Crashing Paradise Read online

  HUMAN beings had always been afraid of shadows. Yet it was not darkness they feared; it was the threat of what might lie waiting within. They craved the sunshine, but the brighter the day, the deeper the shadows. In the modern world, people scoffed at their fear of the dark, at the anxious glances they found themselves giving to the darkened corners of their lives. But in their hearts they still trembled at the thought of what might lurk under the bed or in the closet, or in the back of the garage, among the tools and the lawn mower, and the dark.

  But, in ages past, humanity had known that there was reason to fear the shadows, that races of inhuman creatures lived in those patches of darkness. Very few, however, had understood that the shadows were not simply the absence of light . . . they were the black substance of another plane of existence. All the shadows in the world were connected; each one was a door into a place of endless dark called the Shadowpaths.

  Once, many creatures had been able to travel the Shadowpaths.

  Some even lived there, never able to emerge into the human world, or only able to do so after dark. Time and war had caused most of them to become extinct or flee for other realms. A small scattering of Norse svartalves still lived within that shadow world. There might be a rare tengu or another creature with a gift for shadow walking. Otherwise, the Shadowpaths were home only to hobgoblins. In another age, they had numbered in the thousands—the hundreds of thousands.

  Whole communities had existed. Now there were pitifully few hobgoblins remaining in the human world or within the Shadowpaths, and nearly all of them lived solitary lives.

  Whatever family or community had once existed was gone.

  Lonely in the darkness, they could only wait for their race to become extinct.

  In his workshop in a hidden corner of the shadow realm, with the darkness flowing and pulsing all around him, Squire stood before his forge. He pumped the snorting bellows with one hand while with the other he turned the blade he was making in the fire, admiring the way it glowed red with heat and magic. The Shadowpaths swallowed nearly all light, but the furnace was enchanted, and its light would have shone in the deepest cavern.

  He stared at the sword blade, letting his mind wander again.

  Normally he liked being at the workshop. When he wasn’t at the forge, he allowed himself to be light of heart. He’d spent years working for Mr. Doyle as driver, valet, armorer, and weaponsmith—though this last was his true calling. But out in the human world, he loved all of the worst of their culture—junk food, bad television, and trashy women. Nobody liked a good time more than Squire.

  At the forge, he normally liked things quiet. Making a weapon was serious business. But of late, his visits to the workshop had not been pleasant. On his own, he would drift into dark ruminations on the future, and on the past. Even now, thinking about how detached he had become from any others of his kind, he felt a melancholy that was entirely unlike him.

  Squire was in a foul mood. Which made him all the more grateful for Shuck. The huge shadow beast was curled up just out of reach of the sparks that flew from the furnace, huge eyes watching Squire’s every move. Shuck was not a dog, but out in the world, that was how people perceived him. Their minds couldn’t explain the beast any other way. Squire had brought him into the human world to help deal with some serious trouble a few months back, and since then Shuck had just stuck around at Conan Doyle’s house, becoming a sort of mascot to the Menagerie almost by default. Really, it was Squire and Eve who took care of him. Eve acted like she couldn’t stand the mutt’s presence, but she loved Shuck in spite of herself.

  “I know, I know,” the hobgoblin said to the beast watching him. “Get to work.”

  He laughed humorlessly and drew the white-hot blade from the fire, then moved it to the anvil. Not long ago he had made a double-bladed handheld weapon he called the Gemini Blade. One side was made of iron, which was deadly to fairies and their ilk, and the other crafted of silver, which poisoned vampires and werewolves and many other creatures of darkness. Recently, he’d taken the concept further. Conan Doyle was a master of many sorceries and sciences, and alchemy was among them. With an enchantment from his employer, Squire had been able to create a metal alloy that was a perfect blend of iron and silver, and he had set to work.

  The Demogorgon was coming. When it would arrive, none of them could say for sure, but they had to be ready.

  Weapons would be necessary. Whether or not iron or silver would have any special effect upon it, Squire had no idea.

