Burn the Dark

by S. A. Hunt

  Alcohol.

  Flick, a tiny flame licked up from the Zippo in Robin’s hand, brightening the backyard. “Get away from me!” the witch shrieked, trading the dagger to the other hand and flinging it overhand like a tomahawk. Robin recoiled. The blade skipped off the side of her collar, inches from her throat, a sharp pain just under her ear as the blade nicked her skin.

  Chandler turned and ripped the back door open, scrambling through. Robin snatched up the GoPro and followed, camera in one hand and lighter in the other. She caught the witch just inside the threshold, touching the Zippo’s tongue to the edge of her bathrobe.

  The terrycloth caught, lining the hem with a scribble of white light, enough to faintly illuminate the grimy kitchen.

  “Oooooh!” screeched Chandler, tumbling to her hands and knees. “You nasty, nasty girl! You trollop! You tramp!” The witch stood, using the counter as a ladder, and fumbled her way over to the sink, smearing black all over the cabinets. Raking dirty dishes out of the way, Chandler disturbed a cloud of fruit flies and turned on the faucet. “When I get this put out, I’m going to—I’m going to—” She tugged and tugged the stiff sprayer hose, trying to pull it out of the basin.

  Flames trickled up the tail of Chandler’s bloody bathrobe, but they were going much too slowly for Robin’s liking. She reached over and touched the fabric with the Zippo again. This time the alcohol on Chandler’s back erupted in a windy burp of white and orange. The flames billowed toward the ceiling, a cape of fire, whispering and muttering.

  As Robin lunged in to ignite her sleeve, Chandler reached into the sink with her other hand and came up with a dirty carving knife.

  She hooked it at the girl, trying to stab her and spray herself with the sink hose at the same time. Robin jerked away. The plastic nozzle showered the witch’s head with cold water, soaking her hair and running down her face, washing away the blood and oil-slime. Chandler maneuvered around, trying to spray the fire on her back, but all she could seem to manage was to half-drown herself and shoot water over her shoulder onto the floor.

  “Help me!” cried the flame-ghost, water arcing all over the kitchen. “Why would you do this to an old lady like me? What have I ever done to yoooouuuuu?”

  “You witches killed my mama!”

  Flinging the refrigerator door open, Robin flinched as condiment bottles and a stick of butter clattered to the floor at her feet. Reaching in, she grabbed the neck of a bottle of Bacardi. The last bit sloshed around in the bottom.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Chandler shoved the fridge door closed, almost on Robin’s head. “HELP ME!” roared the slack-faced creature in the bathrobe. Her jaw had come unhinged, and two rows of tiny catlike teeth glistened wetly in the pit of her black maw. Her eyes were two yellow marbles, shining deep in bruise-green eye sockets. “HELP ME OR YOU’LL BURN WITH ME!”

  Pressing her ragged stinking body against Robin’s, Chandler wrapped her arms around the other’s chest in a bear hug.

  Prickly, inhuman teeth brushed against the girl’s collarbone.

  With an incoherent shriek, Robin pushed and slapped at Chandler’s shoulders and face. Those horrible teeth scratched at her hands and the witch craned forward, her throat engorged and fat like a python, her great moray-eel mouth clapping shut at empty air.

  Crash! Robin clubbed the hag across the forehead with the Bacardi, shattering the bottle.

  The liquor inside hit the flames and exploded.

  “EEEEEEE!” the flaming figure keened, fully engulfed now and stumbling blindly around the kitchen, leaving little puddles and clues of fire all over the cabinets and the little dining table with the checkered Italian-café tablecloth. Stacks of old books on the table caught, the grimoires and cookbooks drinking up the heat, already shriveling.

  “Burn, you evil bitch! Burn!” Robin fell back, escaping to a hallway that would have been too dark to navigate if it hadn’t been for the screaming bonfire.

  “KILL HER,” Chandler howled from inside the flames. “KIIILL HERRR!”

  Cats appeared from everywhere, squirreling out of gaps and from underneath the furniture—black, white, calico, tortoise-shell. They ran straight at Chandler and kamikaze’d into the flames, igniting their own bodies in a zealous fervor.

