by Hunt, S. A.
Lucas grunted. “Your confidence inspires me.”
“Let’s just get this over with,” grouched Robin. The bourbon was dancing with her Percocet and every reel and sway of the Suburban made her want to throw up. The feeling of her worm-arm-thing curling and flexing gently by her side wasn’t helping.
They crossed the road and headed under the interstate toward Blackfield. Robin peeled back her shirt to uncover the red-black tendril and saw Wayne surreptitiously cower away from it. The sight of him leaning against the window dug deep and left embarrassment.
“Oh my God,” said Sara. “What is that?”
“According to Gendreau, it’s my new arm.”
Robin picked it up the same way he had, the coil of sausage-flesh draped over her palm like fine jewelry. Not only had it grown another several inches while they were getting ready to leave, but now it was as thick as a finger. “Evidently I absorbed Theresa’s gift for transfiguration when I closed her heart-road, and it’s causing…something to grow in its place.” She hoped it wouldn’t turn out to be a tendril forever. A six-foot squid tentacle would definitely strain things between her and Kenway for sure.
“There’s two more of em,” said Wayne.
Sara leaned forward to see better. “Jeez, they’re braiding together.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Robin thought the intwining tendrils resembled a sort of ponytail made out of Slim Jims. Nausea flopped her stomach back and forth and salty saliva leaked into her mouth.
“Stop the car,” she almost shouted, unbuckling her seatbelt.
Gendreau pulled to the side of the highway and Robin wrenched the side door open, staggering out into the weeds and chalky gravel. She went to her knees on the shoulder of the highway, audienced by a wall of pines and a sun-faded Mike’s Hard Lemonade can. The tentacle under her shirt coiled and flexed. Robin gargled hot vomit into the dry brown grass and then convulsed again, heaving the rest of her stomach’s contents with a splatter.
Exhaustion settled over her and she rested, trying to catch her breath, sucking and blowing wind through a rawhide throat.
Someone got out and before she knew it—or could say otherwise—Kenway was crouching beside her. “You don’t have enough hair to hold out of the way when you puke,” he said, the dull glint of his prosthetic leg peeking out from under his jeans, “but I can at least be there to help you get back up.”
Robin spat and straightened, sitting on her haunches like a samurai at a shrine. Tears tumbled down her face (when had she started to cry?) and she spat again and started to wipe her slimy mouth on the collar of her T-shirt—a thing that people do when they’re not used to being in the polite company of living breathing humanity—but Kenway was there with a wadded-up napkin.
She wiped her face down with all the ceremony of scrubbing bugs off a car fender.
“Other than Heinrich—and I’m not even sure about him—the last person I can remember ever giving half a shit about me died years ago,” she told him, her voice distant and reflective. “Mom was all I ever had. Even in high school.” The wind plucked and pushed at the gaudy paper in her hand. “I don’t know what to do with you, dude. You’re like…a riddle, you know? I feel like you’re a mystery I need to solve. What do you even see in me?”
“All those YouTube subscribers,” said Kenway. “What, four, five million people? I’ve never even met five million people. There aren’t even that many people living in this town. And you walk around thinking you’re alone in this life.” He shook his head. “You’re a princess that thinks she’s a frog.”
A breathy, sarcastic laugh huffed out of her. “I am such a frog. My life is so jacked up, Kenway.” She looked up at him. “Are you sure you want to be a part of it?”
“Am I a part of it?”
“I’d like you to be. Is that okay?”
His beard separated like stage curtains, uncovering a grin as warm as sunshine. “Yeah. I think I’d like that very much.”
Eduardo came trotting up and sat on the gravel beside her, resting a paw on her thigh. The boggle-eyed dog commiserated with a whine, though coming out of a Boston terrier, it was more of a shrill, hiccupy scrape.
A laugh forced itself through Robin’s lips and she combed a hand through her unruly brown mohawk. The I.D. bracelet the hospital had put around her wrist scuffed across her forehead. She’d forgotten about it. Biting the paper, Robin pulled until it broke, and she held it into the wind, watching it twitch and dance. Her fingers let it fall away and the hoop curled into the afternoon, rolling along the roadside like a tumbleweed.
