Malus Domestica (18 page)

Heinrich went on to tell me how the witches figured out how to metaphysically ‘implant’ a cat into a human. You saw them on the video you watched: the people-familiars, they yowl and hiss and claw at you like a cat. It’s because they’re cats in human bodies. It’s a lot like the Cordyceps and toxoplasma—these parasite-cats lie dormant inside their human hosts like hairy tapeworms, sleeping, waiting, until the witches need them.

That’s what was wrong with my father the night he pushed my mother off the upstairs landing and broke her neck in the foyer. He’d been familiarized. He ‘had a cat in him’.

“You may have a chance to save Annie, you know,” Heinrich told me. “She may not be
actually
dead.” I scraped the tears off my face with my shirt. My strange benefactor traded hands with the briefcase and put one of those rough, bony hands on my shoulder. “But it ain’t going to be easy. You’re gonna have to train. Have to learn how to beat em.”

“Why did they do it?” I asked.

“Why did they murder Annie?” That three-piece suit of his was slate-gray and pinstriped, made him look like a railroad conductor. But he always wore black combat boots with it, spit-polished half to hell and back. “Robin, baby, they needed her to make a dryad.”

As we got in his car and headed out of town, he explained. “A dryad is at its most basic a soul trapped inside of a tree. Or, well, technically it’s the name for the tree-prison itself, but it also refers to the tree-and-soul combined. Anyway, dryads don’t occur naturally, so you have to make one—provided your ass knows how, of course.

“Now, if you make a dryad out of a normal person…take Joe Schmoe off the street, kill him, siphon his spirit into a tree, all you have is a self-aware tree. Pretty shitty existence for poor Joe, livin out the rest of eternity with squirrels shovin acorns up his ass, but there ain’t nothin special about it.

“But if you make a dryad out of a supernaturally-endowed person, for example, another witch, you end up with what’s called a
nag shi.
Like the person it was created from, this kind of dryad is an energy-absorber. And with a little coaxing and a bucket of human blood twice a week, it will become a sort of black hole. The tree’s roots draw up life for miles around, and if it’s in a town like Blackfield, it will tap that town for nourishment.

“Where does all that give-a-shit go, you ask?” We were sitting at a crossroads between two cotton fields, listening to the wind shake a stop sign. “It goes into the dryad’s fruit. Flora de vida—the fruit of life.”

Heinrich pulled across the intersection, swinging onto the road that would eventually bring us to his house in distant Texas.

“The soul-tree pulls the will-to-live out of the town and converts it to fruit. Peaches, apples, lemons, whatever the dryad happens to flower. The fruit depends on the soul that was used to make the tree.

“I’m sure you can guess why witches cultivate them and eat the fruit.” He lit a cigar and rolled the window down a hair to suck the pungent smoke out. “I’ll give you a hint: Marilyn Cutty’s grandson Leonard Bascombe fought in the American Civil War.”

❂

“And that’s when I started training with Heinrich,” said Robin. By the time she’d finished the tale, they had migrated to the kitchen. She sat on a stool at the island while Kenway cooked burgers on a griddle set in the island next to the stove. Her camera stood on a bendy-legged tripod at the end of the counter, next to a splat of postal envelopes.

“Was it like in the movies?” he asked, flipping a burger.
Kssssss.
“You know, like a montage with a music backing, and you’re beating up a kick-bag and throwing wooden stakes at a dummy?”

“That’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Robin gave him a dark eye. Noticing a glass vase full of coffee beans, she slid it over and took a sniff. “And …well, there were things like that I guess. It was mainly poring over esoteric texts. Library books, microfiche, photocopied newspapers, stolen documents….”

“Stolen?”

“Heinrich was the type, he didn’t let a little thing like the law stop him from doing what he needed to do.”

“I see.” He flipped another patty.
Kssssss.
“I assume you haven’t had to do anything like that, since you don’t seem to be hiding from the law.” Unwrapping a piece of cheese, he added, “You
aren’t
running from the law, are you? That living-in-the-van would make a lot more sense if you were.”

“Heinrich had already gotten all the stuff he’d needed by the time I met him,” said Robin. “Of course there’s probably a couple dozen unsolved cases of arson out there.” She put a finger to her lips. “But I won’t tell if
you
don’t.”

