Devil Sent the Rain - D. J. Butler Page 0,26

he was standing in. The room that was so much like the inside of a mouth. Hell.

Adrian grabbed a smoking bottle in each hand and turned to drop them into the water.

“Wait!” Eddie barked.

Adrian raised his eyebrows.

“What’s in those?” the guitarist asked.

Adrian shook off a climbing tendril of sleep that grabbed at his terrified brain as he asked himself the same question. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Something bad … something inside of me, I think. Poison, acid. A curse.”

“Your sins,” Elaine Canning said. The water was up to the middle of her thighs, and was choppy with the vibration of the doors.

“Just little ones, though,” Mike chuckled.

Adrian looked at the bottles. He thought of the body of his uncle, charred and smoking in his own bed where Adrian had ambushed him in his sleep. Adrian wasn’t sure he had little sins.

“Here,” Twitch suggested. The fairy stood and bent down to yank open the door-mouth of the washing machine. Inside, stubby jagged teeth ringed the underside of what should have been a washer door, and a pink blob like a tree stump quivered in the bottom of the compartment.

“Hell,” Adrian grumbled. “Does everything have to be bodies?”

“The house does kind of give the impression that it’s trying to cop a feel,” Eddie growled. Adrian struggled to control the shudder of revulsion he felt at Eddie’s words, keep it from being noticeable to the other guys.

“It’s Mikey’s lucky day,” Twitch quipped.

“Hey,” Mike complained. “Call me Mike.”

Adrian dropped the bottles inside the washing machine and Twitch let the mouth clamp shut.

Poomf! Acrid, stinging smoke wafted up from the clenched mouth and the machine-beast groaned and squirmed.

“Out of sight,” Adrian muttered, “you know the rest.” Idiotic cliché. What was out of sight was always in mind. He grabbed other bottles from the shelves, hurling them into the creature’s mouth as Twitch yanked it open. The receptacle wiggled and coughed, but whatever had been in the first bottles stunned it beyond any effective ability to resist. Eddie looked resolutely at the door during the process, his bad eye sliding every which way as he did.

When the shelves were cleared, the fairy shut the monster’s mouth for the last time and stood on it, concealing a fiery, angry, bubbling mass of goo. The air in the laundry room was hardly breathable for the fumes, and the cheek-like wall was drying out. Here and there beetles lost their glow and fell off the wall, splashing softly into the rising water.

But the window was cleared.

Only it wasn’t quite a window. It looked like a sphincter, coiled tight, and big enough that if it could be forced open, a man could crawl through it.

“Huevos,” Mike grumbled. “Really?”

“Just imagine it belongs to someone you really like,” Eddie snapped.

“Now Mikey will remind us that he’s fond of boobs,” Twitch insinuated, winking at the bass player.

“Carajo.”

Adrian grabbed one of the shelves and yanked it out by force. An oily red fluid oozed from the shelf supports where the shelf had been attached, but now there was a space big enough to allow approach to the sphincter-window.

“I’ll go first.” Adrian felt like he had to. They were all inside him, somehow, and he wondered how that was even possible. He stepped over thrashing water and scooted up to the “window” on his knees, the tawny eye still held tight in one hand. With the back of his fist, he swiped beetles out of the way, but he missed one and his knee reduced it instantly to a phosphorescent splat on the shelf. The sphincter pulsed once, and he felt sick. “We’d better look before we … you know,” he said. “Maybe this doesn’t go anywhere at all. I’ll stick my head in and see, and if I signal you guys, pull me out.”

“I don’t think you’re going to be able to yell with your head up … I mean in … I mean …” Mike struggled.

“Why not?” Twitch smiled sweetly. “I’ve known many people who are fine talkers with their heads all the way up their own—”

“Click your heels,” Eddie suggested. “Three times, and we’ll pull you back.”

“So we can all die here together,” Mike complained. The water was up almost to his waist, and he was taller than the others.

“There’s no place like home,” Adrian said.

His vision grayed at the edges and his breath was shallow; Adrian grabbed at the shelf strut to catch himself, sucked in hot, noxious air and then shoved his head into the opening.

It was wet and