  In an instant, the kitchen was a meteor shower, a riot of immolated cats running in every direction, flailing and shrieking.

  Running down the hallway to escape the madcap carnage, Robin came out behind a piano in the living room. She slid over the top of the thing on her belly, plowing through a feathery coat of dust and cat hair.

  On her knees and then her feet, she shoved through the screen door and ran out into the front yard.

  A crowd of thirty or forty people had assembled in the street.

  They stood stock-still and rigid in various states of undress, their hands dangling at their sides, staring at her, eyes shining green in the dark. Unkempt hair, awoken mid-sleep. Some of them slowly worked and flexed their hands.

  “Mrrrrrr,” hummed a man in a hooded sweatshirt. “Rrrrwww.”

  A burning cat pushed past Robin’s feet and out into the front yard, where it collapsed.

  She juked left, running underneath the lemon tree and around the side of Chandler’s tract house, between the board fence and the clapboard wall. Mud and wet grass underneath the tree almost knocked her on her ass.

  “Go go go go go,” she growled under her breath.

  The pounding of sneakered feet made it clear the familiars were chasing her. The fence ended near the back corner and Robin vaulted the chain-link and jumped the sidewalk, almost losing her footing, then sprinted across the street. She opened the driver door of the CONLIN PLUMBING van and threw herself inside.

  Through the window she could see half the neighborhood pouring out of the gap behind the fence like hornets from a nest, and just as terrifying.

  Her key was already in the ignition. She twisted it until she thought it would snap off in the steering column. The van chugged a few times and turned over mightily, GRRRRUH!

  When she went to shut the door, she slammed it on the meaty arm of a fat man in an old Bulls jersey, the collar frayed around his hoary neck.

  “Get your own car, shithead! This one is paid for!”

  “Mrrrr!” he growled. His eyes were green screwheads.

  Crazed, yowling people clustered around the van and hammered the panels with their fists, clawing at the windows. Jersey Man’s arm flapped into the cab with her, fighting her hands, and he found her throat with the fork of his palm, pressing it against her windpipe.

  Her neck was pinned against the headrest. She couldn’t breathe.

  Thrusting her foot into the floorboard, she found the accelerator and put all her weight on it. The engine snarled, vibrating the van, revving hard, so hard for a second she thought it would come apart, but nothing else happened. The van’s cabin filled with an acrid burning smell.

  “Fffffk,” she gurgled, fumbling for the gearshift.

  The passenger window imploded in a tumble of glass and someone reached in at her.

  Robin put the van in Drive and stood on the gas again. This time the machine leapt forward like a greyhound busting out of the starting block, pressing her against the seat. The engine coughed once, twice, the drivetrain rumbled, and then the crowd fell away and she was barreling down the street.

  Bodies fell in the headlights, astonished faces flashing across the hood, and the van clambered over them, bonk-badunk-clank-bang. Driving with her fingertips, she twisted the steering wheel this way and that, trying to shake off the two men halfway inside the cab with her, but only the one hanging out the window fell. The van hauled back and forth, teetering with the gravity of a Spanish galleon on the sea.

  “You will die,” said Jersey Man, his fingers still clamping Robin’s neck to the seat. She could feel her heartbeat in her face. “The Red Lord will find you.”

  Jerking the wheel to the left, she sideswiped a telephone pole. The w
ooden trunk slammed into the man’s shoulder and knocked him off, his fingernails biting into the skin under her ear. Her tires barked and wailed as Robin fought to keep the van under control, and the telephone pole scraped down the side of the vehicle, beating on the hollow panels with a noise like thunder.

  She glanced at the side mirror. Two dozen men and women were running helter-skelter down the street behind her, looking for all the world like a midnight marathon.

  She did not stop. She did not slow down. She drove on.

  The man’s severed arm lay across her chest, speckling the door panel with vivid red blood. She tore its reflexive grip from her throat and threw it out the passenger window, then tried to roll the window up, pushing broken bloody glass out of the gap.

  When the camera abruptly cut to a new shot the sun had come up, turning the sky a sickly dawn gray.

