Dark Rain (5 page)

At his age, Pete hadn’t had anything like a proper arm yet. But I’d already started showing him how to hold the cheese for heaters, curves, and breaking fastballs, explaining to him what the different throws were for. I have to admit it, I’d had dreams for him in that direction.

And if this all sounds rather dull to you, then I’m not even going to apologize. I’d been merely a regular guy – husband, father, cop – before all this had started. And I missed that more than words could say. If circumstances ever let me, it was a place I very badly wanted to get back to.

I found the remote under a paper on the couch, and switched the TV on.

It was tuned to RLKB. And the local news was being broadcast. The station’s sole reporter, Marlon Fisk, was standing at the end of Cray’s Lane, which looked rather less forbidding in the light. But a strip of yellow tape behind him bore the legend ‘do not cross.’ A warning that had come rather too late.

“… are calling this the worst single incident of magic gone wrong in the Landing’s entire history,” he was telling us. “Who caused it and why is still a mystery. But for victims and survivors both, the consequences are all too real.”

So that was how the powers-that-be were playing it. Maybe word had come down from the mayor’s office. I doubted Saul Hobart would announce that as a given quite so quickly. And there’d been my conversation at the Manor, late last night.

Fisk had mentioned survivors, though. People who lived there, obviously, who’d been lucky enough to be out that evening. That lightened my mood a little. Maybe they’d be useful.

My thoughts turned to Cassie. Hopefully, she’d turned up a new clue or a witness. I phoned her, but got no answer. Damn. Where to begin, when I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for?

My appetite deserted me, the way it usually does when I’m under pressure. I put my plate aside, half-eaten, then got dressed and headed for the office.

Banners were flapping around Union Square as I made my way across it. They had to have been put up crack of dawn this morning, since they hadn’t been here yesterday. The wind was up from last night and it yanked the fabric, making it crackle with a noise like sails. As though the looming gray buildings around me might be towed away at any moment.

The message on them read, 285th REUNION EVENING – THIS SATURDAY.

Three days away.

And I felt my heart sink even further. They were trying it yet again.

Face it, the whole ludicrous hoopla of Reunion Eve was no more than a dumb, pointless tradition these days. Something the town felt obliged to go through every year. There is no record of who first began it – maybe one of Raine’s ancestors. But on the self-same date, for centuries, anyone who practiced even a little magic gathered here. A
nd, under the direction of the mayor, took part in a mystic ceremony, trying to return the Landing to the normal world.

Regan’s Curse again, in other words. Even when the most powerful adepts had joined in, they had not managed to lift it.

I could still remember my grandfather telling me the story when I’d been much younger.

“Most of the Salem witches fitted right in. Kept their heads down, at first. Kept their magic hidden. They behaved like regular citizens – which, of course, they weren’t – at least until they’d borne children or sired them, and become established into the community.”

The orange light from the log fire played across his features, which were solid even at that age. He rolled a cigarette and lit it.

“Regan Farrow, though? She was another kettle of fish. Proud of what she was, afraid of no one. She openly put spells on other women’s husbands, took them to her bed.”

“To sleep, grandpa?”

I was wide
eyed.

“No,” he chuckled, “not to sleep. And anyone she didn’t like, she’d turn the water in their well to bitter poison.”

“Did it kill anyone?”

“There’s no record of that. Might have, though. However, in good time, the ordinary townsfolk plain got sick of it. Got pretty scared, in fact, and mad. They came for her one night, like in that movie, ‘Frankenstein.’”

“Did they have pitchforks?”

“Yup, I guess they did. They knocked down her front door, and they came marching in. And Regan? She started to plead with them.

“’I’ll go away,’ she told them, ‘and never come back. You’ll never hear of me again.’

“They wouldn’t listen, though. They grabbed her and they bore her up, and they carried her all the way to the village Common, where Union Square is now. And all the while she’s begging of them, ‘Let me leave, there’s no need to do this’.

