Malus Domestica

by Hunt, S. A.

  “No.”

  “Now what?” asked Fish.

  Ashe’s fingers curled over the bed wall and he rose up to peer over the edge. A bolt from the blue exploded on the other side, whispering across the forest, and a bullet fanned his hair back in a mist of blood.

  Both brothers swore out loud as Ashe toppled over and slapped against the asphalt.

  “No!” shrieked Fisher. “No!”

  Joel looked away, squeezing his eyes shut and covering his face, trying to collect himself.

  Staring into the abyss behind his eyelids, listening to Fish curse over the dead man, he knew they had no other recourse but to run or be shot. He could hit a man point-blank with a shotgun, but with a pistol and a handful of bullets, Joel knew he had no chance against Euchiss’s scoped hunting rifle and a whole box of rounds.

  He tangled a hand in Fisher’s shirt and pulled him to his feet. “Let’s get out of here.”

  26

  AT LEAST THE FIRE had taken care of the cats, which was what they’d come out here to get rid of anyway.

  When Euchiss finally managed to get out of the overturned truck, he twisted his ankle jumping down. He sat in the back of the Frontier for a few minutes, massaging his ankle and waiting for someone to happen by with a vehicle he could commandeer, but the road to the quarry was a long and lonely one. Nobody came out this way except for the pulpwood trucks going to the clear-cut out on the ridge, and that had dried up three weeks ago. There would be no more traffic.

  They had only been six miles from the quarry when the big guy with the ponytail ran them off the road.

  He kicked the lanky vet for good measure before he left.

  Two hours into the pursuit, the pain had drained out of his ankle and it’d become stiff and swollen. Euchiss paused to examine it and found a portwine bruise the size of a baseball across the outside of his heel. Sprained. Damn.

  The forest crowded around him in an infinity of tall pine trees, and the ground was a carpet of rusty red needles. The sky behind the treetops was an endless wind-blasted white. Four-fifths of a box of 6.5mm rustled softly in his pocket.

  He took his phone out and woke it up. No signal. His LMR was also out of the picture—too far away from town for the walkie. “Son of a bitch,” he fussed to himself in his New England drawl. He carried the rifle, a scoped Nosler M48 Patriot, underhand like a briefcase. Oh well. Cutty would just be pissed I messed up. Better he get this tied off by himself, ASAP.

  He wriggled back into his shoe and picked his way over a brook. On the other side was the decades-old remains of a barbed-wire fence, and several yards to the south was a NO TRESPASSING sign. We’ve been curving in a northeasterly direction, he thought, slinking through the rusty wires like a wrestler getting into a ring. Must be getting close to the mines.

  The aforementioned quarry that Bowker had been heading to lay at the far end of a network of mine shafts snaking through the belly of Red Hill Mountain. The locals called it the Mushroom Mines because the damp conditions inside the cave caused white fungus to grow on the wooden tables and scaffolding. The air inside was thick with mold spores. He wasn’t sure if it was poisonous, but he and Bowker never took any chances and usually went in with gas masks.

  They were in the foothills of Red Hill Mountain now, crossing increasingly steep and stony terrain. Up ahead, the trees thinned out, and Euchiss found himself on a bare shelf of limestone overlooking a large gorge some two or three hundred yards across—the sort of gap that would have warranted a bridge were it more traveled. Briars and heather choked the bottom, but the sides were steep and clear.

  The two black guys were scrambling up the opposite bank, picking their way through the boulders and briars. They were almost to the top, no more than a stone’s-throw from the treeline. Euchiss threw himself down and shouldered the rifle, a frisson of glee coursing through his body. A quick adjustment to get an optimal angle, cocking one knee up, and he thrust the gun forward, resting his elbows on the cliff and looking through the scope.

  In the sharp magnification, he could have reached out and plucked the two men off the valley wall with his fingers. Euchiss licked his lips and steadied himself, the crosshair settling over the athletic one with the buzz-cut. Breathe in, breathe out, relax. He tugged the trigger back until the firing pin hammered the cartridge.

