by Hunt, S. A.
Placing the final shard, Robin pressed her fingertip to the starburst of silver cracks and concentrated.
While Gendreau had been healing her surgery scar in the back of Fisher Ellis’s comic shop, she had been subtly tapping the libbu-harrani buried in the pearl at the end of his cane, drawing off some of his curandero power for herself. At the time she’d figured she would need it to keep herself together in the battle to come, but now she found she could use it to put the mirror back together.
Sliding the pad of her demonic finger across the refractive edges, Robin traced each crack out to the frame of the mirror. Each time she did so, it faded, the glass smooth and unmarked underneath, as if she were erasing them.
“There we go,” she said, thumbing the final crack away. She stepped back to admire her handiwork.
Wayne was speechless. Taking his mother’s ring out of his shirt-collar, he lifted it so that he could look through it and focus its magic, and opened the cabinet door. The stark glow of the fluorescent lights in Kenway’s kitchen tumbled through as if they’d been waiting all along.
To Robin, the light fell brisk and sharp, like the chill of a winter door left open. She diminished into the shadows, stepping away until nothing was visible but her eyes and the pulsar-heart still throbbing in her chest.
“Go,” she told Wayne.
“No.”
“Go.” Robin took his shoulder. “Go to Kenway’s apartment and wait there for me.”
“I want to go with you,” said Wayne, backing against the tub. “I want to save my dad. I want to help you.”
She sighed, making that disturbing underwater-engine noise again. Her voice was an impossibly deep rumble. “You can help me one last way before you go back. You can help me find the door that leads to the Lazenbury.”
“Okay.”
“Robin?” called someone from the other side of the mirror-hole. Sara Amundson. “Wayne? Are you…you okay in there?”
Kenway said, his voice shaking, “Is that you?”
“Tell them not to be afraid of me.”
Wayne climbed into the sink and leaned through the portrait-mirror-hole. He glanced back at her. “You can’t go out there anymore, can you?”
“I don’t know.” She really didn’t. “It’s … cold out there. Cold like… fire.” It was counterintuitive, but she knew deep inside that if she went through that hole, if she tested the sanctification, she would burn in that katabatic superfreeze, as if the thermometer had gone all the way past zero and come back around to the top.
He turned back to the kitchen. “She can’t come to the window,” Wayne told them. “But she—”
“Is she okay?” asked Joel.
Kenway sat on top of the fridge next to the painting. Now he leaned over to look through the hole. “Babe? You there? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Robin told him, even though she wasn’t, not really. In her present condition, she felt no pain; she felt godlike, perhaps, indestructible, aware only of the press of the floor against the soles of her feet and the constant draft of supernatural cold seeping through the hole.
He stared at her. The sensation of invincibility melted away under his warm eyes, leaving her feeling naked and vulnerable.
“I’m coming in,” he said, climbing into the hole.
Wayne scrambled out of the way and Kenway clambered over the sink, lowering himself to the bathroom floor.
He stood in front of her, abject wonder and terror in his eyes. “Is that really you?” he asked, reaching for her. At first she wanted to move away, or maybe push his hand back, but she let him touch her, rake his fingertips softly down the coiling slope of her chest and feel the rough wasp-nest swell of her left breast. The starshine of her heart filtered through his fingers.
His hand found its way up to her cheek and stayed there. She closed her luminescent eyes and pressed against the cooling cup of his palm.
“You’re still beautiful to me,” Kenway said. “If not even more than before.”
A rusty laugh bubbled up out of her. “You think a demon is prettier than me?”
“Uhh…” His hand twitched.
“…I’m kidding.”
“Your skin kinda reminds me of a shredded mini-wheat.”
“You’re really pressing your luck, sir.”
The others were coming through now, all except for Joel. Sara came through first, and then Lucas, who helped Gendreau down from the step of the sink. “Simply remarkable,” the curandero said again, eyes wandering the decrepit bathroom.
A dog barked on the other side.
