A familiar voice cut through the vision-dream: strained and distant, a muffled growl from a thousand miles away. Slowly, faintly, Robin understood there were boards behind her head, no longer wallboards but floorboards, and she was lying on her back, her teeth clenched, her fists tight, her legs folded painfully underneath her as if she’d passed out in the middle of a guitar-solo knee slide. The silver Osdathregar dagger was squeezed in one hand, her knuckles aching.
“I got you, kid,” said the voice again.
Hands grasped her wrists and the floor slithered under her. Someone dragged her through the darkness. Tremors coursed through her as though her very bones were vibrating, and the bitter taste of steel blossomed in her mouth, and the acrid smell of burning rubber filled her nostrils.
Her teeth chattered. The world went away again.
Figures stood around her, a looming tribunal of ominous shapes. Robin awoke with a reflexive gasp, scuttling backward, her heart stomping against her ribs.
More demons.
Instinctively she brandished the silver dagger at them.
“Whoa there, Stabby,” said one of the figures.
She lay on a duvet in a chilly room where gray-blue morning light limped through the curtains. The master bedroom, her parents’ bedroom—no, now the man’s room, the boy’s father. Leon? Yeah, that was his name.
“Good morning.” Mr. Parkin himself stood over her, and Kenway next to him. The digital clock on the nightstand said it was a quarter to eight. Robin turned over and held her aching head, curling into the fetal position. For a weird second, the rough blanket underneath her felt like a dirt floor, and she could still smell the dank, musty, dungeony forgotten-ness of the cellar. Her back, her head, and her elbows felt like she’d seen the business end of a Cadillac.
Joel sat in a chair by the bed. He rubbed his face with his hands and folded his arms. “You scared the hell out of me, girl.”
“She scared you?” Kenway sat on the mattress next to her, face etched with horror and worry. One hand clutched something so tightly she thought he might break it.
“What happened?” she asked.
“You stabbed it,” said Leon. “You stabbed the monster. After it ran away, I started dragging you out of there and I think you had a seizure.”
“A big one.” Joel leaned closer. “You were freakin’ out, boo, you threw up, started doin’ the jitterbug.” He did an impression of her seizure, his back stiffening, his arms locked against his sides and his eyes rolled back. Looked like Frankenstein being electrocuted.
Must have been a grand mal. First she could remember ever having. There had been a few petit mal the last couple of years—a few minutes of lost time here and there as she’d zoned out. One of them she’d actually caught on videotape. A spooky twenty minutes of watching herself stare into space. But she’d never had a shivering, tap-dancing, knock-you-on-your-ass episode before.
Of course, she’d never swallowed eight times the recommended dose of aripiprazole before, either. But at least she knew now the Red Lord wasn’t a figment of her imagination, and it wasn’t Illusion magic from Karen Weaver.
“Scary,” she noted.
“No shit.” Kenway leaned close.
One beefy hand came up, and in it was the empty Abilify bottle.
“Kid said you took the entire thing,” he said, his voice grim, gritty, low. “What were you thinking, Robin? What were you trying to do?”
“If I overdose on aripiprazole, I can power through witchcraft illusions,” Robin told him defensively, her hands scrunching the blanket into fists. “It’s an emergency tactic. Anti-psychotic drugs versus psychosis-inducing magic. It’s like using nitrous in a street race. It makes sense to me, and it’s worked before.”
“Bullshit,” said Kenway. He stood up and pitched the bottle overhand across the room. It ricocheted off the wall and hit the floor with a clatter, rolling under the bed. “You know, the next time you decide to overdose on your meds, let me know. So I can fuck off somewhere else and I won’t find you dead the next morning.”
That said, he left the room.
Shame burned Robin’s face. Neither Leon nor Joel said anything, but the way they were shoe-gazing told her she had indeed fucked up.
Her GoPro camera and harness lay in a pile on the nightstand. The Record light wasn’t on. She snatched it up and was about to ask about it, but Joel spoke first. “Don’t worry, it was still recording when we pulled you out. Cut off a half-hour ago. I reckon you got the footage you was looking for.”
Relief wrestled with shame and loss.
