Malus Domestica (21 page)

“Shut up,” rasped the old woman.

“Yes ma’am.”

A slate-gray cat loped out from under one of the mobile homes in Chevalier, and a little dog lying in the yard jumped to his feet and took off after it.

Marilyn held out her hand and the cat ran up to her, clawing its way up her sleeve and perching on her shoulder. As soon as the terrier crossed the Chevalier property line, he stopped short of the man and the old woman, gave a furtive whimper, and ran back to the safety of his territory.

She was sure that deep down Roy knew what they were, even if he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Roy had never been one to ask questions; he was a worker ant, a drone, and they were his queens. But even he wasn’t stupid enough to overlook their eccentricities, the creepy tree in the backyard, their too-intimate regard for each other, and then there was the off-limits third floor, of course, where Mother lived.

Are you looking into the disturbance, cookie?
The velvet gray cat rubbed his wet nose on her face. His muffled purring oscillated in her ear.

Yes, Mother. That’s what I told you I was going to attend to.
Marilyn reached up and stroked the cat’s back.
What did you see, anyway?

Something was asleep in there. The nigger woke it up.

Marilyn pursed her lips.
Such language. And you wonder why we don’t let you out of the house.

Oh, fold it into an airplane and fly it up your ass.
The cat gave a rusty meow.
Did you take Sling Blade with you? He’s a freak. He’s full of plans and low thoughts. He’s always looking up here at the windows. I don’t trust him around the silverware.

Yes. Oh,
you’re
one to talk about stealing silverware.

Don’t forget to water the tree.

I won’t.

The two of them crossed Underwood Road and started up the driveway toward the old Victorian, the cat still perched on Marilyn’s shoulder like a pirate’s parrot. Deep in the folds of her burnoose-like sweater, the dryad’s apple thrummed and shifted warmly.

“Ain’t nobody home,” said Roy.

Marilyn bit her tongue. “That was the whole point of coming over here while they were out for the day.”

“Right.”

She padded up the front walk, her bare feet plopping on each stepping-stone, and climbed up the front stairs onto the porch. Taking a deep breath, she tested the air—nothing but her own lavender, and Roy’s briny miasma—and took hold of the doorknob.

Some heady, electric warmth welled from the knob in her hand, like touching an electric fence with an oven mitt.

Marilyn let go. “Mother’s right, something is inside.” She peered through the parentheses of her hands, face against the glass, trying to see through the window in the door.

The foyer, wreathed in darkness. Nothing else.

It’s been here all this time.
The cat looked through the window too, its little gray head shifting from side to side, green eyes shining.
Maybe it wasn’t the colored folks what woke it up after all. It’s been hiding, waiting for something.

Roy leaned over and rattled the doorknob. Locked. Arching his back, the gray cat hissed.
Oh, cookie, I can feel it from here!

Marilyn rubbed the cat’s scruff, thinking.

She went down to the end of the wraparound porch and down the side, trying to see in through all the windows, but they were all obscured by the brides’-veil curtains, giving her a look only at angles, shapes, glints of reflected sunlight. Stepping down into the grass, she went around back and up the rear stoop, pressing her hands against the window in the door and looking through them into the kitchen.

The same swelling of strength emanated from the doorknob on this side, too. Even the glass hummed against the edges of her hands, so lightly that she almost doubted it, the wingbeats of a trapped butterfly.

Kitchen table. Magazine, salt-shaker, pepper, envelope.

The fridge was new, but it didn’t belong to the new occupants. Annie’s fridge was an avocado Frigidaire with alphabet magnets all over it; this one was a big black monolith with a water-and-ice dispenser in the door.

Nothing else was in the kitchen.

The hallway on the other side of the kitchen door, however, was another story.

Marilyn couldn’t
see
anything back there, technically, but she received a sense of size, of scale. Something
big
was standing in there, something tall and heavy. The floor and walls almost groaned with the strain. The house itself was like a cage, containing some ancient bear just awoken from a decade of slumber, and even though she hadn’t been a child since the Louisiana Purchase, Marilyn felt like a little girl peering in at it.

Whatever it was turned and looked right at her, sending a chill down her carrion spine.

