Malus Domestica

by Hunt, S. A.

  Katie stirred. “I have to peeeeeee.”

  “All right, all right.” Heinrich cracked the door open. Wayne’s father was standing by the front door, peeking through the side-light windows. “Is she gone?”

  Leon spoke over his shoulder. “Yeah. She’s gone.”

  “Gone gone? She’s off the property?”

  “Yeah, she’s crossing the highway right now.” Leon gave them a pointed look as they came out of hiding. “Man, for a bunch of big-shot witch-hunters, you guys sure are hot to stay outta sight.”

  Robin was the last out of the bathroom, closing it behind her to give Katie some privacy. “You remember that green-eyed thing in the darkhouse?” She said ‘dark house’ as one word, darkhouse, as one would say ‘big-house’ or ‘outhouse’. Seemed to be evolving into her name for it. “Well, that thing is the only thing that can kill those witches. That’s how powerful they are. They’d tear through us like wet toilet paper.”

  “Then what made you think you’d be able to take em on by yourself?” asked Leon, going into the kitchen. The water ran as he washed out the coffee carafe, staring out the window over the sink.

  She put her fists on her hips and stared darkly at the foyer rug as if she could find wisdom in the intricate red-and-blue curlicues.

  “The demon,” said Heinrich. “The hallucinations. Owlhead was drawing you here.” He shook out another Royal Hawaiian and stuck it in his mouth, but didn’t light it. Instead, he paced slowly up and down the foyer hallway, one hand in his pocket, the other holding the cigar to his mouth. “He wants you here for some reason.”

  “But why now?” asked Robin. “I’ve always seen him, but it’s only been every now and then. The first nineteen years of my life, I saw him four times. Once when I was as young as that little girl in there, once in middle school, and twice in the mental hospital. The last two years, I’ve seen him at least fifteen times. What’s special about now?”

  “It is close to your mother’s birthday.”

  “Would that be numerologically important, though? Would that have any kind of occult relevance?”

  He shook his head. “No…none that I can imagine. If it were your birthday, maybe.” Heinrich gestured with the cigar. She could tell he didn’t think much of it anyway. Numerology is bullshit, astrology for math nerds. They were grasping at straws. “Maybe he thinks you’ve passed some kind of threshold that would make it possible for you to let him manifest in our world? You are Annie’s daughter, after all. Maybe there’s a link somewhere.”

  “You know as well as I do that demons have never manifested in the material plane.” Heinrich had been a demonologist in a previous life and had a library of reference works, including a stash of material stolen out of the Vatican’s archives in 1976. As part of her training, Robin had studied them all, and she knew that he’d forgotten more than she’d even learned. “They can’t. That’s why they possess people.”

  “What are demons, anyway?” asked Leon. “That didn’t look like any demon I’ve ever seen. I would have expected, y’know, the usual—cloven hooves, pitchfork, horns, the whole nine yards.”

  Heinrich sat on the stairs. “Demons are viruses.”

  “I ain’t pickin up what you’re throwin down.”

  “Goddammit, I knew you was gonna make me explain it. All right, look. A virus is basically a piece of DNA wrapped in protein. You could say it’s dead, but it would have to have lived to be dead, and it’s never been alive. And the only way a virus can assume some semblance of life is by infecting a living being.”

  “…Stillborn.”

  “Yeah, kinda. I like to think of it as a Terminator—a facsimile of life that’s never been alive itself, wrapped in meat.”

  He sighed and took the cigar out of his mouth, staring at it as he rolled it in his fingers.

  “The way it’s been explained to me is, there are two kinds of souls. The souls that come out of Creation’s oven well-formed and functioning find their way into a living body at some point. The souls that come out deformed don’t get a body. They just sorta float around out there in the dark, in the primordial ghost-soup of Limbo. Demons are those two-faced, waterheaded, heart-on-the-outside, too-fucked-up-to-live souls. And the only way they can reach the same level of life that we enjoy is to possess a living body, the same way a virus possesses a living cell.”

  “You say ‘Creation’s oven’,” said Leon, wiping his hands dry with a towel as he came back to the foyer. “So you’re tellin me there’s an actual God up there, cranking out souls in His spiritual bakery?”

