Burn the Dark

by S. A. Hunt

  Behind Miguel’s Pizza, two years after the events in the video, Robin tried to ignore the screaming coming from the video Kenway was watching. Every sense-memory, every smell and pain, they all drifted in her mind like flotsam, always there, always accessible. Every time she watched one of her own videos, the sensations came rushing back. She realized her folded arms had become a protective hug, her nails digging into her own ribs. She tried to go back to eating.

  In the Georgia sun, the faint scars on her arms gleamed pink.

  “Get off me!” shrieked the Robin in the video in her tinny video-voice. She threw the baby-food jar over the witch’s head, where it smashed against the lintel and splattered alcohol all over her bathrobe.

  “Oh shit,” said Kenway, leaning back. “Wait, I totally thought that was gonna be holy water in that jar or something. Righteous.” He was entranced by the action taking place on the screen. “What in the balls is even going on right now,” he said, leaning over the Macbook, eyes fixed on the video. “Is he—is that guy growling like a house cat?”

  “Her familiars,” Robin told him, not looking up from her salad.

  “The Red Lord will find you,” said the man who tried to choke her in the van. His voice was thin and scrapey coming out of the laptop speakers, making it sound more like an insidious whisper than the growled declaration it had been.

  As the video faded to black on an image of the blood washing off the utility van and down the car wash drain, it became a grid of links to related videos. Kenway clicked the link that took him back to the main MalusDomestica page and then clicked through to the list of Robin’s video thumbnails. Most of them had demonic-looking witches’ faces on them, yellow-eyed and snarling, or Robin herself with a scratched-up face, with titles like Mission 12—I Almost Died, or Hammertown 5—Knife Training.

  The Red Lord, thought Robin, shuddering. The thought of encountering that thing again did not appeal to her. It has to be real. Her mind flashed on an image of those huge clawmarks across the toilet stall doors. Not a hallucination caused by Illusion magic from Neva Chandler. She slipped a hand into her laptop satchel to touch the unforgiving security of cold steel. Her combat knife lay hidden in the bag. Maybe the Red Lord is something related to witchcraft, but not a curse. What if the creature could sense witchcraft? What if killing Chandler had alerted it to Robin’s presence?

  If the Red Lord is real, what the hell is it? And where did it come from?

  * * *

  Kenway sat quietly, scrolling through page after page of YouTube’s MalusDomestica videos. He didn’t watch any of them, but he was hunched over the computer like a Hollywood hacker, gazing intently at each thumbnail as if he could divine its contents by osmosis.

  Turmoil spun in Robin’s head like hot bathwater going down a drain, leaving her cold and empty and apprehensive inside. What does he think? Is he scared of me now? No, not possible. He’s a vet, his leg’s been … Does he think I’m a flake? A fake? A nerd?

  Nerd. I can live with nerd.

  Finally, he looked up from the computer and regarded her with a wary, squinty eye. A battle was taking place in his head too, she could tell. She could almost hear the mental gears clanking.

  She couldn’t take it anymore. “Well? Did I scare you away?”

  “Hell no,” Kenway blurted, looking away and talking to the screen with a weird nervous chuckle. “That was badass. The most badass thing I’ve ever seen on YouTube. Up till now I thought it was all just—just cat videos and people crashing bicycles.” His eyes darted back up to her. “Now I know why you make the big bucks. You’re a one-woman production company. You do all your own special effects and everything?”

  Caught off-guard, Robin tilted her head. “Yeeeah, you could say that,” she said with a coy wince. Her mouth screwed up to one side. “Sure.”

  His mouth twitched, his face softened.

  “I hate to interrupt you,” she asked, reaching out to tug the Macbook in her direction with a finger, “but do you mind if I get back to work editing today’s video?”

  “Oh. Oh! Yeah. Yeah, here you go.” Kenway turned the laptop around and watched her face over the Macbook’s lid as if he were waiting for some kind of tell. Does he think it’s an elaborate joke? She closed the web browser and pulled up the video-editing console.

  Noticing the sandwich on the table by his hand, Kenway seemed to remember he had food and picked it up, eating and staring into the middle distance.

