by S. A. Hunt
“Listen, I’m willing—”
“I know about the children,” says Annie.
Edgar Weaver immediately stops talking.
The girl-woman makes a complete revolution around the circle before she speaks again. “The amusement park you built in the woods with your wife’s money.”
“Weaver’s Wonderland.”
“Whatever you want to call it.”
“Those kids are trash,” Edgar says at first, then seems to realize he’s spoken harshly, frowning, biting back his words. “They come from broken homes, poor homes, dead homes. No one’s going to miss them. Nobody’s even going to look for them, we got Blackfield in our pocket. We have men in the police department.”
“Someone will miss them.” Annie picks up a kitchen knife from the floor and points at him with it. Liquid fire dances on the blade. “I found out what you and Cutty are up to. The tree. You know the trees are unnatural. Disallowed—”
Edgar laughs nervously. “The dryads? Everyone has them.”
“No. Only the ones willing to kill for them. That’s—”
“They’re the only way you can live on, you idiot. You want to die like one of us mortals?”
She scowls. “Fell magic. You know that—”
“You want to fall apart at eighty years old? The heart-road makes you immortal, but it doesn’t keep you from aging. It doesn’t make you ageless. The dryad keeps you from mummifying.”
“And I know that. Cutty knows that.”
“Cutty doesn’t care.” His chuckling grows in confidence. “Marilyn is just over three hundred years old. She was around when they signed the Declaration of Inde-fuckin’-pendence! Can you grasp that? Can you even wrap your pretty little head around it? Cutty’s been crafting nag shi since long before you were born. She does what she wants. That’s the consequence of self-government, isn’t it? ‘The honor system.’ Ha! There’s no honor among thieves, and even less among witches.”
“What would you know about witches … man?” She says “man” as if it is a derogatory term, like “imbecile” or “outsider.” It doesn’t affect him, because he’s heard it a hundred times.
“I know Cutty and my wife are going to kill you if you hurt me.”
Annie gestures to the runic circle, drawing a broad oval in the air with the tip of the knife. “Do you know what this is, Edgar? My new friends know a lot about us. And about—”
“It’s bullshit. You don’t know anything.” He spits at her, but most of it only speckles his own legs. “You and your so-called friends, Annie, you don’t know shit. I don’t know what you’re planning, but when you’re done, the coven is going to kill you. No—they’re going to flatten you. Squash you like a bug. Fledgling. You’re a baby witch.
“The nag shi came from the Dream-Witch Yidhra, she’s the first one to have made them—she was the Prometheus who showed them how it was done. And they’ll kill you to protect it.”
“Not if I kill them.” Annie smiles.
“And how, pray tell, do you intend on doing that? Cutty’s too powerful. They all are. Even my wife’s got forty years on you.”
“I found a way.”
“The only thing capable of killing a witch as old as Cutty is a demon. And nobody’s brought a demon into the material world in two millennia. Not since the Christ Sanctification locked the door on Hell two thousand years ago.”
She stands over him, smiling knowingly. A drop of sweat trickles down her belly, zagging through the fine hairs like a bolt of lightning.
Edgar’s angry expression sours and his eyes dart around the room, widening in revelation. “Wait—that’s what this is?” He flexes his arms, straining against the ropes, kicking. “You think you’re going to summon a demon? You think you’re going to call up Satan and sic him on your neighbors?” Now he’s flailing, pulling at the ropes as hard as he can. The anger melts away, replaced by crazed, fearful giggling. “You’re crazy as hell. Who the hell do you think you are?”
Annie steps over Edgar’s thrashing legs and takes a knee between his thighs, crouching over his pelvis. She hovers over him in a three-point stance, her black hair spilling around her face, burying her eyes in shadow.
“What good is immortality with a price like this?” she asks him, tracing curlicues in his chest hair with the tip of the knife. “A blood price? Innocent blood? Come on, Eddie. Even if I condoned the crafting of nag shi, they’ve been watered with the blood of criminals before. Murderers, thieves, rapists. Not children. Not that it’s any—”
“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. You can’t make filet mignon with dollar-store beef, and you can’t grow a nag shi worth a damn with the blood of a rapist. The soul inside the tree, it responds badly to evil blood. You know that.”
“If you’re trying to talk me out of this, you’re doing a spectacularly bad job of it.”
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, changing to a different language, becoming faster, louder, a rapid-fire litany of gibberish. Suddenly Robin realizes what she’s speaking now.
German. Annie is shrieking in German.
Where would her mother learn a German 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 talk to my wife, see if I can get ’em to dig up the tree, 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 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 rib cage into his heart. Edgar seizes up, hissing through his teeth. Veins stand out on 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 skin.
Nothing seems to be happening. She scowls at the dead man and sweat rolls down her face. Did she just kill a man and disfigure herself for nothing? No, there is 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. He had it coming.
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.
The darker it gets, the worse the wound smells. The odor of anise, of licorice and absinthe, and the smell of sulfur 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, and her future daughter, at this bizarre, terrible turn of events.
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 go 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 them 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 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.
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, and drags Annie Martine back into the depths of the basement. The staircase’s risers dig into her back as she falls, scraping skin from her leg and shoulder, and she lands facedown in the dirt.
As she stares over her shoulder, Robin’s mother screams.
