Burn the Dark

by S. A. Hunt

  All of the children’s eyes were suddenly as big as cantaloupes.

  “You wanted theories, hypotheses, and experimentation, didn’t you? The scientific method?” she asked, sauntering closer until they were standing within arm’s length of each other, the woman gazing up into his face. “Well, I can give it to you.”

  Leon took out his cell phone, turned it right-side up, and examined it with a sigh.

  “It’s eight-thirty on a Saturday night, I ain’t got a date, there ain’t nothing to drink in the house, and I ain’t slept worth a damn in three days.” He put his phone back in his pocket and threw his hands up in resignation. “Why the hell not?”

  23

  To Robin’s disappointment, there was no psychic blowback as she walked into her childhood home. The house had no aura of paranormal energy. To her eyes, it was what it had always been: a lonely, drafty gingerbread with memories hanging in the corners like cobwebs.

  She looked down at the GoPro strapped to her chest, pointing it up at her face to see if the red Record light was on. It was.

  Good. Footage good, fire bad.

  Regardless of what Kenway had said about her mental stability, she had been dealing with hallucinatory psychosis for the majority of a decade. At this point, between the terrible first few months of nightmares about her mother dying in her arms, and the therapy sessions that became traumatic in and of themselves, she felt like she knew what was a hallucination and what wasn’t. In fact, in many cases the med cocktail had helped overwhelm illusions induced by witchcraft. The colony of newbie witches she’d encountered in Oregon last August—a backwoods death-cult commune led by a 110-year-old woman calling herself Susie-Q—had tried to trick her into believing she was in the middle of a roaring forest fire, but an emergency thirty milligrams of Abilify had sufficiently untied her brain.

  Something about pharmaceutically de-sensitizing herself seemed to lessen the effects of the witches’ visions. Following a regular low-level dosage regimen actually served to inoculate her against their illusions to the extent she could sense their falseness. It was a bit like seeing the Matrix—with the anti-psychotics in her system, she could see a “fraying” around the edges of their false images, a rough-hewn texture that made the illusions look cheap, as if they had been constructed out of papier-mâché and macaroni. This made it easier to find inconsistencies that made it easier to peel the illusion back.

  Checking her phone, she silently cursed herself for missing her medication deadline. She’d been so focused on getting the videos edited and put up and so anxious about going back to Underwood Road she’d forgotten all about it.

  “Hey, buddy?” said Robin, adjusting her camera harness straps.

  “Yeah?” Leon’s arms were folded and his face was a stone mask. He looked like a cop waiting for her to try something funny.

  “Can I get a glass of water?”

  Leon nodded to Wayne, and the kid got up and went into the kitchen. Robin followed and found Wayne pouring some tap water into a red Solo cup. Take two 5mg tablets by mouth every day, the directions on the side of the bottle said. Her pill bottle only had a handful of doses left in it. She would have to look for another prescription soon. She had been titrating down, rationing them at one five-milligram tablet a day, trying to make them last. The prescription was always hard to get, because she was so outwardly high-functioning. The last doctor, the asshole in Memphis, he’d been an uphill battle. “I’m sorry, ma’am, the medication’s side effects—ischemic stroke, seizures, the risk of anaphylactic shock … I mean, two hundred and forty pills? I can’t advocate prescribing this much on a whim.”

  “Attention whore,” the nurse at the mental hospital had called her. Anderson. Head Nurse Anderson. How could she forget that harpy’s name? “You just want the pills because they make you feel special. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re faking it; mental illness isn’t even a disability to you, is it? It’s a badge of honor. To you, it’s a license to be a shit.” Attention whore. And now she had a YouTube channel with millions of subscribers.

  Pushing one tablet between her lips, she gulped it down with some metallic-tasting water. Maybe you were right, Anderson, she thought, shuddering. Maybe you were right.

  She peered down into the pill bottle.

