by S. A. Hunt
“Is she okay?” asked Joel.
Kenway sat on top of the fridge, looking through the hole. “Babe? You there? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Robin told him, even though she wasn’t, not really. In her present condition, she felt no pain; she felt godlike, perhaps, indestructible, aware only of the press of the floor against the soles of her feet and the constant draft of supernatural cold. He stared at her. The sensation of invincibility melted away under his warm eyes, leaving her feeling naked and vulnerable.
“I’m coming in,” he said, climbing into the hole.
Wayne scrambled out of the way and Kenway clambered over the sink, lowering himself to the bathroom floor.
He stood in front of her, abject wonder and terror in his eyes. “Is that really you?” he asked, reaching for her. At first, she wanted to move away, or maybe push his hand back, but she let him touch her, rake his fingertips softly down the coiling slope of her chest and feel the rough wasp-nest swell of her left breast. The starshine of her heart filtered through his fingers.
His hand found its way up to her cheek and stayed there. She closed her luminescent eyes and pressed against the cooling cup of his palm.
“You’re still beautiful to me,” Kenway said. “If not even more than before.”
A rusty laugh bubbled up out of her. “You think a demon is prettier than me?”
“Uhh.…” His hand twitched.
“… I’m kidding.”
“Your skin kinda reminds me of a Shredded Mini-Wheat.”
“You’re really pressing your luck there, dude.”
The others were coming through now. Sara climbed through first, and then Lucas, who helped Gendreau down from the step of the sink. “Simply remarkable,” the curandero said again, eyes wandering the decrepit bathroom.
Getting as close to the hole as she could tolerate, Robin looked out at the pizza-man. Joel sat on the fridge with his elbow in the dimensional hole, as pretty as you please. It could have been the driver-side windowsill of his Black Velvet.
“Are you staying here, then?”
He gawped openly at her. “I’m afraid, sister.”
“It’s okay to be afraid. But I’ll protect you, baby. That’s what a big sister does.”
“I’ve lost a lot this week. The way my life is, when things go, a lot of things go. I’m scared. This is the closest I ever been to losing everything. But I do kinda want to see the end of this. Even if it’s just so’s I can go to bed at night and know in my heart it’s over. You know?”
“Just a little bit more to go, if you can take it.”
The moment lingered between them for a second. “You say you gonna protect me if I come with you?” Joel asked, getting up onto his knees. He was clutching the Batdazzler, which must have seen a good bit of action, because it was sleeved in vivid red blood and most of the bedazzle gems had been knocked off. “You gonna pinkie-swear me that shit, sister?”
She linked fingers with him. “I pinkie-swear. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to protect you and Fish. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to protect your mother from her fear. But I’m here now and making up for lost time.”
“All right,” he said, and he climbed through into Hell.
* * *
After trying every door in the house—including the back door, which led into the go-kart garage in Weaver’s Wonderland, where they found Joel’s car and the body of missing police officer Michael DePalatis—the one they needed turned out to be the front door, and Robin couldn’t overlook the irony. Apparently, the front entrance of both 1168 and its Hell-annexed alter ego were linked in some deep way.
No rush of wintery cold came in when Wayne opened it, even though she could plainly see the front porch of her childhood home outside. It was nighttime out there, but she wasn’t sure if that was because it was getting close to six or because it was always night in this strange new aberration of a time zone.
“I don’t feel the Sanctification out there,” Robin told them.
“Perhaps it doesn’t apply to a piece of reality when someone has tied it off like a balloon animal,” said Gendreau.
With a brief pause, she put her hand outside. There was a bad moment where she felt the creep of ice—as if there were a holy residue—but then it passed. “It’s safe.” She stepped out onto the porch and they followed her.
Someone sitting in the swing down at the end loosed a shriek worthy of a Sioux warrior and vaulted the railing into the bushes.
“Pete?” called Wayne, squinting into the darkness. “Amanda?”
“Batman? Is that you?”
“Yeah, it’s me.” Wayne walked down to the swing where Amanda, her brothers, and little Katie Fryhover cowered in the dark. Evan and Kasey Johnson stood in front of their sister, wielding a golf club and a skillet, and shields devised from garbage can lids.
