by S. A. Hunt
“I’m coming to find youuuu!” Ginny called from somewhere to her distant right, shouting in a singsong voice.
Lifting the rear sash, Delilah climbed into the bed of the truck, letting it sigh back down on pneumatic hinges.
Crammed against the front of the cargo space was a fluffy black bale of pine needles. Many of the needles had slipped out and now coated the floor of the truck bed with a thin, crunchy carpet. Inside the camper shell, the air seemed sapped of oxygen—stifling hot, grainy with the smell of earth and bitter pine. The side windows were painted over with the red of the body, coloring the light from the streetlamps a boudoir crimson.
To Delilah’s right as she climbed in was a burlap sack with FERTILIZER stenciled across the front, full of something large, bulbous, as big as the girl herself. Next to that was a Stihl weed eater with a well-gnawed line, encrusted with grass and reeking of gasoline. A gardener-man, she thought, duck-walking over to the bale of pine needles and settling down beside it. I wonder if he plants tulips? She loved tulips, loved the light, sweet smell of them.
“I’m going to find you,” said Ginny from somewhere in front of the truck. It had been parked facing the apartment building, with the rear pointing at the dark street. Delilah could hear the little girl’s new shoes clopping along the pavement as she skipped from car to car. “Ah-ha!… No, I guess not.”
Delilah froze in place and slowed her breathing. Her belly rose and fell under her T-shirt and she pinched the seams of her jeans, anticipating her discovery in the hot, dark camper, studying the rough denim with her fingertips as she listened.
“Are you in here?” Ginny asked. A car door opened with a metallic crackle. A couple of heartbeats passed. “Nope.” The door slammed shut, ker-tunk!
Sitting there in the gas-smelling dark, Delilah strained at the limit of her hearing, pine needles poking through her jeans. She slid an inch to her left as quietly as possible and pressed herself against the bristly straw bale. Ginny sounded closer. She gave a surfer-like “Whoa” and walked right up to the snake truck. “Check that out.” Delilah could hear her creeping around the vehicle, taking in the entirety of the artwork. A tiny hand trailed down the side of the panel with a susurrant hiss that sounded more snakelike than Delilah wanted to admit. She shifted to get away from a pine needle poking her and rested her feet against the burlap sack.
Whatever was inside the bag was solid. Whatever it was, it wasn’t fertilizer.
“Whoa,” Ginny said again, this time from the passenger side of the truck. She giggled. “Look at those boobies. She looks like Thor.”
Delilah could hear her breathing even over her own. Ginny was a tall, Nordic little blonde girl who never had any trouble clearing her plate at dinner and stayed stocky and moon-faced even though she was an active kid and played kickball. Delilah could see Ginny in her mind’s eye, swiping a wispy lock of hair out of her big pink grinning face.
A voice called from the apartment building. “Regina! Time to come in!”
Ginny sighed. “Okay, Mama,” she called back. Delilah thought about popping out to surprise her but realized she could reuse this spot next time. Why ruin it now? “Okay, Lilah! You can come out now!” shouted Ginny. “I have to go back in!”
Waiting until Ginny had left, Delilah stayed quiet. She really was a ninja! She had gone undetected. She got up off the floor of the bed and crouched there in the womblike red shadow, striking a kung-fu pose. “Kyah.” She whispered spirit-shouts to herself. “Kyah. Eeyah.” She threw a punch, and then another with the other hand, then tried to kick, but the low ceiling didn’t give her enough room to maintain her center of balance, so she fell back on her butt. She caught herself with her hands, raking the inside of her forearm down the rock-chipped edge of the weed-trimmer head. “Ouch!”
Her hand landed on some angular object inside the burlap bag. It was flat on one side. She raised her arm into the dim light and saw that the trimmer hadn’t broken skin, but there was a painful four-inch red welt.
Tugging back the rim of the burlap sack, Delilah saw a New Balance tennis shoe.
Time ground to a halt. Even the cicadas silenced themselves, though not all at once—dwindling to three or four, and then one buzzing razz tapered off into nothing. All thought of ninjas fled her mind. She was a seven-year-old girl again, bewildered and vulnerable and alone.
