Fisher’s comic store wasn’t quite on the main drag through town, but it was tucked into a homey little street one block over, a narrow slice of old-fashioned Americana. Knickknack shops, drugstores, a pet shop, boutiques, barber shops, a bar, lawyers’ offices, a Goodwill, a soup kitchen. They passed a looming gray courthouse and a red-brick police station.
The Monte Carlo slid into an angled parking spot on the street next to eight or nine other vehicles and Joel got out, taking half the stack of boxes out, leaving the rest for Robin. “Did you say Miguel donates these pizzas?” she asked, picking up the boxes and pushing the car door shut with her foot.
“He sees it as grassroots advertising,” Joel said, suggestively tossing out a hip. “Give ’em a taste, they gonna come back for more.”
“Sound like the drugslinger method to me.” She felt for the curb with her toe and stepped up onto the sidewalk. The windows of the comic shop were painted with intricate images of Spider-Man and Batman in dynamic poses, Bats in his blue-and-gray Silver Age colors. Over their heads was FISHER’S HOBBY SHOP in flowing cursive.
A man came out of the comic book store and held the door open for them. “You trying to hurt me, man,” he told Joel, eyeing the pizza. He was brawny but slender, with a swimmer’s build and a round face.
“Fish, you the one doing it to yourself, don’t blame me. I eat like a human. You eat like a mule.”
The comic shop was dimly lit by bar fluorescents. Comics were only a fraction of the wares on the shelves—there were scores of rare, niche, and run-of-the-mill action figures still in their blister packs, board and card games, Halloween masks cast from various horror movies and superheroes, film props, video game keychains, themed candy. A life-size Xenomorph creature from the Alien movies lurked behind a shelf, motionlessly waiting to snag any customers unfortunate enough to step into range of its throat-jaws.
In the back of the store was an open area with booth seats and folding chairs. Arcing over the heads of two dozen people and a small squad of children was a cone of light casting the opening sequence of horror classic Evil Dead on a projection screen.
“Fish on that keto diet.” Joel put the pizza boxes on a booth table and squirted some sanitizer on his hands, wringing them. The kids immediately got up and came to the table, standing at his elbow like hungry hounds. “He try to tell me it’s good and good for ya, but I see that look in his eye when I bring in these pizzas.”
“What’s the keto diet?” asked Robin.
“Zero carbs. None. Zero, zip, zilch.” Joel made that zip-it gesture across his face and started putting pizza on paper plates, handing them out. “He don’t hardly even eat fruit. He’s always been a fitness nut, but this year he’s goin’ in like a muhfucka. I don’t know how he does it.” He gave one to Robin and she slid into the booth.
“What does he eat?” she asked, placing her camera against the wall to capture the table and its occupants. “Unicorn farts and sunshine?”
“Meat. Vegetables.” He wagged his hand. “Bacon all day every day. He cobble together regular food outta irregular bullshit. And the man fry everything in coconut oil. I tell you, one time he talked me into coming down to his place, and he made pizza with this dough made out of puréed cauliflower.”
“Eww.”
Fish, his girlfriend Marissa, and a tall white biker-looking guy named Kenway came to sit with her in the booth. Kenway’s Goliath frame was crammed into a black T-shirt and his massive beard made him look like a lumberjack having a mid-life crisis. A riot of color and lines ran down his huge arms in sleeves. Robin helped them destroy the pizza and an army of craft beers while they ignored the movie.
As the evening progressed, she became more and more glad she’d agreed to come. Several sequels into a Halloween marathon, she looked up from her beer and realized all the movie-watchers had disappeared. Michael Myers stared blankly out of the screen at a roomful of empty chairs.
“So what do you do?” Robin asked Marissa over the rim of her beer.
“I’m an ER doctor at the hospital here in town.” Marissa glanced at her boyfriend with a warm smile. “Fisher here is a computer nerd on top of his hobby shop. Data entry and programming.”
“Sawbones and computers. Nice. I don’t think I ever had the steel to get through medical school. Just takes something I ain’t got. And my Macbook is the extent of my technical wizardry.”
“I believe everybody thinks that until they’re on the other side, and then they’re like, Holy crap, I did it.”
“Basic Training was like that,” said Kenway. “My mom didn’t think I could get through it.” He laughed. “Something tells me she didn’t think much of me before I went in.”
“What?” asked Marissa. “I don’t believe that. You’re huge.”
“I’ve always been big, but it wasn’t always muscle. I was a tubby guy when I enlisted. I lost a lot of weight in Basic and OSUT. When I came home, my mom picked me up at the airport and asked me, ‘Where the hell did the rest of you go?’ Turns out six months doing calisthenics every day with no beer or hamburgers makes you drop about seventy pounds.”
He checked his watch. “Think it’s about time I head home,” he said, and Marissa let him out of the booth. Robin watched as he unfolded himself and stretched six feet of broad muscle.
She polished off her beer. “Got work in the morning?”
“No, ahh—I don’t really work,” Kenway said, jamming his fingers into his jeans pockets. “Well, I do—” He gestured with a big craggy hand. “—but it’s not really your usual nine-to-five.”
Marissa smiled. “Kenny is Blackfield’s local artiste.”
“Is that so?” Robin beamed. The smile felt alien and uncomfortable on her face. “What kind of art do you do? Underwater basket weaving? Chainsaw carvings?”
