by S. A. Hunt
Then he reached into his jacket liner pocket again and took out something like a cigarette rolled with dead leaves. “Mind if I smoke?”
* * *
They traded the cigarillo back and forth, smoking it by the half-inch, sitting on a bench half-hidden by an enormous magnolia tree. She had only started dabbling in smoking when everything went to shit, and at first the smoke had choked her, but it was smooth enough she didn’t have much trouble picking up the habit again. It was coconut-flavored, which to her, after spending so much time in a drab mental hospital smelling nothing but Simple Green and feet, was like being transported to a tropical paradise.
“So you’re telling me I’m not crazy. The woo-woo shrinky-dink ‘therapy’ the psychiatrist put me through, the brainwashing, the meds, the denial, it was all bullshit.” Robin sat cross-legged on the end of the bench, Heinrich hunched over with his elbows on his knees. That two-piece suit of his was deep sea–blue and pinstriped, made him look a little like a railroad conductor. But he wore black combat boots with it, spit-polished half to hell and back. “None of the things I’ve been claiming to have witnessed are delusions brought on by—as the psych calls it—a psychotic break caused by the trauma of witnessing my mother’s death. The last year or so, the involuntary committal, the being cuffed to a bed, that was … for nothing? There’s nothing wrong with me?”
“Yep. You’re not crazy.” Just then Heinrich had the cigarillo. He ashed it on the ground between his shoes. “Well I mean, if you are, then I guess I’m crazy too.”
She wanted to cry, honestly. She wanted to, but thanks to the blunting effect of the Zoloft, she couldn’t quite muster the tears. There was relief at the idea she’d been right the whole time, but it was subtle, like getting a pebble out of your shoe. And to be frank, it was sort of tempered by the academically terrifying idea she was right—witches were real.
“So … what?” she asked. “What does this mean for me?”
He took a draw off the cigarillo, seemed to mull it over in his head for a moment, and said, “Your mother was murdered,” in his customary blunt way, squinting in the smoke. “By your dear darling daddy.”
“Yeah, no kidding. Tell me something I don’t know. My asshole piece of shit father pushed her down the stairs and broke her neck.” She hated calling her father Dad. The name Dad was reserved for men who gave a shit, men who raised you right, men who took you fishing and bought you ice cream on the way home, men who picked you up after the prom because you were too trashed to drive or be alone with a boy. Men who didn’t murder your mother.
She was in the kitchen when it happened, Robin, a sophomore in high school, making a pitcher of iced tea. Came running out of the kitchen and basically went into shock. Her mother was lying on the floor in a heap of twisted meat, a ragdoll in a dress, her head canted at a weird angle, facing the ceiling.
Her daughter sat beside her and held her, frantic, confused.
A few minutes later, her father snapped out of it. One of us called 911, but I don’t remember who.
The tea, I remember … I left the kettle on and almost burned the house down. The kitchen—and part of the living room—was on fire when the police got there, but the volunteer firefighters managed to put it out, or so she was told. She didn’t remember much of that night, or that month, for that matter. “The state of Georgia charged my father with murder,” she said quietly. “Third-degree, second-degree, premeditated, I don’t know, I wasn’t at the trial. By then I was a ward of the state—the cops had taken me away. And thanks to my story about witches and puking up cats, the psychiatrist at the trial said I was mentally unfit to serve as a witness.”
“Your father killed your mother because they made him do it,” said Heinrich, his voice cutting through her reverie.
“Cutty,” Robin murmured. “Witch.”
My mother’s muddled last words, the last thing she ever said to me, as I sat there on the floor holding her useless body.
Her father had come down the stairs, walking all stiff and slow, not saying a word, one hand sliding down the banister … and when he got to the bottom, he fell on his hands and knees, arching his back, dry-heaving like he was coughing up a hairball.
He started throwing up blood.
It was really coming out, I mean spewing all over the runner, and then he was choking. He was choking and horking and then he vomited up a cat. His neck bulged out like a cantaloupe, and this gray-striped tabby cat came wriggling up his throat, coming out of his mouth yowling and hissing, with its fur and ears all slicked back with blood so it looked like a waxed weasel. Even lubed up like that, it got stuck. It fought the whole way.
