Robin awoke to birdsong tittering through the windows of her tiny cupola bedroom. The first breezes of June came in through the open screen. Outside, green trees flashed the pale undersides of their leaves as if they were waving dollar bills.
A blue creature lay crumpled in a heap of legs at the foot of her bed. The little girl dragged the stuffed animal over. “Look, Mr. Nosy,” she squealed, “it’s the first day of summer vacation!”
Mr. Nosy was a felt mosquito the approximate size and style of a Muppet, with big white ping-pong-ball eyes. At the back of his open mouth was a sort of voice box, and when you pinched one of his feet he whined like a kazoo. In her tiny hands, he came alive. She sat him up very carefully on top of the quilt and wriggled out of her nightshirt, putting on a sundress and a pair of sandals. Cradling the puppet, she clomped down the twisting stairway and opened the door at the bottom.
The smell of bacon and biscuits rolled over her in a warm wave. Robin danced along the second floor landing and down a flight of switchback stairs to the foyer, skipping into the kitchen. Her mother sat at the kitchen table, reading a newspaper and sipping a cup of coffee. Robin arranged her pet mosquito on the counter in front of the bread box and hopped into her chair.
She stared at the back of the newspaper and tried to read it again, but as always in these dreams, it was just a grid of black squiggles.
“Goo morvig,” said her mother.
“Good morning, Mama.”
Annabelle Martine—Mama to Robin, Annie to everybody else—talked as if she had a mouthful of water. She had a speech impediment that made her difficult to interpret, but Robin had grown up with it and found her as easy to understand as anybody else.
Annie smiled, scooping bacon and eggs onto her daughter’s plate. “Did you sleep good?”
“Yep.”
“Your birthday is at the end of the month.” Annie cut a biscuit open and knifed grape jam into it. “Have you decided what you want yet?”
“No. What about a book?” asked Robin. “I like books.”
“Books are the best. Even better than toys and video games, I think. Definitely better than video games.”
“I want a Harry Potter book.”
Annie sneered in mock disgust. “Harry Potter? What do you want to read about Harry Potter for?”
“Harry Potter does magic.” Robin rolled her eyes. “I want to read about magic. And swords and kings and dragons and wizards.” She waved her fork around as if it were a wand, touching her eggs, her orange juice, the table. “I love wizards. I wish I could do magic.”
As she always did when her daughter spoke of magic, Annie smiled bitterly, as if the word dredged some long ago slight from the water under the bridge. “No, you don’t, honey.”
Tick. Tick. Tick. The clock on the kitchen wall chiseled away at the morning. The short hand and the long hand were racing each other around the dial as though reality were in fast forward. The numbers were unintelligible sigils.
Annie had finished her coffee by the time she spoke up again, cutting through the droning of the lawn mower. “Hurry up and finish, and we’ll go down to the bookstore in town. You can pick something out.”
After breakfast, they went out the back door, marching down the little wooden stoop. Their backyard was huge, occupied by a stunted oak tree and a lonely gray shed fringed with ragged weeds. A board swing twisted and wobbled in the breeze. In the distance, out by the tree line, Robin’s father, Jason Martine, bumped and roared along on his gas-stinking Briggs & Stratton.
“We’ll go tell Jason we’re going to town,” said Annie, referring to Daddy by the secret identity all superhero Daddies had. She started off across the grass. “Don’t want him to come in and find us gone without telling him where we went.”
You know how he can get.
The backyard was so big. Why was it so big? Seemed like the farther they walked, the bigger it got. The sun bounced up off the dry, prickly grass with a hard, walloping heat, and the tufts of lawn got taller and thicker until they were wading through a thicket of crabgrass, clover, and wild onions.
“Hold on, Mama,” Robin said, stopping to search the ground, “I want to find a four-leaf clover.”