Fear didn’t quite enter into it, not yet. Some lingering logic said the bag was full of old hand-me-down shoes; a load of clothes destined for Goodwill. Maybe the owner of the truck was a good-hearted man that collected old giveaways for the church or something. She pressed her fingertips against the burlap sack again and felt another shoe inside.
Good.
A big bag of shoes for the church. She relaxed and peeled the bag open a little bit more. Wrapped in a striped sock, a skinny ankle protruded from the mouth of the shoe, pale, hairless.
Delilah’s mouth moved, but nothing came out.
If something had come from her mouth, it would have been “Mama, Mama, Mama,” but for some reason, her voice box didn’t want to work, the wind wouldn’t catch the guitar strings, her throat wouldn’t respond. She just kept mouthing the word over and over again. Her legs didn’t want to work either. She wanted to get out of the truck, to crawl over to the sash and push it open, throw herself out of the camper shell, and run home. But she couldn’t quite wrap her mind around the sight of seeing a little boy’s legs poking out of a fertilizer bag in the back of a stranger’s truck, and it was the confusion that kept her frozen. Instead of directing her feet to propel her outside, her child brain could only spin in place, trying to reconcile one with the other, tires in deep mud.
She touched the leg. Cold.
Dead cold.
This was incorrect, untrue, unreal. It didn’t make sense. People didn’t die like this. People died in hospitals at a ripe old age and their family cried over them at the funeral home, people in cheap gray suits and bifocals. They were buried in cemeteries with flowers and pretty headstones with carvings of angels and animals. You don’t walk on graves. That’s rude, Miss Delilah Lee. Go ’round them.
“Are you okay in there?” The words came out wrong. Strangled, wet. She touched her own face and realized she was crying. “Boy? Are you oh— Are you okay?”
Taking the edge of the sack opening in both hands, she pulled it up, up, up, past the boy’s knees. He was wearing a pair of black gym shorts. She would have kept going, but the sack was caught on the toe of his shoe. With a terrified respect, Delilah pulled the burlap back down, covering the boy’s legs, and started sobbing outright. The inside of the painted-over camper swam in red chaos, a hot-box full of blood, and she went for the back sash.
Nothing there but a round hole where the handle was supposed to be.
For the second time in as many minutes, reality ceased to color inside the lines. Delilah’s hand swept back and forth across the middle of the sash, looking for the handle, but it wasn’t there. The only thing marking its prior presence was the round hole in the sash frame. Inside, she could see the mechanism that operated the latch, but she couldn’t figure out how to move the parts.
In the cab of the truck, someone sat up in the passenger seat.
She became moveless and silent, unwilling to give herself away, a fawn in the grass. The man fetched a heavy sigh and unlatched the cab’s rear window, sliding it open. He twisted in the seat and peered inside, a silhouette crowned with a shock of fiery copper hair. She couldn’t quite see his face, but his head was big. He had the affect of a pit viper, with a wide-set jaw and narrow throat.
“Hey there,” said the man. His voice was dry and high, like sandpaper, like the scraping of sandstone vaults.
Delilah said nothing.
“I know you’re back there, your friend woke me up looking for you.”
Delilah’s burning eyes refused to blink. She was afraid to take them off the wide-headed shadow in the front seat. Snot crept down her upper lip.
“What�
��s your name?” he asked.
Nothing.
“Not talkin’, huh? I can dig it,” he said, emphasizing the phrase with a brief jazz-hand. “Smart. Y’know, when I was your age, I was great at hide-and-seek. Nobody could find me. I knew all the best hiding places. My friends called me Snake—’cause I could wriggle into the littlest places.”
“Lilah,” said the girl. She hunkered against the tailgate, shivering.
“Hmm?”
“My name is Delilah.”
“Delilah,” the man said pleasantly. “Pretty name. Mine’s Roy. Maybe I can teach you a few things about hiding, huh? You don’t want to jump in the back of a crazy-lookin’ truck like this one. This is a bad place. I can show you where to hide where no one will ever, ever find you again.” He put a zip tie between his lips and let it dangle there, as if it were a wheat-straw in a cowboy’s mouth. Delilah thought it looked like a snake’s tongue.