  Everything was quiet. A couple hours had passed since the chase. A fire truck’s silent flasher strobed red across the side of Neva Chandler’s house, or at least what was left of it. Black pikes jutted up from shards of siding and electrical conduits.

  Robin crept into the backyard and lifted the silver dagger from the weeds, then retreated to her van.

  Neva Chandler, the self-proclaimed King of Alabama, said Robin’s voice-over, her soft, measured, academic tone incongruous against the chaotic violence that had just taken place. The video faded to black, but she continued to speak. Almost as old as Alabama itself. My first real kill, my first real fight. There would be dozens more, all over the country, but I’ll never forget this one.

  I just keep thinking, she went easy on me. If she was anything like the others that came after, she could have easily killed me. I think she wanted to die. Maybe she wanted one last tussle, one last knockdown-dragout, she wanted to die on her terms, but yeah, she wanted to die.

  Well.

  If that’s the case, I was more than fuckin’ happy to oblige.

  The camera cut to Robin’s point of view as she stood in a car wash, the watery blue dawn peeking through the clouds, spraying the side of the van with a water gun. Blood ran off in pink sheets, coiling and swirling in oily water as it spilled down the drain grate.

  “That went well, I think?” she said shakily.

  Cut to black.

  1

  Two Years Later

  Robin woke from another nightmare of trees and flame and gulped a deep breath as if she’d surfaced from the ocean. She lay staring at the carpeted ceiling, breathing hard and fast, trembling, trying to mentally scrub off the feeling of being a kid again, the smell of cut grass, the sensation of clutching that wooden hand again—

  Condensation dribbled down the curve of the van’s rear windows, refracting stony gray light. Her cell phone told her it was a few minutes after ten the morning of October 23. She sat up and lifted a camcorder from its customary place in a tub lined with soft black foam, then wriggled out of her sleeping bag and dug through a tub full of rolled clothes.

  The smell of burning bark still floated among the dust, as if the smoke had permeated her skin and hair. She wore nothing but a pair of gray panties and even inside the van, warmed by her farts and body heat all night, the air was graveyard-clammy, so she knew the late autumn morning outside would require something a little more substantial than usual.

  Damn Georgia humidity, she thought, pulling on a pair of jeans and a light jacket over a band T-shirt. Makes the summers hotter and the winters colder.

  The entire back half of the van was lined with rails, shelves, and wire frames in which nested dozens of small plastic bins containing all manner of things:

  packets of trail mix

  electronics parts still in their blister packs

  condiment packets from just about every restaurant under the sun

  barbers’ clippers

  toiletries and shaving razors

  USB cables

  name-brand AA, AAA, D, and tiny dime-like watch batteries

  a rats’ nest of power adapter cables

  One tub held baby-food jars emptied of their contents and refilled with alcohol. Another tub contained handfuls of stacked twigs, another was full of something that might have been ginger root, or perhaps bits of wild mushroom.

  A large pegboard occupied one half of a wall directly behind the driver’s seat. Several edged weapons had been mounted on pegs and held in place with little clips—a broadsword, a short-sword, a kuhkri knife like a boomerang with a handle, a wicked black tomahawk, a Cold Steel katana painted matte black, the gilded silver dagger from the video.

  A fifteen-year-old stuffed animal, a fuzzy blue mosquito peeked over the edge of a tub, his own personal plastic sarcophagus.

  Mr. Nosy’s proboscis was a lot more limp these days—both of his glassy wings and four of his six legs had been stitched back on at some point—but he was still whole and had both of his big white Muppet eyes. Robin leaned over and gave her oldest friend a kiss on the nose.

  Once she was dressed, she put the camera on a screw-mount in the corner, facing her. There were several mounts around the van, including two on the dash and two clamped to the wing mirrors.

  Tucked into the pocket of yesterday’s jeans was an orange prescription bottle. She transferred it to today’s jeans. Taking a moment to screw the heels of her hands into her eyes again to grind away any remaining sleep, she slapped a bongo beat on her cheeks to redden them, then turned the camera on and started recording.

  “Good morning, Internet-Land,” she said, her whiskey-and-cigarettes rasp exploding like a hand-grenade in the silence.