The hulking man laughed and folded his arms. “A little of this, a little of that.” It should have looked authoritative, menacing even, but somehow it seemed protective, bashful. “I did the big mural on the wall at the park, and the superheroes out there on the windows of this shop. I have vinyl equipment too, and I make leather stuff.”
“Renaissance man. Maybe I can commission you to paint my van.”
“That skeezy-ass candy van?” asked Joel.
Robin pursed her lips at him. “Yes, my skeezy-ass candy van. Needs a little style, maybe.”
Kenway rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ll take a look at it, then. What’d you have in mind?”
“Do you do a lot of vans?”
“A couple. Mostly pickup trucks and hot rods from out of town. Shit-ton of motorcycles for guys out of Atlanta and Chattanooga. Did a big-ass snake on a dude’s truck a few years ago. It was pretty freakin’ sick, took forever. Went all the way around the back from one door to the other.”
Robin tried to picture the van with a new paint job. “How do you feel about doing one of Joel over here, butt-naked, sprawled out on a bear-skin rug in front of a fireplace, with a rose in his mouth?”
The two men traded looks. Marissa burst out laughing. Joel shrugged as if to say, I’m game. “You just describing a Saturday night for me,” said the pizza chef, striking a pose.
“I’m pulling your leg, big guy,” Robin said, grinning. “No, it’d have to be something simple, with stylized artwork. Nothing cheesy.”
“Sure I could figure something out.”
“I think you should take the lady back over there and let her show you her skeezy-ass candy van,” suggested Joel, with a devilish smirk. “I live on the other side of town, and it’d be out of my way, so I can’t take her home, but your art studio is between here and the pizzeria.”
A rush of cold heat shot down Robin’s neck in embarrassment. She narrowed her eyes at him. You planned this all along, didn’t you?
Kenway rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah, I guess I could.”
After taking down the projector equipment and cleaning up the mess from the pizza, the five of them regrouped on the sidewalk and said their good-nights. Turned out the artiste drove a rattletrap Chevy pickup, an antique land-yacht. The paint job was the tired Dustbowl-blue of the sky in old photographs, wistful and cool.
Climbing into the cab, Robin pulled her hoodie’s sleeves down to cover her hands and pushed her hands into the muff pockets. She wasn’t cold, but it made her feel better. Safer.
A set of dog tags dangled from the rearview mirror, twinkling in the light. She rolled the window down and sat back to listen to the cicadas buzz and whisper in the distance. Kenway got in, filling the driver’s seat with his muscular bulk, and turned the engine over with an oily, exhausted chugga chugga chugga. He fiddled with the radio, producing a static-chewed gabble.
“What kind of music do you like?”
“Any kind.” She smiled as warmly as she could. “Well, I have a special place for death-metal covers of old showtunes.”
Kenway snorted.
“Kidding.” She eyed him. “I’m game for whatever’s on. Just don’t expect me to dance. I’ve got two left feet.”
“Me too.” The vet knocked on his leg. “They didn’t have any spare righties, so I had to settle for a lefty. It’s hell for buying shoes.” When he caught her look of alarm, he laughed. “Kidding.” He settled on a classic rock station—Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night, Heinrich would have liked that—and he looked to her for approval.
Clearest signal on the band, so she pursed her lips in an agreeing smile. “Sounds good.”
The gearshift was a twenty-sided die as big as an apple. As he went to put the truck in gear, he noticed her eyes on it. “I won that playing Trivial Pursuit at Fish’s shop one night.” He chuckled and pushed it across the gearbox, and the engine dropped in pitch. “First time my encyclopedic knowledge of TV shows has ever come in handy. It’s actually not a real gearshift, I had to drill a hole in the back of it. Would you believe I’ve never played Dungeons & Dragons?”
The Chevy swung out of the parking spot and lumbered down the street, passing a tremendous Gothic church that looked as if it were made of sandstone blocks. “Never woulda guessed. You look like the nerdiest guy in town. Total Poindexter over here—”
The thing from her dream stood under one of the stone buttresses, in an alleyway.
The Red Lord.
Luminous green lamp-eyes gleamed in the darkness of its broad face, strobing between the bars of the churchyard fence. A yellow security light on the church wall illuminated it from behind, making a halo of the reddish hair covering its lumpy shoulders and long arms. Years ago, she had pegged it for at least eight feet tall, but next to the monumental columns and buttresses of Walker Memorial it almost looked delicate.
This thing, whatever it was, had been showing up more and more often in the periphery of her life since the incident with Neva Chandler, as if marking the passage of time, or some kind of recurring echo, like a sonar ping.
Boogeyman.
Maybe it was a curse. Or maybe it was real, maybe Chandler had summoned it, maybe pointed her out to it, made Robin more visible to it, in an attempt to distract her from the Job. The Task. The Quest. Of killing every witch she could find.
But see, here’s the thing: the being called “the Red Lord” never tried to hurt her. Never came at her in a menacing way, other than silently appearing in her personal space. It just lurked at the edge of the shadows, and in darkened doorways, and outside of cloudy windowpanes. Standing in the trees, just inside the glow of an alleyway security light, motionless, monstrous, staring, the wind tousling that mottled mane. Making that come-hither gesture with one long, gnarled finger.
