by Hunt, S. A.
He brought out his hand, holding a steel flip lighter, and he stood there absently flipping it open and shut, staring with unfocused eyes, his mind idling high and out of gear.
Sara folded her arms. “Riddle me this, riddle me that: how do you get into a house with no door?”
Wayne suggested from the Suburban, “You make one.”
Goosebumps of excitement tingled across Robin’s scalp. “Yes! Your ring!” She strode straight to him as he was climbing out of the car and clutched the boy against her chest in a one-armed hug. “Your ring! We can use it to get into the isolation!”
He grinned, tugging the ballchain necklace out of his shirt, revealing Haruko’s ring. Gendreau and Sara came over and the thin magician stooped to level his face with Wayne’s, his hands on his knees. A piquant warmth came over him that reminded Robin of Gene Wilder in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. “Is this it, then? The ring that opens magic doors?”
It sounded about as silly as it possibly could coming out of Gendreau’s girlish cupid’s-bow mouth, but there wasn’t really any way of getting around it. Life is stranger than fiction, as they say. Wayne explained how it worked. “And from inside the dark scary version of my house, all the doors lead to other places in town.”
“Like a hub,” said Robin.
She pushed her fingertips into her jeans pocket and shrugged a shoulder, slowly, deferentially. It was her left shoulder, which sank a shock of blunt pain through her side. “The only problem is, the demon is in that Darkhouse, trapped, waiting for prey to come into his cage. And I’d bet money that magic isn’t all he eats.”
❂
A few minutes later, they were back in town. As soon as the Suburban slipped over a hill and they were greeted by the first thrust of civilization, Gendreau slipped into a Sonic Drive-In to grab something to drink while they planned their next move. Robin ordered a Sprite to help calm her stomach and sat back, sipping the soda, relaxing as the coolness funneled down her chest into her belly, unlocking a tight band of anxiety around her lungs.
Her heart galumphed rhythmically and feverishly inside the birdcage of her chest, throbbing down her arms and into her feet. Gendreau started the Suburban and backed out of the Sonic stall, pulling into traffic. She didn’t know where he was going, and he didn’t seem to either; he seemed to be driving aimlessly through Blackfield, stalling for time.
“You’re bleeding,” said Sara, behind her.
Robin opened her eyes and examined her shirt. “Shit.” A slick of red ran from the top of her shoulder all the way down her flank, and when she peeled back her shirt-tail she saw that it was spreading into the waist of her jeans. The nausea returned, but it was tempered by the chill of the Sprite.
A hand appeared from the front seat, clutching a fistful of Sonic napkins: Lucas, his eyes still unknowable behind those black sunglasses.
She took them and pressed the wad against the surgery scar, dabbing at the blood, gasping at the fresh pain that erupted underneath. The tendril-braid thrashed under her shirt, painting red hoops and commas across her belly.
“I’m sorry about the mess I’m making in your car, Andy,” she told Gendreau, hissing through her teeth.
“It’s a rental,” he said quietly, without turning around.
Silence fell over the car as Robin hiked up her shirt and dabbed at the blood seeping out around the thing in her shoulder.
It was as big around as a garden hose now, pushing the staples out and loosening the stitches, stretching the wound open. The flap of skin that had been inside the U-scar was now a shriveled epaulet lying on top of the tendrils. There were five of them now, closely intertwined into a hard but yielding cable that felt like warm, wet rubber.
Lucas’s hand appeared again, this time holding a spool of Scotch tape.
Robin accepted, confused. “What’s this for?”
He handed her another cache of napkins. “Tape it over the, umm—” He traced a circle on his own shoulder with his fingertips, wax on wax off.
Robin tucked her shirt under her chin to keep it out of the way and sat there for a baffled moment trying to figure out how she was going to do dress her shoulder with one hand.
“Here, I’ll help you,” said Sara, reaching for the tape and napkin.
“…Thank you.”
Sara pressed the napkins to her amputation scar. “Here, hold this down.”
She held the napkins in place, glancing back at the woman. Sara Amundson could have been an Old Hollywood lounge singer, buxom and pretty, her red hair an Aphrodite tumble. She must have read Robin’s eyes because she said dryly, “It’s okay. I’ve seen worse.”
