Malus Domestica

by Hunt, S. A.

“I didn’t see much of her.” The old witch-hunter flexed one arm as if getting comfortable and jerked in sudden sharp pain, crying out, his legs twitching and curling like back-broken snakes. His cries were desperate, pitiful, and nothing at all like the commanding, brooding presence he’d been.

  Fresh blood dribbled from the nails through his wrists. Every fifth or sixth word was interrupted by a panting breath. “They’re tryin to bring someone—something back. Tryin to resurrect something. They been tryin for a long time. It’s why Annie’s apples are so fat. They been nibblin’ on em, savin em up for the resurrection.”

  Heinrich hung his head. “They’ve always been here, Robin. I was too big for my britches. We all was. Cutty and her Matron have been here since the inception of this town.” He grunted and cried out in pain again. “I’m sorry I dragged you into this, babygirl.”

  “If you’ll open your eyes again, you’ll see that I’m neither baby nor girl. Or even human.”

  He did so, and looked at her for a long time with drowsy eyes.

  “Get out of here,” he said. “While you still can.” Heinrich coughed, spattering Robin’s wirecoil chest with blood. “However you got here, use it to get back, and stay away. This some Plan 9 top-level Pentagram Pentagon black magic. They gonna jump up and down on you til you die, then wake you up and beat you some more.”

  “We’re here, and I can’t leave until this is done.” She pointed north, toward the black mission-house. “My mother is in that nag shi. I’m not going to abandon her again. I can’t have her back, but I can set her free.”

  Even in his state, Heinrich still managed to give her that under-the-eyebrows you better do what I say girl look. She knew it well; she’d seen it enough over the last few years.

  When he couldn’t elicit a change in her, he turned to Gendreau. “What’s the verdict, Doc?”

  “Hypothetically, I could pull you back from the brink.” The curandero left off, shaking a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiping his bloody hand on it. “But you’re so far gone that you’re going to die before I can make much of a difference. I would need a lot more time. To be honest I’m surprised you’ve lasted this long.”

  “The human body is a miracle thing, Doc,” said Heinrich with a scoff. “It can take a good whoopin before it gives up. And I ain’t never gave up.” He coughed and choked, grimaced, spat to the side. “Before you go, will you take me out a Hawaiian and light it for me? They’re in my coat pocket behind me.”

  Robin dug in one pocket, then another, found the box and the Zippo. Tapping out a cigar, she paused to drag it under her nose, savoring the rich coconut smell.

  “S’good shit, baby,” said Heinrich.

  She stuck the cigar in his mouth, and if she’d told you she didn’t do it to shut him up, she would have been by all rights a liar.

  He walked it in with his lips. She flicked open the lighter, ignited it, and lit the cigar with it. He took a deep draw and a cloud of smoke billowed out of his face. He winced, his hands flexing against the nails and fence-wire.

  “I can’t fuckin reach it.”

  She dropped the lighter in his shirt pocket and patted it neatly in place. “You’ll figure it out.”

  He grinned, squinting in the smoke, the Hawaiian caught in his teeth. “You a cold-ass cambion, Robin Martine. Colder n’ a welldigger’s ass.”

  “It’s the season of the witch.”

  He took another draw and let it go, coughing with a pained wince. “Give em hell, babe.”

  44

  THE DIRT ROAD SEEMED interminable, a ribbon of dust and gravel snaking into the false night. She didn’t remember it being this long, or the upslope being this dramatic.

  As they got closer to the Lazenbury, they got quiet, rolling their steps and abandoning conversation, assumedly trying to preserve some element of surprise. Robin had put on Gendreau’s jacket, buttoning it closed to mitigate the shine of her heart inside her chest.

  She looked back at the others. Gendreau’s face was the picture of dark focus, but Lucas and Sara were scared as hell.

  “How many have you killed?” she asked them.

  Lucas spoke to the ground. “Three.”

  “What about you, Sara?”

  Sara didn’t speak at first. Eventually she said, “My Gift isn’t meant for combat.”

  “So…none.”

  Irritation simmered in the back of Robin’s mind, but what Gendreau said next fizzled it. “She’s not here for fighting,” mumbled the curandero. “She’s the most talented conjurer and illusionist in the Order outside of my father. Sara is here to dispel Weaver’s illusions for us.”

