by S. A. Hunt
The top of scrawny Wayne’s head appeared from the labyrinth of cars, and then Kenway came jogging awkwardly along on his fake leg like a bicycle with square wheels. He unlocked the doors and the three of them piled in. “Are we going to save my dad now?” asked Wayne from his perch in the back of the van.
Robin’s heart plunged a bit at the excited hope in his voice. “Not yet, bud. I gotta see a man about something first.”
He bit back a frown. “Where we going?”
“To the cabins up by Lake Craddock,” Robin said, pulling on her seat belt. The gruesome worm-thing sticking out of her stitches was seven or eight inches now, long enough to curl lasciviously around the vinyl strap. “I know somebody that can help us save your dad … and who might know what the hell this thing is.”
23
The old white van coursed down the highway into the hills north of Blackfield, passing through the township of Slade, or at least the primordial wilderness people referred to by that name. Other than the turnoff for Underwood Road (which gave her a shiver as it whipped past the van) and a few other roads, there was little else out this way for almost ten miles other than a few abandoned shack-houses and the Slade Volunteer Fire Department. Everything else was pine trees, as far as the eye could see.
On the way out of town, she’d noticed men and women standing stock-still in parking lots, like scarecrows over fields of steel and paint, turning to watch them pass with glittering feline eyes of jade and venomous honey. Meerkat strangers frozen in storefront windows and gas stations with pump nozzles and shopping bags in their hands. Cutty was watching them through Blackfield’s eyes. Robin didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to upset Wayne.
Soon, they came into a little valley with a neatly mowed rest stop and a visitors’ center, presided over by a stately four-lane interstate running west to east. Traffic shushed overhead at breakneck speeds as Kenway slipped underneath the overpass.
Beyond the overpass was a tiny hamlet consisting of a Texaco gas station that had seen better decades and a convenience store, lit up like an airport. Down the road behind the store was a clean Subway sandwich shop that seemed embarrassed by its own cozy grandeur in the middle of all this hillbilly austerity. On a better day, Robin would have wanted to swing by and grab a sandwich, but they’d left her appetite back at the hospital.
At the end of the highway, an access road climbed a slope choked with pine trees, where LAKE CRADDOCK had been tool-burned into a wooden sign over the road. Kenway started up this road, rumbling up the hill toward the log cabin.
A sign next to the cabin announced it as the rental office-slash-tackle shop. They didn’t bother stopping, heading deeper into the pines.
Eventually, they hooked to the right and followed a ledge along the south side of the mountain, rising higher and higher until the distant buildings of Blackfield became specks of gray and light twinkling in a landscape of green fur. Gravel driveways branched away from them now and again, leading to quaint little hunter-lodges. The road bent back on itself at the edge of a several-hundred-foot drop and continued to climb until they finally broke into a clearing at the top.
Here, the trees thinned out and the road became a large parking lot. At the other side of six rows of empty slots was a sprawling Brady Bunch split-level with splintery gray walls. A sign out front called it TOP O’ THE MOUNTAIN CAFÉ & INN. Kenway parked at the sidewalk and they marched up the hill toward the restaurant, climbing three flights of crosstie steps in a broad zigzag. To the north, the mountain crumbled away into a treeless granite headland, revealing a sparkling seagull-gray lake and a distant horizon of naked trees.
At the top, the big vet paused and leaned against the aluminum handrail, sucking in a great big breath of air that had rolled in off the lake and brushed up the mountain. Lowering himself onto one of the crosstie steps, Kenway leaned back on his elbows. The bandage around his head was a phosphorescently clean white. “I need to sit down for a minute, okay? Gettin’ dizzy.”
In this dim white end-of-the-world sun, she saw a much older man hiding behind that long blond surfer-hair and copper beard. His neck had an almost reptilian texture, leathered by a desert sun in a savage world thousands of miles away from there, and his forehead was creased with lines. His eyes were closed, and in any other circumstance, Robin supposed his grim face would have been serene. The wind teased his cottony scruff and would have played with his hair if not for the bandage around his head.
For a moment, she could see the old man he would be one day. “When this is over,” she told him quietly, “we’ll get a boat and go out there for a while. You and me. We can relax out there.”