This was old power, this was
nasty
power, dirty cheating stinking power, an ace up the sleeve, a blast from the past. She had stolen, killed and eaten, she’d done and wrought terrible things, black unspeakable things, but this beast was
…deep,
was the best word she could think of. Deep.

Was this Annie’s?

The cat licked a paw and combed its ears.
I think it must have been.

What is—

Before she could complete the thought, the presence in the house moved up the hallway and through the kitchen, rushing the back door. As it passed through a sunbeam, Marilyn got a sensation of deformed, muscular arms.

“Shit!” she gasped, leaning back. The invisible beast slammed against the locked door hard enough to bang it in the frame.
CRASH!

Roy flinched.
“Jesus!”

The windowpanes crunched, but stayed intact. A low bass growl came from the other side of the threshold, deep enough to make the glass buzz. Marilyn felt compelled—no,
drawn
toward the door, as if some force were pulling her inside. She braced one hand against the door-frame, and then the other, and her face felt as if she had pressed the end of a vacuum-cleaner hose to it, sucking, pulling her out of whack.

Whatever was in there, it wanted to
eat
her rotten body like a buzzard, pick her worm-dirt bones clean until there was nothing left but a grin and two holes for eyes.

“The hell they got in there?” asked Roy. “A mastiff?”

She came down and stood next to him, her toes clenching the grass in surprise and aggravation. “Did you hear it barking?”

“…No?”

“Then what makes you…oh, forget it.” Marilyn threw a hand at him in exasperation and started off back around the house, the cat in tow.
I’ve never seen anything like this in all my years,
she thought.
What is this? How could Annie, little newborn-witch Annie, just a baby next to us, how could she conjure something like this?

Catching up, the cat ran ahead of her and trotted through the dry autumn grass.
There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. —That’s Shakespeare, you know. I gave him that one.

“Mother, you are so full of crap,” Marilyn told the cat.

Mock me at your peril, lovely daughter. No doubt Annie summoned it to kill you before you could craft the dryad. She knew you had your eye on her. The question is, what woke him up? It weren’t Parkin. That thing in there couldn’t give less of a shit about some Yankee negro. No, he’s responding to someone else. Someone else is here. Someone directly connected to Annie.

Marilyn halted so quickly Roy almost ran into her. “I know who’s here,” she said, staring at the forest in thought.

“What?” he asked. “That thing in the house?”

She scowled at him. “No no, not that, but I know why it’s upright and sniffing the air. I know who woke it up.”

The gray cat gazed up at her expectantly.

“Annie’s
daughter,”
said Marilyn, a slow smile creeping under her Big Bird nose. “That’s it, that’s it…her little girl is back in town. My little-bird. She’s come back to the old haunting grounds. Annie’s conjuration knows she’s here, she’s got Annie’s blood in her. He can smell it.” Her hands found each other and she wrung them together. “We should put together a welcome-home party.”

Roy grinned. “I like parties.”

❂

After she sent Roy home, Marilyn went back to the Lazenbury House and stepped into the pantry, where a glass decanter with a cork lid stood on a shelf. Inside the jar was a heap of sun-dried tree frogs, all tangled together like electronics cables. She wrestled one of the frogs out, put it into a food processor, and ground it into a coarse powder that quite resembled cilantro. Then she put the powdered frog and two Earl Grey teabags into a kettle with some water and set it on the range.

While she waited for the tea to boil, Marilyn went into her office, retrieved a book of stamps, and went back to the kitchen, where she grabbed a can of Fancy Feast from the pantry.

The gray cat had followed her into the house. As she tore one of the stamps off the book, it sauntered over to the cat-food can and sniffed it. There was no creaky voice darting into Marilyn’s skull like a slow-creeping fog; Mother had retreated from the cat. Probably asleep. She slept a lot these days.

“Did I say that was for you? Get your ass down,” she said, brushing the cat down onto the floor.

Marilyn put the LSD stamp on her tongue and opened the Fancy Feast with a manual can opener, then sat at the island and ate it out of the can with a silver spoon stolen from Adolph Hitler’s tea service. The swastika on the handle glittered in the track lighting over her head, but the spoon’s beauty did nothing to lessen the foul meatloaf-in-brine taste of the cat food.

