by S. A. Hunt
She slammed the demon-hand against the grille again, producing a slap-bass thrum of steel. More foul dirt crumbled onto them.
Kenway spat and coughed. “Man, that is heinous.”
“Can we hurry this up, please?” complained Gendreau from the darkness behind them. “My knees are killing me.”
Robin steeled herself and took a deep breath of cold, foul air, then whacked her demon-hand against the grille, CLANG, and again, CLANG, and again, again, again, CLANG CLANG CLANG. Each strike was accompanied by a grunt of effort.
Finally, the grille came loose, scraping and shifting upward. “There, I loosened it for you.”
Kenway stood up in the drain, shoving the metal free. “Hardy-har,” he said, and let it fall to the side, the hinge chiseling up more of the loamy grease-dirt. He lifted himself out and then gave Robin a hand up, and the two of them helped Wayne, Gendreau, and Lucas out.
The pitter-patter of little feet made Robin look into the pit. The phantom greyhound Gévaudan whimpered, only visible by his glowing eyes. “Sometimes the abyss looks back.” The church-grim gave a great big shake, jitterbugging across the drain floor, and disappeared. He reappeared in the garage and trotted silently up to Kenway’s apartment, flowing up the stairs like black smoke.
As he did, Joel watched intently.
“What’s up with you and the ghost-dog?” asked Robin.
“He was at the mine pond when those two white boys shot my brother. Standing on the other side, watching.”
She wasn’t sure what to say to that.
Luckily, Gendreau saved her from putting her foot in her mouth. “That is a church-grim. They patrol graveyards, protecting the church from vandals and thieves, and they accompany departed souls to the afterlife.” He smiled as warmly as he could manage. “If the grim was there when your brother was murdered, it most likely escorted him safely to a better place—wherever that might be.”
Joel stood there, absorbing this, as Kenway led the magicians up the stairs. After a moment, a tear trickled down his cheek and he knuckled his eyes clear. A confused smile touched his lips.
“Sounds like a real good boy, then,” he said, and followed Robin up the stairs.
* * *
All Kenway’s works of art hung on the wall over the fridge and cabinets, intricately arranged so each made room for the other and left little of the wall itself uncovered. Robin noticed the darker, more introspective paintings were down at the ends, framing the brighter, lusher ones in the middle, which made the presentation feel like a mosaic of a sun in outer space, as if viewed through a mail slot.
“Very nice work, I must say, Mr. Griffin.” Gendreau spooled off some paper towels to wipe at the grease on his plush-looking jeans, even though his shirt was a black finger-painting. “Do you ever sell any?”
“I’ve had some offers.”
Wayne put his ring to his eye, looking up at them. Then he let it dangle from its chain and climbed up onto the kitchen counter, pushing aside a bag of chips, and very carefully slid up onto the top of the fridge. He put the ring to his eye again and pressed on a tall portrait depicting a horse’s white foreleg, each muscle and vein rendered in exquisite, almost nightmarish detail.
The canvas billowed a little bit like sailcloth but otherwise didn’t move. No dice. Wayne turned on his butt, kicking a fridge magnet off onto the floor, and splayed his hand on the surface of a painting of a shirtless woman as viewed from the back. Like the horse leg, this one was also in bright, washed-out colors and sharp photographic detail.
With a faint click, the painting swung inward on darkness. They all paused to regard it in awed, stony silence. Gendreau pontificated with his arms wide. “I’ve seen a lot of things in my time, but this is remarkable, simply remarkable: an interdimensional crawlspace.”
“I’m gonna go in first,” Robin told them, lifting herself up onto the island in the middle. She crouched next to the stove. “If that thing is waiting to amb—”
A huge orangutan arm slithered out of the hole in the wall, covered in matted red hair. It was so big it was unreal, a Halloween-spider decoration, with long, knuckly fingers and too many of them.
Gendreau shrieked like a horror-film ingénue.
The cacodemon’s hand folded around Wayne’s throat and pulled him against the wall with a thump, the bicep flexing, dragging him inside the hole. It happened so quickly, and had taken Robin so much by surprise, that at first she found her body unwilling to move. But as the boy slid through into that deep velvet darkness, he shouted her name.