Kenway sighed thoughtfully and put the cheese on the meat as it sizzled. “You’re really something, lady. I don’t know what to do with you.”

You could kiss me,
she thought, but didn’t say. “Thank you for giving me a place to hang out for the evening that isn’t my van or the pizzeria. And the internet.”

He smirked up at her. “And the burger.”

“And the burger. I love pizza, but I think I’m overdosing.”

“So how did the YouTube thing start?” Kenway asked, putting some buns on plates and scooping up the burgers onto them.

“You know how in football, the team keeps the game recordings and goes over them later? Heinrich used to do that so we could watch them and fine-tune our techniques. I was the one that suggested we could put the tapes on the internet and make money on them.” Her stomach growled at the smell rising off the griddle. “At first, he was dead set against it, but after I showed him how much like some of the other YouTube series it was, and how much money we could make on it, he warmed up to the idea.”

A noise came from Robin’s jeans, startling both of them. She dug in her pocket and took out her phone.

It was an alarm set to go off at six. She put it back in her pocket and slid down off the stool, opening a cabinet. “Where’s your glasses?”

“I don’t wear glasses.”

She grinned awkwardly. “Drinking glasses.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Kenway opened one of the other doors. Robin took down a glass and filled it at the sink, then went to her laptop on the coffee table and dug a prescription bottle out of her messenger bag. She tipped out a tablet and swallowed it with a gulp of water.

He watched her with curiosity, but didn’t say anything.

Putting the bottle away, Robin went back to the island to sit down and drink the rest of the glass. Kenway gave her a curious eye.

“The pills are for, uhh…well, the shrinks say I have schizophrenia, or something like that. I have hallucinations. Nightmares.” She picked at a fleck of color in the marble counter. “The medication helps. I did have Zoloft too, but I stopped taking it when I ran out of the bottle they gave me at the psych ward. I don’t like it. It makes me a zombie.”

Kenway seemed to be uncomfortable. He actually rolled his shoulders and tugged on his shirt as if it didn’t fit right.

“I guess that probably put you off me, didn’t it?” Robin murmured, folding her arms. “It usually does. The guys. I’ve…tried to date before, but as soon as I break out the pill bottle, they’re out the door.”

Pursing his lips, Kenway looked at her—
really
looked at her, a burning, assessing, ant-under-a-magnifying-glass stare—and then he put down the spatula and rolled up one of his pants legs, revealing the prosthetic foot.

He unbuckled it, a laborious process with grunting and pulling and ripping of Velcro, then pulled the foot off, leaving a nub wrapped in a bandage. As big as Kenway was, the false leg looked as if it were three feet tall, with an articulated ankle and silicone cup. It had a shoe on it, of course, the match to his other Doc Marten.

“If
you
don’t run away from this—” He stood the leg on the counter in front of her. “—
I
won’t run away from
you.”

9

“H
ERE
’
S
THE
HIGH
SCHOOL
, where we are,” said Pete, his pudgy finger pressed against the paper. Pete, Wayne, Johnny Juan, and Amanda Hugginkiss-neé-Johnson stood in front of the huge map of Blackfield hanging in Mr. Villarubia’s fourth-grade classroom. A clock ticked quietly on the wall over their heads: ten minutes after three in the afternoon. They were alone.

The map was as tall as the teacher himself, five feet across, and represented several square miles of the territory of the town, reaching clear out into the surrounding counties. This included Slade, the area north of town where the kids lived.

According to Mr. Villarubia’s Social Studies class, Slade was either referred to as a ‘unincorporated township’, a ‘district’ or a ’suburb’, depending on who you asked. As far as he was concerned, it was basically the northeastern arm of Blackfield, a civilized wilderness reaching up to the interstate freeway that ran between Atlanta and Birmingham, Alabama. Unlike the urban grid of avenues and streets in town, Slade was thick forest and cow pastures, chewed up into a hundred wandering feeder roads. They all branched off of Highway Nine, a two-lane ribbon that dropped like a rock, from the freeway into the heart of Blackfield.

Wayne felt like Lewis and Clark looking at this thing, plotting out tracks and trails. A feeling of adventure swelled in his chest,
safe
adventure, welcoming, inviting adventure, nothing like the streets back home.

