Devil Sent the Rain - D. J. Butler Page 0,19

off by a chain. Instead, in the warm water in which he stood swam five-foot-long eels whose entire bodies but for their bulbous heads glowed yellow-green in the darkness, casting a sickly phosphorescent glow upwards. Lit from beneath, everyone’s faces looked cracked and cadaverous, with hollow pits for eyes above green slab cheeks. Adrian expected twisted steel shelving, stacked deep with jars, cans and boxes of food, all well past their expiration dates and yet months away from being eaten. Instead, there were piles of bodies.

Human bodies.

And he knew some of them.

“Son of a bitch.”

“Shh.” Eddie pointed up at a hole in the corner of the ceiling. “Old furnace vent,” he whispered. “It’s got to lead up to the other rooms.”

Only it didn’t look like an old furnace vent. It looked like an open toothless mouth, just big enough to swallow a human being whole.

Twitch must have read the uncertainty in Adrian’s face. “I’ll go,” the fairy volunteered. She turned to face the vent in the corner, leaped forward—

and plowed headfirst onto the pile of corpses.

“Mab’s shiny belly!” she spat.

“Twitch can’t change shape.” There was a note of panic in Mike’s voice.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, “and you’ve lost your superpower of deep insight. This time, you first.”

He half threw the bassist across the room and Mike started scrambling up the mound of bodies. His bare feet slipped on bellies and crushed heads, turning their necks away at impossible angles.

“Fundillo,” he grunted.

Adrian stared down at the eels, tears stinging his eyes. At the top of the pile lay the body of his father.

“Oh, man.” Mike lingered at the top of the stack on all fours, staring up into the dark hole.

“Pretend it leads to a womb,” Twitch quipped. “If that’s your preference.”

The staircase outside creaked.

“Go!” Eddie hissed. The guitar player scissor-punched Mike in the butt, pushing him forward into the darkness. Then he shoved Mouser up the pile.

Adrian watched them step on the bodies. He was fascinated, horrified and sick. He recognized faces from his childhood. There were neighbors, kids who had gone missing, a survey taker who had really made his uncle angry one day. He didn’t know why their bodies were piled here. Had his uncle actually killed them?

Or was this some twisted invention of his own dreaming mind? Did Adrian wish that he, Adrian, had killed all these people?

But then why was his father on top of the pile?

Twitch stepped onto his father’s chest and sprang up lightly into the vent. Adrian couldn’t be sure, but he thought the opening of the vent constricted a little bit around the fairy as she went into it, like a mouth closing over a morsel.

Creak.

“You next,” Adrian said to Eddie. He wasn’t sure he could do it.

“Nope,” Eddie contradicted. “I got the karate, remember?” He shoved Adrian up the stack.

Adrian closed his eyes just before his bare foot came down on the shoulder of a woman he recognized. Eyes shut, hands and feet scrabbling up a ladder of flesh and bone, he tried to remember where he had seen her.

In the living room. Once. Early after moving in with his uncle, he realized, and he had an image of the woman and his uncle drinking tea and laughing and then Adrian had gone to bed. He’d never seen her again. Had his uncle murdered her?

His uncle was a villain, a monster for what he’d done to Adrian, but could he possibly be that bad? Or was this just Adrian’s suspicion, manifesting inside himself?

Adrian hit a concrete wall with his head and shoulder simultaneously. The stinging force of the blow forced him to open his watering eyes, and he found himself perched on top of his father’s corpse, staring into pitted green caverns where there should have been eyes.

His father had been the better sorcerer. He’d known it as a point of pride when he was a small child, and when his father had died in an unspecified catastrophe involving a demonic summoning gone wrong, he’d guessed his uncle had been behind the mishap. Adrian tried to hold himself steady. His father’s appearance here was only another manifestation of Adrian’s own suspicions, and not proof of anything.

A gurgling from the floor jerked his attention away from his dead father’s face. The water was rising.

“This is sick and wrong,” he muttered, and pushed himself into the vent.

It felt like being swallowed. He almost threw up from the strange, all-embracing fleshiness of the experience.

Ahead of him he heard breathing and the tussling sound of flesh