“I forgot to thank you for coming to my rescue back there in the vineyard.” She squinted into the wind, regarding Kenway’s face. “I didn’t need it—”
“Obviously.”
“—Obviously, but nobody else has ever helped me before.”
He looked at the Suburban, and so did she. The misfit Dog Star magicians (how much that sounded like some dirty-southern-rock band from the Seventies, don’t tell me no lies and keep your hands to yourself) looked back from the front window and the open door, empathy written on their faces.
“You’ve got lots of help now.” Kenway reached out with his big hands and framed her jaw, wiping the tears off her cheeks with hard leather thumbs. “Whether you need it or not.”
Relief tightened her throat and chest, the solace of a long-mourned castaway being picked up by a passing ship.
She put her hand on Kenway’s shoulder and got back to her feet. His hands stayed right where he’d put them, clamped to his own thighs, and she was grateful that he seemed to know the difference between helping her up and being the rock she could lift herself up with.
❂
The road sign moved in the breeze, nodding and jiggering like the palsy of an old woman.
Underwood Road. It stood at the edge of a clearcut shoulder stubbly with juts of broken hickory, a weathervane pointing in uncivilized directions. The Suburban was still parked by the side of the road where she’d gotten out to blow chunks. Robin leaned against the car with the door open, her forehead on her arm and her arm on the frame, trying to let the fresh air settle her stomach.
“You okay?” asked Wayne. He had taken off his glasses and was buffing the lenses with his shirt.
“Yeah, it was…the Percocet, the bourbon, being cooped up in the car, this thing—” She shrugged the shoulder with the bloodworm hanging out of it. “Got to be a little much for me. Needed some fresh air.”
Kenway was beside her. He followed the line of her eyes to the road sign and put his hand on her back. The tendril curled as he did so and she felt him tense up, but he didn’t snatch his hand away. God, but she loved him for that. She really did.
“Are you sure you want to do this today?” he asked.
For sure, she was having second thoughts; her mother had been locked inside that tree for half a decade now, and a few days wouldn’t make much of a difference.
But—
“—They’ve got Leon,” she said. “I can’t leave him there.”
Gratitude loosened Wayne’s features. She could tell he wanted to say something like, My dad’s tough, he would understand if you wanted to psyche yourself up before you jump into Hell, but the relief, and the eagerness to rescue his father, kept him from opening his mouth.
She hoisted herself into the seat and pulled the belt across her lap. “Let’s go. Make hay while the sun shines. Strike while the iron’s hot.”
Kenway lingered in the door, assessing her.
Finally he slithered into the back of the Suburban next to the dog and she pulled the door shut, clunk. Gendreau put on his blinker, waited for a Camaro to go shushing past, and pulled back out onto the highway.
The Suburban crossed both lanes and eased into a crotch of asphalt slicing through the grass median, nose pointed across the northbound lanes. He paused in what could have been propriety—there were no other cars coming; the highway was clear in both directions—and pulled into Underwood Road.
The magician drove like a car commercial. His pale, slender fingers handled the steering wheel in a delicate but businesslike way, a conductor-motorist that poured the Suburban down Underwood’s sinuous length. The constant trees enclosed them on both sides with wet, skeletal trunks still stained a raw strawberry-blonde by the weekend’s rains.
NO TRESPASSING. The sign was still nailed to a tree, speckled with bullet-holes.
