Songs of Dreaming Gods Read online

  SONGS OF DREAMING GODS

  By William Meikle

  A Macabre Ink Production

  Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright © 2017 William Meikle

  Cover design by Zach McCain

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  William Meikle is a Scottish writer, now living in Canada, with over twenty novels published in the genre press and more than 300 short story credits in thirteen countries. He has books available from a variety of publishers and his work has appeared in a large number of professional anthologies and magazines. He lives in Newfoundland with whales, bald eagles and icebergs for company. When he’s not writing he drinks beer, plays guitar, and dreams of fortune and glory.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  NOVELS

  Berserker

  Crustaceans

  Eldren: The Book of the Dark

  Fungoid

  Generations

  Hound of Night / Veil Knights #2 (as Rowan Casey)

  Island Life

  Night of the Wendigo

  Ramskull

  Sherlock Holmes: The Dreaming Man

  Songs of Dreaming Gods

  The Boathouse

  The Creeping Kelp

  The Dunfield Terror

  The Exiled

  The Green and the Black

  The Hole

  The Invasion

  The Midnight Eye Files: The Amulet

  The Midnight Eye Files: The Sirens

  The Midnight Eye Files: The Skin Game

  The Midnight Eye Files: Omnibus

  The Ravine

  The Valley

  The Concordances of the Red Serpent

  Watchers: The Battle for the Throne

  Watchers: The Coming of the King

  Watchers: Culloden

  Watchers: Omnibus edition

  NOVELLAS

  Broken Sigil

  Clockwork Dolls

  Pentacle

  Professor Challenger: The Island of Terror

  Sherlock Holmes: Revenant

  Sherlock Holmes: The London Terrors (3 novella omnibus)

  The House on the Moor

  The Job

  The Midnight Eye Files: Deal or No Deal

  The Plasm

  Tormentor

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  Carnacki: Heaven and Hell

  Carnacki: The Edinburgh Townhouse

  Carnacki: The Watcher at the Gate

  Dark Melodies

  Myth and Monsters

  Professor Challenger: The Kew Growths

  Samurai and Other Stories

  Sherlock Holmes: The Quality of Mercy

  The Ghost Club

  DISCOVER CROSSROAD PRESS

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  We hope you enjoy this eBook and will seek out other books published by Crossroad Press. We strive to make our eBooks as free of errors as possible, but on occasion some make it into the final product. If you spot any problems, please contact us at [email protected] and notify us of what you found. We’ll make the necessary corrections and republish the book. We’ll also ensure you get the updated version of the eBook.

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  SONGS OF DREAMING GODS

  Table of Contents

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  3

  4

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  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

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  Other books

  1

  The tall blonde stepped down off the top landing while Inspector John Green was just halfway up the last set of stairs. She looked dazed, shocked. It was a look John had seen far too often, and he knew she wouldn’t be thinking straight, so he stood well to the side, almost right up against the wall to give her plenty of room to pass. She didn’t even acknowledge his presence, not that he expected her to. If what he’d been told on the phone was right, she’d seen more than enough for one day already. The constable who was leading her away gave him a thin smile.

  “It’s bad, boss. As bad as any I’ve seen.”

  The dazed look faded, not quite completely, from the blonde’s stare, and she looked straight at John, as if seeing him for the first time.

  “I’ll say it’s fucking bad. I thought it was all Carlos Castaneda, mescaline medicine man hippie bollocks,” she said as she wiped blood from her brow. “How was I to know the fucker was telling the truth all along?”

  “Excuse me?” John said. “Could you clarify that?”

  But the hundred-yard stare was back again and although another trickle of blood ran from a small tear at her hairline, she didn’t move to wipe it away this time. What little conversation there was appeared to be over before it had begun.

  The constable raised an eyebrow and shrugged.

  “She’s not spoken much sense at all yet, so your guess is as good as mine, boss,” he said. “She’s had a knock on the head as well as the cuts and bruises. I’ll get someone to have a look at her.”

  He led the woman away. She was still staring, still silent, as they disappeared out of view down the stairwell.

  John let it go. They’d get her statement down at the station after the medic did his thing. There was little to be gained from questioning her until that stare started to focus on matters nearer at hand. Besides, he had other things to worry about.

  He’d been at home when he got the call, and the chief sounded almost apologetic to be contacting him.

  “Normally I’d get Jim Hoskins,” he said “You know that, he’s been covering for you anyway, but he’s on an attempted murder case in Mount Pearl and I don’t want to drag him off it. You need to know; this is a nasty one, John. I’ll understand if you don’t think you’re ready just yet.”