  “Ah.”

  The ground leveled out and the west face of Lazenbury House hulked at them from the darkness like a ghost ship. Faintly to the north, past the end of the driveway, they could see the rollups of the garage. Except… the longer she looked at it, the less it resembled a garage and the more it appeared to be a stable. The doors shimmered and wavered, and she could see the cars inside—an RV and a Plymouth Fury—resting on a layer of scattered straw and rushes.

  And then they were horses. Two chestnut quarterhorses and a painted mare. Tails swished against the night.

  Robin glanced at Sara. Her fists were clenched at her sides and she leaned forward as if pressing her forehead against some invisible surface, a look of immense concentration on her face.

  The Lazenbury itself came alive with raucous noise and movement. The playful fey laughter of young women, tinkling piano music, shuffling boots, the heady thunk of glass mugs on hardwood tables. Windows that had been clear and modern, doublepaned to retain heat, became warped and cloudy leaded glass.

  Through them Robin could see shapes moving back and forth, as if there were some kind of party going on inside.

  An electric wall-sconce next to the exterior-opening kitchen door jiggered like a film-reel and suddenly it was a gas lantern, dull and hissing with a sick green-orange light. The door itself transformed, melting with LSD fluidity from an aluminum screen door into a heavy wooden one with a head-sized password hatch cut in the middle. Iron pencil bars were bolted over the hole.

  Lucas asided to Gendreau, “Why didn’t you tell me you were taking me to a whorehouse?”

  “Because it hasn’t been a whorehouse for almost a century.” The curandero asked Sara, “This is, I’m assuming, an illusion. Can you dispel it?”

  “I’m trying. It’s pretty well stapled down.” She raked her fingers through her hair, tousling it, and her hands went back to her temples, clutching the sides of her forehead. “I’ll keep working on it.”

  “You do that,” said Robin, opening the kitchen door, releasing a burst of fragrant steam and a wave of incredible heat. “I’m going in.”

  “Not by yourself you ain’t.” Lucas followed her.

  Gendreau grumped. “Oh, piss and potatoes. Wait for me, then.”

  The forge-hot kitchen was a bustle of movement, lit only by gas lamps on the walls to either side. Three women and a man in greasy white smocks shuffled in a coordinated dance between two bubbling stock pots, a brick oven full of Halloween-orange light, and the gruesome cadaver of a wild boar

  (stab it with their steely knives)

  suspended on a spit over glowing coals in the middle of the room. Both left haunches, the flank, and half the face were gone, leaving clinical cross-sections open to the heat of the air. Robin saw an empty skull, a crabbish cluster of teeth, the pallid stripes of rib-bone, and looked away, queasy.

  A preoccupied, dreamlike ignorance hung over the scene like Scrooge being shown his own memories by the Spirit of Christmas Past, and the cookies took no notice of their new visitors—or if they did, paid them no mind.

  Robin pushed through a swinging door and went into the saloon.

  Filthy workmen in chambray shirts and dungarees played cards, told jokes, and drank at five round tables in what should have been Marilyn Cutty’s living room. A thin cirrus haze of cigarette smoke hovered around an iron chan
delier arrayed with hurricane lamps. A passel of whores in bustiers and striped hose leaned against an upstairs railing.

  Below, a bar ran across the room on their left, staffed by a ginger in arm-garters and a villainous mustache. At the far end was a player piano, where a slope-shouldered minstrel in a ratty hide coat and hat sat on a stool tickling ivories.

  The barman poured liquid honey into a glass and pushed it toward a grungy hobo in a Stetson and a leather duster. Twinkling beneath the flap of the hobo’s coat was a mint-condition breaktop Colt revolver.

  Kenway stared. “Did we wander into the holodeck from Star Trek, or what?”

  Gendreau’s face was grim. “This is quite possibly the most realistic illusion I’ve ever seen. Hell, I’m not one hundred percent sure it’s not a conjuration…or even, God help me, a temporal anomaly.”

  “It’s not a time-warp,” said Sara, snapping her fingers in front of a man’s face. He sifted through his poker cards, oblivious to her attempts to distract him.

  “Do they know we’re here?” Robin asked. “Do Weaver and Cutty know we’re here?”

