Burn the Dark

by S. A. Hunt

  “What happened to your mother? You make it sound like it was so bad it made you end up on medication.”

  “She was on the anti-psychotics, I was on the anti-depressants.”

  “What happened?”

  “Your moms happened.”

  “What?” Annie? What on earth could she possibly have done to break Joel’s family down the middle? Robin barely remembered them, much less her mother interacting with them enough to cause that kind of damage. “What are you talking about?”

  “It was the witches.”

  “What would they possibly want with your mother?”

  “I don’t mean they put a spell on her or nothing,” Joel continued, “but it was … you know, her knowing they killed your mama Annie, her paranoia about ’em got worse. Night terrors sometimes, maybe three or four times a month. Got worse and worse. She started sleeping in the living room because she didn’t like being in her bedroom—she said there was a ‘man made out of cobwebs’ in her closet—but then she painted the living room windows because she thought somebody was watching her sleep.

  “Accused Fish of stealing her money, accused me of stealing from her too. Spoons. She accused me of stealing her fuckin’ spoons. Can you believe that? Anyway, she went batshit at the end. Completely lost her mind. Started lumping Annie in with the witches, said she was afraid of all of ’em. She thought they were gonna cut her tongue like they cut Annie’s.”

  “What?” Robin’s brow furrowed. “Ain’t nobody cut Mom’s tongue, she was born that way. Birth defect.” Annie Martine wasn’t the loveliest of women, but her petite Audrey Hepburn frame and heart-shaped face gave her an ethereal, elven quality people couldn’t seem to resist.

  In that brutally honest fashion of curious children, Robin had asked her several times over the years why her tongue was the way it was.

  Annie gave her a different tale each time. I stuck it out at a crab and he pinched it, she’d say, or I was running with scissors and tripped and, well, snip snip! and sometimes, I tried to kiss a turtle and he bit me, and the last time she claimed she’d stuck it in a light socket. Once Robin had even hauled out her toy doctor bag and asked to examine Annie’s tongue with a magnifying glass. A jagged red scar about an inch long bifurcated the very tip, twisting it.

  Most strangers who heard Annie speak assumed she was deaf and spoke loudly to her, carefully enunciating their words. But she was never offended. She dryly looked up at whoever was speaking to her and said, “I’m not deaf,” and then stuck out her tongue. Robin hated the way they would recoil in horror at her twisted scar, but Mama always laughed gaily and carried on as if it were nothing but a bawdy joke.

  Joel leaned back against the kitchen counter, folding his arms. “Anyway, my moms wouldn’t even go outside,” he continued. “She developed—what they call it, when you’re afraid of the outdoors?”

  “Acrophobia?” Robin squinted. “No, that’s a fear of heights. Agoraphobia, that’s it.”

  “Developed agoraphobia. She lived there at the house for about a year, me here taking care of her, and then I eventually had to put her in the home. I couldn’t do it no more.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I’m so glad she didn’t do all that when I was little little—can you imagine how much that would have jacked up a little boy? And she wouldn’t have been in any kind of condition to raise the two of us. There’s no telling where I’d be now.”

  Enough of the YouTube video had loaded Robin decided it was time to hit the play button. “Roll that beautiful bean footage,” she said, and … click. However, instead of her first battle, it displayed a black screen and a message: An error occurred. Please try again later.

  “What the hell?” She looked up at Joel. “Your Internet is hot garbage.”

  He shrugged. “It’s an old house, lady. What do you want from me?”

  “Where is your router?”

  He shrugged even deeper. “Beats the hell out of me.”

  Robin scowled at him.

  “Okay, you got me fair and square. I’m stealing Wi-Fi from the guy living behind me. I ain’t got my own Internet. So sue me.”

  She made a snarly face at him. “I should,” she mock-threatened, and reloaded the website to try buffering the video again. “Take two. Maybe I can get this to go through before the connection craps out.”

  The two of them languished in the stillness, listening to the subtle creaking and popping of Kenway creeping around upstairs.

  “He sure is taking a long time,” said Joel.

