shelves that in Adrian’s memory held detergent and clean clothing here bubbled with caustic, fiery-looking liquids in glass ampules. The tiny chamber had two doors, and they were both shut. All the light in the room came from a host of bugs, like beetles only the size of Adrian’s fist, that crawled slowly up and down the walls.

“Never been in a laundry room before?” he joked.

“We’re inside you,” Eddie said. “I’m ready for an explanation.”

“Yeah.” Adrian’s eye, his natural eye, hurt like hell. He didn’t like getting the third degree from Eddie, but maybe he deserved it. “Me, too. I think we’re in my dreams, maybe … or my
shadow
, if that means anything to you.”

“Nope,” Mike said, “but it doesn’t sound good.”

“It doesn’t feel too good, either.” Adrian rubbed his sore eye.

“I wouldn’t beat yourself up about it,” Twitch said, grinning, “only we don’t seem to have come alone.” She hoisted herself up on top of the washer and shook flakes of dried blood out of her hair. The washer shuddered like a living thing, and the dryer next to it started to raise its door like a top-loading mouth—Twitch thumped it with one fist, and it fell shut again.

Eddie nodded grimly. “I was kind of hoping that when you passed out we’d all wake up back in the Silver Eel.”

“No such luck,” Mike said.

“I take it we came here to hide from the Fallen?” Adrian inferred. He imagined one of the others slinging him over their shoulder and jogging. Good thing he was one of the smaller guys in the band.

As if to answer his question, one of the room’s two doors rattled.

“I don’t think we’re really
hidden
,” Eddie observed.

“At least we know which door to take.” Adrian grinned gamely. He had no idea how to get out of this nightmare. He was afraid to put the tawny eye back into his head, though it had unlocked his sorcery, at least for one spell—he hurt too much, and he didn’t want to pass out again.

Boom!

The other door rattled, too.

“All three of them are here?” Adrian asked.

Mike nodded.

“We were hoping you might know another way out,” Twitch suggested, crossing her ankles like she wanted to meditate. Under her, the washing machine-beast grumbled and then emitted a noxious stink.

“
Up
,” Adrian said, thinking of the white umbilical cord he seemed to have—assuming the tawny eye itself didn’t
create
the connection. Even if it did, surely the light had to go somewhere. “I think the way
out
is
up
. There was a window,” he remembered. It had been behind the washing room shelves, as he recalled, and he looked there now. Sure enough, he saw a shadow that could be a window, partly hidden behind a haze of fumes filling the upper reaches of the laundry room shelves. “Too bad Jim’s not here. We might have a shot at actually taking them.”

The water was deeper, almost up to Adrian’s knees. He couldn’t see how it was coming in, but guessed it must be flooding up under the doors.

BANG!

Both doors shook again at the same moment, struck heavily from outside.

“Oh, I think James is here,” Eddie contradicted him. He turned to Elaine Canning, who stood fretting in the corner. “Isn’t he?”

“You truly are devils,” she said, frowning deeply. “And this is truly the worst you and your masters have yet devised. Almost, you drive me to regret my acts.”

Adrian shook his head, feeling groggy. “What’s she talking about?” he asked.

Elaine wasn’t done. “To make me watch as my lover was so shamed and assaulted.” She shook her head and shed a tear from each eye. “You are low, and cruel.”

BOOM!

Both doors shook again.

“Right,” Adrian said. “What I don’t know, et cetera.” Not that he believed it. The thing you didn’t know was usually exactly what killed you. “Let’s get the window open.”

“What’s outside?” Mike asked. The bassist helped Adrian begin to gather up the bubbling vials and glass pots.

“Hell if I know,” Adrian said.

“Maybe hell if you don’t,” Eddie pointed out.

***

Chapter Six

Adrian scrambled up onto the top of the dryer. His feet were wet and numb from the cold water and he slipped, but Twitch caught him. Eddie and Mike stationed themselves one beside each shuddering door, fists clenched. Elaine Canning stood resigned in the middle of the small room.

