Dark Rain by Tony Richards Page B

that. But he did not avert his gaze.
    “That your family, Ross?” he asked.
    I didn’t like the tone of his voice. Not one little bit.
    Particularly when he added, “Dude, is that chick yours?”
     
    My alarm clock started ringing. My hand went across to slap it off. I awoke, but the dream hung with me for a little while. Maybe I was trying to rearrange the circumstances in my head, attempting to make them better.
    I sat up suddenly, remembering what had happened yesterday evening. In point of fact, it all came flooding back.
    My head seemed to ache with the pressure of it and I rubbed my brow, blew breath out through my teeth.
    It was seven in the morning. The house, as usual, seemed entirely cold and echoey without my family around. There was only one reason why I still lived here. I wasn’t convinced they were completely gone. Was still hanging on to the faint possibility they might come back. Or was I just fooling myself? I often wondered that.
    Most things that I did, these days – I did them just to fill the gap where my genuine existence used to be.
    I took a long, hot shower. Didn’t even bother to towel myself. Just pulled on a robe and then went through into the kitchen, where I got some coffee brewing.
    Jack Stroud, I could see from my window, was back out on his front lawn, waging stage two of his war against the family F ormicidae .
    I popped a slice of bread into the toaster, then fried myself a couple of eggs.
    It suddenly struck me that it was insane, the way I rattled around this place. Then I remembered the alternative. Rattling around alone elsewhere.
    I closed my eyes a moment. Then I went into the living room, plate in one hand, mug in the other. It was the same way that it usually was. There were several tall shelves full of books. Alicia and I had always been big readers – she had been a teacher before Tammy came along. The half-dozen paintings on the wall were all by local artists. There was a large stack of assorted records by the stereo, although I’d not played any of them for a while. A checkerboard was open on a table in the corner, with the game half-finished, gathering dust.
    It was like the damned Marie Celeste in here , I thought.
    Hung above the mantelpiece was a stuffed smallmouth bass. It was only seven inches long, but was the first fish Pete had ever caught – he’d pulled it out of the lake at Crealley Street Park, so we’d had it mounted anyway.
    And ranged below it were a small cluster of baseball trophies, from my own days as a pitcher back in high school. I’d had them tucked away in a box in the garage, but he’d found them, insisted we take them out, to Alicia’s grins and my embarrassment. I could still hear his voice piping in my head. “It’s an achievement, dad! You’ve got to show them!”
    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