Malus Domestica (35 page)

“No.” Leon shook his head. “He died when I was seventeen.”

“What happened? —If you don’t mind me askin.”

“He pulled over the wrong car. He saw the passenger throw something out the window into the woods, and when he went to go ask about it, the passenger shot him.”

Horror and sympathy warred on Linda’s face.

The conversation was dragging Wayne down, so he got up and went inside to face his fears, letting the screen door slap shut behind him.

Thump, thump, thump, he crutched into the living room and plopped down on the couch next to Pete. They were watching the Alex Cross movie, or at least Pete was. The girls lay on the floor making pictures; Amanda was drawing them and Katie was coloring them.

Standing next to the TV was the blood-smeared strength-test hammer. Wayne leaned up and took a piece of tepid pizza from the box on the table, sitting back to nibble on it. He couldn’t pay attention to the movies because his eyes were fixed on the far corner, opposite the TV, where he’d first seen Owlhead.

The monster had been tall enough that the top of its broad head brushed the ceiling, its back to the nearly empty bookshelves on that side of the room. It reached for him with long arms, as long as he was tall, covered in copper-wire hair, streaked with the swampy green of old filth.

“I owe you, man,” he said, when he’d gotten down to the crust.

Pete tore his eyes away from the screen. “What?”

“I said I owe you.”

“For what?”

Wayne looked at him as if he’d grown a third eye. “Savin my life?”

Pete shrugged, squishing his chubby face with his shoulder. “It was the w— the woman, I told you. The old woman.
She
saved you, alls I did was smack the snake.”

“Was you about to call that old woman a witch?”

“So what if I was?” Pete chewed his cheek. “I mean, I guess? People say they are. My mom says they used to be friends with the lady that lived in this house.” He grinned. “Lesbian Satanists. Sounds like a rock band.”

Wayne peered at his leg. “Do you think she did magic on me?”

“I don’t know what magic looks like, but I don’t— I, I feel like that’s not it.”

A faint disappointment settled over Wayne. “Oh.”

Settling into the couch, he pulled his knees up to his chest and tried to lose himself in the movie. His eyes were growing heavy when he heard his father shout outside.

“Ay!
The hell
you think you doin?”

All the kids scrambled up and went to the windows, Wayne looking through the screen door. Apparently Linda had gone home while they were watching the movie, because she was no longer on the stoop. Instead, two people had come marching out of the night, approaching the house. He recognized them as the big blond guy and the lady with the mohawk.

“We don’t want any trouble, Mr. Parkin,” the woman was saying. “We just wanted to check on your son and talk to him about what he saw in his hospital room.”

Without her bulky jacket, Robin turned out to be slender and small, with narrow hips and a graceful neck, but Wayne had the feeling surprising strength lurked in her wiry body. Veins stood out on her forearms. She was wearing a nylon chest harness, and a small camera was mounted between her breasts.

“I appreciate you finding him after he wandered off, but I don’t know you from Adam,” said Leon. “And frankly I’m not sure I’m comfortable with any of this. What he saw was a hallucination brought on by his episode, and that’s the end of the story.”

“You know that’s not true.”

The blond man shrugged. “He’s got another witness that says he was there for the whole thing.”

“I know that guy even less.” Leon paced slowly, talking with animated hands. “How do I know
he
didn’t lure Wayne out of the hospital room while I was asleep and run off with him?”

Wayne’s father had apparently been thinking about the circumstances of his son’s disappearance, and to his dismay had come up with the worst-case scenario. “That’s not how it went, Dad,” Wayne said, pushing the door open and stepping outside without his crutch. “Joel is all right. And you know it.”

Leon simply pointed at him with a
shut your mouth
finger, daggers in his eyes. Wayne recoiled at first, his eyebrows rising, but he stood his ground.

“Your son is a good kid,” said Robin. “And smart. I feel like he deserves the benefit of the doubt. He wouldn’t be defending a kidnapper, would he?”

Folding his arms, Leon seethed at the two interlopers for a long moment.

Then his eyes drifted over to Wayne, who was trying his hardest to project a vibe of honesty. “I’m a teacher, man,” he finally said, a look of defeat coming over his face. He leaned over and rested his hands on his knees as if he were about to vomit, then straightened up, his hands meeting.