Annie stopped, took a knee, and swept her hand like a beachcomber with a metal detector. Easy as pie, she plucked a lucky four-leaf and held it up for her daughter to count the leaves. Never failed to amaze Robin that while she could wander the yard for hours stooped over like an old woman and never see a single one, her mother never seemed to have any trouble finding them. “You’re so lucky. But you’re not as lucky as me.” She inserted the clover’s stem behind Robin’s ear so it flowered against her temple like a hibiscus in a hula girl’s hair. “You’re not as lucky as me, because I have you.” Annie grinned. Instead of their usual eggshell white, her teeth were made of wood, brown and swirly dark. “I’m the luckiest mommy in the world, you know that?”
Robin stared at her mother in horror. “Why are your teeth made of wood, Mama?”
“What?” Annie threw her head back and laughed. “You’re so silly. Such a silly-billy.”
Their feet plowed across the interminable lawn, breaking up clumps of mulched grass with a rhythmic swishing. Robin squinted into the heat. Beyond an invisible motion swirling in the air, she could still see her father on his red-and-black-and-green riding mower.
Robin blinked, and her father and his lawn mower were gone. Now there was something else crouched in the tall grass, a gargantuan shape she’d never seen in the sunlight before. And now that solar rays beat down and fully illuminated the creature, she felt both terror at its appearance and a sort of giddiness at its ludicrous proportions. Wind whipped at the coarse, yarn-like hair, it was a mountain of red-and-green-and-black hair, prone in the tall grass like a lion stalking its prey. Looked like a mascot costume abandoned to the elements, a baseball jester infested with rot and mold. It reached out slowly, so slowly, with one horrible claw and swept aside the green grains to get a better look at her.
This may have been a dream, but that didn’t stop the terror from creeping like ivy into the folds of her brain.
“M-Mama,” Robin finally managed to stammer.
“The Red Lord,” said Annie. “He’s going to find you.”
That man at Neva Chandler’s house in Alabama, he’d said the same thing. The Red Lord. He’s going to find you. You’re going to die.
Had the witch cursed her?
For some reason Annie seemed to be slowing. Not all at once but gradually as they walked, as if each step were a centimeter shorter than the last. The clipped grass piled around their toes like frozen water at the bow of an icebreaker ship.
“Who is he?” asked Robin.
“He’s always been there, ever since the door was opened. Watching. Waiting. A vigilant beast.”
Her mother seemed to be the only one succumbing to it, though, like a peat bog, because soon Dear Mama was up to her ankles in the turf. Green ripples bobbed outward from her toes like pond scum, lapping over her instep. “Don’t want him to come in and find us gone without telling him where we went,” she said, the grass welling around her shins.
“Mama?”
Now Annie was positively forging against the grass; she reached with every step, leaning forward, steaming across the yard.
Looking the way they came, Robin hugged Mr. Nosy against her chest. She wiped her hair out of her eyes. The house was a brick of blue clapboard behind them, as far away as Christmas, the swingin’-tree and woodshed tiny and model-like as if they’d been made of popsicle sticks and reindeer moss.
The lawn had swallowed Annie up to the knees. Her fists pistoned in and out like a boxer working a belly, as if she were walking in treacle. “He’ll find you. Wherever you are. I’m so sorry.” Her mother was walking so slowly now Robin could overtake her.
Polished cedar. Annie’s eyes were made of wood. The sclera were a pale alabaster with streaks of pink, and ragged black knotholes gaped where her irises and pupils should have been. Goatish eyes. “Don’t want him to come in and find us.”
“What do you mean?” asked Robin, standing in front of her mama, clutching Mr. Nosy. Annie was no longer driving forward, but halted mid-stride. Her feet were rooted in the earth as firmly as any fencepost and her arms were at kung-fu angles, one punched forward and the other’s elbow jutting out behind her. She was a statue locked in an action pose.
“What do you mean?” Robin repeated, her voice climbing. Now she was shrieking. “What do you mean? Goddammit why don’t you ever tell me what you mean?”
She reached out and slapped her mother’s motionless face with a six-year-old’s hand.
