by S. A. Hunt
“That’s different,” said Robin. “How come you haven’t seen that before?”
“This is the first time I’ve taken this ring off.” Leon put the ring on the kitchen table as if he were afraid to touch it, standing it on edge. The ring turned by itself and the light-javelin flared. Now it was two feet long and hard to look directly at, a miniature star compressed to a smear the width of a human finger. Their shadows wheeled and swooped around the room, capering across the wallpaper, diving into the cabinets.
“I have some real important questions I wish I could ask your wife, Mr. Parkin,” said Robin, trying not to stare into the light.
“You and me both, ma’am.”
“It’s a compass,” breathed Amanda, peering through her fingers.
Leon picked up the ring and the javelin faded to a mere whisper. “I can feel it tugging,” he said, holding it up. “Like a magnetized compass needle.” He rotated on the spot and the javelin faded down to a vague blur hovering in the C of his thumb and forefinger. He turned the other way and the javelin grew again, spearing over his shoulder and out in front of him.
A bitter ozone-stink floated in the air. Robin put her palm in front of the light. It wasn’t hot at all. The back of her hand glowed orange, the finger-bones dark shadows in veiny flesh, sprouting from her wrist.
“Nothin’ to it but to do it, I guess,” said Leon, and he marched out of the kitchen.
Out in the hallway, the javelin faded, even though he was still facing the same direction. Leon turned to his left and the ring flared again. He walked toward the foyer. The ring led them to the second floor, the kids clomping up the stairs behind him as if he were the Pied Piper.
“Here,” Leon told them, opening the door to the cupola.
The only thing on the other side was the stairway hooking up into the shaft’s spiral. Wayne held Haruko’s ring up to his eye. This must not have had an effect, because he closed the door and opened it again. Closed it, opened it. “I don’t know, there’s nothing.”
Leon’s ring was still pointing at the door. He went upstairs, Robin, Pete, and Wayne following. “I’ll be down here,” said Joel. “If y’all run across that shaggy bastard, I don’t want any part of it.”
With four people standing in it, the cupola was unusually crowded. Examining the room with his ring, Wayne turned every which way, looking up at the ceiling, looking out all the windows, even squeezing between Robin and Pete to check under the bed.
Now the javelin of light pointed down the stairs. “Come on,” said Robin, herding Wayne down them. At the bottom, she closed the door leading out to the landing (wincing apologetically to Kenway, Joel, and the girls as she did so) and braced the boy with a hand on his shoulder. “Now yours. Open the door.”
Wayne eyed the door through the monocle of Haruko’s ring and turned the doorknob. It scraped and creaked as if it were a thousand years old. He pushed the door open, revealing not their friends standing on the upstairs landing, but an archway full of deepest darkness.
* * *
A breath of frigid air wafted out, curling around their knees, chilling their hands. Groaning from the depths of the shadow-house was the immense galleon-creak of shifting timbers, as if the earth below that strange foundation was constantly moving.
Robin sat down and Leon settled behind her, putting his ring back on. “I’m not going in there,” said Wayne, staying on his feet, as if he would bolt at any moment.
She adjusted the GoPro on her chest rig. This was going to require a Spielberg-worthy framing.
“Hopefully you won’t have to.” She drummed her fingernails on the doorframe, lightly at first, then a little more insistently. “Here it is, buddy,” she said, her voice soft, as if perhaps she were speaking to herself more than anything on the other side. “Here we are. Come show your face. I know you’re in there.” The dark doorway yawned apathetically for a long several seconds, as if it had nothing to prove to her. She leaned forward, trying to get a better look at the faint light down the hallway.
Bursting out of the shadows, a shaggy arm reached through the door, claws flexing a hair’s-breadth from her face.
“Oh!” Robin threw herself backward against Leon’s shins, and Wayne screamed, running up the stairs into the cupola. Pete let out a shrill shout.
Before she could properly react, the coppery hair all over the arm burst into flames, WHOOSH, as readily as if it were drenched in gasoline. The arm withdrew and the fire diminished in the watery darkness, a single flame licking one last time.
