Malus Domestica (37 page)

At the end of the block Joel cut right, running down the street. “I’m gonna hide in the park. The one down the hill where they do the farmers’ market. Come get me.”

“What on Earth have you got yourself into, big brother?”

“I’ll tell you more when you get here. Peace be on ya.” He slowed enough to slip the iPhone into his pocket and took off again, trading the Batdazzle to his free hand. As he ran, he tried to figure out how he was going to climb a tree with the bottle of
Alizé without breaking it.

20

T
O
R
OBIN
’
S
DISAPPOINTMENT
,
THERE
was no psychic blowback as she walked into her childhood home. The house had no aura of paranormal energy. To her eyes, it was what it had always been: a lonely, drafty gingerbread with memories hanging in the corners like cobwebs. Not that she had anticipated it. This strange extra-sensory perception she’d picked up since coming back to Blackfield was thoroughly new, and in fact she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a delusion. Regardless of what Kenway had insinuated, she had been dealing with schizophrenia for the majority of a decade. At this point she knew what was a hallucination and what wasn’t.

In fact, in many cases the Abilify had helped overwhelm illusions induced by witches. The colony of newbie heartless that she’d encountered in Oregon last August—a backwoods death-cult commune led by a 110-year-old woman calling herself Susie-Q—had tried to trick her into believing she was in the middle of a roaring forest fire, but an emergency thirty milligrams of anti-psychotics had sufficiently untied her brain. Night-night for the newbies.

Checking her own phone, she silently cursed herself for missing her medication deadline. She’d been so focused on getting the videos edited and put up and so anxious about going back to Underwood Road that she’d forgotten all about it. She asked Leon for a glass of water and Wayne led her to the kitchen sink, pouring some tap water into a Mason jar.

T
AKE
2 5
MG
T
ABLETS
B
Y
M
OUTH
E
VERY
D
AY
, the directions on the side of the bottle said. Her pill bottle only had a handful of doses left in it. She would have to pursue another prescription soon. She had been titrating down, rationing them at one five-milligram tablet a day, trying to make them last. The prescription was always hard to get, because she was so outwardly high-functioning, and to be honest, other than hallucinating the tall hairy thing again and the occasional voice,

( t h e
 
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i
 
n e e d
 
t h e
 
r i n g )

she felt okay.

What was that?
she thought, reeling, the glass in her hands.

The last doctor, the asshole in Memphis four months ago, he’d been an uphill battle. “I’m sorry, ma’am, the medication’s side-effects—ischemic stroke, seizures, the risk of anaphylactic shock…. I mean, two hundred and forty pills? I can’t advocate prescribing this much on a whim.”

“Attention whore,” the nurse at the mental hospital had called her. “You just want the pills because they make you feel special. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re faking it; mental illness ain’t even a disability to you, is it? It’s a badge of honor. To you, it’s an excuse to be a shit.”

Attention whore.
And now she had a YouTube channel with five million subscribers. Pushing one tablet between her lips, she gulped it down with some metallic-tasting water.

Wayne stared at her, his jaw set. “Are you okay?”

When he went around to the other side of the kitchen it seemed like a preemptive gesture, as if he wanted to put the table between them. “I’m fine,” she said, pouring out the rest of the water and leaving the jar in the sink. “Have a headache, is all. Thank you for the water.”

They regarded each other from across the room.

( t h e
 
r i i i i n g )

“You’re welcome,” said the boy, and he stumbled back into the living room, giving her the side-eye as he went.

Robin hugged herself, letting her eyes wander around the familiar-but-not-familiar kitchen. What she remembered as green was now blue, and next to the replaced appliances it gave her an odd sensation of Capgras delusion, as if she were talking to an old friend wearing a mask. Holding up her GoPro, she stared into the lens and sighed, giving it a meaningful look. The show wasn’t just about the things she faced, it was about her…that’s what the viewers were there for. Come for the demons, stay for the girl. But this time, she couldn’t find the words to encapsulate the way she felt in this alien home.

So she capped off those bottled-up feelings with her ringmaster top-hat. “You guys out there in Internet Land ready for a show?”

