Malus Domestica (17 page)

On top of the pole was a flatscreen TV, the wires running down through the door’s deadbolt and into an outlet on the floor. Two iron-and-wood park benches made a right angle around the other side of the table.

“Wow,” Robin said, still standing at the top of the stairs.

A queen-sized bed pressed against the wall to the right, covered in a cream fleece duvet.
“Who
makes the big bucks, again? This place is amazing.”

“Most of it was already here when I moved in, except for the bed and the TV.” Kenway went over to the kitchen and stood at the island, pouring a glass of what appeared to be tea. “The apartment was part of the deal when I took over the art shop from John Ward. The VA loan covered most of it; I bought whatever else I needed with my savings. Ranger combat pay makes for a nice nest egg when you’re single.

“To save on power, I don’t run the heat, which is why it’s cool in here. If I get
too
cold, I haul my little fire-pit up here and build a fire in it. Lord knows I have enough crap downstairs to burn. Ward used this place for restoring antique furniture too—sometimes I do—and there’s a lot of old wood left over.”

Above the bed and above the kitchen, the walls were covered in three or four dozen paintings.

Most of them were without frames, just naked mounted canvas. Impressionistic renderings of forests at strange angles, birds in flight, animalistic women in provocative poses with brilliant lantern eyes and bodies hashmarked with cat-stripes. Men and women running with mysterious machines in their hands that could have been rifles, could have been construction equipment. Bokeh, the circular lights that appear in out-of-focus photos, dominated the pictures, giving them all an element of dreamlike wonder.

A few other paintings depicted pale nude men standing alone in foggy fields. Hands cupping blood. The bokeh made them nightmarish; they were hung off to the side, as if to marginalize them.

Robin put her bag on one of the park benches and opened her Macbook on the door-table, connecting to the wi-fi. Luckily, there was no password, so it only took a minute to get to the channel submissions page. While it uploaded, she walked over to the wall of glass.

Peering down into the alleyway behind the building, she could see a large aqueduct running east to west, water trickling along the bottom. “I guess if we’re going to tell stories, I should tell mine.”

Kenway’s answer was grim but somehow warm. “You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to. I
need
to.”

He joined her at the window. “You haven’t told your subscribers on YouTube?”

“Yeah. I did in one of my first few videos. But it’s not the same, you know? Talking to a camera. It’s impersonal. You don’t get the same kind of catharsis. And besides, you’ll be the second one I’ve told face to face, and I need someone that will believe me. Because what I’ve finally come back here to do is going to require someone to believe me—believe what I have to say.”

“The second person?” asked Kenway. “Your therapist?”

“No, I didn’t talk about it to my therapist. He wouldn’t have believed me. The whole reason I ended up in the psych ward is because I told the cops the truth about what happened.” She spoke to the window, looking down into the aqueduct. “No, I had to tell Heinrich everything if I wanted his help, but if I wanted them to let me out of the looney-bin, I had to keep my mouth shut.”

“Heinrich?”

“Heinrich Hammer.”

“Who is that?” asked Kenway, with a disbelieving chuckle. “Sounds like a fighter in the UFC.”

“My mentor. The guy that taught me everything I know about hunting witches.” Robin smiled. “He could probably fight in the UFC if he wanted to, but he might be too violent for MMA.” She rolled up her sleeves, revealing scars running halfway up the insides of her forearms. “I went to him because I’m going to need everything I know, and all those weapons in my van, if I want to rescue my mother.”

R
OBIN
’
S
S
TORY

T
HERE
HAVE
ALWAYS
BEEN
witches. According to my research, and what Heinrich told me, the first witch’s name was Yidhra. She was a priestess of Ereshkigal, the Mesopotamian goddess of the land of the dead, Irkalla. Yidhra became a witch by sacrificing her own heart in exchange for a piece of Ereshkigal’s power.

The goddess replaced Yidhra’s heart with what we believe was a
libbu-harrani,
Sumerian for “heart-road”, to Irkalla, or more specifically, perhaps a sort of conduit—sort of like how a power-outlet in a house pulls its electricity from the electric company. Her heart had been exchanged for a direct line to the afterlife. From this conduit, Yidhra derived her powers: divination, sorcery, necromancy, speaking with the dead, the familiarization of animals, that kind of shit.

