Robin opened her eyes and realized she’d fallen asleep editing video. Her laptop was open in front of her, sitting on a piece of wood she’d scavenged from the garage downstairs. Bright moonlight fell at a slant through the giant floor-to-ceiling windows, illuminating the dark studio apartment with a soft blue-gray glow. For a few seconds, she thought she was back in Heinrich’s hidey-hole lair back in Hammertown. But instead of kung-fu posters and a desert, the walls were hung with impressionist paintings and the windows looked out on a red-brick wall, the back of a hardware store.
On the nightstand by the bed, a digital clock with burning red numbers said it was half past three in the morning. Robin stretched luxuriously, enjoying the feeling of the fleece blankets and flannel sheets against her skin. First time in ages she’d been able to sleep without nightmares. She felt like a million bucks, even if it was the middle of the night.
Kenway slept on one of the benches, cushioned by an array of throw pillows, a vague form under a too-thin blanket, traced by the flickering light of the TV.
She briefly entertained the idea of coaxing him into the bed, but let the thought fade. Rolling out of bed, she searched underneath it and discovered cabinets, and inside them she found a quilt. She took it over to the bench and unfolded it over Kenway, draping it over his supine form. He slept in his jeans, with his fingers interlaced over his belly in a very self-satisfied Winnie the Pooh way, his prosthetic leg removed and standing vigil next to him. He didn’t snore, but every time he exhaled, he blew it through his lips with a pewwww, pewww sound. Robin chuckled to herself as she tucked the quilt in around him.
A cane lay across the coffee table, alongside a matte-black handgun. She bent forward to peer at it in the low light and saw a magazine pressed into the magazine well. The safety was on.
Wandering over to the huge floor-to-ceiling window, she stood by the cold glass and studied the alleyway below, hugging herself against the chill. The stars above were a shotgun-blast of diamonds on a cape of indigo velvet. The alleyway was a bottomless black canyon, featureless, abyssal.
No one lurked out there in the darkness, as far as she could tell, but that didn’t banish the feeling of being watched.
An immense stage curtain hung from the ceiling by the window. She felt around the edge of the heavy fabric and found a rope. Creeping across the room, she did her best to quietly pull the curtain closed, and somewhere in the corner, a pulley rattled and squeaked softly, feeding her rope until the window was covered.
Without the moonlight or the city-glow, the apartment was engulfed in nothingness, cut only by the red numerals of the alarm clock. She tiptoed back to bed and slid under the covers again, the sheets silky and warm against her heels. Her face sank into the pillow and her body seemed to collapse in on itself, her muscles relaxing.
Sleep claimed her almost immediately.
The tree dream.
Again, she sat at the breakfast table with her mother Annie. For some reason, this time it was the dead of night.
Solid shadow rested heavily against the kitchen windows, twisting what was usually a warm, comforting memory into a sinister mutant version of itself. The only light in the kitchen was an electric green phosphorescence coming from the digital numerals on the microwave clock, turning her childhood kitchen into some secret dream-room of shadows and emerald chrome.
“You know there ain’t no talk of magic in this house, ma’am.” Annie folded her newspaper and set it aside, cradling long-cold coffee in both hands. Her voice was a soft, furtive mutter, as if she were trying not to be overheard. “Magic is wrong. Magic goes against God. And in this house, God’s rules come before man’s now. We been over this.”
“Yes, Mama.” Regardless of the dreadful, nonsensical darkness, Robin had already forgotten it was a dream, in that irresistible way our minds always convince us the impossible is real.
“You’re more than welcome to read your Harry Potter book, but I won’t have any talk about magic. Okay?”
“Okay, Mama.”
“A book is just a book. It ain’t real.”
Dream-Robin sucked on her lip for a moment. She summoned a little courage and asked, “If magic ain’t real, why does God not want it in our house?”
Annie gave her that exasperated don’t-be-a-dummy scowl from under her eyebrows. “I didn’t say magic wasn’t real. I was saying Harry Potter isn’t real. You can read them as long as you understand the difference between reality and fiction. Harry does ‘good magic,’ and that’s okay—he’s a good little boy—but in real life, good magic doesn’t exist. In real life, honey, all magic is bad.”
“Yes, Mama.”
Found you, said a low voice from the hallway.
The floor creaked under their feet, and something heavy and hulking stood right behind Robin. In her dream-form, a willowy waif-child not even in the throes of puberty, the thing behind her chair seemed exponentially larger than she’d ever known it before.
Hot breath breezed over her ear. Rotting meat and the astringent scent of star anise assaulted her nostrils. I’ve been looking for you for so long.
Welcome home.