He seemed to wake up from a grim daydream, his eyelids rolling slowly open. His eyes focused on her. “Sounds nice.” He got up, dusting his ass. “Okay, I’m good.”
Wayne pulled the front door open and let them in.
The Top O’ The Mountain Café was quiet for lunchtime. Deathly quiet, in fact, and there wasn’t an employee in sight. This made sense, it being a Tuesday in the off-season. The three of them slipped through a shadowy foyer, passing racks of tourism pamphlets and a cash register, down a short corridor past restroom and kitchen doors, and into a cavernous great hall. To the right was an open dining area with a dozen white-draped tables, chairs neatly turned on top of them. The walls were floor-to-ceiling plate windows, affording a beautiful view of a dismal October lake to the north and miles of woodland to the south, the white sky hemmed by the jagged jawline of Blackfield.
Tucked into a dark recess to their left was a rustic bar. Anders Gendreau leaned behind it like an old-timey soda jerk dressed way above his station, peering at them from underneath a rack of glass goblets. “It’s about time you got here, cambion,” he said, tossing a bar towel over his shoulder. Against the dark blue suit, it almost resembled a sort of holy vestment. “I can only drink so much gin before I’m useless.”
He poured Robin and Kenway each a finger of bourbon, then poured Wayne something that looked like gin or vodka out of a bottle with an orange on the label.
She frowned. Cambion. Crooked. “Please don’t call me that.”
“What? Cambion?”
“Yeah.”
The magician nodded deferentially. “If you like.”
Wayne sniffed the drink, sipped it, and coughed. “Man. I don’t know how my dad goes crazy for this stuff. Tastes like straight gasoline.”
“Don’t worry, little man. One day you’ll develop a taste for the finer things.” Gendreau looked over his shoulder at the choir of multicolored bottles. Against the mirrored back wall, the collection seemed infinite, and in the reflection, their doppelgängers stared back with haunted eyes. “You won’t find any of those finer things here at the Hayseed Café,” he chuckled, “but you mark my words. Every good man knows the virtue of a smooth libation.”
“I’ll take your word for it, mister.”
“So, what are we doing here?” asked Kenway, wincing appreciatively at the taste of the liquor.
“This is Anders Gendreau,” said Robin. “He’s from an organization called the Dogs of Odysseus. Anders, these are my friends Kenway Griffin and Wayne Parkin.” She indicated them with the bourbon glass as she introduced them. “Wayne is the owner of the ring that opened a way into where the demon’s trapped.”
“Pleased to make your acquaintance.” Gendreau held out a hand. Wayne shook it. “I bet it would enchant you to know we are magicians.”
“Magicians. Of course there are magicians.” Sitting on a stool, Kenway poured himself another finger of bourbon and threw it back. Distantly, Robin wondered if he should be drinking liquor with a head injury. “Witches, demons, giant pig-monsters, and rings that open doors to Hell—why didn’t I think there would be magicians?” He put down the shot glass with a clunk and eyed the witch-hunter. “Next you’re gonna be telling me Bigfoot exists.”
“I plead the Fifth,” said Gendreau.
“Hey, can you do magic like a Dungeons and Dragons w
izard?” asked Kenway. “Like, if you need to fart in a Starbucks and you don’t want to leave your stuff alone, can you cast Silence on yourself so nobody can hear you rip one?”
The magician choked on his drink and wiped his mouth. “No. Actually, knowing my luck I would accidentally cast Zone of Truth.” He blew a raspberry noise. “Yes, that was me!”
Kenway guffawed into his bourbon glass.
By that point, Robin’s Percocet was wearing off again and the pain had returned in earnest, but there were three distinct sources of agony now: the papercut screaming of the stitched-and-stapled scar itself, a deep, knotty kinking she supposed must have been the muscles or ligaments that were once attached to her triceps, and then there was an ache in her rib reminiscent of the side stitches you get when you’re running.
“I have an issue, Mr. Wizard.” Robin grabbed the left hem of her shirt and hiked it over her shoulder. This revealed her left breast, but at this point she didn’t care. It also uncovered the writhing foot-long earthworm-thing hanging out of the nadir of the U-shaped surgery scar.
