Malus Domestica (39 page)

“Plenty of children.” Edgar smiled. “What do you think the Countess Bathory did with all those virgins?” He shook his head sadly. “The virgins are best, y’know. They’re like Miracle-Gro.”

Straightening, Annie leans back, tilts her face to the hidden heavens. She’s obviously heard enough. Words in a dead language Robin doesn’t recognize stream out of her mouth in a muttering tone. She lifts the knife toward the ceiling, the incantation rising, becoming faster, louder, a rapid-fire litany of gibberish. Robin realizes what she’s speaking, even though she can’t understand it—Japanese. Annie is shrieking in Japanese. Where would her mother learn a Japanese ritual?

Edgar looks as if he’s trying to press himself against the dirt hard enough to sink into it, trying to will himself away from this lunatic woman-child. Annie’s eyes roll back, her eyelids parting to show only the white sclera.

“What the hell?” the man under her pleads. “Stop! Please! Stop this crazy shit! We can talk about this! I swear to God, I’ll—”

Her head sinks forward and her irises roll down out of her eye-sockets again. But she’s not looking at him, she’s looking at a point somewhere far behind him, somewhere deep in the soil. Annie brings the knife down, but not into his chest like he expects, not yet, no, not yet, she opens her mouth and slips the tip of the blade into her mouth like a spoon. The steel scrapes against her teeth as she opens her mouth wide.

Annie presses the blade-point against the floor of her mouth, turns it up so that she’s holding it like a bridal bouquet, and flicks it up and out. The knife penetrates her tongue and rips it open up the middle, splattering Edgar’s face and chest with blood.

He flinches, squinching one eye. “Jesus Christ. You’re insane.”

Crimson wells in her mouth and spills over her teeth, down her chest and between her breasts. Annie leans forward, trying to speak, trying to continue the incantation, choking on the blood. It collects on his chest in a hot puddle. “Uckkkk, ffnnnggkk, uurkk.”

Her eyes: they’re almost all white, except for pinprick black pupils.

Now she raises the knife and drives it through his ribcage into his heart. Edgar seizes up, hissing through his teeth. Veins rise in his neck as he pulls at the ropes again, fists clenched, knuckles white.

One final breath huffs out of his lungs and he goes limp, the light draining from his eyes. Annie leans on the knife, the strength going out of her, and it sinks up to the hilt in his flesh, more blood pulsing from the wound. She stays that way for half a minute, her eyes closed, willing the dizziness to go away. Blood continues to trickle out of her mouth. It is everywhere, now a pool collecting under Edgar.

What snaps her out of her reverie is the sick bbbrraaaap of Edgar’s corpse as it relaxes and lets go of the gas still in his system. The fart reverberates in the dirt chamber.

“Jevuf, Eg,” Annie complains, getting up.

The cellar spins. The girl spits a stream of blood through her teeth like a farmer. She slides the knife out of the body’s chest and stands back, nausea churning cold in her guts. She collapses to her knees, sitting down, the dirt cold against her naked buttocks. Nothing seems to be happening. Self-pity blooms in her chest. The ritual doesn’t seem to have had an effect…did she kill someone for no reason? She scowls at the dead man and tears roll down her face. No, there was a reason: Edgar was a horrible person who did horrible things, and he deserves this. And if she hadn’t done it, someone else would have.

Wait.

Something’s going on. The corpse is different.

She gets up on her hands and knees and crawls over to Edgar’s side. The wound she made with the knife—it’s turning black, rotting, withering like a bad apple. It’s larger, too, easily three inches long, where the knife-blade had only been an inch wide, if that.

The darker it gets, the worse the wound smells. The odor of anise, of licorice and absinthe, and the smell of sulphur too, rotten eggs, rises out of it. The flesh around the hole withers and turns black, radiating outward in black veins, as if infected with darkness. It’s caving in, a depression falling through like burning paper into a hollow cavity in Edgar’s chest. Annie slinks away, her eyes locked on the spreading, sinking blackness. The body is eroding through the middle, deteriorating from the inside out, not so much hollowed but becoming the growing hole itself.

Fear streaks through the girl at this bizarre, terrible turn of events. Was this what she expected? Was this even what she wanted?

Underneath her, the ground shudders. Annie’s hands instinctively snatch away and she crabwalks backward until her shoulders smack into the stone wall. The dirt stirs slowly, like a blanket over the tossing and turning of a sleeping giant. Dust clouds down from the ceiling. A dozen lit candles topple over, rolling around on the floor. Some of them put themselves out in the blood with a crisp, venomous hiss.

“Oh, my God, what did I do?” Annie asks herself, her voice a strained whisper.

Edgar’s remains (if one can call it that at this point) seem to be sinking into the dirt floor, as if his blood is acid and it’s eating a crater in the soil, a crater that’s confined by the shape of the symbols chalked around him. His torso is now a black hole demarcated by four disembodied limbs and a head.

The hole grows in depth and diameter until whatever’s left of him slides or tumbles down into the darkness, leaving a pit six feet wide in the middle of the room.

Everything falls dead silent.

Dank, cold air layers over the rim of the pit, licking boldly, invitingly at Annie’s hands. Hesitant at first, she crawls toward it and peers over the edge. The blood pooling in her mouth still runs down her chin, and now it strings syrup-thick straight down into the new abyss. Down it goes, where it stops, nobody knows. The darkness appears to be infinite.

“What in the name of God,” she says, but the words are addled by her ripped tongue and come out garbled.

Something is moving down there. Annie stares.