  Robin opened her hands, raising them from the laptop keyboard as if offering her answer as a surprise. “I reckon he’s very thorough when it comes to security. You want him to search this place top to bottom, right? Ain’t no creeps hiding in the closet after we leave.”

  Joel shuddered. “Yeah, good point.”

  Something shattered upstairs with a crash.

  “Sorry,” called Kenway.

  Joel’s hand slipped over his face and he pinched the bridge of his nose. His eyes darted around the room as if he were looking for a new topic to gab about, and he gestured with his beer bottle at symbols carved all over the kitchen table. “This algiz Viking thing. Does it work?”

  “Not as much as it used to back in the day, but yeah. Why you ask?”

  “Because my moms drew it and painted it all over our house. This right here ain’t even half of it. Hundreds of ’em, in every room. Sharpie, paint, ketchup, Nesquik syrup, shit, blood. Muhfuckin’ ants for days. Place stunk. Took ages to clean it all up after she went into the home.”

  “Yuck.”

  “Does the protection, ahh, does it get more powerful the more you put the symbol on the thing?” he asked, punctuating with that rolling hand-gesture, and so on and so forth. “Like, on your chest, or on your walls? Or—” He made an expansive motion to indicate the symbols carved all over the kitchen table.

  “You asking me if it stacks? I don’t know,” said Robin. “Can’t say for sure. Ain’t like there’s scientific tests been done on this stuff. But if it does get more powerful that way, then it sound like you got the safest house in Blackfield.”

  “Heh. Wish I could have told her that.”

  “You still can.”

  “She died in the home a little while after she went in. Massive stroke.”

  Reluctant to give him another impotent apology, Robin opted for, “Wish I could have been here to explain things to her, and you, or even just to be there for you. Sound like Fisher wasn’t there in the way you needed him.”

  “He thought the whole thing with the witches was bullshit.” Joel scoffed. “Weirdest thing, man, the guy that collects action figures and old fantasy and horror movies, he the one don’t believe in this supernatural stuff. Ain’t that a hot mess? But yeah, he was out of there as fast as his little legs could carry him. Left as soon as he graduated high school, went to college on a football scholarship. Computer stuff. IT, that kind of thing. Now he works from home here in town. Telecommutes.”

  “Fancy.”

  “Yeah, it’s aight. You’d think he’d get a big-ass house out in the country around here, but no, he lives in a loft apartment over his comic book store. I guess he’s trying to save up all that money he can. He always was the ant type, and me the grasshopper, I guess.”

  “What about you?” asked Robin. “Did you go to college?”

  “What college? On what scholarship?” Joel gave a genuine laugh. “Nah, after Mr. Barnett, I bounced around town doin’ this and that. Takin’ care of my moms, mostly. Fish helped, at least financially. He picked up what her insurance couldn’t carry. Since I lived in the house with Mama, I didn’t have to pay no rent, so at least I had that goin’ for me.

  “Sittin’ up in your little attic bedroom, playin’ with dolls and shit,” said Joel, in a wistful tone. “You prolly played with me more than Fish did. Man, we didn’t have no worries back in them days, did we?”

  Robin shook her head, smiling a bittersw
eet smile.

  The video was ready. She hit play, and the sound of her voice floated out of the speakers as her two-years-younger face appeared on the screen. “Been trackin’ this one for weeks.” The two of them stood there in the quiet kitchen, drinking beer and watching her fight Neva Chandler.

  “You will die,” the man said again, reaching through her van window, reaching through a window in time, reaching into her chest and clutching whatever nerve governs fear in the human body. “The Red Lord will find you.”

  Welcome home.

  Robin shivered. Finished her beer, considered going for another one. When the video ended, Joel shook his head and walked away, tossing the beer bottle in the recycling bin.

  “What?”

  He shook his head again. “I don’t know how you do it.”

  “It was hard at first. I had a hard time, in the beginning. Between Heinrich’s brutal training and the blood-curdling paranormal things I saw facin’ the witches, I almost wanted to go back to the mental hospital. I didn’t go completely out of my mind when I was in the loony bin, but the shit I saw, and the shit I had to do, after I got out, it just about broke me.”