“Hey, hambone, was that you I heard scream?” asked Joel.
Pete hugged himself bashfully. “No.”
Unfamiliar constellations hung low in the night sky like electric bulbs screwed into the clouds. The trailer park’s mobile homes were pale, dark-eyed hulks run aground on a black shore. There were no lights. The de-conjuration must have interrupted the electricity in the power lines.
“Looks like when Weaver tied off the neighborhood,” said Kenway, “she took Chevalier Village and 1168 with it.”
Evan Johnson coughed, wiping his face with his sleeve. “It’s been dark out for like two days straight. The power went out, and all of a sudden, the sun went away at like three in the afternoon yesterday.”
“Ever since,” said his brother, “we can’t get out. The night makes a wall.”
“The night makes a wall,” echoed little Katie.
“Me and Evan tried to get out.” Kasey pointed west with his golf club, down the road. “But it’s like the air gets hard.”
Evan giggled in spite of himself.
“It’s like we’re in a giant aquarium, you know?” said Amanda, standing up. Katie Fryhover clung to her leg with the desperation of a castaway on a life preserver. “We don’t know what’s going on. Our parents don’t either.”
“It’s the witches,” Wayne told them. “They did this. And we’re here to fix it.”
Pete came swishing through the grass, dusting off his shorts, and climbed the front steps. When he saw Robin, he stopped short, his hand on the banister. The other hand held the strength-test hammer.
“It’s okay,” she told him. “It’s me, Robin, the crazy chick with the camera.”
“What the hell happened to you?” he asked in the bravely rude way that is the kingdom of children.
“I did the drugs. All of them.”
Lucas Tiedeman burst out laughing.
“We came over here to Wayne’s cause it’s the farthest away from the witches’ house,” said Amanda. “It seemed safe. Well, the safest place, anyway. The witches never come over here. I think they’re afraid of it.” Her eyes wandered out to the trailer park. “My dad seems like he is, too. He won’t leave the house.”
“He’s been drinking since the sun went away,” said Evan. “He sits in the dark and drinks and stares out the window.”
“Maw-Maw sleepin’.” Katie Fryhover peeked at Robin and hid her face again.
Kasey Johnson’s makeshift weapon sank until the end rested on the porch. “None of ’em will go outside,” he said, his tone flat and demoralized. “Not even our neighbors, like Mr. Weisser and Mrs. Schumacher. They won’t even answer the door when we knock.”
“I think you should take your friends to the hole back to my apartment,” said Kenway, his hand resting on Wayne’s shoulder. “Make yourself at home. There’s some stuff in the fridge if you get hungry. I don’t know how long this is going to take.”
“Okay.” Wayne waved the other children into the house. “Come on, guys.”
They followed him willingly enough, but Pete stopped at the front door and turned back to Kenway. “Hey, mister?” he said, hefting the ca
rnival mallet. “Take this with you.” He offered the mallet to the tall Nordic vet. Kenway’s big mitt closed over the wooden handle and he lifted it over his head like a barbarian straight out of a Boris Vallejo painting.
“Mjolnir,” Wayne said in awe from the foyer.
Kenway flourished it. The big hammerhead made a swooshing noise through the air. “Thanks, kid.”
“Kick ’em in the ass, man,” said Pete.
“Oh, I almost forgot—” Taking off the GoPro harness, Wayne handed it off to Robin. “Here’s your camera, ma’am.” He smiled and pushed his broken glasses up on his nose. “Thank you for lettin’ me be your cameraman for a little while.”
“Thank you.”
She adjusted the straps and put it on Kenway.
“And now your watch begins, Mr. Cameraman.” The GoPro’s evil red on-air light burned in the dark, a solemn, watchful eye.
With a soft and concluding click, the front door eased shut behind them, leaving the magicians, the veteran, the pizza-man, and the demon-girl alone on the front porch.
Sprawling in front of them was a twilight zone of shadows, interrupted only by the sight of the pale mobile homes marching darkly into the distance, a cemetery for giants. The night was windless and heavy, a smothering summer twilight three months too late.
