Downpour (6 page)

I noticed that a couple of the deck boards had rotted a bit, but the rest of the path and upper level were otherwise in good shape. I guessed they hadn’t been maintained recently but were well built enough to stand up to the abuses of time and weather. Snow had collected beneath the walkway, but the deck was clear, in spite of the forest shadow that fell on the house from the bluff side.

The red-painted front door faced west, into the trees. There wouldn’t be a view of the famous sunset from Leung’s house. I knocked on the door and got no answer, not even the rustling of startled birds. I would have peered through the nearest window, but all of them had been covered with winter storm shutters long ago. The house gave every appearance of being closed up on a long-term basis. I walked around to the side of the deck that faced the lake and glanced up and down the shoreline from my second-story vantage.

The shoreline of Lake Sutherland was lined with mostly small, older houses on the west and south. Larger, newer houses dominated the north and east shores with signs of a larger development at the northeast bend of the lake. Almost every house had a dock and a large porch or deck facing the water. The water-facing side of Leung’s house was typical: more open, grand, and welcoming than the land-facing side, making the lake the focal point of life in the house. Most of the houses were shuttered at this time of year, just like Leung’s. A few wood or fiberglass dinghies rested upside down on blocks along the abandoned docks, sheltering thin white patches of unmelted snow beneath them. I could make out the wide swath of a public boat launch beyond the big development on the northeast, but there were no boats out on the lake today and the water had a strange, submerged luminescence.

A fast look through the Grey didn’t reveal a lot more from such a distance. The same strange shadows and threads lay on the ground and shore as I’d seen at Lake Crescent, but fewer of them, and the buzzing of the grid seemed softer at this lake. I did spot a bright strand of blue energy deep below the water’s surface, connected to the shore on the east by a fan of silvery lines and smudges like glowing fingerprints and the spiderweb shape of windshield cracks. It would take a closer investigation to discover what the smears and threads were, and I didn’t have the equipment to dive or row to them. I supposed I
might
still have some ability to grab ahold of such things, but . . . I let it go for now and turned my attention back to Leung’s home.

I looked around the shore and the bluff on each side of the house and spotted a clearing in the trees just south of the house and facing the lake. It would have been impossible to see from almost any other angle along the shoreline. Dark shadows seemed to have drifted up on the ground in the clearing, defying the light that still penetrated through the trees. It wasn’t moving, but there was something decidedly Grey about the spot, and I thought I’d best take a closer look, since I clearly wasn’t going to get into the house.

I circled the house and found a staircase that led down to the lower deck a few feet above the water. From there I spotted a short set of steps that let me out onto the shore. The shore wasn’t sandy but was made of mud and gravel and occasional larger stones. The short stretch of open shore just south of the house had been flattened a bit, leaving a hidden space big enough to drag up a couple of small boats or kayaks. A steep path of gravel and stones pretended to be a natural runoff beside the house, zigzagging from the shelf on the shore to the clearing, but the larger stones were too evenly spaced to be accidental, no matter how well they were camouflaged by the smaller gravel around them. I started for the makeshift stair.

“Looking for the owner, y’won’t have much luck. It’s just summer places round here.” I knew that New England drawl....

I spun to my left, seeking the voice’s owner, and saw Darin Shea standing on the shore beside the next house to the south. He was wearing the same olive green parka and dirty work jeans as he had the first time we’d met and he kept his hands in the jacket pockets while he knocked his heavy hiking boots against the ground, shaking off a crust of icy mud. His aura was, as before, a weird mix of blue and gray with spikes of red, as if the world offended him in some degree and he was going to small talk it into submission.

“Hello again, Mr. Shea. You know the owner?” I asked, stopping where I was.

“That’s Mr. Leung’s place,” he said, sauntering toward me. “Ain’t seen him in a while, but the house is all wintered up. Safe guess he ain’t around.” He stopped a few feet from me, nodding as if we were just meeting for the first time. “Nice place, yeah?”

“Seems it,” I agreed, slightly put off by his slow-paced chattiness once again. “Do you do any work for the Leungs?” I asked.

“Nah. His daughters and son-in-law watch out for the house.”

“Do his daughters live nearby?”

“Yup.”

