I Come with Knives

by S. A. Hunt

  “Hey, Kenny.”

  A low, thin voice, a familiar papery rasp, coming from the dark door at the end of the hallway.

  Hairs on Kenway’s scalp tingled, and the sensation trickled down his arms. “Heinrich? Is that you?” His voice was barely more than a whisper. He turned to more fully confront the shadowy hallway, cartoons playing riot over his back.

  “What’s for breakfast?” the voice rasped again.

  Definitely coming from the dark door down there. The second one, the one the old man had already searched, the one like a dirty monk’s quarters.

  Fingertips on his right hip, Kenway found only denim, the smooth arc of his belt. No pistol. It had been instinct to reach for it, to find the comfort of the 45’s cold, angular steel.

  I know that voice. Where do I know that voice from?

  Creak of hardwood underfoot. His boots carried him slowly up the carpet runner, toward the deep black sliver between the door and the frame, carrying him toward some mean promise of things he should but shouldn’t see. A secret. Hidden things, a broken vow, an old regret. At the threshold now. Silence beyond. His hand floated up and his fingertips pressed against the cold wood of the bedroom door. He pushed it open and confronted the void. Hinges squealed softly.

  Even the darkness seemed to be solid on the other side, yielding like a black sheet. Inside the dark he could make out the ledge of a bedside, a quilt of Byzantine squares, all rendered in the monochrome of night.

  Some shape underneath the quilt. Feet, perhaps.

  “Hey, brother,” rasped the voice, from the bed. The feet moved, the squares shifted.

  “Fuck you,” whispered Kenway, his voice choked and quavering. His heart thudded in his chest, a hammer beating on a kettle drum.

  “I took my medicine,” rasped the voice, in a shuddering, robotic way, like someone talking through a box fan. “I took my medicine already, before I laid down to sleep. I feel better.”

  The shape slid out of sight, and the quilt flattened.

  “I feel better this way,” rasped the voice.

  “No.”

  “I’m better now,” rasped the voice. “Touch me. Feel me. I’m okay now that you’re here, battle buddy.” A hand eased into view, sliding across the quilt. It was a man’s hand, gray, waxy-looking. The fingernails were blue, the faded blue of old jeans. Despite his terror, Kenway found himself reaching out with one shaking set of fingers, trembling.

  At the last moment, he flinched them into a fist. “Chris,” he said. Emotion twisted his voice into a croak. “You’re not here. Oh my god, you’re not.”

  “You don’t believe in ghosts?”

  “Goddamn, fuck me, no, no, I don’t.” His head slowly shook back and forth of its own accord, as if he could alter reality by force of will alone. “I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t. I can’t.”

  “That’s a shame,” rasped the buzzing voice, the buzzing of flies in a pie tin. It made Kenway think of Joe Walsh making his guitar speak with a Talk Box. “Ghosts believe in you.” The gray hand darted out and grabbed his, palm cupping his knuckles. The hand was cold, not just cool

  (cold, colder than 95 degrees. I remember the temperature)

  it was the cold of marble, or lunchmeat

  (like somebody stole him and replaced him with a ham. Right there, in that bedroom, I thought he was playing a prank on me.)

  The occupant of the bed leaned forward into the light. Staff Sergeant Chris Hendry’s face resolved from the shadows, and Kenway was horrified to see the black veins standing out on the man’s swollen face. Tongue like a boxing glove, filling his mouth with a sea slug of purple meat, Chris’s eyes cast skyward like saints in old paintings, the undersides streaked with black vessels. His skin had the white, turgid look of boiled chicken. Dried blood crusted the rims of his nostrils.

  “Good morning,” he buzzed.

  Kenway recoiled in terror, backing out of the bedroom. His fingertips discovered the absence of his nonexistent pistol again.

  “You’re not real,” he told the black doorway.

  No answer. Motion, a shape, nothing more than a pale smear, beyond the door.

  Rigored arms grasped the doorframe, and Chris’s dead body pulled itself out into the hallway. The corpse emerged, slowly, silently, floating just above the hardwood floor. Chris was dressed in the clothes he’d died in, an ancient Metallica T-shirt and a pair of tighty-whities. Or, at least, that’s what Kenway assumed the T-shirt had on it; the front was crusted with a spray of thick, granular vomit.

