I Come with Knives

by S. A. Hunt

  But those horrible sights were still buried down there, deep beneath the surface, memory-sharks that only breached and flashed their cuttlebone teeth in the dead of night. Those children she’d saved, all grown up one day, will sit straight up in the bed next to their wife or husband as the last foaming tide of a nightmare ebbs into the darkness of sleep. Nightmares of things they saw as children but have forgotten as adults, their childhoods stolen by smiling hags with chips of ice in their eyes, hobgoblins who would have eaten them—or, worse, stolen their hearts for an ageless corpse-queen—if not for a punk-rock witch-hunter and the gleaming silver dagger in her hand.

  She was still lost in thought when Gendreau stopped at a stop sign.

  Another highway crossed in front of them, running perpendicular to Underwood Road. As soon as Robin’s eyes drifted north, she knew it ran all the way out to Miguel’s Pizzeria in the mountains. They had met the road on the other end of her childhood home, the “shortcut” Kenway had driven when he had first taken her back to her skeezy candy van to lie in the dark and cold, miserably horny and staring at the ceiling.

  “Did we pass it?” Maybe she wasn’t paying attention—she had been pretty deep in her own head there for a few minutes.

  Confused, everyone turned to look. Robin’s sallow face reflected in Lucas’s black tactical shades. “I think?” asked the magician. “I guess we did? I don’t even remember going through the neighborhood and seeing the trailer park on the left.”

  Gendreau said over his shoulder, “Shall I turn around and go back? Or are we on the wrong road?”

  “It’s the right road,” said Lucas. “Underwood.” He reached under the front seat and brought out a folder, opening it. “That’s what the file says. I mean, we were here the other night, it’s not like we’re lost.”

  “It’s the right road.” Robin scanned the road behind them. “But something’s wrong.”

  The Suburban dipped into the oncoming lane, doing a U-turn back onto Underwood, and Gendreau piloted them into the woods again. This time, Robin clutched the headrest in front of her, her head on a swivel as she watched the road for landmarks.

  Power poles kept a steady cadence on the right side of the car, and the familiarity of almost twenty years tinged every leaf and sign they passed. The familiar swoop and sway of the road’s subtle waveform settled over them once more, but this time, Gendreau slowed until they were at a funereal pace, the asphalt grumbling under their tires, trees parallaxing past at walking speed.

  “Wait a minute,” said Robin.

  She stared through the left-hand windows of the Suburban, where a power pole loomed by the road’s shoulder.

  Kenway shifted. “What is it?”

  “The power lines are on the left side now.” Robin looked through the left window, then over Kenway’s shoulder through the rear window. “They cross the road at the Lazenbury. I know because the line comes down Underwood on the side of the road my old house is on, then the lines cross the street to the transformer in front of the Lazenbury, where lines go up to the hacienda and over to the trailer park, and from there, the lines stay on that side until it gets to the highway going up to the pizzeria.”

  Making a three-point turn, Gendreau maneuvered the Suburban east again, putting the lines on their right.

  A few minutes later, Lucas said, “Now the lines are on the other side.”

  “Karen Weaver is hiding the house.” Sara Amundson peered up at an angle through her gray window. The tint layered a sullen darkness over the world outside. “I know it. She has cropped that whole quarter-mile out of the road. Like cutting the middle out of a string and tying the ends back together.”

  Gendreau put the Suburban in reverse and they whined backward—slow at first, and then faster, until they were racing backward toward the west, the engine whining with an inhaling burr like an electric track-car.

  “Stop,” said Sara. “Let me out.”

  They drew up short, catty-cornered in the eastbound lane. Robin threw open the back door and got out, followed by Kenway and then Sara. The illusionist clawed the Murdercorn wig off her head and tossed it into the backseat, letting the wind comb fingers through her brilliant red hair.

  “Look. You can see it there.” Sara pointed east, at the south side of the road.

  A splintery power-pole towered over them sixty feet away, topped with gray beehive electricity components. Rubber-coated wires emerged from the couplings, protruding into the air some twenty or thirty feet, where they faded away, as if God had stooped down with a giant Pink Pig drafting eraser and rubbed it out of existence.