“ROBIIIN!”
That was enough to animate her. Reaching up with both hands, she grabbed his ankle, and for a brief instant, they were playing tug-of-war with him, and then his foot slid out of his sneaker.
Wayne slipped into the dark.
“No!” She dropped the shoe and scrambled on top of the fridge, thrusting her left arm into the hole before Andras could close it.
The painting slapped shut on her wrist and bounced open again.
Before she could second-guess herself or the others could follow, Robin grabbed the edges of the crawlspace and hauled herself through into the upstairs bathroom of 1168 Underwood Road.
* * *
She vaulted the sink headfirst and hit the opposite wall, punching a hole in dusty sheetrock. The medicine cabinet clicked shut and the mirror shattered, shards of silvered glass crashing into the sink.
“Robiiiiin!” screamed Wayne from deeper in the house.
As she made her way down the hall, pinballing back and forth with her hands out, her eyes became used to the dark and a fungal, formless subterranean light gave shape to the furniture.
At the end of the hall stood the demon, Wayne under his arm like a football.
Goddamn, but that thing was huge. No wonder the children had been so afraid of it. A thrill of terror racked her system. It was all head and lanky frame, an enormous black-green chimpanzee with jagged dinosaur legs and a giant mascot head. Before he slipped over the banister, he flicked those Edison-bulb eyes with their throbbing sea-green filaments back at her. Robin gave chase, hurling herself onto the demon’s broad back. It was like leaping onto a wicker sofa with a rug thrown over it, with the same dirty-woody smell of neglect and musty filth. Andras’s skin actually creaked. She sank the fingers of her black left hand into his hairy-splintery flesh and found he was, indeed, hollow on the inside. He was a wicker sculpture made of a hundred thousand cords all wound together.
Unlife jostled and rustled inside, as if his heart were a trapped bird. Andras shrugged his free arm, twisting back and forth with a sound like breaking branches, and the scissor-blades of her fingers drew loose. Robin whipped free of him and tumbled to the floor in the foyer. The demon tossed Wayne down and stalked toward her. The boy collapsed next to the baseboards; his glasses fell off and skittered across the hardwood.
(welcome home)
The words flickered in Robin’s head like a pilot light, a secret match-flame, less words than abstract concept-shapes, Rorschach blots. She would not give this violating devil the dignity of an answer. Robin flourished the strange left hand and ran at him, fury compounding inside of her. She meant to sink those claws into him again and tear him into pieces and see what was inside.
(the ring thank you for opening the door once again)
he said, flinging one hand across his chest in a capeless parody of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula,
(i will finally be free)
the demon told her, and as Robin came at him, he backhanded her. That long insectoid arm batted her out of the way, a beam of hard bone piling against her right side. She hit the wall with an OOF and crashed through a curio arranged with dusty pictures, sprawling on top of jagged things. Robin’s heart thundered in her chest and she was flushed with an incredible heat, almost embarrassing in its fury. “This is all your fault.” The knot in her throat burned. “You are why I’m here, and why I am the way I am, and why my mother is dead.” Cambion. Crooked woman, half-monster.
She wanted to cry, to sob in defiance and rage at this monstrous creature, this avatar of corrosive lust, but she refused to give him the satisfaction.
Andras grinned with a rack of teeth like jags of broken wood. She plunged the hand he had given her into his belly, breaking skin too hard for her human hand to damage, and pulled it open like Christmas wrapping.
Fluttering sensations moved up her arm and touched her face. She opened her eyes and pure disgusted fear shot a cold iron bolt through her core.
Spiders.
He was full of spiders,
more fucking spiders,
THOUSANDS OF THEM,
crawling out of the empty darkness inside his body and up her arm, a legion of bristling marbles marching toward her face.
Each one was a nightmare unto itself, she sensed, an embodiment of some base desire, a walking prejudice or an evil thought; in the three seconds that passed as they scuttled out of hiding, Robin caught intrusive thoughts—flashes of murder, physical violation, undiluted hatred or lust. Andras picked her up by the scruff of her neck as if she were a kitten. He held her against the wall.
