Malus Domestica

by Hunt, S. A.

  He took the wedding band out of his shirt and handed it to her. Robin held it up to the ceiling fan 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 gutteral 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.

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

  “The way a word makes you feel. How does the word ‘videogame’ 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 videogames. They make me happy.”

  “A videogame 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 videogames,’ 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 Amanda. “Wayne accidentally found a way with the ring—an actual way, a doorway.”

  “Yes. And that’s how it works. The meanings of words, whether it’s runes, English, or Japanese pictographs, 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 something about buying a house?”

  “Well, my analogy is sort of shot now, but what I was going to say is that 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.”

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

  Robin scowled at him over the ring, a wry smirk playing at her lips. “It doesn’t work that way…as far as I know. 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.”

  “It meant a lot to me and Haruko,” said Leon.

  He held up his left hand, flashing the mate to the wedding band.

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

  “Yep. Haruko Nakasone.”

  “It’s very pretty.”

  “I met her at the Lunar New Year party in the Chicago Chinatown 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.”

  “How—” Amanda started to say, and hesitated. Leon watched her expectantly, his face impassive but warm. “How come you don’t have any pictures of her?”

  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 teeball 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 scenes of Wayne and Leon, class photos.

  “I dunno. It’s just easier that way.” 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.”

  Robin sighed in irritation, inspecting 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 that led 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 that 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. Leon blinked, speechless. Tiny motes of brighter light sparked out of the epicenter of the glow, slow-motion welding slag drifting outward like dust in a sunbeam. Katie Fryhover grinned a snaggle-toothed grin. “Preeeetty.”

  “That’s different,” said Robin. “How come you haven’t seen that before?”

  “This is the first time I’ve taken this ring off in months.” Leon put his ring on the kitchen table as if he were afraid to touch it, standing it on edge. The ring turned by itself and the light-javelin flared. Now it was two feet long and hard to look directly at, a never-ending camera flash compressed to a smear the width of a human finger.

  “It’s a compass,” breathed Amanda.

  Leon picked up the ring and the javelin faded to a mere whisper. “I can feel it tugging,” he said, holding it up. “Like a magnetized compass needle.” He rotated on the spot and the javelin faded down to a vague blur hovering in the C of his thumb and forefinger. He turned the other way and the javelin grew again, spearing over his shoulder and out in front of him.

  Acrid ozone-stink floated in the air. Robin put her palm in front of the light. It wasn’t hot at all. The back of her hand glowed orange, the finger-bones dark shadows in veiny flesh, sprouting from her wrist.

  “Nothin to it but to do it, I guess,” said Leon, and he marched out of the kitchen. Out in the hallway, the javelin faded, even though he was still facing the same direction. Leon turned to his left and the ring flared again. He walked toward the foyer. The ring led them to the second floor, the kids clomping up the stairs behind him as if he were the Pied Piper.

  “Here,” Leon told them, opening the door to the cupola.

  The only thing on the other side was the stairway hooking up into the shaft’s spiral. Wayne held Haruko’s ring up to his eye. This must not have had an effect, because he closed the door and opened it again. Closed it, opened it. “I don’t know, there’s nothing.”

  Leon’s ring was still pointing at the door. He w
ent upstairs, Robin, Pete, and Wayne following.

  With four people standing in it, the cupola was unusually crowded. Examining the room with his ring, Wayne turned every which way, looking up at the ceiling, looking out all the windows, even squeezing between Robin and Pete to check under the bed.

  Now the javelin of light pointed down the stairs. “Come on,” said Robin, herding Wayne down them. At the bottom, she closed the door leading out to the landing (wincing apologetically to Kenway and the girls as she did so) and braced the boy with a hand on his shoulder. “Now yours. Open the door.”

  Wayne eyed the door through the monocle of Haruko’s ring and turned the doorknob. It scraped and creaked as if it were a thousand years old. He pushed the door open, revealing an archway full of deepest darkness.

  A breath of frigid air wafted out, curling around their knees, chilling their hands. Groaning from the depths of the shadow-house was the immense galleon-creak of shifting timbers, as if the earth below that strange foundation was constantly moving.