  Heinrich guffawed, leaning back to laugh at the ceiling. “That’s the million-dollar question, ain’t it?” He put the coconut cigar back in his pocket. “Welcome to the clergy. Nice to meet you, hope you guessed my name.”

  Robin went into the kitchen to fetch her cup. Sitting on the counter was her camera, the RECORD light burning red, in full view of anyone putting an icebox cake in the Frigidaire.

  22

  “YOU WILL TELL US how it went, won’t you?” asked Amanda, as the kids headed home after breakfast. “You know, dinner with the witches?”

  The Parkins didn’t have any of the ingredients for breakfast, but Leon needed to make a trip to the grocery store anyway to get the steaks, leaving them with Kenway and Robin. To the boys’ surprise, the veteran was quite a gamer, and the boys geeked out with him over Wayne’s PlayStation. The tall black guy, Heinrich, spent most of the morning sitting on the back stoop smoking his cigars and staring at the forest out back. Wayne kinda liked that dude—he was standoffish and creepy, but in a cool, self-aware way, as if it were a facade he’d developed over the years.

  “Why don’t you go with us?” Wayne offered, and both Pete and Amanda blanched at the thought. “What, are you scared?”

  “Hell yeah,” said Pete. The carnival hammer rested on his shoulder.

  “They’re super-creepy.” Amanda folded her arms. The three of them were standing on the front porch of the Victorian. The day had grown cool, and the overcast sky was the blank, featureless white of an unwritten story. “I don’t think you understand, Wayne.”

  “Understand what?”

  “We’ve been living down the hill from those women our entire lives,” said Amanda. “Our parents…I don’t know if they’re afraid of them, but…nobody in Chevalier Village goes outside much after dark unless it’s an emergency, you know? The women don’t talk to us; we don’t talk to them.” Her eyes found their way up to the hacienda. “This morning was the first time I’ve ever heard Karen Weaver speak. Or really, the first time I’ve ever been close enough to hear her speak.”

  “They’re kinda like you guys’ Dracula, huh?” asked Wayne.

  Pete’s head tilted. “What do you mean?”

  “The mysterious Count Dracula, livin up on the hill overlookin the town. Nobody goes up there, and the village warns away anybody that comes snooping. Chevalier is kind of a mini-Transylvania, ain’t it? They got you spooked like a vampire.”

  Amanda nodded, but didn’t say anything.

  “Astute observation,” said Robin, startling Wayne. She was sitting in the swing at the end of the porch.

  “We’d better get out of here, I guess,” said Amanda, bouncing down the front steps. As she stepped into the grass, she turned back to him. “Be careful. If they really are witches, they’re dangerous. Take care of your dad, okay?”

  “I’ll try. I don’t think they’re gonna do anything. We’re just eatin steak, right? We’re going to dinner there. They can’t violate guest right.”

  “Real life isn’t Game of Thrones, Wayne.”

  Wayne swallowed anxiously and sat down on the steps to watch them trudge back to the trailer park.

  Robin came down to his end of the porch. She wasn’t wearing her chest harness, but she was toting the little camera she carried everywhere. Her messenger bag was slung around her shoulder. She put the camera on top of the newel post at the end of the porch railing, facing them, and the red l
ight on it told him it was recording.

  “So you got a YouTube channel?” he asked her.

  “Yup. It’s got all my detective work and encounters on it. All my fights this far. Well, almost all of them. I’ve been ambushed a couple of times.” She sat down next to him, leaning over with her elbows on her knees. “You and your dad should watch a couple of them. So you can—I don’t know, maybe it’ll help you trust me.”

  “I think after showing him the monster in the doorway, he believes,” said Wayne. The woman’s eyes sparkled even in the dim light of the overcast day. She was intensely pretty, he thought, fine-featured and pale, but her eyes were old. Or maybe tired. There was a sharp, almost unsettling intelligence in them, like a hawk. “I know I believe.”

  “I have a plan,” she told him.

  “A plan for what?”

  “I want to use your ring to get into their house without having to walk through the front door. Take em by surprise.”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “There’s a fourth witch, somewhere on the property,” she said, looking up at the Lazenbury. “I’m pretty sure she lives upstairs. She’s much older than the other three. Heinrich believes that fourth witch is the one augmenting the power of the rest of the coven. Witches can band together and draw on each others’ power—that’s the whole point of a coven.”