Before he could suffocate, Robin’s father had to grab that striped tabby cat by the head and pull it out like a … like a birthday-party magician, pulling scarves out of his mouth.
“He was their familiar,” said Heinrich.
“Familiar?”
“The women living in that house up the hill from the one you grew up in. Marilyn Cutty, Theresa LaQuices, and Karen Weaver. Those women are probably the oldest and most powerful coven in America. I’ve been looking for ’em for years, looking for a way to nail their asses.”
Cutty, weird, quaint Marilyn Cutty, who she thought of as the equivalent of her grandmother for so many years, whose house she’d played in as a child. Robin remembered lying on the floor in Cutty’s living room, reading the Sunday comics and petting her calico Stanley, a little high from the scented markers she’d been coloring with. When Robin escaped during one of her parents’ frequent feuds and toddled over to her house, Marilyn would take her shopping and they’d come home with these complex Lego sets. God, she loved Legos. You don’t have to buy me nothin’, Robin would tell her, and old Marilyn would say, I know. That’s why I do it.
How could this old woman who regularly loved and spent money on a little girl be this kind of evil?
“See, cats will do anything a witch tells them to,” continued Heinrich. “That’s not a total stereotype—witches really do have black cats, and white cats, and gray cats, all kinds of cats, but it’s a little more complicated.”
He passed Robin the cigarillo and she pinched it to her lips as if it were a joint, sucking a lungful of smoke out of it.
“Witches can command cats, you know, like the rats in that movie Willard,” said the gangly stranger. “They can do this because cats belong to, and are minions of, the Mesopotamian goddess Ereshkigal—they’re creatures of the afterlife, which is why they can see spirits.”
Robin stiffened, giving him a you’re shitting me look. She handed him the cigarillo.
“Yeah,” he scoffed, “ghosts.”
His voice was hard, but his eyes were compassionate. “Whole ’nother can of worms we’ll maybe have time to get to some day.” He took a drag off the cigarillo and smoke curled out of his nose like a dragon. “Right now, you ought to know something: your mother is a witch.”
Stunned. Speechless.
All she could do was sit there, trying to compare her sweet, pretty, good-natured mother, that tiny curly-haired housewife
(Mom made me forget something)
with the goofy speech impediment and the deep and abiding love for Christianity
(I need to protect myself)
against the sinister image of witches she’d built up in her mind during the months she’d spent in the mental hospital. She’d known all along, though, hadn’t she? She eyed the scars down the insides of her forearms, the chicken-foot symbol, the algiz carved into her skin. Mom tried to make her forget the things she’d seen and heard when she was little, and there were holes in her memory like a moth-eaten sweater, but in the end, she had managed to cling to a few of them. And there, in the back of her mind, those suspicions had lingered, even through the institution’s electroshock therapy.
Mom was a witch. Heinrich’s declaration pulled at those old mnemonic scars. You know it’s true.
“There are good witches, and there are bad witches,” said
Heinrich. Sometimes, it seemed, a witch could be both. “Your mother was a good witch, and she was a new witch. Cutty probably talked her into giving up her heart only a couple years after you were born.” Heinrich aimed those flinty eyes at Robin. “You can console yourself with the knowledge Annie waited until after you were born to give her heart to Ereshkigal. Witches can’t have kids, you know. To be a mother, you have to have a heart.”
“What’s all this got to do with my father and the witches’ cats?”
“There’s this fungus called Cordyceps,” Heinrich said quietly and measuredly, as if he were confessing to something. “That’s the scientific name. It infects ants’ brains and it makes them do things they wouldn’t normally do, like climb up a tree, where the fungus bursts out of their head and spores out into the air. Reproduces.
