The Raven King
Page 27

Mr Gray indicated a buzzing streetlight as they drove by the courthouse. Three shadows passed over the top of it, cast by nothing Maura could see. “Henrietta is one of those places that looks supernatural even from a distance. It will be a perennial stop for people in the business, poking around for things that might be the cause or effect of it.”
“Which is dangerous for the merry men because there is actually something for them to find? Cabeswater?”
Mr Gray inclined his head again. “Mm. And the Lynch property. I don’t forget my part in this, either.”
Neither did Maura. “You can’t undo that.”
“No. But —” His pause at this point in the conversation was evidence of the Gray Man regrowing his heart. It was a pity that the seedling of it had to erupt into the same torched ground that had killed it in the first place. Consequences, as Calla often said, were a bitch. “What do you see for me? Do I stay here?” When she didn’t answer, he pressed, “Do I die?”
She removed her hand from his. “Do you actually want to know?”
“Simle þreora sum þinga gehwylce, ær his tid aga, to tweon weorþeð; adl oþþe yldo oþþe ecghete fægum fromweardum feorh oðþringeð.” He sighed, which told Maura more about his mental state than his untranslated Anglo-Saxon poetry did. “It was easier to tell hero from villain when the stakes were only life and death. Everything in between gets harder.”
“Welcome to how the other half lives,” she said. With sudden clarity, she drew a loopy symbol in the air. “What’s the company with the logo like this?”
“Disney.”
“Har.”
“Trevon-Bass. It’s nearby.”
“Is there a dairy farm close to it?”
“Yes,” Mr Gray answered. “Yes, there is.”
He made a safe but illegal U-turn. In a few minutes, they passed the faded concrete monolith of the Trevon-Bass factory, then turned on to a back road, and finally down a drive bounded by four-board fence. Rightness trickled through Maura, like reaching for a pleasant memory and finding it exactly how you left it.
Maura said, “How did you know it was back here?”
“I’ve been here before,” Mr Gray said in a vaguely ominous tone.
“I hope you didn’t kill someone here.”
“No. But I did hold a gun to someone’s head here, in full disclosure.” A barely visible farm sign welcomed them to the vacation property. The drive ended in a gravel lot; the headlights illuminated a barn that had clearly been converted into stylish living space. “This is where the Greenmantles stayed when they were in town. The dairy’s way over there.”
Maura was already opening the car door. “Do you think we can get inside?”
“I would merely suggest brevity.”
The side door was unlocked. Both Maura’s clairvoyance and her heart could sense Mr Gray standing close behind her as they stepped inside, tense and watchful. Nearby, some cows lowed and grunted, sounding larger than they must have really been.
The inside of the rental was very dark, all shadows, no corners. Maura closed her eyes, letting them adjust to the idea of total blackness. She was not afraid of the dark, nor of the things in it. Fear was unworthy of her devotion; the rightness was.
She groped for it now.
Opening her eyes, she made her way around a lump that was probably a sofa. Certainty thrummed through her more strongly as she found a staircase and began to climb. At the top was an open-plan kitchen, dimly lit with purple-gray through the massive new windows, green-blue from the microwave clock.
It was unpleasant. She couldn’t tell if it was something about the room itself, or merely Mr Gray’s memories pressing up against her own. She proceeded.
Here was a pitch-black hallway, no windows, no light at all.
It was more than dark.
As she stepped cautiously into it, the darkness ceased to be darkness and instead became an absence of light. The two conditions are similar in several ways, but none of which were important when you were standing in one instead of the other.
Something whispered Blue in Maura’s ear.
Every one of her senses was wrung raw; she couldn’t tell if she was meant to push forward or not.
Mr Gray touched her back.
Except that it wasn’t him. She only had to turn her head slightly to the right to realize that he was still at the edge of the liquid dark. Maura took a moment to visualize a protective shell around herself. Now she could see that the hallway ended at a doorway. Though there were other closed doors on either side, the one at the end was obviously the source.
She glanced back at the light switch beside Mr Gray. He flicked it.
The lights were like losing an argument with the correct answer. They should have been on. They were on. When Maura peered at the bulbs, she could tell in an objective way that they were on.
But the hallway was still not lit.
Maura met Mr Gray’s narrowed eyes.
They crossed the final few feet, soundless, pushing the absence of light before them, and then Maura hovered her hand above the doorknob. It looked ordinary, which is how the most dangerous things looked. It cast no shadow on the door, because no light reached it.
Maura stretched for the rightness and found terror. Then she stretched beyond that and found the answer.
Turning the knob, she pushed open the door.
The hall lights seeped darkly past her, revealing a large bathroom. A scrying bowl lay beside the bathtub. Three colourless candles had dripped all over the back of the sink. PIPER PIPER PIPER was written backwards on the mirror in a substance that looked a lot like pink lipstick.
There was something large on the floor, and it was moving and scraping.
Maura told her hand to find the light switch, and it did.
The thing on the floor was a body – no. It was a human. It was twisting in a way a human shouldn’t, though, shoulders unfolding. Fingers claws on the tile. Legs scrabbling, scuttling. An inhuman sound escaped from his mouth, and then Maura understood.
This person was dying.
Maura waited until he had finished, and then she said, “You must be Noah.”
 
 
Calla had also been having a persistently negative hunch that day, but unlike Maura, she had been stuck in an Aglionby Academy office doing paperwork and didn’t have the liberty of trying to find out what the source of the bad feeling was. Nonetheless, it grew and grew, filling her mind like a black headache, until she had given in and asked to go home an hour early. She was lying on her face upstairs in the room she shared with Jimi when the front door slammed.