  “You aren’t real.”

  Apparently, Chris was done talking, because he had no further reply.

  Cartoon colors from the television swam across his dead, bloated, emotionless face. The corpse glided toward him like an astronaut on a spacewalk, and the tips of his toes dragged along the carpet runner. Dried tears formed a powdery crust in his eyelashes. “YOU LET ME DIE,” Chris stated in his slow, papery, buzzing robot-voice. It had become fuzzy with distortion, like a scrambled cable signal.

  The second-floor railing pressed against Kenway’s back.

  “YOU LET ME GET COLD,” said the cadaver, hanging motionless in midair. His eyes had rolled back into his head, revealing more of the black vessels worming across his eyeballs. “YOU DIDN’T EVEN KNOW I WAS DEAD.”

  His guts all twisted up inside him, his fists clenched, Kenway sprinted for the stairs, prosthetic leg clanking down the iron risers. As he went, he thought he heard the sound of an old woman cackling, perhaps it was the TV behind him, he was running across the living room, into the kitchen, out the back door, running pell-mell down the long dirt driveway.

  By the time he realized he’d left Heinrich in the Lazenbury House, he was past the mailbox. He hesitated, clomping to an ungainly stop in the middle of Underwood Road.

  Go back, you coward piece of shit. Kenway turned and stared at the witches’ house. His hand went to his empty hip again. Looming over him was the Parkins’ Victorian house, the cupola thrust into the night sky like the devil’s top hat. Heat lightning flickered silent paparazzi flashes in the red clouds. Go back. They need you.

  “I’m sorry,” he told the cooling night. “I didn’t know. I had no idea you took the pills. I didn’t see you do it. You never said anything.”

  Run, you coward. Run and hide.

  “You just laid down and died. You never said anything. You never told me you were doing it. You never asked for help.”

  On his knees, he pressed his forehead to the cold asphalt. He wanted to pry the highway from the ground and crawl underneath it like a bedsheet. His self-admonishments were interrupted by a sound welling out of the distance, an immense, prehistoric roar from beyond the Lazenbury House like Godzilla crawling out of his grave—a deep, saurian steel mixed with the plaintive squeal of a hog, reverberating in the Georgia trees.

  Tears trickled down his face as he stood.

  Gunshots rang out across the night. Muffled at first, coming from inside the house. And then one final blast out on the driveway, followed by a man’s scream. Crossing the road to the Parkin family’s Victorian house, Kenway dug his keys out of his pocket and headed for his truck.

  Yeah, there you go, run and hide.

  That’s all you’ve ever been good at, isn’t it?

  Rain began to fall.

  10

  Deeper and deeper into the garden, Robin felt as though they had gradually stepped out of the world and penetrated a quiet, savage wilderness where no civilized man had been in quite some time, if ever. Her imagination painted grotesque Lovecraftian coyotes lurking the trellises, tendril-eyed hounds that ate rotten grapes and anyone stupid enough to wander into their territories.

  Territories, that’s what it felt like. She expected to see a signpost at some point, with arrows directing her toward points unknown: WONDERLAND, 88 MILES. THIS WAY TO NARNIA. MID-WORLD, NEXT EXIT. The phrase back forty kept popping into her head. Back forty. Back forty. Forty what? Miles? Leagues? She was about to ask Marilyn how
far it was to the Tennessee border when the grapevines came to an end and they emerged into a neatly mowed clearing.

  Lavender made a sweet game of the evening air. Skirts of purple wildflowers unfurled to either side, lorded over by several trees drooping with dark fuchsia blossoms. Underneath the trees were pools of shadow. In the very center stood the tallest tree, an apple tree, Malus domestica, the reason for her being and the catalyst of her fate.

  Hugging herself against a damp breeze, Robin approached the nag shi.

