by S. A. Hunt
Okay, this had gone from weird to unnerving.
As if on cue, the screen door opened and Annie Martine stepped into the Lazenbury’s kitchen, out of breath, in a jacket and sundress. Ancient dollar-store flip-flops tried their best to stay on her feet.
“Hello, Annabelle,” Cutty said sharply, casually, an assassin’s dagger.
To Robin’s surprise, her mother’s eyes were glazed with alarm. “What are you doing in here?” she asked, without preamble.
“Eating banana bread and talking to my grandmother?”
Annie blinked, her eyes going wide. “Marilyn Cutty is not your grandmother, and how many times have I told you not to come up here?” She half-lunged toward her daughter, taking the teenager’s wrist and almost dragging her backward off the stool.
“Hey!” Robin twisted to catch herself as she stumbled to her feet. “The hell you trying to do, break my neck?”
“We need to get home,” said Annie. “We need to get home now.”
“No.” Robin wrenched her hand out of Annie’s grasp, her mother’s fingernails whipping painfully down the back of her thumb. “No, I don’t need to go home. I am home.”
“This is not your home.”
“It’s more of a home than that house has ever been,” said Robin, pointing vaguely in the direction of the Victorian. “Between you and Dad screaming at each other and this Jesus-freak shit the past few years—you know, you were right, it has turned into a boxing ring. And I’m done fighting for my life.”
“What?” said Annie.
“I told you, you keep me cooped up in that place like you’re afraid somebody’s gonna hurt me. Or kidnap me or something. Have you been watching too much Forensic Files or something?”
She caught Annie’s eyes flicking toward the old woman.
“Her?” asked Robin, pointing at Cutty. “You’re afraid of her?”
“No,” said Annie.
She reached for her daughter’s hand again, but Robin snatched it away.
“She’s not afraid of me.” Cutty said it blandly, but her eyes were flecks of hot steel. “She’s afraid of Karen.”
“Karen?” Robin drew a blank for a second. Her mind reeled through a Rolodex of faces. “The one that dresses like a horse thief and spends all her time making her own clothes and looking for mushrooms in the woods?” She looked at her mother. “Why are you scared of her?”
“I’m not.”
“She is afraid of Karen,” said Cutty, “because your mother is the reason why Karen’s husband is no longer in Slade Township. It is a blood feud from before you were born, and your mother is terrified of participating in it, because Karen Weaver can be a terrifying woman to antagonize. But what she fails to acknowledge is that I am the Dutch dam between your mama and the ass-whooping she deserves. Whatever measures she’s taken to protect herself—and you—are entirely unnecessary right now. As long as I am here, she—and you—are safe.”
“I think we’ve done enough talking,” said Annie, fully lunging for Robin. She tangled a fist in the girl’s T-shirt and hauled her toward the screen door. Robin banged through it and stumbled out into the driveway, her mother right behind her.
Continuing the theme of surprise, Annie grabbed her again. But this time, instead of anger, there was a panicked protectiveness. Annie clutched the girl’s head against her chest, even though Robin was a couple of inches taller.
“Mom! What are you doing?”
Her mother’s eyes were full of fear, darting in every direction, searching the horizon. “Gotta get you home, okay, baby? I need you to trust me and shut up and start walking. We need to get the fuck out of here and back to the house. I’ll leave you alone, you can do whatever you want, and I won’t say a word. But we need to go.”
It was the first F-bomb she’d heard her mother drop in … a very long time. If ever. “What is so important about the house? Why do you look so scared?”
“I’ll tell you some other time. Right now, we need to move.”
“No,” said Robin. “Not until you tell me what’s going on.”
With a soft slap, the screen door closed. Marilyn Cutty had joined them outside and stood there watching quietly, her arms motionless but subtly tense at her sides.
Annie watched the old woman. “We don’t have time for this.”
“This is Dixieland, Annabelle.” Cutty’s thumbs and forefingers rasped together in the stillness of the evening, like a gunslinger getting ready to draw down on a desperado in front of the town saloon. “The days run slow here.”