As they spoke, Wayne fed French fries to Eduardo, the dog gnoshing and slurping noisily.
“I didn’t tell you where I came from, did I?” asked Sara.
“No.”
The magician jerked out a second strip of tape and laid it across the top of the napkins, along the first. “The Order rescued me from a coven commune in Ireland.”
“Really? You don’t have an accent.”
“I was a baby. Abducted. The coven was going to sacrifice my heart and make me one of their own, but the Order attacked the commune and rescued me, and several others.” She laid a third strip of tape down, and continued to put three strips on the bottom, and then a fourth. “The boys, they were on borrowed time. Witches already killed one of em that day.”
“What were they—” Robin started to ask, but she already knew.
“Yeah.”
The witches were eating the boys. Robin had seen the tiny bits and pieces in their brick ovens. That, at least, the fairytales had gotten right. Sara gave her a knowing look. And that’s why you’ll never see a witch-hunter eating bone chicken, fried or otherwise. Once you’ve seen what an hour at 350 degrees can do to a baby, you’ll never touch rotisserie again. “The Dog Star brought me to America and I’ve been here ever since.” Sara leaned over and stage-whispered, “So I know what monsters look like.”
Eduardo polished off the fries and heaved a deep, oinking sigh.
“So now that we’ve reconned, regrouped, and refreshed,” said Anders Gendreau, “what’s our current plan of attack, Miss Martine?”
Robin thought about it, sipping at her drink. She asked Wayne, “How did you get into the Darkhouse the first time? Are there specific ways or methods you have to get there from here? You said you got there from your room at the hospital.”
“Yeah,” Wayne said through a mouthful of hamburger.
A speck of lettuce was stuck to the corner of his mouth. He knuckled it in. “But you can’t go back there cause that Australian doctor guy’s gonna want to keep you, ain’t he?”
“Yes, I can’t go back there. Not right now.”
“Well me and that Joe-elle guy in the banana-hammock came out through a painting in Kenny’s apartment.” He chewed the hamburger up and swallowed. “Maybe we can go in the same way.”
Gendreau pulled into a parking lot and did a U-turn, easing back into traffic. An old man selling home-grown produce out of a raggedy-ass Sanford and Sons pickup stood up out of his lawn chair to watch them pass. His hands gnarled into stiff claws, a slow, angry grimace crawling across his face.
His eyes were not his own; they were hollow cat’s-eye marbles, full of the swamp-light of tapetum lucidum.
“Hi-ho Silver, away,” Gendreau sang, heading back north.
“Keep going straight.” Kenway gave the blond magician directions to his art shop in the historical district. He startled Robin with a reassuring hand on her good shoulder. “When you get to the Bojangles, keep to the right and turn on Broad. My place is a couple blocks down that. It’ll say ‘Griffin’s Arts and Signs’ on the window with a big red gryphon.”
Robin’s face flushed and she flashed a smile back at him. He didn’t withdraw his hand right away. His eyes were deeply warm and locked on her face, darting from eye to eye to nose to mouth.
You make me hope I survive this, she thought.
“Ark,” barked Eduardo. He almost sounded as if he were sobbing. “Snort-snort-karoooo! Snort…karoooooo!”
“What are you yelling about?” Sara picked the dog up and put him in her lap, holding his haunches. Eduardo trembled. “He’s not going to hurt her,” she said in his ear. “He likes her, you goofy dog.”
“Snort-barooooo! Ark! Barooooo!”
Kenway sat back. “Okay,” he said, putting up his hands. “I’ll stop touching her! Does that make you happy, ya flea-bitten mongrel?”
The Boston terrier licked his lips and climbed down out of Sara’s lap, dancing up into Kenway’s, and he jammed his wet pug-nose into the crook of the veteran’s elbow, wriggling between his arm and his side as if to hide his face.
“What’s your deal?” Kenway asked. “You act like you’re afraid of something.”
