Malus Domestica (15 page)

“You think you’re the first to seek me?” asked the witch, her lips contorting over the bulge of teeth. “My trees are composted with the rot of a dozen
just like you.”

She spidered over the chair, her pink bathrobe flagging over her humped back.

Past-Robin said “Shit!” and ran deeper into the house.

Darkness swallowed the camera, shredded by light coming in through the witch’s windowblinds. The image went into hysterics as Robin pumped her arms, running through the house. Tripping over something, she went sprawling in a pile of what sounded like books. “God!
Aarrgh!”

The witch came through the house after the girl, her bare feet thumping the carpet, then bumping against the linoleum, meat drumming against wood. “God won’t save you. You’ll not have
me,
little lady,” gibbered Neva, invisible in the dark. “You’ll not have
me,
you’ll not have
me.”

Past-Robin pushed through the back door of a kitchen, bursting out into a moon-lit back yard. Turning, stumbling, she aimed the camera at the house.

Shick,
the sound of metal against leather.

The back door slapped open. Something came racing out, a wraith shrouded in stained terrycloth, the lemon-heart blood coursing down her chin and wasted xylophone chest—and then the old woman was gliding across the overgrown yard, reaching for her with those terrible scaly owl-hands.

“Hee hee hee heeeee!”
cackled Chandler, instantly on her, shoving her into the weeds. Both went down in a heap and Robin lost the camera.

Whirling around, the video’s perspective ended up sideways on the ground, peering through the grass, barely capturing the ensuing melee in one corner of the screen. Neva Chandler landed on top of Robin’s belly cowgirl-style and raked at her face with those disgusting yellow nails, so deceptively sharp, and laughing, crowing in her harsh raven-rasp of a voice.

Even though Robin was fighting with everything she had, she couldn’t push the old crone away. An astounding strength lingered in those decrepit bones. Tangling her fingers in the girl’s hair, Chandler wrenched her head up and down, bouncing it uselessly against the grass.

Behind Miguel’s Pizza, two years later, Robin tried to ignore the screaming coming from the video Kenway was watching.

Every sense-memory, every smell and pain, they all drifted in her mind like flotsam, always there, always accessible. Every time she watched one of her own videos, the sensations came rushing back.

In the Georgia sun, the faint scars on her arms gleamed pink.

“Get
off
me!” shrieked the Robin in the video in her tinny video-voice, thrusting the silvery dagger through the pink bathrobe and into the witch’s ribs—
SHUK!

Time seemed to pause as the fight stopped as suddenly as it had started. Chandler’s arms were crooked back, her fingers clawed in a grotesque parody of some old Universal movie monster. Her face was twisted and altered by some strange paranormal force, her mouth impossibly open until it was a drooping coil of chin and teeth.

Black liquid like crude oil dribbled out around the blade of the dagger. The witch exhaled deep in her throat, a deathly deflating.

Video-Robin withdrew the dagger, releasing more of the black syrup. Then she plunged it deep into the old woman’s chest again,
shuk,
and twice, and thrice, and four times,
shuk shuk shuk.

With a shrieking snarl,
“Grrraaaaaagh!”
the witch leapt backward—propelled, more like, as if she’d been snatched away by some invisible hand—and scrambled to the safety of her back stoop, cowering like a cornered animal. A stew of red and black ran down her sloped chin and wattled neck.

“Bitch!
That won’t work!” she choked through a mouthful of ichor. Chandler had taken the dagger away, and now it glittered in one warped claw. “It’ll take more than that to—”

Hands shaking, Robin produced the Gerber jar full of water and threw a fastball.

The jar went wide, whipping over the old woman’s head, and shattered against the eaves, showering her with the contents. The witch flinched, blinking in confusion. “This isn’t
The Wizard of Oz,
honey, I’m not going to melt. You were having more luck with the knife.” She flourished the dagger as if she were conducting a symphony with it. “You want this Osdathregar back?
Come get it,
whore!”

Video-Robin reached into her jacket and whipped out a Zippo, the lid clinking open.

“Oh
shit,”
said Kenway, leaning back. “Wait, I totally thought that was gonna be holy water in that jar or something. That’s righteous.”

“What have you got there?” demanded the witch. She sniffed the arm of her bathrobe and grimaced. “Oh
hell
no.”

