Malus Domestica (53 page)

Blisters were forming across the back of the man’s neck and around his eye sockets, big pillowy blisters that were butter-yellow and translucent, like Dial soap.

The rotten dock finally collapsed, crashing into the water with a flat noise and a harsh clatter of nails and bits of wood. Concrete pylons jutted up from underneath it, as pitted as golf balls, and stained red.

“I need to get to a hospital,” said Ashe.

Joel looked over at the veterinarian’s blood-slimed face and the pink patches across his elbows and love-handles—which had begun to turn an angry red—and his pants, which were smoking and had become like threadbare linen, fine and screenlike.

His scalp was split in the middle, and Joel could see a glint of bone inside the gash. “Okay.”

He climbed into the snake-truck and sat in the driver’s seat and listened to his heart continue to break, feeling that, now, maybe, it was imperative to be worthwhile—to make something of himself, and he understood in his exhaustion and sorrow that up until now, he hadn’t made much of an effort to do so. He thought about the sight of his brother toppling backward into the water and decided that perhaps it had finally come time to stop caring for a crazy old woman that was three years dead, and take care of himself.

The door opened; the door closed. Ashe sat sprawled on the passenger side, his head back and his mouth tilted open like a man already dead.

The keys were still in the ignition. Cranking it, Joel grabbed the windshield-wiper lever in a fist and wrenched it down, almost breaking it off. “Oh hell…this ain’t my Velvet.” He grabbed the gearshift jutting up out of the center console, then paused and swore again.

“I can’t drive a stick.”

“I think I might have a concussion,” said Ashe. His voice thrummed at the lowest register, muttering from the back of his throat. “You better fake it, buddy.”

Joel sighed, depressing the clutch and twisting the shifter into first. The Serpent’s truck jerked forward.

33

T
HE
HOLE
IN
THE
clouds made it feel as if the vineyard were at the bottom of a vast dark canyon, and the trellis rows seemed to go on forever, dwindling to a vanishing point in the distance.

Deeper and deeper into the garden, Robin began to feel as though they had gradually stepped out of the world and penetrated a quiet savage unnamed wilderness where no civilized man had been in quite some time, if ever. Her imagination painted grotesque Lovecraftian coyotes lurking the trellises, tendril-eyed hounds that ate rotten grapes and anyone stupid enough to wander into their territories.

Territories,
that’s what it felt like. Robin expected to see a signpost at some point, with arrows directing her toward points unknown: W
ONDERLAND
, 88 M
ILES
. T
HIS
W
AY
TO
N
ARNIA
. M
ID
-W
ORLD
, N
EXT
E
XIT
.

The phrase ‘back forty’ kept popping into her head.
Back forty. Back forty. Forty what? Miles? Leagues?

She was about to ask Marilyn how far it was to the Tennessee border when the grapevines came to an abrupt end and they emerged into a neatly-mowed clearing.

Lavender made a sweet game of the evening air. Impeccable landscaping flung out skirts of purple wildflowers to either side, lorded over by several trees that drooped with dark fuchsia blossoms. Underneath the trees were pools of cotton shadow.

In the very center stood the tallest tree, an apple tree,
Malus domestica,
the reason for her being and the catalyst of her fate. Robin approached the nag shi, hugging herself against a damp breeze sweeping across from east to west.

The apple tree was tremendous, larger than any apple tree had a right to be, carrying a globe of green foliage as big as a house. The twisted trunk underneath was a stout and heavy ten or fifteen feet in diameter, stooped in burdened anguish. In the front of the tree, the bark had grown around a collection of knotholes and contour grains. What might have been the motionless shape of a face peered out at them, a pareidolia face like the Virgin Mary on a piece of toast, smeared sideways in a half-grimace half-smirk.

Robin put her hand on the dryad’s rough bark. Warmth radiated from underneath, as if the wood were a door leading to a room full of fire.

“I told you I would be back one day, Mama.”

She’d hoped there would be an echo of thought, a ripple of sentience like she’d received from the demon Andras, but there was only a warm apple tree.

“That’s your mama?” asked Wayne.

She nodded. “She died when I was only a little older than you. Now she’s resting in this tree.”

“You put her there?” he asked Marilyn Cutty.

The witch only stood there silently, but then said, “Yes. For killing her coven-sister’s husband, and for burning the previous tree.”

He came up and put his hand on Annie’s bark. A swell of emotion exploded in Robin’s chest at the sight of it and she thought she would burst into tears. “She looks like she’s in pain,” he said, the citronella torch glinting off his glasses. Cutty’s long-staffed tiki torch gave the scene a strangely cultist vibe. “That’s a long time to be like this.”