  She put on her socks and boots as she talked, long green army socks and a pair of comfortable combat boots. “Malus here. You might be able to hear I’ve got a bit of a sinus thing right now. And I think I might be getting a sore throat. Guess that’s what I get for not eating enough oranges?”

  She paused, glanced down at the van floor as if to gather her thoughts, then went back to cramming her feet in her boots.

  They were like big sneakers, with a padded ankle, an Air Jordan profile, and soles like tractor tires. She’d bought them at a PX in Kentucky earlier that year for almost two hundred dollars, and they had earned the nickname “shit-kickers” before she’d even paid for them. Postmodern punk-rock couture. Her jeans were snug enough the boots fit over them.

  “If you’ve been watching my channel, then you’ll know what I’ve been through. Who I am. My purpose. Well, I’m here. Back where this shit all started.” She tied the laces into a big floppy knot, then looked directly into the camera. “Home,” she said, as if the word were a hex. “Blackfield.” She tucked the laces into her boots and turned the camera to point through the rear window.

  Moisture on the windows made a swimmy, crystalline netherworld of the overcast day outside. Crows razzed at each other outside the van, chittering and muttering dark gossip.

  She swiveled the camera back around, filling the tiny viewfinder screen with her pale face and the dark circles around her eyes.

  Instead of giving her the tough rock-chick look she’d been going for, her wavy Mohawk and shaved scalp made her seem otherworldly and delicate, fuzzy with a week and a half of chestnut stubble.

  “This girl is going to go find a cup of coffee. Y’all ready for some BREAKFAST FOOTAGE?”

  Big black crows took flight in every direction when she opened the back door, complaining in their harsh voices. She stepped down out of the van and unscrewed the camera, then grabbed the vinyl messenger bag. As the doors met in the middle with a slam, a blue-and-red logo reconstituted itself: CONLIN PLUMBING.

  “I know you ain’t here for the food, this isn’t a cuisine travelogue channel. But I’m starving.” She took some B-roll footage of the area. The van was parked at the edge of a large graveled clearing, and mild white-gold sunlight tried to break through into the day. Several tents had been erected in the grass some thirty yards away, and beyond them was a utilitarian two-story cinderblock building, with doors labeled MEN and WOMEN. From in
side came the white-noise rush of hot showers running, and steam poured from PVC pipes jutting out of the roof. Simple graffiti was spray-painted on the walls: BITE MY SHINY LIBERAL ASS. ST. VINCENT. YEE-THO-RAH. Doodles of a monkey taking a shit and a robot on a motorcycle.

  To her right, a sprawling split-level cabin lurked in the shadows of the woodline, pumping out the constant smell of cooking food. The back of the restaurant opened up in a large hangar-like seating area with five trestle tables. She scanned the shadows in the back, peering cautiously, looking for a familiar silhouette and staring green eyes.

  “The Red Lord will find you,” the man had said.

  Last time she’d seen what he called the Red Lord was three weeks ago, a jagged figure standing in the tree line on a back road out of Seattle just after dark. Time before that had been two months earlier, a dark shape looming in the corner of her motel room at four in the morning, watching her sleep with luminous eyes.

  She sighed with relief.

  “Malus inbound. Prepare for impact.”

  Climbing a hill, she clomped across the front porch, where a smiling gray fireplug of a dog was leashed to the banister.

  “Hello there, Mad Max,” she said, pointing the camera at him. “How are you today?”

  The Australian cattle dog licked his chops and whined.

  Miguel’s Pizzeria was dimly lit and claustrophobic, with clumps of ropes and climbing gear hanging from the ceiling, and stacks of shoeboxes by the door. A half-dozen booths filled the room, all of them empty.

  Robin went to the counter, a glass case containing mementos and historical knickknacks, but nobody was there. A tip jar and a charity jar stood by the register (take a penny, leave a penny), and A4-printed photographs postered the wall behind the counter (take a picture, leave a picture).

  The photos were of semi-famous people posing in their climbing accoutrement with the owners of the restaurant, and panoramic shots of the mountains around the valley. She thought she recognized Les Stroud of the TV show Survivorman in one picture, and maybe Aron Ralston of 127 Hours fame in another, his prosthetic arm around Miguel’s shoulder.