by Hunt, S. A.
Present-day Robin sitting at the table sighed and mumbled, “A little under three hundred. …A day.”
“Three? What—” Kenway’s brain seemed to slip gears, and he leaned forward, gripping the table with both hands as he groped for words. “Three hundred dollars a day?”
She nodded, blushing.
“Are you kidding me? I didn’t even see that kind of money in Iraq. I don’t think any enlisted soldier ever has in the history of modern warfare.” He did the math in his head, staring up at the ceiling as if God could help him. “Eighty-three-hundred a month. Uhh. …That’s about a hundred grand a year.”
Robin looked away and coughed, then dug in her salad and pushed a forkful of it into her mouth as if she could chew the math up and swallow it.
She felt about three inches tall. She wished she was so she could climb into her salad bowl and hide under the lettuce. Her breakfast turned to bitter grass in her mouth, the Ranch saline and sour.
Kenway’s forehead wrinkled and his eyes searched the table. He glanced up at her and paused the video. “You make six figures pretending to kill witches on the internet?” Luckily they were alone on the patio. A brisk wind leapt the fence and ran under the trestle tables, chilling her through her thin sweater.
“Yes,” she said, chewing, thoroughly embarrassed.
“Holy goddamn.” Today he was wearing a blue-plaid sort of Western shirt, with curlicues across the chest. Kenway rolled up his sleeves to reveal the tattoos running up his arms. In the sunlight she could finally make them out: robed Japanese samurai battling each other in a froth of hibiscus flowers and green leaves, katanas raised, screaming silently forever.
Graceful red foxes darted in and out of the scenes on his arms. “I mean, god, damn.” He pressed his palms against the edge of the table as if he were going to push away. “Sitting on a secret like that, you didn’t have anything to worry about, you know,” —he drew cursive in the air with his finger at her— “with the shrink thing. I don’t think you’ve….”
She ate her salad quietly, not knowing what else to say.
Kenway seemed to deflate. “I’m sorry, it’s just—” A cloud passed across his face. “—a lot to take in, you know?”
“I understand.”
“Well, hey, at least you know I’m not interested in you for your money,” he lilted. “I liked you even before I knew.”
Robin nodded, staring down into her food.
“What I meant was, what I was saying, with that kind of a nest egg, it’s not like you’ve really got to worry about what anybody thinks of you.” Kenway rubbed his face and picked up his sandwich. “I don’t know, I mean, you’re sort of ‘above the fracas’, you know what I’m saying? Above reproach.” He took a big bite of the sandwich and stared at the wall, chewing, and said, a little quietly, “Hell, out of my league, maybe.”
A cold shock ran down the middle of her chest.
“No, not at all,” she told him, not meeting his eyes. “Money doesn’t make me better than anybody. It doesn’t make anybody better than anybody else. Besides…I’ve only just now gotten to that point recently, viewer-wise. It’s taken a lot of scrimping and saving to get to this level. I haven’t technically made that kind of money yet. And I won’t unless I keep swimming.” She pointed at the Macbook with her fork. “The videos are passive income, but only so many people can watch them so many times, and if you don’t keep producing content you’ll start losing subscribers. So it’s kinda like being a shark: you have to keep swimming if you want to survive. It’s a lot like being an author, I think.”
Kenway regarded her thoughtfully for a moment, not saying anything, and then pressed the Play button on the video with his pinky finger. The camera zoomed out as the hoot-owl took flight and left the screen stage-right. Video-Robin turned to watch it dwindle into the night sky.
“Hello, dear,” croaked a subtle voice.
Video-Robin whirled around and the world whipped to the left, revealing the front of the white tract house and its shadowy porch, arrayed with boxes of junk, chairs, yellowed and fraying newspaper. A tribunal of cats sat on their haunches all over the porch, fifteen or twenty of them: calico, tortoise-shell tabbies, midnight-blacks, two Siamese, an orange Morris with brilliant green eyes.
Someone stood behind the screen door, a smear of gray a shade lighter than the darkness inside the house.