Annie’s cheek came loose like a deflated blister, a sag of translucent candle-skin, and the wind flaked a bit of it away, revealing dark brown underneath. Then more came away, and Annie Martine’s face began to peel as easy as old paint, spiraling like burning paper into the breeze. Below the flaking skin was bark, smooth black-brown bark, studded with jagged wooden teeth. A lovely wooden skull lurked behind that ivory Annie mask, intricately carved, beautiful, horrifying.
The hulking red thing, still crawling in the saw grass, laughed. Grrrrruhuhuhuhuh.
Robin’s lungs refused to inflate. Stepping back, she watched as the outermost layer of her mother deteriorated inch by inch, crumbling off and blowing away.
Birch-scrolls drooped from her shoulders, breaking off at the elbow; waxy green leaves spotted with worm-rust sprouted from her hair, and uncurled from her knuckles and the tips of her fingers. Annie’s arms and wrists lengthened, reaching out in front of her and over her head, and her legs thickened, elongated, becoming like those of an elephant, covered in cobbly flesh. The terrible sound of rending muscle-fibers whispered underneath Annie’s bark as she stretched, reaching for the sky, and then she was a tree, she was a goddamn tree towering over her daughter, an apple tree, Malus domestica, her skull-carving face buried in her trunk so only her sightless eyes and maniacal Jolly Roger grin were visible.
She had become a Titan’s arm, reaching up from the crust and grass, clutching a handful of leaves. Her eyes drooped like empty sleeves, the left one combining with her mouth to make a gaping, C-shaped knothole.
Then the tree that had been Annie burst into flames, all that foliage going up in a bonfire WHOOSH of hot light, and the mama-thing inside screamed in pain and terror, and
Little Robin screamed,
and
old women cackled, ceaselessly echoing back on themselves,
and—
Knuckles banged on the side of Robin’s van, waking her up with a start.
Fucking nightmare again. Fourth time since crossing the Mississippi. Enough, already. She squirmed out of her sleeping bag and opened the door.
Joel stood outside, sidelit by the pizzeria’s security lights. He squinted into her flashlight beam. “Hey. Thought that would be you, out here in this sketch-ass van.” He had put on a light windbreaker, his hands tucked deep into the jacket’s pockets. “Got any free candy?”
“No, ’fraid not.”
“Damn.” Joel’s eyes seemed to focus more fully on her face. “Hey, you all right? You look like you seen a ghost.”
“Maybe.” Robin massaged her eye sockets. “No, it’s—I had a nightmare. Same one every time. Been happenin’ a lot lately.”
Joel’s face grew softer. She could tell he wanted to pursue that line of thought, to comfort her, but there was an air-cushion, like underneath an air-hockey puck, that the intervening years had pressed between the two of them. They had been close friends a long time ago, but that was a long time ago. In another era. “Uhhm,” he began, uncertainly, “I wanted to come tell you, my brother Fish, he owns a comic shop in town? And he does this movie-night thing every Friday. He gonna start it up in about—” He checked his cell phone. “—twenty minutes. You know, if you want to get out of that sketch-ass van for a little while.”
“I don’t know. I—”
“Miguel usually lets me bring over a bunch of pizza from the shop. Employee discount.”
“Jesus, why you ain’t say that to begin with?” she asked, flicking on the dome light so she could find her clothes. The sriracha-pineapple-pepperoni slice she’d had for lunch had been amazing, and she was more than ready for Round Two.
“What in the hell?” asked Joel, peering into the back of the van with saucer eyes. He reached in and took the broadsword down from its clamp on the wall and struck Conan poses with it. “What is all this now? This part of your witch-hunting YouTube channel?”
Robin wriggled into her jeans. “Yep.”
He put the sword back and tipped one of the plastic bins so he could see into it. Batteries. “You loaded for bear. You’s a badass bitch.”
“Witch-hunting is a resource-intensive business.”
Shrugging into a hoodie, Robin clambered out of the back of the van and locked it up. As Joel led her out to his car, she turned her video camera on and aimed it at her face, holding it at arm’s length. “Hi everybody. It’s Malus. I was getting ready to settle down for the night with a good book and a bowl of staple-food ninety-nine-cent ramen when my new best friend Joel—”
She aimed the camera at Joel. “What up, Internet.” He blew a kiss.