He slowly cracked each of his knuckles as he talked. “I’m a teacher, and what if I just can’t get on board with this story, of-of-of doors that aren’t supposed to be there, and monsters in shadow-houses? I need empirical proof, goddammit. I believe in the scientific method, you know? Theories, hypotheses, experimentation. Like the doctor at the hospital said, this is hoo-doo. And I don’t go to church because I don’t believe in hoo-doo.”

“This has nothing to do with a lack of religious faith,” said Kenway. Realization dawned in his eyes and he spoke to Robin. “Wait, if these witches take their powers from the goddess of the underworld, does that mean God is real? And Heaven, and Hell, and all that?”

Robin shook her head. “Ereshkigal is the goddess of the afterlife, the spiritual realm, not the ‘underworld’, because there
is
no underworld. Heaven and Hell are states of mind in the void of the afterlife, not physical locations. The classical Hell and its nine Circles that Dante Aligheri described in
The Divine Comedy
doesn’t exist. Heaven is sublime contentment. Hell is sublime regret.”

This was all gibberish to Wayne. Comedy? This didn’t sound funny at all. Limbo? Like the party game where you bend over backwards and walk under a bamboo pole? His head spun with strange names.

Kenway waved away all that poetic mumbo-jumbo, pressing the point. “What about God, though?”

“There
is
a force, but it’s not the belligerent all-knowing Old Testament sky-wizard so many people think it is. God—or Allah, or Ahura Mazda, or Jehovah, all different names for the same thing—isn’t an old bearded man in a toga and sandals, it’s a word for the attracting force of unconditional love itself. It can be the strongest force in the universe if you let it.”

His laugh echoed off the side of the house. “That was uncharacteristically sentimental of you, lady.”

Leon took a deep breath and blew out a long, exasperated sigh. “Maybe I should talk to you the next time I feel like I need a shot of Jack. When I lost my wife, I lost my belief in bullshit.”

Robin grinned crookedly. “I sound like a TV evangelist. But it’s true. At least, that’s the conclusion I’ve gathered in the couple of years I’ve been doing this. You kinda get a feel for the supernatural when you deal with it on a regular basis. But I don’t really traffic in churchy matters, Mr. Parkin. My job is a little darker than all that.”

“…Darker?” Leon went over and sat on the stoop, and Wayne joined him. His father slipped an arm around his shoulders. “What, you mean like an exorcist or something?”

“Of a sort. I hunt witches.”

“I didn’t think you looked like the convent type. A witch-hunter? I thought that went out of style with bonnets and butter churns.”

“Those were delusional Puritans in Salem times, Mr. Parkin. Using superstition and dogma to eliminate anybody they didn’t like. I’m sure you’ve heard that refrain many times, being a teacher.”

“I’m a Literature teacher, not History. And you can call me Leon.” He pointed at the camera on Robin’s chest. “Are you filming this?”

She nodded, detaching it from her harness and handing it to Kenway. He aimed it at her and she gave him the finger. “I run a YouTube channel about my travels. Do you mind that I’m filming?”

Leon hesitated. “…I guess not.”

“So how are you feeling, Wayne?” asked Robin, her tone clinical.
 

“A lot better. Whatever Miss Weaver put on me was—” He almost said
was magic,
and amended himself, “—like, a miracle. The doctor said so. And she even paid my hospital bill. Twenty thousand dollars.”

Kenway whistled.

“I am forever in her debt,” said Leon. “The hospital would have been chasing me for that money until the day I died. She saved both our lives.”

“I’ve got a little secret for you, that I never got to tell you back at Kenway’s apartment—” Robin began, but Wayne guessed at what she was about to tell him.

“I remember you sayin something about your mama and your kitchen table in our kitchen.” His mouth tucked to one side in a coy, assessing way. “This used to be your house, didn’t it? Was your mama the one that died here?”

“Yes. Yes, she was.”

“My mama died too.” He took out the gold ring around his neck and showed it to her, the inscription sparkling in the dull yellow light of the wall sconce.
Together We’ll Always
Find a Way.
He was glad Dad let him keep it; he felt naked without it. “This was hers.”

“I’m sorry,” said Robin.

“Me too.”

She paused, an uncomfortable warmth on her face, as if consolations were unusual for her.