The acid had just kicked in when the tea-kettle began to whistle. She made a cup of it and sat back down to drink it (black, of course—sugar always screwed with the alchemic makeup of the scrying mixture), staring blankly out the window at deepening colors, listening to intensifying sounds.

The breathy
hmmmmm
of the refrigerator.

The constant
tick-tock tick-tock
of the smiling Felix clock on the kitchen wall and its swinging tail and tennis-match eyes, off-rhythm with the grandfather clock in the living room (mental note to wind it up).

A pulpwood truck gargled past out on Underwood Road.

Sparse birdsong fluted in the October trees. She took a deep sip of the tea and closed her eyes.

Projected on the silver screen of her eyelids was a house somewhere in Blackfield…not the Lazenbury, but some brighter, cheerier dwelling, closer to the center of town, with pearl-colored wallpaper and cherrywood furniture. Heavy traffic droned back and forth outside this other house. She walked around, inspecting each room until she was satisfied no one was there, and then opened her eyes. Closed them again.

This time she was walking down a street. A side street, one of those that ran perpendicular to the main thoroughfare. A small gaggle of children walked by, three boys and a girl. One of the boys was black, and Marilyn recognized him as the neighbor’s son, the new residents of Annie’s house.

The children stopped and she went to them. The girl stooped to pet Marilyn. “Aw, what a pretty kitty. Hi there, pretty-kitty,” she cooed.

Meow,
said the old woman. She sniffed the girl’s hand.

“Meow,” said Amanda
Hugginkiss
Johnson.

“Do you speak Cat, now?” asked the thuggish-looking fat boy.

Marilyn knew him from the trailer park down the hill from the Lazenbury. Amanda glared at him over her shoulder and gave Marilyn a few more luxurious strokes. “Pretty kitty,” she said, and jogged off to catch up with the others. “Have a nice day, kitty-cat!”

Opening her eyes again, Marilyn took another sip of tea and clamped her eyelids shut.

Now she was in some kind of shop, some weird type of five-and-dime maybe, if those were still around. Funny-books, plastic toys, board games, and Halloween masks were on display all over the room. She was sitting on a glass counter next to a colored man, who was typing on a sleek white laptop computer.

“Not time to feed you yet, Selina,” said the man, giving Marilyn a rub around the ears. “I’ll give you something when suppertime gets here, I promise.” Pleasure reverberated down her spine in spite of the hand on her back.
Prrrrrow,
she said, and opened her eyes again.

Any luck?
asked Mother. The gray cat had climbed back up onto the counter and was licking the last few morsels out of the can in her hands.

Not yet. But I’ll find her, don’t you worry your pretty little head.
Marilyn pushed the Fancy Feast away and combed her fingers through her silver hair, reveling in the acid-altered sensation of her nails sweeping across her scalp.

Dropping acid for almost a century and a half had inured Marilyn against its most devious effects; like most practitioners of her brand of legerdemain, she’d had the revelation a long time ago that, like a dream, the LSD’s effects could be controlled, harnessed, channeled. In a dream, when you expect something to happen, it will happen. If you dream about a box, expect to find a decapitated head in that box and that’s exactly what you’ll find. In that way it’s a great method for distilling your own subconscious, for defragmenting one’s neural pathways. Cleaning house, if you will. Searching out base desires and mental flaws and eradicating them if possible.

The lysergic acid diethylamide functioned in much the same fashion—if you expected to hallucinate something, you would hallucinate it. For a witch of Marilyn’s caliber, hallucinations are a bit more…shall we say,
substantial
when the chemistry is altered by certain secondary ingredients. The cat food helped her channel the hallucinations, to ‘tune into’ the stray cats of Blackfield instead of having a Pink Floyd loopty-doo session. Without the aftertaste on her tongue, she could forget why she was in a fugue state and what she was attempting to do.

Inserting herself into another cat, Marilyn found herself perched in the branches of an oak somewhere downtown, treed by a black Labrador. Cat number five was under a car somewhere, devouring the cold remnants of a discarded styrofoam box of Chinese takeout.