Come with me, it always seemed to be saying.
I have something to show you.
Maybe the stress of her traumatic shock therapy at the mental hospital, and the strenuous training with Heinrich, and the brutal fight with Chandler … well, maybe it all piled up on her until it triggered some kind of a slow-motion mental breakdown.
Hell, maybe she’d been born crazy all along, and the stress had brought it all roaring into her life at full blast.
Perhaps unsettled by the fear on her face, Kenway gave her a side-eye. “You okay? Look like you saw a ghost.”
“Y-yeah. I mean, no. No ghosts here.” She gave him her best smile.
“You and Joel sound like you grew up together,” he said, grinning. “Talk the same way. Hey y’all, we fittin’ to hop on ’at train. Aight.”
“Like a couple of Podunk country kids?”
“Yeah.” He gestured at her in a general way. “So what do you do for a living? Must be pretty interesting—”
“Cause of the way I look?” She glanced at herself in the wing mirror and suddenly she seemed outlandish, all dark-eyed and gray-scalped. You look like an extra from a Mad Max movie. For the first time in a long time—maybe the first time period—she wished she were wearing more makeup. Her fingernails had been black earlier that week, but now they were mostly chipped away.
Kenway scoffed, grinning. “You said it, not me.”
“I make Internet videos.” She remembered she was holding her camera, and she waggled it indicatively. It was not filming.
“Really. Huh.” Kenway stopped at a red light, waiting for cross-traffic that never came. “Didn’t even realize you could make money doing that. What do you do in ’em?”
Bet you probably thought I did porn, she thought. You wouldn’t be the first to make that assumption. The radio was turned so low Robin could hear the traffic light clicking softly in the breeze. Lyrics squirmed at the edge of her hearing like voices on a telephone.
“Vlog.”
“Gesundheit.”
“No, it’s like a video journal. I … ‘document’ things. On YouTube.” You document yourself killing the shit out of things, you mean? She hesitated. Kenway was good-looking, and she didn’t want to jeopardize whatever tenuous thing she could sense hovering in the cab between them with the truth. “Ahh … I don’t know, it’s nothing. Not really that great. I just talk to the camera a lot. Drive around, visit places, do stuff.” Visit places, do stuff, kill monsters with swords and knives, sacrifice goats. Okay, maybe not that last one, but you’re well on your way, aren’t you?
“Cool, cool.” The light turned green and the truck grumbled across the intersection. “Anyway, I wanted to tell you, I really dig that Mohawk.”
She instinctively brushed a hand across her bristly scalp. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’m—I’m really into rock chicks. Biker chicks. That kind of thing. I guess.” He rolled his own window down and laid an elbow out of it, leaning away from her. He shrugged. “I don’t know. I just … wanted to say it, say something. You look good. It’s a good look for you.”
“Thanks.”
“Suits your face.”
Robin summoned up her curiosity. “So … you don’t really look like a local. I don’t remember you from when I was a kid.” Good pickup line, doofus. Do you really know everybody in town?
“Grew up in Washington and California, moved out here a couple years ago. Visiting a friend of mine and decided to stay. I like this town. It’s quiet, and I, uhh … guess I had some baggage I needed to get rid of. And this place is a good place to lose it.” He glanced at her and back at the road. “The baggage, that is. Lose my baggage.”
“I know what you meant.” Robin stared through the windshield. “I think I brought some back here myself.”
You brought an entire cargo ship, girl.
At night, Blackfield was a dead city, an abandoned town painted in shades of the ghastly rust-orange of sodium-vapor security lamps. They only saw two cars, and both of them turned down side streets, heading home. “Y’know, I guess it must not be ‘nothing’—” Flicking the turn signal, tick tock tick tock, Kenway eased into a turning lane and boated left. “—I mean, if you can make a living at it, whatever it is you do on YouTube must be good enough to pay the bills. Right?”
“Yeah, I guess it’s all right. Beats a kick in the ovaries.”
“So come on. Out with it, Miss Mysterious. What do you do in these videos, for real?” He smirked at her, lip curling in one corner, white teeth glinting in his beard.
They crossed a small bridge over a canal running parallel to the main drag, and she could hear the faint gurgle of rushing water. On the other side, Kenway turned right and carried them up a street of quaint two-story buildings like some kind of historical business district. A stray dog trotted through the showers of orange lights and patches of darkness, a man on a mission.
“Do you watch a lot of YouTube videos?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No, not really. I don’t even have a smartphone. I have a computer at the shop, but I only use it for work. My laptop in my apartment, I don’t use it much at all except for watching movies or checking email. Reading the news.”
She squinted. “What about that movie The Blair Witch Project?”
“I remember, yeah. Came out in like, 1999 or 2000, didn’t it?”
“Yeah. My channel is sort of like that. Fake real-life footage of supernatural events in my life. There are actually a lot of channels like mine. Most of them are people dealing with ghosts. Haunted houses. And monsters. Extra-dimensional monsters?”
Coming out of her mouth, it sounded stupid as hell. Stupid, she thought. It sounds crazy, is how it sounds.
“Mm-hmm.” Kenway nodded.
They slowed to a crawl, level with a dark shop front. The plate-glass windows were painted with a gryphon in rampant red, and underneath was lettering in Old English: GRIFFIN’S ARTS & SIGNS. “This is my place. I live upstairs from my shop in a drafty studio apartment. Yep, I’m the stereotypical starving artist.”