(you are me)
he said, and she could hear the grin in his mind-voice
(you are me and i am you)
and to her shock and terrified surprise, the swarthy skin of her draconic left arm began to spread, leeching across her collarbone and under her clothes, filling her in with its wicked hardness. Sinister, gleaming edges shredded the fabric of her shirt and hoodie, revealing the demon inside.
Black widows poured out of him and enveloped her from left to right, carrying a payload of licorice-smelling ink, engulfing her breast until it was a round bulb of wicked thatch. Her soft pink-brown nipple transformed into a rusty bolt head. Spiders crawled into her mouth. Andras was infecting her with darkness, infesting her, corrupting her, changing her.
Rays sifted through pig-iron twine. Blades of gold shimmered across the ceiling. She looked down and saw her heart behind her chest; she could actually see it like the sun in a picnic basket, a pulsar burning and blazing inside of her with a warm amber light. My God, is that me? Is that mine? she thought, her lips stiffening, her eyes burning, her hair turning to crimson straw. Her tongue hardened into a pitted black blade.
A framed photo hung on the other side of the hallway. Her own reflection swam in the cloudy glass. Her face blackened and warped, her eyes bulged and shined from deep within, dirty green foglamps. Her pupils were sharp electric pinpricks.
(I AM YOU AND YOU ARE ME)
Andras laughed, the sound of a whetstone coughing down the length of a sword blade.
—Cambion, crooked cambion—
“No!” she cried. Her voice was a watery scrape. She inhaled and the breath shook dirty cords in her chest. Grrrahuhuh. “NO!” she cried again, and hammered Andras with an iron fist.
The demon’s sternum cracked and he let go of her, stumbling away, clutching his chest like he’d had a heart attack.
“I am not you!”
Both of her hands were spun from smoky iron thread and dry vine, and hair the color of merlot grew down her wrists in woolly shags like the sleeves of a wizard robe. “You can claim me all you want,” Robin snarled up at the owl-headed wicker man. The words were oily and metallic, syllables chiseled from oak and steel. She pounded a fist against her chest, “But you’ll never get that last five percent. I am not you! My heart is my own!”
Fear, real fear, and bewilderment guttered in the demon’s dull lamp eyes. She ran at him and plunged both fists through the mesh of his chest, ripping him open.
Piles of spiders spilled out in a whispering rush, recluses and orb weavers, tarantulas and fat, scuttling wolf spiders. Wayne shrieked somewhere, but Robin did not falter or relent. Clutching the demon’s bear-trap lips, she gripped the rim of his lower jaw and tore his face in half. Inside his head was the biggest spider of all. Eight finger-bones as long as umbrella ribs unfolded from the ruins of his wicker skull. Onyx eyes glistened at her from a clump of bone the yellow of unbrushed teeth. Gripped by disgust, Robin hauled it out of its shattered shell, wrestling it over to the nearest window.
The massive yellow crab-spider tried to bite her face, lunging between her arms with clicking-grinding mandibles.
(LET ME GO, LITTLE ONE)
Revulsion shot home like a dead bolt. He had recognized her for what she was. Andras knew she was his daughter.
A term of endearment from this monster?
Intolerable. She jammed one of her spun-iron elbows against the window and the glass shattered, shards sucking violently away into the deepest darkness Robin had ever seen.
On the other side of the frame was nothing. Not a space with nothing in it; there wasn’t even a space. Just a lightless vacuum. And yet … a silvery malevolence breathed back there, an invisible entity she could only feel as a pulsing idiot wrath.
Faintly, distantly: the tuneless trilling of flutes.
Thrusting the bone-spider through the broken window, Robin shoved it out into the void. Andras disappeared, its flailing legs swallowed up and away.
Satisfied the creature was gone, she inhaled—grrrrahuhuhuh—and roared into the nothing, “Fuuuuck! Yooouuu!” It felt impotent, a wretched scream into an unfeeling abyss, but it had a certain gratification.