A pair of bright green eyes blinked sluggishly, each one the size of a softball.
Grrrrurururuhuhuh, rumbled Owlhead.
His wet, ragged respiration reminded Robin of a tiger, or perhaps a dragon in a movie, but muffled, heavy, languid.
“You,” she breathed, staring. “It is you.”
The Red Lord from her dreams.
Owlhead was the Red Lord. And he was here, he was solid, he was real, and he wasn’t a hallucination. He wasn’t going to vanish into a pile of spiders this time. The forty milligrams of aripiprazole anti-psychotic didn’t do shit to him.
(g i v e m e)
“No,” she said, and realized she was still cowering against Leon’s feet, halfway up the stairs. She sat down, but didn’t lean forward. She stared into the Red Lord’s great green eyes, and tried to will her heart to stop pounding. Thundering, really—rapidly, like the hummingbird drumbeat of some speed-metal song. “I got some questions. I got you here now. You fucking real, you’re tangible, you’re here, and I’m going to ask you some questions.”
No voice reverberated in the corner of her mind.
“You there?”
Grrrrurururuhuhuh.
She checked over her shoulder. Wayne was still upstairs—he wanted no part of this, and she didn’t blame him. Leon’s face would have been as white as milk if he could go pale, but his open mouth and wide eyes were more than enough evidence of his terror.
He didn’t leave, though, she had to give him that. Neither did Pete, though he had moved halfway up the stairs, watching around the corner.
“What are you?” Robin asked the empty doorway.
Grrrrurururuhuhuh.
Robin had never addressed anything like this before. She tried to remain assertive. Her hands trembled and her insides quaked, but it wasn’t entirely from fear. She felt like she’d drank six pots of coffee. The aripiprazole had kicked in, and it had shifted her body into a strange gear. Five-wheel-drive. “No. You answer my questions. You been houndin’ me for ages. I ain’t slept worth a shit in weeks, thanks to you. And now I’m gonna get some information out of you, goddammit. I wanna know what and who the fuck you are.”
(s o h u n g r y)
“Hungry?” Owlhead’s eyes were like green Christmas baubles with lights inside them. “What do you eat?”
An image squirted into Robin’s mind, indistinct, piecemeal, a cloud of clues like a half-finished jigsaw puzzle. Her subconscious fluttered around the edges, trying to make sense of the shards, and she caught glimpses
liver-spotted hands, wielding a knife, coming around a boy’s throat, slash
of various things, faces,
a curtain of blood
places … no names, but
tiny graves in the woods
a distinct motif she thought she could sort through …
broomstick leaning in the corner
flickering firelight, bubble and gurgle of boiling water
Marilyn Cutty’s birdlike smirk swam in the gloom. Robin leaned forward, disregarding the fact she was within arm’s reach of the creature again. “Cutty? You eat witches?”
No answer.
The stairway creaked slowly. Robin looked up and saw Wayne creeping down, his eyes curious. She threw out a trembling hand. “No! Stay upstairs! Keep the ring up there, away from the door.”
Grrrrurururuhuhuh.
(t h e r i n g t h e r i n g)
“Why you want the ring? Does it protect
you? Does it allow you to get out that house?”
Grrrrurururuhuhuh. Owlhead blinked slowly.
“If it eats witches,” Wayne said from the cupola, “ask it why it tried to bite my damn head off.”
A hand slipped over Robin’s shoulder. Leon in the corner of her eye. “Are you psychic or something? How is that thing talking to you? I don’t hear nothing but the breathing.”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I don’t know!”
Heinrich. She really needed to talk to him, but he wasn’t answering his phone. He had a bad habit of doing that.
“Why are you here?” she asked the eyes. “Who brought you here?”
Grrrrurururuhuhuh, breathed Owlhead.
Sensory echoes welled out of the darkness, like heat distorting the air over a fire. When the ripples broke over her mind’s eye, she saw her mother’s face. “Mom?” Robin stared. “Did my mother have something to do with bringing you here?”
The green eyes closed, vanishing, extinguishing.