They drove on. He took them to the end of the median and did a U-turn through the turning lane, going the way they came.
“Do a lot of business?” she asked.
“Not really. But I like it that way. Might have one or two big projects a month. The rest of the time I paint.” He tugged his jeans leg up, revealing the sheen of a metal rod. His lower left leg was a prosthetic foot. “VA disability,” he said, knocking on it with a hollow tonk, tonk. “Gives me a lot of free time.”
“I was wondering if you were in the army.” Robin’s eyes flicked to the dog tags hanging from the mirror. She caught one of them and turned it to the light. SFC GRIFFIN, KENWAY. 68W. BLOOD TYPE AB. RELIGION NONE.
“Used to be.”
“Mind if I ask what happened?”
He didn’t answer right away. His eyes were fixed on some point in front of the Chevy—not the road, but some place in another time. Good going, idiot. Foot, meet mouth. “I’m sorry,” Robin said. “I shouldn’t—”
“It’s okay. I was uhh … collecting my thoughts.” He tipped down the visor and caught a pack of cigarettes, pulling one out with his lips.
He didn’t light it, but he put the pack back in the visor and drove with his lighter in his wheel hand. “I was part of an escort for a Provincial Reconstruction Team convoy. They’re the ones—they have a lot—women, uhh, we brought female soldiers out to the villages where we were building schools and shit, you know, to talk to the Afghan women and kids.” The wind played with his hair. His temples were shaved but the top was long, and it whipped in the breeze coming through the window.
A wincing expression had slowly come over his face as if he’d developed a headache. “Anyway. I stopped our vehicle when I shouldn’t have. Ka-blooey. End of the line.”
“I’m sorry.” Is it possible to deep-throat your own foot?
Kenway lit the cigarette and took a draw, shrugging. “Oh—do you mind?” he asked, indicating the cigarette.
She smiled wanly. “It’s your truck, Joe Camel.”
“You smoke? You want one?”
“Trying to quit. Lung cancer isn’t good professional branding, and I’m all about branding.”
The night blurred past them for a few more moments as they passed lightless storefronts, dead barber’s shops, dark alleyways yawning in brick throats. They startled a cat that had been peering into a storm drain and it bounded away, leaping into a hedge.
“You’re staying in the rock-climber village next to Miguel’s, right?”
“Yep. Roughing it.”
A silk sheet of silence settled over the truck as the town tapered away, the buildings rolling into darkness until they coursed along a narrow corridor of trees. Robin became more and more at ease as they rode. Kenway had a calming, languid, ursine presence that reminded her of Baloo the Bear from that old Jungle Book cartoon movie. He seemed to operate on a different wavelength; everything he did was slow and lazy, as if he had all the time in the world.
The night vacuumed his smoke away as he drove, his elbow out the window. The trees fell away as well, the blue Chevy bursting into the open, the night sky unfurling above them in a dome of stars. Shreds of gray cloud sailed west under a nickel moon. Hills around them narrowed, enclosing the road in washboard crags of granite, then widened again.
BLACKFIELD CITY LIMITS, said a lonesome green sign. A bit beyond that was a turnoff leading east into the tree line. Kenway flicked the turn signal and the ancient truck slowed.
“Where are we going?”
He looked over at her. “Shortcut? I always go this way when I go to Miguel’s.”
“Oh.” The truck angled onto Underwood Road. “Do you like to hike?” The mountains around Miguel’s were honeycombed with hiking trails, paths trickling through the forest toward Rocktown. Rocktown was a clifftop strewn with huge limestone boulders, the local hotspot for college kids, rock climbers from afar, and anybody looking for an out-of-the-way place to burn a bag of weed with their friends. If there’s anywhere safe from the prying eyes of Joe Law, it’s at the top of a fifty-foot vertical rock face.
“Sure, I like to climb.” He smiled. His eyes were the same tired blue as his truck. “Yes, in fact, I can climb with this foot, in case you were wondering. Haven’t done it much lately, but yeah.”
Underwood Road.
Please keep driving. She wanted him to keep on driving to the far end of the four-lane where the freeway overpass arced above their heads, where the Subway restaurant, the bait shop, the Texaco, and the road to Lake Craddock clustered around a secluded rest stop in the wilderness. She didn’t really want to come out here yet. Not yet. I’m not ready. I need a few days to pump myself up.
Or talk yourself out of it, you mean?
Forest surrounded the truck in a claustrophobic collar of pines and elms, the tree trunks shuttling past in a picket-fence flicker of columns and shadows. She stared out the window at them, the late-summer wind buffeting her face.
“I used to live on this road when I was a kid.”
Kenway took one last draw on the cigarette and ashed it in the dash tray, then flicked it outside. “Yeah?”
The trees kept barreling toward them, counting down, becoming more and more familiar. She kept expecting the houses and the trailers with every turn, the memories leaking in like water under a door. There was the NO TRESPASSING sign, shot full of .22 holes. Just there, a faint patch of grungy Heathcliff-orange, the armchair someone had dumped in the woods when she was twelve. Tried to sit on it once. Found out the hard way there were wasps in it.