Without warning, the darkness rushes up and she bowls over backward, scrambling to get away. It rushes against the floorboard ceiling, pooling between the joists, falling upward like water. It doesn’t seem to have any real mass, and makes no sound at all as it fills the room—it’s more of a gas, a billowing fog that turns the wood as black as ebony and leeches the color from the Georgia-red dirt.

This was a bad idea. Annie flops over and runs for the cellar stairs, scrambling up the board risers toward the door, catching a splinter in the palm of her right hand, but there is something crawling out of the pit, something ponderously heavy and seething, and when she looks over her shoulder she sees two green eyes: Chinese lanterns the color of grass, of frogs and avocados, glowing dully in the dark.

Grrrrurururuhuhuh.

A clawed hand with too many fingers grips her ankle.

S
UNDAY

21

R
OBIN
AWOKE
WITH
A
reflexive gasp, scuttling backward, her heart stomping against her ribs. The top of her head bounced off a wood headboard with a noise like a bowsprit hitting a rock and she bawled a stream of profanities, clutching her skull with both hands.

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.

Mr. Parkin himself stood over her. “Good morning.”

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. Leon rubbed his face with his hands and folded his arms. “You scared the hell out of me, lady.”

“She scared
you?”
Kenway sat on the mattress next to her and put a hand on her leg. It was the first time he’d touched her; a pleasant if skittish warmth spread across her chest.

“What happened?” Her back, her head, and her elbows felt like she’d seen the business end of a Cadillac. 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.

“You had a seizure,” said Leon.

“A big one.” Kenway squeezed. “You were freakin out, man, you fell down and started doin the jitterbug on the stairs.” He did an impression of it, 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.

“Scary,” she noted.

“No
shit.”

A bolt of pain next to her right ear made Robin wince. “Down there. In the cellar, my mother called that thing here with some kind of a ritual, a spell, I don’t know what. And it summoned that monster, that demon thing.”

Leon frowned.
“That’s
what that 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. Was like a letter from the past, you know? Like I was watching an old videotape, except the VCR…was in my head, and the tape was shitty and dirty but I could still see. She was trying to stop them, to kill them, the other witches. 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 maybe she didn’t, maybe it was the demon that created it.”

The bedroom fell silent as the three of them sat there trying to process this new information.

A 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.”

Kenway pushed himself to his feet. “How do you like it?”

A tall, long-limbed man sauntered through the bedroom door and pushed his fingers into the pockets of his coat like Vampire Columbo. The Kangol fedora on his bald head, along with the black overcoat, even made him look like a pulp-fiction detective.

Heinrich’s eyes were inscrutable behind silver aviator shades. “She likes it black.”

❂

“I watched your video Friday and saw you were in town. I caught the first plane outta Houston and hauled ass out here.” They all sat around the kitchen table nursing cups of Folger’s and listening to Heinrich. Robin’s GoPro camera lay on the counter next to the coffee-maker, recording their impromptu pow-wow. The kids were all still asleep on the living room floor, lying on pallets, except for little Katie Fryhover, who woke up with the sun and was wrapped in a blanket in Leon’s recliner, reading one of Wayne’s comic books and eating a Nutrigrain bar.

To Robin’s eternal surprise, Heinrich took his coffee as sweet as a granny. She studied his face as he took off his sunglasses and folded them neatly, hanging them from the collar of his shirt. The old man’s eyes were limpid but yellowed. He’d grown a goatee at some point, and it was as gray as brushed steel.

“Did you come out here to help me, or stop me?”

Heinrich regarded her with his characteristically flat stare, Kenway and Leon sitting quietly to either side. Taking off his fedora, he placed it in the center of the table, revealing his glossy brown head.

He finally said, “Do you
need
help?”

“Do you think I need help?”

“None that I’m qualified to give.”

Robin smirked. “Har-de-har. Speaking of which, I’m almost out of Abilify. The doc in Memphis wouldn’t prescribe more than a month’s worth. He says I’m overdoing it.”

“What are the side effects?”

“Ischemic stroke. Anaphylactic shock.” She looked out the window at a slate-gray sky. “…Seizures.”

He rolled his head in astonished agreement. “Well. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. You had a seizure last night, according to these two men. Sounds like Mr. Doctor knew what he was talking about. Maybe you
do
need to ease off.”

“I have been cutting back.” Robin frowned. “But I need them to make the voices go—” She interrupted herself. Leon seemed unsettled, his brow knitted together in …not quite fear, but at least a considerable amount of unease. He was staring at her as if he expected her head to fall off.

Might as well drop the bomb. “…To make the voices go away.”

Leon glanced toward the hallway door, as if Wayne were standing there. She could see the protectiveness written all over his face.

“Voices?” he asked. “What do you mean, voices?”

“I’m schizophrenic,” she explained, her voice low, her face pinched.

An embarrassment she hadn’t experienced in a long time made her face burn. She probably wouldn’t have felt this way if Wayne weren’t involved; she could almost hear Leon thinking of ways to keep him away from her.

“We’ll see what we can do.” Heinrich took out a cigar and leaned forward with his elbows on the table, examining it at length as if it was the bullet destined to end his life. “I’m sure there’s some other anti-psychotic that won’t fuck you up so much.” He didn’t offer one to anybody else, even though he knew Robin was a smoker. “Anyway. I sure as hell ain’t here to stop you. I ain’t never been able to stop you before.”

“I talked to Karen Weaver yesterday.”

“Oh yeah? What about?” He stuck the slender cigar between his lips and dug a matchbook out of his shirt pocket, the Royal Hawaiian wagging as he spoke. Robin knew what it would be before she even saw the label: Vanilla Coconut. “You two catch up on life n’ shit? Quiche recipes, grandkids, who’s fuckin who on
The Young and the Restless?”