by S. A. Hunt
A rush of cold heat shot down Robin’s neck in embarrassment. She narrowed her eyes at him. You planned this all along, didn’t you?
Kenway rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah, I guess I could.”
After taking down the projector equipment and cleaning up the mess from the pizza, the five of them regrouped on the sidewalk and said their good-nights. Turned out the artiste drove a rattletrap Chevy pickup, an antique land-yacht. The paint job was the tired Dustbowl-blue of the sky in old photographs, wistful and cool.
Climbing into the cab, Robin pulled her hoodie’s sleeves down to cover her hands and pushed her hands into the muff pockets. She wasn’t cold, but it made her feel better. Safer.
A set of dog tags dangled from the rearview mirror, twinkling in the light. She rolled the window down and sat back to listen to the cicadas buzz and whisper in the distance. Kenway got in, filling the driver’s seat with his muscular bulk, and turned the engine over with an oily, exhausted chugga chugga chugga. He fiddled with the radio, producing a static-chewed gabble.
“What kind of music do you like?”
“Any kind.” She smiled as warmly as she could. “Well, I have a special place for death-metal covers of old showtunes.”
Kenway snorted.
“Kidding.” She eyed him. “I’m game for whatever’s on. Just don’t expect me to dance. I’ve got two left feet.”
“Me too.” The vet knocked on his leg. “They didn’t have any spare righties, so I had to settle for a lefty. It’s hell for buying shoes.” When he caught her look of alarm, he laughed. “Kidding.” He settled on a classic rock station—Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night, Heinrich would have liked that—and he looked to her for approval.
Clearest signal on the band, so she pursed her lips in an agreeing smile. “Sounds good.”
The gearshift was a twenty-sided die as big as an apple. As he went to put the truck in gear, he noticed her eyes on it. “I won that playing Trivial Pursuit at Fish’s shop one night.” He chuckled and pushed it across the gearbox, and the engine dropped in pitch. “First time my encyclopedic knowledge of TV shows has ever come in handy. It’s actually not a real gearshift, I had to drill a hole in the back of it. Would you believe I’ve never played Dungeons & Dragons?”
The Chevy swung out of the parking spot and lumbered down the street, passing a tremendous Gothic church that looked as if it were made of sandstone blocks. “Never woulda guessed. You look like the nerdiest guy in town. Total Poindexter over here—”
The thing from her dream stood under one of the stone buttresses, in an alleyway.
The Red Lord.
Luminous green lamp-eyes gleamed in the darkness of its broad face, strobing between the bars of the churchyard fence. A yellow security light on the church wall illuminated it from behind, making a halo of the reddish hair covering its lumpy shoulders and long arms. Years ago, she had pegged it for at least eight feet tall, but next to the monumental columns and buttresses of Walker Memorial it almost looked delicate.
This thing, whatever it was, had been showing up more and more often in the periphery of her life since the incident with Neva Chandler, as if marking the passage of time, or some kind of recurring echo, like a sonar ping.
Boogeyman.
Maybe it was a curse. Or maybe it was real, maybe Chandler had summoned it, maybe pointed her out to it, made Robin more visible to it, in an attempt to distract her from the Job. The Task. The Quest. Of killing every witch she could find.
But see, here’s the thing: the being called “the Red Lord” never tried to hurt her. Never came at her in a menacing way, other than silently appearing in her personal space. It just lurked at the edge of the shadows, and in darkened doorways, and outside of cloudy windowpanes. Standing in the trees, just inside the glow of an alleyway security light, motionless, monstrous, staring, the wind tousling that mottled mane. Making that come-hither gesture with one long, gnarled finger.
Come with me, it always seemed to be saying.
I have something to show you.
Maybe the stress of her traumatic shock therapy at the mental hospital, and the strenuous training with Heinrich, and the brutal fight with Chandler … well, maybe it all piled up on her until it triggered some kind of a slow-motion mental breakdown.
Hell, maybe she’d been born crazy all along, and the stress had brought it all roaring into her life at full blast.
Perhaps unsettled by the fear on her face, Kenway gave her a side-eye. “You okay? Look like you saw a ghost.”