Flies buzzed on her mother’s face.
Robin awoke in a panic, heart fighting the inside of her rib cage. When she opened her eyes, the bed was frosted in the same sick green glow.
White vapor curled from her mouth. The room seemed as if it were ten, twenty degrees colder, as if the heat had been sucked out and replaced by the vacuum of outer space. Even the bed was cold, under the blankets, and not like the coolness of its untouched perimeters, but a frigid January chill that burned like naked steel against her bare skin.
Slowly, she turned to look over her shoulder, and found herself face to face with the huge window curtain. The green glow came from behind it, shining straight through the rough screen of heavy burlap, lighting the whole thing up.
No. Not again. Robin lay in the cold bed, staring, terror pushing acid up her throat. He’s back there, hiding, watching me, grinning again.
He’s not a hallucination, is he?
The only way she was going to stop this and find some path back to sleep would be to confront this waking nightmare. She was going to have to dispel the vision by meeting it head-on—the only thing that ever worked to make the creature go away.
The creature. Why don’t you call him what he is? she thought, shivering. That man in Alabama knew his name. Your mother knew who he is.
He’s come looking for you again.
He was waiting.
And in the end, after the therapy and pills, turns out it was never mental illness at all. Just like everything else about you, everything else you’ve done in your adult life, the “fictional” YouTube videos, your rapier wit, your road-warrior wardrobe, it was smoke and mirrors, duct tape and paper clips rigged up to hide the truth. From everybody, including yourself.
She reached out with a shaking hand and clutched the edge of the curtain, hoping she wouldn’t have to see the magician’s secret on the other side. It’s not a curse from some raggedy-ass witch in a backwater Alabama shithole, either.
She pulled it aside. Metal rings scraped somewhere high above with a tambourine sibilance, revealing the source of the light.
It’s not a brain tumor causing your frontal lobe to short-circuit.
Two huge green eyes stared down at her from a massive head. The Red Lord stood over her, with muscular orangutan arms and crooked canine legs with too many joints. Shaggy hair covered it in a pelt of flame-red, moss-green, ink-black.
No, he’s real. As real as the nose on your face.
And he was standing right next to the bed.
This was the closest she’d ever been to the creature. Every time she’d tried to get close to it, the Red Lord would disappear, leaving her empty-handed and frustrated, but now, this time, here it was, big as life, standing in Kenway’s apartment, close enough to touch, but she couldn’t move, she couldn’t let go of the curtain, her hand wouldn’t respond to her brain, she couldn’t let go and run, run screaming out of the room and down the stairs into the street, but it was reaching up to touch her with one of those long shaggy stinking arms, stinking of the hidden grave, of wet moldy earth, and it had too many fingers and the fingers had too many joints,
whispering
and as it moved, the Red Lord creaked like old leather, like a wicker basket,
and that hand crept closer to hers,
whispering
and those fingers were tipped in hornlike claws, curving spikes, reaching for her, reaching past her trembling hand, reaching for her face
claws brushed her cheek
whispering
(w e l c o m e h o m e)
(w e l c o m e b a c k h o m e)
The floor lamp next to the couch came on with a click. “Jesus what the shit are you screaming ab—” Kenway started to ask.
His voice inserted a key into Robin’s brain and her body unlocked.
As she regained control of herself, the Red Lord fell toward her, collapsed across the bed and across her body, and disintegrated over her like a column of red smoke, or perhaps the thing had never been there at all—and where it had fallen was now a mountain of knotted hair—no, not hair, spiders, five thousand of them, ten thousand of them, tiny venomous-looking crawlers with banded brown legs and peanut-shaped bodies.
The bed and Robin herself were covered in them, crawling all over each other, creating the
whispering
sound like fine wax paper, or perhaps Bible pages, being rubbed together. Robin scrambled up out of the bed, kicking out from under the sheets. “Jesus! Jesus fuck!” she cried, worming out onto the floor in a tumble of spiders, toppling onto her shoulder with a bang, dragging the alarm clock with her.
Arachnids crawled all over her, delicate legs tickling up her shoulders, across her chest, over her face. Bristly gossamer feelers on her lips, on her eyelids.
“WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT!” Kenway sat straight up on the couch.
“MUH,” Robin bellowed, in the throes of a crazed fit, flailing and kicking on the floor, tangled in sheets. “UUGGGH!”
Hobbling into the bathroom with the cane, Kenway came back with a can of hairspray and pulled a lighter from his pocket. He aimed both at the bed, snik! snik! snik!, ejecting a cone of roaring flame, sweeping it back and forth, roasting as many spiders as possible. The cane fell over and the veteran stood there on one foot like some crazed combination of a dragon and a flamingo.
