Burn the Dark

by S. A. Hunt

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  Copyright Page

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  This book is dedicated to the fans, the Outlaw Army, because without you none of these books would exist. My best friend Chaser and Katie Fryhover most of all, both of whom visualized so many of the elements of my books through cosplay costumes, font design, fashion, and monster design.

  All of you, you are my muses, my rock, and my center. I love you all so much.

  A girl perched in the cab of a utility van. In one hand was a baby-food jar full of liquid. In the other was a dagger, silver and glittering in the rusty glow of the streetlight outside. Her hair was a Mohawk of wavy chestnut locks, sides buzzed down to dark stubble.

  On the dash was a camera, recording her half-shadowed face as she spoke. “Been trackin’ this one for weeks,” she said, punctuating weeks with the point of the dagger, her voice thrumming with a Southern drawl. “Looking for all the signs. Missin’ pets. Unusually lucky lottery plays. Over-population of cats. Weird accidents. And all that shit I told you about, you know, in the video about runes.

  “I been huntin’ down all the runes in Alabama I can find, and here, in Birmingham, they’ve started to converge. There are more here than anywhere else in the state.” She tucked the jar into a jacket pocket and picked up the camera, aiming it out the window. “Like I told y’all, they always live in ‘the bad part of town.’

  “But I don’t think they choose to live there because it’s the ‘bad part.’ I think it’s shitty because they live in it. They suck the goodness out of it, they eat the pride, devour the heart of the neighborhood until the people don’t care about anything anymore. There’s just drugs and poverty and garbage. And when there ain’t nothing left, the witch packs up and moves somewhere else. Like psychic vampires, or something. Tapeworms in the intestines of the world.”

  She heaved a heavy sigh, much too world-weary for such an ethereally young face.

  “If you got any doubt about what I’m doing, you gotta get this in your head right now: these fuckers ain’t Wiccans or hippies, they ain’t those chicks from The Craft, they ain’t Sabrina or the chick from Bewitched. These bitches are the real deal. Lieutenants of Hell on a vacation to Earth. Soul-sucking hag-beasts. And that’s what this one is.”

  Across the street from the van was a board fence. Someone had spray-painted incomprehensible graffiti on it—could have been an ambigram for all she knew, legible upside-down as well as right-side-up.

  “Lot of times they’ll hide the runes in the graffiti. Check out that sideways Jesus-fish in the middle—see how it’s a different color than the rest of it?” Robin’s arm thrust into the shot as she pointed at different parts of the graffiti with the dagger. The symbol she indicated was a simple diamond shape that crossed at the bottom to make the tail fins of a skyward-facing trout. “This is what I’m talking about. That ain’t no English letter, that’s a rune. It means home, or homelands. It’s there to let you know you’re in a witch’s territory. And you see that little crown on top of it? Means there’s a witch livin’ somewhere on this block.”

  She turned the camera around and put it on the dash again. Tattooed on her sternum, just below the pit of her throat, was a symbol like a Y with an extra limb in the middle:

  “The runes,” she said, “they’re there to help them find each other. I mean, there are seven billion people on this planet; even with the Internet—which a lot of them don’t use—it’s not easy. Taggers don’t even know they’re doing it, either. The witches, they … I don’t know, they influence them somehow, like they send out a radio signal the kids can’t help but catch. Like queen bees and worker drones. Maybe it’s … hell, I don’t know. Whatever it is, it needs to stop.”

  The witch-hunter opened the door and got out of the van, slipping the silver dagger into a sheath hidden in the lining of her jacket. In vinyl lettering down the side of the white van was a sleek, utilitarian logo: CONLIN PLUMBING. The license plate was HEXTIME. She strode with purpose across the night-dark street, and approaching the board fence, she rounded the corner, holding the camera up so it could see into the front yard of a run-down tract house.

  Overgrown grass around a lemon tree, shadowy front porch with no porch light. A rocking chair lurked in the gloom.

