by S. A. Hunt
A greasy stink lay on the air. The french fries had burned.
“This isn’t evil.” Robin’s words were heavy and slurred, as if she were having to lift them over the wall of her tongue. She expected her mother to ask her if she’d been drinking, but she didn’t say anything, just kept scrubbing. “It’s … Mama, it’s the stuff, like you scratched in the windowsills.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Annie glared up at her and kept scrubbing.
“Yes, you do. Are you doing something to me?”
“No!” cried Annie. “You trying to fight with me again? I thought we were okay now, thought we were cool. I wish you would sit down and eat your supper. You’re not well. Your blood sugar is low.”
Robin shook her head, slow at first, and then wildly, her ponytail sweeping across the back of her neck in a growing panic. “My blood sugar is fine, Mama.”
“Then what the hell?”
“I feel like I’m forgetting things. Something.” She reached up with her free hand and ground the heel of her palm into her eyebrow. “Something happened and I can’t remember what. I went somewhere and something happened, Mama. Something happened and I need to do something and I can’t remember what.”
“Do I need to take you to the doctor?” Annie’s eyes were glittering black pools in the dim bathroom light.
Not a medical doctor—a psychiatric doctor. Robin could read between the lines well enough. A shrink. “No, I don’t need to go to a doctor. I need you to stop doing whatever you’re doing to me. We went to—” Robin blanked, staring at the wall. The words had been there, just there; she was about to say them, and they flitted away like a housefly. Some sensation like a smooth wall had set itself up between her brain and her mouth, the same feeling like when you’re trying to do math but you’re too tired to focus.
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her mother’s lips were moving, like a ventriloquist’s. Subtly, silently, almost a trick of the light.
Summoning all of her will, Robin closed her eyes and fought the wall in her head, pushing, punching, pressing. She felt like she had to sneeze, but with her brain—that same kind of high, half-painful anticipation.
just walk
even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil
Terrible black eyes. Eyes reaching into her and scooping her clean.
keep walking until we’re home
But there were words in there, thoughts, crusted in the darker corners of her brain, that her mother’s spoon couldn’t reach, if it was indeed her mother doing this, whatever it was, this creeping assassin dementia. “Wwweee www—wwwennt,” Robin tried to say. “Wwweee went. To Gramma Mmm-mmary’s houuuse.” The words came out like meat processing through a grinder, tortured and crushed, almost in the same slow, buzzing hornet-voice Cutty had spoken to her earlier that evening.
Alarm spread across Annie’s face.
To her horror, Robin glanced away from her mother. The bathtub was full of dark water, silty with blackness.
the Lord himself goes before you and will be with—
“We went to Grandma Mary’s house,” she said, and the lights went out.
Arms reached for her from the darkness, water clattering across bathroom tile, as something stood up out of the bathtub and clutched at her.
Ragged fingernails chiseled cold fire into her wrists. She opened her eyes and saw a drowned woman, mouth gaping low and full of black teeth, eyes shrunken to hard pits, sockets cavernous. Her skin was clammy, glistening, almost gelatinous. Hair streamered black down the corpse’s shoulders—
That film-hiccup effect again. She was no longer in the bathroom.
A half-moon perched high in the sky, bathing her in monochrome light. She sat in her bed, quilt pooled around her hips. Her wrists thrummed with pain, hot now instead of the cold of the thing in the bathtub. Leaning across the bed, she turned on the nightstand lamp.
Blood streaked the sheets.
One of her hands was a tight fist around the nail file, the one she’d been scraping paint off the windowsill with, and it was smeared with blood. Still wet, fresh.
Inside her wrists were a pair of lines burning with hot agony, cut deep with the file, but not deep enough to pierce the vessels. Scary, but not suicide-scary—they had made a mess, but they weren’t bad enough to justify calling an ambulance. Had she tried to slit her own wrists in her sleep?
No … they weren’t just “lines.” Splaying toward the crooks of her elbows were three lobes where she had cut the Elder Futhark chicken-foot symbol into her skin.