29
Red rust stains dragoned down the porcelain under the faucet. Dirty tiles marched across the walls in broken, snaggle-toothed rows. Robin found Wayne in the upstairs bathroom, lying in the clawfoot bathtub.
The medicine cabinet door was still shattered. Wayne had pulled it open, trying to find the way back, but behind it was nothing but glass shelves arrayed with ancient orange prescription bottles. She could see all this because her heart continued to shine through the fibers of her chest, illuminating the house around her.
“No!” shouted the boy, curled into the fetal position in the tub. “Please don’t kill me!” He turned and threw something at her. “Just take it! Please don’t hurt me!”
Crooked, she thought sadly. She picked up whatever he’d thrown and found his remaining shoe. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she said. Her voice seethed, deep and hot like a Ferrari engine.
The boy only shivered harder.
“We’ve got work to do.” She knelt by the tub. “Look at me, Wayne.” Robin handed him his eyeglasses. He took them and slid them over his terrified eyes. She held out his shoe as well, the laces dangling.
“Oh, my God,” Wayne said, one lens still broken out. Blood trickled from a cut in his hair. “Is that you? You really are a demon.”
“Only ninety-five percent.” She tapped her chest, where the shining evidence of that last five percent rested. A loud but muted kickdrum thumped in time with her nuclear heart, sending subtle ripples across the room. Lub-dub. Lub-dub. Lub-dub.
“I can’t get the crawlspace open.” Wayne pointed at the broken mirror. He spoke in the petulant, tired tone of a boy that can’t get to sleep.
She stood at the sink, her dark fingers curling around the basin’s edge.
“I can fix this, I think.”
She picked up a shard of glass and slipped it into the door of the medicine cabinet. Then she took another and slid it into place next to the first. It should have taken her a long time, but the mirror was dirty and had broken in large glimmering daggers held together by filth, having shattered outward from a point in the center.
Placing the final shard, Robin pressed her fingertip to the starburst of silver cracks and concentrated.
While Gendreau had been healing her surgery scar in the back of Fisher Ellis’s comic shop, she had been subtly tapping the libbu-harrani heart-road buried in the pearl at the end of his cane, drawing off some of his curative power for herself. She couldn’t get much of it, as the source of the energy was buried deep inside a thousand nacreous layers of calcium carbonate, but it was enough for this. Sliding the pad of her demonic finger across the refractive edges, Robin traced each crack out to the frame of the mirro
r. Each time she did so, it faded, the glass smooth and unmarked underneath, as if she were erasing them.
“There we go,” she said, thumbing the final crack away, revealing a clear, whole sheet of glass. She stepped back to admire her handiwork.
Taking his mother’s ring out of his shirt collar, Wayne lifted it so he could look through it and focus its magic, and opened the cabinet door. The stark glow of the fluorescent lights in Kenway’s kitchen sifted through. To Robin, the light fell brisk and sharp, hostile, like the chill of a winter door left open. She diminished into the shadows, stepping away until nothing was visible but her luminous eyes and the pulsar-heart still throbbing in her chest.
“Go,” she told Wayne.
“No.”
“Go.” Robin took his shoulder. “Go to Kenway’s apartment and wait there for me.”
“I want to go with you,” said Wayne, backing away from the dimensional window. “I want to save my dad. I want to help you.”
She sighed, making that disturbing underwater-engine noise again. Her voice was an impossibly deep rumble. “You can help me one last way before you go back. You can help me find the door into the Lazenbury.”
“Okay.”
“Robin?” called someone from the other side of the mirror-hole. Sara Amundson. “Wayne? Are you … you okay in there?”
Kenway, his voice shaking: “Is that you?”
“Tell them not to be afraid of me.”
Wayne climbed into the sink and leaned through the portrait-mirror hole. He glanced back at her. “You can’t go out there anymore, can you?”
“It’s … cold out there. Cold like … fire.” Counterintuitive, but she knew deep inside if she went through that hole and tested the Sanctification that kept Andras locked out, she would burn in that superfreeze, as if the thermometer had gone all the way past zero and come back around to the top.
He turned back to the kitchen. “She can’t come through the window,” Wayne told them. “But she—”