  But the armory of weapons he had made for the Menagerie—swords and axes, bows and crossbows, pikes and daggers and katars—needed to be bolstered, regardless. Many had been lost or broken. And if Conan Doyle was correct, when the Demogorgon came, they might have new allies to equip for fighting.

  In the meantime, there were other menaces to be faced.

  And for most of those, the silver-iron alloy would do quite nicely indeed. So Squire had been hard at work replenishing the armory with the finest, lightest, most elegant, and most deadly weapons he had ever crafted. From the sound of this Demogorgon thing, he wasn’t going to be a whole lot of help in the fight. But his weapons might be a different story. It helped to feel like he could contribute.

  He picked up his hammer and brought it down on the now cooling, red-hot metal of the new alloy sword. Again and again, with the clang of metal upon metal resounding through the workshop and out along the Shadowpaths, he hammered the sword’s blade, flattening its edges, perfecting its shape.

  This was the legacy of his kin. Hobgoblins knew metalwork and weapons the way they knew how to travel the shadow realm. Squire could see the blade in the metal even before it was forged, the same way his eyes could find the right path through the shadows to emerge wherever he wished in the human world.

  On a rack nearby hung four such swords, two new battleaxes, and a set of seven daggers made from the silver-iron.

  He’d put his runic signature in each blade, and their handles were ornate and intricate. Squire was proud of his work and saw no reason for it not to be as beautiful as it was deadly. A hundred arrows tipped with the alloy lay on a wooden table nearby, along with a bow he had fashioned out of ironwood.

  Metal wasn’t the only thing he could craft. He’d even been known to dabble in explosives, though not of any ordinary sort. As a creature of the shadows, he’d found the best such weapons to be magical—grenades that exploded with the light of sunrise.

  The grindstone sat nearby, quiet and dark. The sword wasn’t ready for sharpening yet. It needed more time with the furnace and the hammer. Once again he moved it to the fire, holding it there as the metal heated.

  On the floor, Shuck shifted, suddenly alert. The beast raised his enormous head and gazed at Squire.

  “What’s up, pal? You hungry again?” the hobgoblin asked.

  “I think I’ve got a couple of bags of Oreos somewhere. Or I could heat up some of those microwave burritos if you promise not to stand upwind after.”

  Squire grinned, baring rows of shark teeth.

  Shuck crouched low and began to growl, the shadow hound’s hackles rising. Squire stared at him, then glanced around the workshop, peering into the shifting, breathing darkness of the Shadowpaths. The mutt wasn’t growling at him; he was sure of that. A little teasing about the effect burritos had on him was nothing new.

  No, Shuck had the scent of something that wasn’t supposed to be here.

  Squire listened, his hearing even more acute than his vision in this place. His fingers loosened and then tightened their grip on the handle of the silver-iron blade still thrust in the flames of his furnace. He wished he could have gotten to the rack of finished weapons, but there was no telling what stalked him, now, and he didn’t want to take any chances.

  In the pulsing shadows to the left, past the grindstone, there came a whisper of something in motion. Even as Squire spun to face it, blade still in the fire, Shuck let out a thunderous roar and bounded past the hobgoblin.

&n
bsp; A wave of oily black shadow darted, serpentine, into the light of the furnace. Only those eldritch flames illuminated the thing’s jaws as they opened wide, revealing long ebony teeth, black upon black. Squire pulled the unfinished sword from the flames, liquid metal spattering the forge and anvil and the floor, still on fire.

  Too slow. The thing’s jaws opened wider and it thrust at his head.

  Shuck rammed into the shadow serpent, jaws closing on its oily hide. It hissed loudly as it fell to the ground, and then it shook the length of its body, which disappeared into the darkness in woven coils, at least twenty or thirty feet long. It threw Shuck off—the hound crashing into the grindstone and knocking the wheel over. Shuck cried out with the impact, and Squire raged at the sound of his pain.

  The mutt had bought him precious seconds.