She pulled a T-shirt out of her dresser and tore it into strips, winding them around the cuts on her arms, then stripped her top sheet and retrieved her laptop. She checked her browser history, but there were reams and reams of research there, probably fifty or sixty links to pages about ancient symbols. Too many to suss out the meaning of the drawing she’d carved into her own arms. More than she remembered seeing earlier.
How long has Mom been doing this? she wondered, eyes welling. What is she even doing? What was she saying in the bathroom?
In her bookmarks, she didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Webcomics, links to Etsy shops, YouTube channels, Wattpad stories, DeviantArt galleries, Facebook groups, history websites for homework. She scrolled to the bottom: an online order form for Miguel’s Pizza and a link to the first season of a show on a pirated-anime website.
Going back to the history, she got an idea. Maybe she’d carved her arms as soon as she’d found the symbol, which meant the page with the symbol would be at the bottom.
Click. RuneSecrets. There it was. The three-lobed Y.
“Algiz,” she mouthed silently. “Represents the divine might of the universe. A Norse symbol of divine blessing and protection.” It also stood for the elk. Below was a large picture of the algiz rune. “Alignment with the divine makes a person sacred, set apart from the mundane.”
Past-Me knew what was going on. Dots of blood pierced the gray cotton around her wrists. Maybe these blood sacrifices would protect her from them—from the gap-faced ghoul, whoever or whatever it was. God, how long? How long has she been making me forget? Is this the first time I’ve tried to push back?
Maybe this symbol, this “algiz” would protect her. Protect her from her mother—from the woman who imprisoned her and made her forget.
You can’t wash away a scar.
1
Present Day
Forty yards back, a steel pole as bbig around as Michael DePalatis’s arm stretched across the overgrown dirt road. Pulling the police cruiser up to the gate, he unbuckled his seat belt and started to open the door.
“I got it.” Owen checked the gate and found there was, indeed, a chain confining the gate to its mount, and a padlock secured it. Two of them, in fact.
Hypothetically, they could go around it, if not for the impenetrable forest on either side. “Shit.” Mike got out of the car anyway. “Looks like we’re walking.” He hopped over the gate, his keys jingling. The grass beat against Mike’s shins, and hidden briars plucked at his socks. “When we get out of here, you might want to check yourself for ticks. Few years ago, I was part of a search effort out in woods like this, and when I got home, I found one on my dick.”
“Oh, that’s nasty,” said Owen. He laughed like a kookaburra.
Conversation slipped into silence. The two men walked for what felt like a half an hour, forging through tall wheatgrass and briars. Mike glanced at his partner as they walked. Officer Owen Euchiss was a scarecrow with an angular van Gogh face. The black police uniform looked like a Halloween costume on him.
They called him Opie after the sheriff’s son on The Andy Griffith Show because of his first two initials, which he signed on all of his traffic citations. His constant sly grin reminded Mike of kids he’d gone to school with, the little white-trash hobgoblins who would snort chalk dust on a dare and brag about tying bottle rockets to cats’ tails. Middle age had refined him a
little, but the Scut Farkus was still visible under Opie’s mask of dignified wrinkles.
“Ferris wheel,” said Owen, snapping Mike out of his reverie. He straightened, peering into the trees.
The track they were walking down widened, grass giving way to gravel, and skeletal machines materialized through the pine boughs. They emerged into a huge clearing that was once a parking lot, and on the other side of that was an arcade lined with tumbledown amusement park rides, the frames and tracks choked with foliage.
Had to admit, the place had a sort of postapocalyptic Logan’s Run grandeur about it. A carnival lost in time.
The two policemen walked aimlessly down the central avenue, heels crunching on the gravel. “What did Bowker say we’re supposed to be looking for?” asked Owen.
“You heard the same thing I heard.”
“‘Something shady.’”
They came to a split, facing a concession stand. Owen took out his flashlight and broke off to the left, heading toward a funhouse. “I’ll check over here.”
Mike went right. A purple-and-gray Gravitron bulged from the woodline like an ancient UFO. Across the way was a tall umbrella-framed ride, chains dangling from the ends of each spoke like something out of Hellraiser. He contemplated this towering contraption and decided it had been a swing for kids, but without the seats, it could have been a centrifuge where you hung slabs of beef from the chains and spun the cow blood out of them. Or maybe it was some kind of giant flogging-machine that just turned and turned and whipped and whipped.