A bolt of pain next to her right ear made her wince. “Down there. In the cellar, my mother did some kind of a ritual, when she was young, and it summoned that monster, that demon thing. Trapped it with a spell from German Judeo-Christian witchcraft or exorcist hoodoo or something, I don’t know what. Sounded like a Celine Dion cover of ‘Du Hast Mich.’”
Leon frowned. “That’s what that Looney Tunes hair-monster was? A demon. For sure. There’s a demon. In my house.”
She dragged herself up and sat against the headboard. “I saw it. In my mind. Like a letter from the past, you know? Like I was watching an old videotape, except the VCR … it was in my head, and the tape was shitty and dirty but I could still see. Mom was trying to stop them, barricade the doors, to block the other witches from coming into the house to kill her. She was trying to summon a demon, but instead of making it manifest here, she accidentally created another—I don’t know, it’s like she cleaved off a second copy of the house. This dark copy, or some kind of dark flip-side. Or maybe she didn’t, maybe it was the demon that created it. But that’s where the demon manifested, and that’s where it was trapped. She imprisoned it there.”
The bedroom fell silent as their brains churned, processing this new information.
A half-cup of coffee on the nightstand next to the clock was pushing a rich aroma into the air, and Robin couldn’t stand it any longer. She rubbed her temples, her eyes cutting sidelong at the cup like a jonesing junkie. “I need a cup of that and I need it ASAP.”
She comforted herself with the familiar ritual of rinsing out the last of the coffee and making a fresh pot, going through methodical motions: fetching the bag of frozen Dunkin Donuts in the freezer (helps it keep longer, so sayeth the Leonard), dosing out the proper portion (three scoopfuls to a full pot of water), pouring water into the Mr. Coffee’s reservoir.
Click. She pressed the button and stood there at the counter, staring at the machine until it began to gurgle. Tendrils of steam crept out from under the lid.
“Hey,” said Joel, eliciting a twitch.
Her eyes moved first, and then her head. She blinked—slowly, balefully, like a lizard, she thought—and said, “What’s up,” sounding perhaps a little more nonchalant than she felt at the moment. Maybe there was still a bit of the Abilify buzzing in her system; she could feel the floor pressing hard against the soles of her feet, and the room was colder than it ought to be, traced in the damp early-morning chill that made you feel small and thin and vulnerable, like a newborn chick too far from its warm nest. She was a naked wire, thrumming with anxious electricity.
“You okay?” Joel leaned in. Steam bathed their faces. “You took a nasty fall, according to the Professional back there. And that seizure thing? Got me worried, bruh, for real.”
Leon the Professional, thought Robin. She could always appreciate a good movie joke. One of Heinrich’s favorite flicks. When she started on this road to revenge, she liked to envision herself as the Natalie Portman to Heinrich’s Jean Reno—his protégé, his shadow, sa fille de substitution. “Yeah,” she said, not looking up from the slowly filling coffee carafe. “I’m fine. I mean, I slept. A little, at least. I just need a cup of coffee and I’m ready to rock.”
“You overdosed and had a seizure. Are you sure you don’t need to go to the emergency room?”
“No. I done this before.”
“Oh, okay. And what happened then?”
“It didn’t knock me out, but I staggered around the woods for like an hour, tryin’ to will the ground to stop breathing under my feet.”
Joel leaned back, wry disapproval scrawled on his face.
“Look, most of what happened to me last night was supernatural,” said Robin, parceling out each word with her hands, as if the explanation needed help getting out of her head. “The demon thing knocked me out more than the meds did. He opened a window into the past in my head. Well, I say opened, but it was more like he tied a vision to a brick and threw it through my brain’s living room window. He showed me a stolen memory from my mom. That kind of thing don’t come cheap, you know. You can’t just … inject random memories into someone’s brain and not expect some kind of, of, cerebral trauma, you know?”
“You saying he gave you brain damage?”
Robin licked her finger and made a check mark in the air. “Demonic brain damage. One more item off my bucket list.”
“Oh, good. Is there anything else on there I should know about? Dismemberment? Defenestration? Thing they did on Game of Thrones where the big guy pushed his thumbs into the little guy’s eye-holes until his skull exploded? Is there a five-dollar word for that?”
“If that happens, I really will need a bucket.”
Joel loomed in close, giving her a playful scowl, eyes narrowed. “Just drink your damn coffee, princess.” He walked away, shaking his head.