At the top of the faint figure was the gnarled suggestion of a face. “What brings you round at this time of night, young lady?” asked the old woman, her voice kind but deliberate, with a hint of accent. British? Irish? Whatever it was, it wasn’t midwestern or southern.
The motionless cats reflected the streetlight with their lantern-green eyes. Video-Robin threw a thumb over her shoulder. “Ah, my car broke down. I…I was hoping I could use your phone.”
“Ah.” Neva Chandler paused. Kenway thought he could see her folding her arms, but it was hard to tell. She might have been wearing a pink bathrobe. “I thought all you young ladies these days carried those—those cellular phones, they call them. With their tender apps and GPS-voices. Go here, go there, and soforth.”
“No ma’am,” replied Video-Robin. “I’m kinda old-school that way I guess.”
Chandler scoffed. “Old-school.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well…if you’re going to come in, it would behoove you to do so, and get clear of the street,” the old woman said in a warning way, even though Robin was fully in her front yard by now. “It’s a dangerous place for dangerous people.” The short set of stairs leading up to the porch were made of concrete covered in a coat of flaking gray paint, and it turned out the porch itself was as well. Columns of wrought-iron curlicues held up the roof. At Robin’s feet was a china bowl with a few pebbles of dry cat-food.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Stepping up onto the porch, video-Robin tugged the screen door open with a furtive hand.
The old woman behind the mesh faded into the darkness like a deep-sea creature and Robin stepped in behind her, filling the video window with black.
Click-click. A dingy bulb in an end-table lamp burst to life, brightening a living room positively crowded with antiques. A grandfather clock stood next to an orange-and-brown tweed sofa, its tiny black arms indicating the time was a few minutes to midnight.
No less than three pianos filled one end of the room, two player and one baby grand, all covered in dust.
Four televisions of progressive evolution clustered on top of a wood-cabinet Magnavox, rabbit-ear antennae reaching over them for a signal no longer being broadcast.
The old woman’s track-house looked like the 21st century equivalent of the rundown-shack-at-the-edge-of-the-village, the customary domicile of the medieval witch. Gangs of unlighted candles stood atop every surface, halfway melted into the saucers and teacups that held them. Lines of runic script decorated the windowsills and, apparently, the threshold of the front door between her feet.
Another cat sat on top of a piano, running its tongue down the length of one leg. Video-Robin let the screen door ease shut. “I’m so sorry to bother you this time of night.”
The old woman shuffled over to a plush wingback chair and dropped herself into it, relaxing. She was indeed wearing a pink bathrobe, with steel-gray hair as dry as haystraw tumbling down the sides of her Yoda face. A whisper of mustache dusted her upper lip. She could have been a thousand years old if a day.
An old pressboard coffee table dominated the space in front of the sofa and armchair. Occupying the center of the table was a wooden bowl, and inside the bowl was a single pristine lemon.
“It’s no bother at all, my dear,” Chandler said, peering up at Robin with baggy, watery-red eyes. As she spoke, she flashed black gums and the pearlescent-brown teeth of a life-long smoker. “I’m usually up late. No bother at all.”
The real Robin sitting behind the Macbook thought about how Chandler’s house stank. She remembered the fog of funk like it was yesterday. Boiled
cabbage, farts, cigarettes. Dead old things, burnt hair, burnt popcorn. Cat shit.
“The phone,” wheezed the old woman in the video, curling a finger over the back of the chair, “is over in there, in the hallway, on the little hutch. Do you see it?”
“Yes,” said video-Robin.
As the camera soared past the armchair and toward a doorway in the back of the furniture-crowded room, the Now-Robin sitting at the patio table explained, “Sometimes…when the witches have completely drained a neighborhood down to the bones and they’ve used it all up, all the—whatcha call it, the ‘life’, the soul, there’s nothing left to move with. They can’t migrate to a new town, they get stuck, and slowly wither away. They starve. They die from the inside out.”
One shoulder came up as a chill of disgust grated through her guts, made her back tense up. “The deadness slowly makes its way to the outside. After a while they’re just a rotten corpse in a living-human costume. Death masquerading as life.”