  The sharp, hollow CRACK! surprised him and sent a pulse of pleasure through his testicles. The two men flinched and dirt spewed up inches to the right of Fisher Ellis’s head. He looked over his shoulder, scanning the gorge wall.

  “I’m up here, you dumb shit.” Euchiss cycled the Nosler’s bolt, ejected the empty casing, and chambered a fresh round.

  Something went off with a pop like an M-80 and a bullet whirred into the trees behind him. He peered through the scope and remembered that the faggot with the shaved head had stolen Bowker’s Glock. Joel fired several more rounds, all but one whizzing into the trees behind Euchiss. “You can’t hit me from there with that. Who are you foolin?”

  He took aim on Joel, who seemed to realize the futility of shooting back and threw the empty pistol into the gorge. As Euchiss was getting ready to pull the rifle’s trigger, his trousers vibrated and a jangly melody came from his pocket.

  Being this high up, he must have gotten a signal. He dug out his phone—yup, four bars. Euchiss grunted in irritation at a text message.

  Cutty having steaks w neibrs @ 6. U in?

  Steaks? Who gives a rat’s ass about steaks? He sighed and looked through the scope. Joel had made it to the treeline, and the Billy Blanks wannabe was almost over the gorge bank. Euchiss put the crosshairs on his back, center mass, and fired another round. That warm ache hummed in his balls again at the sound of the blast.

  This one plugged Fisher in the upper left arm, blowing a chunk of meat all over his brother.

  By the time he’d cycled the empty casing out and sighted on them again, the fag had pulled him out of the ravine and they were running into the trees. The pine trunks flickered across their fading bodies like a picket fence.

  Euchiss snatched up his phone and typed a text.

  Had accidnt on way 2 quarry. LT dead. Chasing 2 guys @ Red Hill on foot. Come get me. Take E acc road, bring gun. Ill B there in abt 45 min

  The reply was immediate:

  On my way.

  Euchiss jumped up and shouldered the rifle, skirting the limestone and billygoating his way down a trail into the wash. The brambles plucked at his thin uniform pants, scratching his legs, and he ignored them. The scars on his back and across his thighs were evidence that his father had done worse than anything Mother Nature could inflict with thorns and claws.

  27

  A HALF AN HOUR to six, Robin took Wayne into the cupola to have him open the way to the Darkhouse again. But before she could close the stairwell door, Leon put his hand against it, holding it open. “For the record, I want to vote against this.”

  “Vote against what?” Robin and Wayne sat on the stairs, and her camera was attached to her chest harness, ready to record her foray into the strange other-version of the house. “Opening this door?”

  “That too, but I’m talking about attacking those women. I haven’t seen any hard proof that they’re…” Wayne could tell Leon hated even saying the word. “…Witches. Hell, even if they are, what’s to say they aren’t good witches?”

  “There’s no such thing as good witches, Mr. Parkin.”

  “What about your mother?”

  Robin bit back any further words. She had a toothpick in her mouth in that Sly Stallone takin’ care of business way, and as she let Leon’s admonishment slide, the toothpick rolled around in her teeth.

  “They paid my son’s medical bills. Paid em off, every red cent. Even if they were bad people—and I haven’t seen a bit of evidence to support that claim—I don’t know if I can condone this.” Leon gestured to Wayne, beckoning him down off the steps.

  With a heavy heart, the boy stood next to his father, pushing his glasses
up his nose. He tried to apologize to Robin with his eyes. I’m sorry, lady. I got to do what my dad says.

  Leon rubbed his scruffy chin and folded his arms. “I’m sorry…but if you do this, you’re gonna have to do it without me or Wayne.”

  She was crestfallen, but only briefly. Her face hardened and she stared at the steps between her knees. “I understand.” Getting up, Robin sidled past them and went downstairs.

  Wayne traded a glance with his father, put his ring-necklace back on, and followed her. They found her in the living room with Heinrich and Kenway. “Change of plans,” she told them, standing in the doorway. “I’m going to dinner with Parkin and his son.”

  Heinrich put down the book he was reading. “What? Why?”