  Peering into the cabinets as if he were looking for something, Joel busied himself puttering around the kitchen. “I’m so hungry I could eat a farmer’s ass through a park bench.”

  “What?”

  “I’m so hungry I could eat a knuckle sandwich and go back for the fingers.”

  Robin burst out laughing. “Where in the hell did you hear that?”

  “Shit my moms used to say. I think she got it from her granddad back in the day.” Finally he found a jar of peanut butter and a half-pack of saltines. “What kinda shit you seen?” Joel asked, sitting back down.

  “I met a witch that could go out-of-body and jump into other people’s bodies.”

  Joel recoiled. “What? Like Quantum Leap?”

  “Yeah. She had to touch them first. It was crazy as hell watchin’ her move through a subway—I met this witch in New York City, by the way—and it was like watching a train full of people do the Wave. Except instead of standing up and raising their hands, these people sitting elbow-to-elbow would turn and look at me one after the other with this creepy, pissed-off look.”

  “How did you fight her, sis?” The pizza chef slathered peanut butter on crackers. “How you even fight something like that?”

  “I couldn’t attack her directly. She was jumping around inside of innocent people; she abducted kids and puppeteered the innocent hosts, made ’em take the kids to dead-drop points, like out in the industrial parks or in the subway tunnels, and leave them for her coven to retrieve. If I managed to catch her and try to fight her, she would find some way to jump out and leave me standing there ready to beat the shit out of somebody that never even seen me before.” Robin stole one of his crackers and crammed it into her mouth. “What I had to do was, I had to figure out where her original body was at, and kill that.”

  “How did you figure that out?”

  “I let her kidnap a kid, then I followed her proxy host into the subway system and ambushed the coven when they got there. From there I just had to work my way into the center of the coven’s lair to kill the Matron. Along with three other witches and about two dozen henchmen. My guy Heinrich helped me with that one. He did not appreciate having to walk through sewer water.”

  Joel stared at her for a long moment, his eyes studying her face, a half-slathered cracker on the table in front of him.

  Finally he said, “I’m glad you’re back in town. It’s like having my sister back. You do feel like the only person I know that truly gets me. And knowing you’re the resident professor on this shit makes me feel a lot better about all of it.”

  “I’m glad.” She smiled and stole the cracker. “The more time I spend with you, the more you feel like the brother I never had. I’m glad I came back, even if it was just to reconnect with you.”

  Joel shook like he’d gotten a chill and went back to peanut-buttering crackers. “If we keep on with this Hallmark Channel shit, my teeth are gonna rot right out of my head.”

  Kenway returned, the Bedazzled ball bat resting on his shoulder.

  “The coast is clear,” he said, laying the bat across the table. “Thought I saw somebody. Turned out to be a really big mirror that for some dumbass reason was inside of a goddamn closet.”

  “Seven years bad luck, Sergeant Slaughter.” Joel got up and pushed his chair under the table. “And now I’mma go change out these clothes into something a little more me. And … look for a broom to clean up broken glass.”

  Kenway winced and mouthed Sorry as he passed.

  When he came back downstairs, he was tying a silk do-rag around his head, dragging a cloud of tart perfume. Skinny jeans, black boots, and a spaghetti-strap top. “You should polish your boots,” said Kenway. “I used to wear some like that. I can show you how to spit-polish them so shiny you can see yourself in ’em.”

  Joel looked down. “I’ll skip the spit, but I do appreciates ye.”

  “So are we gonna go pick up his car by ourselves, or do we want to get a cop to follow us down there?” asked Robin.

  “I fear for my car,” said Joel. “Ain’t no tellin’ what he’s done with it. But I fear for myself a little bit more. I think if I’m gonna go knockin’ on a serial killer’s door, I want a trigger-happy cop there with me.”

  * * *

  The officer on duty at the police station took them into the break room and made a cup of coffee while Joel gave him a statement. Kenway and Robin sat at a hand-me-down trestle table from the local school that folded up in the middle and had attached stools.

  “So you say he had you tied upside down by your feet,” the cop echoed for clarification.

  Lieutenant Bowker was a tall, corn-fed man. The back of his neck cradled his shaved skull in a fat roll. Stirring his coffee, he came over to the table and sat down with a clipboard. “And he had another man tied up there? You say this killer was … collecting blood for a ‘garden’?”