  “I want to be on your channel,” he said when he finished, startling her. He wiped his mouth with a napkin and wadded it up, shooting at the trash barrel from his seat. The balled-up napkin bounced off the wall and landed on the ground. “I want to fight witches too.”

  Robin was speechless. “You what?”

  “I’m tired as shit of hanging around doing what I do. Being the starving-artist cripple that spends all his time up in his studio painting.” Kenway got up and went over to the trash, leaning against the wall to snatch the paper off the ground and toss it.

  When he came back to her, he leaned on the table with both hands as if he were about to make a business proposal. “The painting thing: it’s okay I guess. I mean, it’s better than sittin’ around with my thumb up my ass. But I do the car stuff because I’m good at it, not because I have a passion for it. And the paintings, ehh. I thought I wanted to be a painter a long time ago. I’ll be straight with you, it’s wearing kinda thin.” Kenway thrust a hand at the Macbook. “Shit! Look at these videos! That’s passion!” Sitting down, he threw back the last of the beer in the bottle and busied his hands with squeezing the cap into a clamshell shape. “That’s different, man. I wanna do something different for a change.”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

  He sat there peeling the label off the bottle for a little while, just long enough to give her time to finish the final touches on the video. She went to YouTube and started the transfer.

  Kenway wadded up the sandwich wrapper, pitching it into the garbage, and he was about to get up and probably say his see-ya-round.

  Don’t let him leave without saying something. She reached across the table as if to touch him. He’s a good dude, you idiot. Don’t let him be the one that got away.

  In the sunlight, his eyes were the pale, dirty blue of a shallow lagoon, almost gray. He nibbled the corner of his mouth, studying her face, and his eyebrows rose expectantly.

  “Look, okay,” she said, glancing at the progress bar on her video upload. Two percent. The battery in her laptop would die before it ever got to twenty. “Umm. You’re already in this video I’m trying to upload. You can be in the next one too. You don’t have to leave.”

  Ugh, she thought. Desperate much? Tone it down a little, yeah?

  Fetching a deep, deep sigh, he stroked his beard, smoothing it down. “So what’s on the agenda for the rest of the day? Doing any witch-hunting?”

  “Right now I’m trying to upload this video, but it’s taking forever. And I don’t have forever.”

  “I live in the middle of town.” He tossed a thumb over his shoulder. “So my Internet’s great. Fast as hell. You’re more than welcome to come over and use mine.”

  * * *

  As soon as the back doors of the van came open, Kenway recoiled in surprise, his eyes wide. The swords hanging from the pegboard glittered in the sunlight. “Good lord, you’ve got an arsenal in here. Look at all this.”

  “Part of being a witch-hunter. Thought you would get a kick out of seeing this stuff.” Robin gathered her power adapter and— “Actually…” She had planned on riding with him in his truck, but it made more sense to just take the van over there. No sense in leaving it here unattended. “How about I just follow you to your place?”

  “That’ll work.”

  Apparently when he was alone in the truck, Kenway drove like a maniac. She had trouble keeping up with him in her lumbering panel van. The GoPro was mounted on the dash, facing out the windshield, recording the chase. One of
these days I’m going to have to have an actual car chase, she thought, grumbling up Highway 9. The subscribers will love that.

  Traffic was light when they got into town a few minutes later, the lunchtime rush winding down for an afternoon of work.

  At the end of his block, Kenway whipped into a parking lot on the corner and she slid into a slot next to him. A sign standing in front of her grille said PARKING FOR STEVEN DREW D.D.S. OFFICE ONLY. One just like it was in front of his Chevy.

  As soon as they pulled in, she opened her door and said, “Heavens to Betsy, Action Jackson. Who in the hell taught you how to drive?”

  “The army.”

  “Fair point.” She eyed the sign in front of her van, the one that said she couldn’t park there. “What about this?”

  “I painted the mural in his waiting room for free. He lets me park here so I don’t have to use the parallel parking or the angled parking in front of the shop. Backing out into the road makes my ass itch.”

  “Oh.” Robin gathered her Macbook and charger, put them in her messenger bag, and unhitched the GoPro from its mount.