  The piano stopped abruptly, mid-melody.

  Eyes burned at them from every direction as the miners and cowboys looked up from their liquor and card games and fixed on Robin and the Dog Star magicians.

  “Ah,” said Lucas.

  The pianist wheeled about on her stool and clutched her bony knees, standing up.

  “Yes, we’re quite aware you’re here, love,” said Karen Weaver. Her dark-rimmed eyes blazed underneath the floppy brim of her hat, a loose hatcord under her chin. She looked like an elderly Annie Oakley in her tweed vest and paisley cravat. She appraised Robin from where she stood by the piano. One hand softly closed the piano’s key cover and rested there.

  “How did you get in here?” Weaver’s other hand went to the hatcord and worried at it. “How did you get into my poke?”

  “Your poke?”

  “My tesseract,” Weaver said sharply, impatiently, as if talking to an idiot. “My tesseract, my tesseract! You know what that is, yes?”

  Gendreau nodded. “A simple enough astrophysics concept: the folding of space to make a distance shorter. Folding point A to point C to eliminate point B.”

  Weaver stepped away from the piano, her age-spotted hands clutched over her heart, and retreated to touch it again as if it could lend her some degree of protection, or comfort. “Well of course, of course. But ay; what happens to point B, then? Ah, you’re standing in it, you are, you are. This is the land between: my …poke.” The witch continued to stare at Robin. “Who are you? …What are you?”

  “Annie’s daughter.” Robin took off the plush navy jacket and handed it back to Gendreau, revealing the lighthouse pulse of her heart. “It turns out the ritual my mother used Edgar for—”

  “Killed!” spat Weaver. “My husband, killed!”

  “—killed Edgar for wasn’t entirely wasted. She did manage to summon a demon. But it was an incubus. And it… took her.”

  Weaver’s face soured. “A half-breed, then. You’ve got the blood of a demon in you. I should have expected as much. It was always a mystery to us how your mother could have given birth to you after her sacrifice to the Goddess…we always assumed she’d been with child since before. Children carried through the ritual usually come out stillborn…but not always. There are exceptions….”

  “This time, I wasn’t the exception.”

  “No, no, I suppose not…” The witch remained by the piano. “Oh, but you’re such a deadly-beautiful snake, aren’t you? A regular prize. I’ve never seen a demon before. Marilyn says, she says they’re dangerous; they eat magic, you know, they feed on the energies out there—” She swept a pensive hand at the ceiling, as if the afterlife rested just outside the atmosphere.

  “But when we’re here among the living,” said Robin, “we prefer to suckle on the heart-roads of witches.”

  All the desperados’ eyes tracked her as she took a step across the saloon.

  Weaver recoiled, shaking.

  She shouted, “Don’t you take another step, you snide hobgoblin, you worthless cur-dog—! You stay away from me, you hear? I told you not to come here, didn’t I? But you didn’t listen. You never listened.” The witch bit back a grimace, flashing her buckish front teeth. “Always knocking on the door, let me in, Gramma, let me in, little whelp making a mess, screwing up my seamstress work.”

  She pinched at the air to emphasize. “I thought maybe if I left a few of my needles in the carpet, you’d stay out of my sewing room, maybe a few pricks in your pink little feet and you’d stay the hell out, but nope! I’d get up to go piss and when I came back you’d be right back in there again, pulling out my pins and knocking my dummy over!

  “And Mary didn’t care, oh no, she’d laugh and laugh, and tell me, She’s just a little girl, Karen, you had a little girl once, you know they’re a handful, and yes, I had a little girl once, but did she have to rub it in? Did she always have to rub it in?”

  Robin took another step.

  Weaver pointed at her. “Go back where you came from, goddamn you!” she said in a rapid, poisonous hiss, “I’m not going to tell you again!”

  “Enough of this—” Robin lunged at her, clutching her jacket.

  It came away in her hands as if the witch had slipped right out of it. When she looked up she saw that the witch had evaporated, leaving Robin holding empty clothes…if she’d ever really been there at all.

  Robin turned to say something, and saw that all the cowboys now had Weaver’s face.