No crickets sang. The silence was absolute.
* * *
Above them, the sky remained a chintzy model-town facsimile of the real thing, the stars almost low enough to reach up and touch. With no wind and no nightlife, the trees around them were a silent wall of black paranoia, beat back only by the crunching of their heels. The road leading to the Lazenbury was a dark and lonely one, winding forever through suboceanic darkness. Robin’s glowing heart illuminated the path around them but did nothing to assuage the feeling of being watched.
“Is that who I think it is?” asked Sara.
A wooden crucifix stood by the road.
Nine feet tall, confronting them like a warning. Heinrich Hammer was pinned to it with long roofing-nail spikes through his wrists and wire around his elbows.
In the green-yellow light of Robin’s pulsar heart, the blood running in blotchy ribbons down his chin and chest was a glassy obsidian. He’d been worked over good; his legs were obviously broken by the crazy bandy way they angled, and his chest was a litany of gills, a dozen fleshy pink stab wounds. The witches had stripped him of everything except for his slacks, but his black duster caped from the back of the cross like Christ’s tomb shroud, the sleeves tossed over his shoulders as though he were being embraced by the Grim Reaper himself.
As they approached, Robin was surprised to see his eyes crack open.
He coughed weakly. “Hi, folks.”
“Evening, asshole,” said Robin.
Heinrich spat blood into the weeds. He stared at her with one glassy, jaundiced eye. The other was swollen shut. “See you found your daddy. I bet you got some questions, huh—” His gentle prodding was cut off by a wet, productive cough.
“Is this why you trained me to kill?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“You weren’t helping a bereaved girl find closure. You were sharpening a sword. Your sword.” Robin got up close, close enough to smell the sweet, coppery smell of blood, and … something else, something both ammoniac and sugary. “Your golden ticket back into the Dogs of Odysseus.” Ah, he’d pissed himself. That’s what it was.
“You tried to break one of our cardinal rules, Mr. Atterberry,” said Gendreau, taking off his jacket and stepping closer to raise a hand. “Bringing a demon through the Sanctification. Did you think we’d let you back in if you actually managed to break it?” Ectoplasmic energy skirled up and out of the curandero’s slender arm, a throbbing cloud of motes the color of red Christmas lights, as if the sparks of a campfire whirled around Gendreau’s hand.
“I thought I could tame the demon,” said Heinrich. “Filter it, extrude it, through the girl.”
“Extrude?” Robin made a face. “You make me sound like goddamn espresso. I’m not the best part of waking up, you fake-ass-kung-fu Obi-Wan shitdick. Why don’t you hurry up and die before I turn that crucifix around and jam it up your ass?”
“You thought you could smuggle my girl here,” said Joel. “Fuck was you thinkin’?”
Heinrich sighed. “I messed up. I did; I freely admit it. I made an ambitious mistake. But hey, look at it this way—you didn’t turn out so bad, did you? Right?” A fat tear cut through the blood on his face. “My God, look at you, Robin—cough—you’re—”
“A monster.”
“—beautiful! You’re beyond extraordinary.” He chuckled, and the chuckles turned into full-fledged (if exhausted) laughter.
“What’s so funny?”
The crucified man shook his head slowly, dejectedly, and his grin drooped into a desolate grimace. She thought he’d started laughing again, but the convulsions turned out to be silent sobs. Drool slipped down his chin in a spider-silk strand. “You have no idea what Cutty is up to in there,” he told them. “Their Matron. They were hiding her upstairs, in the attic. After they caught me, they took me up to see her.”
“Yeah?” Gendreau twitched. “Who is it?”
“She claims to be Morgan le Fay.”
“The sorceress fairy-queen from Arthurian legend?”
Sara folded her arms. “You are so full of crap. Impossible. Morgan le Fay wasn’t even real. Those were stories.”
“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger,” said Heinrich, and he coughed hard, spitting into the weeds.
“Even if that is le Fay up there, she’d have to be hundreds of years old.”