  “Because I want to talk to Marilyn Cutty face to face. I used to consider her a grandmother, and I want to see the evil in her eyes before I go through with what I came here to do. And…” She took the toothpick out of her mouth and glanced at Leon. “Mr. Parkin has reservations about what we’re planning on doing. He’s not going to let me use Wayne’s ring to traverse into the Lazenbury.”

  The old witch-hunter got up off the couch and came in close, talking in a low, venomous tone everybody could hear. “What Parkin thinks don’t matter. They been killing children for years. You know. Andras showed you. That run-down park out there wunt no fun-joy-happy-happy place—it was a goddamn slaughterhouse. Those women are singlehandedly responsible for nearly every missing-persons poster and cold-case in the Blackfield Police Department. And when your mother tried to stop them, they killed her and put her soul into a fucking tree.”

  “You seem awfully ready to put boots on the ground when this morning you were ready to call the game on account of rain.”

  “I didn’t think you were ready. In light of what you just said, I don’t think you’ll ever be.”

  “Parkin deserves to see proof before I enlist his son into being basically my secret weapon. I want to show him the dryad. They’ve been through a lot, and I owe them that much. They deserve to see the truth. And I deserve—”

  “You’re lettin them use him against you. You think Weaver bein out there in them woods was an accident? I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s the one that planted that snake out there for the boy to find in the first place.” He threw a hand toward the window, toward the mission-house. “You know what this tells me? This tells me that they’re afraid of you.”

  “Why on Earth would they be afraid of me?” Then something occurred to her, something so staggering that she actually recoiled. All her fervor faded. “You know, don’t you?”

  “Know what?”

  Heinrich’s question was still as angry as his speech, but he stepped away and went to the window to stare out at the early evening. Wayne thought he looked like he was running away from the interrogation.

  “What happened to my mother after she summoned Andras,” Robin said in a leading tone.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I told you what happened in the vision the demon gave me. She opened the house to possession and invoked Andras into it, but he caught her before she could escape. You know what happened down there, don’t you?”

  Heinrich said nothing, his hands clasped behind his back, turned away from them.

  “What did the demon do to my mother?”

  “I think you know already.” The old man sighed, his shoulders rolling. Leather creaked as he did so, even though his jacket was wool. Robin’s accusatory finger sank to her side and she stared at his back. Her face gradually twisted into a mixture of disgust, horror, and…relief? She went to the couch and sat down, staring at the TV as if it were on.

  “I am completely lost,” said Kenway.

  Leon put his hands in his pockets. “You ain’t the only one.”

  Clearing his throat, Heinrich spoke to the window. “‘He is a great Marquis of Hell, appearing in the form of an angel with a head like a wood-owl. His office is to sow discord, and if the exorcist have not a care, he will slay both him and his fellows.’” He glanced over his shoulder.

  “I know that much from what Robin told us.” Kenway got up out of the recliner and stood next to Heinrich, staring at the side of the hunter’s face, his arms folded, his eyes challenging.

  Heinrich didn’t return the glare. “What the Ars Goetia doesn’t include is that in addition to being a cacodemon, Andras is known to some demonologists to also be an incubus. He doesn’t always slay the exorcists tasked to remove him, or the individuals complicit in his invocation.”

  “What’s an incubus?”

  Robin was staring at her hands as if she were on a bad acid trip. “The demon took advantage of my mother.” Realizing she had the GoPro attached to her chest, she turned it off. She drew her legs up under her, boots and all.

  “I know at least this much, being a Literature teacher,” said Leon.

  Kenway rounded on him. “You know what?”

  “A succubus is a female demon that ambushes sleeping men and has sex with them.” Leon’s face darkened and his chest heaved as if thinking about it winded him. “An incubus is a male demon that preys on women the same way.”

  Sympathy and dismay gave Kenway the expression of a man visiting someone in the cancer ward. “You mean that owl-headed monster raped Annie Martine?”

  Heinrich finally met Kenway’s eyes. “Yes.”