Lucas Tiedeman turned in his seat to glare back at them, finally taking off his sunglasses. Robin was relieved that he did, indeed, still have eyes, and they looked perfectly normal. “Whassamatter, boy? What’s wrong? Did Timmy fall in the well?”
Eduardo howled again into Kenway’s shirt.
39
JOEL ELLIS MARCHED MINDLESSLY down the sidewalk through Blackfield, his hood up and his hands jammed into his pockets. The sky threatened rain, and part of him hoped it would come again. It suited him today.
It had been a pretty good thumper last night, and something about torrential downpours made him feel safe, made him feel buffered against the slings and arrows of the world. Caveman remnants nestled in the nooks of his brain told him that creatures afraid of getting soaked didn’t go out in the rain to hunt, didn’t brave the elements; if he stayed in his cave with his fire and his spear and his fingerpainted self-expressions, he would be okay.
Nobody goes out in the rain. Nobody will get you while it’s raining.
Mama’s house had a tin roof (and did he ever love the sound of rain hitting those warbling red sheets), but that’s not where he was headed this evening; he was headed for the comic shop. It was close enough to the hospital to walk to, and when he got there he could decide where to go from there. All that mattered now was finding shelter, and it had nothing to do with rain. If he decided to go back to Mama’s house (never his house, always Mama’s house), he’d take the 6:15 from the bus stop by Broad Plaza.
Fisher had given him a key to the shop
(just in case you ever wanna get out of that house, you know)
but he hadn’t had it on him and didn’t even know where it was, now, honestly, so he had the one from Ashe Armstrong’s keyring, the keyring that also held the key for the Frontier pickup that was now resting at the bottom of the acid mine drainage in Lipton Quarry, Owen “Opie” Euchiss’s corroded corpse plastered to the front.
As he walked, Joel studied the key in his hand. It had a Captain America cover on it—the back end was coated in rubber like a car key, blue-and-white-striped, with a red circle and a white star inside. It was a commercial key for a commercial lock, and it felt like an alien artifact in his hand, a lightsaber, Excalibur, a tool meant for someone vastly more important than himself.
He mourned to himself as he walked, and as he was crossing the Martin Dupree Bridge over the river that cut through the center of town, traffic hissing and crashing obliviously past behind his back, Joel found himself racked by sobs and unable to see where he was going. He clutched the guardrail of the bridge and stared through a quivering screen of tears at the dark quicksilver cackling some thirty or forty feet below. A python of heartache coiled hotly around his chest, twisting the breath out of him until black spots, cigarette burns on a film reel, bloomed in his eyes.
The wind blustering up the channel boxed him with wet, cold fists. Another part, darker and less vestigial, shoved in meanly next to the caveman neurons in his brain, told him to jump.
Rationality told him that the fall wouldn’t kill him; the water wouldn’t even hurt him at this height. He’d just be going for an impromptu swim.
“Goddammit,” Joel told the river in a pinched growl, wishing he could rip the guardrail out of the cement with his bare hands. There was something missing now, wasn’t there? An out, a back door—under it all, there had been an emergency exit, and now that it wasn’t there anymore he recognized it for what it was. Fisher had always been his golden parachute, he knew, for when living in the house their mother had died in would become less of an inability to move on and more masochism, maybe a self-flagellation. Punishment for not being able to repair the woman that had raised them. He knew in the back of his mind that he would one day tell the difference and step back, and Fish would be there waiting to help him back up.
What happened ain’t your fault, big brother, Fish had said one day.
Serendipitously, they had run into each other at Kroger. Joel was so drunk he was sweating, and Fish was trying to talk him into staying at the shop and sleeping it off. You couldn’t stop it and you couldn’t fix it, and it ain’t even your place to. Sometimes people just lose their minds and all you can do is watch it happen and make it easier on em and move on.
Fuck you. Joel had stumbled away, getting the last word (as he always did, as he always had to). You didn’t even try.
“Why didn’t he shoot me first?”
Dry birdshit ground under his right thumb like flour.
“Why didn’t that son of a bitch shoot the one that didn’t have everything in the world goin for him? Why not me?” Joel lingered there until he’d collected himself, and went back to walking, watching his feet eat up the sidewalk.
