Burn the Dark

by S. A. Hunt

  A knothole resembling an eye carved into a deep fold in the bark seemed to watch as Marilyn reached up with both hands and took hold of one of the apples—huge, fat, like heirloom tomatoes. She pulled on it.

  The bough resisted, bending right down to her waist before the fruit finally ripped free. She buffed the apple on her sleeve and toasted the dryad with it in gratitude.

  “Thank you, Annabelle,” said the witch, heading back to the house.

  * * *

  He had changed into a fresh shirt while he was in the garage, significantly reducing his stench. Marilyn approved of this. She handed Roy a glass of iced tea and they went out the back door and down the driveway.

  They said nothing to each other on the way down the hill. Neither of them was much for small talk, and besides, they’d said pretty much everything that needed to be said a long time ago when she and the girls had found him living on the streets in rural New York.

  She contemplated New York City as she crossed the dirt and gravel on her horn-hard bare feet, her skirt curtaining around her ankles in the breeze.

  The city was nice—the buildings, they’d grown so tall since the last time she was there, and it was a sight to see. But all those ugly new cars were so noisy and horrible, and the air stank, and there were so many new witches and their stunted, half-assed dryads. Suckling like piglets at the teat of the Big Apple, sucking it dry until its core was rotten with consumption, apathy, darkness.

  She hated it. The poverty and large-scale drain made the people mean, insolent, resistant to influence. Hard to live with. Hard to control. Cows driven mad by flies. Marilyn preferred small covens in small cities like Blackfield, a town with a population under ten thousand.

  You only really needed one tree and as long as you had plenty of cats you were always protected. One tree meant you had a sort of bottleneck push, instead of the constant pull of the piglets. It was why Annie’s apples were so fat and rich—Blackfield surged with life, stupid red-blooded American hillbilly life, and Marilyn and her girls gorged on its underbelly like ticks on a dog, unseen, unnoticed. A bit like having a secret fishing-hole, really.

  They were halfway across Chevalier Village when Roy started belting out a country song to himself.

  “Shut up,” rasped the old woman.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  A slate-gray cat loped out from under one of the mobile homes in Chevalier, and a little dog lying in the yard jumped to his feet and took off after it.

  Marilyn held out her hand and the cat ran up to her, clawing its way up her sleeve and perching on her shoulder. As soon as the terrier crossed the Chevalier property line, he stopped short of the man and the old woman, gave a furtive whimper, and ran back to the safety of his territory.

  She was sure deep down Roy knew what they were, even if he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Roy had never been one to ask questions; he was a worker ant, a drone, and they were his queens. But even he wasn’t stupid enough to overlook their eccentricities, the creepy tree in the backyard, their too-intimate regard for each other, and then there was the off-limits third floor, of course, where Mother lived.

  Are you looking into the disturbance, cookie? The velvet gray cat rubbed his wet nose on her face. His muffled purring oscillated in her ear.

  Yes, Mother. That’s what I told you I was going to attend to. Marilyn reached up and stroked the cat’s back. What did you see, anyway?

  Something was asleep in there. They woke it up.

  Marilyn pursed her lips.

  The cat gave a rusty meow. Did you take Sling Blade with you? He’s a freak. He’s full of plans and low thoughts. He’s always looking up here at the windows. I don’t trust him around the silverware.

  Yes. Oh, you’re one to talk about stealing silverware.

  Don’t forget to water the tree.

  I won’t.

  The two of them crossed Underwood Road and started up the driveway toward the old Victorian, the cat still perched on Marilyn’s shoulder like a pirate’s parrot. Deep in the folds of her burnoose-like sweater, the dryad’s apple thrummed and shifted warmly.

  “Ain’t nobody home,” said Roy.

  Marilyn bit her tongue. “That was the whole point of coming over here while they were out for the day.”

  “Right.”

  She padded up the front walk, her bare feet plopping on each stepping-stone, and climbed up the front stairs onto the porch. Taking a deep breath, she tested the air—nothing but her own lavender, and Roy’s briny miasma—and took hold of the doorknob.