“Y-yeah. I mean, no. No ghosts here.” She gave him her best smile.
“You and Joel sound like you grew up together,” he said, grinning. “Talk the same way. Hey y’all, we fittin’ to hop on ’at train. Aight.”
“Like a couple of Podunk country kids?”
“Yeah.” He gestured at her in a general way. “So what do you do for a living? Must be pretty interesting—”
“Cause of the way I look?” She glanced at herself in the wing mirror and suddenly she seemed outlandish, all dark-eyed and gray-scalped. You look like an extra from a Mad Max movie. For the first time in a long time—maybe the first time period—she wished she were wearing more makeup. Her fingernails had been black earlier that week, but now they were mostly chipped away.
Kenway scoffed, grinning. “You said it, not me.”
“I make Internet videos.” She remembered she was holding her camera, and she waggled it indicatively. It was not filming.
“Really. Huh.” Kenway stopped at a red light, waiting for cross-traffic that never came. “Didn’t even realize you could make money doing that. What do you do in ’em?”
Bet you probably thought I did porn, she thought. You wouldn’t be the first to make that assumption. The radio was turned so low Robin could hear the traffic light clicking softly in the breeze. Lyrics squirmed at the edge of her hearing like voices on a telephone.
“Vlog.”
“Gesundheit.”
“No, it’s like a video journal. I … ‘document’ things. On YouTube.” You document yourself killing the shit out of things, you mean? She hesitated. Kenway was good-looking, and she didn’t want to jeopardize whatever tenuous thing she could sense hovering in the cab between them with the truth. “Ahh … I don’t know, it’s nothing. Not really that great. I just talk to the camera a lot. Drive around, visit places, do stuff.” Visit places, do stuff, kill monsters with swords and knives, sacrifice goats. Okay, maybe not that last one, but you’re well on your way, aren’t you?
“Cool, cool.” The light turned green and the truck grumbled across the intersection. “Anyway, I wanted to tell you, I really dig that Mohawk.”
She instinctively brushed a hand across her bristly scalp. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’m—I’m really into rock chicks. Biker chicks. That kind of thing. I guess.” He rolled his own window down and laid an elbow out of it, leaning away from her. He shrugged. “I don’t know. I just … wanted to say it, say something. You look good. It’s a good look for you.”
“Thanks.”
“Suits your face.”
Robin summoned up her curiosity. “So … you don’t really look like a local. I don’t remember you from when I was a kid.” Good pickup line, doofus. Do you really know everybody in town?
“Grew up in Washington and California, moved out here a couple years ago. Visiting a friend of mine and decided to stay. I like this town. It’s quiet, and I, uhh … guess I had some baggage I needed to get rid of. And this place is a good place to lose it.” He glanced at her and back at the road. “The baggage, that is. Lose my baggage.”
“I know what you meant.” Robin stared through the windshield. “I think I brought some back here myself.”
You brought an entire cargo ship, girl.
At night, Blackfield was a dead city, an abandoned town painted in shades of the ghastly rust-orange of sodium-vapor security lamps. They only saw two cars, and both of them turned down side s
treets, heading home. “Y’know, I guess it must not be ‘nothing’—” Flicking the turn signal, tick tock tick tock, Kenway eased into a turning lane and boated left. “—I mean, if you can make a living at it, whatever it is you do on YouTube must be good enough to pay the bills. Right?”
“Yeah, I guess it’s all right. Beats a kick in the ovaries.”
“So come on. Out with it, Miss Mysterious. What do you do in these videos, for real?” He smirked at her, lip curling in one corner, white teeth glinting in his beard.
They crossed a small bridge over a canal running parallel to the main drag, and she could hear the faint gurgle of rushing water. On the other side, Kenway turned right and carried them up a street of quaint two-story buildings like some kind of historical business district. A stray dog trotted through the showers of orange lights and patches of darkness, a man on a mission.
“Do you watch a lot of YouTube videos?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No, not really. I don’t even have a smartphone. I have a computer at the shop, but I only use it for work. My laptop in my apartment, I don’t use it much at all except for watching movies or checking email. Reading the news.”