  “Doing some filming?” Kenway led her up the sidewalk. As she walked, Robin panned the camera around, shooting B-roll of the street and all the buildings they could see. His art shop was four buildings down, past two empty shopfronts, a Mexican cafe called El Queso Grande, and a DUI driving course office.

  “Yep. I like to get as much footage as I can. Makes for a lot of variety and plenty of videos. The more videos you have, the more visible you are on YouTube.”

  “Makes sense.”

  I can make today’s video a clip episode, like they do on TV shows, she thought. Kenway took out a jingling keyring and unlocked the front door of his studio, pulling the glass door open. I can tell him my story, and I can illustrate it by splicing in bits of earlier videos. Nice late-season recap episode for new viewers.

  Lights came on and a forest of angular shadows turned into a small office, a computer workstation with two monitors, and several enormous machines of mysterious purpose. One of them looked like a giant laminator, or maybe something that pressed trousers for elephants.

  A large table stretched to her right, and both the walls and the table were covered in hundreds of vinyl appliques: sports logos, automobile logos, clothing logos, tattoo designs of gryphons, dragons, tigers; mottos like NO FEAR and ROLL TIDE ROLL and ADVENTURE HURTS BUT STAYING HOME KILLS. A huge cutout of a running football player. Big floppy refrigerator magnets and a couple of coffee mugs with promotional artwork for local businesses. She followed him through a door in the back, coming out into a huge industrial garage and a set of steel stairs leading through a hole in the ceiling.

  The garage was strewn with all manner of work trash, bits of vinyl, pieces of broken easel, scraps of canvas, a disassembled foosball table, sheets of plywood and pressboard, and four wide boards with holes cut in them.

  The boards made her think of Skee-Ball games. Two legs were bolted to their sides so they stood up at an angle. “What are these?”

  “Cornhole.”

  “What?”

  “Cornhole,” Kenway said again, walking over to a wobbly drafting table and picking up a green beanbag about the size of a baseball. He turned and lobbed it high; she watched it with the camera as it made an arc just under the garage rafters and slapped against the cornhole board, inches from the hole.

  “Oh.”

  He tossed her a beanbag. “You give it a shot.”

  Robin caught it and fired it across the room. The beanbag hit the wall and landed on top of an electrical conduit some ten feet up.

  “Well, shit.”

  Kenway laughed, climbing the stairs. “Three points.” They were impossibly high, climbing twenty feet up the wall and passing between the steel rafters. There were no acoustical tiles, so the ceiling was just gray-green-brown wood that looked like it had been salvaged from a shipwreck.

  Emerging from the stairwell, Robin found herself in a space somehow majestic and quaint at the same time. The entire second story was one big open space like the garage downstairs, with a naked fifteen-foot ceiling. Taken as a whole it resembled some kind of modernized tribal lodge, all polished dark wood and hard angles. The south wall was plate-glass windows, looking out at the back of the building behind them and a vast blue sky.

  Green marble countertops, steel fixtures, and black appliances made a sprawling kitchen to her left. Directly in front of her was a coffee table made out of a front door, with a short pole jutting up through where the knob used to be.

  On top of the pole was a flatscreen TV, the wires running down through the door’s deadbolt and into an outlet on the floor. Two park benches made a right angle around the other side of the table.

  “Wow,” Robin said, still standing at the top of the stairs. A queen-sized bed pressed against the wall to the right, covered in a cream fleece duvet. “Who makes the big bucks, again? This place is amazing.”

  “Most of it was already here when I moved in, except for the bed and the TV.” Kenway went over to the kitchen and stood at the island, pouring a glass of what appeared to be tea. “The apartment was part of the deal when I took over the art shop from John Ward, the guy who used to run it before he retired. The VA loan covered most of it; I bought whatever else I needed with my savings. Combat pay makes for a nice nest egg when you’re single. To save on power, I don’t run the heat, which is why it’s cool in here. If I get too cold, I haul my little firepit up here and build a fire in it. Lord knows I have enough crap downstairs to burn. Ward used this place for restoring antique furniture too—sometimes I do—and there’s a lot of old wood left over.”

  “You don’t have issues with smoke?”