Their estranged companion Kenway had escaped to the back stoop to smoke a cigarette and stare at the deep Slade Township woods, with its wet, obfuscating October morning fog, wispy cumulus clouds rolling low through the trees. In Georgia, you don’t really call it “the forest.” The forest is a European thing, a Dungeons & Dragons thing, a storybook glen where knights ride, and bandits creep, and faeries flitter. The forest is where stories begin. No, down here in the Appalachian pines, where meth-heads murder each other over stolen power tools, where banjo-toting mutants make you squeal like a pig, where you might kick aside a pile of yellow leaves and find the moldering bones of somebody’s brother or father, you call ’em the woods, and the woods is where stories end.
Man, Robin thought, spooning sugar into a mug. Aripiprazole hangovers make me corny as fuck. Write drunk, indeed.
Her head swam. Nausea burned in the swell of her jaw, as if there were venom in her salivary glands, just waiting to poison someone’s blood. She looked up from her careful caffeine alchemy and found Joel staring up at her, sitting at the table. They were the only two people in the kitchen.
“What?” she asked, spoon poised in midair.
He shrugged and sat back. Nothing, said his expression, nothing at all. But he continued to stare at her.
“If you gon’ say something, say it.”
“You know he’s mad at you.” Joel folded his arms. “You know you fucked him up.”
Robin poured creamer into the mug, and coffee on top, and threw her hands wide in a what-can-you-do way. “It was bound to happen sooner or later. I’m just surprised it took so long. Normally everybody just wanna nail me against a wall and disappear, and as soon as the medication comes out, the disappearin’ part usually comes first.” She stirred the coffee with a cold chuckle. “At least something gets to come first.”
“No,” said Joel, holding up a finger. “No jokes here, comedian. You don’t get to let him into your life, learn his secrets, and use them against him. That is a good man out there. He ain’t the disappearin’ type. It’s time to stop sabotaging your own happiness. Yeah, I can see it in your eyes. You think you’re broken, you think you don’t deserve somebody good, and when you see a good thing comin’, you start playin’ it all by ear because who gives a fuck, right? It’s all going to turn to shit anyway, right? Well, just fuckin’ stop.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
Joel snorted. “Hey, if the heels fit.”
They lingered there in a kitchen for a long time, Joel sitting at the table like Human Resources holding a job interview, Robin leaning against the counter holding a cup of coffee under her face, sauna steam curling across her lips and chin.
“You know what happened with that army friend of his.”
“I know.”
“How can you do that to him?”
“I wasn’t thinkin’.”
“No, you wasn’t.” Joel got up and poured himself a cup of coffee. The teacher’s coffeemaker was a big one made for an office, a twelve-cup cauldron. Probably a hand-me-down from some teachers’ lounge, fired and replaced by a Keurig.
“I ain’t ask for this, you know. You set me up with him.”
“I’ve known him long enough to know he’s the same kind of screwed up you are. You both got eyes like knives. You two go together like chocolate and—”
(the shit, the suck, the fighting, it changed us. Made us wild animals)
“Peanut butter?”
“I was gonna say ‘soy sauce,’ but yeah, peanut butter, that works.”
Their banter was interrupted by a knock at the front door.
Joel’s grim smile disappeared and he eased out of his chair, his head hunched down. “You expectin’ visitors?” he asked, glancing at the window over the sink.
“No.” Robin started toward the hallway leading to the foyer, but Katie Fryhover stepped into the doorway.
“Witch-lady is outside.” The little girl knuckled one eye sleepily. “Why is she wearing a bunch of rags?”
Sidling past the little girl, Robin crossed the hallway and slipped into the downstairs bathroom, a cramped half-bath with a toilet and a sink. The walls were tiled in a dizzying motif of hornet-yellow sunflowers. “Go see what she wants, Mr. Parkin,” Robin said through the half-open door, briefly recognizing how weird it was to carry a cup of coffee into the bathroom. She put it on top of the hamper. “Don’t let her know we’re here.”
Joel sidled inside, squeezing between them. Robin stood in the corner behind the sink, pushing a wastebasket out of the way. “If she sees me, she gonna know you’re here,” he said to her, closing the toilet’s lid and sitting on it. Joel tried to close the door, but there was a soft knock. He opened it a crack.