  “Fuck it,” she told her YouTube audience, “time for the nuclear option. Time to put up or shut up, Slender-Squatch.” She tipped the whole thing into her mouth and painfully gulped all the pills down. Forty milligrams and half a glass of water, down the gullet. “If the Red Lord is a witchcraft hallucination, it’s a powerful one. We’ll do this like we did in Klamath Falls, won’t we, and we’ll see how that works. A few days’ worth of anti-psychotics at once should tell me whether or not that thing is a psychiatric Harvey the Rabbit or the paranormal rabbit-man from Donnie Darko.”

  Empty orange bottle. White pill-dust lined the bottle’s inner curves. Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?

  Wayne stared at her, his jaw set. “Are you okay?” When he went around to the other side of the kitchen it seemed like a preemptive gesture, as if he wanted to put the table between them.

  “I’m fine,” she said, leaving the red cup in the sink. “Have a headache, is all. Thank you for the water.”

  They regarded each other from across the room.

  (t h e r i i i i n g)

  A voice, deep, muffled, coming from somewhere obscure. Sounded like Darth Vader on quaaludes, talking through a pillow directly into her right ear.

  “You’re welcome,” said the boy, and he stumbled back into the living room, giving her the side-eye as he went. Robin hugged herself, letting her eyes wander around the familiar-but-not-familiar kitchen. What she remembered as green was now blue, and next to the replaced appliances it gave her an odd sensation of Capgras delusion, as if she were talking to an old friend wearing a mask.

  Holding up her GoPro, she stared into the lens and sighed, giving it a meaningful look. The show wasn’t just about the things she faced, it was about her. That’s what the viewers were there for. Come for the monsters, stay for the girl. But this time, she couldn’t find the words to encapsulate the way she felt in this alien home.

  So she capped off those bottled-up feelings with her ringmaster top-hat. “You guys out there in Internet-Land ready for a show?”

  When she came back to the living room, the children sat on the sofa watching her raptly, and there was a feeling of ominous ceremony in the air, as if they were preparing for a séance. Leon was propped against the bookshelves next to the television, his arms still folded impatiently, and Kenway leaned in the foyer doorway.

  “The creature you saw in that shadow-version of your house,” Robin said, wringing her hands as she paced in front of the TV, “I’ve been seeing it off and on for a couple of years now.” She debated telling them about the psychosis, but the look on Leon’s face told her it would erode his trust. “I think it’s the same thing, anyway. Whatever it is, I’ve been seeing it more since I came back to Blackfield. Since this is my old house, I think it has something to do with me.”

  “What do you think it is?” asked Wayne.

  “I don’t know. Hallucination? Ghost? Demon? But I’d like to try to find it and get a better look at it.”

  He shook his head emphatically. The expression of terror on his face was genuine. “Oh, no, you don’t want to see it. Owlhead is scary as hell.”

  “The boy speaketh the truth,” said Joel. “That thing will make you piss.”

  Pete spoke up. “Your mother was a witch, wasn’t she, ma’am?”

  “Yes.” Brisk way to bring it up, but yes.

  “Maybe it’s here because of her.”

  “I don’t know,” she said again, and sighed deep. “Well, if we’re going to get on with it, there’s no time like now. Wayne, do you have your mother’s ring with you?”

  He took the wedding band out of his shirt, took the chain off his neck, and handed it to her. Robin held it up to the ceiling fa
n light. “The inscription on the inside of the ring says Together We’ll Always Find a Way. Words and symbols can bend or break the witches’ power, and what the inscription says is important. ‘Together we’ll always find a way.’ Think about it. The connotations of words are what have an effect on their hexes, curses, and spells, and what is this saying?”

  (t h e r i n g r i n g t h e r i n g g i v e i t)

  The slow guttural voice crept in around the edges of the conversation, under their words, like a television in another room. Robin took a deep breath and tried to ignore it, tried to will the aripiprazole to start working.

  Pete raised a hand. “What does ‘connotation’ mean?”

  “The way a word makes you feel. How does the word ‘video game’ make you feel?”

  “It makes me feel happy? I guess?”

  “But it’s just a word for a box of circuits and wires.”

  He shrugged sheepishly. “I really like video games. They make me happy.”