“Cats themselves can carry a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii, and it can infect the brain of its host, influencing its behavior. When it infects a mouse through contact with cat feces, that mouse contracts an illness called toxoplasmosis and behaves erratically. Gets real screwed up. Real friendly to cats. So you can imagine what happens next: the mouse ends up in the cat’s bowels. The only place that particular thing can reproduce. And hakuna matata, the circle of life rolls on.”
He took another puff and handed it over. “The witches figured out how to metaphysically ‘implant’ a cat into a human the same way the Cordyceps inserts itself into an ant’s brain, the same way Toxoplasma gondii infects mice’s brains. They yowl and hiss and claw at you like a cat. It’s because they’re cats in human bodies. Body-snatchers. Pod people, I suppose. These parasite-cats lie dormant inside their human hosts like hairy unborn children, sleeping, waiting, until the witches need them.”
“So that’s what was wrong with my father the night he pushed my mother off the upstairs landing,” said Robin. “He’d been familiarized. He had a cat in him.”
At some point the weight of their conversation had broken through the meds, and tears welled up in her eyes at the sensation of having been right. Robin scraped her face with the inside fabric of her hoodie. God almighty, right as rain, she was right. She wasn’t lying, she wasn’t delusional, she wasn’t either of those things. Fuck her therapist. Fuck art therapy. Fuck Anderson.
All of a sudden the air seemed sweeter. It was like being let out of a locked chest she’d been shut up in for a year.
“Why did they do it?” she asked.
By then they had smoked the cigarillo about as far as they could smoke it. “Why did they murder Annie?” Heinrich mashed the cigarillo against the end of the bench to put it out, then turned and flicked it into the bushes. “They needed her to make a dryad.”
“What is that?”
“A dryad is at its most basic a soul trapped inside of a tree. Or, well, technically it’s the name for the tree-prison itself, but it also refers to the tree-and-soul combined. Anyway, dryads don’t occur naturally, so you have to make one—provided you know how, of course. Now, if you make a dryad out of a normal person … take Joe Schmoe off the street, kill him, siphon his spirit into a tree, all you have is a self-aware tree. Pretty shitty existence for poor Joe, livin’ out the rest of eternity with squirrels shovin’ acorns up his ass, but there ain’t nothin’ special about it.
“But if you make a dryad out of a supernaturally endowed person, for example, another witch, you end up with what’s called a nag shi. Like the person it was created from, this kind of dryad is an energy-absorber. And with a little coaxing and a bucket of human blood twice a week, it will become a sort of spiritual black hole. The tree’s roots draw up life for miles around, and if it’s in a town like Blackfield, it will tap that town for nourishment.
“The soul-tree pulls the will-to-live out of the town and converts it to fruit. Peaches, apples, lemons, whatever the dryad happens to flower. Where does all that give-a-shit go, you ask? It goes into the dryad’s fruit. Flora de vida—the fruit of life. The fruit of immortality.”
* * *
“You may have a chance to save your mother, you know,” Heinrich told her. “She may not be actually dead. Not completely. She is a nag shi. She is somewhere, there inside their dryad.”
A thrill went up Robin’s spine at the thought she could see her mother again.
Her strange benefactor put one of those rough, bony hands on her shoulder, and she fought the urge to shove him. It must have showed on her face, because he immediately withdrew the hand. “But it ain’t going to be easy,” he said. “You’re gonna have to train. Have to learn how to beat ’em.” He leaned over toward her. “How would you like to get out of here?”
At first, a splinter of fear tried to worm its way into her. A certain feeling of vulnerability flowered there, like a mouse being invited into the open, where all the owls and eagles and falcons could see it. When she’d first arrived at Medina Psychiatric, Robin had been terrified that since she’d seen them murder her mother, seen them do whatever they did to her father, they’d want to come after her too. Eventually, as she began her meds, and the fog of fear and mania and paranoia had cleared, and she got used to her new environment, the concrete walls of the mental hospital had engendered a feeling of safety, of protection.
She blinked. She was becoming institutionalized, like the old guy in that prison movie. The Shawshank Redemption. What was his name? Books? Hooks? Brooks?
“I’d like for you to come with me,” he said, “back to my place in Texas.”