“Almost two thousand years old,” said Gendreau. “According to Arthurian legend, Arthur Pendragon defended Britain against Saxon invaders in 510, 520 AD. He was real, if embellished. If Morgan was real, she was contemporary to that time.” He stared at the dirt under their feet in thought, drawing curative runes with the tip of his cane. “She first appeared in an 1170 book by Chrétien de Troyes. I can’t remember the name, though. Oh, no, wait, it wasn’t de Troyes, it was The Life of Merlin by Geoffrey of Monmouth.”
“You can remember all that,” asked Sara, “but you can’t remember your order between the radio and the window at freakin’ Burger King?”
Lights were still on in the Lazenbury, hollow orange eyes in the black. Robin searched the windows for silhouettes. “If their Matron is really Morgan, she’s…”
“Old as hell?” asked Lucas.
“To put it bluntly,” interjected Gendreau. “And more powerful than any witch alive.” The unspoken insinuation was obvious to Robin. We may have bitten off more than we can chew. She hoped she was the secret weapon Heinrich had intended her to be.
“Fuck that noise,” said Joel, leaning on his baseball bat. “If you’re trying to make me wish I’d stayed behind, it’s working.”
“I didn’t see much of her.” The old witch-hunter flexed one arm as if getting comfortable and jerked in sudden sharp pain, crying out, his legs twitching and curling like back-broken snakes. His cries were desperate, pitiful, and nothing at all like the commanding, brooding presence he’d been back in Texas. Fresh blood dribbled from the nails through his wrists. “They’re tryin’ to bring Ereshkigal back. They been trying for a long time. It’s why Annie’s apples are so fat. They been savin’ ’em up for the resurrection.” Heinrich hung his head. “I was too big for my britches. We all was. Cutty and her Matron have been here since the inception of Blackfield itself.” He grunted and cried out in pain again. “I’m sorry I dragged you into this, baby girl.”
“If you’ll open your eyes again, you’ll see I’m neither baby nor girl. Or even human.”
Heinrich studied her with drowsy eyes.
“Get out of here,” he said. “While you still can.” He coughed, spattering Robin’s wire-coil chest with blood. “However you got here, use it to get back, and stay away. This some Plan 9 top-level Pentagram Pentagon black magic. They gon
na jump up and down on you ’til you die.”
“Can’t leave until this is done.” She pointed at the mission house. “My mother is in that nag shi. I’m not going to abandon her again. I can’t have her back, but I can set her free.”
Even in his state, Heinrich still managed to give her that under-the-eyebrows you better do what I say, girl look. She knew it well; she’d seen it enough over the last few years.
“That don’t work on me anymore.”
When he couldn’t elicit a change in her, the old man turned to Gendreau. “What’s the verdict, Doc?”
“Hypothetically, with more time, I could pull you back from the brink.” The curandero shook a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his bloody hand on it. “But you’ll die before I can make much of a difference. To be honest, I’m surprised you’ve lasted this long.”
“The human body is a miracle thing, Doc,” said Heinrich with a scoff. “It can take a good whooping before it gives up. And I ain’t never gave up.” He coughed and choked, grimaced, spat to the side. “Before you go, will you take me out a Hawaiian and light it for me? They’re in my coat pocket behind me.”
Robin dug around, found the box and the Zippo. Tapping out a cigar, she paused to drag it under her nose, savoring the rich coconut smell.
“’S’good shit, baby,” said Heinrich.
She stuck the cigar in his mouth, and if she’d told you she didn’t do it to shut him up, she would have been by all rights a liar. He walked it in with his lips. She flicked open the lighter, ignited it, and lit the cigar with it. He took a deep draw and a cloud of smoke billowed out of his face, and he winced, his hands flexing against the nails and fence-wire.
“I can’t fuckin’ reach it.”
She dropped the lighter in his shirt pocket and patted it neatly in place. “You’ll figure it out.”
As she did so, a pendant tumbled out of the collar of his shirt—a cameo, an oval containing a carving of a woman’s face in profile. He used to tell her it was his mother, back when Robin was fresh out of the looney bin and still dumb as beans.
It felt warm. Felt strange with potential.