  “What the hell?” asked Kenway, shading his eyes against the drab white sky. “What is this, the Bermuda Triangle?”

  Taken as a whole, the arrangement over their heads seemed to refract like a pencil inserted into a glass of water. There was no visible difference in the unending army of trees all around them, but when you paid attention to the power cables, you could see where Weaver had excised the Lazenbury and everything around it. The power line coalesced into being on the north side of the road and hooked into the couplings at the top of another power-pole.

  “Can you nullify it?” Gendreau’s cane rapped on the road twice as he walked, and then he directed the tip at the strange refraction. “Or reverse it?”

  Taking a piece of chalk out of her pocket, Sara drew an increasingly complicated series of sigils and symbols on the asphalt: concentric circles, words in some flowing, inscrutable script, geometric diagrams, intersecting lines. The more she drew, the more her face darkened with irritation, until the chalk snapped in half and she looked up at them from where she knelt. “I can’t even find the edges. Except for that weird lensing with the power lines, it’s almost seamless. It’s like trying to open a fire exit from the outside, except there’s not even a door. It’s a blank wall that I know has a door on the other side of it.”

  A desolate satisfaction came over Robin. “Now d’you see how powerful they are?” she asked, trying not to sound smug.

  “I was always aware.” Indignity soured Gendreau’s aristocratic face. “I’ve seen this sort of thing before, Miss Martine … but not this well done. The others, they’ve—you could get your fingers under the illusion, to so speak, and pry it up like a rock so you can find the worms underneath. But this … I can’t find where in the fabric of space and time the illusion begins and ends. It’s completely flush with reality.”

  A bird came sailing across the trees, a big black crow. As it drew near the place where the cable refracted out of view, she almost expected it to disappear, slipping into oblivion as soon as it crossed that invisible boundary and possibly reappearing a few minutes later, but it passed by without so much as a flicker.

  As she stared, the visual image of the bird vanishing pushed an idea into her head. She rounded on Gendreau. “Can you un-conjure something?”

  “I’ve never heard of it before, but yes, I suppose you could. I mean, you can conjure things—”

  “—So why can’t you un-conjure them? Banish them?”

  “That would explain why the illusion is so finely grained.” Gendreau stared at the smearing end of the powerline, rubbing the corners of his mouth. “Yes … yes, perhaps what she’s done is, instead of … yes.…” The bull-pizzle cane came to rest on the pavement and he tucked a hand into the breast of his suit blazer. “… It’s not an illusion at all, is it? Weaver has un-conjured the area around the house. She’s pinched a pouch out of the fabric of reality and sewn the gap shut, isolated it, like a pocket hidden in the lining of a jacket.” He stood there staring blankly at the sky, his mind idling high and out of gear. “There’s no gap to find because there isn’t one.”

  Sara folded her arms. “Riddle me this: how do you get into a house with no door?”

  “You make one,” Wayne suggested from the Suburban.

  Goose bumps of excitement tingled across Robin’s scalp. “Yes! Your ring!” She strode straight to him as he was climbing out of the car and clu
tched the boy against her chest in a one-armed hug. “Your ring! We can use it to get into the isolation!”

  He grinned, tugging the ball-chain necklace out of his shirt, revealing his mother Haruko’s ring. Gendreau and Sara came over, and the thin magician stooped to level his face with Wayne’s, his hands on his knees.

  “Is this it?” he asked. “The ring that opens magic doors?”

  It sounded about as silly as it possibly could, coming from this character, but there wasn’t really any way of getting around it. Life is stranger than fiction, as they say. Wayne explained how it worked. “And from inside the dark, scary version of my house, all the doors lead to other places in town.”

  “Like a hub,” said Robin. “The only problem is, the demon is in that Darkhouse, trapped, waiting for prey to come into his cage. And I’d bet magic isn’t all he’s willing to eat.”