Then, there it was: the forest opened up again and there was the trailer park on her left, all lit up with its sickly white security lights, trailer windows haunted by the honey-red glow of lamps and the epileptic blue stutter of TV shows. A large aluminum sign out front declared CHEVALIER VILLAGE, or at least that’s what it seemed to say, under a coating of graffiti.
On top of the angular Old English gibberish was a tiny spray-painted crown.
Suddenly she was sixteen again, she was thirteen, she was nine. Robin sighed, sitting up against her best judgment, and tried to see if there was anything—or anybody—she could recognize. But the night was too dark, and the cars were all too modern, and the yards were strewn with toys, and everybody was inside and had battened their hatches against the dark.
On her right, a double-wide by itself, with a hand-built porch and naked wooden trellis, chintzy aluminum birds with their pinwheel wings, a deteriorating VOTE ROMNEY sign by the culvert. A wooden-slatted swing dangled by one chain from a rusty frame, the end jammed into the dirt.
Next door, looming on the other side of a stretch of grass, was the monolithic 1168.
“Slow down,” Robin blurted. NO, DON’T, KEEP GOING!
The Chevy downshifted and the neighborhood lingered around them. The engine protested. Materializing from the deep night like the hull of some sunken ship was the gingerbread Victorian farmhouse she’d grown up in, her childhood home.
The security lamp on a nearby power pole threw a pallid greenish cast across the front so the black windows were more like eyes in a dead face.
“This was my house,” she said, as if in a dream.
Familiarity wreathed the window frames and eaves of the house in mist-like echoes as she studied it from afar. Her memories were stale, and far from her groping mental hands. The house was a different color (she knew it as green, the pale green of dinner mints, with John Deere trim), but it was her house. She could feel the splintery porch railing in her hands, the words and runes her mother had carved deep in the windowsills and then painted over.
“Nice place,” said Kenway. A U-Haul truck and a blue car sat in the driveway, the car tinted charcoal gray by the watery light. She didn’t recognize them. “Looks like somebody else lives there now. Just moved in. Or they’re about to move out.”
Something drew Robin’s eyes back to the trailer park across the street, and she traced the long gravel drive snaking along the east hip of the park to the old mission-style manor lurking on top of the hill.
The Lazenbury House cut a tombstone silhouette against the Milky Way.
All of the lights were off except for one window on the topmost floor. She’d never been up there, but she knew the rest of the house. She knew the blood-red walls, the piano, the Japanese-style front garden with its fishpond. The sprawling, Eden-like orchard out back. She knew the dirt-floored cellar, with its fire-blackened casks of wine and cramped dumbwaiter-style elevator. She’d practically grown up in that house. She remembered stories her mother had told her when she was a teenager, losing sight of little two-year-old Robin and searching the house for her, only to discover she’d wandered over to Granny Mariloo’s house for cookies and apple juice. A few times, she’d cried for hours, banging on the door of an empty house. Robin had vague memories of her mother Annie marching resolutely up that long gravel drive barefoot, the wind rippling the hem of her dress, to come fetch her daughter.
Those were the days when her father had been his worst, and her parents had fought with each other the hardest. Disturbed by the shouting, Baby Robin would creep out and seek solace with sweet, maternal Marilyn.
But she’d never been allowed on the top floor.
Did the Lazenbury have an attic? She wasn’t sure.
A shadow moved behind the attic window’s lacy curtain.
“Okay,” she said, startled out of her reverie, and Kenway took that as an indication to keep on trucking.
The forest swallowed them up again, and they followed their headlights down a long, winding two-lane under oppressive branches. Farmhouses sailed past in the cool twilight, surrounded by empty gray pastures tied to the earth with barbed wire and driftwood stakes. Underwood ended at a lonely T-junction watched by a grove of birches, where a single cabin peered through the trees with one yellow eye. Kenway turned left and the Chevy roared north.
A few minutes later, the headlights scraped across the belly of the interstate overpass, and a little beyond, in the crook of a long, shallow curve, was Miguel’s Pizzeria. A single security lamp stood vigil by the shower building. Kenway pulled up onto the gravel drive, weeble-wobbling across the jagged ground, and the bicycle in the back thumped in time with the truck’s creaking suspension.
“That’s me.” Robin pointed at the plumber van.
Kenway erupted into laughter. “Aha ha ha, Joel wasn’t kidding. That is truly sketch.” He must have seen the look on her face, because he immediately stopped grinning. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—I mean … shit. I wasn’t trying to hurt your feelings. I’m sorry.”
She waved him off. “It’s okay. I know how it looks.”
“If you don’t mind me asking, why are you living in an old panel van?”
Opening the door, she started to get out but something seemed to press her back into the cab of the truck. Reluctance? Robin slid to the edge of the bench seat, the fabric of her jeans buzzing across the upholstery, but she just sat there. To hell with it, she thought, her eyes fixed on the sign out in front, a picture of a cartoon Italian chef perched on a cliff face. I’D CLIMB A MOUNTAIN FOR MIGUEL’S PIZZA! Might as well go ahead and drop the bomb. It’s going to happen eventually, might as well wreck this before it really gets going.
Instead of meeting his eyes when she turned to him, she fixed on his giant hand, wrapped around the steering wheel. “I bought it with the money in my mom’s bank account when I was released from the psychiatric hospital a few years ago.”