“What did you do?” asked Robin. The three of them formed an acute triangle in the driveway. “Why is Karen mad at you?”
Cutty’s eyes softened. Her head tilted in anticipation.
“I had him arrested,” said Annie. “Karen’s husband. He … I caught him touching kids out there in that old amusement park. His amusement park. And he was hurting them.” Her eyes cut over to Robin’s, and her face hardened. “I called the police, and they didn’t do shit.”
“Oh, they arrested him.” Taking languid, lawyerly steps, Cutty paced around them. “They took Edgar away, and they did their little investigation. But they didn’t find anything, did they, Annabelle? So, they had to let him go. They let him come back home, and that’s not the whole story, is it, hon?”
Annie said nothing, just stood there, breathing hard, her hands shaking. Robin couldn’t tell if she was furious or terrified.
“Because he didn’t stay home, did he?” continued the old woman. “A year or so later, he just, hell, I don’t know, he wandered off, didn’t he? Slipped into the ether, like Amelia Earhart. Couldn’t nobody find him. Didn’t nobody know anything about where he went.”
“We need to go home,” said Annie through gritted teeth.
“What is she talking about?” asked Robin.
This time, Annie bulldozed her daughter down the driveway from behind, almost powerwalking her, muttering Bible verses under her breath. “The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you. He will never leave you nor forsake you.”
“Karen seems to think you know.” Cutty lingered somewhere far behind them at the top of the driveway some thirty or forty feet back. Her voice echoed off the side of the Lazenbury as she spoke. “Karen thinks you know where her husband went.”
“Oh God,” Annie murmured in the girl’s ear. “Don’t turn around, okay, baby?” Chills ran up the girl’s arms at the panic in her mother’s voice. “Don’t look back. Don’t look back at her. Don’t look her in the eyes. Walk. Keep walking until we’re home. Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” Robin twisted, trying to see the expression on her mother’s face. Annie manhandled her. “Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Eyes front, baby girl. Jesus loves you.”
“Oh, people liked to talk,” Cutty called from the gathering darkness beside the hacienda. She was almost shouting now, but her voice remained casual, as if she were trying to carry on a conversation across a baseball field. “People said he ran off because he was embezzling from the city. Somebody allegedly found dead babies in a dumpster on his property. They even said he was putting LSD in the Wonderland Slush Puppie machines. People, people, my God, they can say such mean things, they can get you in so much trouble, can’t they? They can get folks put in jail. They can get folks burned, get good women drowned in the river.”
“What is she talking about?”
The girl’s eyes managed to lock on the distant figure at the top of the driveway, an elderly Q-tip in a big slouchy sweater. Cutty stood stock-still, hands clasped behind her back.
“Don’t look,” said Annie, forcing her head forward again. “Don’t listen. She can’t do nothing if you ain’t listening and you ain’t looking. The Lord is my light and my salvation. The Lord is the stronghold of my life—”
“I just don’t—” Robin glanced over her shoulder.
All she saw behind them was beige cable-knit. Marilyn Cutty was inches from he
r mother’s back, right behind them, gliding effortlessly, close enough to touch, still motionless at parade rest, her hands behind her back. She loomed over them, a suddenly mythic shape, not walking yet still somehow advancing on them, as if she were standing in a toy wagon that her mother was pulling like a sled dog. “Cast your cares on the Lord and he will sustain you,” Annie was saying, her voice growing hoarser with every word. “He will never let the righteous be shaken.”
In a voice like the buzzing, sleepy drone of a hornet, Cutty said, “Go ahead and look.”
Despite her dread, Robin’s eyes traveled the Celtic knotwork of the sweater, passing over the drooping cowlneck, and she peered up into Cutty’s face. Only, there was no face. Cutty’s hair had been reduced to lifeless gray moss on a parched skull. The old woman’s own eyes were not eyes; they were one puckered, misshapen socket that gaped asymmetrically across her face like an old shotgun wound. Her skin was pale book-leather, pebbled and cracked. Her lips were pulled taut against driftwood teeth, her stretched mouth almost combining with the eye socket into one amorphous C-shaped hole.