  Robin sat down and Leon settled behind her, putting his ring back on. “I’m not going in there,” said Wayne, staying on his feet, as if he would bolt at any moment.

  She adjusted the GoPro on her chest rig. This was going to require a Spielberg-worthy framing.

  “Hopefully you won’t have to.” She drummed her fingernails on the doorframe, lightly at first, then a little more insistently. “Here it is, buddy,” she said, her voice soft, as if perhaps she were speaking to herself more than anything on the other side. “Here we are. Come show your face. I know you’re in there.” The dark doorway yawned apathetically for a long several seconds, as if it had nothing to prove to her. She leaned forward, trying to get a better look at the faint light down the hallway.

  Bursting out of the shadows, a shaggy arm reached through the door, claws flexed a hair’s-breadth from her face.

  “Oh!” Robin threw herself backward against Leon’s shins, and Wayne screamed, running up the stairs into the cupola. Pete let out a shrill shout.

  Before she could properly react, the coppery hair all over the arm burst into flames, WHOOSH, as readily as if it were drenched in gasoline. The arm withdrew and the fire diminished in the watery darkness, a single flame licking one last time.

  A pair of bright green eyes blinked sluggishly, each one the size of a softball.

  Grrrrurururuhuhuh, rumbled Owlhead.

  His wet, ragged respiration reminded Robin of a tiger, or perhaps a dragon in a movie, but muffled, heavy, languid.

  ( g i v e m e )

  “No,” she said, and realized that she was still cowering against Leon’s feet, halfway up the stairs. She sat down, but didn’t lean forward. “I got some questions.”

  No voice reverberated in the corner of her mind.

  “You there?”

  Grrrrurururuhuhuh.

  She checked over her shoulder. Wayne was still upstairs—he wanted no part of this, and she didn’t blame him. Leon’s face would have been as white as virgin snow if he could go pale, but his open mouth and wide eyes were more than enough evidence of his terror.

  He didn’t leave, though, she had to give him that. Neither did Pete, though he had moved halfway up the stairs, watching around the corner.

  “What are you?” Robin asked the empty doorway.

  Grrrrurururuhuhuh.

  ( t h e r i n g t h e r i n g f r e e m e )

  Robin had never addressed anything like this before. She tried to remain assertive.

  “No. You answer my questions.”

  Well…there was that one witch in New Orleans, the one the priest had claimed was possessed by a demon. Taking the same tack with this thing seemed like the right course of action.

  I wonder if Owlhead is a demon, she thought, looking down at the protective runes tattooed in the palms of her hands. Is this what demons actually look like? After dealing with the paranormal as long as she had, the visual of pitchforks and goat-horns certainly seemed whimsical. She’d never actually seen a demon, but it stood to reason that they looked nothing like colonial woodcuts or monastic illustrations.

  In retrospect, so many layman artists knowing what a real demon looked like seemed unlikely…artistic hubris, even.

  ( s o h u n g r y )

  “Hungry?” Owlhead’s eyes were like green Christmas baubles with lights inside them. “What do you eat?”

  An image squirted into Robin’s mind, indistinct, piecemeal, like a half-finished jigsaw puzzle. Her subconscious fluttered around the edges, trying to make sense of the shards, and she caught glimpses

  liver-spotted hands, wielding a knife, coming around a boy’s throat, slash

  of various things, faces,

  a curtain of blood

  places…no names, but

  tiny graves in the woods

  a distinct motif she thought she could sort through…

  broomstick leaning in the corner, flickering firelight, bubble and gurgle of boiling water

  Marilyn Cutty’s birdlike smirk swam in the gloom. Robin leaned forward, disregarding the fact that she was within arms’ reach of the creature again. “Cutty? You eat witches?”

  No answer.

  The stairway creaked slowly. Robin looked up and saw Wayne creeping down, his eyes curious. She threw out a hand. “No! Stay upstairs! Keep the ring up there, away from the door.”

  Grrrrurururuhuhuh.

  ( t h e r i n g t h e r i n g s h e i s c o m i n g )

  “Why do you want the ring? Does it protect you? Does it allow you get out of that house?”