  Some heady, electric warmth welled from the knob in her hand, like touching an electric fence with an oven mitt.

  Marilyn let go. “Mother’s right, something is inside.” She peered through the parentheses of her hands, face against the glass, trying to see through the window in the door.

  The foyer, wreathed in darkness. Nothing else.

  It’s been here all this time. The cat looked through the window too, its little gray head shifting from side to side, green eyes shining. Maybe it wasn’t the colored folks what woke it up after all. It’s been hiding, waiting for something.

  Roy leaned over and rattled the doorknob. Locked.

  Arching his back, the gray cat with the honey eyes hissed. Oh, cookie, I can feel it from here!

  Marilyn rubbed the cat’s scruff, thinking.

  She went to the end of the wraparound porch and down the side, trying to see in through all the windows, but they were all obscured by the bride’s-veil curtains, giving her a look only at angles, shapes, glints of reflected sunlight. Stepping down into the grass, she went around back and up the rear stoop, pressing her hands against the window in the door and looking through them into the kitchen.

  The same swelling of strength emanated from the doorknob on this side, too. Even the glass hummed against the edges of her hands, so lightly she almost doubted it, the wingbeats of a trapped butterfly.

  Kitchen table. Magazine, salt-shaker, pepper, envelope.

  The fridge was new, but it didn’t belong to the new occupants. Annie’s fridge was an avocado Frigidaire with alphabet magnets all over it; this one was a big black monolith with a water-and-ice dispenser in the door.

  Nothing else was in the kitchen.

  The hallway on the other side of the kitchen door, however, was another story.

  Marilyn couldn’t see anything back there, technically, but she received a sense of size, of scale. Something big was standing in there, something tall and heavy. The floor and walls almost groaned with the strain. The house itself was like a cage, containing some ancient bear just awoken from a decade of slumber, and even though she hadn’t been a child since the Louisiana Purchase, Marilyn felt like a little girl peering in at it.

  Whatever it was turned and looked right at her, sending a chill down her carrion spine.

  This was old power, nasty power, dirty cheating stinking power, an ace up the sleeve, a blast from the past. She had stolen, killed, and eaten, she’d done and wrought terrible things, black unspeakable things, but this beast was … deep, was the best word she could think of. Deep.

  Was this Annie’s? Did she put this here?

  The cat licked a paw and combed its ears. I think it must have been.

  What is it—

  Before she could complete the thought, the presence in the house moved up the hallway and through the kitchen, rushing the back door. As it passed through a sunbeam, Marilyn got a sensation of deformed, muscular arms.

  “Shit!” she gasped, leaning back. The invisible beast slammed against the locked door hard enough to bang it in the frame. CRASH!

  Roy flinched. “Jesus!”

  The windowpanes crunched, but stayed intact. A low bass growl came from the other side of the threshold, deep enough to make the glass buzz. Marilyn felt compelled—no, drawn toward the door, as if some force were pulling her inside. She braced one hand against the doorframe, and then the other, and her face felt as if she had pressed the end of a vacuum-cl
eaner hose to it, sucking, pulling her out of whack.

  Whatever was in there, it wanted to eat her rotten body like a buzzard, pick her worm-dirt bones clean until there was nothing left but a grin and two holes for eyes.

  “The hell they got in there?” asked Roy. “A mastiff?”

  She came down and stood next to him, her toes clenching the grass in surprise and aggravation. “Did you hear it barking?”

  “No?”

  “Then what makes you … oh, forget it.” Marilyn threw a hand at him in exasperation and started off back around the house, the cat in tow. I’ve never seen anything like this in all my years, she thought. What is this? How could Annie, little newborn-witch Annie, just a baby next to us, how could she conjure something like this?

  Catching up, the cat ran ahead of her and trotted through the dry autumn grass. There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy—Shakespeare, you know. I gave him that one.

  “Mother, you are so full of crap,” Marilyn told the cat.