I’ve rarely wanted so much to brain someone with a heavy object. Plainly he didn’t feel like giving me the information yet. I tried a different tack. “Any idea when Leung left?”

Shea shrugged again. “Nope.”

“So . . . you’re staying on the lake?”

“Yes and no. I’m house-sitting one of my projects.” He waved in the direction of the southeastern shore. “Down there a ways.”

He had indicated south of the strange underwater lines, but not on them. I considered asking him about the clearing, but if he wasn’t volunteering information, I wasn’t sure I wanted to call his attention to either thing. I didn’t like the way Shea had just turned up, what with his weird aura and no visible way to have arrived here. I hadn’t heard an engine, or a door, and I didn’t see a boat at the dock or any footprints on the deck of the house behind him, though his boots had been muddy enough to leave some. There was also no boat in sight, and I didn’t think he’d walked on water or scrambled down from the tree line above without making a sound. With the oddness of the world-in-between around here, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d turned out to be a ghost. I wasn’t sure why it felt so strange to meet him here, but it just seemed . . . odd.

“What business y’got with Mr. Leung?” he asked.

“My own business.” Shea’s eyes went a little cold and flat as I said it, as if he were about to do something I wouldn’t like. I continued. “Just trying to find him; nothing sinister. But he’s not here, so . . . I guess I’ll ask his daughters.” I turned and stepped back onto the deck, away from Shea, starting toward the stairs to the upper story, then turned back in a rush, expecting to catch him moving. But he was just standing the same way, with his hands back in his pockets. “You couldn’t tell me where I could find them, could you?”

He chuckled, dismissing whatever danger he’d thought I posed. “Don’t think you’re too likely to catch up to Willa. Might have more luck with the older one, Jewel. You might not want to dawdle getting to her—folks say she’s dying, though she’s been doing it a while now.” Shea didn’t look broken up, and I thought I saw the tiniest flick of a smile pull one corner of his mouth as he said it. “She and her husband’ve got a big house on Lake Crescent. Ask anybody—they’ll show you. I gotta get back ’fore the light goes.” But he didn’t turn to go. He held still and watched me go up the stairs and across the upper deck.

I’d have to come back once he’d left. I wanted a look at that clearing without Shea or anyone else around, but I didn’t think he’d hang about long if he was seriously worried about getting home before dark; the shadows were already lengthening. I got back into the Rover and drove out to the highway, pulling in at the general store I’d passed when escaping the white monstrosities by the side of the road earlier. I checked on Chaos, who was still sleeping in her nest of sweatshirts, before turning the truck around and returning to Lake Sutherland Road. I left the Rover farther out this time, at the very edge of the scrubbed-clear space ahead of Leung’s home, and walked along the edges of the tree line to get back to the house on the lake. Twilight had dyed the overcast sky ink blue and leached the colors of the world to indigo and navy with odd patches of bone white where the rocky ground was naked of cover. The trees around me looked like charcoal smudges and I found the footing treacherous in shadow.

Nervous about what might happen, I let myself sink into the Grey where the world between worlds was bright with silvery mist and colored lines. I braced for any attack, noise, or the invading reach of the magical grid. But aside from the rattling whispering of the grid and the muttering of ghosts, nothing came for me this time. I couldn’t see the lakes, but the whole area within my view was like a more intense version of what I’d seen on the shore of Lake Crescent a few days earlier: Strange bolts of colored light shot horizontally through the mist, dodging the shadow-shapes of corporeal trees and diving suddenly downward toward the lake. Something gave a sharp laugh that came from no human throat, but no shape loomed from the Grey fog with it.

Ghost whispers grew louder as I worked my slow way back to the house, skirting the time-worn memory of the trees, and fell away as I emerged just south of the house, on the edge of the rise. I saw no sign of Shea or anyone else living—though there was a thin, boiling fog of ghosts along the shore. I caught my breath while my heart settled back into a normal pace.

I made my way to the hidden clearing next to the house with the quietest tread I could muster on the frosty loam, touching trees as I went, as if they would protect me from danger. Even out of the Grey, the effects I’d seen as I approached lingered. The lake below and the wooded hill I moved across seemed menacing and otherworldly in the still, cold dusk with a strange, sparkling light flickering from deep below the lake’s surface. I stopped at last at the edge of the weird clearing, peering at it through the Grey.