“Go home, littlebird,” something buzzed from deep in Cutty’s throat.
Inside those nightmare face-holes, flesh that should have been wet and pink was dry yellow rawhide. Robin’s skin flashed as cold as frozen nitrogen. A scream tried to climb out of her throat, but she could only produce a wheeze. “Lord God in Heaven,” Annie was saying, “hallowed be thy name. Please let us get home safe and sound.” Then she muttered something in her daughter’s ear like a record being played backward underwater—
* * *
Night had arrived in earnest. Soft light fell in from the Martines’ living room as Robin and her mother moved through the shadows in the foyer, Robin’s hand clutched in Annie’s. “Come on, let’s fix you something to eat.”
“What happened? How did we get here so fast?”
“You ’bout passed out in the driveway.”
“Passed out?”
“Yeah. Have you eaten today, baby?” asked Annie, leading her down the hallway toward the kitchen. Her mother seemed to have lost all her fear and was now almost … chipper. “Did you eat lunch?”
“I had some cheese crackers. And a cup of yogurt, I think.”
“One cannot live on cheese crackers alone.”
They filed into the dark kitchen and Annie deposited her daughter at the table, pulling out a chair for her. She turned on the hood light over the range, which cast a dim greenish glow over the table. “Still got some of that chicken. I’ll make you a sandwich. Want some french fries?”
“French fries?” The words tumbled out of her mouth rusty and ill-used.
“Yeah, I got some Ore-Ida in the icebox.”
Annie set the oven to preheat and rummaged in the freezer. “Maybe that fight we had did something to your blood pressure or something, I don’t know. But it ain’t gonna hurt to get some food in your belly.” She pulled out a bag, got a cookie sheet out of the drawer under the oven, and poured a heap of crinkle fries on top of it. As she scattered them on the sheet, Annie kept talking. “Look … I’m sorry I walked in on you, baby. Hey, from now on I’ll—I’ll flash the lights in the stairwell, all right? There’s a light switch at the bottom, I’ll flick that a few times. How about that?”
“Yeah, that’s—” Robin blinked, examining the kitchen from her seat. Everything looked dark and new in the lamplight, thrumming with some ominous note she could feel but not quite hear. “Did we— Were we just on the other side of the highway?”
Annie stared at her. “Dunno what you mean.”
“Did we go to Grandma Marilyn’s house?”
“Not that I know of. I found you down by our mailbox, sittin’ in the grass, talkin’ nonsense.”
Robin searched her mother’s face. “What was I saying?”
“Oh, I don’t know. You were mumbling something, I couldn’t hear it. You didn’t fall and hurt yourself today, did you?”
“No.”
As if by instinct, the girl reached up and ran fingers through her hair, feeling for a bruise. There were none.
“So,” Annie said.
“So.”
“You’re not batting for the home team, then?”
“I play for both teams, Mom. I like boys and girls both. Not that—” Not that it’s any of your business, she started to say, but it turned to ashes in her mouth.
“There’s a lot of love in your heart. I guess it makes sense you’ll give it to anybody that’ll take it. It’s all gotta go somewhere.” Annie huffed a cool laugh. “Just a surprise, is all.”
Ice tinkled. Mom was pouring tea into one of the glasses with lemon wedges painted all over. Robin sipped at it, staring down into the dark kaleidoscope of ice and tea, then she put it down on the table without letting go. Something about the weight of the glass, and the liquid inside, reassured her—as if some voice in the back of her mind said that if something happened, something that justified defending herself, she could throw it.
“Did you do something to me?” she asked.
Dirty dishes thunked slowly against the basin. Her mother had turned to the sink, elbow-deep in hot water. “I don’t know what you mean.” Annie rinsed a plate, putting it in the dish drain rack.
