Dark Rain Read Free Page A

them butchered with equal vigor,” she continued, the words coming out twisted. “Not a shred of mercy shown.”
    My head reeled as I took that in. We’d had disasters in the town before, usually caused by magic. Fires. Explosions. Creatures being conjured up, or the conjurers themselves going berserk and lashing out around them. The dark arts can be an unpredictable and deadly thing. But there’d been nothing on a scale like this. I couldn’t even start to imagine who might be responsible.
    “Butchered how?” I asked, trying to keep my nerves intact.
    It wasn’t easy.
    Cassie frowned as though her entire face were trying to draw toward the center. “Either knives or talons.”
    My God.
    “Why would anyone do that?” I breathed.
    Although, living where we did, it might just as easily be a ‘what’ as a ‘who.’
    “I’ve not the first idea. There’s not a print that I can find, foot, claw, or paw. No signs of forced entry either.”
    “Someone got invited in?”
    “I’d seriously doubt that.”
    One thing didn’t figure, any way you tried to look at it. I stared around all over again.
    “But … why here? What’s special about this place?”
    Nothing that either of us could see. Cassie let her shoulders jolt.
    Then she drew herself up very straight and asked me if I wanted to take a look.
    Not really. But what was the point of coming down here if I didn’t?
    The front door of the nearest house was open, blank darkness inside We headed for it. Had to skirt around a little pink tricycle on the driveway, ribbons tied to its handlebars. Cass didn’t even glance down at it. She’d seen it before, and obviously wished she hadn’t.
    Her flashlight came back on, revealing faded, stripy wallpaper in the hallway, pink and white. A coat stand, with a baseball jacket hanging from it. A furled umbrella. A rubber plant in a big sepia pot. One of those embroidered Bless This House plaques hanging from a wall. Simply an ordinary home of the low-income variety. A TV was still glowing from the living room, although its sound had been switched off.
    Cass, I noticed, didn’t follow me when I went in there. I reached out, found the light switch, flipped it …
    God. I wanted, straight away, to turn it off again. For time eternal.
    As I had been told, a family. There had been four of them. And, by the bloodstains on the couch and armchairs, they must have been settled around the set when who-or-what had paid them a visit. It seemed to have happened all at once. They’d had the time to jump to their feet – letting out yells of terror, perhaps – before their new visitor had taken them to pieces.
    The worst thing was, apart from the damage and the gore, they looked like they might any moment get back to their feet and start moving around again. Only one thing separates the living from the dead, and that’s intention. Corpses look like people who have plain forgotten what they want to do next.
    My breath hissing in my lungs, I inspected the wounds more closely. Whatever had done this definitely wasn’t human. It was far too strong for that. And the weapons it had used … there appeared to be several of them, tightly grouped and each as sharp as scalpels.
    The question rose again. If not human, then what? Someone must have created the thing. And I wondered who was crazy enough to work any witchcraft quite as dark as this.
    And the same had happened in all the houses on this street, according to Cass. I wondered how long it must have taken. Hadn’t anyone heard screams, been warned?
    The sickly charnel-house odor was beginning to overpower me. I couldn’t bear it anymore – my stomach started tightening. I backed out of the room, then squeezed my eyes tightly shut. Moisture was pressing up behind the lids, before much longer.
    Although it wasn’t wholly the sights, the smell. A realization had begun to settle over me. As I’d said, we have bad things happen in the Landing all the time. When so many of its