by S. A. Hunt
“What is this?” demanded Cutty. “Stay out of this, boy!”
Slowly, excruciatingly, Kenway rotated the dagger like a pressure valve, so it was pointing in the other direction—at the witch standing in the kitchen.
Sweat trickled down Cutty’s gray face. “No! No!”
“I am tired of your bullshit, lady,” replied Kenway. “I’m gonna end this if it fucking kills me.” He leaned into the dagger, walking it toward her, and he looked so comically, so ludicrously like a mime fighting an invisible wind, Robin almost laughed. Cutty thrust her hands forward and the pommel hit him in the lips, but he let out the most ferocious growl and put his back into it.
Ten feet. Seven feet. Five feet.
The Osdathregar trembled in his hands, and then he was vibrating, like a man gripping an electric fence, still growling, only now it was a shuddering washing-machine utterance: “GRR-R-R-AAAH!” Cutty backed against the kitchen island as the blade came within arm’s reach.
As if she were Superman launching himself forward from a stand-still, Robin punched with both fists.
Darting out of Kenway’s hands, the Osdathregar flew the last couple of feet and caught Cutty in the solar plexus, threading through her, lifting her. Robin brought her fists down as if ending an orchestra piece and the dagger darted into the floor, nailing the witch to the hardwood planks.
Kenway collapsed next to her.
The ear-splitting shriek that came out of Cutty was unbelievable. The oven door, the microwave door, and every lightbulb in the room exploded, raining glass all over the kitchen floor. Every drinking glass in the dish drain shattered. Even the television screen spiderwebbed.
The force pinning Robin to the wall let go and she dropped onto her hands and knees, barking her shin on a nightstand on the way down.
“Uuuuuuuhr,” groaned the cadaverous horse-limbed thing on the floor.
Robin crawled to her feet and staggered toward it. An angular shape moved restlessly inside a cloudy white caul. The rubbery sac was clear enough she could see through it. Thick wisps of black hair clouded around pale limbs … an elbow … a hip … a hand … a face.
One bloodshot eye gazed through the membrane. A finger poked through and ripped the knife hole wider. Robin jerked away from it in horror and her ankle bumped something.
The bottle of champagne.
Getting an idea, she approached the thing tearing out of its amniotic sac, her heart slamming in her chest over and over, veins rocketing with adrenaline. Robin steeled herself and grabbed the reborn Ereshkigal. Her fingers sank into clammy flesh like cold butter.
A thin, malformed face stared at her, eyes glassy and veiny under a scum of cold, clear mucus. “EEEEEEEEE!”
Robin screamed back, terrified, “Aaaaah!” but she was already steaming along and there wasn’t no stoppin’ this train. She rose, flexing, and lifted Ereshkigal by the upper arms. The wraith under the flapping caul screeched and kicked like a feral child.
A hard, strange wind skirled through the apartment, rising and howling and stinking of rot and sulfur, and the paintings flapped and clacked in stiff wooden applause. Papers blew off their fridge magnets and swirled in the air, plastering against the couch and cabinets. Robin’s sexpot witch-gown flapped madly around her thighs. She muscled the larval Ereshkigal over to the lifeless Matron in the wheelchair, and there she dumped it on top of Morgan, or Sycorax, or whatever the ancient bitch wanted to call herself. Then she turned, grabbed up the bottle of champagne, and …
… remembered champagne is not flammable.
“Shit. Shit!” she shouted into the hurricane.
She dashed to the kitchen, threw the bottle into the sink (where it shattered) and hauled the refrigerator door open.
Inside was a carton with one egg in it, a bottle of ketchup, a half-quart of milk, a box of Mexican leftovers, and enough liquor and beer to stock a tavern. “Thank God for bachelors.” She grabbed a bottle of Stolichnaya. Storming around the island (dodging Cutty’s reaching hands on the way), she approached the wheelchair-bound corpse of the Matron and the banshee in her lap.