They’d find no gibbering crackheads demanding money, or trying to sell them stolen watches, coins, car stereos. There’d be no haggard, barefoot women offering to “make a man” out of him, no Bloods looking to recruit a new pusher. No cops stopping him on the sidewalk to ask him what he was doing, where he was going, what he had in his pocket,
no sir, it’s just an action figure, no sir, it’s just a piece of candy, see?

There was only him, a warm sun on a cool fall day, and a bunch of trees. He found a reassurance and confidence in that the other children would never know.
They literally can’t see the forest for the trees,
he thought rather suddenly, a realization dawning on him.
They grew up here. They’ll never know what this place really is because they’ve always known it.

“And here’s Chevrolet Trailer Park,” Pete said, pointing to a non-descript part of the woods. His fingertip stood an inch to the right of the Nine, and a few inches north of the river that ran across that end of Blackfield.

“That’s
Chevalier Village,”
corrected Amanda.

“Whatever,” Pete said, grimacing.

He pointed to the school again and traced their route. “Okay, what we’re gonna do is cross Gardiner, cross the baseball field, then take Wilmer up to Broad, and then we’re gonna follow Broad up to here.” He looked over his shoulder. “That’s where Fish’s Comic Shop is. Have you been there yet, Batman?”

“No,” said Wayne.

“It’s fuckin awesome. We’ll have to stop there on the way. They got a life-size Alien and a Freddy Krueger claw. The guy that owns it does movie nights on Thursdays.”

“I love that place,” Johnny Juan said to no one in particular.

Amanda rolled her eyes and sighed through her nose. “I wish you would stop swearing so much. It’s not right.”

Pete winced at her.
“You
ain’t right.” He went back to his explanation. “Okay, whatever, when we’re done there, we’ll go up Broad Street for about a block and then there’s a bridge that you can go under, into the canal that runs next to the street. It’s about eight foot deep. It runs under Highway Nine.”

“What about the water?” asked Johnny.

“There ain’t no water. Well, not really. There’s a little bit. There’s not a lot in there unless it rains. Nothin to worry about.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Anyway, we follow the canal this way.” He traced the dotted line east to where it hooked up at a shallow angle, and then he followed it northeast. “Up to the river, and there’s a bridge there we’ll have to cross. Or we can walk across the big blue pipe that crosses the river next to it. We’ll come to the pipe first. The bridge is a little farther down.”

“I’ll take the bridge,” said Amanda. “You guys can fall in and drown without me.”

Pete ignored her jibe, tracing a path from the river bridge into what Wayne assumed by the blotchy outline were trees. The blotch was a massive crescent of forest that lined the north side of Blackfield and accompanied another highway going north. “Then we’ll cut through these woods here and take this trail going…north.” His finger drew an invisible line up into the forest and on up to a trembly, jagged path labeled U
NDERWOOD
R
D
. “From there it’s a straight shot to Chevrolet.”

“Chevalier.”

“That’s what I said, Chevrolet. Anyway I’ve got a surprise for you back in those trees.”

“A surprise?” Amanda asked, her eyes narrowing. “What
kind
of surprise?”

“Something I found last summer.”

“It’s not like those old porno magazines you found on top of the ceiling tiles in the boys’ bathroom, is it?” asked Johnny. He wiped his hands on his shirt as if the memory alone was enough to soil him. “Those were so gross. So much
hair.”

Amanda held her stomach and feigned a dry-heave.

The band of explorers headed out the front door, threading a path through the kids outside waiting for the buses and car pickups. When they got to the edge of the parking lot, a police officer in the middle of the road stopped traffic to let them across.

“Y’all be careful goin home,” said the cop, a slender man with a weaselly face and
Men in Black
Ray-Bans. His jet-black uniform was impeccable, ironed smooth, and he wore a patrol cap with a badge over the brim that glinted in the sun.

“Yes sir,” grinned Wayne.

“I ain’t no sir,” the officer called to him as he stepped up onto the curb. “Sir’s my old man, I’m just Owen.”

“Thank you, Owen!”

The officer waved them off and went back to directing pick-up traffic.

King Hill Elementary was three blocks west of the main drag through town, a sprawling complex on a hill at the edge of a wooded suburb. The kids marched resolutely across the school’s front lawn toward the baseball field. The only other sound was birdsong and the tidal wheeze of poor Pete’s horsey panting.