What was he going to do with the comic shop? He didn’t have any idea how to run it. All he knew was making pizza and makin himself purty and drankin and color-coordinating his clothes. Maybe he could sell it. No, you asshole, you can’t sell it. That’s all you got left of him. Then what? He could move into the loft apartment, maybe. No, that wouldn’t work. Mama’s house was paid for, and Fish was still leasing. Unless he could turn a profit on a store that hadn’t seen black ink since the first six months it’d been open, he’d be out on his ass.
He couldn’t even count on his savings—he had, maybe, eight hundred in the bank and another three hundred stashed at Mama’s house, in a Folger’s House can buried in the back yard, and that was only because all he had to worry about was utilities (Mama’s bungalow was a 110-year-old protected historical structure, a train depot built in 1904 and decommissioned in 1962 when the trainyard in Glen Addie was built).
That money’d be gone in a flash if he had to throw it at a commercial property.
Didn’t that kid with the magic ring say something about Fish givin him a part-time job at the shop? That was one nerdy-ass kid. Maybe he could get ahold of him and bend his ear. What was his name? Wayne Newton? No, that’s that white dude in Las Vegas that sang “Everyone’s Gotta Be Beautiful Sometime”, or “It’s Not Unusual To Be Loved”. Some cheesy hot mess like that. Wayne Parker? Parkin? Yeah, that’s it. Ashe would know a few things too, I’m sure.
“Unh!” he grunted, knocked out of his thoughts as a woman shoved past, running full tilt.
She wore a red wool peacoat and black leggings, gold hoops in her ears, Ugg moonboots. Her crinkly dark hair streamered out behind her as she ran. “Watch where you goin, bitch!” Joel called after her, dimly aware that she was dressed way too nice to be running down the sidewalk.
Another hand slammed into his back and he caught himself over the guardrail. A man in a Members Only jacket sprinted by and Joel surged after him in a rage, snagging his coat. “Who do you—”
The man rounded on him and whipped fingernails across Joel’s face. Blood dotted his sweater. Instead of the angry warning he expected to come out of the man’s mouth, it was the vehement yet ridiculous puff-adder hiss of a movie-of-the-week vampire. Members Only’s eyes were the split jade of a cat’s.
Joel recoiled, baffled, putting up his dukes.
The man turned and ran. Another woman came along behind him as well, and that’s when Jo
el scanned the parking lots and sidewalks around him and realized that while he’d been walking with his head down, feeling sorry for himself, the world had come alive with running people. In every direction, men, women, and children sprinted north at top speed, some of them loping along like chimpanzees.
They were heading the same direction he’d been walking: Broad Avenue.
With an expression of deepest confusion still on his face, Joel jammed the Captain America shop key into his pocket and started jogging in that direction. Whatever was going down, it couldn’t be good, and he wanted to get behind a locked door ASAP.
40
THE DOG STARS’ SUBURBAN approached the four-lane intersection of Broad and Main, and Gendreau maneuvered them into the right-hand lane, the turn signal metronoming.
His gasflame eyes burned at them in the rearview mirror. “The dog is clairvoyant,” he said imperiously, easing past the traffic light, turning right on red. “Did you forg—”
A trumpeting rumble like a charging elephant shook the Suburban, drowning out whatever Gendreau was saying.
Brilliant headlights turned the inside of the vehicle into a blinding lightbox. Robin spun to see where it was coming from and found herself face to face with the front-end of a garbage truck. The truck’s grille and MACK logo swelled across the left-hand window.
BOOM! An angry god tackled the rental Suburban broadside, the side caving in under an onslaught of steel.
Windows imploded, showering them in sea-glass diamonds. Gendreau’s airbag deployed, pounding him against the seat with a giant white boxing glove. Wayne was thrown rudely against Robin, and Robin’s head bounced off the grille of the garbage truck with a guitar-like spronk!
The street reeled out from under their juddering tires, skrrrrrt-rt-rt-rrrrrt. Everybody leaned hard to the left for about a half-second as the Suburban capsized to the right and hit the curb, the tires still screaming. Gendreau’s hair hovered without gravity in a flaxen halo.