It occurred to Robin that the South had a lot of these signs distributed throughout the wilderness, as if the great landgrabs of the colonial days had never truly ended, the countryside still scissored into a patchwork of a thousand discrete estates protected with musket and handaxe. She had seen a lot of these signs in the past few years, less of them up north until you got into Canada, and almost none in New England except for Maine and swaths of upstate New York. The commune in Oregon had them, but only because the hunters that used to own the property had put them up; the witches didn’t need them, didn’t want them
(welcome, sir, welcome, have a seat, have a beer, welcome to hotel california)
because they liked it when trespassers showed up uninvited. The things she’d seen in her travails criscrossing the country, following Heinrich’s leads, following Heinrich’s orders…the human finger-bones hanging from porch eaves in gruesome wind-chimes, the skulls full of burnt blood, the decaying figures sitting in iron cages,
(so much like mummies, shriveled ash-brown skin glued to thin rods of bone, hands clawed around their knobby knees, stiff lips stretched across yellowed piano-key teeth)
the cries of children locked in cellars, their minds wiped bare by the Gift of illusion, yes, it worked both ways you know, the crones can make you see things and they can make you not see things as well.
But those horrible sights are still buried down there deep beneath the surface, memory-sharks that only breach and flash their cuttlebone teeth in the dead of night. Those children, all grown up, will sit straight up in the bed next to their wife or husband as the last foaming tide of a nightmare ebbs into the darkness of sleep. Nightmares of things they saw as children but have forgotten as adults, their recognition stolen by smiling hags with chips of ice in their eyes, hobgoblins who would have stolen their hearts for an ageless star-beast if not for hungry Robin and the gleaming silver dagger in her hand.
The mouldering orange recliner flickered into view through the picket-fence trees.
Like she’d done a hundred times growing up, Robin tried to imagine what that ancient tweed chair smelled like. She wondered what, if anything, lived in it. Maybe it was full of spiders, an arachnid apartment building—or maybe it was full of paper, rinds of pulp machined by the clockwork jaws of a hundred chewing wasps.
She was still lost in thought when Gendreau stopped at a stop sign. Another highway interceded, running perpendicular to Underwood Road, and as soon as Robin’s eyes drifted north, she knew that it ran all the way out to Miguel’s Pizzeria in the mountains. They had met the road on the other end of her childhood home, the ‘shortcut’ Kenway had driven when he had first taken her back to her skeezy candy van to lie in the dark and cold, miserably horny and staring at the ceiling. (Plumbing indeed.)
Robin twisted in her seat and looked through the rear window. Kenway did as well, and then Sara. Eduardo panted obliviously, eyes cocked to either side.
“Did we pass it?” she asked.
Kenway faced front again. “I think? I guess we did?”
“I don’t even remember going through the neighborhood and seeing the trailer park on the left.” Maybe she wasn’t paying attention. She was pretty deep in her own head there for a few minutes.
Gendreau said over his shoulder, “Shall I turn around and go back? Or are we on the wrong road?”
“It’s the right road,” said Lucas, still wearing his slick wasp-eye shades. “Underwood.” He reached under the front seat and brought out a folder, opening it and displaying the contents to the driver. “That’s what the file says.”
“It’s right.” Robin scanned the road behind them. “It’s the right road, but something’s wrong.”
The Suburban dipped into the southbound lane, doing a U-turn back onto Underwood, and Gendreau piloted them into the woods again. This time Robin clutched the passenger headrest in front of her, her head on a swivel as she watched the road for landmarks.
Power poles kept a steady cadence on the left side of the car, and the familiarity of almost twenty years tinged every leaf and sign they passed. Robin stared at the mile markers cruising past the window, but they were useless, numberless reflective discs. The familiar swoop and sway of the road’s subtle waveform settled over them once more, but this time Gendreau slowed until they were at a funereal pace, the asphalt grumbling under their tires, trees parallaxing past at walking speed.
“Wait a minute,” said Robin.
She stared through the right-hand windows of the Suburban, where a power pole loomed by the road’s shoulder.
Kenway shifted. “What is it?”
“The power lines are on the right side now.” Robin looked through the left window, then over Kenway’s shoulder through the rear window. “They cross the road at the Lazenbury. I know because the line comes down from the pole in front of my old house, then the lines cross the street to the transformer in front of the Lazenbury, where lines go up to the hacienda and over to the trailer park, and from there the lines stay on that side until it gets to the highway.”