Deet-deet. The stillness was broken by an electronic alarm. Roy took a phone out of his pocket and studied it, the screen illuminating his face. His nose was pointed, his nostrils wide, his eyes thin and somehow both clever and stupid at once. As he read the message, his mean slash of a mouth formed silent words.
“Looks like I need to get back to the house. No rest for the wicked.” His eyes flashed up to Delilah and he got out of the truck. The camper sash opened with a creak, allowing cool night air to pour in like fresh river-water, and the man scowled in at her. “Out of the truck, princess,” said Roy, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “Game’s canceled.”
Delilah clambered over the tailgate and stumbled onto the pavement.
Leaning over her, the redheaded man smiled. “Run on home. And if you tell anybody I was here, well … I know where you live. And I promise you, you don’t want to play hide-and-seek with me. I know where you live.” Getting back into his truck, Roy regarded her with those tiny, venomous eyes. “Stay outta strangers’ cars, kid. You’ll live longer.”
7
Dinner was amazing. Kenway’s steaks turned out perfectly, and to her chagrin, Robin found the witches’ side dishes more than adequate: potato salad with tender little chunks of boiled egg, dusted with smoked paprika; garlic-buttered corn on the cob; bundles of asparagus spears, each wrapped in bacon and fried; scoops of bruschetta; and to cut the savory, sweet-potato casserole topped with toasted marshmallows and crushed pecans. They ate at the table in the garden, the lowering dusk kept at bay by citronella tiki-torches that smelled like grapefruit.
You know, Kenway probably can’t see us inside the garden because of the wall. That felt like bad news, even though she was probably more capable of defending herself against the coven than he was. I wonder if he’s even observing. When I decided to go to dinner, I didn’t fill him in on an alternate plan. No doubt Heinrich is carrying the water, though. Probably up a tree with a directional microphone, knowing him. Her eyes scanned the dark forest, raking the pines for a glowing cigar-tip. She missed Kenway, wanted him there, should have brought him in. Needed his warm, lumbering closeness. He made her feel safe and normal, two things she hadn’t experienced in a very long time. Him and his broad back, and his romance-novel hair, and his laid-back Baloo way. He made her feel like someone stood beside her against the world for a change. Maybe that’s why I like him so much, she understood, watching the old women eat. Not that she was weak without him, but it was nice to be able to rely on someone other than yourself for a change.
“Miss Cutty,” said Leon. “We were talking about how unusual your house is on the walk out here.”
“Would you be surprised to know that it used to be a whorehouse?”
If the man could have blushed red, he would have. “A whorehouse?”
“Well, I suppose the more tactful parlance might be brothel. It’s called the Lazenbury House, after its original builder and owner, William Lazenbury. He was a nineteenth-century coal baron from Virginia. He built it in the lawless days of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. Customers came from miles around. In its heyday, that house saw its fair share of murders—gunslingers fighting over a card game, drunken brawling, jealous lovers a little too attached to the working girls.
“The murders, of course, had everyone convinced that the house was haunted,” said Marilyn, sipping her tea. “But then, you get that with any old house with historical value like mine. Wanted it the moment I saw it, but I had to wait for the owner to die first.”
“So, you really are witches?” asked Wayne.
“We are, honey,” said Theresa.
“You don’t look like witches.”
Cutty smiled graciously. Robin knew enough about her to see under the mask and knew it was an act. “Pray tell, young man—what is a witch supposed to look like?”
Wayne’s eyes danced from his father to Robin, and then he murmured to Cutty, shrinking a little bit, “I don’t know.” A piece of bread touched his lips, clutched in his hands like a squirrel. He spoke into it bashfully. “Green? With all black clothes and a big floppy hat?”
“And a wart on my nose and a broom and a cauldron full of bubbling brew?”
He pushed his glasses up on his nose.
“Well, you can thank artistic license for that depiction. Pure fiction.” She cut into her steak, talking as she did so. “… It’s sort of like Santa Claus. You know what the real Santa Claus looks like, yes?”