Crouched at her feet is an incredible and terrifying sight, a hulking creature covered in shaggy hair the color of blood and comprised almost wholly of gangly limbs. It looks down at her with brilliant green eyes set in a gargantuan head and gives her that drowned-engine growl again. Grrrrurururuhuhuh.
“Yes,” gasps Annie, as if in response to some unheard question. “I summoned you here to make a deal.”
The Red Lord’s head tilts, but he says nothing, if talking were ever part of his skill set. He reaches forward with one terrible claw again and grasps Annie’s ankle, dragging her away, crawling backward, dragging her toward the pit in the middle of the cellar. The packed earth stains her naked body red and brown.
Annie screams, “No! I did the ritual! You have to listen to what I say! This is a deal! I called you here to protect me from the coven!”
The Red Lord pauses. He lets go of her, resting on his haunches, and begins to slowly pace around the room on all fours like an anxious panther. As he moves, his hips and shoulders roll in unnatural ways, over-extending and rotating in their sockets as if they are less part of a natural skeletal order and more a mocking approximation of some living being.
The entire time, he stares at her with those terrible green eyes.
“With this entrapment spell, I have imprisoned you here in my home, author of discords, sixty-third spirit, lord in the abyss, governor of thirty legions of damned souls,” says Annie. Her words remain muddled by her injured tongue, but the meaning is clear. “You will protect this house from the oracle Marilyn Cutty, the skinchanger Theresa LaQuices, and the conjurer Karen Weaver, and their Matron, the oracle they call Mother. You will not allow the four of them inside this house. Within these walls, you will not allow them to do harm to me.”
Saying nothing, doing nothing, the Red Lord crouches by the pit. He seems to be waiting for her to say more. Annie must be receiving the same sort of mind-voice Robin had been hearing the past few days, though now it must carry a word of agreement to her terms, because Annie appears to relax, or at least a grim form of relief passes across her face.
“Now what is your demand in exchange for my wishes?” she asks, her voice breaking. “I was told you would require something as payment for your services.”
The Red Lord blinks, head tilting ever so slightly.
Annie gasps, a subtle breath of the close, foul air of the cellar. “Oh, God. You can’t be…” She shakes her head, covering her face with her hands. When she looks up at the creature again, her next words come out in a sobbing howl. “But the goddess has taken my heart from me!”
From her vantage point somewhere in the darkness, Robin watches the two of them size each other up. The Red Lord crawls toward her mother in a slow, self-assured fashion, eyes always locked on her face, vivid green in a colorless room. Facing this horrible thing, Annie tries to regain whatever composure she’d had before, but it’s all she can do to keep from screaming herself hoarse.
Scrambling backward, she turns and claws up the stairs, hand and foot at first, banging against the wall, and then running, pounding up and up to the door at the top. She wrenches it open to find her own kitchen, but something is wrong. There are still no colors, no electricity. The night outside the windows is more than night—it is an absence, a nothingness. She doesn’t have to open it to see and to know the house, or at least this facet of it, exists in the vast vacuum of the underworld.
She didn’t pull the beast into our world.
He pulled the house into his.
All of this realization happens in a fraction of a second as Annie bursts from the cellar door and crashes into the doo-wop diner table, slamming it into the kitchen cabinet and overturning two of the chairs. Frantic, terrified, she goes to her belly and crawls underneath the table, curling into a fetal ball in the shadow. She bought the table two years ago at a yard sale in Summerville, thinking it would look good in their kitchen, with its aluminum trim and steel legs and sparkly green surface, not knowing she would one day be using it as a shield between herself and some hulking monstrosity from another plane of existence.
&nb
sp; The cellar door, even though it was already black, fills with a deeper darkness. Green light splits it as two lambent eyes open.
The Red Lord slinks into the kitchen.
Panic overtakes her. Annie clambers to her feet and runs.
She pounds down the hallway rug toward the front door, sparing a second to glance through the archway into the living room. Black and white too, an ominous shadow-lair straight out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Some shimmering light illuminates the walls in there, like a handful of broken glass. The windows are black squares.
To her surprise, the front door opens easily. Annie flees the house.
But she doesn’t get far. As soon as she steps onto the front porch, she can plainly see there will be no escaping.
Beyond the porch railing is an abyss as deep and yawning black as a starless night. Annie sees this at a run and tries to stop herself, grasping at the banister as her feet find stairs, but she slips, goes down on her ass, slides halfway down the stoop, and then her bare feet are dangling out into space. The lawn is a Mariana Trench.
From somewhere far below comes a strange sound: the dissonant noise of competing flutes. Annie Martine hangs by her hands from the front steps of her house, dangling over a long fall into a mad, infinite nothing.
Looming over her is the Red Lord.
At first Robin thinks he is going to peel her away from the steps and pitch her screaming into the whistling dark, but he takes hold of Annie’s upper arm and drags her to safety, depositing her on the porch with all the care of tossing a bag of dirty laundry, elbows and ass banging on the boards.
The dirt-streaked woman lies on her back, gasping for breath. “No,” she says, pushing herself backward with her heels. “Even if I wanted to, it doesn’t work that way. Not anymore. Crossing back into the sanctified land afterward might kill me. Poison me.”
She knows, though, and Robin suspects, the Red Lord would never let her get away, never let her get out of the deal, whatever it is. Once you’ve summoned a demon and asked your favor—and at this point, Robin was dead sure it was a demon—you satisfy his demands, or you die.