  “It must have happened when I was a baby,” said Robin. “She’s had that scarred-up tongue as long as I can remember.” She turned to look at them. Tears stood in her eyes. “Now I know why my mama turned her back on—on magic, and went to religion the way she did.”

  “Yeah,” said Heinrich. “When you were a baby.”

  She scowled at him, and a tear raced down one cheek. “Are you the one that gave her the Japanese invocation?”

  His head bowed and he spoke to the windowsill. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I thought it would be the only way to finally destroy Cutty.”

  Taking out one of his coconut cigars, Heinrich studied it in the last light of the day. “She’s the one that came to me, you know. I mean, when I found Cutty’s coven here in Blackfield, your mother was the one I approached because she was the youngest, and I knew she would be the easiest to influence. —To turn against them.

  “But back then, I didn’t know about Edgar Weaver and his carnival. She came to me to tell me about them, to ask me for help making Edgar pay for killing those kids. She didn’t want anything to do with the coven. That’s when I knew I had the sacrifice I needed to complete the ritual.” He sighed. “I had no idea the house itself would be possessed, and that she would get trapped in it with Andras. I only found out after the fact that he’s an incubus.”

  Robin sneered. “And you call me impetuous. You almost got my mother killed.”

  Heinrich gave her a look that might have said, still didn’t stop that from happening, did it? and stashed the cigar in his jacket pocket again.

  After a contemplative pause, he looked at his watch.

  “It’s almost six. If you’re goin to dinner, you’d best get going. You can chew me up when you get back.”

  28

  ASHE ARMSTRONG OPENED HIS eyes and rolled over onto his hands and knees, upchucking that morning’s Grand Slam breakfast on the asphalt. The puke burned like magma in his stretched and abraded throat.

  Blood dribbled on the puddle of vomit. He touched his hairline. Electric pain shot across his scalp and he snatched it away.

  Dragging himself to his feet, he staggered across a highway that swung like a hammock and he examined his head in the wing mirror. His hair was sopping wet and his whole face was coated in streams of crimson—he looked like Sissy Spacek in Carrie.

  As far as he could tell, the rifle bullet had skipped off the crown of his skull, cutting his scalp open and knocking him unconscious.

  Dad always said I was hard-headed.

  His eyeballs throbbed in dull agony.
He climbed into his Frontier and tried to will the nausea away. Several minutes passed before he realized the windshield was shot out.

  The truck full of kennels was now a roaring bonfire, black smoke rising in a column to the white sky. Cats yowled helplessly from their cages out in the grass, safe but abandoned. Those poor babies. When I get back to town, I have to get Dave and Susan to come down here and pick them up.

  The cat.

  He vaguely recalled a cat. What the hell happened with the cat? He remembered reaching into the cargo compartment of the overturned truck, and then nothing until a few minutes later, on his hands and knees in the mud, choking. He’d vomited then too, but it wasn’t food, it was hair. A huge wad of hair that scratched his gullet coming out.

  Ashe swallowed. Felt like strep throat, needles in his esophagus.

  The hair had claws. He remembered holding a cat in his arms. Had he saved the cat from the fire? He couldn’t be sure. It had been wet, he knew that much. Maybe it’d fallen in the river? He casually leaned over and vomited again, this time nothing coming up but sour bile. Tears ran down his face from the pain, cutting streaks in the blood. Did he have a concussion? He didn’t think so, but it was possible.

  God, he felt drunk. He grabbed a wad of Arby’s napkins out of the door pocket and mopped at the blood on his face with trembling hands, scraping it out of his eyelids and the creases beside his nose, wiping his face in the sunvisor mirror as if he were removing makeup. Before he knew it, he was crying quietly, his shoulders shaking. Lucky, so goddamn lucky, he thought, wadding the napkins up and tossing them into the floorboard. If he made it out of here he was going to have to go skydiving or swimming with dolphins or ride a bull named Fu Manchu or something.

  His cellphone lay on the floor mat. It must have fallen there when he was ramming the truck. Ashe brushed the bloody napkin out of the way and picked it up, fighting a wave of dizziness.