“Sounds like Eduardo wants to go too,” chuckled Lucas. Joel handed the terrier through the hole. Safely on the Darkhouse side, Eduardo shook himself and panted up at them, his tail waving back and forth.
Robin got as close to the hole as she could tolerate, looking out at the pizza man. He sat on the fridge with his elbow in the dimensional hole, as pretty as you please. It could have been the windowsill of his Black Velvet.
“Are you staying here, then?”
He gawped openly at her. “Yep. I’ll keep the light on for ya, and the way open. I think I been through enough today, and you look like you can handle yourself. I’ll leave you to it.” The moment lingered between them for a second, and then he added, “You gonna be like that forever, Girl Wonder? It’s a nice look, but … it’ll be hard gettin a table at IHOP lookin like modern art.”
“It doesn’t feel sustainable. I don’t know.” Robin looked at her hands. “I’ll figure something out.”
“We’ll get you a hat and a nice pair of sunglasses.”
Robin laughed again. “Yeah.”
The others were already filing out of the room. “We’ll be back soon,” she told him, backing out, and he saluted.
“I’ll be here.”
❂
After trying every door in the house—including the back door, which led into the go-kart garage in Weaver’s Wonderland, where they found Joel’s car and the body of Michael DePalatis—the one they needed turned out to be the front door, and Robin couldn’t overlook the irony. Apparently the front entrance of both 1168 and its Hell-annexed alter ego were linked in some deep way.
She stood way back while Wayne opened it, but no rush of wintery cold came in, even though she could plainly see the front porch of her childhood home outside. It was night-time out there, but she wasn’t sure if that was because it was getting close to six, or because it was always night in this strange new aberration of a timezone.
“I don’t feel the sanctification out there,” Robin told them.
“Perhaps it doesn’t apply to a piece of reality when someone has tied it off like a puppy-dog’s tail,” said Gendreau.
Eduardo whined.
“—Err, sorry.”
Robin stepped toward the door and, with a brief pause, put her hand outside. There was a bad moment where she felt the creep of ice—as if there were a holy residue—but then it passed.
“It’s safe.” She stepped out onto the porch and they followed her.
Someone sitting in the swing down at the end loosed a shriek worthy of a Sioux warrior and vaulted the railing into the bushes.
“Pete?” called Wayne, squinting into the darkness. “Amanda?”
“Batman? Is that you?”
“Yeah, it’s me.” Wayne walked down to the swing where Amanda, her brothers, and little Katie Fryhover cowered in the dark. Evan and Kasey Johnson stood in front of their sister, wielding heavy-looking sticks and shields devised from garbage can lids.
Leaning on the banister, Robin gazed out into a dark sky strewn with unfamiliar constellations that hung low in the night like electric bulbs screwed into the clouds. The trailer park’s mobile homes were pale, dark-eyed hulks run aground on a black shore. There were no lights. The de-conjuration must have interrupted the electricity in the power lines.
“Looks like when Weaver tied off the neighborhood,” said Kenway, “she took Chevalier Village and 1168 with it.”
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Evan Johnson coughed, wiping his face with his sleeve. “It’s been dark out for like two days straight. The power went out and all of a sudden the sun went away at like three in the afternoon yesterday.”
“Ever since,” said his brother, “we can’t get out. The night makes a wall.”
“The night makes a wall,” echoed little Katie.
“Me and Evan tried to get out.” Kasey pointed west with his stick, down the road. “But it’s like…it’s like the air gets hard.”
Evan giggled in spite of himself.
“I ain’t jokin, turd-vert.”
“It’s like we’re in a giant aquarium, you know?” said Amanda, standing up. Katie Fryhover clung to her leg with the desperation of a castaway on a life-preserver. “We don’t know what’s going on. Our parents don’t either.”
“It’s the witches,” Wayne told them. “They did this. And we’re here to fix it.”
Pete came swishing through the grass, dusting off his shorts, and climbed the front steps. When he saw Robin, he stopped short, his hand on the banister. The other hand held the strength-test hammer, resting on his shoulder.