  * * *

  A few minutes later, they were back in town. As soon as the Suburban slipped over a hill and they were greeted by the first thrust of civilization, Gendreau pulled into a Sonic Drive-In to grab something to drink while they planned their next move. Robin ordered a Sprite to help calm her stomach and sat back, sipping the soda, relaxing as the coolness funneled down her chest into her belly, unlocking a tight band of anxiety around her lungs.

  Her heart rumbled feverishly inside the birdcage of her chest, throbbing down her arm and into her feet. Gendreau started the Suburban and backed out of the Sonic stall, pulling into traffic. She didn’t know where he was going, and he didn’t seem to either; he seemed to be driving aimlessly through Blackfield, stalling for time.

  “You’re bleeding,” said Sara.

  Robin opened her eyes and examined her shirt. A slick of red ran from the top of her shoulder all the way down her side, and when she peeled back her shirttail, she saw it was spreading into the waist of her jeans. The nausea returned, but it was tempered by the chill of the soda.

  A hand appeared from the front seat, clutching a fistful of napkins: Lucas, his eyes still unknowable behind those black sunglasses.

  She took them and pressed the wad against the surgery scar, dabbing at the blood, gasping at the fresh pain that erupted underneath. The tendril-braid thrashed under her shirt, painting red hoops and commas across her belly.

  “Sorry about the mess I’m making in your car, Andy,” she told Gendreau, hissing through her teeth.

  “It’s a rental,” he said quietly, without turning around.

  Silence fell over the car as Robin hiked up her shirt and dabbed at the blood seeping out around the thing in her shoulder. It was as big around as a garden hose now, pushing the staples out and loosening the stitches, stretching the wound open. The flap of skin that had been inside the U-scar was now a shriveled epaulet lying on top of the tendrils. There were five of them now, closely intertwined into a hard but yielding cable. Felt like warm, wet rubber.

  Lucas’s hand appeared again, this time holding a spool of Scotch tape.

  Robin accepted, confused. “What’s this for?”

  He handed her another cache of napkins. “Tape it over the, umm—” He traced a circle on his own shoulder with his fingertips, wax on, wax off.

  Robin tucked her shirt under her chin to keep it out of the way and sat there for a baffled moment trying to figure out how she was going to dress her shoulder with one hand.

  “Here, I’ll help you,” said Sara, reaching for the tape and napkin.

  “Thank you.”

  Sara pressed the napkins to her amputation. “Here, hold this down.”

  She held the napkins in place, glancing back at the woman. Sara Amundson could have been an Old Hollywood lounge singer, buxom and pretty, her red hair an Aphrodite tumble. She must have read Robin’s eyes because she said dryly, “It’s okay. I’ve seen worse. So, what are you thinking for our plan of attack?” she asked, trying to distract her patient.

  Robin thought about it, sipping her drink. “Wayne, how did you get into the Darkhouse the first time? Are there specific ways or methods you have to get there from here? You said you got there from your room at the hospital.”

  “Yeah,” Wayne said through a mouthful of hamburger. A speck of lettuce stuck to the corner of his mouth. He knuckled it in. “But you can’t go back there, ’cause Marissa and the hospital security’s gonna want to keep you, ain’t they?”

  “Yes, I can’t go back there. Not right now.”

  “Well, me and that Joe-elle guy came out through a painting in Kenway’s apartment.” He chewed the hamburger up and swallowed. “Maybe we can go in the same way.”

  An old man selling homegrown produce out of a raggedy-ass Sanford and Son pickup stood up from his lawn chair to watch them pass. His hands gnarled into stiff claws, a slow, angry grimace forming on his face. His eyes were not his own; they were hollow cat’s-eye marbles, full of the cold coin-light of tapetum lucidum.

  “Hi-ho, Silver, away,” Gendreau sang, heading back north.

  “Keep going straight.” Kenway gave the blond magician directions to his art shop in the historical district. He startled Robin with a reassuring hand on her good shoulder. “When you get to the Bojangles, keep to the right and turn on Broad. My place is a couple blocks down. It’ll say GRIFFIN’S ARTS AND SIGNS on the window with a big red gryphon.”