Over time, Yidhra became the Biblical ‘Witch of Endor’, a minor celebrity in ancient Mesopotamia, a notorious sorceror, oracle, and cult figure that drew in acolytes, followers that also sacrificed their hearts to Ereshkigal.

By the time she was living out her twilight years in the village of Endor, she had convinced hundreds of women to give up their hearts.

One night halfway through my sophomore year of high school, my father murdered my mother right in front of me. Pushed her off the upstairs landing and she broke her neck in the foyer.

He
did
kill my mother, but he
didn’t.

By that I mean it was just something my father never would’ve done.

I was in the kitchen when it happened, making a pitcher of iced tea. Came running out of the kitchen and basically went into shock. My mother was lying on the floor in a heap of twisted meat, a ragdoll in a dress, her head canted at a weird angle, facing the ceiling. I sat beside her and held her. I didn’t know what to do.

A few minutes later, my father snapped out of it. One of us called 911, but I don’t remember who.

The tea, I remember…I left the kettle on and almost burned the house down. The kitchen—and part of the living room—was on fire when the police got there, but they managed to put it out, or so I’m told. I don’t remember much of that night, or much of that month, for that matter.

No, my father killed my mother Annie because
they
made him do it.

“Cutty. Witch.”

My mother’s muddled last words, the last thing she ever said to me, as I sat there in the floor holding her useless body.

My father came down the stairs, walking all stiff and slow, not saying a word, one hand sliding down the banister…and when he got to the bottom, he fell on his hands and knees, arching his back, dry-heaving like he was coughing up a hairball. He started throwing up blood.

It was really coming out, I mean
spewing
all over the runner, and then he was choking. He was choking and horking
and then he vomited up a cat.

His neck bulged out like a cantaloupe, and this gray-striped tabby cat came wriggling up his throat, coming out of his mouth yowling and hissing, with its fur and ears all slicked back with blood so it looked like a waxed weasel. Even lubed up like that, it got stuck. It fought the whole way. Before he could suffocate, my father had to grab that striped tabby cat by the head and pull it out like a…like a birthday-party magician, pulling scarves out of his mouth.

The state of Georgia charged my father with murder. Third-degree, second-degree, premeditated, I don’t know, I wasn’t at the trial. By then I was a ward of the state—the cops had taken me away. And thanks to my story about witches and puking up cats, the psychiatrist in charge of looking after me pronounced me mentally unfit to serve as a witness.

That’s where
he
found me. Heinrich Hammer…this tall, rangy black guy in a three-piece suit, with a face like a pitbull and an attitude to match. I had no idea who he was or how he knew me, but he showed up out of the blue the day I turned eighteen, the day I aged out of the state’s care. He offered me a place to stay. Told the hospital he was my new social worker, wanted to take me out of the psych ward and help me rebuild my life.

Not wanting to be homeless, I took him up on it. He drove me back to my old house on Underwood and picked the lock on the front door.

The city still hadn’t sold it during my stay in the psych ward, but they had cleaned it up. The blood was gone. The carpets were replaced, and the burns were sanded and painted over. They had changed out all the window treatments and taken out the furniture. Auctioned it off, probably.

“Your mother was murdered,” Heinrich said in his customary blunt way. I told him I already knew.

It was tough, but I walked around and broke it down CSI-style for him right there in the foyer, pointing out where she fell, pointing out where Dad had been standing when I came in, up there at the railing. How he’d come down the stairs and horked up a stray cat. I was crying by the time I finished.

“He was their familiar,” said Heinrich.

“Familiar?”

He took me to the front door.

“The women that live in that house,” he said, and pointed up that gravel driveway at the mission house on the hill. “Marilyn Cutty, Theresa LaQuices, and Karen Weaver. Those women are the oldest and most powerful coven in America. Quite possibly the most powerful witches on the planet. I’ve been looking for em for years, looking for a way to nail their asses.” He eased the front door closed and turned the deadbolt. “And I think you might be the one that can help me do that. …Come on, help me look for your mother’s gear.”

