Malus Domestica (14 page)

Kenway picked up his sandwich and went back to eating it, but his eyes were locked on the Macbook’s screen as he chewed.

“The runes, they’re there to help them find each other. I mean, there are seven billion people on this planet, even with the internet—which a lot of them don’t use—it’s not easy. And the taggers don’t even know they’re doing it, either. The witches, they…I don’t know, they
influence
them somehow, it’s like they send out a radio signal that the kids can’t help but catch. Like queen bees.

“Maybe it’s…Hell, I don’t know. But whatever it is, it needs to stop.” Then-Robin opened the door and got out of the van, slipping the silver dagger into a sheath hidden in the lining of her jacket.

Taking a pull off his beer bottle, Kenway worried at the edge of the table with his thumb. “Intense. You say you do this for a living?”

“Yep.” Robin leaned over the table, resting her chin on her folded arms, looking up at him. “For a few years now. I have a little over four million subscribers.”

Kenway’s eyebrows jumped.

He sipped from the beer again and set it next to her elbow. “Wow. That’s a hell of an audience.”

Past-Robin was stalking across the night-dark street on the Macbook’s screen, clutching the dagger and water-jar inside her jacket. The witch-hunter approached the board fence and rounded the corner, holding the camera up so that it could see into the front yard of a run-down tract house.

Overgrown grass around a lemon tree, shadowy front porch with no porch light. A rocking chair lurked in the gloom.

“It’s probably rude to ask, but I’m dyin to know,” said Kenway, and he burped into his fist. “What kind of money do you make doing this? YouTube videos, I mean. It
can’t
be enough to pay bills, much less car insurance. It’s why you’re living in the van, right? You know, other than the fact that you travel around to shoot this stuff.”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

The Robin in the video crept up the front walk of the tract house.
Hoo, hoo, hu-hu.
Halfway across the yard, she paused and slowly turned to point the camera up into the branches of the lemon tree, the aperture whirring as she zoomed in on it. A snowy owl perched in the hatchmark master-work of shadows some eight feet up, throat pulsing,
hoo, hoo, hu-hu.

Present-day Robin sitting at the table sighed and mumbled, “A little under three hundred. …A day.”

“Three? What—” Kenway’s brain seemed to slip gears, and he leaned forward, gripping the table with both hands as he groped for words. “Three hundred dollars a
day?”

She nodded, blushing.

“Are you
kidding
me? I didn’t even see that kind of money in
Iraq.
I don’t think
any
enlisted soldier ever has in the
history of modern warfare.”
He did the math in his head, staring up at the ceiling as if God could help him. “Eighty-three-hundred a month. Uhh. …That’s about a hundred grand a year.”

Robin looked away and coughed, then dug in her salad and pushed a forkful of it into her mouth as if she could chew the math up and swallow it.

She felt about three inches tall. She wished she
was
so she could climb into her salad bowl and hide under the lettuce. Her breakfast turned to bitter grass in her mouth, the Ranch saline and sour.

Kenway’s forehead wrinkled and his eyes searched the table. He glanced up at her and paused the video. “You make six figures pretending to kill witches on the internet?” Luckily they were alone on the patio. A brisk wind leapt the fence and ran under the trestle tables, chilling her through her thin sweater.

“Yes,” she said, chewing, thoroughly embarrassed.

“Holy god
damn.”
Today he was wearing a blue-plaid sort of Western shirt, with curlicues across the chest. Kenway rolled up his sleeves to reveal the tattoos running up his arms. In the sunlight she could finally make them out: robed Japanese samurai battling each other in a froth of hibiscus flowers and green leaves, katanas raised, screaming silently forever.

Graceful red foxes darted in and out of the scenes on his arms. “I mean, god,
damn.”
He pressed his palms against the edge of the table as if he were going to push away. “Sitting on a secret like
that,
you didn’t have anything to worry about, you know,” —he drew cursive in the air with his finger at her— “with the shrink thing. I don’t think you’ve….”

She ate her salad quietly, not knowing what else to say.

Kenway seemed to deflate. “I’m sorry, it’s just—” A cloud passed across his face. “—a lot to take in, you know?”

“I understand.”

“Well, hey, at least you know I’m not interested in you for your money,” he lilted. “I liked you even
before
I knew.”

Robin nodded, staring down into her food.