  Mock me at your peril, lovely daughter. No doubt Annie summoned it to kill you before you could craft the dryad. She knew you had your eye on her. The question is, what woke him up? It weren’t Parkin. That thing in there couldn’t give less of a shit about some Yankee Negro. No, he’s responding to someone else. Someone else is here. Someone directly connected to Annie.

  Who do you know fits that bill?

  Marilyn halted so quickly Roy almost ran into her. “I know who’s here,” she said, staring at the forest in thought.

  “What?” he asked. “That thing in the house?”

  She scowled at him. “No no, not that, but I know why it’s upright and sniffing the air. I know who woke it up.”

  The gray cat gazed up at her expectantly.

  “Annie’s daughter,” said Marilyn, a slow smile creeping under her Big Bird nose. “That’s it, that’s it … her little girl is back in town. My littlebird. She’s come back to the old haunting grounds. Annie’s conjuration knows she’s here, she’s got Annie’s blood in her. He can smell it.” Her hands found each other and she wrung them together. “We should put together a welcome-home party.”

  Roy grinned. “I like parties.”

  * * *

  After she sent Roy home, Marilyn went back to the Lazenbury House and stepped into the pantry, where a glass decanter with a cork lid stood on a shelf. Inside the jar was a heap of sun-dried tree frogs, all tangled together like electronics cables. She wrestled one of the frogs out, put it into a food processor, and ground it into a coarse powder that resembled cilantro. Then she put the powdered frog and two Earl Grey teabags into a kettle with some water and set it on the range.

  While she waited for the tea to boil, Marilyn went into her office, retrieved a book of stamps, and went back to the kitchen, where she grabbed a can of Fancy Feast from the pantry.

  The gray cat with the honey eyes had followed her into the house.

  As she tore one of the stamps off the book, it sauntered over to the cat-food can and sniffed it. There was no creaky voice darting into Marilyn’s skull like a slow-creeping fog; Mother had retreated from the cat. Probably asleep. She slept a lot these days.

  “Did I say that was for you? Get your ass down,” she said, brushing the cat down onto the floor.

  Marilyn put the LSD stamp on her tongue and opened the Fancy Feast with a manual can opener, then sat at the island and ate it out of the can with a silver spoon stolen from Adolf Hitler’s tea service. The swastika on the handle glittered in the track lighting over her head, but the spoon’s beauty did nothing to lessen the foul meatloaf-in-brine taste of the cat food.

  The acid had just kicked in when the tea-kettle began to whistle. She made a cup of it and sat back down to drink it (black, of course—sugar always screwed with the alchemic makeup of the scrying mixture), staring blankly out the window at deepening colors, listening to intensifying sounds.

  The breathy hmmmmm of the refrigerator.

  The constant tick-tock tick-tock of the smiling Felix clock on the kitchen wall and its swinging tail and tennis-match eyes, off-rhythm with the grandfather clock in the living room (mental note to wind it up).

  A pulpwood truck gargled past out on Underwood Road.

  Sparse birdsong fluted in the October trees. She took a deep sip of the tea and closed her eyes.

  Projected on the silver screen of her eyelids was a house somewhere in Blackfield … not the Lazenbury, but some brighter, cheerier dwelling, closer to the center of town, with pearl-colored wallpaper and cherrywood furniture. Heavy traffic droned back and forth outside this other house. She walked around, inspecting each room until she was satisfied no one was there, and then opened her eyes. Closed them again.

  This time she was walking down a street. A side street, one of those running perpendicular to the main thoroughfare. A small gaggle of children walked by, three boys and a girl. One of the boys was black, and Marilyn recognized him as the neighbor’s son, the new residents of Annie’s house.

  The children stopped and she went to them. The girl stooped to pet Marilyn. “Aw, what a pretty kitty. Hi there, pretty-kitty,” she cooed.

  Meow, said the old woman. She sniffed the girl’s hand and smelled Club crackers, candy, Magic Markers.

  “Meow,” said the girl she knew as Amanda.