Frustration. She could feel swells of frustration rolling out of the doorway, washing against the stairs like the surf at high tide. The Red Lord wanted something, but she couldn’t tell what. The ring, of course, but something else. What else? “You want to tell me something? What you want me to know?”
Then it hit her. Name. Name. “I need a name.” And she leaned in, peering deep into the dark. “What is your name?”
To his credit Leon was right beside her, eyes focused on that black rectangle at the bottom of the stairs. “What is your name?” he asked. “And why are you in this house?”
They hesitated, craning forward, listening, watching, straining to divine some kind of answer from the door. They saw nothing except for a lightless gap, an empty, absent blackness.
“Is it gone?” Wayne, at the top of the stairs, leaning around the corner. “I don’t see anything. What was that noise it made? Sounded like a growl.”
An answer was forming in Robin’s mouth as a great shaggy arm thrust out from the doorway and took hold of Leon Parkin’s foot. Long, knob-knuckled fingers wrapped around his ankle and jerked it out from under him.
Before they could react, Leon banged down the stairs on his back. Instead of a scream, he let out a strangled hoot. “Ooh!”
“Dad!” screamed Wayne.
“Help!”
Bracing herself against the wall, Robin fumbled for Leon’s hands as he slid toward the doorway on his ass. “I got you!” She took his left arm with both hands, but her fingers caught in the cuff of his work shirt, a white dress shirt, and the cuff link button popped off with a staccato ripping noise. She lost him with her right hand, but her left still had his wrist.
The Red Lord’s arm burst into flames with a WHOOSH! and a halo of bright, shimmering fire. Colors prismed in a half-circle around the flame.
By now everyone was screaming and the stairwell descended into pure chaos. Leon got one foot under him and managed to crouch on it, the other leg out behind him in an awkward fencing lunge, but the burning arm jerked him backward and the two of them fell against the wall, shoulders slamming against the clapboard with a woody crunch.
Fingers slid through Robin’s hands. At the last second, her eyes darted up and locked onto the man’s sweat-glossed face, where she saw pure, unadulterated terror in his eyes. “It’s got me,” he stammered.
Leon banged once against the doorframe and slipped into the dark.
“God-fucking-dammit,” shouted Robin, and without a fraction of hesitation she charged into the doorway after him.
* * *
Dizziness overcame her as she stumbled into the dark Other-House. Suddenly it all came back as she knelt there on the second-floor landing—this was her house. Not the house Leon and Wayne had claimed, but her childhood home. Under her feet was the threadbare rug Jason Martine had bought at a yard sale when Robin was twelve. Set against the wall was the creaky old wicker vamp chair her grandmother Edith had passed down to her mother Annie. Their family pictures hung on the wall. But it was all overlaid with this sinister, desolate darkness only given shape by some strange glow that shimmered and rippled across the walls and floors like a flashlight on cave-water.
“Help!” bellowed Leon, sliding across the floor, kicking madly at the fist wrapped around his leg. The Red Lord was still on fire as he walked down the landing toward the stairs, a hoary red cave troll wreathed in flame, still dragging Wayne’s father, the white flames casting a silvery shine.
In the holy firelight, Robin could see more clearly the house that had once belonged to her family. Cobwebs draped over the furniture like bridal veils, and buntings of hideous gossamer hung from the rafters. Dust turned everything a sullen shade of gray.
Tucked into the back of her jeans was the silver dagger she’d used on Neva Chandler. The Osdathregar. The Purifier. If this thing works on witches, it should work on whatever this is. She charged after them and past Leon, plunging the dagger into the Red Lord’s arm. He let go of the man with a terrifying noise, a metallic roar like an oil tanker running aground, and rounded on Robin. The Red Lord clubbed her with his flaming hand.
Something popped like bubble-wrap in her chest as she cartwheeled over Leon and collided with the wall. Framed pictures fell, smashing on the floor.
Scrambling onto his hands and knees, then on his feet, Leon fled.
The Red Lord did not give chase. Instead, he committed to confronting the woman who had stabbed him with the silver dagger, the mysterious blade Heinrich had called the Osdathregar, the weapon Heinrich seemed to treasure above all the other weapons in his armory. Stomping toward Robin, the Red Lord reached down and took her by the arm, snatching her up off the floor. His other hand closed on her throat, and he slammed her against the wall, pinning her by the neck.