“I’m not a wizard, but—” Gendreau flinched. “What the hell!”
“You don’t know what it is?”
The bloodworm, as Robin had come to think of it, had grown longer on the way over there (or perhaps more of it had emerged, and perhaps there was a whole coil of the thing inside her chest, and that horrible thought made Robin want to pitch herself through the closest window), but it seemed to have calmed, and now dangled from the stitches, the end twitching every so often in the come-hither motion of a cat’s tail.
“Great Odin’s codpiece, no, I do not!” exclaimed the magician, coming around the bar to get a closer look, a disgusted grimace spreading across his vulpine face.
Wan sunlight picked out a blue vein wandering across the cream-white dome of her left breast, and her skin prickled at the visual of that repulsive subtle tendril sliding through the warrens of her arteries. “I feel as though I should know,” he said, hitching up his cane in that jaunty way again. “It seems supernatural in nature.”
“You think?”
Faint indignation flashed in his glacial eyes and he narrowed on the tendril again. This close to his face, she noticed how intense his eyes were: gas flames in porcelain. The magician reached for it, hesitated, then drew up his courage and took the worm in his bare hand. His fingernails were clipped to a microscopic uniformity and reflected the windowlight as if carved from soapstone.
It curled around his knuckles.
“Hurt me when the doctor pulled on it,” she told him. “I think it’s connected to something.” She swallowed terror and added, “Something inside.”
Heat radiated from Gendreau’s hands, as if her hip was too close to a stovetop, and she angled her head to see it was the pearly head of his cane. He held the simmering orb close to the tendril and let his eyes slip closed. He rubbed the tendril between his thumb and forefinger, rolling it softly, squeezing it, and then he released it and stood straight.
“What are you doing?”
“Testing it,” he murmured. The cane-tip rested on the floor by his foot. “It’s not a separate creature,” he said with an authoritative finality. Robin studied his haughty, borderline-impassive face.
“What do you mean? You mean it’s become part of me now?”
“No, I mean it hasn’t become ‘part of anything.’ It is you.” Gendreau’s thumb worried at the smooth surface of the cane’s iridescent white head. “There’s only one life, one individual source of vitality occupying the space you’re standing in—other than your intestinal flora and mitochondria and all the bacteria on your skin and the Demodex on your face, of course—and that is you. There’s nothing else. That … spaghetti noodle … is your flesh and blood.”
“What does that mean?” Kenway stooped with his hands on his knees, his eyes wide and brow severe. “Is—is she growing a squid-leg to replace her missing arm? Can demons even do that? Grow back limbs?”
“Do I look like a demon expert?” Gendreau’s face twisted as if he had a lemon wedge in his mouth. “At any rate, if she were going to grow something, I must say, what a horrendous thing to substitute a perfectly good arm with.”
Robin scowled. “You’re not helping.”
His face softened. “Ahh. Well, who knows, really. You absorbed Theresa LaQuices’ heart-road at the point of her death, yes?”
She nodded knowingly but said nothing, urging him on with her pointed silence.
Gendreau spread his hands as if it were obvious. “Her particular Gift is the talent of transfiguration, alteration—if I were a betting man, I’d say when you absorbed the witch’s libbu-harrani, you also inherited her Gift. In this case, you’ve inherited the ability to reconfigure yourself. It looks like your unconscious mind is trying to grow something to replace the arm Theresa took.”
Robin rubbed her face with the hand that wasn’t an octopus tentacle. “Jesus freakin’ Christ. Could my unconscious mind come up with something that doesn’t look like carp bait?”
“Oh, hello,” Gendreau interrupted. “What’s this?”
She glanced at his face, then at the object of his focus: her shoulder. “What?” Her eyes ached as she stretched her neck to look.
“There are two now.”
Wayne adjusted his glasses, gazing through the bottom, his nose wrinkling like an old man reading the newspaper. “There’s another one coming out next to the first one.”
