Malus Domestica

by Hunt, S. A.

  A thin black tendril four or five inches long was tonguing its way out of the surgery scar, reaching out like a time-lapse video of a tree-sprout germinating from an acorn.

  “Unnnh!” grunted Kenway. “What the hell.”

  The tendril writhed and explored like an earthworm seeking moisture, groping around Robin’s armpit.

  Wayne stared. “Woah.”

  On closer inspection, it was the red-black of raw liver, or a dry kidney bean. The worm-thing didn’t stink—didn’t even have a smell outside the fact that her armpit was right there—but the sight of it was enough to turn her stomach. Robin covered her eyes and faced away like a little girl getting a vaccine, but she could still feel it licking insidiously at her ribs and the swell of her left breast, the faint tickles of a ghost-finger.

  She stared in terror at the insides of her eyelids, shaking. “What in the world is that? Why is it inside me?”

  “Hell, I don’t know!” Kossmann said, his voice breaking.

  Panic set in and then she couldn’t seem to get enough air, there wasn’t enough oxygen in the room no matter how hard she gasped for it. “For the love of God, get it out of me. Get it out get it out get it out.”

  Digging in his pocket, Dr. Kossmann took out a pair of purple nitrile gloves, wriggling his hands into them, snap, snap. He licked his lips in thought and his head darted this way and that, searching the room. “Dammit,” he said, patting himself down. “I don’t have anything to grab it with.”

  “Just use your fingers!” cried Kenway.

  “Yes, well, too right,” said the doctor, and he put his left hand on Robin’s ribs, gingerly taking hold of the tendril with his right in a sort of pen-grip, as if he were going to sign his name on the surgery scar. It snaked back and forth, curling around his finger, and he tucked his face into the pit of his own shoulder to gather himself.

  “So help me God,” the doctor said with a muffled cough, and he pulled the tendril.

  A few months after she’d been released from Blackfield Psychiatric Hospital and she’d discovered her mother’s savings account through the debit card that she’d found slipped into one of Annie’s grimoires, Robin had purchased the CONLIN PLUMBING candy-van for nine hundred dollars.

  After the van she’d had a little more than three grand left over, so to celebrate her newfound freedom (against Heinrich’s better judgement, it must be said), she went to purchase the barbell piercing that was currently resting in a hole punched through her tongue. Pulling on that fresh tongue piercing was a bit like what Robin was experiencing right now as Dr. Kossmann tugged on the worm-thing sticking out of the amputation scar.

  “Owwww!” she shouted into the quiet hospital room as tears flooded her eyes. “Rrrrhhaaaah!” Even under the Percocet, it hurt like it was stapled to her very heart.

  The doctor let go and stepped back with his hands up in surrender. Robin uncovered her eyes. Kossmann was shaking like he’d been shot at. “Wait right here,” he said, ripping off his gloves as he strode at the door (at, not to, he pretty much walked at the door in his haste to get out). “I’ll be back in two shakes.” He snatched the door open and stepped outside, pulling it shut.

  On the other side, they heard him say, “Bugger me through a hula-hoop,” as he left.

  She slid out of the bed and crammed her feet into her combat boots, digging through the overnight bag Kenway had packed from the clothes in her van. “Come on,” she said, forcing herself into a T-shirt and zipping the bag shut, picking it up. “We need to get out of here.”

  “What? Why?” asked Kenway.

  “Because I don’t know what this thing in my shoulder is, but I feel like they’re not going to be able to get it out without really hurting me.” Robin went to the door and pulled it open a crack, pressing one eye to the gap even though she didn’t know who she expected, if anyone at all. Other than a few nurses bustling up and down the hall and a man sitting in a wheelchair at the end, there was no one on the wing.

  She looked back at the man that had followed her this far and told him with her eyes that she needed him to go a little farther. “Also…I think it’s got something to do with Andras, and I really don’t want hhh— …I don’t want doctors messing around with it.”

  Good God. Skin crawled down her spine. She’d almost said “human doctors”.

  Kenway’s face tumbled through concern and confusion, settling on grim acceptance. He put all of Wayne’s stuff back in his bookbag and grabbed the baggie of pain meds off the nightstand.