“Santa Claus?” Wayne sat up, putting down the bread and pantomiming a beard. They had obviously strayed into something a ten-year-old could be enthusiastic about. “Yeah! He’s all dressed up in red, and he’s got rosy cheeks and a big white beard. He carries a giant sack full of toys and rides in a sleigh pulled by reindeer.”
Cutty forked the bite of steak into her mouth and waved this away as if to dispel it. “A fiction, concocted by a newspaper cartoonist and perpetuated by the Coca-Cola company to sell soda. The real man looked much different, and didn’t live at the North Pole.”
“Wait, Santa Claus is real?”
“Oh, absolutely. The name ‘Santa Claus’ comes from Sinterklaas, which is the Dutch name for Saint Nicholas, also known as the bishop Nikolaos of the ancient Greek city of Myra. People left their shoes out on the stoop at night, and Nikolaos would leave coins in them.” Cutty’s features lightened in an open disbelief so uncharacteristic to her that Robin almost laughed in her face. “You don’t believe in Santa Claus?”
“Lady, I’m a hood kid.”
Leon’s face twisted in disapproval. “You ain’t no hood kid.”
The boy shrugged his shoulders, pushing his glasses up on his nose, as if he were more chastised at being caught saying it in front of his father than possibly being wrong.
“Just because you grew up in Chicago—” Leon began, but trailed off. He looked to Cutty. “Anyway, you were saying, Santa Claus was a Greek priest?”
“Yes. He was a very generous man, and he was also one of the most powerful magicians and alchemists that ever lived. He was tall and skinny, with a long beard. Nicholas died in the year 343 and his remains were buried in Italy.” Cutty swirled her tea, the ice clinking musically against the glass. She eyed Robin. “The point of my history lesson is, most things are not as others would have you believe. There is always a long story behind an old face.”
“So, witches aren’t the only ones that can do magic?”
Weaver stifled a burp. “Hell, no. We don’t really like to call it ‘magic,’ by the way. That’s busking, card tricks, that kind of shit.”
“Witches are the most prominent manipulators of paranormal energy these days,” said Cutty. “Always have been, really. Men can do it as well, like Nikolaos of Myra, but it requires artificial means. They can’t do it naturally like we can. They require conduits, relics such as crystal balls, alchemy, staves. As a Christian, Nicholas used a shepherd’s crook … which is where candy canes came from, if you can believe that.
“Whole secret societies have risen and fallen over the centuries, seeking to channel the Gift. Thaumaturgy,
which is the name we use for it, is threaded into our very being. Men—wizards, warlocks, magi, magicians, whatever they choose to call themselves, can only borrow this force using crude artifacts. We are filled with it. Thanks be to the goddess of the afterlife, Ereshkigal, we are magic. All magic comes from a supernatural patron, and we are more connected to ours than any other practitioner.”
Robin smiled. “You make it sound so noble.”
“Is it not?”
“Not when you bleed people dry of their lives with the nag shi. Drain them of their happiness, their spirit—”
Cutty held up a hand. Her fingers were slender and pale, young-looking, no longer knob-knuckled. Robin realized underneath the warm, diffuse glow of the citronella candles, the old woman’s face was softer, less creased than it ought to be. Younger. “You promised you weren’t going to bring us any drama, littlebird.”
That term of endearment brought back old, old memories. Herself as a tiny child, sitting in the Lazenbury’s kitchen, eating cookies and drinking apple juice, reading the comics out of the Sunday paper or watching cartoons on the wood-cabinet Magnavox. Marilyn Cutty had a dog back then, a miniature pinscher named Penny, for the coins of copper fur over his eyes.
Littlebird. She cast a glance at Wayne. “I did.”
“You’re an honest soul,” said Cutty. “I remember when you used to call me Grandmother. Hell, two days out of every week, you’d be up here knocking on my kitchen door, crying about your mummy and daddy fighting about this or that.”
“Why didn’t you get another dog when Penny died?”
Cutty stumbled. “Oh … well, I don’t know. I suppose it just hurt too much to lose him. And besides, there was no little girl to come around and play with a dog anymore. Once you found makeup and boys and such, my little tomboy stopped visiting.” She cut a spear of asparagus into several bites. “I came to visit you in the hospital after … after your mother, you know.”