Kenway nodded, slowly. “Ahh.”
She winced a smile at him in gratitude. “Thanks for the ride home. Oh!” Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a scant wad of cash and peeled off a twenty, thrusting it in his direction. “Gas money. As thanks.”
His eyes landed on the money, his eyebrows jumped, and he twitched as if he were going to take it, but he said, “No, that’s—it’s all right, I’m good.”
“No, really. Take it.”
He pointed at the dash dials. “I’m full anyway. Filled up on the way to Movie Night.”
Folding the money into a tube, Robin stuck it in the tape deck so it looked like the stereo was smoking a cigarette. “There.” She slid the rest of the way out of the truck and shut the door, walking through the glare of his dingy headlights.
On the driver’s side, she stood in the dark hugging herself. “Drive safe,” she said, feeling awkward. “Thanks again for the ride home.”
He didn’t leave. “You’re an odd duck, Robin.”
Ice trickled into her belly. You don’t know the half of it, dude.
“I like odd ducks.”
“Quack quack,” she replied, with a wan smile.
You are a fucking doofus, Robin Martine. The two of them had a short staring contest, the girl standing behind her van, Kenway sitting in his idling truck.
She was about to bid him adieu and climb into her party-wagon when the man in the truck spoke up. “If you’re ashamed about the psychiatric thing, don’t be. Lord knows I’ve spent enough time talking to army shrinks. I shouldn’t have any room to talk.” Drumming a bit on the windowsill, he added, “So … yeah. Don’t know what your story is, but you won’t find any judgment here.”
Robin smiled. “I appreciate that.”
“I don’t know how long you’re going to be in town, but I’ll be around. If you want a real bed to sleep on for a night, you’re welcome to crash at my place.” He crossed his fingers. “No creep stuff, scout’s honor. Just … you know, an offer. I guess. It’s there on the table. I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“Okay.”
She took hold of the utility van’s rear door handle and started to open the door and climb in, but then had the idea to tell Kenway good night. Unfortunately, when she turned to speak, he was already rolling the window up and putting the truck in gear. Robin stood there with one foot on her back bumper and watched the Chevy grumble around the parking area, crunching across the gravel and washing the pizzeria with its headlights. Kenway pulled up to the road, paused, then lurched out and disappeared with a roar.
Robin lingered there in the dark for a moment, looking around. She sighed and climbed into the back of the cold van.
Cold, empty, quiet. All of a sudden, her mobile candy-van nest didn’t look nearly as inviting as it had before. Robin stripped, kicked her fuzzy legs down into the cold, empty sleeping bag, and lay down with a huff.
Alone again. The inside of the van was deathly silent.
“Shit,” she muttered to herself, regretfully wrenching a beanie down over her eyes and rolling over onto her side.
She was drifting off to sleep when light began to press against her eyelids, pulling her back to the surface.
It’s dawn already? she thought, stirring. I feel like I haven’t slept at all. She checked her phone and discovered it had only been an hour and a half. Robin looked up, blinking in confusion at the shelves and the backs of the front seats. The inside of the van was traced in lime-green light, as if there were a traffic signal right outside the back window, shining through the glass.
The glow faded as she clambered up onto her hands and knees to look outside. “The hell was that?” she muttered, forehead to the rear window.
Nothing out there but the side of Miguel’s Pizza and the parking lot. A security light shone through one of the massive oaks next to the building, showering silver coins across the gravel. Beyond was the stygian darkness of the Georgia night, drilled by the constant noise of the cricket serenade. She paused there on her knees, eyes and body motionless, watching for movement.
Only the restless swishing of the oak’s leaves. Light gathered in the trees across the highway and a car passed, pushing its high beams down the road and out of sight.
Reaching into a storage tub, she pulled out a combat knife and sighed. “Of course I’d have to go piss. Beer always makes me piss. Thank you oh so much for giving me time to get into my sleeping bag and get comfortable.”
She climbed out of the van, clutching the knife in one hand so the cold flat of the blade lay against her wrist, and wriggled into her combat boots, tucking the untied laces in alongside her feet. Gravel crunched softly under her soles, almost inaudible under the night-sounds as she made her way toward the cinder-block building out back. She shined her cell phone back and forth, the blue-white light sweeping over gray bushes, gray trees, gray picnic tables, everything traced with the kind of creepy, desolate somebody’s-watching-me loneliness that is solely the domain of dark country roads, places where you expect to see things nobody should ever have to see.
Wish I hadn’t been the only one to camp out here tonight, she thought, as a moth battered itself against her cell phone. Could definitely have used a little company. Her breath coiled white in the beam.
Still resplendent with graffiti, the simple structure towered over her. In the dark, illuminated by a flashlight, the words and doodles had a sinister quality, less like an autograph from the past and more like the scrawlings on the walls of a prison cell.
“Crap.” The restroom door was locked. She tried the men’s room and found it locked as well.
Maybe I could cop a squat out there in the weeds.
She stared out at the dark forest. Nah. If something comes out of there after me, I don’t want to be standing there with my jeans around my knees and my bare ass hanging out.