  “A video game is only a box of circuits and wires, but the word makes you happy because you have fun with them—and that happiness is the connotation. It’s the deeper meaning of the word. If I said, ‘Let’s go play video games,’ in your mind you’re gonna be gearing up to go have fun, right?”

  He nodded, rapt.

  “So what does the phrase ‘find a way’ mean to you?”

  “To literally find a way,” said Joel. “Wayne accidentally found a way with the ring—an actual way, a doorway. A doorway leading to the garage where I was hanging.”

  “Yes. And that’s how it works. The meanings of words, whether it’s Viking runes, English calligraphy, or Japanese kanji, affect Ereshkigal’s power.” Robin went back to pacing. “I’ve been thinking about this. When Wayne’s father mortgaged the house, he also bought—”

  “Renting,” said Leon.

  “Hmm?”

  “I’m just renting the house. From the realty company. They’re renting it out.”

  “Oh.” A pang of dismay, or perhaps inferiority, flickered through her, as if merely renting the house instead of buying it outright devalued it, and by proxy, Robin and her family as well.

  Leon sat on an ottoman, templing his fingers. “You were saying?”

  “What I was going to say is, now that you and Wayne live here, you’re part of the residual energy of the house.” She held the ring up to her eye and looked through it, turning in a slow circle, searching the faces throughout the room. “And that includes your belongings, like this ring. From what I can tell, the engraving is channeling my mother’s latent energy.”

  “What if I gave them a blender with ‘Let Nothing Stop You’ engraved on it?” asked Kenway. “Would that mean they’d have a blender that could blend anything? Even steel?”

  Robin gave him a stern glance over the ring. “It doesn’t work that way. The symbols have to have emotional or cultural meaning. The older languages, like the Elder Futhark rune on Pete’s chest, naturally have more power than modern-day English. But you can augment English by lending the words importance, or gravity. Like this ring. The engraving lends the ring weight. Makes it an artifact. But only to the person to whom the engraving has meaning.”

  “It meant a lot to me and Haruko,” said Leon. He held up his left hand, flashing the mate to the wedding band. “She actually made these rings herself. Forged them from stainless steel. She made her own jewelry, sold it on websites like Etsy, and in Chinatown.” He dug in his shirt-collar and pulled out a tiny metal pendant depicting three spirals joined in the center. “She made this too. It’s a ‘triskelion,’ a Celtic symbol that represents the act of learning, of moving forward. She made it for me when I started teaching school kids. Said it would inspire me.”

  Her eyes lost their edge and she smiled softly. “Was that your wife’s name? Haruko?”

  “Yep. Haruko Nakasone. Formerly of Nakasone’s Knick-Knacks.”

  Made them herself? thought Robin. Something about this sparked a question in the back of her mind, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on quite what it was. Wayne’s mom couldn’t have been a witch—witches’ power came from their heart road, their libbu harrani, not an external source. But she could feel some aspect to this, something she couldn’t quite find the shape of, like unfamiliar furniture in a dark room.

  Mental note to do some research when she got back to Heinrich’s hideout and the piles of stolen esoterica books there. “It’s very pretty.”

  “I met her at a party in Chicago when I first started going for my bachelor’s degree at UIC. I was teaching English classes in Chinatown at the time.” His face lightened with a wistful grin. “I knew she was the one when she started showing up for classes as an excuse to come talk to me.”

  “Is jewelry the only thing she liked to create?”

  “The ghosts, Dad,” said Wayne.

  Leon stared at him as if he’d spoken an alien language, and then his eyes darted over to Robin. “Yeah, uhh. Thanks for reminding me, son. Yeah, she also painted yōkai.” He hesitated, rubbing his jaw for a moment, with a lost look on his face. His eyes scanned the room, darting along the few still-unpacked boxes remaining around the room. He opened one of them, then another, and took out what looked like a medieval scroll. “She painted yōkai, but she didn’t really sell those. I mean, she did, technically, but for like a thousand bucks apiece, which means she didn’t sell a whole lot of them outside of the art fair.”

  Unfurling the scroll, Leon gradually revealed an intricate painting of a woman in a flowing white dress.

  Robin tried not to scream.

  “Whoa,” said Pete.

