Devil Sent the Rain - D. J. Butler Page 0,15

oil first, and that seemed like cheating. Or if not cheating, then useless—you couldn’t go into combat hoping your enemy would coat himself in inflammable liquid beforehand.

His uncle certainly wouldn’t, and his uncle was the enemy that Adrian imagined defeating, over and over again. Crushing, decapitating, mutilating, and above all, burning to a crisp.

He dropped the pull-down stairs slowly, stopping to give the hinges a touch of oil, as he always did. Only in the dream-state, the hinges were muscular, like the hinges of a jaw, and Adrian oiled them by rubbing them down with his hands. He felt unclean and violated.

Part of him, tucked away, knew that he was dreaming. That part wondered if Adrian was under the river of filthy water on the restaurant floor and beginning to drown. A dream might seem eternal in the few seconds it would take his body to fill its lungs with water and slip into brain death.

The carpet on the floor in the upstairs hallway felt like meat underfoot, squishy and wet, and where his bare feet depressed it, he left behind little puddles of blood. He pushed the pull-down stairs back up into the ceiling and shivered a bit when he heard a click that sounded like teeth chomping together. The walls sagged in towards him and ran with rivulets of warm moisture, puddling at the bottom and draining, somewhere, but very inefficiently. The air was thick and humid, and felt already-breathed. Light came from a globe hanging from the center of the ceiling that Adrian knew should be an incandescent bulb behind frosted glass, but instead it looked like a swaying uvula. Adrian ducked to avoid touching it.

Adrian knew to step carefully around the wardrobe, because the floor under it was prone to creaking. It caught him by surprise that the wardrobe doors snapped open and sprang at him, biting with long yellow teeth—

snap! Snap!

He stumbled away and caught himself on the banister around the stairwell down. The wardrobe stayed rooted in its spot, but it gnashed teeth at him and tried to bite, exhaling a nasty mothballs-and-dead-mice smell. The piece of furniture had scaly skin like old, cracked wood that badly needed oiling, only tufts of hair grew out of the cracks.

“Son of a bitch,” Adrian muttered, and crept past. The wardrobe hummed, but didn’t follow.

The bathroom at the top of the stairs was Adrian’s safe place—it was the only room in the house so small that when he was in it, his uncle didn’t fit. It was the size of a closet, with the shower head directly over a smallish toilet, and no sink. The loose brick behind the toilet was warm and soft to the touch, so Adrian didn’t look at it, folding his precious pages and tucking them inside quickly. It was a damp space, which forced him to recopy his pages every couple of weeks, but it was a hidden one.

Inside the bathroom, he could hear for the first time that it was raining outside, cats and dogs. That made him nervous—he had thought from the light in the attic that dawn might still be an hour away, but with the rain cloud cover it might be imminent. And at dawn, the wards of sleeping that kept his uncle from discovering him would end.

It hadn’t been raining when he’d been on the roof, he mused. Sudden storm.

At the top of the stairs he looked where there should have been a window, and saw a membrane. Like an eardrum, he thought, or maybe an eyelid. It was red and thinly veined, but there was definitely grayish light beyond it. The membrane trembled with each raindrop that hit it, and Adrian felt sick. Body, body, everywhere.

“The more things change,” he muttered, “the more I still hate them.”

He nearly slid down the stairs to the ground level, and there he stopped, his heart pounding. Someone was in the kitchen, with a light on. He turned and crept softly down the hall, not looking into the kitchen door on the dream-magic logic grounds that if he didn’t see who was in the kitchen, the person in the kitchen wouldn’t see him.

He smelled blood as he passed, and heard the snuffling of beasts.

At his uncle’s door he stopped, and his heart stopped with him.

He’d built the wards of sleeping over months, carefully writing lines and glyphs behind furniture, inside closets and even between the sheetrock panels of the walls to keep them out of his uncle’s sight. The final