“Thanks,” Adrian said to Twitch. He leaned against the wall, which was warm and slick and gave way with slight elasticity, like the inside of his own cheek. He tried not to think about it. He tried pretending he was just inside a bouncy castle, on a humid day in upstate New York. Which reminded him of the house where he’d been apprentice and prisoner both.

Which reminded him of the room he was standing in. The room that was so much like the inside of a mouth. Hell.

Adrian grabbed a smoking bottle in each hand and turned to drop them into the water.

“Wait!” Eddie barked.

Adrian raised his eyebrows.

“What’s in those?” the guitarist asked.

Adrian shook off a climbing tendril of sleep that grabbed at his terrified brain as he asked himself the same question. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Something bad … something inside of me, I think. Poison, acid. A curse.”

“Your sins,” Elaine Canning said. The water was up to the middle of her thighs, and was choppy with the vibration of the doors.

“Just little ones, though,” Mike chuckled.

Adrian looked at the bottles. He thought of the body of his uncle, charred and smoking in his own bed where Adrian had ambushed him in his sleep. Adrian wasn’t sure he had little sins.

“Here,” Twitch suggested. The fairy stood and bent down to yank open the door-mouth of the washing machine. Inside, stubby jagged teeth ringed the underside of what should have been a washer door, and a pink blob like a tree stump quivered in the bottom of the compartment.

“Hell,” Adrian grumbled. “Does everything have to be bodies?”

“The house does kind of give the impression that it’s trying to cop a feel,” Eddie growled. Adrian struggled to control the shudder of revulsion he felt at Eddie’s words, keep it from being noticeable to the other guys.

“It’s Mikey’s lucky day,” Twitch quipped.

“Hey,” Mike complained. “Call me
Mike
.”

Adrian dropped the bottles inside the washing machine and Twitch let the mouth clamp shut.

Poomf!
Acrid, stinging smoke wafted up from the clenched mouth and the machine-beast groaned and squirmed.

“Out of sight,” Adrian muttered, “you know the rest.” Idiotic cliché. What was out of sight was always in mind. He grabbed other bottles from the shelves, hurling them into the creature’s mouth as Twitch yanked it open. The receptacle wiggled and coughed, but whatever had been in the first bottles stunned it beyond any effective ability to resist. Eddie looked resolutely at the door during the process, his bad eye sliding every which way as he did.

When the shelves were cleared, the fairy shut the monster’s mouth for the last time and stood on it, concealing a fiery, angry, bubbling mass of goo. The air in the laundry room was hardly breathable for the fumes, and the cheek-like wall was drying out. Here and there beetles lost their glow and fell off the wall, splashing softly into the rising water.

But the window was cleared.

Only it wasn’t quite a window. It looked like a sphincter, coiled tight, and big enough that if it could be forced open, a man could crawl through it.

“Huevos,” Mike grumbled. “Really?”

“Just imagine it belongs to someone you really like,” Eddie snapped.

“Now Mikey will remind us that he’s fond of boobs,” Twitch insinuated, winking at the bass player.

“Carajo.”

Adrian grabbed one of the shelves and yanked it out by force. An oily red fluid oozed from the shelf supports where the shelf had been attached, but now there was a space big enough to allow approach to the sphincter-window.

“I’ll go first.” Adrian felt like he had to. They were all inside him, somehow, and he wondered how that was even possible. He stepped over thrashing water and scooted up to the “window” on his knees, the tawny eye still held tight in one hand. With the back of his fist, he swiped beetles out of the way, but he missed one and his knee reduced it instantly to a phosphorescent splat on the shelf. The sphincter pulsed once, and he felt sick. “We’d better look before we … you know,” he said. “Maybe this doesn’t go anywhere at all. I’ll stick my head in and see, and if I signal you guys, pull me out.”

“I don’t think you’re going to be able to yell with your head up … I mean in … I mean …” Mike struggled.

“Why not?” Twitch smiled sweetly. “I’ve known many people who are fine talkers with their heads all the way up their own—”

“Click your heels,” Eddie suggested. “Three times, and we’ll pull you back.”

“So we can all die here together,” Mike complained. The water was up almost to his waist, and he was taller than the others.