  Kenway pointed at vents in the ceiling. “Ventilation for aerosol chemicals. Those, and the vent in the bathroom, they pull the smoke out before it gets too bad.”

  Above the bed and above the kitchen, the walls were covered in three or four dozen paintings, without frames, just naked mounted canvas. Impressionistic renderings of forests at strange angles, birds in flight, animalistic women in provocative poses with lustrous eyes and bodies hash-marked with cat-stripes. Men and women running with mysterious machines in their hands that could have been rifles, could have been construction equipment, could have been thin shards of stone. Bokeh, the circular lights that appear in out-of-focus photos, dominated the pictures, giving them all an element of dreamlike wonder.

  A few other paintings depicted pale nude men standing alone in foggy fields. Hands cupping blood. Grimy faces, always half-obscured by shadow. The bokeh made them nightmarish; they were hung off to the side, as if to marginalize them.

  Robin put her bag on one of the park benches and opened her Macbook on the door-table, connecting to the Wi-Fi. Luckily, there was no password, so it only took a minute to get to the channel submissions page. While it uploaded, she walked over to the wall of glass. Peering down into the alleyway behind the building, she could see a large aqueduct running east to west, water trickling along the bottom. “I guess if we’re going to be hanging out like this, I should tell you the truth. Tell you how I came to do what I do for a living.”

  Kenway’s answer was grim but somehow warm. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I want to. I need to.”

  He joined her at the window. “You haven’t told your subscribers on YouTube?”

  “Yeah. I did in one of my first few videos. But it’s not the same, you know? Talking to a camera. It’s impersonal. You don’t get the same kind of catharsis. And besides, you’ll be the second one I’ve told face-to-face, and I need someone who will believe me. Because what I’ve finally come back here to do is going to require someone to believe me—believe what I have to say. I need somebody on my side. The more, the better. Shit is going to go pear-shaped real quick, and I need people on my team who are cool with pears.”

  “The second person?” asked Kenway. “Your therapist?”

  “He wouldn’t have bel
ieved me. He didn’t believe me. He brainwashed it out of me, as a matter of fact. The whole reason I ended up in the psych ward is because I told the cops the truth about what happened. And for telling the truth, I got the third degree—hypnosis, electroshock therapy, everything short of waterboarding.” She spoke to the window, looking down into the aqueduct. “No, I had to tell Heinrich everything if I wanted his help, but if I wanted them to let me out of the loony bin, I had to keep my mouth shut.”

  “Heinrich?”

  “Heinrich Hammer.”

  “Who is that?” asked Kenway, with a disbelieving chuckle. “Sounds like a fighter in the UFC.”

  “My mentor. Guy who taught me everything I know about hunting witches.” Robin smiled. “He could probably fight in the UFC if he wanted to, but he might be too violent for MMA.” She rolled up her sleeves, revealing scars running halfway up the outsides of her forearms. Much too haphazard to be self-cutting scars—they were nicks and cuts from knife-fighting. “I went with him that day in Medina Psychiatric because I’m going to need everything he taught me, and all those weapons in my van—”

  “And a bunch of pear experts?”

  Robin grinned. “Yes, and a bunch of pear experts. I’m going to need all of that if I want to go head-to-head with the witches who murdered my mother.”

  9

  Four Years Ago

  A shabby ghost sat on a concrete bench in the sun, listening to birds sing in the willows. As pale as the driven snow, her heart-shaped face was spattered with acne and her lips were chapped and thin. Matted brown hair streamed down her cheeks and back. Her hands were cradled in her lap, her fingernails chewed to the quick, a pencil stuck between her fingers like a cigarette.

  The teenager was dressed plainly, in a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie. On the back was stenciled MEDINA PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL.

  It was a nice day, or so she’d been informed. Other patients milled around, playing catch with a little rubber ball, or shuffling through the many clover patches strewn across the courtyard looking for a lucky four-leaf. The nurses said it was good for her to get out and get some fresh air, but the sertraline and aripiprazole in her system dulled everything—the sun on her skin, the breeze in her hair, the sound of it rustling the whiplike branches of the weeping willows around her, the smell of fresh-cut grass.