When the rides had been damaged enough and lost so much of what identified them, they became alien and monstrous.
Third-wheel mobile homes made a village in the back, caved in by the elements. Bushes cloaked their flanks and bristled from inside. He slapped a whiny mosquito on his face.
Blood on his fingers. He wiped it on his uniform pants.
After wandering in and out of the carnie village, Mike decided none of them were in good enough shape to sustain life. He headed back into the main arcade.
At this point, he had developed an idea of what Wonderland looked like from above: an elongated I like a cartoon dog-bone, the arcade forming the long straight part down the middle. Mike stood at the west end of the dog-bone, staring at the concession stand, and took his hat off to scratch his head.
He took the left-hand path, walking toward the funhouse. Behind the concession stand to his right was a series of roach-coaches: food trucks with busted, cloudy windows, wreathed in tall grass. A Tilt-A-Whirl, an honest-to-God Tilt-A-Whirl. Bushes and a tree thrust up through the ride, dislodging plates of metal and upending the seashell-shaped cars. A wooden shed with two doors stood behind the Tilt-A-Whirl, quite obviously an improvised latrine.
Here, the tree line marked the end of Wonderland. A chain-link fence tried to separate fun from forest, but sagged over, trampled by some long-gone woodland animal. Tucked between the Tilt-A-Whirl and the smashed fence was a pair of gray-green military Quonset huts. At the end of one of them stood a door with no window in it, secured with a padlock. NO ADMITTANCE—EMPLOYEES ONLY!
“The hell?” Mike lifted the padlock. No more than a couple of years old. Schlage. As he tried the doorknob, the entire wall flexed subtly with a muffled creak. Old plywood? He pressed his palms against the door and pushed. The striker plate crackled and the wall bowed inward several inches.
“Geronimo,” he grunted, and stomp-kicked the door. The entire wall shook.
Another kick set the door crooked in the frame. The third kick ripped the striker out and the whole door twisted to the inside, the hinge breaking loose.
Inside was pure, jet-black, car-full-of-assholes darkness. Dust made soup of the air. Mike took out his flashlight and turned it on, holding it by his temple, and stepped into the hut. A workbench stood against the wall to his right, and a dozen buckets and empty milk jugs were piled in the corner, all of them stained pink. Wooden signs and pictures were stacked against the walls:
VISIT HOOT’S FUNHOUSE!
ARE YOU TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL? DRINK FIREWATER SARSAPARILLA!
GET LOST IN OUR HALL OF MIRRORS!
Three hooks jutted up from the bare cement floor in the middle of the room. Chains were attached to them, and the chains led up to three pulleys.
Old blood stained the floor around the hooks.
“Ah, hell,” said Mike, drawing his pistol.
On the other side of the workbench was a door. He gave the stains a wide berth, sidling along the wall.
Flashlight in one hand and pistol in the other, he crossed his wrists Hollywood-style and pushed the door open with his elbow. Beyond, the polished black body of a Monte Carlo reflected his Maglite beam.
POW! Something exploded in the eerie stillness.
A bolt of lightning hit Mike in the ass. Electricity crackled down the Taser’s flimsy wires, tak-tak-tak-tak, racing down the backs of his thighs, and he hit the floor bleating like a goat. The pistol in his hand fired into the wall between his jitterbugging feet, blinding him with a white flash.
“You had to come in here, didn’t you?” asked the silhouette in the doorway, tossing the Taser aside and plucking the pistol out of Mike’s hands. Chains rattled through a pulley and coiled around his ankles. Strong, sinewy hands hauled him up by the feet and suspended him above the floor. One of those white five-gallon buckets slid into view underneath his forehead, knocking his useless arms out of the way, and then his hands were jerked up behind his back and he was locked up in his own cuffs, dangling like Houdini about to be lowered into a glass booth full of water. “This is what I should have done to that faggot, instead of lettin’ him hang around,” said a man’s voice, reminiscent of Opie but growlier, deeper, more articulate. “But I got his fuckin’ car now. Sweet ride, ain’t it? Did you see it in there?”