  The shadow serpent tensed, then sprang toward Squire again. But the hobgoblin was faster than he looked, and he sidestepped, slashing the unfinished sword at the snake’s head. The blade glowed with heat, and the silver-iron was still soft from the fire. It cut the dark substance of the monster’s hide, and bent as it did, the burning metal flowing and molding itself to the thing’s flesh, searing itself into the wound even as it cut.

  With a shrieking hiss, the thing rose and slammed its body on the ground. It thrashed and coiled and threw itself into the shadows, writhing in pain and trying to dislodge the melted metal. Squire would have gone for more weapons then, but the serpent was between him and his new armory.

  “Shuck!” he called. “Come on, boy! We’re out of here!”

  The beast leaped up and ran at his side, the two of them racing along the Shadowpaths together. Squire looked over his shoulder, his heart pounding and his thoughts racing, terror and superstition moving through him faster than poison.

  “Can’t be,” he whispered into the roiling, living darkness around him, the shifting clouds of black and gray. “No fuckin’ way.”

  The Murawa’s dead. No one’s seen one for three hundred years.

  But what else could it be, Squire wondered, if not the shadow serpent that had stalked hobgoblins along the Shadowpaths since the shadows had first coalesced? The Murawa was the bogeyman story hobs told their little ’goblins to make them behave.

  But it was dead. It had to be.

  Squire ran blindly through the shadows, keeping to the solid paths beneath his feet, careful not to slip into the shifting void on either side, but paying little attention to destination. Getting the hell away from the workshop was his only concern at the moment. Shuck ran with him. Tendrils of darker shadow, the living blackness that comprised this place, reached out as though to slow them down. Shuck growled low in his massive chest, and the shadows withdrew, giving them a clear path.

  But the whisper of motion came from behind them. The serpent was wounded but not dead. Squire just wasn’t that damned lucky. It was after them, and picking up speed.

  If the Murawa doesn’t exist anymore, then what the hell is that thing?

  The answer was obvious. The rumors of the hobgoblineater’s death had been greatly exaggerated.

  “Shit,” he grunted, and redoubled his speed. His chest ached. His hands opened and closed as he wished for a weapon.

  A path opened to his left. Squire didn’t hesitate or bother to consider where it would lead. He’d get back to Conan Doyle’s house in due time. Right now, he and Shuck just had to get out. Maybe he could double back along another path, get to the workshop and find a way to defend himself. Not that he was worried about the forge or the weapons he’d made. The Murawa didn’t have any hands. It wasn’t going to be picking up a sword.

  Except the one I buried in your ugly head!

  Shuck started to growl again as he ran, low and angry.

  Squire shushed him. His lungs burned with exertion. He peered through the shadows, trying to figure out where he was, get his bearings so he could find a good spot to exit.

  A hiss seared the air, too close.

  Squire glanced behind him and saw the Murawa sliding and darting along the curving path behind them. The hot metal imbedded in its flesh still had the tiniest glow as it cooled.

  Way to go, the hobgoblin thought. Now you really pissed him off.

  “Shuck!” he called, and darted to the right.

  Shadows swirled around them. The path was soft beneath his feet, but he had to find some way to escape the Murawa.

  The shadow serpent hissed and charged into the maelstrom of darkness in pursuit. It was faster than Squire, by far. Faster than Shuck, and the mutt ran like hell followed after.

  Squire muttered curses under his breath, covering his fear with profanity, trying to hide it even from himself. He heard the Murawa’s jaws snap closed and then a gentle sigh as it opened them wide. He called out to the hound again as he hurled himself to the left. Shuck followed, just as the shadow serpent lunged at them. It tried to twist to snatch them, but its momentum carried it past, into the black nothing of the void.

  Its body slithered past them, and for a moment, Squire thought it might spill entirely into the forever abyss that lay waiting for those who strayed too far from the solid paths.

  But its body was too long. It coiled back in on itself and started after them again.

  The hobgoblin and his shadow beast had kept running.

  The Murawa had lost ground, but it would gain quickly. Up ahead, a trio of paths split off from the one they were on. He took the left fork, and it spiraled downward. He and Shuck raced along the curling path. Above them, the Murawa hissed again. Squire heard its jaws clack.