“Nooooooo!” roared Cutty. Her face changed, became cavernous with teeth. A fell light shined in her eyes and she bucked ferociously against the dagger’s hilt. “You stupid little shit!” Wind kicked across the side of the building, howling into the apartment through the broken windows. Cutty snarled in a guttural, blustering roar. “I’ll crack open your chest and eat your heart, girl!” The witch panted like a winded horse, slavering and coiling around the dagger in her chest. “Get this thing out of me and I’ll show you how to hurt! You’ll wish Annie never pushed your sorry ass out of her rotten cunt!”
“You know what? I’m done listening to your two-faced bullshit.” Giving her a wide berth, Robin shut the refrigerator door. Then she braced her foot on the wall and hooked her fingers around the back of the fridge.
Six feet to her right, Cutty looked up, curious.
“Rot in Hell, Mee-Maw,” said Robin, pulling.
“What are you d—NO! NOO!”
Closing her eyes against the sight of the contorted face of the woman that had helped raise her, Robin pried the fridge away from the wall and overturned it on top of Marilyn Cutty’s head. The Kenmore flattened the witch’s skull with an impact heavy enough to vibrate the hardwood floor. Gray brains and skull fragments sprayed in a thin starburst.
Thin wisps of energy curled from underneath. Gore sizzled as if the floor were a griddle, and dissipated into black scum. Some part of her regretted having to do that. “I’m sorry, Marilyn,” she said, watching the energy fade. She couldn’t bring herself to absorb the heart-road lingering in the maimed corpse. I’m sorry there wasn’t any love in you after all. We thought you were a gift, but you were a manipulative box of snakes tied up with a pretty bow. You used our love for you against us, used our family and used me to make your coven stronger. I’m sorry you couldn’t have been the grandmother we thought you were.
But I’m not sorry I had to end you.
She picked up the vodka bottle and turned to face the last two monsters in the room, the ruined Matron and the thing writhing in her lap like a mashed beetle. “Now. Back to business,” she said, opening the Stolichnaya and approaching the wheelchair. Clear vodka sloshed inside the bottle as she raised it over the alleged Ereshkigal. “Where were we? You like to party, Gollum?”
Upending the liquor, Robin made the vital mistake of looking down at the wheelchair as she went to pour its contents out.
Gazing back up at her was the gap-faced Matron.
Hard eyes stared out of those hollow, desiccated sockets. Robin flinched. As the vodka trickled down the creature’s warped face, the rawhide tongue in its mouth worked and it said, hoarsely, “Yee-Tho-Rah.”
Dark tendrils burst out of the Matron’s shoulder where the fully formed teratoma had birthed itself. Thin pseudopods snaked and slithered like black spaghetti noodles across her terrifying face and down her chest and arm, covering both her and the reborn Ereshkigal, obscuring them in protective roots. The tendrils fattened and hardened as they propagated, developing cracked bark-skin.
“Yee-Tho-Rah,” the Matron said again, and a wave of pressure exploded from her skull, crashing against Robin in an invisible ripple of distortion and throwing her to the floor. Knuckles banged against hardwood. Forehead bounced off of kitchen tile.
And Robin went away.
35
When she opened her eyes, she was home.
“No!” she shouted, scrambling to her feet. She stood in the front hallway of the Victorian, the front door at her back. It was night.
Soft lamplight tumbled through the door from the living room. Golden dust hovered around her boots. “What is this shit? Is this Illusion magic? You cheating hussy.” She automatically reached toward her pocket with her good hand, and the first thing she realized was that her dress didn’t have any fucking pockets, and the second thing was she didn’t have the aripiprazole anymore.
N
o more med-bombing to dispel the illusions.
“Shit. Shit-shit-shit.” She turned this way and that, scanning the house for some kind of sign, somebody else, another person, some crack or divot she could use to peel back the illusion.
Blood trickled down the side of her face from a cut at her hairline and pattered on the floor from the stab wound through her hand. She wrenched the front door open. Outside was inside—beyond the threshold was the very hallway she was already standing in, as if viewed from the front porch. She ran out the front door and into the Victorian’s foyer.
Behind her, the front door slammed shut. She rounded on it and flung it open, only to find the Victorian’s kitchen as viewed from the back stoop.