  The girl in the video crept up the front walk of the tract house.

  Hoo, hoo, hu-hu.

  Halfway across the yard, she paused and turned to point the camera up into the branches of the lemon tree, the aperture whirring as she zoomed in on it.

  A snowy owl perched in the masterwork of shadows some eight feet up, throat pulsing, hoo, hoo, hu-hu. The camera zoomed out as the owl took flight and left the screen stage right.

  “Hello, honey,” croaked a subtle voice.

  She whirled around and the world on camera whipped to the left, revealing the front of the white tract house and its shadowy porch, arrayed with boxes of junk, chairs, yellowed and fraying newspaper. A tribunal of cats sat on their haunches all over the porch, fifteen or twenty of them: calicos, tortoiseshell tabbies, midnight-blacks, two Siamese, an orange Morris with brilliant green eyes.

  Someone stood behind the screen door, a smear of gray a shade lighter than the darkness inside the house.

  At the top of the faint figure was the gnarled suggestion of a face. “What brings you round at this time of night, young lady?” An old woman, her voice kind but deliberate, with a hint of accent. British? Irish? Whatever it was, it wasn’t midwestern or southern.

  Motionless cats reflected the streetlight with their lantern-green eyes.

  Neva Chandler, said a voice-over from Robin. The self-proclaimed King of Alabama. Her voice was soft, introspective, an inside-voice that belonged more at a funeral than a YouTube video. Tinged with a faint southern twang.

  The girl threw a thumb over her shoulder. “Ah, my car broke down. I … I was hopin’ I could use your phone.”

  “Ah.” The old woman paused. She might have been folding her arms, but it was hard to tell. “I thought all you young ladies these days carried those—those cellular phones, they call them. With their tender apps and GPS-voices. Go here, go there, and so forth.”

  “No, ma’am,” replied the girl. “I’m kinda old-school that way I guess.”

  The old woman scoffed. “Old-school.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, if you’re going to come in, it would behoove you to do so, and get clear of the street,” the old woman said in a warning way, even though the girl was fully in her front yard by then. “It’s a dangerous place for dangerous people.”

  The stoop leading up to the porch was made of concrete painted in flaking gray, and the porch itself was as well. Columns of wrought-iron curlicues held up the roof. At Robin’s feet was a china bo
wl with a few pebbles of dry cat food.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Stepping up onto the porch, she tugged the screen door open with a furtive hand. The old woman behind the mesh faded into the darkness like a deep-sea creature and Robin stepped in behind her, filling the video window with black.

  Click-click. A dingy bulb in an end-table lamp burst to life, brightening a living room positively crowded with antiques.

  A grandfather clock stood next to an orange-and-brown tweed sofa, tiny black arms indicating the time was a few minutes to midnight. Four televisions of progressive evolution clustered on top of a wood-cabinet Magnavox, rabbit-ear antenna reaching over them for a signal no longer being broadcast. No less than three pianos filled one end of the room, two player and one baby grand, all covered in dust.

  All of a sudden the smell hit her, a wall of rotten musk. Boiled cabbage, farts, cigarettes. Dead old things, burnt hair, burnt popcorn. Cat shit.

  Gangs of unlighted candles stood atop every surface, halfway melted into the saucers and teacups that held them. Lines of runic script decorated the windowsills and the threshold of the front door between her feet.

  Another cat sat on top of a piano, running its tongue down the length of one leg. Robin let the screen door ease shut. “I’m so sorry to bother you this time of night.”

  Chandler shuffled over to a plush wingback chair and dropped herself into it, crumpling. She wore a pink bathrobe, with steel-gray hair as dry as haystraw tumbling down the sides of her Yoda face. A whisper of mustache dusted her upper lip. She could have been a thousand years old if a day.

  An old glass-top coffee table dominated the space in front of the sofa and armchair. Occupying the center of the table was a wooden bowl, and inside the bowl was a single pristine lemon.