The room spun. The darkness narrowed, trying to converge on her face, as if it couldn’t wait to swallow her whole. Those glowing green traffic-light eyes were mere inches from her own, each eyeball the size of her fist, set in spiraling eye sockets as big as dinner plates, in a head the size of a television set. Robin gazed into them and saw nothing but the empty, feral rage of an animal driven to lunacy by imprisonment.
White fire still licked from the arm pinning her against the wall, but as she watched, the flames extinguished themselves, as if the darkness were asbestos, smothering them to death.
“Why have you been stalking me? Watching me? Taunting me?” choked Robin. Her feet pedaled uselessly at the air. “What is so special about me?”
The beast’s other hand came up, palming her forehead, the heel of his palm covering her eyes. In that brief moment, her mother’s face swam out of the darkness again, coming through in grainy patches, like a bad signal on FM radio.
“I can’t breathe.” She punched at the arm and the hand around her throat, throwing hook after hook into his forearm and wrist. The flesh under all that hair was as hard as bone, unyielding and solid. “You asshole. Either kill me or tell me what I need to know. One or the other.”
He said nothing, just kept trying to force the image of Annie Martine into her head, like hammering a wedge into a tree stump. It felt like he was splitting her brain down the middle trying to jam something through a hole in the brick wall of aripiprazole in her system.
“Okay,” she spat, reaching for his body with her free hand. Her skull felt like it had ten gallons of water sloshing around in it.
Tangling her fingers in the shaggy hair coating his chest, Robin pulled with everything she had and thrust the silver dagger, driving it deep into the creature’s chest.
And her mind split open like a coconut.
24
Light flares in the inky void, resolving into a face. Annie Martine materializes, illuminated by candles, fading in from black. Gradually, the scene makes itself clear: her mother is kneeling in a dirt-floored, stone-walled room, surrounded by thousands of stumpy white candles—on the floor, arrayed along the walls, standing in floor brackets.
Annie
mutters to herself, her eyes closed. The incantations she’s saying are too low for Robin to make out. She is almost nude, clothed only in a pair of Hanes boyshorts, nubile, her late-teens body sleek and glittering with beads of sweat. Occult symbols have been painted in key positions on her body with some dark paste like melted chocolate. Not blood. Some kind of mixture. They look like brush-painted kanji, but … wrong, somehow. Upside-down, maybe. Too many parts, not enough curves.
A round diagram six feet across has been drawn on the floor with chalk, a ring of incomprehensible symbols. A man lies in the center of the runic circle, stripped naked, his paunch sweaty, his balding scalp glistening in the candlelight. His arms and legs are outstretched like the Vitruvian Man, his wrists and ankles tied to steel tent-stakes, driven into the earth. He wakes up, blinking, looking around worriedly.
A folded dishtowel lies across his groin, obscuring his genitals.
“Where am I?” he asks.
Annie finishes muttering and looks up at him from under her brows. She is undebatably angry, but it is a long-simmering rage, ripe, reptile-cold. “You’re in my cellar, Edgar.”
“Why am I naked? What is this?”
“This is a ritual. I’ve chosen you as my sacrifice.” Annie stands up, presenting the full glory of her lithe, petite body.
Her dark hair is feathered and parted in the middle, and it makes everything feel like a scene excerpted from a horror movie from the eighties, even though this vignette had to have taken place in the early nineties. The only thing missing is a synth score from John Carpenter. Robin gets the distinct feeling this vision is a stolen hand-me-down memory, a psychic telephone game—the Red Lord took this scene from the past, lifted it from her mother somehow, and passed it on to her daughter.
(An inheritance, then?)
(Well, better late than never, I suppose.)
“Sacrifice?” He angles his head up, peering over his belly. “What the hell are you going on about?”
“Shut your mouth.” Annie walks slowly around the runic circle, pacing like a predator. He watches her, his eyes trickling up and down her sweat-slick body, and the lust hiding behind the terror in his eyes is disgusting.