She shut the door and stared angrily at the sideboard in the hallway, with its cordless landline phone and framed portraits of Robin and her parents. This house wasn’t the one currently being lived in by the Parkin family—it was the one she’d shared with Jason and Annie Martine, the house she’d grown up in. And since (a) the house wasn’t real, and (b) there was no Andras, she didn’t even have the demon to back her up against the Matron.
Snatching the doily off the sideboard, she dumped the phone and portraits on the floor and wrapped the lacy cloth around her wounded hand, tying it off. As she did, she caught a glimpse of her Halloween costume—her skin was painted green and she was wearing a black Lycra skirt with the hem ripped to tatters, but the makeup was mostly gone from her face, leaving her with a weird green burnish lingering around her nose and in her ears.
“I have to get out of here,” Robin growled, heading upstairs, cradling her wound. “I have to get back there before Kenway dies or that weird screaming baby-woman goes full Akira. I don’t have time for this It’s a Wonderful Life shit.”
In the second-floor hallway was a long, low bookshelf, the one running from the master bedroom door all the way down the landing to the bathroom door. Crammed into it were all of Robin’s many books, from her original Stephen Gammell editions of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark to her Stephen Kings and Dean Koontzes. If there was anything her mother allowed her to indulge in, it was the Scholastic Book Fair and the Books-A-Million in Blackfield, and this shelf was evidence. Sliding one of the tomes out—Nora Roberts’s Morrigan’s Cross—she turned it to a random page and started reading it. Another page. The middle of the book. The ending. “Perfect copy,” she said, tossing it over her shoulder. It flapped through the balusters and into the hallway downstairs. She slid out another one, Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box. Random page. End of the book. Beginning.
“Another perfect copy. Fuck,” she said, and turned to hurl the book down the landing. “Fuck! Fuuuck!”
“You’re not going to outthink the Matron,” someone said by her left shoulder.
Twitching in surprise, Robin spun to find Annie. Or, at least, most of what she remembered as her mother.
What stood behind her was the suggestion of a shape limned in gossamer light, like an invisible woman standing in the rain. “She’s not like most illusionists,” said Annie. “She can get in your head and scour the deepest reaches of your memory. She knows every word of every book on that shelf. If there are Christmas presents in this house, she knows what’s in them. She knows which of those stairs creak and which ones don’t. She knows how much cereal is left in that box of Lucky Charms in the kitchen. She’s been doing this for centuries—you’re not going to be able to dismantle the illusion by looking for books with blank pages, or by counting the ice cubes in the freezer.”
“You scrambled my brains when I was a kid. It’s half your fault I ended up in the crazyhole to begin with, and I’ve been busting my ass all alone. What makes you think you’re qualified to come out of nowhere and help me now?”
“I thought you forgave me.”
“I did,” said Robin, “but I never said I forgot.”
Annie frowned. “I was only ever trying to protect you. I’m still trying to do that, if you’ll let me. Stop with these cobbled-together, half-assed tactics. Overdosing on antipsychotics. Trying to play her game by looking for inconsistencies in her illusions.”
“Then how the hell do I undo this?” she demanded, pacing across the creaky floor. “I don’t have anything left in my bag of tricks.”
“You can teach an old dog new tricks.” Annie smiled. “Did you forget?”
“Forget what?” Robin winced as the wound in her hand sent a jolt of pain up her wrist. “I don’t have time for riddles, Mama.”
“What did you do to Theresa?”
“I devoured her power and closed her heart-road.” Robin paused. “Are you saying my demon side can get me out of here?” She looked around, frantic, and asked despondently, “How? I don’t have the Matron here, I can’t grab her and tap the road.”
Throwing her arms wide, the glassy specter did a perfect slow-motion Sound of Music twirl across the hardwood floor, her hands open. “You don’t need to, honey. You don’t need to go to her, she brought the feast to you. Look, you’re surrounded by her magic. You’re soaking in it. You’ll have to drink a river, but nobody says you have to start at the source.”
Confused resignation settled over Robin. “So … what does that mean? I have to devour the illusion?”
Annie nodded. “I think so, yes.”