  “No bother at all, my dear,” the old woman said, peering up at Robin with the baggy, watery eyes of a basset hound. “I’m usually up late. No bother at all.” As she spoke, she flashed black gums and the pearlescent brown teeth of a lifelong smoker. “Ah, the phone,” she wheezed, curling a finger over the back of the chair. “Over in there, in the hallway, on the little hutch. Do you see it?”

  The camera soared past the armchair and toward a doorway in the back of the furniture-crowded room.

  As it did so, Robin softly interjected a pensive voice-over. Sometimes when the witches have completely drained a neighborhood down to the bones and they’ve used it all up, all the—whatcha call it, the “life,” the soul—there ain’t nothing left to move with. They can’t migrate to a new town, they get stuck, and slowly wither away. They starve. They die from the inside out. The deadness slowly makes its way to the outside. Heinrich and I think that’s what happened here.

  The old woman’s telephone turned out to be a rotary phone. Robin picked up the handset and pressed it against her ear, listening for a dial tone. She put it against the GoPro in her hand.

  After a while they’re just a rotten corpse in a living-human costume.

  Nothing came from the earpiece but a muted ticking, as if she could hear the wind tugging at the lines outside.

  Death masquerading as life.

  “So what is a beautiful young lady like you doing in a trackless waste such as this? This is a hobby town—there’s nothing to do, so everybody has a hobby. Painting model airplanes, collecting stamps, making meth, doing meth. Can’t be that, though. You’re not around to buy drugs.” The decrepit crone sat up, leaning over to pluck the lemon out of the bowl with one knobby monkey-paw hand. “No, Robin dear, ohhh, you don’t look like the others. You don’t look like shit.”

  “No, ma’am, I don’t do drugs. I mean, other than medication.” Robin put the handset down. “I’m from out of town, visiting a fr—”

  Chandler’s breathing came in phlegmy gasps and sighs, tidal and troubled. Sounded like she’d been running a marathon.

  “How did you know my name?” asked the girl.

  “Oh, honey, bless your heart,” said the crone, “I been expecting you all day.” She pricked the rind of the lemon with a thumbnail and peeled part of it away, revealing not the white-yellow flesh Robin had expected, but the vital and fevered red of an internal organ. “It took you longer to get here than I expected. But then Birmingham is rather Byzantine, isn’t it? I remember when I was a child, when it was all gaslights and horse-drawn carts, the layout was so much simpler then.”

  Blue veins squirmed across the lemon’s surface in time to some eldritch beat.

  The lemon had a pulse.

  Lifting the thing to her mouth, Chandler bit into it, spritzing fine droplets of blood into the air.

  Ferocious wet devouring-noises came from the other side of the chair, like wolves tearing into the belly of a dead elk. More blood sprayed up, dotting the wallpaper, the lampshade. The remains of the lemon’s rind dangled from the crone’s hand like a fresh scalp, bloody and pulpy.

  Red dripped on the filthy carpet.

  “My last lemon,” said Chandler, twisting slowly in the chair.

  One twiggish hand slipped over the back, gripping the velvet and cherrywood. “I’ve been saving it for a special occasion, you know.”

  Rising, she stared Robin down with eyes that flashed with a red light deep inside. Her teeth were too many for her mouth, tiny canines, peg-like fangs. The wrinkles across the bloody map of her face had smoothed. Her schoolmarm hair had gone from corn silk to black rooted in steel. “You think you’re the first to seek me?” asked the witch, her lips contorting over the bulge of teeth. The longer she spoke, the deeper her voice got, dropping in pitch like a toy with a dying battery. “My trees are composted with the rot of a dozen just like you.”

  “There ain’t nobody like me, lady. I eat assholes like you for breakfast.”

  The monstrous witch blinked. “You eat assholes?” She giggled, which coming out of her throat sounded horselike.