  “What good is that going to do?” he asked, studying his mother Haruko’s ring.

  She delved into her messenger bag and took out a beautiful, ornate dagger. A few emeralds were laid into the hilt. “Except for the core, it’s made of silver. The entire thing, from point to pommel.”

  “I thought silver was for werewolves.”

  “This silver is….” She turned it so that the stiletto caught the white sky, and ivory shimmered down the mirrored metal blade. “To use a comic book analogy, it’s spiritual adamantine. Witches can’t change it or defend against it. It’s magically inert. Energy-neutral. If you had enough of these, you could pin a whole coven of witches to the floor and there’s nothing they could do about it. Only lay there cussing at you.”

  “Do you?” He lifted the dagger out of her hands and examined it. “Do you have enough?”

  “Heinrich says there are two others in the world, but this is the only one of these I’ve ever seen.”

  “Can’t you make more?”

  “According to him, they were made using the nails that the Romans pinned Jesus Christ to the cross on Golgotha with. The nail is the core of the blade. Whether that’s total bullshit or not, I have no idea. For all I know, they’re made with Elvis Presley’s melted-down fillings. But I’ll tell you right now, this one works. It’s helped me kill a lot of witches.”

  “What do you do, stab em in the heart?”

  “Witches don’t have hearts to stab.” Robin explained the ritual of Ereshkigal’s sacrifice. “You pin her down with it and set her on fire while she’s immobilized. Fire is the only thing that can stop a witch. You can’t kill them, you can only destroy them.”

  “I thought it was water you had to kill em with.”

  “Nope.”

  Wayne screwed up his face. “Why can’t you tie her to a stake like the old witch-hunters used to do?”

  “Because those weren’t witches,” said Robin. “They were just your normal every-day humans. A rope isn’t going to hold a real witch, and that’s assuming you can even keep her still long enough to tie her up.” She put the dagger away. “Anyway, if I can get to the fourth witch and pin her down with this, I can burn her. With her out of the picture, the other three will be a lot easier to handle. Hopefully, if I play my cards right, I can take them out one at a time.”

  “Why don’t you go do it right now?” he asked, showing her the ring.

  “I need the diversion to make it work. I can’t match them all three at once. You and your dad are gonna go to dinner and keep them busy. Meanwhile, me and Heinrich will go into the Darkhouse and look for a door that’ll take us into the second floor of the Lazenbury.”

  23

  WHEN JOEL AWOKE, THERE was a silhouette standing in the doorway. Officer Bowker, aiming a pistol at his face.

  “Jesus God!” he shrieked, scrambling backward and off the end of the futon, tumbling to the floor. A rusty sawband of hot pain raked across his thigh. “Don’t shoot me! Don’t—”

  “Hey-hey-hey. Hey.”

  Bowker turned a switch—click click—and a lamp filled the room with a soft glow. It wasn’t Bowker at all, it was his brother Fisher, and he was holding out a cup of coffee, not a Glock. “It’s all right, man! You’re all right! It’s me.”

  Joel’s mouth tasted like he’d been helping himself to a litter box. Hangover pain ran laps around the inside of his head, the scratches on his chest were still sore, and his entire body was stiff and achey, but none of it could hope to compete with the gunshot wound in his leg.

  He was wearing nothing but a pair of Fisher’s boxers and gauze had been wrapped around his thigh in a thick band, affixed with a pair of tiny aluminum clips. The gauze was clean, but he didn’t know if that was because it was fresh or because he wasn’t bleeding that heavily. The stinging agony went bone-deep, as if he’d been shot with a nailgun and the nail was still in embedded in the muscle. He got a mental flash of the Serpent shooting nails through the garage door and squinched his eyes until it went away.

  His hands were shaking too bad to hold a cup of coffee. “Just put it over here,” he said, his nervous fingers pattering on the end-table. “I’ll get to it.”

  The walls of the cramped room were lined with bookshelves, and the shelves were full of hundreds of VHS tapes: all the best and most obscure horror and fantasy movies of the last forty or fifty years. Nestled into a space between the shelves was an old Magnavox television/VCR. A bundle of clothes lay on the end table (a shirt and a pair of jeans, both folded as meticulously as a display in an Abercrombie and Fitch) and the Bedazzled baseball bat leaned against the end of the futon.