“Jesus,” said Kenway. He put down his sandwich and wiped the marinara off his fingers with a napkin.
Neva Chandler’s telephone turned out to be a rotary phone. Video-Robin picked up the handset and pressed one of the cups against her ear, listening for a dialtone. She put it against the Go-Pro in her hand.
Nothing came from the earpiece but a muted ticking, as if she could hear the wind tugging at the lines outside.
“So what is a beautiful young lady like you doing in a trackless waste such as this? Can’t be the usual. You’re not around to buy drugs.” The decrepit crone sat up, leaning over to pluck the lemon out of the bowl with one knobbly monkey-paw hand. “No, Robin dear, ohhh, you don’t look like the others. You don’t look like shit.”
“No, ma’am, I don’t do drugs.” Video-Robin put the handset down and picked it up again, listening. “I’m from out of town, visiting a fr—”
Chandler’s breathing came in phlegmy gasps and sighs, tidal and troubled. She sounded like she’d been running a marathon.
“—How did you know my name?”
“Oh, honey, bless your heart,” said the crone, “I’ve been expecting you all day.” She pricked the rind of the lemon with a thumbnail and peeled part of it away, revealing not the white-yellow flesh Robin had expected but the vital and fevered red of an internal organ.
Blue veins squirmed across the lemon-heart’s surface in time to some eldritch beat. “It took you longer to get here than I expected. But then Birmingham is rather Byzantine, isn’t it? I remember when I was a child, when it was all gaslights and horse-drawn carts, the layout was so much simpler then.”
The lemon had a pulse.
“What the hell,” said Kenway, his mouth hanging open.
Lifting the lemon-heart to her widening mouth, Chandler bit into it, spritzing fine droplets of blood into the air.
Video-Robin put down the phone’s handset. The chair and the woman sitting in it were facing away from her, so she couldn’t actually see what was happening, but ferocious wet devouring-noises were coming from the other side, like wolves tearing into the belly of a dead elk.
More blood sprayed up, dotting the wallpaper, the lampshade.
The remains of the lemon’s rind dangled from the crone’s hand like a fresh scalp, bloody and pulpy. Red dripped on the filthy carpet.
“That was my last lemon,” said Chandler, twisting slowly in the chair.
One twiggish hand slipped over the back, gripping the velvet and cherrywood. “I’ve been saving it for a special occasion, you know.”
Rising, she stared Robin down, eyes that flashed with a red light deep inside. Her teeth were too many for her mouth, tiny canines, peg-like fangs. The wrinkles across the bloody map of her face had smoothed. Her schoolmarm hair had gone from cornsilk to black. She was ten, twenty years younger.
“You think you’re the first to seek me?” asked the witch, her lips contorting over the bulge of teeth. “My trees are composted with the rot of a dozen just like you.”
She spidered over the chair, her pink bathrobe flagging over her humped back.
Past-Robin said “Shit!” and ran deeper into the house.
Darkness swallowed the camera, shredded by light coming in through the witch’s windowblinds. The image went into hysterics as Robin pumped her arms, running through the house. Tripping over something, she went sprawling in a pile of what sounded like books. “God! Aarrgh!”
The witch came through the house after the girl, her bare feet thumping the carpet, then bumping against the linoleum, meat drumming against wood. “God won’t save you. You’ll not have me, little lady,” gibbered Neva, invisible in the dark. “You’ll not have me, you’ll not have me.”
Past-Robin pushed through the back door of a kitchen, bursting out into a moon-lit back yard. Turning, stumbling, she aimed the camera at the house.
Shick, the sound of metal against leather.
The back door slapped open. Something came racing out, a wraith shrouded in stained terrycloth, the lemon-heart blood coursing down her chin and wasted xylophone chest—and then the old woman was gliding across the overgrown yard, reaching for her with those terrible scaly owl-hands.
“Hee hee hee heeeee!” cackled Chandler, instantly on her, shoving her into the weeds. Both went down in a heap and Robin lost the camera.