While she thought about it, she paced back and forth on the sidewalk, listening to the crickets. Noise came out of the night in a constant assault, like an eternal tide of bugs, swelling and ebbing, swelling and ebbing. She put her hands in her pockets and found what she’d thought was a balled-up receipt, but turned out to be a pack of cigarettes. She tugged them out and flattened the box. Marlboro Lights. Sigh. Two left. She pulled one out and held it up to the security light. Bent, mashed, but still in one piece. Her other hand plucked her lighter from her pocket and she flicked the Zippo open, the same Zippo she’d burned Neva Chandler with back in ol’ Ally-Bammy, and she lit the cigarette with it.
Pay dirt. She sipped at the filter, pinching it as if she were about to throw a dart, and gave a productive cough. Blue smoke clung to her face and smelled terrible. She spat on the ground and growled, “Keep sayin’ you gonna quit, and one of these days you’ll believe it.”
The restroom door unlocked. K’tunk.
She froze there in the gloom, the Marlboro perched between her lips.
“Don’t do this to me,” she said from the corner of her mouth, squinting. The knife came up, shining and sharp, and she settled into a fighting stance. “Not tonight, please.”
No one came out. She pushed the door open and found darkness.
“Hello?” Taking one last drag on the cigarette with the knife-hand, she flicked it into the dark, where it extinguished with a hiss in a puddle of water. “If someone is hiding in here, you better sing Happy Birthday or I’m gonna stab your ass. In the neck. Yeah, your ass-neck.”
Before she could find the light switch by the door, the fluorescents flickered to life with a soft blink-ink! and hummed down at her.
Motion detector.
With a soft hiss, the door eased shut on its hydraulic arm, and the block walls muffled the night-song outside into a subtle whisper. The gently raunchy smell of a public ladies’ room ambushed her: dirty mop-water, ammonia, the hot iron smell of old musk.
Could a motion detector unlock a door? She studied the lock and found only a key-operated deadbolt.
Maybe the mechanism was inside the door where she couldn’t see it.
Best not to overthink it. Robin padded toward the back of the room with the combat knife clutched face-level in one hand, every footfall and rustle of clothing magnified by the bricks, and began a thorough search of the room. Four shower stalls, curtains pulled across three of them. Five toilet stalls, all the doors closed. She made her way down the line, nudging the curtains open with the blade of the knife. She pushed the toilet doors open one at a time. At each stop, she froze, waiting to be attacked, and moved on to the next.
On the third toilet, she kicked it open and charged in like a madwoman, yelling at the top of her lungs, brandishing the knife. “AAAAH!”
She looked down, shining the cell phone into a disgusting toilet.
“Eww.”
To her relief, the endmost toilet stall was relatively clean. Resting the knife on top of the tampon disposal box, she pulled down her jeans and underwear and sat down on the huge horseshoe toilet seat. Someone had Sharpied a rhyme onto the wall near her face. Tinkle, tinkle, if you sprinkle, please be neat and wipe the seat.
Light gleamed on the blade of her knife. Gurgle, gurgle, if you burgle, please be kind and stay outside.
She had finished, and was about to tear off a few squares to wipe with, when the lights went out, blinding her.
“Ah, dammit.”
The darkness was absolute, as solid as black water against her face.
A moment passed. “Hello?” she called again, feeling stupid at talking to the motion detector. She pushed the stall door open, trying to trigger it again. A few seconds later the bolt clacked against the frame as the door swung shut. She pushed it again. Thunk. She pushed it again. Thunk. She pushed it again. “Come on, man. Come on.”
No thunk.
Robin peered blindly into the dark, overwhelmed by the feeling someone was looking down at her.
Something was holding the door open.
Reaching toward the jeans pooled around her ankles, Robin dug in her pocket and pulled out her cell phone, activating the flashlight. As she did, the knife fell off the tampon box and clattered out into the larger part of the room. “Crap, no!”
What she could see: the stall she sat in, a half-square of torn toilet paper lying in the far corner, and the door standing open, halfway between the wall and the stall frame. She must have pushed it far enough to get it stuck on some rust in the hinge or something. While the floor was bare gray cement, the walls were painted an institutional white. Four feet away from her boots lay the knife.
What she could hear: the distant, tuneless shree-ew shree-ew of insects. Her own breathing. The soft ticking of the wind blowing early autumn leaves against the side of the building.
“Shit,” she grunted, leaning forward to reach for the knife.
Much too far away. “Turn the lights back on, please.” She stuck the phone out and waved the light around. Shadows leapt and capered across the wall. “Yoo-hoo.” Still holding out the phone, Robin reached through her thighs with the wad of toilet paper and started to clean up. “I can’t see. I need to—”
SCREEEEEEEEEEEEE! A shrill, skin-crawling sound like ten thousand knives being scraped across a blackboard shrieked through the restroom. Blood and adrenaline thrummed through her body as she hunched over in pain, shielding her ears from the metallic screaming.
Admittedly, the shock and surprise actually squeezed out a little bit more urine. She dabbed at herself again, dropped the paper into the water, and flushed the toilet, half-rising to her feet. The bowl was still refilling as the lights came on.
In the middle of pulling up her jeans, Robin squinted up at the door and realized it was trembling, like an arm held out too long.
Trying not to freak out, Robin stood and finished dressing. By then the lights were flashing madly on and off, turning the restroom into a Daft Punk concert.