A hair-thin line of blue energy encircled the clearing and a thin sheen of silver stretched over the ground within, unmarred by other energy colors or strands of magic. The dark shadows I’d spotted before still lay there, and just beyond them a roiling haze of color with no defined shape that seemed to be tied to the circle in some way I couldn’t see. I stayed on the outside of the circle and moved around, trying to figure out the configuration of the shadows and colors and if they were meaningful. But the more I studied it, the more it looked as if the persistent Grey shadows were the residue of people working magic here for a long time, and some hadn’t bothered to clean up after themselves.

I pulled out my pocketknife and flipped open the long blade—it wasn’t ideal, but I thought it would do in a pinch—and squatted down. Then I drew the blade through the hairline of energy, breaking the circle’s edge. The Grey sighed a little, the colored haze dispersed, and the circle dimmed a bit, but nothing spectacular happened. Nothing active was going on there. That was fine with me. I stepped into the clearing proper and started looking for clues to the area’s purpose. Magic, of course, but to what end and what kind? I didn’t see the angry red and black accumulations of blood magic or necromancy, but the feel of the place was unsettling nonetheless, like unseen cobwebs fluttering against my face.

I poked at the dark hummocks of Grey shadow, trying to get an idea of what they were. One of them felt cold and wet and sharp against my fingertips, a bit like the edges of a temporacline. I put my hand flat on that one and pushed on it, careful not to step into it if it should suddenly open into a layer of time. The dark thing unfolded and I could glimpse a bent view of something happening in the circle sometime in the past.

A figure too warped to discern was casting a spell of some kind, holding up a rectangular metallic object and slowly moving it over a bowl with great effort, as if it weighed more than it possibly could. The mage struggled a bit with it. A second figure, something wavering and bright, not human, joined the first, seeming to step into it and add a green, energetic glow to their combined shape. The joined figures dropped the metal oblong with a grunt and it splashed heavily into the bowl, sending up a huge gout of liquid. I could feel it sting my face and I flinched, hoping it wasn’t blood or something worse. The figures broke apart and finished their spell, the first chanting and lighting a candle that sparked oddly, before it began sputtering and smoking, then burning furiously until it was just a puddle of dark wax on the gravelly ground. The second withdrew to the edge of the circle, waiting. Once the flame was out, the original magician picked up the bowl and carried it to the edge of the circle, to a hole dug just inside the line, where the contents—including the metal thing—were dumped into the shallow pit and buried. Then the mage scuffed a foot over a dustylooking symbol on the ground.... The loop of memory and magic shuddered to a halt.

I let go of the crumpled bit of time and started looking for the place where the spell’s remains had been buried. I found it at the edge farthest from the lake where the dirt that had collected under the trees had become thick over time. It took a bit of digging with my knife and hands, and my fingers were scraped and stinging with cold by the time I found the metal object.

It was the front license plate from Steven Leung’s car, badly rusted, burned, and bent but recognizable. From the condition, I assumed the plate had been on the Forester when it had burned, so the mage had taken it off the car afterward. I frowned, not sure what the spell had been meant to do.... I shivered and stood up, holding on to the license plate. I was too cold and not just a little paranoid about the place to want to risk hanging around in someone’s magic circle any longer. I kicked dirt back over the hole and tramped it down, covering it with a scatter of junk and gravel. It wouldn’t deceive anyone who took a good look, but it would stand a casual glance, especially from a distance. Tucking the license plate into my jacket, I made my way back to the Rover as fast as discretion would allow.

It was full-on dark and beginning to sprinkle by the time I got to the truck. I could hear a few nocturnal creatures moving about in the forest, heading for cover from the incipient rain, which made the place seem a little more normal. I just hoped none of them were the white things. There was nothing unusual near the truck and I was grateful to get inside and leave the area. I still wasn’t sure what the spell I’d observed in the crumpled bit of Grey memory was meant to do, but my best guess would be that it somehow hid or moved Leung’s burned car where it had, so far, gone undiscovered. If I could figure out where, I might be able to lead the authorities to the car and lay the ghost to rest.