Texas, she thought, licking her chapped lips.
Mental images of wide-open desert, dry breezes, bristly sagegrass, sand, tumbleweeds … it was intoxicating. So different from the sweltering, claustrophobic forests of Georgia. “I can train you,” Heinrich was saying. “I can teach you what I know about witches—and,” he scoffed, “what I know could fill a book.”
The gangly stranger got up off the bench and tugged his jacket straight, dusting off the seat of his pants. “I been working on getting you out of here for a while. Behind the scenes, like. You come with me, you can get ’em back for the shit they did to you. If you want, you can get all them witches.”
All them witches.
“How many witches are there?” Robin asked, threatening to retreat into her shell. She looked around with guarded eyes. The sun was starting to go down, and the shadows mingling with the infinity of pine trees around them seemed to be getting longer and deeper.
“A few.”
“How many is a few?”
“I don’t know, a few hundred?” Heinrich made a dismissive gesture, as if trying to wave away the question. “Listen, they’re weak shit. Most of ’em ain’t worth chasing. Little more than palm-reading hippies and crazy cat-ladies. Now, some of ’em are bad news. But the big fish is Cutty’s coven.” He tugged his cufflinks, adjusting his sleeves. “After you train with me, you can cut your teeth on the small fries before you go back to Blackfield and do what you need to do. I’ll make sure you’re ready before you face off against any of them. By the time I’m done with you, you’ll be a killing machine.”
In the middle of his spiel, Mark (or perhaps Mike) Hurley came out of the dayroom door, still wearing his a-size-too-big Sunday-morning-church suit and tweed overcoat. He began to make grand, sweeping motions in front of him, as if he were smoothing out the lawn. Then he held up his hand and made pinching motions in front of his eye, looking at Robin and Heinrich. “I’m crushing your head! I’m crushing your head!” he shouted, his voice echoing off the building. “Look on these works and despair, proletariat! I’m the oppressive specter of free market capitalism, and I’m crushing your head!”
Robin and Heinrich looked at each other.
“I had a bowl of Quaker oatmeal for dinner,” said Mark/Mike. “The oats in it were picked by slaves who are the descendants of the people who came here from Neptune in 1962.”
“I have papers releasing you into my care,” said Heinrich.
“Give me a minute to pack my shit,” said Robin.
* * *<
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He held the front door open for her as Robin stepped outside of Medina Psychiatric for the first time in more than a year. She still wore the team hoodie, so to speak, and the sweatpants, but the gym bag hanging by the straps from her right hand had clothes in it, salvaged by the cops from her bedroom at the house on Underwood. Unfortunately, they were a bit tight on her now—after spending all that time either strapped to a bed or sitting around in the dayroom, she’d developed a muffin top and the clothes no longer fit.
In her other hand was a stockpile of meds in a Ziploc freezer bag, along with a pill cutter.
“We’ll stop somewhere on the way out of Georgia and get you some new clothes,” said Heinrich, checking out the stencil on the back of her hoodie. He led her down the front stairs and into the parking lot. “I can tell you now, though, you’re gonna be losing some of that baby fat when you start training. So the clothes in that bag will probably fit you again.”
“That’s good, I think,” said Robin. Her chest felt tight, her heartbeat thundering in her neck. “I like this stuff. I’d like to be able to wear it again.” Though would she? The clothes in the gym bag were flowery, girly—sundresses, T-shirt dresses, jeans with Bedazzler gems on the butt. She wasn’t that person anymore. She’d examined all the clothes as she’d packed them, and had the unmistakable impression she was packing clothes meant for a child.
The man’s car was a Ford Fairlane, a sleek, monumental cruiser with flair to spare. Deep devil red, almost burgundy, and the chrome was spotless.
“Sweet ride, mister,” she said, as he unlocked the trunk. She tossed her bag inside.
“Thanks. Inherited it from my father. He was a preacher. Drove it to service every day for almost thirty years.”
“It’s nice.” She peered through the back window at the leather seats. “Very clean.”