“I need to use the bathroom,” Katie whispered through the gap.
The pizza-chef palmed the top of her head and tugged her into the bathroom, closing the door for good. Robin clutched the little girl against her knees. “Shh,” she murmured, looking down at Katie’s upside-down face with her finger across her lips. “Gotta be quiet, okay, honey? We can’t let the witch-lady know we’re in here, or she’ll turn us into bugs.”
“I don’t wanda be a bug,” Katie murmured back, shaking her head slowly.
“Then be as quiet as you possibly can.”
In perfect unison, Joel turned off the bathroom light and Leon opened the front door.
“Good morning.”
“Good morning from the Welcome Wagon!” hooted Karen Weaver. “I was out ’n about, and I wanted to stop by and see how your boy was doing.”
“Actually, I’m glad you came by. I was going to come up and see you today.”
“Is that so?”
“Come on in, ma’am … feels a little clammy out there. I’d hate for you to catch your death of cold.”
“Too true, too true.” Weaver’s boots thumped on the entryway rug and knocked on the hardwood floor. The front door closed with a soft click and the two of them went into the living room, which made them a little harder to hear.
In the bathroom, Robin was dead silent and motionless, straining to listen. She tried her damnedest not to cough.
“Well, hello there, kiddos! Oh, a sleepover! How wonderful!”
“What’s this?” asked Leon.
“Oh, it’s an icebox cake. I thought the boy would appreciate a sweet treat while he convalesces.” The rustle of paper. “Look through the glass dish—see how the cake is marbled underneath? You bake the cake and pour Jell-O mix into it, and let it soak in the fridge. The Jell-O sets inside the cake.”
Some strange sensation of hunger echoed in Robin’s bones, reverberating from deep in the center of the house as if the creaky Victorian itself were tired of nails and mice and wanted something fresh. A half-presence lurked out there with them, the same eerie weight you sense when you know someone’s home with you but you haven’t seen them yet.
Owlhead, she thought. You can smell the witch, can’t you?
When she closed her eyes, she could almost hear his ragged, leonine breathing. And he wasn’t hungering for icebox cake.
“Wow, that’s really nice of you. Sounds great. After breakfast, maybe, I’d love some.”
“Yes, yes, after breakfast, of course, of course. Here, I’ll stash it in your Frigidaire.” The brittle rapping of Weaver’s boots clattered down the hallway toward the kitchen and the bathroom. Robin realized she was scrunching up the little girl’s shirt and let go. Weaver kept going and hung a right into the kitchen and paused. “Why does it smell like perfume in here?”
“Been burning incense,” said Leon. “Nice expensive stuff from the head shop down there by the Payless Shoes. Thought it might warm the house up a little. Housewarming, you might say.”
“Good call, good call. I burn frankincense myself.” Opening the fridge, Weaver hooted. “Boy oh boy oh boy. I can tell you’re a bachelor, sir. Heavens. Ain’t nothing but takeout, leftovers, and condiments! Cold pizza indeed! Reckon I’m going to have to treat you gang more often.” The heavy Pyrex dish thumped onto the metal rack inside and she closed it up.
“Sort of what I wanted to talk to you about, actually,” said Leon, right on the other side of the bathroom door.
“Oh, we got all the time in the world for small talk.” Weaver came back out into the hallway and paused. Her breezy bulk was almost palpable through the door, like a winter wind through an autumn window. A faint ratcheting noise was followed by a gush of warm air from the vent next to Robin’s toes. “So drafty in this old house, ain’t it?” asked Weaver. “Come on, let’s turn up the heat a bit. Don’t want the boy to catch a cold on top of a snakebite, hmm?”
The witch thumped back into the living room and clapped once, rasping her dry old hands together. Robin’s mind produced a mental image of a housefly furiously rubbing its forelegs against each other. She shuddered.
“How are you feelin’, dear boy? How’s that leg a’ yours?”
Wayne mumbled something not quite audible.
“Very good, very good. Sounds like the poultice did the trick, hmm? Drew the poison right out of you as easy as … well, dirt out of a carpet! It’s the salt, you know, that does the trick. You toss in a few secret ingredients and it’ll draw the venom right out of the bite.”