“What I meant was, what I was saying, with that kind of a nest egg, it’s not like you’ve really got to worry about what anybody thinks of you.” Kenway rubbed his face and picked up his sandwich. “I don’t know, I mean, you’re sort of ‘above the fracas’, you know what I’m saying? Above reproach.” He took a big bite of the sandwich and stared at the wall, chewing, and said, a little quietly, “Hell, out of my
league,
maybe.”

A cold shock ran down the middle of her chest.

“No,
not at all,” she told him, not meeting his eyes. “Money doesn’t make me better than
anybody.
It doesn’t make
anybody
better than anybody else. Besides…I’ve only just now gotten to that point recently, viewer-wise. It’s taken a lot of scrimping and saving to get to this level. I haven’t technically made that kind of money yet. And I won’t unless I keep swimming.” She pointed at the Macbook with her fork. “The videos are passive income, but only so many people can watch them so many times, and if you don’t keep producing content you’ll start losing subscribers. So it’s kinda like being a shark: you have to keep swimming if you want to survive. It’s a lot like being an author, I think.”

Kenway regarded her thoughtfully for a moment, not saying anything, and then pressed the Play button on the video with his pinky finger. The camera zoomed out as the hoot-owl took flight and left the screen stage-right. Video-Robin turned to watch it dwindle into the night sky.

“Hello, dear,” croaked a subtle voice.

Video-Robin whirled around and the world whipped to the left, revealing the front of the white tract house and its shadowy porch, arrayed with boxes of junk, chairs, yellowed and fraying newspaper. A tribunal of cats sat on their haunches all over the porch, fifteen or twenty of them: calico, tortoise-shell tabbies, midnight-blacks, two Siamese, an orange Morris with brilliant green eyes.

Someone stood behind the screen door, a smear of gray a shade lighter than the darkness inside the house.

At the top of the faint figure was the gnarled suggestion of a face. “What brings you round at this time of night, young lady?” asked the old woman, her voice kind but deliberate, with a hint of accent. British? Irish? Whatever it was, it wasn’t midwestern or southern.

The motionless cats reflected the streetlight with their lantern-green eyes. Video-Robin threw a thumb over her shoulder. “Ah, my car broke down. I…I was hoping I could use your phone.”

“Ah.” Neva Chandler paused. Kenway thought he could see her folding her arms, but it was hard to tell. She might have been wearing a pink bathrobe. “I thought
all
you young ladies these days carried those—those cellular phones, they call them. With their tender apps and GPS-voices. Go here, go there, and soforth.”

“No ma’am,” replied Video-Robin. “I’m kinda old-school that way I guess.”

Chandler scoffed. “Old-school.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well…if you’re going to come in, it would behoove you to do so, and get clear of the street,” the old woman said in a warning way, even though Robin was fully in her front yard by now. “It’s a dangerous place for dangerous people.” The short set of stairs leading up to the porch were made of concrete covered in a coat of flaking gray paint, and it turned out the porch itself was as well. Columns of wrought-iron curlicues held up the roof. At Robin’s feet was a china bowl with a few pebbles of dry cat-food.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Stepping up onto the porch, video-Robin tugged the screen door open with a furtive hand.

The old woman behind the mesh faded into the darkness like a deep-sea creature and Robin stepped in behind her, filling the video window with black.

Click-click.
A dingy bulb in an end-table lamp burst to life, brightening a living room positively crowded with antiques. A grandfather clock stood next to an orange-and-brown tweed sofa, its tiny black arms indicating the time was a few minutes to midnight.

No less than three pianos filled one end of the room, two player and one baby grand, all covered in dust.

Four televisions of progressive evolution clustered on top of a wood-cabinet Magnavox, rabbit-ear antennae reaching over them for a signal no longer being broadcast.

The old woman’s track-house looked like the 21
^st
century equivalent of the rundown-shack-at-the-edge-of-the-village, the customary domicile of the medieval witch. Gangs of unlighted candles stood atop every surface, halfway melted into the saucers and teacups that held them. Lines of runic script decorated the windowsills and, apparently, the threshold of the front door between her feet.

Another cat sat on top of a piano, running its tongue down the length of one leg. Video-Robin let the screen door ease shut. “I’m so sorry to bother you this time of night.”