  Fish left the coffee next to the clothes and sat next to his brother. “How’s your leg feel?” he asked, handing Joel a couple of pills.

  “Hurts.”

  Extra strength Tylenol. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do until he could get back to the stash at Mama’s house. He dry-swallowed the Tylenol one at a time.

  “I bet. Luckily it was just a graze. Cut a hole in the outside of your leg about the size of a quarter, but that’s all. Coulda been worse. At least he didn’t hit an artery or clip the bone.”

  Underneath the gauze was about ten or twenty stitches. Joel didn’t know the exact amount and he really didn’t care, to be honest—the night before was a haze of alcohol and pain, only broken up by memories of running from the police lieutenant and hiding in a bush in the park like a wino, finishing off a blood-slick bottle of cognac. Fisher had picked him up on the back of his motorcycle, one of those sleek Japanese deals in cranberry red and black, and spirited him away.

  He vaguely remembered refusing to be taken to the hospital. “Who stitched me up?”

  “Ashe.”

  A huge shadow stepped into the doorway. “I hear voices. Sounds like the patient is awake.”

  Ashe Armstrong was a local veterinarian and the comic shop’s equivalent of Norm from the TV show Cheers—a regular and Fish’s most loyal customer. If he wasn’t at work, he was here, sitting on a stool at the end of the counter and talking comics with Fish. They’d called him around nine the previous evening with a breathless plea to make a house call, and to his credit he’d showed up with bells on.

  He was also a little over six feet tall and nearly sturdy enough to arm-wrestle a grizzly bear. Plenty of muscle to hold down a struggling drunk.

  “How you feeling?”

  “Like I been shot in the leg and like I need to be shot in the head,” Joel said testily. The god-rays of morning sunlight shifting through the doorway around Ashe’s frame were sending shards of glass into his brain. After his initial snap was me
t with silence, he added, “…Sorry. I’m jus a little beat-up. Thank you for patchin me up.”

  “No biggie. Anything for my friends.”

  “‘Beat up’ is putting it lightly,” said Fish.

  Stepping into the room, Ashe sat on a milk crate with a creak of plastic. “You said a cop shot you? I take it that’s why you didn’t want to to go to the hospital.”

  “Yeah. He said somebody he called ‘the Serpent’ was supposed to have finished me off. The cop said they’re all workin together…said Marilyn Cutty owns this town.” Joel tilted his head back and slumped down, pressing a palm against his eyes. A kaleidoscope of geometric shapes flashed behind his eyelids. “I’m guessin this ‘Serpent’ guy is the dude I met on the internet Friday night.”

  “A booty call?” Fish sighed. “Brother, you got to quit cattin around like this. You gonna end up with something they don’t make vaccines for.”

  “I got rubbers.”

  “That’s always what you say, ain’t it? A raincoat ain’t gonna keep you dry forever. Besides, you came within a hair of getting yourself killed by some looney-tune cracker with a knife.”

  “Livin on bacon and cauliflower ain’t gonna make you immortal, either. You can’t jog your Jamaican ass away from Death, and he don’t care how much you can dead-lift.” Joel picked up his coffee and cradled it under his chin. “Complex carbohydrates ain’t what drove Mama crazy and pushed her into the grave, you know. They ain’t gon kill you either.”

  Fish turned and walked out, shaking his head. A radio in the shop came on, obnoxiously loud, tuned to some local station in the middle of their drive-to-work morning chit-chat. It snarled through a dozen stations before landing on classic rock. Guns N’ Roses wasn’t Fish’s forte, but this was how his brother dealt with turbulent conversations between the two of them: blocking it out with music. Any kind, it didn’t matter, as long as it was loud.

  This is probably why we ain’t never fixed nothing, thought Joel. He storms off into his bedroom and plays The Roots at three hundred decibels, and I go find something to smoke. Ashe quietly watched him drink his coffee, his hulking body hunched over with his elbows on his knees and his hands slowly wringing each other. The veterinarian’s dark hair and heavy features made him look like a young Penn Gillette.