Whirling around, the video’s perspective ended up sideways on the ground, peering through the grass, barely capturing the ensuing melee in one corner of the screen. Neva Chandler landed on top of Robin’s belly cowgirl-style and raked at her face with those disgusting yellow nails, so deceptively sharp, and laughing, crowing in her harsh raven-rasp of a voice.
Even though Robin was fighting with everything she had, she couldn’t push the old crone away. An astounding strength lingered in those decrepit bones. Tangling her fingers in the girl’s hair, Chandler wrenched her head up and down, bouncing it uselessly against the grass.
Behind Miguel’s Pizza, two years later, 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.
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, thrusting the silvery dagger through the pink bathrobe and into the witch’s ribs—SHUK!
Time seemed to pause as the fight stopped as suddenly as it had started. Chandler’s arms were crooked back, her fingers clawed in a grotesque parody of some old Universal movie monster. Her face was twisted and altered by some strange paranormal force, her mouth impossibly open until it was a drooping coil of chin and teeth.
Black liquid like crude oil dribbled out around the blade of the dagger. The witch exhaled deep in her throat, a deathly deflating.
Video-Robin withdrew the dagger, releasing more of the black syrup. Then she plunged it deep into the old woman’s chest again, shuk, and twice, and thrice, and four times, shuk shuk shuk.
With a shrieking snarl, “Grrraaaaaagh!” the witch leapt backward—propelled, more like, as if she’d been snatched away by some invisible hand—and scrambled to the safety of her back stoop, cowering like a cornered animal. A stew of red and black ran down her sloped chin and wattled neck.
“Bitch! That won’t work!” she choked through a mouthful of ichor. Chandler had taken the dagger away, and now it glittered in one warped claw. “It’ll take more than that to—”
Hands shaking, Robin produced the Gerber jar full of water and threw a fastball.
The jar went wide, whipping over the old woman’s head, and shattered against the eaves, showering her with the contents. The witch flinched, blinking in confusion. “This isn’t The Wizard of Oz, honey, I’m not going to melt. You were having more luck with the knife.” She flourished the dagger as if she were conducting a symphony with it. “You want thi
s Osdathregar back? Come get it, whore!”
Video-Robin reached into her jacket and whipped out a Zippo, the lid clinking open.
“Oh shit,” said Kenway, leaning back. “Wait, I totally thought that was gonna be holy water in that jar or something. That’s righteous.”
“What have you got there?” demanded the witch. She sniffed the arm of her bathrobe and grimaced. “Oh hell no.”
Alcohol.
Flick, a tiny flame licked up from the Zippo in Robin’s hand, brightening the back yard.
“Get away from me!” the witch shrieked, trading the dagger to the other hand and flinging it overhand like a throwing-knife.
Robin recoiled. The blade skipped off the side of her collar inches from her throat.
Chandler turned and ripped the back door open, scrambling through. Robin snatched up the GoPro and followed, camera in one hand and lighter in the other. She caught the witch just inside the threshold, touching the Zippo’s tongue to the edge of her bathrobe. The terrycloth caught instantly, lining the hem with a scribble of white light. It was enough to faintly illuminate the grimy kitchen.
“Oooooh!” screeched Chandler, tumbling to her hands and knees in the kitchen. “You nasty, nasty bitch! You whore! You tramp!”
The witch stood, using the counter as a ladder, and fumbled her way over to the sink, smearing black all over the cabinets. Raking dirty dishes out of the way, Chandler disturbed a cloud of fruit-flies and turned on the faucet. “When I get this put out, I’m going to—I’m going to—” She tugged and tugged the sprayer hose, trying to pull it out of the basin. “—Well I daresay don’t know what I’ll do, you naughty shit, but I guarantee you won’t like it very much!”
Flames trickled up the tail of Chandler’s bloody bathrobe, but they were going much too slowly for Robin’s liking. She reached over and touched the fabric with the Zippo again.
This time the alcohol on Chandler’s back erupted in a windy burp of white fire. “No! Stop!” said the witch, slapping her hand away. The flames billowed toward the ceiling, whispering and muttering.