“There’s no place like home,” Adrian said.

His vision grayed at the edges and his breath was shallow; Adrian grabbed at the shelf strut to catch himself, sucked in hot, noxious air and then shoved his head into the opening.

It was wet and tight, and he didn’t immediately emerge from the other side.

Scrabbling with his feet, he got purchase with his bare toes on the struts of the shelving and inched himself forward. The opening tightened as he pushed, and Adrian struggled to slip his arm in alongside his head. He couldn’t breathe, his heart hammered, he thought he might lose consciousness.

This was a house, he told himself. It was in his shadow, it might be part of his shadow, but it was modeled on the house where he’d learned wizardry, the house of his nightmare. That house had had an inside and an outside, like any house did. This one would have an outside, too. It had to.

Of course, he couldn’t be sure what was out there.

Then he got his fist holding the eye up next to his mouth, and the forced passage allowed him to breathe again. He kicked forward, slid, wiggled, groped his hand forward—

pop!

His hand holding the eye poked out into space on the other side. Adrian’s head was still in the trembling, meaty tunnel, but suddenly, he could see.…

Through the eyeball in his hand.

“Sumfabish,” he muttered through tightly clenched lips.

The house of Adrian’s apprenticeship had been a nineteenth-century creaker on a genteelly decaying street in upstate New York, gnarled with vines and shrouded from its neighbors by several ragged rows of maple trees. What Adrian saw outside this building was a tempest of color and noise. Streaks of red and gold fell past the eye like lightning, dropping away into darkness, and he felt water.

With a mighty kick of his legs, Adrian pushed his head out.

He filled his lungs with the air outside the building and looked around. He saw the streaks of light and followed them down, looking for ground. But there was no ground where he thought there ought to have been, no carpet of green grass and wildflowers untouched by a mower, no laid path of flat stones circling the house. There was a fall that might have been infinite, for all the perspective that Adrian had, and at the bottom, there was a maelstrom of color and sound. Rain pelted the back of Adrian’s head as he stared down into the crimson and gold pinwheel, slowly rotating and crunching with a sound like an infinite rockslide, like a river of stones the size of the Mississippi, grinding together forever.

Adrian wished he had something impressive and witty to say, but he didn’t. No one would have heard him, anyway.

Then someone grabbed his ankles—

for a heart-stopping moment, he thought he was going to be dragged back inside by the Fallen—

but instead he was pushed.

“Holy shit!” Adrian yelled, and grabbed for any support he could find. The real house, the house of his subjugation and misery, had been overgrown with strong old creepers. They were the reason Adrian’s uncle had made him sleep in the basement—it would have been too tempting, his uncle said, to climb out the window on the vines if his bedroom had been on the second floor. Not that Adrian hadn’t been allowed to leave the house, but he’d only been supposed to do it with his uncle’s permission and under wards of tracing.

Adrian slammed his empty hand against the side of the house and found a vine. He grabbed it.

Only it didn’t feel like a vine. There was no bark, no leaves, and the fibrous cable he gripped was far too straight to be a naturally growing vine. It felt kind of like rope, of a thick and particularly scaly kind. It reminded him of something, but in the panic of the moment as he grabbed at it, he couldn’t think of what.

Adrian’s feet shot out of the sphincteral passage and spun out into space. He bit off a scream and tried not to let go as suddenly the weight of his body was all on the strength of one arm. His legs arced out sideways and he tumbled once completely around, like a hot dog in a gas station’s heating rack, before his body slammed into the side of the building, in a thick tangle of the heavy cable. Flakes of something shook off the wall on impact and fell on him like ash or fake snow.

The building trembled, sending a ripple through the thicket of cables. Adrian smelled a thick animal musk, and suddenly, he realized what he was holding onto.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. The rope was
hair
.

Adrian lost his breath. His heart thumped once in his chest and stopped. His vision spun and he started sliding.

“No!” he screamed.

By willpower, sweating and trembling, he stayed awake. He clamped his hand onto the strand of hair and stopped his fall. His arm hurt, he ached, his vision pulsed in and out. He cursed his uncle as his consciousness returned. He’d told the band he’d been cursed in revenge for his theft, but that wasn’t true. His uncle had been deader than a well-done steak when Adrian had finished with him, and in no condition to cast any curses.