The old woman shuffled over to a plush wingback chair and dropped herself into it, relaxing. She was indeed wearing a pink bathrobe, with steel-gray hair as dry as haystraw tumbling down the sides of her Yoda face. A whisper of mustache dusted her upper lip. She could have been a thousand years old if a day.

An old pressboard coffee table dominated the space in front of the sofa and armchair. Occupying the center of the table was a wooden bowl, and inside the bowl was a single pristine lemon.

“It’s no bother at all, my dear,” Chandler said, peering up at Robin with baggy, watery-red eyes. As she spoke, she flashed black gums and the pearlescent-brown teeth of a life-long smoker. “I’m usually up late. No bother at all.”

The real Robin sitting behind the Macbook thought about how Chandler’s house stank. She remembered the fog of funk like it was yesterday. Boiled cabbage, farts, cigarettes. Dead old things, burnt hair, burnt popcorn. Cat shit.

“The phone,” wheezed the old woman in the video, curling a finger over the back of the chair, “is over in there, in the hallway, on the little hutch. Do you see it?”

“Yes,” said video-Robin.

As the camera soared past the armchair and toward a doorway in the back of the furniture-crowded room, the Now-Robin sitting at the patio table explained, “Sometimes…when the witches have completely drained a neighborhood down to the bones and they’ve used it all up, all the—whatcha call it, the ‘life’, the soul, there’s nothing left to move with. They can’t migrate to a new town, they get stuck, and slowly wither away. They starve. They die from the inside out.”

One shoulder came up as a chill of disgust grated through her guts, made her back tense up. “The deadness slowly makes its way to the outside. After a while they’re just a rotten corpse in a living-human costume. Death masquerading as life.”

“Jesus,” said Kenway. He put down his sandwich and wiped the marinara off his fingers with a napkin.

Neva Chandler’s telephone turned out to be a rotary phone. Video-Robin picked up the handset and pressed one of the cups against her ear, listening for a dialtone. She put it against the Go-Pro in her hand.

Nothing came from the earpiece but a muted ticking, as if she could hear the wind tugging at the lines outside.

“So what is a beautiful young lady like you doing in a trackless waste such as this? Can’t be the usual. You’re not around to buy drugs.” The decrepit crone sat up, leaning over to pluck the lemon out of the bowl with one knobbly monkey-paw hand. “No, Robin dear, ohhh, you don’t look like the others. You don’t look like shit.”

“No, ma’am, I don’t do drugs.” Video-Robin put the handset down and picked it up again, listening. “I’m from out of town, visiting a fr—”

Chandler’s breathing came in phlegmy gasps and sighs, tidal and troubled. She sounded like she’d been running a marathon.

“—How did you know my name?”

“Oh, honey, bless your heart,” said the crone, “I’ve been expecting you all day.” She pricked the rind of the lemon with a thumbnail and peeled part of it away, revealing not the white-yellow flesh Robin had expected but the vital and fevered red of an internal organ.

Blue veins squirmed across the lemon-heart’s surface in time to some eldritch beat. “It took you longer to get here than I expected. But then Birmingham
is
rather Byzantine, isn’t it? I remember when I was a child, when it was all gaslights and horse-drawn carts, the layout was so much simpler then.”

The lemon had a
pulse.

“What the hell,” said Kenway, his mouth hanging open.

Lifting the lemon-heart to her widening mouth, Chandler bit into it, spritzing fine droplets of blood into the air.

Video-Robin put down the phone’s handset. The chair and the woman sitting in it were facing away from her, so she couldn’t actually see what was happening, but ferocious wet devouring-noises were coming from the other side, like wolves tearing into the belly of a dead elk.

More blood sprayed up, dotting the wallpaper, the lampshade.

The remains of the lemon’s rind dangled from the crone’s hand like a fresh scalp, bloody and pulpy. Red dripped on the filthy carpet.

“That was my last lemon,” said Chandler, twisting slowly in the chair.

One twiggish hand slipped over the back, gripping the velvet and cherrywood. “I’ve been saving it for a special occasion, you know.”

Rising, she stared Robin down, eyes that flashed with a red light deep inside. Her teeth were too many for her mouth, tiny canines, peg-like fangs. The wrinkles across the bloody map of her face had smoothed. Her schoolmarm hair had gone from cornsilk to black. She was ten, twenty years younger.