  John knew he was far from ready. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be fully ready again, but he wasn’t going to tell the chief that. He’d been off work for so long it was driving him nuts, and he couldn’t give them any opening that might lengthen his absence. So here he was, about to walk in on blood and gore and folks who’d been alive but now we
re not, when he was only recently back from the brink of death himself. He took a deep breath, wished he’d had a drink before leaving the house, and walked into Apartment Six.

  He had been attending crime scenes for too many years to remember and thought he was inured against the worst horrors that man could inflict on his fellow man, but on entering the apartment even his hardened cynicism was being tested to the maximum. When his gaze landed on one atrocity, and slid away, finding it too much to bear, there was another to be seen at every turn. Despite an almost overwhelming panic attack, he had to breathe shallow, through his mouth—the stench of shit and piss and blood was almost overpowering. He was glad now that he’d not had that drink before leaving home; the scene was one of carnage and bloody chaos and he already knew he had his work cut out for him if he was to make any kind of sense of it.

  There were five, maybe six bodies. It was hard to tell amid the gory mess that lay strewn all across the floor and furnishings. Two, at least two, lay sprawled on a sofa, limbs and arms intertwined as if they’d clutched at each other in fear even as they’d been torn into little more than lumps of wet meat. Another lay on the floor, face down in a drying puddle of blood and brain and guts. Yet another was by the door. They, she, if the skirt was any indication, had nearly made it out, leaving red handprints almost, but not quite, up as far as the door handle. The last had tried, and failed, to crawl under the glass-topped coffee table and had only managed to get head and shoulders underneath; not nearly enough to save them. The body was pulled up into a defensive ball with the white bone of their spine showing clearly through rent clothing and torn flesh.

  John’s constable on this case, Todd Wiggins, stood in one of the few spaces clear of the gore, documenting the scene in his notebook. He saw the inspector looking, and threw a mock salute. John managed a thin smile in reply, but smiling was the last thing he felt like doing right then.

  John’s sergeant, Janis Lodge, was off to one side near the large picture window, taking notes of her own. She didn’t look up, didn’t acknowledge his presence, but he knew she’d seen him come in, and was giving him time and space to ease his way back on the job.

  I’m going to need plenty of both.

  His first instinct was to look for any spent shell casings, but there were none visible; no tell-tale holes in walls or windows either. And on closer inspection, as close as he cared to get anyway, the bodies didn’t look to have been shot. It looked more like they had been mutilated and some of them dismembered by someone in a rage, using an as yet unidentified weapon. At that moment, he was at a loss to think what it might be.

  He stood in the center of the room, unsure of his next move. He should be giving orders, making connections, collecting evidence, but all he could see was blood and the stuttering flashback running just behind his eyes of a knife, slashing. The wounds in his belly ached, a deep, almost agonizing pain that he’d been living with since he got out of hospital but now seemed worse than it had for weeks.

  “You okay, Boss?” Janis asked. She’d taken a step closer to him, and he noticed she had kept her voice low so that only he could hear. John knew what she was asking. It had only been two months, and he was supposed to be taking four, that was the minimum the doctors said he should rest, but he couldn’t ignore this call. This was his town, and a multiple murder here was an affront that he felt as deep as any knife wound.

  He still hadn’t answered Janis’ question. In truth, he was far from okay. But like it or not, this is what he was good at; this was all he was good at. He needed to work, otherwise the bottle might win this round, and once that started winning, the way back might be even longer still.

  He gazed out of the window so Janis couldn’t see his eyes. The wounds throbbed, hot then cold, and with his every breath he felt the knife again as it slid into the soft tissue of his belly. Only the fact that he was starting to run to fat had saved him. He could thank, not blame, the beer for that at least.

  It had been his own fault in a way. The first thing they teach you in training is make sure a body is really just a body and not some maniac looking for any excuse to do you harm. He’d been in a hurry that afternoon, the promise of a dinner date at the end of a long day meant he was eager to get it done and get off shift, so he hadn’t paid attention. It had snowed, was still snowing, heavily in town, and the alleyway off George Street was several inches deep in the stuff, although there was only a slight dusting on the body. He should have noticed that, should have remembered that dead men don’t melt snow. Instead he’d stepped forward, bent over, and almost fallen on his ass when the supposedly dead vagrant woke up and thrust a knife at him. Maybe if he had actually fallen he might have missed taking the wounds, but he hadn’t been that lucky.