When she came back to the living room, the children sat on the sofa watching her raptly, as if Robin were a magician about to put on a show. Leon was propped against the bookshelves next to the television, his arms folded impatiently, and Kenway leaned in the foyer doorway.

“The creature you saw in that shadow-version of your house,” Robin said, wringing her hands as she paced in front of the TV, “I’ve been seeing it off and on for a couple of years now.” She debated telling them about the schizophrenia, but the look on Leon’s face told her that it would erode his trust. “…I
think
it’s the same thing, anyway. Whatever it is, I’ve been seeing it more since I came back to Blackfield. Since this is my old house, I think it has something to do with me.”

“What do you think it is?” asked Wayne.

“I don’t know. But I’d like to try to find it and get a better look at it.”

He shook his head emphatically. The expression of terror on his face was genuine. “Oh, no, you
don’t
want to see it. Owlhead is scary as hell.”

Pete spoke up. “Your mother was a witch, wasn’t she, ma’am?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe it’s here because of her.”

Robin was quiet for almost a full minute. She thought about asking the boy
Why would my mother call down something like that?,
but she knew he would have no answer. She wanted to be offended at the thought of sweet, demure Annie being responsible for the monster they were calling Owlhead, but it was pointless. “I don’t know,” she said again, and sighed deep. “Well, if we’re going to get on with it, there’s no time like now. Wayne, do you have your mother’s ring with you?”

He took the wedding band out of his shirt and handed it to her. Robin held it up to the ceiling fan light. “The inscription on the inside of the ring says
Together We’ll Always
Find a Way.
Words and symbols can bend or break the witches’ power, and what the inscription says is important. ‘Together we’ll always find a way.’ Think about it. The connotations of words are what have an effect on their hexes, curses, and spells, and what is this saying?”

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i t )

The slow gutteral voice crept in around the edges of the conversation, under their words, like a television in another room. Robin took a deep breath and tried to ignore it.

Pete raised a hand. “What does ‘connotation’ mean?”

“The way a word makes you feel. How does the word ‘videogame’ make you feel?”

“It makes me feel happy? I guess?”

“But it’s just a word for a box of circuits and wires.”

He shrugged sheepishly. “I really like videogames. They make me happy.”

“A videogame is only a box of circuits and wires, but the word makes you happy because you have fun with them—and that happiness is the connotation. It’s the deeper meaning of the word. If I said, ‘Let’s go play videogames,’ in your mind you’re gonna be gearing up to go have fun, right?”

He nodded, rapt.

“So what does the phrase ‘find a way’ mean to you?”

“To literally find a way,” said Amanda. “Wayne accidentally found a way with the ring—an actual way, a doorway.”

“Yes. And that’s how it works. The meanings of words, whether it’s runes, English, or Japanese pictographs, affect Ereshkigal’s power.” Robin went back to pacing. “I’ve been thinking about this. When Wayne’s father mortgaged the house, he also bought—”

“Renting,” said Leon.

“Hmm?”

“I’m just renting the house. From the realty company. They’re renting it out.”

“Oh.” A pang of dismay, or perhaps inferiority, flickered through her, as if merely renting the house instead of buying it outright devalued it, and by proxy, Robin and her family as well.

Leon sat on an ottoman, templing his fingers. “You were saying something about buying a house?”

“Well, my analogy is sort of shot now, but what I was going to say is that now that you and Wayne live here, you’re part of the residual energy of the house.” She held the ring up to her eye and looked through it, turning in a slow circle, searching the faces throughout the room. “And that includes your belongings, like this ring. From what I can tell, the engraving is channeling my mother’s latent energy.”

Kenway squinted. “What if I gave them a blender with ‘Let Nothing Stop You’ engraved on it? Would that mean they’d have a blender that could blend anything? Even steel?”

Robin scowled at him over the ring, a wry smirk playing at her lips. “It doesn’t work that way…as far as I know. The symbols have to have emotional or cultural meaning. The older languages, like the Elder Futhark rune on Pete’s chest, naturally have more power than modern-day English. But you can augment English by lending the words importance, or gravity. Like this ring. The engraving lends the ring weight. Makes it an artifact.”