  Grrrrurururuhuhuh. Owlhead blinked slowly.

  “If it eats witches,” Wayne said from the cupola, “ask it why it tried to bite my damn head off.”

  A hand slipped over Robin’s shoulder. Leon in the corner of her eye. “Are you psychic or somethin? How is that thing talkin to you? I don’t hear nothin but the breathin.”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I don’t know! Until I came back to Blackfield, I hadn’t ever heard voices like this—”

  But she had, hadn’t she? The schizophrenia.

  Maybe Kenway was right…maybe it hadn’t been schizophrenia at all, all this time. Maybe she had inherited something from her mother. If not her witch-ness, but perhaps some obscure level of paranormal sensitivity. She frowned. Am I a witch and I don’t know it? What if her mother had sacrificed her when she was a child, without her knowledge, and she’s grown up without a heart all this time? Nonsense. Bullshit. Heinrich would know, I’m sure. Besides, you’d know if you were dead inside, right?

  Heinrich. She really needed to talk to him, but he wasn’t answering his phone. He had a bad habit of that.

  “Why are you here?” she asked the eyes.

  Grrrrurururuhuhuh, breathed Owlhead. Sensory echoes welled out of the darkness, like heat distorting the air over a fire. When the ripples broke over her mind’s eye, she saw her mother’s face.

  “Mom?” Robin stared. “Mom brought you here?”

  Another ripple issued from the doorway, but this time when it touched her, she went blind.

  ❂

  Light flares in the ink-black void, resolving into a face. Annie Martine materializes, illuminated by candles, as if fading in from black. Gradually, the scene makes itself clear: her mother is kneeling in a dirt-floored, stone-walled room, surrounded by thousands of stumpy white candles—on the floor, arrayed along the walls, standing in floor brackets.

  Annie mutters to herself, her eyes closed. The incantations she’s saying are too low for Robin to make out. She is nude, nubile, her late-teens body sleek and glittering, her breasts high and firm. Sweat beads on a bunny-tail of brown pubic hair. Occult symbols have been painted in key positions on her body with some dark paste like melted chocolate. Not blood. Some kind of mixture. They look like kanji, but…wrong, somehow. Upside-down, maybe. Too many dots.

  A round diagram six feet across has been drawn on the floor with chalk, a ring of incomprehensible symbols. A man l
ies in the center of the runic circle, stripped naked, his paunch sweaty, his balding scalp glistening in the candlelight. His arms and legs are outstretched like the Vitruvian Man, his wrists and ankles tied to steel tent-stakes, driven into the earth. He is waking up, blinking, looking around worriedly.

  A folded dishtowel lies across his groin, obscuring his genitals, for which Robin is grateful. “Where am I?”

  Annie finishes muttering and looks up at him from under her brows. She is indebatably angry, but it is a long-simmering rage, ripe, reptile-cold. “You’re in my cellar, Edgar.”

  “Why am I naked? What is this?”

  “This is a ritual. I’ve chosen you as my sacrifice.” Annie stands up, presenting the full glory of her lithe, petite body. Her dark hair is feathered and parted in the middle, in that iconic Eighties way, and it makes everything feel like a scene excerpted from a horror movie from the Me Decade. The only thing missing is a synth score from John Carpenter.

  “Sacrifice?” He angles his head up, peering over his belly. “What the hell are you going on about?”

  “Shut your mouth.” Annie walks slowly around the runic circle, pacing like a predator. He watches her, his eyes trickling up and down her sweat-slick body, and the lust hiding behind the terror in his eyes is disgusting.

  “Listen, I’m willing—”

  “I know about the children,” says Annie.

  Edgar immediately stops talking. The girl-woman makes a complete revolution around the circle before he speaks again. “The children.”

  “The amusement park you built in the woods with your wife’s money.”

  “Weaver’s Wonderland.”

  “Whatever you want to call it.”

  “Those kids are trash,” Edgar says at first, then seems to realize he’s spoken harshly, frowning, biting back his words. “They come from broken homes, poor homes, dead homes. No one’s going to miss them. Nobody’s even going to look for em, we got the county in our pocket.”