“They,” he sighed, “bound her to a stake. Piled it all around with big bundles of hay and such. And then they set light to it.”

“They burned her?” I yelped, horrified.

My grandpa just frowned gently and his gaze went sad. He had always been a decent and humane man, and he hated thinking about anyone in pain.

“That’s what they did to witches in those days. They were meaner times. And so, the flames were getting higher. They were scorching at her petticoats. And Regan Farrow, knowing she was going to die and already hurting, stared down defiantly at the town’s inhabitants. Her eyes blazed and her face contorted. And a few seconds before the fire engulfed her, she yelled these words out.

“‘If I cannot leave, then none of you ever shall. And you shall dwell alone here.’

“That’s her curse on this town, kiddo. That’s how it’s been ever since.”

And how it was today. Nothing had changed, in all the passing decades.

Other folk
s, outsiders, could come here and go away again. But if you had the bad luck to be born inside Raine’s Landing …

There can’t be many of us who haven’t tried to leave at least a dozen times. By car or on foot, the outcome is always the same. As soon as you cross the municipal limits, everything around you seems to slow down, then stop moving. The leaves don’t shake in the trees anymore. There’s no stirring in the grass around you, and no birds fly overhead. Not even an insect buzzes. The world becomes deathly quiet, and bled a little of its color too, as though the sun has looked away.

You head down the road, but never reach an intersection. The horizon gets no closer. And no other buildings come in sight.

After a while, evening falls, and you’re forced to head back.

It’s a good part of the reason why our town is such a large one. No one ever leaves. And yes, these days we have to be careful about certain stuff. Who marries whom, for instance. There’s an awful lot of cousins around these parts. But otherwise, we get on mostly fine. At least, as well as a community like ours can manage. The rest of the world sends stuff in, we send it out. How could we survive otherwise? But that apart, we’re cut adrift from it.

And – part of the curse too – the outside world gives us a wide berth, or else plain ignores us.

So as Raine had said last night, we’re stuck.

Reunion Evening hadn’t shown a sign of working, on any occasion it had been attempted. I saw no reason to expect it would be any different this time.

But then, I can be too downbeat sometimes – I acknowledge that. And so …

Best of luck this year, folks.

Something else caught my attention, going past the big, dark statue of Theodore Raine. Standing by its bronze plinth, stock still, was a raggedy old man I’d never seen before. He was stood straight as a ramrod and was about as tall as I am, maybe slightly taller. Wore a shabby brown raincoat that reached right down past his knees, and had a shapeless, broad brimmed hat planted firmly on his shaggy silver head. A beard of the same color hid most of his face. He didn’t even seem to notice I was there.

There were a few derelicts in the Landing and – to put it mildly – a few eccentrics too. He didn’t fit onto the list of ones I knew about. But then, people’s circumstances change all the time. He could have become newly homeless. Or he might just dress like that.

Beside
him was a flabby, rather mangy looking dog. A bulldog, pretty oversized for its breed, fast asleep. And the fellow had a placard draped across his chest.

Repent
, it read.
The end of the world is nigh.

The Landing’s always throwing up some weird new character. He had probably just wandered in from one of the outer suburbs, drawn toward the center of town as though by a magnet. So I gave him a sideways glance, satisfied myself he was not misbehaving, then continued on.

“The hour of Doom is at hand!” he yelled suddenly at my retreating back.

Oh yeah? What else was new?

SIX

At twenty before eight, the big red truck pulled off the turnpike. It slowed down, wheezing, as it reached the off-ramp – which was totally unmarked – then gathered impetus again. Before long, it was speeding down a narrow two-lane blacktop, the dense New England woodlands flashing by its cab.

Don Kozinsky, at the steering wheel, was sweating. God, he hated this part of his week. He’d been doing this run for two years, and he still hadn’t gotten used to it.