  It would have them in a moment.

  “Fuck it,” he said, glancing at the hound. “No more time to be picky.”

  A gray patch of lighter shadow wavered off the path to his right. He had no idea where he was, but he called to Shuck and leaped through it. The hound came after him.

  Squire backpedaled away from the shadows. Shuck circled around him, staring at the place where they’d come back into the human world. The ground was rocky and inhospitable but he paid little attention to their location, standing back, staring at the shadow cast by a ridge of stone and earth.

  Beyond it was the rising sun, so the shadow was long.

  In the dark, Squire felt sure he could see the Murawa squirming, and imagined he could still hear its hiss. It thrust again and again toward him, but could not escape the Shadowpaths.

  He let out a long breath of relief as it disappeared, and the shadow was just a shadow again. With a laugh of horror and amazement, he took another step back, lost his footing, and splashed into cool water.

  Sputtering and waving his arms, he dragged himself up and looked around. In the soothing light of dawn he saw a pair of sampans with torn and dirty sails moving lazily along the river. Shuck made a sound that might have been a bark or a laugh, and Squire shot him the middle finger.

  “Enough outta you, muttley. Not funny. You know I hate bath time.”

  Still, he had to smile as he climbed onto the riverbank and stood up, glancing around at the sampans and the river and the mountains in the distance.

  “So,” he said. “China.”

  Then he looked once more at the shadows where they had emerged. The snake showing up might have been random, but it didn’t feel that way. Squire needed to inform Conan Doyle as soon as possible, and that meant he didn’t have time to find another way home. Once he’d had a rest, it looked like he was going to have to enter the shadow realms again. He wondered how long he could evade the Murawa.

  “Fuck.”

  3

  DANNY Ferrick held a plastic DVD case in his hand, staring at the profiled headshots of the man and woman gazing intensely into each other’s eyes, mere seconds away from a passionate kiss. The movie was called Casablanca, and it was supposed to be some sort of film classic.

  Danny thought it looked like crap.

  “It was one of my favorites, back before I passed away,” the ghost of Dr. Leonard Graves stated, his specter hovering in the
air beside the couch where Danny was sitting. “I actually attended its official premiere in 1942.”

  He looked up from the case, focusing on the ghost. The phantom’s translucent substance softened, and then grew sharper, as if phasing in and out of existence.

  “Yeah, but is it any good?” Danny asked with a petulant snarl. He had suggested a Japanese horror movie import that he’d gotten off the Internet, but his mother and the ghost weren’t quite in the mood for the horrible—thank you very much—especially after what they’d gone through recently with him when his father, a demon who feasted on human experience, had returned to the human world looking for a reunion.

  Danny cringed inwardly at the images that filled his mind.

  He squeezed his eyes tightly closed for a moment—he knew he had his father’s eyes—and attempted to banish the memory of what his father had done, and what he had done at his father’s request.

  The demon boy opened his eyes to find the ghost watching him.

  “At a glance it is a masterfully told tale of two men vying for the love of the same woman set against a wartime backdrop of political and romantic espionage,” Dr. Graves said.

  “But upon closer examination it is also a film that expertly depicts the conflict between democracy and totalitarianism.”

  Danny looked down at the case in his hands and snarled.

  “Sounds like ass,” he said sourly.

  An emanation of frigid cold flowed from the ghost, a sure sign that Graves was annoyed. Before he could reply, Danny’s mother came into the room.

  “Are we set?” she asked.

  Danny turned to see that she had a large bag of microwave popcorn and two unopened cans of soda in her arms. She smiled as she handed him the bag.

  “I guess,” he grumbled, digging into the popcorn, pushing one kernel into his mouth at a time. “We got a real exciting one about democracy fighting totalitarianism—whatever the fuck that means.”

  His mother frowned and slapped his leg as she dropped down on the sofa beside him. “Danny. Enough with the language.”

  He rolled his eyes.