You know what I mean, Robin started to say, but it was as if the words had been typed onto a sheet of paper in front of her and some unseen hand had snatched it off the table before she could read it. Instead, she found only silence on her tongue. So, she thought of something else to say. “What was Marilyn talking about?”
Looking over her shoulder with a guileless expression, Annie said, “I don’t know. I haven’t talked to old Mary Cutty in a long time. Did you run into her today?”
We just talked to her, Robin wanted to say, but the words vanished into the dark again. Her lips parted as if to speak, but her tongue pressed uselessly against her teeth. Did you do something to Karen Weaver’s husband? she subvocalized, trying to push the words, to birth the words, but nothing came out.
“I heard he ran off with some hussy,” said Annie.
“What?”
Cold surprise flickered across Annie’s face. Before either of them could say anything else, the oven chimed to let her know it was done preheating, and she put the baking sheet inside with a bang, setting the timer for twenty minutes. Wiping her hands on the towel that forever hung from the oven door handle, Annie marched out of the room. “I’m going to go see what your father’s up to. Keep an eye on those french fries, hmm? I put enough in there for both of us.”
Minutes crawled past. A clock ticked softly on the wall, but the time on it was senseless, the hands splayed in random directions. Robin couldn’t focus well enough to divine its meaning, no matter how hard she stared at it, as though she could anchor her mind in the solid contrast of black numbers on white, black hands on white.
After an eternity of trying to tell the time, her eyes wandered away and settled on the kitchen door framing a narrow glimpse of the hallway: the right end of the sideboard table, on which stood a portrait of the three of them together—her father Jason, her mother Annie, and herself. Taken in Gatlinburg almost a decade earlier, everybody in cowboy gear. Dad still had his horrible goatee, Mom still had her cutesy bangs, and Robin herself was a little girl with glittering eyes and a sullen expression.
Mom. Fear shot an arrow through her chest. Suddenly, she didn’t want her mother coming back through that doorway. If Annie Martine came walking through that door, she thought she would scream and run like hell. Mom made me forget something. She’s still making me forget something.
How?
She’s a w—a wuh
She’s—wwwwh
A w—
She’s a www-wwuh—
Robin got up and spat into the kitchen sink, as if she could spit out the words. As she stood there gazing into the drain, with its mesh drain-trap full of soggy bits of food, she remembered the french fries. She opened the oven door and looked at them. After
half a minute of staring, she realized they weren’t even remotely done, so she closed the door and stared at the range.
What was I doing? She scanned the kitchen the way you do when you’ve walked into another room and forgotten what errand brought you there.
I need to protect myself.
From what? How?
Creeping cautiously but quickly up the stairs without knowing quite why she was creeping, she went up to her room, where she pulled her laptop out of the drawer underneath the north windowsill in her cupola. She sat there staring at the screen for a long moment, trying to recollect why she’d come up here and connected to the Wi-Fi.
On the windowsill, the carvings under the paint were thrown into sharp relief by the screen’s stark light.
A nail file in her backpack. With it she dug at the paint as if it were a lottery ticket, trying to reveal the symbols her mother had scratched into the window frames, looking for some kind of revelation or inspiration that could help her figure out what was going on in her head. Underneath were symbols that almost looked like English letters—F, N, S, R, some odd combination of lowercase b and uppercase P, all manner of symbols composed of straight lines and right angles. Looking back at the screen, she did a few Google searches and finally found something resembling her mother’s carvings. According to the website in front of her, they were Nordic runes. Something called Elder Futhark—
Reality jumped like a broken film reel and Robin blinked, startled.
She was no longer sitting on her bed; she and her mother were standing in the bathroom, and her mother was scrubbing at the back of Robin’s left hand with a washrag and scalding-hot water. “What did you think you were doing?” asked Annie. “What is this, some kind of Satanic thing?” Half-obscured by suds and the rag in Annie’s hand, there was something written on Robin’s skin with a Sharpie marker, some strange smeared symbol that looked like a chicken’s footprint. “Are you writing evil things on yourself? What is this?”