  “Yeah.” Joel sat with his fingers templed under his nose. The studs in his ears twinkled in the fluorescents.

  “Now, are you sure—” Bowker lifted a sheet of paper to peek underneath, let it fall. “—this wasn’t just some kind of sexual fetish game gone wrong? Maybe things got a little out of hand and maybe you misconstrued the, ahh, the situation, so to speak. I mean, people get roofied all the time, and stuff like this happens. Not to diminish that kind of thing, you know, but, ahh … murder is kind of in a whole ’nother ballpark.”

  Joel had already detailed the series of events that led to waking up in the garage—talking to B1GR3D online about dinner and sex, meeting him at his apartment, getting halfway through a steak and passing out.

  He closed his eyes as if in restraint, and a few seconds later, opened them. “Yes. I’m more than sure it wasn’t a sex game. There was a man who was dead as shit, and all of his blood was in a plastic bucket. Not a little bit of blood. All of the blood from his body was in the bucket.”

  “Now, he, ahh…” Bowker wrote some more. “You said you escaped. How did you ‘escape’? Seems like it would be hard to get out of a hogtie like that. Especially in fuzzy cuffs.”

  “I didn’t say the cuffs were fuzzy.”

  “Ah, right.” Bowker crossed out some text.

  “I squeezed one of my hands out the cuffs—they weren’t put on tight enough—and I got myself down while he was gone.” The cuffs themselves had, in reality, been removed with Kenway’s bolt cutters and were now rusting quietly at the bottom of the Dumpster behind his studio. “I ran through the woods until I got to the road, where Mr. Kenway here found me walkin’ down the highway.”

  “What about the other man?” asked Bowker. “The other one that was tied up. You just left him there?”

  “He was dead. Nothing I could do.”

  “How d’you know?”

  “Because his throat was cut.” Joel drew a finger across his
neck, and his voice became urgent, exasperated. “Blood was runnin’ up to the top of the man’s head and drippin’ on the motherfuckin’ floor.”

  Bowker leaned back warily. “Well now there ain’t no need to get excited, Mr. Ellis.”

  “There ain’t—” Joel stopped himself before he could become fully livid, and spoke in measured tones, bracketing each point with his hands. “I almost got killed, and you want to mess around. Ain’t you supposed to protect and serve?” He sat up straight and boggled at some spot on the wall with a dazed look. “Oh, hell. I must’ve forgot where I was at. I’m Black in a got-damn police station.” His eyes focused lasers of sarcasm on Bowker’s pink face. “What was I thinking? Maybe I should’ve kept the cuffs on.”

  Adrenaline dripped into Robin’s system at the way this meeting was going.

  The officer pursed his lips, flustered, his face darkening. He glanced over at Kenway and the snarling, hooded wolf-man stretched taut across his broad chest. “We ain’t got to go there, Mr. Ellis,” grunted Bowker. “I’m honestly tryin’ to help you in good faith. Now I don’t much care one way or the other what your proclivities are, and I’m real sorry you must have got the wrong idea here.” He twiddled the ink pen between his stubby fingers and went back to writing, his tone hardening, losing that good-ol-boy apathy. “Can you tell me what this man looked like?”

  “He had red hair.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, he was real skinny, had a skinny throat and skinny arms, but he was—he was sinewy, you know? The strong kind of skinny. Big hands.” Joel traced the edge of his jawbone. “Had a real sharp jaw. Nose like a beak, big nostrils. Itty-bitty beady eyes, dark eyes.”

  Bowker wrote for a long time, pausing every so often.

  “Anything you can tell me about where this man was holding you?” He fidgeted, rubbing his nose, scratching his cheek. “Do you remember any details about where you were detained?”

  “Yeah. Yeah … lot of signs and pictures and stuff leaning against the walls. Like, advertising signage. Stuff about Firewater sarsaparilla, a big picture of the Loch Ness—no, I mean, the Creature from the Black Lagoon. I think there was something with a clown. I saw something about Wonderland. Welcome to Wonderland?”