“It’s okay,” she told him. “It’s me. It’s Robin, the crazy chick with the camera.”
“Miss Martine?”
“The one and only.”
“What the hell happened to you?” he asked in the bravely rude way that is the kingdom of children.
“I did the drugs. All of them.” Robin pointed at him with one wire-coil finger. “Be smart, kids, stay in school.”
Lucas Tiedeman burst out laughing.
“We came over here to Wayne’s cause it’s the farthest away from the witches’ house,” said Amanda. “It seemed safe. Well, the safest place, anyway. The witches never come over here. I think they’re afraid of it.” Her eyes wandered out to the trailer park. “My dad seems like he is, too. He won’t leave the house.”
“He’s been drinking since the sun went away,” said Evan. “He sits in the dark and drinks and stares out the window.”
“Maw-Maw sleeps.” Katie Fryhover peeked at Robin and hid her face again.
Kasey Johnson’s stick slowly sank until the end of it was resting on the porch. “None of em will go outside,” he said, his tone flat and demoralized. “Not even our neighbors, like Mr Weisser and Mrs Schumacher. They won’t even answer the door when we knock.”
“I think you should take your friends to the hole that goes to my apartment,” said Kenway, his hand resting on Wayne’s shoulder. “Make yourself at home. There’s some stuff in the fridge if you get hungry. I don’t know how long this is going to take.”
The boy peered through his one spectacle eye at him. “Okay.” Wayne waved the other children into the house. “Come on, guys.”
They followed him willingly enough, but Pete stopped at the front door and turned back to Kenway. “Hey, mister?” he said, hefting the carnival mallet.
“Hmm?”
Pete grinned. “Take this with you,” he said, offering the mallet to the tall Nordic vet. Kenway’s big mitt closed over the wooden handle and he lifted it over his head like a barbarian straight out of a Boris Vallejo painting.
“Mjolnir,” Wayne said in awe from the foyer.
Kenway flourished it. The big hammer-head made a swooshing noise through the air. “Thanks, kid.”
“Kick their asses, man,” said Pete.
“Oh, I almost forgot—” Taking off the GoPro harness, Wayne handed it off to Robin. “Here’s your camera, ma’am.” He smiled and pushed his broken glasses up on his nose. “Thank you for lettin me be your cameraman for a little while.”
“Thank you.”
She adjusted the straps and put it on Kenway.
“And now your watch begins, Mr Cameraman.” The GoPro’s evil red on-air light burned in the dark, a solemn, watchful eye.
With a soft and concluding click, the front door eased shut behind them, leaving the magicians, the veteran, and the demon-girl alone on the front porch.
Sprawling in front of them was a twilight zone of shadows, only interrupted by the sight of the pale mobile homes marching darkly into the distance, a cemetery for giants. The night was windless and heavy, a smothering summer twilight three months too late. No crickets sang. The silence was absolute.
❂
The dirt road leading to the Lazenbury was a dark and lonely one, winding for what felt like a quarter of a mile through suboceanic darkness. With no wind and no nightlife, the trees around them were nothing but a silent wall of black paranoia, beat back only by the crunching of their heels on the gravelly dirt. Above them, the sky remained a chintzy model-town facsimile of the real thing, the stars almost low enough to reach up and touch.
Robin’s glowing heart illuminated the path around them, but did nothing to assuage the feeling coming from that lightless storybook forest of being watched.
“Is that Heinrich?” asked Sara.
A wooden crucifix stood by the road some nine feet tall, overlooking them like a warning from an old pulp western. Heinrich Hammer was pinned to it with long roofing-nail spikes through his wrists and wire around his elbows.
In the green-yellow light of Robin’s pulsar heart, the blood running in blotchy ribbons down his chin and chest was a glassy obsidian. He’d been worked over good; his legs were obviously broken by the crazy bandy way they angled, and his chest was a litany of gills, a dozen fleshy pink stab wounds. The witches stripped him of everything except for his slacks, but his black duster caped from the back of the cross like Christ’s tomb shroud, the sleeves tossed over his shoulders as though he were being embraced by the Grim Reaper himself.