  “Okay,” he said, shoving the pills into his pocket, “let’s go, lady.”

  The nonchalant scurry down the hall and past the nurses’ station was a lot less intense than Robin anticipated, though she couldn’t have told you who she thought would show up to stop them. Riding four floors down in the elevator was an exercise in restraint, because the tendril was nosing around inside the sleeve of her T-shirt like a cat lost in a bedsheet. Looking at it made her want to throw up. Wayne happened to see it out of the corner of his eye and he sidled away against the wall, folding his arms.

  “Did that really hurt as much as it sounded?” asked Kenway. “Is it attached to something?”

  “I think so. It felt like it.”

  The elevator door clunked open and the three of them hustled through the lobby at a walking pace. “Ma’am?” said a woman sitting behind the help desk. She called again, a little more insistently this time. “Ma’am?” Robin pushed the front door open, feeling totally nonconformist and about as punk as you can get in the capitalist 21st century. She didn’t check out or anything.

  To her surprise, the sun made her sneeze, and with the Percocet in her system it jarred her like a blow to the head and she had to steady herself against one of the protective pylons in front of the crosswalk. As soon as she was sober, she took off running into the crowded parking lot, her combat boots clopping across the tarmac. It didn’t help that the missing arm threw off her balance; she usually ran as much with her fists as with her feet, in a sort of driving, heavy-footed lope, so it felt as if she were running with one hand in her pants pocket.

  She half-expected to see her candy-van, but Kenway’s land yacht of a pickup was parked out there instead. The top of scrawny Wayne’s head appeared from the labyrinth of cars, and then Kenway came jogging awkwardly along on his fake leg like a bicycle with square wheels. He unlocked the doors and the three of them piled in.

  “Are we going to save my dad now?” asked Wayne.

  Robin’s heart plunged a bit at the excited hope in his voice. “Not yet, kiddo. I gotta see a man about something first.”

  He bit back a frown. “Where we going?”

  “To the cabins up by Lake Craddock,” Robin said, pulling on her seatbelt. The gruesome worm-thing sticking out of her stitches was seven or eight inches now, long enough to curl lasciviously around the vinyl strap. She craned her neck, trying to get her face as far away from it as possible. “I know somebody that can help us save your dad…and who might know what the hell this thing is.”

  37

  THE OLD BLUE CHEVY coursed down the highway into the hills north of Blackfield, passing through the township of Slade, or at least the primordial wilderness people referred to by that name. Other than the turnoff for Underwood Road (which gave her a shiver as it whipped past the truck) and a few other roads, there was little else out this way for almost ten miles besides a large brick garage with three rollups and aluminum letters across the eaves: SLADE VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT.

  On the way out of town, she’d noticed attentive men and women standing stockstill in parking lots, like scarecrows over fields of steel and paint, turning to watch them pass with glittering feline eyes of jade and venomous honey. Meerkat strangers frozen in storefront windows and gas stations with pump nozzles and shopping bags in their hands.

  Cutty was watching them through Blackfield’s eyes. Robin didn’t say anything; she didn’t want to upset Wayne any more than he already was.

  Soon
they came around a wide curve and down a hill into a little valley with a neatly-mowed rest stop and a visitors’ center, presided over by a stately four-lane freeway running west to east. Traffic shushed overhead at breakneck speeds as Kenway slipped underneath the overpass.

  On the other side was a tiny hamlet consisting of a dark-eyed Texaco gas station that had seen better decades, a log cabin hiding in the treeline, and a Kangaroo convenience store, lit up like an airport. Tucked back a few hundred yards behind that was a clean, oddly mediterranean Subway sandwich shop that seemed embarrassed by its own cozy grandeur in the middle of all this hillbilly austerity. On a better day, Robin would have wanted to swing by and grab a sandwich, but they’d left her appetite back at the hospital.

  A paved two-lane climbed a slope choked with pine trees, skirting a log cabin with LAKE CRADDOCK tool-burned into a wooden sign over the road. Kenway crossed the access road, rumbling up the hill.