Mike’s heart lunged at the snick of a blade being flicked out of a box cutter.
“No, please!” he managed to grunt.
“You live, you learn, I guess.” The man cut a deep fish-gill V in Mike’s neck, two quick slashes from his collarbone to his chin.
Both his carotid and his jugular squirted up his cheeks and over his eyes, beading in his hair. The pain came a full second later, a searing cattle-brand pincering his throat. Mike gurgled, sputtered, trying to ask questions, deliver threats and pleas, but there was nobody in the garage to hear him.
The door slammed shut, leaving Mike in musty darkness.
2
Heinrich’s eyes were intense—not wide and starey eyes, but small, flinty. He’d grown a beard at some point, and it was as gray as brushed steel. He was a big man—not burly or stocky, but long-trunked and long-limbed, with a commanding, arboreal presence. Robin’s witch-hunting mentor looked like a bounty hunter from the Civil War.
To her eternal surprise, the old man took his coffee as sweet as a granny. She studied his face as he folded his sunglasses neatly, hanging them from the collar of his shirt.
“I watched the video you posted the other day and knew you were heading back to Georgia. Hopped in the car and hauled ass out here. That’s why I haven’t been answering the phone—I’ve been on the road.” They all sat around the kitchen table in the Victorian house at 1168 Underwood, nursing cups of Folger’s and listening to Heinrich recount how he caught up to his protégée. Robin was still a bit dazed from the previous night’s encounter with what the kids called “Owlhead,” the ensuing vision she’d had of her much younger mother summoning it, and the antipsychotic meds she’d overdosed on in an attempt to dispel what she’d thought was a hallucination.
Her GoPro camera lay on the counter next to the coffeemaker, recording their impromptu palaver. “Did you come out here to help me,” Robin asked, “or stop me?”
Taking off his gambler hat with a measured motion, Heinrich placed it in the center of the table, revealing his glossy brown head. He regarded her with a flat stare, Kenway and Leon sitting quietly to either side, and ignored the question. Instead, he asked, “Wha
t are the side effects?”
“Ischemic stroke. Anaphylactic shock.” She looked out the window at a slate-gray sky. “… Seizures.”
Heinrich rolled his head in wry agreement. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. You had a seizure last night, according to these men,” he said, giving the eyeshadowed Joel an assessing up-and-down. The pizza-man eyeballed him right back, folding his arms indignantly. “Maybe you do need to ease off.”
“I don’t think you need any more,” Kenway said in a flat growl.
“I have been cutting back.” Robin frowned. “But I need them to stop the hallucinations.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Hallucinations?” asked Leon. “You mean this kind of thing has happened before?” He glanced toward the hallway door, as if his son Wayne were standing there. She could see the protectiveness written all over his face. Embarrassment she hadn’t experienced in a long time made her face burn. She probably wouldn’t have felt this way if Wayne weren’t involved; she could almost hear Leon thinking of ways to keep him away from her.
“On top of the illusions that the witches can plant in your mind, I’ve been seeing strange things for a very long time,” she told him. “Night terrors. Nightmares that might be memories—”
(Go ahead and look, buzzed a stretched-out face.)
She visibly flinched, and a little coffee spilled on the table. Robin mopped at it with the sleeve of her hoodie. “—memories that might be nightmares. And the owl-headed thing.”
“Well, I think we proved Owlhead ain’t a hallucination. I saw it with my own eyes. Maybe all that other shit is real too.” Leon’s taut expression loosened a little. “Maybe you’re not crazy after all.”
“We’ll discuss your meds later.” Heinrich took out a cigar and leaned forward with his elbows on the table, examining it at length as if it were the bullet destined to end his life. “I’m sure there’s some other antipsychotic that won’t fuck you up so much.” He didn’t offer one to anybody else, even though he knew Robin was a smoker. “Anyway. I ain’t here to be your pharmacist, and I sure as hell ain’t here to stop you. I ain’t never been able to stop you before.”