He’d cursed Adrian before. He’d done it at the beginning of his apprenticeship, to cripple Adrian. He’d only taught Adrian weak and watered-down magic anyway, and he’d forced on him this narcolepsy that limited his powers even further, so he wouldn’t ever be a threat to his master. He hadn’t really wanted an apprentice—he’d wanted a victim, someone he could trap and lure into complaisance with the sorcerous equivalent of candy.

To hell with him, Adrian thought grimly. He’d never underestimate Adrian again.

He shook himself back to the present. He needed both his hands to climb. Adrian looked at the tawny eye in his palm, then down into the coruscating void beneath him. His face throbbed, but he couldn’t risk dropping the eye—without it, he didn’t think he could perform any magic in this strange place.

With a whimper of pain, Adrian jammed the eye back into his own eye socket. Immediately, even with his head tucked down into his chest, he again saw the umbilical cord of light sprouting from his own body. It pulsed crimson and gold, matching the colors of the maelstrom below.

Just as Adrian looked up again, Elaine Canning poked her head and shoulders out of the “window” above him, her hair wet and plastered to her head under the wire in which it was bound. “Zounds!” she gasped.

“Grab onto the … vines!” Adrian called.

She heard him and followed his instruction, climbing out onto the wall with surprising agility for a woman in a hoop skirt. The chains wrapped around her looked red-hot and gave off smoke, but they didn’t seem to slow her down.

With both hands free, Adrian began dragging himself up to join her. He was cold and wet, and he hoped he didn’t have to climb too far this way, but the hair-vines were surprisingly easy to cling to. They were hard to flex, but they were rough, and his fingers found good purchase.

“You’re pretty nimble,” Adrian grunted, trying to take his mind off the madness around and below him.

Mike’s thick black hair and leather jacket punched out of the opening next.

“I can ride a horse and shoot a gun,” she snorted, “as well as play the thirteen-course lute. And I can keep accounts in accordance with Pacioli’s
Summa de Arithmetica
.”

“Yeah?” Adrian grabbed Mike by the collar and helped him steady himself as he climbed out. It was good to see Mike out of jammies and back in his cracked brown jacket again, but Adrian knew he was only seeing it that way because of the tawny eye, and the eye made his head hurt. “You ought to join the band.”

“The band of hell?” she asked, as they both climbed slowly up.

“Seems like it sometimes, doesn’t it?” Adrian muttered.

“Jeez,” Mike grunted, righting himself and clambering after them. “I’m sure glad this went somewhere. We were afraid we might have shoved you into a bottomless gut or something.”

“Yeah,” Adrian agreed, “that would have been a
lot
worse.”

Twitch pulled herself out of the hole quickly. “Oberon!” she shouted, but grabbed a handful of hair without missing a beat and then waited. The sphincter looked more relaxed, and Adrian tried not to think about that. He felt sick to his stomach.

Eddie launched through the opening like a bullet from a gun, missing his catch.

“Dammit!” the guitarist yelled, slapping for a grip—

he pitched forward, tumbling into the void—

and Twitch caught him by the ankle.

Eddie swung out, limbs splayed like he was ready for a cosmic belly flop into the grinding lights below. Twitch grunted—

slid down several feet—

but held on. Eddie reached the end of his arc and fell back against the side of the house, head-down and shouting curses.

“Come on!” Adrian yelled. The void about him spun like the park around a carousel ride and he tried not to look at it. It made him want to let go, fall asleep, and just drift down into the light. Whatever the light was.

He was pretty sure it couldn’t be good.

The wall—he forced himself not to think about what it really was, but the slightly quivering surface under all the hair—sloped sharply in now, and he dragged himself onto an almost flat shelf. The rain hit him full force, cold and hard, and he squinted up into it. He could see no cloud, nor anything else resembling an ordinary sky. He saw darkness, streaks of light, a shining cord of light rising into the black, and rain hitting him in the eye.