“Please let this be an illusion,” Robin pleaded, as she got to her feet. The duvet, sheets, pillow, and all burst into flame.
Some of the spiders—looking very much like brown recluses, or what she supposed brown recluses looked like—came tumbling over the side of the flaming mattress and scuttled across the floor. She squished them with her bare feet, grinding them into the hardwood floor, slick goo and angular toothpicks between her toes. The air stank of burning arachnids and burning mattress, a thin high chemical smoke that somehow smelled like cooked lobster and burnt leaves and singed hair and roasting latex. And to Robin’s surprised disgust, a hint of caramel.
The big veteran kept roasting them with the hairspray flamethrower, blowing a column of fire up and down and back and forth across the bed, swearing the entire time. Robin found the switch for the ventilation, starting a fan in the ceiling, trying to suck out the reek.
“’Stinguisher under the kitchen sink!” shouted Kenway. The bed had become a roaring inferno, filling the apartment with an eye-burning fog.
Robin ran into the kitchen and opened the cabinet under the sink. A cherry-red tank stood behind a collection of cleaning supplies. She raked them out of the way and dragged the fire extinguisher out, ripped the pin out of the handle, and lugged it over to the bed to spray the fire with foam.
Eventually, between the two of them, they had burned or stomped as many spiders as they could manage, and the fire had been put out. The bed was a charred mess, and the floor was slimed with spider-pulp. Both of them backed into the kitchen to recuperate, sitting on the floor, shaking with adrenaline. Robin’s feet were caked in guts. Kenway sat hunched over, his one remaining leg coiled under him like a cobra ready to strike or bolt, his arms tensed, still gripping the lighter and hairspray.
“What the actual fuck,” he hissed. “Why is my apartment full of spiders, Robin?” His head turned, and his brilliant blue eyes burned into her own. “What was that green-eyed thing standing by the bed?”
Goosebumps thrilled up and down Robin’s arms.
“You saw it?” she asked, astonished. “You saw the Red Lord?”
“Hell yeah, I saw the, ‘the Red Lord.’” He coughed, making a sour face. “Or, at least, I saw something, it was lighting up the room like a goddamn Christmas tree.” He eyed their reflections in the window, as if he expected the glass to explode. “Why did it turn into spiders? What the hell is it?”
“You asking me?”
“It’s your bullshit,” he said, his tone veering into accusatory. “You telling me you don’t know anything about it?” He crabwalked backward a few feet to the end of the kitchen island and reached over his head for a pack of cigarettes. He tapped one out and lit it with the lighter, and sat there leaning against the cabinet, smoking it, his hands shaking. “Freakiest shit I have ever seen. What the fuck did you bring here?”
“Hell, I don’t know! I thought it was a hallucination!”
“That’s why you were taking those pills?” His face had turned legit white, making his ginger-blond beard look almost ashen-brown. “Jesus Christ whole-wheat toast, maybe I should be taking them too.”
After a while, somehow, some way, Robin’s heartbeat started to slow down, and she could feel her muscles relaxing. She got up and climbed onto the kitchen island, washing her spider-encrusted feet in the sink. Kenway didn’t get up. When she finished, she got back down on the floor and sat next to him. The cigarette smoke bothered her a bit, but she didn’t mind.
“Sorry I was an asshole about that—” Kenway gestured toward the remains of the mattress. “Whatever that was.”
“It’s cool. I understand.”
“You deal with this kind of shit on the regular?” he asked, digging an empty Sprite can out of a nearby trash bin and ashing the cigarette into it.
A lone spider wandered across the hardwood floor in front of them. Robin grabbed an issue of Field and Stream off the island counter, rolled it into a tube, and smashed the spider with it.
“You know, I was going to read that,” said Kenway. “Eventually.”
Robin unrolled the magazine and held it up to look at the flattened spider. “Sorry.” She offered it to him. When he made a face, she rolled it up and pushed it into the garbage. “Anyway, you keep askin’ me that. Sounds like you’re slowly starting to believe.”
“I’m getting there. How do you do it?” he finished the cigarette and dropped it into the can. “I’d be fit for the loony bin in a week.”
“They say if you eat a live frog first thing in the morning, nothin’ worse can happen to you for the rest of the day. Well, I started off in the loony bin, so what in the world is bad enough to send me back?” Robin scoffed. “This ain’t nothing. At least it wasn’t snakes.”
“I’ll take snakes over spiders.”
The two of them sat for a while, watching the mattress smolder, trying to will their hands to stop shaking. The stink of burnt spiders and melted memory foam still hung in the air.
Welcome home.