“Gear?”

We searched the entire house from top to bottom. My parents’ old bedroom, the attic, the kitchen, my childhood bedroom in the cupola on top of the house.

What we were looking for was under the house. The two of us stood shoulder to shoulder in the cramped dirt cellar, in front of the brick well. My mother told me when I was a little girl never to go down there and mess with it, because I could fall in and break my neck.

“See, cats will do anything a witch tells them to,” said Heinrich, brandishing a crowbar. “That’s not a total stereotype—witches really do have black cats, and white cats, and gray cats, all kinds of cats, but it’s a little more complicated than that.” Prying off the swollen boards blocking the well, he found the rope tied to the well wall, five feet down. He had to lean over the side and haul the bags up with the crowbar. “Witches can command cats, you know, like the rats in that movie
Willard
, with that skinny motherfucker that was in that
Charlie’s Angels
movie.”

Now I know why my mother made me promise not to go down there. Old books and incense and crystals and bones and little baggies of weed, each one in a Ziploc freezer bag, all of them tied up in two plastic Walmart bags and lowered down with a nylon calf-rope. There wasn’t any water, but it was still damp. The bags were mildewy.

“They can do this because cats belong to, and are minions of, the Mesopotamian goddess Ereshkigal—they’re creatures
of
the afterlife, which is why they can see spirits,” said Heinrich, glancing at me as we stood down there in the cellar, shining a flashlight on the paraphernalia on the dirt floor. “…Yeah,
ghosts.”

His voice was hard, but his eyes were compassionate. “I’ll get to that in a minute. Right now, you ought to know something: your mother is a witch.”

I was stunned. Speechless. All I could do was stand there, trying to compare my sweet, pretty, good-natured mother, that tiny curly-haired housewife with the goofy speech impediment and the deep and abiding love for Christianity, against the sinister image of witches I’d built up in my mind during the months I’d spent in the mental hospital. Months trying to figure out why my mother had accused Cutty in her last moments. Cutty, weird, quaint Marilyn Cutty, who I’d thought of as the equivalent of my grandmother for so many years, whose house I’d played in as a child.

I remembered lying on the floor in her living room, reading the Sunday comics and petting her calico Stanley, a little high from the scented markers I’d been coloring with.

Some days when I toddled over to her house, Marilyn would take me shopping and I’d come home with these complex Lego sets. God, I loved Legos.
You don’t have to buy
me nothin,
I would tell her, and old Marilyn would say,
I
know. That’s why I do it.
How could this woman who regularly loved and spent money on a little girl be this kind of evil?

“There are good witches, and there are bad witches,” said Heinrich.

Sometimes, it seemed, a witch could be both.

My new friend was carrying a briefcase. He put it on the ground, opened it, and put my mother’s things on a bed of foam, one item at a time, delicately and reverently. “Your mother was a good witch, and she was a
new
witch. Cutty probably talked her into giving up her heart only a couple years after you were born.” Heinrich aimed those flinty eyes at me, shining the flashlight under his chin, and they turned soft. “You can console yourself with the knowledge that Annie waited until after you were born to give her heart to Ereshkigal. Witches can’t have kids, you know…to be a mother, you have to have a heart.”

We went back up and stood under the upstairs landing, in the exact spot where my mother had fallen.

“There’s this fungus called ‘Cordyceps’,” Heinrich said quietly and measuredly, as if he were confessing to something. “That’s the scientific name for it. It infects ants’ brains and it makes them do things they wouldn’t normally do, like climb up a tree…where the fungus bursts out of their head and spores out into the air. Reproduces.

“Cats themselves can carry a virus called ‘toxoplasma gondii’, or some shit like that, in their intestines, and it can infect the brain of its host, influencing its behavior. When it infects a mouse through contact with cat feces, that mouse contracts an illness called ‘toxoplasmosis’ and behaves erratically.

“Gets real screwed up. Gets real friendly to cats. So you can imagine what happens next: the mouse ends up in the cat’s bowels. The only place that particular virus can reproduce. And hakuna matata, the circle of life rolls on.”