  Annie’s arboreal sarcophagus was tremendous, larger than any apple tree had a right to be, carrying a globe of green foliage as big as a house. The twisted trunk underneath was a stout and heavy five or six feet in diameter, stooped in burdened anguish. Bark had grown around a collection of knotholes and contour grains, and what might have been the motionless shape of a face peered out at them, a pareidolia face like the Virgin Mary on a piece of toast, smeared sideways in a half-grimace, half-smirk. Robin put her hand on the dryad’s rough bark. Warmth radiated from underneath, as if the wood were a door leading to a room full of fire.

  “I told you I would be back one day, Mama.” She’d hoped there would be an echo of thought, a ripple of sentience like she’d received from the demon Andras, but there was only an apple tree with a faint maternal warmth. She leaned in on both hands and pressed her face to the trunk, rough against her cheek. She wanted to build a treehouse in its branches and live there always. She wondered if the plank swing was still hanging from the tree behind their old house. She would go get it and tie it up here, and swing on it every day.

  “That’s your mama?” asked Wayne.

  Robin nodded. “She died when I was only a little older than you. Now she’s resting in this tree. I think.”

  “You put her there?” he asked Marilyn Cutty.

  The witch only stood there silently, but then said, “Yes. For killing her coven-sister’s husband, and for burning the previous tree.”

  The boy came up and put his hand on the bark.

  A swell of emotion exploded in Robin’s chest at the sight of it. “She’s in pain,” Wayne said, the citronella flame glinting off his glasses. Cutty’s long-staffed tiki-torch gave the scene a strangely cultist vibe. “Long time to be like this.” He pressed his face against the tree as well. “She loved you very much.”

  “Yes, she did.” The girl’s throat burned and tears spilled down her face, threatening to turn into sobs. Between the two of them, face-to-face there in the darkness and torchlight, her voice was an intimate murmur. “She loved everybody. Everybody that was good. And even some that were bad. She tried to save her family from the coven. She made me forget things. She made me half-crazy with missing memories. She made me think I was going out of my mind. But now I understand she was protecting me. In her own screwed-up hillbilly way, she thought she was protecting me.”

  She turned to the old woman. “Can I talk to her? Is that possible?”

  “You can certainly try.” Cutty smiled. “Indeed, I read somewhere that plants grow better if you talk to them. I myself have been known to come out here and have a heart-to-heart with my former protégée from time to time.”

  Clutching the rough bark, Robin turned her face so her ear and cheek pressed against the apple tree. “Mom?” she asked, closing her eyes, straining to hear over the cicadas. She thought she felt the first cold droplet of what the storm had been promising them all evening. “Mom, are you there? I’m back. I came back.”

  No answer. At least, none she thought she could decipher.

  Wind whispered endlessly in Annie’s leaves, swelling and ebbing and cackling and rushing, as if she’d summoned the rest of nature to do her talking for her. Robin balled a fist and pounded on the tree trunk, producing a dull thump. “I have something to tell you, Mama. Something I’ve wanted to tell you for a couple of years now.” She pounded again. And again. Rearing back, she hammered the bark hard enough to gouge the skin on the side of her hand, and instead of that light, almost soundless thud, she thought she heard the hollow bang of a door. “I forgive you, Mama,” she said, and turned, resting with her back against the tree. “You were only doing what you thought was right.”

  Who’s there? It felt as if she were thinking in stereo—her own inner monologue on one side and a soft, almost inaudible voice on the other.

  “Mom?” Silence, scary heart-stopping silence. Had she imagined it? “Are you there?”

  Where am I?

  “Cutty made you into a dryad, Mama. You’re standing in the back garden behind the Lazenbury House. You’re a nag shi, locked up inside an apple tree.”

  Oh, God.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop them.”

  Baby, there was nothing you could do. I called the Owl King to protect our house from them, but turns out there was nothing he could do about familiars.

  “I could have stopped Dad.”

  I love you, and you’ve got more sass than a hundred thousand Reba McEntires, but there’s no chance in the world you could beat your daddy’s ass, especially not if he’s got a cat in him. Jason has a good seventy or eighty pounds on you.

  “I could have. Somehow. If I’d known what was going on.”

  He picked me up over his head and threw me downstairs into the foyer like I was a bag of dirty laundry. You’re a little bitty teenager and you’re probably seventy-five percent pizza roll.