“—came to invite me to Movie Night. Complete with more of that damn fantastic pizza from the pizzeria. Lady Luck smile on me for a change.”
Joel drove a beautiful jet-black Monte Carlo with bicycle-spoke rims and whitewall tires. She opened the passenger door and slid into the plush black interior to find an eight-ball gear shift and an armrest wedge embroidered with a stylized picture of Vonetta McGee in her Blacula costume, and the words BLACK VELVET in cursive. She recognized Vonetta as soon as she saw the armrest, because Blacula was one of Heinrich’s favorites.
“All black.” Robin buckled up as Joel tossed himself into the car. “Speaking of badass bitches, I bet this thing is a bitch in the summer.”
He turned the engine over with a cough and a beastly, deep-throated grum-grum-grum-grum. “Honey, it’s a bitch all year,” Joel said, throwing it into gear and pulling out of the parking lot.
Speakers in the back howled “Crazy on You” by Heart as he piloted Black Velvet down the twisting highway, his headlights washing back and forth across the trees. The back seat had a stack of cardboard boxes in it, filling the car with the tangy-savory smell of hot pizza. As they came into Blackfield proper, the headlights spotlighted familiar sights that brought back a flood of nostalgia.
“I see you ain’t lost ya country accent,” said Joel.
Much of the town was different. New Walgreens. The Walmart had become a sprawling co-op. But underneath the shiny new veneer of change were old landmarks saturated with memories.
“Nope. You can take the girl out of the country—”
There was the bridge she used to play under when she was a kid walking home from school.
Jim’s Diner, where she had her first piece of cheesecake.
Funeral home with the giant sloped parking lot she’d sledded down one winter and crashed into some spare headstones at the back, leaving a bruise on her ass.
Walker Memorial, where she’d gone to church a few times under the instruction of her therapists in her junior year of high school. Lasted about a month, but she could still hear the vaulted echoes of footsteps, smell the varnish on the pews, the dusty carpet, the faint reek of ancient hymnal books with stiff pages.
“But you can’t take the country out of the girl,” said Joel, turning down the stereo so he could talk. He took out an iPhone and texted someone, typing with one thumb. “Been a few years, ain’t it?”
“Yeah.” Robin spoke to the window, the world wheeling past her face like a diorama. They passed the Victory Lanes alley on 7th and Stuart, the neon sign out front showing a bowling ball knocking two pins into the rough shape of a V over and over. “I didn’t think I’d ever be back here. Lot of bad memories.”
“You said this morning you wanted to pay your respects to your mom?” He attached his phone to a magnetized ball on the dash, click, where it perched above the radio.
“Yeah. I might hit up my old house too, if I think I can handle it.”
Black Velvet paused at a traffic light and the two of them sat there, listening to the muscle car idle. Joel sniffed, tugging his nose. He glanced out the window and then back at her as if he were about to give her nuclear secrets. “Hey, you want me to go with you?” he said in his own laconic Georgia drawl. Ay, you want me to go witchu? “You know, moral support? Or whatever? I don’t know when you wanna go, but I got some time off coming.”
“I don’t know yet.” Robin’s twang matched it in a way. Iono yet. “Maybe some time this week.”
“Lemme know. I’ll be there with bells on.” He flicked the tiny disco ball hanging from his rearview mirror and light danced around the interior of the car. “Jingle jangle.” No response from the woman in the passenger seat, so Joel leaned forward to catch her eye. “Hey, you gonna be aight? Must have been a hell of a nightmare. You say they happen all the time?”
“Used to get ’em real bad back when I was in the hospital, after the fire.” After the fire, she always thought of it, because it was easier to focus on the fire than the sight of her dying mother looking up at her from the floor. “The medication helped. After a while they stopped … but by then I was basically a wooden mannequin, so it didn’t even matter.”