(b i t e y o u, w a n t t o b i t e y o u)
Starvation surged in Robin’s chest, dropping into the pit of her belly, and for a terrifying second she thought her stomach was going to growl out loud. Owlhead wanted the old woman, and bad. She could feel it. But without a display of prestidigitation on Weaver’s part, the demon couldn’t find her. It was attuned to her arcane energies.
“People’s got lots of mean things to say about our country remedies and old wives’ tricks,” Weaver was saying, “but when they work—and they always do—oh, those folks shut their traps, they shut ’em right up.”
Leon took the opportunity to jump in. “Mrs. Weaver—”
“Call me Karen.”
“Karen, then … I just—”
“Or, you can call me Grandma if you like. Granny, Grammama, Mee-Maw, I come a-runnin’ to bout any of those.”
“‘Mee-Maw’? I wanted to thank you for what you did at the hospital. For … for footing Wayne’s hospital bill. I don’t—I don’t even know how to voice my gratitude enough. You have no idea how much you helped me out. I mean, almost thirty thousand dollars? As a high school teacher, that’s like a year’s pay for me.”
The witch tittered. “Wasn’t no trouble, no trouble at all. You save up a lot of money livin’ with two other old goats in a crumblin’ pile in the ass-end of nowhere. Chicken coops’re cheap, and we’re all hens down that way.”
“I see.” Leon scoffed politely. “Well, there’s not much I can do to repay you, at least for the time being, but I, uhh … I wanted to invite you over for dinner. My treat. It’s the least I can do for the lady that saved my son’s life and me a ton of heartache.”
“How lovely of you. I’d be delighted. But your kitchen is awfully small … and ain’t exactly geared to the gills. Now, our kitchen, on the other hand, well. You could roast a buffalo in that sucker, hooves and all, and dress it up no worse than Wolfgang Puck himself! And it’s been quite a long time since we’ve had any company up there. Yessirree.”
Silence lingered for a few seconds, and then Weaver went on talking.
“Make a deal with you, Mr. Parkin. You put together what you want for dinner—steaks, chicken, lamb, whatever you fancy. Bring it on up to the house. We’ll sizzle it up fine and dandy with some veggies and baked tubers and yeast rolls, hmm?”
“Yeah, okay. Sounds good to me.”
The uncertainty in Leon’s voice made that a bald-faced lie Weaver would have to be an idiot to miss.
“You seem reluctant, buddy. What’s the matter?”
“I hate to impose.”
“It’s the stories, ain’t it? The tall tales about us being a bunch of witches. Bubble-bubble-toil-and-trouble and all that. I expect the folks over there in the trailer park been tellin’ you tales out of school.” Weaver chuckled dismissively, airily. “Take a gander at my face, hon. What color is my skin? Green?… No? And where’s the wart on my nose? My pilgrim hat and buckled shoes? My bristly dustbroom and black pussycat?”
Another stretch of quiet, and then Leon said with a soft laugh, “Okay, yeah. I get the point. Sometimes I’m bad about letting what people say get to me. Not quite gullible, but—”
“Too trusting?”
“I guess? I guess you could say so.”
Pete cut in. “The heck is a tuber?”
“A potato, my man,” said Weaver. “An obsolete word for a potato, from an obsolete potato of an old woman.”
Nobody laughed. Weaver continued to talk, unfazed. “Trust is a good thing, Mr. Parkin. A good thing. I think this world could use a bit more of it. Without it, where would we be? Kids don’t hardly get to play outside these days, do they? They just sit in the house with their Internet and video games because the world out there scares the hell out of them. We don’t trust them around strangers anymore. We don’t trust Halloween candy anymore, for Pete’s sake, and as an alleged witch I can tell you without a doubt that’s a crying shame.”
Robin could only think of her mother pinning Weaver’s husband to the floor two decades ago. Edgar, the real-life boogeyman, making children disappear out of his homegrown Six Flags. She had no doubt Weaver was complicit in the racket. Hypocrite hag, she thought, squeezing little Katie’s shoulders. The girl squirmed. She pressed her hand over Katie’s mouth before she could complain. Sorry, sorry—don’t squeal! We’ll all be shitting bumblebees if she finds us in here!