  Two, three dozen Karen Weaver clones played cards at the tables. The man drinking at the bar was Weaver. The ginger behind the bar was Weaver, mustache and all. Even the whores upstairs were Weaver, her eight mushy old hippie tits wobbling in their bust-cups like tapioca.

  “Time to take you all out to the woodshed and give yuns a whoopin,” said one of the gambling Weavers, tossing back a glass of whiskey.

  The Weaver bartender rolled up her sleeves, flourishing handfuls of gleaming black claws. “Yessssss,” she snarled, her face lengthening, her mouth drooping open. Wolven teeth dripped saliva on the bar.

  Weaver-doubles all over the saloon rose from their chairs, stripping off their hats, faces and fingers stretching, becoming swarthy and hideous. Their eyes deepened, darkened, red marbles glittering in black pits.

  Kenway let the carnival hammer drop into his other hand and rolled his neck with a sick crackle.

  “Ah, well, you see—” Gendreau started to say.

  The lights went out, leaving them in a moonlit tangle of shadows.

  “—Piss and potatoes!”

  The saloon exploded into movement as every witch in sight descended on the magicians like a murder of screeching ravens.

  Snatching up a deck of poker cards, Lucas started whipping them overhand into the crowd. One of the witches fell away, a Jack of Diamonds sticking out of her chest, and collapsed on the floor, melting into smoke.

  The thwock! thwock! thwack! of Kenway’s hammer echoed off the high plaster ceiling, swinging in great overhead arcs. The vet staggered from one encounter to another, smacking their foreheads in a frenzied game of Whack-a-Mole.

  Witches’ skulls whiplashed, bouncing off Kenway’s bloody mallet head. “Little Bunny Foo-Foo!” he was singing with maniacal glee, “a-runnin through the forest!” The hammer struck at the end of every line. “Pickin up the field mice, and boppin em on the head!”

  Gendreau and Sara backpedaled, the curandero leading her out of the way and defending her with his pizzle cane, twirling and striking with some clever sort of martial art. The fist-sized pearl at the end made for an outstanding bludgeon. The illusionist made obscure symbols in the air with her fingers, trying to dispel the imagery.

  Robin waded into the melee, attempting to grab a Weaver and suck the juice out of her, but it was like herding cats—the clones would flinch or duck, fending her off with chairs and bar stools, juking out of the way. The two
she managed to lay hands on vanished into egg-smelling smoke.

  “One of them’s got to be the real witch!” she told the magicians, “grab one and hold her and let me—”

  Something hard slammed into her shoulder, almost knocking her down. Kenway winced, lifting the carnival hammer. “Woop, sorry!”

  “Watch where you’re swingin that thing!”

  “Yes ma’am!”

  He turned and smashed it through a chair and into a clone’s head, evaporating her. Then he missed a swing at another one and upended a table with it, raining beer, broken glass, and 19th century dollar-coins across the ceiling.

  A witch leapt on his back and sank her yellow fangs into his shoulder. “Aaaaah!”

  Robin took her by the hair of the head, marching her over to the bar to slam her facefirst into the polished counter, breaking her nose with a thick bang.

  This one didn’t disappear.

  “Got you now, chick,” said Robin, and grasped her by the throat. Oily blood streamed out of Weaver’s nose, dripping from her hellacious gargoyle teeth.

  Concentrating, Robin pushed her consciousness into the witch, a sort of mental pseudopod, and found the heart-road deep inside. Then she withdrew, pulling the energy with it like a fish-hook. It came thin and watery into the center of her being, and a dank salty taste welled in her mouth.

  The light of her heart flashed brightly through her fibrous chest, casting disco-ball flares around the room.

  Weaver gasped. The skin of her face became sallow and shrank taut against the bone, every curve and socket suddenly reliefed in sharp detail.

  “Nooo!” cawed the witch, wresting herself out of Robin’s grip.

  The other shadow-Weavers converged on Robin as the real one shrank away, and she found herself battling a flock of shrieking harpies. They shoved her down on the floor and raked and wrenched at her with their claws, tearing away strips of skin that bent and ripped like chicken-wire.

  “I’ll kill you, you demon whore!” screamed one of them, wedging her nails under Robin’s right breast and tearing it away. Another one scrabbled at her ear, breaking it off. “You and your mother took my Edgar away! I’ll swallow your soul!”