  Now here he was, some new holes in him, ones that he knew would always be there long after the flesh had healed, and back at work too early, far too early.

  But what else can I do?

  At least the bodies strewn around him were most certainly dead, so he didn’t have that to worry about. And the view from the window was more than enough to distract him from the scene inside while he took time to gather his thoughts before responding to Janis.

  The building sat on a corner plot on Church Street, the frontage on the road itself and the eastern side on an alleyway that ran along the hillside. This apartment, on the top floor, overlooked the shorter house across the alley and had an open view to the wide expanse of St. John’s harbor and the mouth of the Narrows. The Atlantic Ocean beyond glistened in sword-like beams of sun slanting through the clouds and far to his left the high dome of Signal Hill had a new dusting of late spring snow. Normally the sight would have lifted John’s spirits. He loved this old town deeply, but today was looking to be far from normal and it was only just getting started.

  He didn’t have time to explain all that to Janis though, and he knew she was patiently waiting for an answer, so he forced himself to turn away from the window. He gave her as good a smile as he could manage.

  “I’m fine, just a bit tired,” he replied. “The chief got me out of bed before ten. That’s early for me these days.”

  She didn’t smile back at his forced attempt at humor, and looked like she might want to make something more of it, but John wasn’t ready for a cross-examination. He nipped any questioning in the bud by none too subtly reminding her that they were cops on a job.

  “What have we got so far, Sergeant?”

  She looked him in the eye, and finally managed a smile of her own in reply.

  “If that’s the way you want to play it…”

  He understood what she was asking. She’d been more than his Sergeant these past weeks, she’d been his link back to the real world, a friend when he needed one, and a nurse when he fucked up and overdid things. But here, now, he needed to be a cop, and he knew her well enough to know she’d understand.

  “It’s the only way I know,” he said.

  She reached across the space between them and touched his arm lightly.

  “Welcome back, Boss,” she said, “we missed you around here.”

  He thought that things might be getting better already.

  He let Janis ease him gently back into the swing of things, the details of the case doing much to ground him back into a sense of who he was, what constituted reality, for here and now at least.

  “What you see is what you get, boss,” she said. “Six in here, all dead by method as yet unknown, sometime in the early hours of the morning. A party gone wrong from what we’ve been able to ascertain so far. The blonde you must have seen on the way in is the only survivor, but good luck on getting anything out of her any time soon. I’m pretty sure she’s been on something hallucinogenic. Mushrooms would be my guess, given the nonsense she’s spouting about what went down. Whatever it was they’re taking her to the station to see if they can bring her down enough to be able to give us a statement.”

  “Carlos Castaneda, mescaline medicine man hippie bollocks,” John said, and Jani
s looked at him sharply, as if he’d just gone mad. He smiled thinly. “Just something our survivor said on the stairs. I don’t think it helps us any. How about some science? Where’s the Forensics team?”

  “They got the call same time as you did I believe. They’re on their way but have been held up near the airport by a crash…a fatality I heard, and half an hour before they get here I was told. But I don’t know that they’re going to find much of any use to us. There’s no weapon here that we can find, and we’ve looked everywhere, and it looks to me like all these deaths were done by some kind of animal attack, although there’s no prints in the blood of man nor beast, and no sign of any fur or hair. You chose a bad day to come back. It’s a weird one, Boss.”

  “What do you think? An axe maybe? Or even a chainsaw?”

  “That was my first thought too,” Janis said. “But there would be spatter everywhere in that case, the walls would be covered in it, you know that. And as you can see, it is puddles that we have here, not spatter. And there’s something else you need to look at in the kitchen.”

  She led John around an arch, one of those mock things people utilize as room dividers when they knock down walls. It led into a smaller kitchen-dining area. There was a small window looking across Church Street outside to the old church itself. The fixtures and fittings were all old, nineteen seventies or eighties vintage at a guess, and a naked neon light tube, currently off, hung somewhat precariously a foot overhead. The kitchen table was covered in liquor, wine and beer bottles and the linoleum on the floor felt sticky underfoot where booze, and God knows what else, had been spilled, but it was the thing that had been hung above the stove that got most of John’s attention. It was a poster of sorts, two feet tall by one foot wide, a psychedelic mélange of swirling green, yellow and purple that had been sketched over in thick black ink with a pair of black circles enclosing a five-pointed star. The pentacle had been crudely done in thick red lines that looked wet and sticky. He had to check closely before he convinced himself that it wasn’t more blood.

  “What’s this? Some band’s logo?” he asked.