  “I, uhh—well—”

  “If you’re gonna be a witch-hunter like your friends, you need to work on your one-liners!” Chandler spidered over the chair, pink bathrobe flagging over her humped back.

  “Shit!” Robin ran. “Shit shit shit!”

  Darkness swallowed the camera, shredded by light coming in through the witch’s window blinds. The image went into hysterics as Robin pumped her arms, running through the house.

  Tripping over something, she went sprawling in a pile of what sounded like books. “Goddammit! Aarrgh!”

  The witch came through the house after the girl, her bare feet thumping the carpet, then bumping against the linoleum, meat clubbing against wood. “God won’t save you. You’ll not have me, little lady,” gibbered Chandler, invisible in the dark. “You’ll not have me, you’ll not have me.”

  Robin pushed through the back door of a kitchen, bursting out into a moonlit backyard. Turning, stumbling, she aimed the camera at the house.

  Shick, the sound of metal against leather. Robin drew the silver dagger.

  The back door slapped open. Something came racing out, a wraith shrouded in stained terrycloth, the lemon-heart blood coursing down her chin and wasted xylophone chest—and then the old woman was gliding across the overgrown yard, reaching for her with those terrible scaly owl-hands.

  “Hee hee hee heeeee!” cackled Chandler, instantly on her, shoving her into the weeds. Both went down in a heap and Robin lost the camera.

  Whirling around, the video’s perspective ended up sideways on the ground, obscured by the grass, barely capturing the melee in one corner of the screen. Neva Chandler landed on top of the girl’s belly cowgirl-style and raked at her face with those disgusting yellow nails, deceptively sharp chisel-points, laughing, crowing in her harsh raven-rasp of a voice.

  Even though Robin was fighting with everything she had, she couldn’t push the old crone away. An astounding strength lingered in those decrepit bones. Tangling her fingers in the girl’s hair, Chandler wrenched her head up and down, bouncing it uselessly against the grass.

  “Get off me!” shrieked
Robin in her thin, high video-voice, thrusting the silvery dagger through the pink bathrobe and into the witch’s ribs—SHUK!

  Time seemed to pause as the fight stopped as suddenly as it had started. Chandler’s arms were crooked back, her fingers clawed in a grotesque parody of some old Universal movie monster. Her face was twisted and altered by some strange paranormal force, her mouth impossibly open until it was a drooping coil of chin and teeth. Robin withdrew the dagger, releasing black syrup. Then she plunged it deep into the old woman’s chest again, shuk, and twice, and thrice, and four times, shuk shuk shuk.

  Black liquid like crude oil dribbled out around the blade of the dagger. The witch exhaled deep in her throat, a deathly deflating.

  “Knife to meet you!” shouted the girl.

  Not my best, said the voice-over. I’m learning, okay?

  With a shrieking snarl, “Grrraaaaaagh,” the witch leapt backward—propelled, more like, as if she’d been snatched away by some invisible hand—and scrambled to the safety of her back stoop, cowering like a cornered animal. A stew of red and black ran down her sloped chin and wattled neck. “That won’t work!” she choked through a mouthful of ichor. Chandler had taken the dagger away, and now it glittered in one warped claw. “It’ll take more than bad puns and pigstickers to—”

  Hands shaking, Robin produced the Gerber jar and threw a fastball.

  The jar went wide, whipping over the old woman’s head.

  Glass shattered against the eaves, showering her with the contents. Chandler flinched, blinking in confusion.

  “This ain’t The Wizard of Oz, honey, I ain’t going to melt. You was having more luck with the dagger.” She flourished the dagger as if she were conducting a symphony with it. “You want this back? Come get it, little girl!”

  The witch-hunter reached into her jacket.

  She whipped out a Zippo, the lid clinking open.

  “What you got there?” The witch sniffed the arm of her bathrobe and grimaced. She looked up. “Oh hell no.”