“It meant a lot to me and Haruko,” said Leon.

He held up his left hand, flashing the mate to the wedding band.

Robin’s eyes lost their edge and she smiled softly. “Was that your wife’s name? Haruko?”

“Yep. Haruko Nakasone.”

“It’s very pretty.”

“I met her at the Lunar New Year party in the Chicago Chinatown when I first started going for my bachelor’s degree at UIC. I was teaching English classes in Chinatown at the time.” His face lightened with a wistful grin. “I knew she was the one when she started showing up for classes as an excuse to come talk to me.”

“How—” Amanda started to say, and hesitated. Leon watched her expectantly, his face impassive but warm. “How come you don’t have any pictures of her?”

Leon twisted to look at the bookshelves behind the TV. There were books, of course; a scattering of knickknacks, a trophy with a little man on top swinging a bat at a teeball post, a small crystal award with the word
Poetry
etched front and center on the plaque. Framed photos of Leon accepting certificates, shaking hands. Wayne with other children, candid scenes of Wayne and Leon, class photos.

“I dunno. It’s just easier that way.” He picked at his eyebrow as if he wanted to hide his eyes behind his hand. “I guess they’re still packed up in my room with the other boxes.”

Robin sighed in irritation, inspecting the room with the ring up to her eye again. Nothing special leapt out at her, no doorways made themselves apparent in the walls of the living room. She wandered out into the foyer hallway, and the children scrambled off the sofa to follow her. She ended up in the kitchen, turning in a slow circle again.

“This is where I found the door that led to the garage,” said Wayne, pointing at the back wall.

Robin faced the wall, but saw nothing out of the ordinary.

“What about the rest of the engraving?” asked Amanda. “It says
‘Together
We’ll Always Find a Way’. What if it’s only Wayne that can do it?”

“Worth a shot.” She handed the ring back to its owner.

Wayne put it up to his eye, and for a long second she almost convinced herself he could see the door. But then he relaxed, his hands sinking to his sides, and he frowned at her. “Nope. I don’t see nothin.”

“Maybe it don’t work when you’re actually
in
the house,” offered Pete. “Maybe it only works when you’re somewhere else and you want to come
here.”

Robin had to admit, that made sense.

With a sigh, Leon took off his wedding band.

“What about this one?” It took a bit of twisting and pulling to get it loose. “Maybe if—”

As soon as it came off, a shine emanated from inside, a faint javelin of white light jutting out of the hoop of the ring. Leon blinked, speechless. Tiny motes of brighter light sparked out of the epicenter of the glow, slow-motion welding slag drifting outward like dust in a sunbeam. Katie Fryhover grinned a snaggle-toothed grin. “Preeeetty.”

“That’s
different,” said Robin. “How come you haven’t seen that before?”

“This is the first time I’ve taken this ring off in months.” Leon put his ring on the kitchen table as if he were afraid to touch it, standing it on edge. The ring turned by itself and the light-javelin flared. Now it was two feet long and hard to look directly at, a never-ending camera flash compressed to a smear the width of a human finger.

“It’s a compass,” breathed Amanda.

Leon picked up the ring and the javelin faded to a mere whisper. “I can feel it tugging,” he said, holding it up. “Like a magnetized compass needle.” He rotated on the spot and the javelin faded down to a vague blur hovering in the C of his thumb and forefinger. He turned the other way and the javelin grew again, spearing over his shoulder and out in front of him.

Acrid ozone-stink floated in the air. Robin put her palm in front of the light. It wasn’t hot at all. The back of her hand glowed orange, the finger-bones dark shadows in veiny flesh, sprouting from her wrist.

“Nothin to it but to do it, I guess,” said Leon, and he marched out of the kitchen. Out in the hallway, the javelin faded, even though he was still facing the same direction. Leon turned to his left and the ring flared again. He walked toward the foyer. The ring led them to the second floor, the kids clomping up the stairs behind him as if he were the Pied Piper.