  “Super gross,” said Amanda. “I mean, it’s nice. Beautiful painting. But super gross.”

  “Yōkai are Japanese ghosts,” Leon was saying. “Back in the day—and by that I mean feudal Japan—people would commission these creepy ghost paintings and hang them by the front door of their home to scare away intruders.”

  Gracefully depicted on the thin sheet of canvas, the woman in white seemed to have been caught in the act of turning away from the viewer, as if about to walk away, but the longer one studied it, the more one saw she was in a shy, guarded position, as if trying to shield herself from prying eyes. And for good reason, because her skin was as pale as a fish-belly, and her face was distorted into a gap-faced scream. The yōkai’s mouth drooped open like a sack and her eyes seemed to unravel, all of her features running down her face like a wax figure in the sun until the eye sockets and mouth began to blend into one hollow C-shaped cavern.

  “This one,” said Leon, “is called Drowned Woman.”

  No words battled in Robin’s throat or mind as she stared at the wall-hanging, only a patternless, frantic static.

  “Hey, if you ever want to sell those, dude,” Kenway said, “I know a guy into stuff like that, met him when I started trying to sell my art. He’s got an office in Atlanta. You could do something like a memorial art show or something. If the idea of keeping the proceeds makes you feel gross, you could donate the money to a charity you think Haruko would have approved of.”

  Please just roll the painting up and put it away. Please God please. It was everything Robin could do to keep from fleeing the room.

  Mr. Parkin did just that, leaving the scroll on the cold hearth, and Robin felt the knot at the core of her body come undone. First, she realized her fingernails were digging into her palms, and then secondly she realized she had fingernails, and hadn’t bitten them down to the quick as usual. Nothing like staying busy to keep you out of a bad habit.

  “How—” Joel started to say, and hesitated. “How come you don’t have any pictures of Haruko?”

  Leon twisted to look at the bookshelves behind the TV. There were books, of course; a scattering of knickknacks, a trophy with a little man on top swinging a bat at a Tee Ball post, a small crystal award with the word Poetry etched front and center on the plaque. Framed photos of Leon accepting certificates, shaking hands. Wayne with other children, candid scene
s of Wayne and Leon, class photos.

  “I dunno.” He picked at his eyebrow as if he wanted to hide his eyes behind his hand. “I guess they’re still packed up in my room with the other boxes. It’s just easier that way. Somebody told me once, ‘If you got time to think, you got time to drink.’ And I try not to let myself sit and think about certain things.”

  Sighing in irritation, Robin inspected the room with the ring up to her eye again. Nothing special leapt out at her, no doorways made themselves apparent in the walls of the living room. She wandered out into the foyer hallway, and the children scrambled off the sofa to follow her. She ended up in the kitchen, turning in a slow circle again.

  “This is where I found the door to the garage,” said Wayne, pointing at the back wall.

  Robin faced the wall, but saw nothing out of the ordinary.

  “What about the rest of the engraving?” asked Amanda. “It says ‘Together We’ll Always Find a Way.’ What if it’s only Wayne who can do it?”

  “Worth a shot.” She handed the ring back to its owner.

  Wayne put it up to his eye, and for a long second she almost convinced herself he could see the door. But then he relaxed, his hands sinking to his sides, and he frowned at her. “Nope. I don’t see nothin’.”

  “Maybe it don’t work when you’re actually in the house,” offered Pete. “Maybe it only works when you’re somewhere else and you want to come here.”

  Robin had to admit, that made sense.

  With a sigh, Leon took off his wedding band. “What about this one?” It took a bit of twisting and pulling to get it loose. “Maybe if—”

  As soon as it came off, a shine emanated from inside, a faint javelin of white light jutting out of the hoop of the ring.

  Tiny motes of brighter light sparked out of the epicenter of the glow, slow-motion welding slag drifting outward like dust in a sunbeam. Leon blinked, speechless. “Oh hell naw,” said Joel, eyes and mouth gaping. “Y’all, that’s some Lord of the Rings shit.”

  Katie Fryhover grinned a snaggletoothed grin. “Preeeetty.”