  A sign next to the cabin announced it as the rental office-slash-tackle shop. They didn’t bother stopping, heading deeper into the pines.

  The road eventually hooked to the right and followed a ledge along the south side of the mountain, rising higher and higher until Robin began to see the distant buildings of Blackfield as specks of gray and light twinkling in a bear-fur landscape of dead trees. Gravel driveways tunneled away from the burro-trail now and again, leading to quaint little hunter-lodges. The road bent back on itself at the edge of a several-hundred-foot drop and continued to climb until the trees thinned out and the road became a parking lot. At the other side of six rows of empty slots was a sprawling Brady Bunch split-level with splintery gray walls.

  A sign out front called it TOP O’ THE MOUNTAIN CAFÉ & RESTAURANT. Kenway parked at the sidewalk and they marched up the hill toward the restaurant, climbing three flights of cross-tie steps in a broad zig-zag.

  At the top he paused and leaned against the aluminum handrail, sucking in a great big breath of air that had rolled in off the lake and brushed up the mountain. To the north, the mountain crumbled away into a treeless granite headland, revealing a sparkling seagull-gray lake and a distant horizon of naked trees. In this dim white end-of-the-world sun, she saw a much older man hiding behind that long blond surfer-hair and copper beard. His neck had an almost reptilian texture, leathered by a desert sun in a savage world thousands of miles away from here, and his forehead was creased with lines.

  His eyes were closed, and in any other circumstance, Robin supposed his grim face would have been serene. The wind teased his cottony scruff. “When this is over,” she told him quietly, “we’ll get a boat and go out there for a while.”

  “That sounds nice.”

  Wayne pulled the front door open and let them in.

  The Top O’ The Mountain Café and Restaurant was quiet for lunchtime. Deathly quiet, in fact, and there wasn’t an employee in sight. This made sense, it being a Tuesday in the off-season. The three of them slipped through a shadowy foyer, passing racks of tourism pamphlets and a cash register, down a short corridor past restroom and kitchen doors, and into a cavernous great-hall. To the right was an open dining area with a dozen white-draped tables, chairs neatly turned on top of them.

  The walls were floor-to-ceiling plate windows, affording a beautiful view of a dismal October lake to the north and miles of woodland to the south, the white sky hemmed by the jagged jawline of Blackfield.

  Tucked into a dark recess to their left was a rustic bar. Anders Gendreau leaned behind it like an old-timey soda jerk dressed way above his station, peering at them from underneath a rack of glass goblets. “It’s about time you got here, cambion,” he said, tossing a bar towel over his shoulder. Against the dark blue suit, it almost resembled a sort of holy vestment. “I can only drink so much gin before I’m useless.”

  He poured Robin and Kenway each a finger of bourbon, then poured Wayne something that looked like gin or vodka out of a bottle with an orange on the label.

  She frowned. Cambion. Crooked. “Please don’t call me that.”

  The magician nodded deferentially.

  Wayne sniffed the drink, sipped it, and coughed. “Man. I don’t know how my dad goes crazy for this stuff. Tastes like straight gasoline.”

  Gendreau smirked. “Don’t worry, little man. One day you’ll develop a taste for the finer things.” He looked over his shoulder at the choir of multicolored bottles. Against the mirrored back wall, the collection seemed infinite, and on the other side their doppelgängers stared back with haunted eyes. “You won’t find any of those finer things here at the Hayseed Café,” he chuckled, “but you mark my words. Every good man knows the virtue of a smooth libation.”

  “I’ll take your word for it, mister.”

  “So what are we doing here?” asked Kenway, wincing appreciatively at the taste of the liquor.

  “This is Anders Gendreau,” said Robin. “He’s from an organization called the Order of the Dog Star. Anders, these are my friends Kenway Griffin and Wayne Parkin.” She indicated them with the bourbon glass as she introduced them. “Wayne is the owner of the ring that opened a way into where the demon’s trapped.”

  “Aaaaaaaaaah.” Gendreau held out a hand. Wayne shook it. “Pleased to make your acquaintance. I bet it would enchant you to know that we are magicians.”