She squinted. “What about that movie The Blair Witch Project?”
“I remember, yeah. Came out in like, 1999 or 2000, didn’t it?”
“Yeah. My channel is sort of like that. Fake real-life footage of supernatural events in my life. There are actually a lot of channels like mine. Most of them are people dealing with ghosts. Haunted houses. And monsters. Extra-dimensional monsters?”
Coming out of her mouth, it sounded stupid as hell. Stupid, she thought. It sounds crazy, is how it sounds.
“Mm-hmm.” Kenway nodded.
They slowed to a crawl, level with a dark shop front. The plate-glass windows were painted with a gryphon in rampant red, and underneath was lettering in Old English: GRIFFIN’S ARTS & SIGNS. “This is my place. I live upstairs from my shop in a drafty studio apartment. Yep, I’m the stereotypical starving artist.”
They drove on. He took them to the end of the median and did a U-turn through the turning lane, going the way they came.
“Do a lot of business?” she asked.
“Not really. But I like it that way. Might have one or two big projects a month. The rest of the time I paint.” He tugged his jeans leg up, revealing the sheen of a metal rod. His lower left leg was a prosthetic foot. “VA disability,” he said, knocking on it with a hollow tonk, tonk. “Gives me a lot of free time.”
“I was wondering if you were in the army.” Robin’s eyes flicked to the dog tags hanging from the mirror. She caught one of them and turned it to the light. SFC GRIFFIN, KENWAY. 68W. BLOOD TYPE AB. RELIGION NONE.
“Used to be.”
“Mind if I ask what happened?”
He didn’t answer right away. His eyes were fixed on some point in front of the Chevy—not the road, but some place in another time. Good going, idiot. Foot, meet mouth. “I’m sorry,” Robin said. “I shouldn’t—”
“It’s okay. I was uhh … collecting my thoughts.” He tipped down the visor and caught a pack of cigarettes, pulling one out with his lips.
He didn’t light it, but he put the pack back in the visor and drove with his lighter in his wheel hand. “I was part of an escort for a Provincial Reconstruction Team convoy. They’re the ones—they have a lot—women, uhh, we brought female soldiers out to the villages where we were building schools and shit, you know, to talk to the Afghan women and kids.” The wind played with his hair. His temples were shaved but the top was long, and it whipped in the breeze coming through the window.
A wincing expression had slowly come over his face as if he’d developed a headache. “Anyway. I stopped our vehicle when I shouldn’t have. Ka-blooey. End of the line.”
“I’m sorry.” Is it possible to deep-throat your own foot?
Kenway lit the cigarette and took a draw, shrugging. “Oh—do you mind?” he asked, indicating the cigarette.
She smiled wanly. “It’s your truck, Joe Camel.”
“You smoke? You want one?”
“Trying to quit. Lung cancer isn’t good professional branding, and I’m all about branding.”
The night blurred past them for a few more moments as they passed lightless storefronts, dead barber’s shops, dark alleyways yawning in brick throats. They startled a cat that had been peering into a storm drain and it bounded away, leaping into a hedge.
“You’re staying in the rock-climber village next to Miguel’s, right?”
“Yep. Roughing it.”
A silk sheet of silence settled over the truck as the town tapered away, the buildings rolling into darkness until they coursed along a narrow corridor of trees. Robin became more and more at ease as they rode. Kenway had a calming, languid, ursine presence that reminded her of Baloo the Bear from that old Jungle Book cartoon movie. He seemed to operate on a different wavelength; everything he did was slow and lazy, as if he had all the time in the world.
The night vacuumed his smoke away as he drove, his elbow out the window. The trees fell away as well, the blue Chevy bursting into the open, the night sky unfurling above them in a dome of stars. Shreds of gray cloud sailed west under a nickel moon. Hills around them narrowed, enclosing the road in washboard crags of granite, then widened again.
BLACKFIELD CITY LIMITS, said a lonesome green sign. A bit beyond that was a turnoff leading east into the tree line. Kenway flicked the turn signal and the ancient truck slowed.
“Where are we going?”