Alcohol.

Flick,
a tiny flame licked up from the Zippo in Robin’s hand, brightening the back yard.

“Get away from me!” the witch shrieked, trading the dagger to the other hand and flinging it overhand like a throwing-knife.

Robin recoiled. The blade skipped off the side of her collar inches from her throat.

Chandler turned and ripped the back door open, scrambling through. Robin snatched up the GoPro and followed, camera in one hand and lighter in the other. She caught the witch just inside the threshold, touching the Zippo’s tongue to the edge of her bathrobe. The terrycloth caught instantly, lining the hem with a scribble of white light. It was enough to faintly illuminate the grimy kitchen.

“Oooooh!”
screeched Chandler, tumbling to her hands and knees in the kitchen. “You nasty, nasty bitch! You whore! You
tramp!”

The witch stood, using the counter as a ladder, and fumbled her way over to the sink, smearing black all over the cabinets. Raking dirty dishes out of the way, Chandler disturbed a cloud of fruit-flies and turned on the faucet. “When I get this put out, I’m going to—I’m going to—” She tugged and tugged the sprayer hose, trying to pull it out of the basin. “—Well I daresay don’t
know
what I’ll do, you naughty shit, but I guarantee you won’t like it very much!”

Flames trickled up the tail of Chandler’s bloody bathrobe, but they were going much too slowly for Robin’s liking. She reached over and touched the fabric with the Zippo again.

This time the alcohol on Chandler’s back erupted in a windy
burp
of white fire. “No! Stop!” said the witch, slapping her hand away. The flames billowed toward the ceiling, whispering and muttering.

As Robin went to ignite her sleeve, Chandler reached into the sink with her other hand and came up with a dirty carving knife. She hooked it at the girl, trying to stab her and spray herself with the sink hose at the same time.

Robin jerked away. The plastic nozzle showered the witch’s head with cold water, soaking her hair and running down her face, washing away the blood and oil-slime. She maneuvered around, trying to spray the fire on her back, but all she could seem to manage was to half-drown herself and shoot water over her shoulder onto the floor.

“Help me!” cried Chandler, water arcing all over the kitchen. “Why would you do this to an old lady like me?
What have I ever done to yoooouuuuu?”

Video-Robin flung the refrigerator door open. Condiment bottles and a stick of butter clattered to the floor at her feet. Reaching in, Robin grabbed the neck of a bottle of Grey Goose. The last fifth sloshed around in the bottom.

Chandler shoved the fridge door closed, almost on Robin’s head.
“HELP ME!”
roared the slack-faced creature in the bathrobe. Her jaw had come unhinged, and two rows of tiny catlike teeth glistened wetly in the pit of her black maw. Her eyes were two yellow marbles, shining deep in bruise-green eye sockets. “HELP ME OR YOU’LL BURN
WITH
ME!”

Pressing her ragged stinking body against Robin’s, Chandler wrapped her arms around the other’s chest in a bear-hug.

Prickly, inhuman teeth brushed against the girl’s collarbone.

Robin loosed an incoherent shriek and flailed, pushing and slapping at Chandler’s shoulders and face. Those horrible teeth scratched at her hands and the witch craned forward, her great moray-eel mouth clapping shut at empty air.

Crash!
Robin clubbed the hag across the forehead with the Grey Goose fifth, shattering the bottle. The liquor inside hit the flames and
exploded.

“EEEEEEE!” the flaming figure keened, fully engulfed now and stumbling blindly around the kitchen, leaving little puddles and clues of fire all over the cabinets and the little dining table with the checkered Italian-cafe tablecloth. Stacks of old books on the table caught, the grimoires going up in a whoosh. Robin fell back, escaping to a hallway which would have been too dark to navigate if it hadn’t been for the screaming bonfire.

“KILL HER,” Chandler howled.
“KIIILL HERRR!”

Robin ran down the hallway and came out behind a piano in the living room. She pushed the cat out of the way and slid over the top of the thing on her belly, plowing through a feathery coat of dust and cat hair. Struggling to her feet, she shoved through the screen door and ran out into the front yard.

A crowd of people had assembled in the street, thirty or forty neighbors in various states of undress. They stood stock-still and rigid, their hands dangling at their sides, staring at her, eyes shining green in the dark.