“Anyway,” said Weaver, “I need to get back to the ranch. I got a dress I’ve been working on for a month or so now and I’m starting to get down to the wire on my deadline. These young ladies these days, they don’t have any patience for craftsmanship.”
“A dress?”
“Oh, yeeeah. I design and make wedding dresses and sell ’em on the Internet. A real cottage industry, all by myself. Can you believe it? I talk down at the Internet like it’s some kind of playpretty for lazy folks, but really, it’s been a Godsend for an old lady like me. Why, I can visit the Great Wall of China from the comfort of my kitchen!”
The two of them headed to the front door, Leon with his slow cowboy stride, Weaver bustling along in a constant swish of fabric and a boot-heel drum solo.
“How does steak sound?” Leon asked, opening the front door.
“Like this: MOO.”
The kids in the living room giggled.
“Steaks sound just fine, Mr. Parkin,” said Weaver.
“Please, call me Leon.”
“Ah, the lion! I like that quite a lot. You strike me as a man with a lion’s courageous heart, Leon. Boy’s quite lucky to have such a father. I think he takes after you.”
“Thank you.”
“Seven o’clock? Six? I don’t want to keep the lion-cub up too late. It is a school night, after all.”
“Six is fine. I’ll be there.”
“It’s settled.” Weaver’s voice became a little clearer, a little louder. She must have leaned into the doorway to shout. “Have a good Sabbath, everybody! Dig that cake! There’s more where that came from!”
An awkward silence followed this as the children hesitated, unsure of how to respond.
“Thank you, Miss Weaver,” called Amanda.
Pete and Wayne echoed her. “Thank you, Miss Weaver.”
Meanwhile, Robin could feel the witch’s laser gaze through the wall, as if she had Superman’s eyes. She knows we’re here. She knows, dammit. Even though they’d parked in Chevalier Village so the plumbing van wouldn’t be sitting in Leon’s driveway for Cutty to see.
“You’re very welcome,” grinned Weaver. “Au revoir!”
The front door closed. The whole house seemed to hold its breath for a full minute as everybody stayed locked in position, listening. Almost as if they were waiting for something.
“That is one creepy-ass old biddy,” noted Joel.
Katie stirred. “I have to peeeeeee.”
“All right, all right.” Joel cracked the door open. Wayne’s father stood by the front door, peeking through the sidelight windows. “Is she gone?”
Leon spoke over his shoulder. “Yeah. She’s gone.”
“Gone gone?” asked Joel. “She’s off the property?”
“Yeah, she’s crossing the highway right now.” Leon gave them a pointed look as they came out of hiding. “Man, for a big-shot witch-hunter, you sure are hot to stay outta sight.”
Robin was the last out of the bathroom, closing it behind her to give Katie some privacy. “You remember that green-eyed thing in the darkhouse?” She said ‘dark house’ as one word, darkhouse, as one would say “big-house” or “outhouse.” Seemed to be evolving into her name for it. “Well, that creature may be the only thing that can kill those witches. That’s how powerful they are. They’d tear through us like wet toilet paper.”
“Then what made you think you’d be able to take ’em on by yourself?” asked Leon, going into the kitchen.
The water ran as he washed out the coffee mugs, staring out the window over the sink. Robin put her fists on her hips and stared darkly at the foyer rug as if she could find wisdom in the intricate red-and-blue curlicues. “Thought I might have a chance with the Osdathregar, I guess.”
“Hey, guess what,” said Kenway, coming in through the back door. He blew the last smoke of his cigarette as he did, the door pulling the cloud inside-out. In the awkward silence of the witch’s departure, his boots sounded like hammers on the tile.
“I give up. What?”
“You got company,” he said, and stepped aside.
A tall, gangly man sauntered into the kitchen and pushed his fingers into the pocket of his coat, pulling a flip-phone out and opening it. The felt gambler hat on his bald brown head, along with the black overcoat, made him look like he should be chasing an outlaw through Tombstone. The witch-hunter’s eyes were inscrutable behind silver aviator shades as he showed them the phone’s screen.
“I finally got into my voicemail.” Heinrich pinched the cigar from between his teeth and blew a cloud of coconut-smelling smoke. “Robin Hood, how many times have I told you not to call me and interrupt my kung fu?”