  “Do you speak Cat, now?” asked the fat boy.

  Marilyn knew him from the trailer park down the hill from the Lazenbury. The Maynard boy. Amanda glared at him over her shoulder and gave Marilyn a few more luxurious strokes. “Pretty kitty.”

  Opening her eyes again, Marilyn took another sip of tea and clamped her eyelids shut. Now she was in some kind of shop, some weird type of five-and-dime maybe, if those were still around. Funny-books, plastic toys, board games, and Halloween masks were on display all over the room. She was sitting on a glass counter next to a colored man, who was typing on a sleek white laptop computer.

  “Not time to feed you yet, Selina,” said the man, giving Marilyn a rub around the ears. “I’ll give you something when suppertime gets here, I promise.” Pleasure reverberated down her spine in spite of the hand on her back. Prrrrrow, she said, and opened her eyes again.

  Any luck? asked Mother.

  The gray cat with the honey eyes had climbed back up onto the counter and was licking the last few morsels out of the can in her hands. Her mother’s mind was inside, idling, listening. They were scrying in tandem. Mother was old enough, and powerful enough, to scry without the assistance of wet cat food and LSD.

  Not yet. But I’ll find her, don’t you worry your pretty little head. Marilyn pushed the Fancy Feast away and combed her fingers through her silver hair, reveling in the acid-altered sensation of her nails sweeping across her scalp.

  Dropping acid for almost forty years, and straight peyote for long before that, had inured Marilyn against its most devious effects; like most practitioners of her brand of legerdemain, she’d had the revelation a long time ago that, like a dream, the LSD’s effects could be controlled, harnessed, channeled. In a dream, when you expect something to happen, it will happen. If you dream about a box, expect to find a decapitated head in that box and that’s exactly what you’ll find when you open it.

  In that way it’s a great method for distilling your own subconscious, for defragmenting one’s neural pathways. Cleaning house, if you will. Searching out base desires and mental flaws and eradicating them if possible.

  The lysergic acid diethylamide functioned in much the same fashion—if you expected to hallucinate something, you would hallucinate it. For a witch of Marilyn’s caliber, hallucinations were a bit more … shall we say, substantial when the chemistry was altered by certain secondary ingredients. The cat food helped her channel the hallucinations, to “tune into” the stray cats of Blackfield instead of having a Pink Floyd woo-woo session. Without the aftertaste on her tongue, she could forget why she was in a fugue state and what she was attempting to do.

>   Inserting herself into the mind of another cat, Marilyn found herself perched in the branches of an oak somewhere downtown, treed by a black Labrador. Cat number five was under a car somewhere, devouring the cold remnants of a discarded Styrofoam box of Chinese takeout. For the umpteenth time, she mused on how much sweet-and-sour chicken looked like battered and fried mice. Another leap put her behind the wheel of a female tabby, in the middle of a frantic mating session behind the Dollar General on 9th and Thompson.

  The tom’s barbed penis jabbed at her rotten, long-barren womb and she almost fell off the bar stool, snapping back to the Lazenbury kitchen. “Aaraaagh!”

  Problems? asked Mother.

  The gray cat licked its chops and flopped over on its back, studying her face upside-down.

  “No … no. Don’t worry about me.” Shaking, Marilyn caught her breath and took a deep gulp of the bitter toad tea. “While I search for Annie’s daughter, I want you to get a good look at that thing down there in Annie’s house. Figure out what it is, and how we get rid of it.”

  Who the hell are you ordering around? Reaching up, the cat snagged Marilyn’s sleeve with a toenail and unraveled a loop of yarn out of her sweater. I was one of Rasputin’s lovers and pupils, you know! I mixed pigments for Michelangelo! I taught—

  “I’m not in the mood for your sass, Mother. Or your history lessons.”

  Sass? You ain’t seen sass, cookie.

  “I have no doubt. Just, please, while I take care of this, do me a favor and take a look at Hairy Freako down there in the Victorian. I’ll bring you up a bowl of ice cream after dinner.”

  Do you promise?