“It was cancer,” said Leon. “Throat cancer. She was getting better, but then they let her get an infection and it spread to her lungs. She went downhill fast. Like the song, it’s been
Just The Two of
Us
ever since.” He hugged Wayne tight. “So you used to live here. What you talkin about, your mom dying here?”

“My father murdered her,” said Robin, pointing back at the Lazenbury. The huge house loomed over them in the background, a black square jutting into the night sky. “And it’s them, those women up there in the mission-house, that made him do it.”

Wayne stared. “Are they really witches?”

“Yes. Very dangerous and very old witches.”

“Does this mean you’re here to…what?” asked Leon. “Kill em?”

She stared at the stepping stone under her foot.

Leon rubbed his forehead, his eyes darting around at the grass as if he were trying to read it. He tossed a hand up for emphasis. “I don’t know if I can condone that, Miss, ahh—”

“Robin Martine.”

“—Miss Martine. They saved my son’s life. They paid for his hospital visit. They’ve barely said one word to us, much less brought over a basket of poisoned apples. Surely they can’t be
all
bad, can they? Three little old ladies, for Christ’s sake.”

Robin pulled her lips into her mouth, staring at the stoop in thought. When she looked up again, her face was dark, her eyes piercing. She licked her lips and said, “They’re pitting you against me. This whole thing—the snakebite, Weaver paying your bill, all of it—they’re using you as a human shield. They know I’ll hesitate because of you.”

“That sounds like crap,” said Leon. “How could they orchestrate my son getting bitten by a snake?”

Robin regarded Wayne. “How did you kids end up at the fairgrounds, anyway? Whose idea was it to go out there?”

He didn’t say anything at first, for fear of incriminating Pete. But then he got the idea to pull a Spartacus and said, “It was me. It was my idea. Somebody told me about—”

“Oh, bull,” said Pete, pushing the door open and coming outside. “It was
my
idea, ma’am. I wanted to show em my secret way home that nobody knows about. I take the Broad Avenue canal down to the river and then there’s deer trails that go up to the fairgrounds. They come out behind this house, back there in the trees.”

“Hmmm.” Robin took out a Sharpie. “Take off your shirt.”

“Take off my shirt?”

“Yes,” she said, coming up onto the porch and uncapping the marker. Pete wriggled out of his shirt and stood there with it bunched up in one hand. Robin zeroed in on his chest and drew a meticulous symbol in the middle. “What’s your name, by the way?”

“Pete.”

“Nice to meet you, Pete.”

He looked down at the marker, scrunching his second chin. “Why?”

“It’s not a Y, it’s an
algiz.
A prot—”

“No, I was asking you
why
you drew on me.”

Robin looked up at him; she was still hunched over with the heel of her hand on his right boob.

“Do you feel funny?”

“Other than the fact that I took off my shirt and you’re drawing pictures on me? Not really.”

She stood back. “The symbol I drew is an
algiz
rune.”

“Owl jizz?”

Robin massaged the bridge of her nose, closing her eyes. “No,
‘all-jeez’.
It’s an ancient Druidic protective symbol that blocks or dampens supernatural influence.”

Pete tried to angle his head for a better look at the symbol, making a scrunched-up face that gave Wayne the giggles. “Is something supposed to be happening?”

“Yes.”

She seemed disappointed at first, but then a new zeal took over and she capped the Sharpie. “But it doesn’t look like what I expected is going to happen. So you can put your shirt back on. I guess you taking the kids to the fairgrounds was just a coincidence.”

“Or maybe Karen Weaver really
did
do what she did out of the goodness of her heart,” said Leon. “I’m thinkin of goin up there in the morning and inviting her to Sunday dinner as thanks.” He watched his hands worry at each other. “It’s not exactly twenty thousand dollars worth of thanks, but it’s the best I got.”

“What did you expect to happen?” asked Pete.

“You don’t want to know,” Robin told him, and turned to Wayne’s father. “I would steer clear of them from now on, honestly. They’re bad juju. In fact, everybody needs an
algiz
while I’m here and I’ve got a Sharpie in my hand.”

“You’re not drawing voo-doo bullshit on my son.”

Wayne pushed himself to his feet. “I don’t mind. You can draw on me,” he said, beginning to unbutton his shirt. “What is this symbol supposed to do? I know you said it’s ‘protective’, but what does that mean?”

Leon took his wrist and tried to pull him back down, his eyes steely. “No. You’re not getting mixed up in this.”