  “Magicians. Of course there are magicians.” Sitting on a stool, Kenway poured himself another finger of bourbon and threw it back. “Witches, demons, giant pig-monsters, and rings that open doors to Hell—why didn’t I think there would be magicians?”

  “I have an issue, Anders,” said Robin.

  By now the Percocet was wearing off again and the pain had returned in earnest…but there were three distinct sources of agony now: the papercut screaming of the stitched-and-stapled scar itself, a deep, knotty kinking that she supposed must have been the muscles or ligaments that were once attached to her tricep, and then there was an ache in her rib reminiscent of the side-stitches you get when you’re running.

  She grabbed the left hem of her shirt and hiked it over her shoulder. This revealed her left breast, but at this point she didn’t care. It also uncovered the writhing foot-long earthworm-thing hanging out of the nadir of the U-shaped surgery scar.

  Gendreau flinched. “What the dickens!”

  “You don’t know what it is?”

  “Dear shit! No, I do not,” said the magician, leaning over the bar to get a closer look, a disgusted grimace spreading across his pale vulpine face.

  The bloodworm, as Robin had come to think of it, had grown longer on the way over here (or perhaps more of it had emerged, and perhaps there was a whole coil of the thing inside the cage of her chest, and that horrible thought made Robin want to pitch herself through the closest window) but it seemed to have calmed, and now dangled from the stitches, the end twitching every so often in the come-hither motion of a cat’s tail.

  Coming around the end of the bar, Gendreau came out and walked past, his bull-dick cane thumping insistently on the carpet. “C’mere into the light and let me take a look at it.”

  She followed him over to the massive south window and her entourage joined them. The wan sunlight picked out a blue vein wandering across the cream-white dome of her left breast, and her skin prickled at the visual of that repulsive subtle tendril sliding through the warrens of her arteries. This thought made the areola of the nipple on that side pucker up, but something about the magician’s effete mannerisms told her that she might as well be a goose.

  “I feel as though I should know,” said Gendreau, hitching up his cane in that jaunty way again. “It seems supernatural in nature.”

  “You think?”

  His glacial eyes flashed up at her in faint indignation and narrowed on the tendril again. This close to his face, she noticed how intense they were: gasflames in porcelain. The magician reached for it, hesitated, then drew up his courage and took the worm in his bare hand. It curled warmly, twining around his knuckles. His fingernails were clipped to a micro
scopic uniformity and reflected the windowlight as if carved from soapstone.

  “It hurt me when the doctor pulled on it,” she told him. “I think it’s connected to something.” She swallowed terror and added, “Something inside.”

  A peculiar heat radiated from Gendreau’s hands, as if her hip was too close to a stovetop, and she angled her head to see that it was the pearly head of his cane. He held the simmering orb close to the tendril, and let his eyes slip closed.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Testing it,” he murmured.

  Did he say tasting it? She couldn’t be sure. The heat emanating from his cane flared brightly for a brief moment, and then faded away, leaving a cool emptiness. He rubbed the tendril between his thumb and forefinger, rolling it softly, squeezing it, and then he released it and stood straight.

  The cane-tip rested on the floor by his foot. “It’s not a separate creature,” he said with an authoritative finality. Robin studied his haughty, borderline-impassive face.

  “What do you mean? You mean it’s become part of me now?”

  “No, I mean it never was. It is you.” Gendreau’s thumb worried at the smooth surface of the cane’s iridescent white head. “There’s only one life, one individual source of vitality occupying the space you’re standing in—other than your intestinal flora and mitochondria, of course—and that is you. There’s nothing else. That…spaghetti noodle…is your flesh and blood.”

  “What does that mean?” Kenway stooped with his hands on his knees, his eyes wide and brow severe. “Is—is she growing a squid-leg to replace her missing arm? Can demons even do that? Grow back limbs?”

  Gendreau’s face twisted as if he had a lemon-wedge in his mouth. “If she were going to grow something, I must say, what a horrendous thing to substitute a perfectly good arm with.”

  Robin scowled. “You’re not helping.”

  His face softened. “Ahh. Well…who knows, really? We do know that you absorbed Theresa LaQuices’ heart-road at the point of her death, yes?”