  “Mama, I’m not a teenager. I’m old enough to drink. Daddy went to jail.”

  What?

  “You’ve been here for a few years.”

  Oh, no.

  “Yeah. Hey, but it’s okay. The state took me in. They put me in Medina Psychiatric, got me on mood stabilizers. I did art therapy and watched a lot of Dr. Phil. Found out I’m pretty partial to butterscotch pudding.”

  Her mother’s voice grew stronger as they conversed, until it sounded as if Annie Martine were sitting in the branches of the tree. Robin felt a soft, lilting laugh. Sounds like a hoot. A moment of silence, and then: How did you get out? What are you doing back in Blackfield? Did you age out of the system or something?

  “Heinrich came and got me. Apparently, you knew him.”

  That guy. Yeah, he’s all right. I met him at church. He’s Moses Atterbury’s son, you know, the chaplain at Walker Memorial? He’s the one that gave me the invocation ritual for the Owl King. He said the only thing can scare a witch is a demon, because demons eat their magic. They’re leeches.

  “But not yours.”

  … No, he fed on me plenty. The Owl King fed on me for more than a decade. He was like a big ol’ tick, hanging around our house, getting fat on my heart-road. Suckin’ on me like the bottom of a milkshake. How do you think you were able to resist my Gift long enough to draw Norse protection runes on yourself?

  Did Heinrich take care of you, by the way? I only knew him for a few months, but he seemed all right. Ain’t never met a man that knew magic. I don’t know why he came and got you, though. What are you to him? He don’t even know you. You wasn’t even born yet when I knew him.

  “He can be an asshole, and he likes to keep secrets, but he taught me how to fight. Said he came and got me because he figured he owed it to you, to take me under his wing.”

  Good girl. The voice was fading again. You always was good at fighting.

  “Mama, before I go, I need to know.” Robin turned once more, both hands gripping her mother’s bark. “What did you do?” She leaned close and whispered into the tree’s jagged folds, “What price did you pay for the Owl King’s help? What did you give him?”

  She waited for Annie’s reply, but none came.

  “What did you do, Mama?”

  Still nothing.

  “Go home, littlebird,” Cutty said quietly.

  Opening her eyes, turning to face the others, Robin looked over her shoulder and said hoarsely, “What?”

  “Go home,” the witch repeated. “The Victorian across the street, Hammer’s hidey-hole in Texas, I don’t even care if y
ou drive around in your van and do what you do to the others out there, as long as it doesn’t involve this coven.” Her face softened, as did her tone, and she gazed up into the tree’s branches. “Annie is mine and here she’ll stay. This town is mine. Take my advice and forget about her, and Blackfield, and me. Leave. She is paying penance for her foolishness and there is nothing here for you but heartache. And if you persist, death.”

  The GoPro on Wayne’s chest cast a red glow on Annie’s bark, firelight through a keyhole. Robin straightened and stepped back from the dryad.

  “Do you remember what I asked you that last day?” asked Cutty.

  “The last day you ever saw me? When me and my mom were having that fight, and I came up to your house to see you?”

  “You were getting away from her, not visiting me. But yes. Remember when I offered my home to you, said you should come and live with me, and escape from your mother’s delusions, until you could graduate high school?”

  “Yes. Now I realize what you were doing—recruiting me.”

  “I wish you had taken me up on it,” said Cutty. “Oh, how much easier things would have been. How wonderful and how strong you could have become. It may not be too late, you know. We are immortal. Become one of us, if you can. You will have all the time in the world to cast off that husk of immaturity and be something authentic. Something real. An heiress for the ages. Can you imagine?”

  “I can imagine seeing you wish in one hand and shit in the other, and I can imagine which one fills up first.”

  “You were always so delightfully crude. Once we had you under our wing, we could have repaired your manners. Crafted you into a proper lady, not”—Cutty waved a dismissive hand at her—“whatever this trailer-trash road warrior is.”

  “I’m going to ignore that.” Robin wanted to punch her, but the visual of her fist making contact with her erstwhile grandmother’s face compressed her guts into a heavy wooden ball in her belly. Some random deadhead out in the Chicago projects was one thing, but this woman had sheltered and fed her for years.