The goods he was delivering slid around a little in the back. Big brown crates filled up with canned goods, any kind that you could think of. Beets, clams, tuna, creamed corn – name it, it was there. This was all he did, come rain or shine. Deliver the stuff to the grocery stores throughout the area. And he was usually happy with his lot. Not now, though. Not at all.

A bend forced him to slow down. But then he was gunning the big diesel motor once again. Quickly in and quickly out. That was the way he preferred it.

You’d think there’d be at l
east one signpost for the place, a town that size. But he’d never seen one, except that ratty, ancient ‘welcome’ one on the town limits. You couldn’t even find it on most maps. In fact, the only time he’d
ever
seen it on a map was in the window of an antiques store in Falmouth.

He’d lived in this region all his life – he was currently a resident of Palmer. And most folk
s in these parts had never even
heard
of Raine’s Landing.

Not that he ever mentioned his trips here. Why was that? He never talked about the place, once that he was out of it. He was pretty certain other truckers dropped freight off here too. The place looked prosperous enough. And he’d, on occasion, passed a rig speeding back the other way. But at the stops he frequented, the talk was about sport and chicks and other towns. But never once about Raine’s Landing.

He considered going even faster – on a road like this; how dangerous might that be? But it was hard to fight the temptation. Because by this stage of the trip, the heebie-geebies were beginning to set in.

Again, he wasn’t sure what caused them. But he’d felt them his first visit here and on every occasion since. He’d been following the instructions that his boss had handed him, scribbled on a sheet of paper. No maps available, remember?

He only had to get within a mile of the town’s outskirts when the voices seemed to start up, deep inside his head.
‘Stay away.’ ‘You don’t want to come here.’ ‘Turn around – go back, go back.’

Oddly, they were not his own. They mostly sounded female, a few deeper ones far in the background. And … the first time it had happened, he’d been forced to pull the rig over, almost putting its wheels in a ditch. He was that badly shaken up.

They had to be just his imagination, he’d decided. But they still had a strange, powerful effect on him.

Every fiber of his being seemed to pull at him, the opposite direction to the one that he was going. Every sinew, every muscle, was attempting to rear back. His instincts screamed at him to hit the brakes and get no closer. This was not a place where he belonged.

But he’d been a trucker for twenty years. And always delivered his consignments. So Don gritted his teeth, peered fiercely through the windshield and continued on.

The woods finally parted and the town came into view. It looked no different
than a lot of places around here. A typical Massachusetts township, larger than a lot of them, but unremarkable in any other way. So why was his heart beating so? Why did he keep glancing down at his own dashboard, finding it hard to even
look
at the place for an extended period?

Concentrate on your job, man
, he told himself. He had six stores to deliver to.

He took them one after another, as though he were training for some newly-created sporting event. Just dropped off the crates and got the manager to sign for them. Jumped back in his cab and headed for the next address. The streets passed by him in a blur.

The people that he had to deal with were all polite enough, even attempting to be friendly in some cases. But he simply mumbled at them, keeping his eyes lowered, his expression fixed like stone. He couldn’t look at anything directly, not even a face, it seemed.

Within an hour, he was done. Thank the Lord – relief washed over him. He was heading back toward the turnpike like a man possessed.

Strangely, however, once that he was passing through the trees again – the town lost from sight – his memory began to fail him. All of the anxiety that he’d felt earlier … what had it really been about?

He blinked, and found he couldn’t recall precisely what Raine’s Landing had looked like when he’d first approached it. Nor the layout of the streets he’d hurried down.

After a while, even the name of the place had begun dissolving from his thoughts.

He was back onto the turnpike before too much longer. And couldn’t seem to quite remember why he’d ever left it.

Don’s face creased with a gentle smile. He leaned across and turned his radio on. It was promising to be a pleasant, sunny day, and all of his anxiety was behind him now, forgotten. He was already thinking about his next port of call. Frank’s Roadside Tavern, and a big, cooked, greasy breakfast.