Making a three-point turn, Gendreau maneuvered the Suburban east again, putting the lines on their left.
A few minutes later, Lucas said, “Now the lines are on the other side.”
“Karen Weaver is hiding the house.” Sara Amundson peered up at an angle through her gray window. The tint layered a sullen darkness over the world outside. “I know it. She has cropped that whole quarter-mile out of the road. Like cutting the middle out of a string and tying the ends back together.”
Gendreau put the Suburban in reverse and they whined backward—slow at first, and then faster, until they were racing west ass-first, the engine whining with an inhaling burr like an electric track-car.
“Stop,” said Sara. “Let me out.”
They drew up short, catty-cornered in the eastbound lane. Robin threw open the door and got out, followed by Kenway and then Sara. The illusionist clawed the Murdercorn wig off her head and tossed it into the back seat, letting the wind comb fingers through her brilliant red hair.
“Look. You can see it there.” Sara pointed east, at the south side of the road.
A splintery power-pole towered over them sixty feet away, topped with gray beehive electricity components. Rubber-coated wires emerged from the couplings, protruding into the air some twenty or thirty feet, where they just…faded away, as if God had stooped down with a giant Pink Pig drafting eraser and rubbed it out of existence.
“What the hell?” asked Kenway, shading his eyes against the drab white sky. “What is this, the Bermuda Triangle?”
Robin turned. The power-line coalesced into being on the north side of the road and hooked into the couplings at the top of another power-pole. “They pick back up over there.”
Taken as a whole, the arrangement over their heads seemed to refract like a pencil inserted into a glass of water, the black cables diverting diagonally and invisibly across the sky. There was no visible difference in the unending army of trees all around them, but when you paid attention to the power-cables you could see where Weaver had excised the Lazenbury and everything around it.
To the west, she could see the faint speck of orange where the old tweed chair stood abandoned. To the east, a barbed wire fence marked the beginning of the old horse-farm on the far end of Underwood.
Gendreau got out and went to Sara. His cane rapped on the road twice as he walked, and then he directed the tip at the strange refraction. “Can you nullify it?”
She shook her head and her face darkened with irritation. “I can’t even find the edges. Except fo
r that weird lensing with the power-lines, it’s almost seamless. It’s like trying to open a fire exit from the outside, except there’s not even a door. It’s a blank wall that I know has a door on the other side of it.”
A desolate satisfaction came over Robin. “Now d’you see how powerful they are?” she asked, trying not to sound smug.
“I was always aware.” Indignity and sheepishness swirled in Gendreau’s aristocratic face. “I’ve seen this sort of thing before, Miss Martine…but not this well-done. The others, they’ve—you could get your fingers under the illusion, to so speak, and pry it up like a rock so you can find the worms underneath. But this… I can’t find where in the fabric of space and time that the illusion begins and ends. It’s completely flush with reality.”
Robin didn’t fail to notice the irritated way the magician referred to her by her surname.
A bird came sailing across the trees, a big black raven. As it drew near the place where the cable refracted out of view, she almost expected it to disappear, slipping into oblivion as soon as it crossed that invisible boundary and possibly re-appearing a few minutes later, but it passed by without so much as a flicker.
Robin watched it glide away and the visual image of the bird vanishing pushed an idea into her head.
She rounded on Gendreau. “Can you un-conjure something?”
He grimaced in baffled contempt, but then lightened. “I’ve never heard of it before, but yes, I suppose you could. I mean, you can conjure things—”
“—So why can’t you un-conjure them?”
“That would explain why the illusion is so finely grained.” Gendreau stared at the smearing end of the powerline, rubbing the corners of his mouth. “Yes…yes, perhaps what she’s done is, instead of…yes….” The bull-pizzle cane came to rest on the pavement and he tucked a hand into the breast of his suit blazer. “…It’s not an illusion at all, is it? Weaver has un-conjured the area around the house. She’s pinched a pouch out of the fabric of reality and sewn the gap shut, isolated it, like a pocket hidden in the lining of a jacket.”