  Robin’s face flushed and she flashed a smile back at him. He didn’t withdraw his hand right away. His eyes were deeply warm and locked on her face, darting from eye to eye to nose to mouth.

  You make me hope I survive this, she thought.

  The magicians’ vehicle approached the four-lane intersection of Broad and Main, and Gendreau maneuvered them into the right-hand lane, the turn signal metronoming. His gas-flame eyes burned at them in the rearview mirror.

  A trumpeting horn shook the Suburban.

  Brilliant headlights turned the inside of the vehicle into a blinding lightbox. Robin spun to see where it was coming from and found herself face-to-face with the front end of a garbage truck. The driver door opened and a man leaned out, or at least she thought it was a man; he was as bald as a bedpost and his skin was an angry, welted red.

  Teeth glistened in the pit of his withered mouth. His ears were black holes, and deranged eyes stared from deep in his knothole eye sockets.

  To Robin, he was the angel of Pestilence.

  25

  Joel Ellis marched mindlessly down the sidewalk through Blackfield, his hood up and his hands jammed into his pockets. The sky threatened rain, and part of him hoped it would come again. It suited him today.

  It had been a pretty good thumper last night, and something about torrential downpours made him feel safe, made him feel buffered against the slings and arrows of the world. Caveman remnants nestled in the nooks of his brain told him creatures afraid of getting soaked didn’t go out in the rain to hunt, didn’t brave the elements; if he stayed in his cave with his fire and his spear, he would be okay. Nobody goes out in the rain. Nobody will get you while it’s raining.

  Mama’s house had a tin roof (and did he ever love the sound of rain hitting those warbling red sheets), but that’s not where he was headed this evening. He was headed for the comic shop. It was close enough to the hospital to walk to, and when he got there, he could decide where to go from there. All that mattered now was finding shelter, and it had nothing to do with rain. If he decided to go back to Mama’s house (never his house, always Mama’s house, even though she hadn’t lived there in years), he’d take the bus or something. Or borrow Fish’s bicycle.

  His brother had given him a key to the shop. In case you ever wanna get out of that dark, musty house, you know.

  As he walked, Joel studied the key in his hand. It had a Captain America cover on it—the back end was coated in rubber like a car key, blue-and-white-striped, with a red circle and a white star inside. It was a commercial key for a commercial lock, and it felt like an alien artifact in his hand, a lightsaber, Excalibur, a tool meant for someone vastly more important than himself. />
  As he was crossing the Martin Dupree Bridge over the river, traffic hissing and crashing obliviously behind his back, Joel found himself racked by sobs and unable to see where he was going. He clutched the guardrail of the bridge and stared through a quivering screen of tears at the dark quicksilver some thirty or forty feet below. Heartache coiled hotly around his chest, twisting the breath out of him until black spots, cigarette burns on a film reel, bloomed in his eyes. Wind blustering up the channel boxed him with wet, cold fists. Another part, darker and less vestigial, shoved in meanly next to the caveman neurons in his brain, told him to jump. Rationality told him the fall wouldn’t kill him. The water wouldn’t even hurt him at this height. He’d just be going for an impromptu swim.

  Though, if there were rocks hiding under the surface, he’d probably break his legs.

  “Goddammit,” Joel told the river in a pinched growl, wishing he could rip the guardrail out of the cement with his bare hands. There was something missing now, wasn’t there? An out, a back door—under it all, there had been an emergency exit, and now that it wasn’t there anymore, he recognized it for what it was: Fisher had always been his golden parachute, he knew, for when living in the house their mother had died in would become less of an inability to move on and more of a masochism, maybe a self-flagellation. Punishment for not being able to repair the woman that had raised them. He knew in the back of his mind he would one day tell the difference and step back, and Fish would be there waiting to help him back up.

  What happened ain’t your fault, big brother, Fish had said one day.

  Serendipitously, they had run into each other at Kroger. Joel was so drunk he was sweating, and Fish was trying to talk him into staying at the shop and sleeping it off. You couldn’t stop her and you couldn’t fix her, and it ain’t even your place to. Sometimes, people lose their minds and all you can do is watch it happen and make it easier on ’em and move on.