Kneeling, Robin pulled out another story, an enormous brick of a book, and opened it to the middle. Between her hands was a well-thumbed copy of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. She took hold of the top of the first page and ripped it neatly down the spine, then wadded the paper into her mouth as if it were a handful of potato chips. It was dry and tasteless as her saliva soaked into the pages.
“Not quite what I had in mind, baby,” Annie said.
Her daughter glared at her, mouth crammed full of fantasy. “Well, you weren’t very specific, were you?” she said, voice muffled.
Eyes back down to the book. She’d seen something, there, for a moment, out of the corner of her eye. Some faint trace of green luminescence. Ink stained her tongue as the ball of paper in her mouth became soggy. She ran her fingers across the smooth surface of the next page, and a ghostly green St. Elmo’s fire traced the path her fingertips made down the paper, brief and otherworldly, static electricity in the dark.
Yee-Tho-Rah, thundered a godlike voice from the bowels of the house.
The glass in the window at the end of the landing crackled delicately, like thin ice. Yeee. Thooo. Raaaaaaaaah, the Matron intoned again.
Wood floorboards under her hands flexed and creaked as the house shook—not an earthquake-shake but a subtle vibration. Nailheads twisted slowly up out of the floor. Pain coursed over Robin’s scalp and shot needles down her brainstem as her skull seemed to shrink, compressing her gray matter. Yee-Tho-Rah, Yee-Tho-Rah, the Matron continued chanting, the mantra coming in waves, a slow three-beat phrase to the tune of Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” rippling throughout the house.
Invisible knives pierced Robin’s eardrums and she doubled over, her forehead pressed into the open book. The words in front of her eyes blurred.
“Don’t let her beat you, baby,” said Annie, standing over her. The spirit knelt by her daughter. The pictures on the walls danced softly on their hooks. “I didn’t mean for you to actually eat our reading material, but if it’s working, then by all means, keep going.”
Tears dotted the book’s pages. “I figured,” Robin grunted, eyes scrunched shut against the torture, “that would be where the strongest, and most complex, uuggh, part of her Illusion hex was goinnnggggGGGHH FUCK.”
YEE. THO. RAAAAAH, roared the house around her, and then the room seemed to twist. Sheetrock ripped. The studs in the walls complained, sounding for all the world like a chorus of frogs, and then snapped behind the wallpaper, a series of gunshot cracks. The entire house seemed to bend over double. Trying to ignore the chaos all around her, Robin ripped another page free of the book and stuffed it into her mouth with a crackle. So goddamned hard to chew.
<
br /> “Embrace it,” Annie shouted over the noise. “You have hellfire in your heart. Show this old hag how it burns!”
Anger—no, rage, blind, violent, seismic rage boiled up inside of her, and the ball of page-paper burst into flames in her mouth. She inhaled through the fire as if it were a cigarette and smoked the witch, filled her lungs with the witch’s last energies, filled her body with it, ignited her bones and her soul and everything she was with the paranormal power of the heart-road of the Matron Yee-Tho-Rah.
Littlebird, the girl she had been, the little tomboy that walked around barefoot and kissed pretty softball pitchers, she caught on fire.
Attention-whore Robin, the filthy, half-mad, overmedicated teenager furious at having her childhood stolen and put back in upside down, she caught on fire.
Malus Domestica, the witch-killer with the van full of swords, she caught on fire.
Past and present went up in flames, roiling in her chest, and Robin vomited all this burning pain and anger out in one long stream of dragonfire. A helix of light poured from her mouth, washing across the bookshelf and wall, where books charred and erupted. She turned and blew it all over the floor and banister. Flames rippled across the carpet like blue dominoes.
The second floor of the Victorian folded like a mirror curving inward and she fell, sliding down a runner of embers, as the house tried to turn itself inside out and wad itself into a ball to crush her. She blew hellfire as she went, clawing at the floor, and hit the end of the landing feet-first, somersaulting through the window.
Glass crashed around her, and she fell into nothingness.
* * *
The first thing she saw when she came to and emerged from the mirage was the pale figure standing over her. Robin gasped a ragged breath and sat up. She had been lying against the overturned fridge, the remnants of Cutty’s brains soaking into her jeans.