He looked over at her. “Shortcut? I always go this way when I go to Miguel’s.”
“Oh.” The truck angled onto Underwood Road. “Do you like to hike?” The mountains around Miguel’s were honeycombed with hiking trails, paths trickling through the forest toward Rocktown. Rocktown was a clifftop strewn with huge limestone boulders, the local hotspot for college kids, rock climbers from afar, and anybody looking for an out-of-the-way place to burn a bag of weed with their friends. If there’s anywhere safe from the prying eyes of Joe Law, it’s at the top of a fifty-foot vertical rock face.
“Sure, I like to climb.” He smiled. His eyes were the same tired blue as his truck. “Yes, in fact, I can climb with this foot, in case you were wondering. Haven’t done it much lately, but yeah.”
Underwood Road.
Please keep driving. She wanted him to keep on driving to the far end of the four-lane where the freeway overpass arced above their heads, where the Subway restaurant, the bait shop, the Texaco, and the road to Lake Craddock clustered around a secluded rest stop in the wilderness. She didn’t really want to come out here yet. Not yet. I’m not ready. I need a few days to pump myself up.
Or talk yourself out of it, you mean?
Forest surrounded the truck in a claustrophobic collar of pines and elms, the tree trunks shuttling past in a picket-fence flicker of columns and shadows. She stared out the window at them, the late-summer wind buffeting her face.
“I used to live on this road when I was a kid.”
Kenway took one last draw on the cigarette and ashed it in the dash tray, then flicked it outside. “Yeah?”
The trees kept barreling toward them, counting down, becoming more and more familiar. She kept expecting the houses and the trailers with every turn, the memories leaking in like water under a door. There was the NO TRESPASSING sign, shot full of .22 holes. Just there, a faint patch of grungy Heathcliff-orange, the armchair someone had dumped in the woods when she was twelve. Tried to sit on it once. Found out the hard way there were wasps in it.
Then, there it was: the forest opened up again and there was the trailer park on her left, all lit up with its sickly white security lights, trailer windows haunted by the honey-red glow of lamps and the epileptic blue stutter of TV shows. A large aluminum sign out front declared CHEVALIER VILLAGE, or at least that’s what it seemed to say, under a coating of graffiti.
On top of the angular Old English gibberish was a tin
y spray-painted crown.
Suddenly she was sixteen again, she was thirteen, she was nine. Robin sighed, sitting up against her best judgment, and tried to see if there was anything—or anybody—she could recognize. But the night was too dark, and the cars were all too modern, and the yards were strewn with toys, and everybody was inside and had battened their hatches against the dark.
On her right, a double-wide by itself, with a hand-built porch and naked wooden trellis, chintzy aluminum birds with their pinwheel wings, a deteriorating VOTE ROMNEY sign by the culvert. A wooden-slatted swing dangled by one chain from a rusty frame, the end jammed into the dirt.
Next door, looming on the other side of a stretch of grass, was the monolithic 1168.
“Slow down,” Robin blurted. NO, DON’T, KEEP GOING!
The Chevy downshifted and the neighborhood lingered around them. The engine protested. Materializing from the deep night like the hull of some sunken ship was the gingerbread Victorian farmhouse she’d grown up in, her childhood home.
The security lamp on a nearby power pole threw a pallid greenish cast across the front so the black windows were more like eyes in a dead face.
“This was my house,” she said, as if in a dream.
Familiarity wreathed the window frames and eaves of the house in mist-like echoes as she studied it from afar. Her memories were stale, and far from her groping mental hands. The house was a different color (she knew it as green, the pale green of dinner mints, with John Deere trim), but it was her house. She could feel the splintery porch railing in her hands, the words and runes her mother had carved deep in the windowsills and then painted over.
“Nice place,” said Kenway. A U-Haul truck and a blue car sat in the driveway, the car tinted charcoal gray by the watery light. She didn’t recognize them. “Looks like somebody else lives there now. Just moved in. Or they’re about to move out.”
Something drew Robin’s eyes back to the trailer park across the street, and she traced the long gravel drive snaking along the east hip of the park to the old mission-style manor lurking on top of the hill.