The light turned green, and Joel eased through the intersection, the car’s engine grumbling. “Yeah, them anti-psychotics and anti-depressants, they can straight-up turn you inside out.”
“You been on that stuff?”
Joel made a flinchy sort of face and said, “Oh hell yeah. Baby, I’m a gay black man in the backwoods south. Even if my mama hadn’t lost her mind and drove my brother away and turned me into a fucking basket case, I’d still be on this town’s shit list. Some days I’d be fit to be tied if I didn’t have something to soften the blow.” He flexed a smoothly muscular arm. “Take this python right here, this started when I was workin’ for Mr. Barnett fresh outta high school, doing landscaping for his lil shit-ass company. Hard work toting around bags of concrete and big-ass rocks and digging holes all day. After a year and a half of that, I started to get swole. And you know what? I caught a little less shit because of it. People looked at these biceps and it made their bullshit dry up in their mouth.”
“You ever get in any fights?”
“A couple. People talkin’ shit about my mama. That’s why I don’t work for Barnett no more.”
“You like fighting?”
“No! Not at all. Hell naw. You kidding me? Look at this shit I got on. This is actual silk. I painted my muhfuckin’ nails. I hate fighting. I like my face the way it is, and I like my guts not full of holes. I’d rather smoke a little good-good and drive my car and play some video games and mind my own business. But sometimes people like to make their circus your circus.”
He drove on. She noticed that he kept glancing into the rearview mirror, peering through it as if it were a mailslot. “And sometimes,” he continued, “when they see you get big, they send a few more dudes. That’s why I learned how to move out the way, too. How to drive. How to be elusive. Lot of Black folks, we talk about bein’ invisible, you know—white people, they can look right through you, like you ain’t even there. I judo that shit, right? I make it work for me. I’m like a ninja, I vanish. Ali said float like a butterfly. One minute I’m there, the next, I ain’t. Ain’t nothing but burnt rubber and a little bit of Forever Red in the air.”
“I’m sorry,” said Robin.
“For what?”
“That you had—have—to put up with that kind of shit.”
“Don’t be. Made me a stronger person. I made enough money there to make a down payment on Black Velvet. Either that or a security deposit on an apartment, and after Fish left to make his bones and get rich, I had to stay behind, live in our old house, and take care of my moms.” A few seconds passed and then he said, “I wasn’t really ever as smart as Fish. I didn’t have any choice in the matter.” He shrugged, glancing at her. “I do what I can, but I ain’t my brother.” He patted the dashboard. “But I got my Velvet here, I got gas in the tank and something to eat, and that’s enough for me.”
They stopped for another traffic light, this one in front of a Taco Bell. Someone had stolen the C off the sign out front so instead of HIRING CLOSERS, it said HIRING LOSERS. Joel leaned forward, catching her eye with a look of concern.
“So: the nightmares,” he said. “You wanna talk about ’em?”
Robin gazed out the window, staring her reflection in the face. After a few moments to find the words, she spoke.
“In my dream, I’m a little girl again, and my mom is still alive.” She elected not to mention the Red Lord. Seemed a little too heavy for a night like this, and for such a cramped space. “My mom and I go out the back door to talk to my dad while he’s mowing the lawn, and she starts acting weird, and then turns into a tree. And then she bursts into flames and starts to burn, and I always wake up before I can put her out.”
“Weird.”
As they pulled into the diagonal parking in front of his brother’s comic book store, Joel leaned over in a conspiratorial way, and murmured, “Well, it’s good to have you back, even if being back in town is making you have nightmares. You always welcome to come down to my place and share a bottle of cognac with me. I find the nectar of the gods is most efficacious when it comes to knockin’ y’ass out so you can sleep the dreamless sleep of the innocent.”
Robin took a moment to study his smooth, open face. “You know, I might takes you up on that.”
“Maybe we’ll even play a little dress-up like we did when we was kids,” Joel said, putting the car into Park and shutting off the leonine engine. “We won’t have to borrow your mama’s clothes to get gussied up like back then.” He flicked an earring. “I buy my own shit now!”