She thought he was dead, but as they approached, Robin was surprised to see his eyes crack open.
He coughed weakly. “Hi, folks.”
“Good evening, Heinie,” said Robin.
Heinrich spat blood into the weeds. “You know I hate when you call me that.” He stared at her with one glassy, jaundiced eye. The other was swollen shut. “See you found your daddy. I bet you got some questions, hu—” His gentle prodding was cut off by a wet, productive cough.
“Is this why you trained me to kill?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“You weren’t helping a bereaved girl find closure. You were sharpening a sword. Your sword.” Robin got up close, close enough to smell the sweet, coppery smell of blood, and…something else, something both ammoniac and sugary. “Your golden ticket back into the Order.” Ah, he’d pissed himself. That’s what it was. They’d either really scared him or really hurt him, and at this point she hoped it was the latter.
“You tried to break one of our cardinal rules, Mr Atterberry,” said Gendreau, taking off his jacket and stepping closer to place a hand on Heinrich’s shirt. “Bringing a demon through the sanctification. Did you think we’d let you back in if you actually managed to break it?”
Robin felt ectoplasmic energy skirl up and out of the curandero’s slender arm. She could see it, as well, a throbbing aura the dusky sapphire blue of the sky over a Dustbowl farm.
“I thought I could tame the demon,” said Heinrich. “Filter it, extrude it, through the girl.”
Robin made a face. “I’m not the best part of waking up, you dick.”
“You thought you could smuggle it,” Gendreau noted in droll disbelief.
Heinrich sighed. “I messed up. I did; I freely admit it. I made an ambitious mistake. But hey, look at it this way—you didn’t turn out so bad, did you? Right?” A fat tear cut through the blood on his face. “My God, look at you, Robin—cough—you’re—”
“A monster.”
“—Beautiful! You’re beyond extraordinary.” He chuckled, and the chuckles turned into full-fledged (if exhausted) laughter.
“What’s so funny?”
The crucified man shook his head slowly, dejectedly, and his grin drooped into a desolate grimace. She thought he’d started laughing again, but the convulsions turned out to be silent sobs. Drool sli
pped down his chin in a spider-silk strand.
“You have no idea what Cutty is up to in there,” he told them, his breath hitching. “I found their Matron upstairs.”
“You did?” Gendreau twitched. “Who is it?”
“She claims to be Morgan le Fay.”
“The sorceress fairy-queen from Arthurian legend?”
Sara folded her arms. “You are so full of shit. That’s impossible. Morgan le Fay wasn’t even real. Those were stories.”
“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger,” said Heinrich.
“Even if that is le Fay up there, she’d have to be hundreds of years old.”
“Almost two thousand years old,” said Gendreau. “According to Arthurian legend, Arthur Pendragon defended Britain against Saxon invaders in 510, 520 AD. He was real, if embellished. If Morgan was real, she was contemporary to that time.”
He stared at the dirt under their feet in thought, drawing curative runes with the tip of his cane. “She first appeared in an 1170 book by Chrétien de Troyes. I can’t remember the name, though. For some reason I want to say it’s Enid Blythe, but that’s not right. Oh no, wait, it wasn’t de Troyes, it was The Life of Merlin by Geoffrey of Monmouth.”
“You can remember all that,” asked Sara, “but you can’t remember your order between the radio and the window at freakin’ Chik-Fil-A? Some savant you turned out to be.”
Robin’s eyes rolled up to the temple-like silhouette of the Lazenbury. The lights were still on in there, hollow orange eyes in the black, but it might have been candles. Probably was. “If their Matron is really Morgan, she’s….”
“Old as hell?” asked Lucas.
“To put it bluntly,” interjected Gendreau. “And more powerful than any witch alive.”
The unspoken insinuation was obvious to Robin. We may have bitten off more than we can chew. She hoped she was the secret weapon Heinrich had intended her to be.