Look, the witches were one thing—she’d been fighting monster-faced hags for a couple of years at this point, gnarled old witches and chubby-cheeked bohemians that could Force-throw furniture like Carrie, fill your car with snakes, and turn themselves into raving gorgons. She was used to that crap. But this was different. There was no witch in here, there was nothing physical to focus on.
Whatever was giving her grief here in this creepy restroom in the middle of nowhere, it wasn’t a witch, and she couldn’t see it.
“Ghost?” she asked out loud. “You a ghost?”
For a wild second, she actually expected to hear an answer.
She’d never dealt with a ghost before. Wasn’t even sure they existed. But after the last few years, anything could be possible. Maybe he was bullshitting her, but Heinrich had told her of even wilder things than witches out there in the shadows, creatures like the draugr, the horrifying vampire ghouls of Icelandic legend, and the tiyanak, a man-sized fetus that climbed trees, luring people with the cries of a baby until they were close enough to drag up into the branches and devour.
He’d never mentioned ghosts, but how much more far-fetched is a man-eating tree baby?
Her pulse began to even out, her nerve returning. “No such thing as vampires, no such thing as giant man-eating babies, and no such thing as ghosts.” Robin grabbed her phone. “Go get it, go get it, come on, you a bad bitch,” and she stepped out of the stall into the flashing madness, shining the phone’s light toward the middle of the room.
With one final POP!, the seizure-inducing fluorescent lights extinguished themselves, bathing her once again in shadow.
She ducked. “Jesus!”
The cell phone glinted on chrome fixtures, porcelain sinks. Right, said her inner voice as she knelt to retrieve the combat knife. No such thing. But half a decade ago, you used to think there was no such thing as witches either, did you?
Blink-ink! The motion detector tripped and the lights came back on, snaggletoothed by two dark tubes.
“Aight, I’m done playing this game. Cram your lights up your ass, Zuul, I ain’t your Keymaster.” She washed her hands (briefly, barely a wetting) and went for a paper towel, but there was only a hot-air dryer. Not in the mood to have hot shit-air blown all over her hands, Robin flung the door open and stepped outside.
Cold bug-song covered her in a dazzling blanket of noise. In the restroom, the automatic light clicked off.
She wiped her hands on her clothes and marched back across the parking lot, phone in one hand and knife in the other, light from the tree-obscured security lamp pouring kaleidoscope shadows across her face. “Rusty fuckin’ door hinges, that’s what it was,” she said as she went. “Malfunctioning backwater automatic lights. But I’m sure as hell awake now, that’s for sure. Gonna take me forever to get to sleep! So thanks a lot for that, you beat-ass electronic piece of shit!”
Behind her, the automatic light clicked on again, bathing her feet in stark white and unfurling her shadow out in front of her so she was stepping on her own heels. Robin turned and walked backward, expecting to see the hydraulic door easing shut and tripping its own sensor, but what she saw turned her blood vessels into rivers of Arctic ice water. Her hands went numb.
The Red Lord was inside the women’s restroom.
Through the door behind him, Robin saw the automatic light go out, and the monstrous silhouette became a blind rectangle of black.
Bright green lamps appeared in the doorway as his eyes opened, two milky railroad signals in the dark. His shaggy bulk filled the doorframe from side to side and he bent to step underneath the lintel, unfolding to his full height. And he was huge, a stretched-out scarecrow, all hair and sinew and bone.
The two of them stood there in the parking lot of Miguel’s Pizza, facing each other.
“You ain’t real,” she told him.
Those green lamplight eyes gazed listlessly at her from the doorway.
“I know what you are.” An anxious sort of confidence wound its way into her voice. “You’re some kind of lingerin’ hallucination the King of Alabama put on me. I never got to see exactly what her Gift was. It must have been Illusion. That’s what’s going on here.” She scoffed. “Don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner. I mean, come on, that’s the deal, right? Maybe Neva reached into my head while I was standing in her living room, found my memories of the night terrors and nightmares I had when I was a kid, and she used them to hex me with some kind of worst-fear bullshit before she died.”
The creature stared, blinking slowly.
Calming, relaxing, she gave a snide little shrug, and continued walking backward. “All I got to do is find somebody, maybe a houngan, that can do a little hoodoo, nix this Illusion hex on me, and we’re golden. Au revoir, weirdo. It was nice knowing—”
Leaning forward, eyes still locked on her, the hallucination let out a deep growl, a low, wet, ragged rumble, a drowned engine.
Grrrrrararararuhuhuh.
She ran.
As soon as she took off, she slid out of one of her untied boots, leaving it behind. The gravel bit into the sole of her foot as she ran for the Conlin Plumbing van. She flung the door open, jumped into the back with the sleeping bag and tubs of junk, and slammed it.
“Hallucinations don’t make noise,” Robin breathed, fogging up the back window as she locked the door. “Do they?” Her voice shook. “I don’t know what the hell that thing is, but it’s not Illusion magic.”
Kneeling in the back of the van, clutching the Glock, loaded with a full mag of hollow-points. Eyes on the back window. Watching for movement.
Staring. Waiting. “Where’d you go, fucker?”
Steeling her nerve, she crossed herself with the Glock—mammaries, ovaries, wallet, and watch—and pushed the back door open. Night air rushed in. She pointed the gun, sweeping the parking lot, finger slipping into the trigger well.
Nothing out there.
It was gone.