“Oh, God, give me my meds,” Robin pleaded, jamming her fingers into her jeans pocket and fishing out the baggie of Percocet. The sharp pain of the U-scar was getting worse, dulling into a coarse, grinding torment, fibrous and blunt, like chewing popsicle sticks. A headache bloomed at the base of her skull. Going over to the bar, she grabbed the club soda tap, hauled the sprayer hose out, and put a Percocet in her mouth. She thought it over and gave herself another dose, then sprayed them down her throat with club soda.
“Errruuhuhuh.” She shuddered at the bitter taste.
A chilling thought passed over her: the sound she’d produced reminded her of the dragon-gargle Andras made when he exhaled.
(crooked cambion)
Robin pushed it out of her mind and let the soda hose reel back into its socket.
“Are you—” Kenway started to say.
“No, I’m really not okay,” she observed with a gentle scoff. “I am miles from okay.”
“Perhaps you should take it easy for a couple of days and let nature take its course,” said Gendreau. “Cutty’s group is weakened by the loss of its eastern corner, and it will take some time to find and recruit a fresh member. In the meantime, I can prepare myself.”
“No. It’s got to go down today.” Robin tugged her T-shirt back down. The tendril snaked back and forth under the fabric. “They’ve got Wayne’s father. I’ve got to get him out of there. And the longer we wait, the more pod people they’ll be able to make, and the more prepared Cutty, Weaver and their Matron will be when we actually come. We’re wasting time.”
“All right.” Gendreau stared at her, his face gradually darkening. “All right. We’ll have to make do with what we’ve got. But we’re going to have to storm the hacienda like the damned Blitzkrieg, yeah?” He breezed past her, carrying his cane by the literal shaft. “We can’t give ’em any time to react.”
The magician led them outside to the narrow patio that served as the front porch. Feathery flakes of snow sparrowed down from the washrag sky, melting on the cement. Wayne stopped short. “Whoa, it’s snowing!”
“Weird,” said Kenway. “Isn’t it a little early in the year for snow?”
Robin held up a hand to catch snowflakes. “It’s a little early in the decade for it. It hardly ever snows here.”
Gendreau shrugged with a knowing smile.
Instead of taking the zigzag of stairs back down to the parking lot, he cut left and went down a sloping sidewalk leading along the restaurant’s north side. An access road curled around the back of the b
uilding for deliveries. Gendreau crossed this and made his way to a balcony erected at the edge of the lakeview bluff.
Coin-op binoculars punctuated the balcony’s parapet. Two people stood at the edge, watching the wind kick skirls of sunlight across the water’s surface hundreds of feet below. Sitting at their feet was an enormous dog, a skinny black beast with interminably long legs. Down feathers of ice danced around them like a scene out of a snow globe. “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” said Gendreau as they approached.
“Do you think Deliverance is based on true events?” the woman asked him, turning away from the lake. Elvira’s spooky face stared out from the front of her T-shirt, and her arms were livid with tattoo sleeves of skeletons and curlicues.
“God, I hope not,” said Gendreau. “Friends, these are my colleagues Sara Amundson and Lucas Tiedeman.”
“I’m using these binoculars to look for sexually ravenous troglodytes, but all I can find are birds.” Sara’s lipstick was bloodred, her fingernails were as black as murder, and her hair was silver-white, shot through with streaks of pink. Jutting from the prow of her skull was a spiraling bone point about seven inches long.
Robin liked her immediately.
The man standing next to her was dressed like an FBI spook, in a black suit and tie. Even though the sky was a pool of dirty cotton, his eyes were inscrutable behind a pair of shades. What Robin could see of his face was young and handsome, with a princely profile. Too young, maybe—she could see him getting carded a lot.
While they were talking, Wayne knelt to address the skinny black dog. Reaching out to pet it, he was startled when his hand passed into the dog as if he were reaching into a hole.
Wayne jumped to his feet. “What the heck?”
“Once upon a time,” said Sara, “people believed the first person buried in a new graveyard would have to linger there as a ghost and protect it from the Devil. They served as a sort of guardian spirit, who would defend the churchyard from thieves and vandals, and lead the newly deceased into the afterlife. Well, they didn’t want to get stuck here on Earth after they died, so whenever they started a new graveyard, the first thing they buried in it would be a dog. And forever afterward, that dog would manifest on the property as a ‘church-grim.’”