“Mrrrrrr,”
hummed a man in a hooded sweatshirt.
“Rrrrwww.”

Kenway was entranced by the action taking place on the screen. “What in the balls is even going on right now,” he said, leaning over the Macbook, eyes fixed on the video. “Is he—is that guy growling like a house cat?”

“Her familiars,” Robin told him, not looking up from her salad.

In the video, she juked left, running underneath the lemon tree and around the side of Chandler’s tract house, between the board fence and the clapboard wall.

The pounding of sneakered feet made it clear that the familiars were chasing her. The fence ended near the back corner and Robin jumped the sidewalk, almost losing her footing, sprinting across the street. She opened the driver door of the C
ONLIN
P
LUMBING
van and threw herself inside, wriggling into the seat.

Through the window she could see half the neighborhood pouring out of the gap behind the fence like hornets from a nest, and just as terrifying.

When she went to shut the door, she slammed it on the meaty arm of a fat man in an old Bulls jersey, the collar frayed around his hoary neck.
“Mrrrr!”
he growled. His eyes were green screwheads.

Her keys were already in the ignition. She twisted it until she thought she would snap it off in the steering column. The van chugged a few times and turned over mightily,
GRRRRUH!

Crazed, yowling people clustered around the van and started hammering the panels with their fists, clawing at the windows and prying at the hood. Jersey Man’s arm flapped into the cab with her, fighting her hands, and he found her throat with the fork of his palm, pressing it against her windpipe.

Her neck was pinned against the headrest. She couldn’t breathe.

Thrusting her foot into the floorboard, she found the accelerator and put all her weight on it. The engine snarled, vibrating the van, revving hard, so hard that for a second she thought it would come apart, but nothing else happened.

“Fffffk,” she choked out, fumbling for the gearshift.

The passenger window imploded in a tumble of glass and someone reached in at her.

Robin put the van in Drive and stood on the gas again. This time the machine leapt forward, catching hard and plowing low as if she was up to the headlights in water. The engine coughed once, twice, the drive-train rumbled, and then the crowd fell away and she was barreling down the street.

Bodies fell in the headlights and the van clambered over them,
bonk-badunk-clank-bang.

She twisted the steering wheel this way and that, trying to shake off the two men halfway inside the cab with her, but only the one hanging out the window fell. The van hauled back and forth, teetering with the gravity of a Spanish galleon on the sea.

“Rrrrrowww!” complained Jersey Man, his fingers still clamping Robin’s neck to the seat. She could feel her heartbeat in her face.

“Here, kitty-kitty.”

She jerked the wheel to the left and sideswiped a telephone pole.

The wooden trunk slammed into the man’s shoulder and knocked him off, his fingernails biting into the skin under her ear. Her tires barked and wailed as Robin fought to keep the van under control. The telephone pole scraped down the side of the vehicle, beating on the hollow panels with a noise like thunder.

She glanced at the side mirror. Two dozen men and women were running helter-skelter down the street behind her, looking for all the world like a midnight marathon.

She did not stop. She did not slow down. She drove on.

When the camera cut to a new shot the sun had come up, turning the sky a sickly dawn gray. A firetruck’s silent flasher strobed red across the side of Neva Chandler’s house, or at least what was left of it. Wet black pikes jutted up from shards of siding and electrical conduits. Robin crept into the back yard and lifted the silver dagger from the weeds, retreating to her van.

“Good work,” said a voice from the back.

The video ended and became a grid of links to related videos. Kenway clicked the link at the bottom that took him back to the main
MalusDomestica
page and then clicked through to the list of Robin’s video thumbnails.

There were
at least
two hundred videos.

8

K
ENWAY
SAT
QUIETLY
,
SCROLLING
through page after page of YouTube’s MalusDomestica videos. He didn’t watch any of them, but he was hunched over the computer like a Hollywood hacker, gazing intently at each thumbnail as if he could divine its contents by osmosis.

Turmoil spun in Robin’s head like hot bathwater going down a drain, leaving her cold and empty and apprehensive inside.
What does he think? Is he scared of me now? No, not possible. He’s a vet, his leg’s been…. Does he think I’m a flake? A fake? A nerd?