“Little different than prison,” said Cutty. “If not better. She has no idea where she is, or what’s happened to her. There’s no thought, no regret, no spiritual agony.”

Robin savored the dryad’s maternal warmth. She leaned in on both hands and pressed her face to the trunk, rough against her cheek. She wanted to build a treehouse in its branches and live there always. She wondered if the plank swing was still hanging from the tree behind their old house…she would go get it and tie it up here, and swing on it every day.

Wayne pressed his face against the tree as well. “She loved you very much.”

Her throat burned and tears spilled down her face, threatening to turn into sobs. “Yes she did. She loved everybody. Everybody that was good. And even some that were bad.”

“Go home, littlebird,” Cutty said quietly.

Turning, Robin looked over her shoulder. “What?”

“Go home,” the witch repeated, “the Victorian across the street, Hammer’s hidey-hole in Texas, I don’t even care if you drive around in your van and do what you do, as long as it doesn’t involve this coven.” Her face softened, as did her tone, and she gazed up into the tree’s branches. “Annie is mine and here she’ll stay. This
town
is mine. Take my advice and forget about her, and Blackfield, and me. Leave. She is paying penance for her foolishness and there is nothing here for you but heartache. And if you persist, death.”

The GoPro on Wayne’s chest cast a red glow on Annie’s bark, firelight through a keyhole. Robin straightened and stepped back from the dryad. “What if I said I—” she started to say, but then Marilyn Cutty’s face twisted into the most frightening expression of rage she’d ever seen.

“You bitch—!”
snarled the witch.

The spotty gray cat had followed them out here, and was sitting on Cutty’s shoulder. Cutty reached up and snatched the animal down, holding it by the throat. “
You tricksy trollop whore!”
Taking the cat’s neck in both hands, she wrenched it violently in opposite directions with a sickening celery-like
crunch.

“Holy
shit,”
blurted Leon.

As if his brain had been unplugged, he bonelessly sank to his knees and fell over.

Foam spittle bubbled between his lips. He writhed and thrashed on the grass like an earthworm, his eyes rolled back and his fists curled tight by his ears. Wayne ran to his father’s side and tangled his fists in the man’s shirt, screaming in confused horror.
He didn’t put an algiz on himself,
thought Robin, as Marilyn Cutty flung the dead cat into the flower bed and stormed away, hitching up her skirts.
That skeptical idiot—!

“You,” shouted Cutty, pointing at Theresa LaQuices as she left, “kill the girl and come to the house. Hammer is in the Lazenbury, and he’s trying to kill Mother with the Osdathregar.”

Theresa turned and grinned at Robin. Her gums were jet-black, and now too were her eyes.

Throwing Wayne off, Leon scrambled up and hurtled into the vineyard after his new master, loping and capering, using his hands as much as his feet. The boy shouted after him and started to follow, but the frothing darkness in the spaces between the trellises cowed him and he hesitated, glancing at Robin for guidance.

“My covvy-sister Karen is good at illusions, you know,” said the cumbersome crone.

Theresa’s breasts and thighs bulged and rolled under her peasant dress like a sack of potatoes as she paced around in front of Robin in a languid, confident way. “But do you know what
I’m
good at, girl?” Her head tilted as she said this, and at first it looked as if she were cracking her neck, but it was immediately obvious that the muscles around her throat were thickening, tightening.

“Alteration,” she said, her voice going bell-deep and sonorous, threaded with pain. “Transfiguration.” Her elbows rose as if she were about to dance the funky chicken, but then her shoulders broadened, and her hands began to enlarge, and she stumbled and fell on her hands and knees. “Transformation.”

Bones crackled thickly inside Theresa as if her skeleton were rearranging itself. Her dress split up the back with a brittle
pop!
of white linen, revealing her shoulder blades and flabby, age-spotted flanks, and then her bra strap broke in half. Vertebrae surfaced from the flesh behind her head, widening, standing up, becoming spines.

The witch’s head turned and bobbypins slipped out, her coal-black hair spilling free. Her jaw was lengthening, and she growled through a maniacal jackal grin. Her face was the pink, hairless bastard of a dozen beasts.

Robin ran.

“Go!” she bellowed, sprinting at Wayne, paralyzed in terror at the edge of the torch’s light.
“RUN!”

His eyes widened behind his torch-glared glasses, and he sprinted into the vineyard.

The darkness enclosed them, and silent heat lightning flickered across the clouds, affording her the occasional glimpse of the trellises blazing past. Wayne was running at full speed and she was pleasantly surprised to find that he was not the asthmatic nerd of a thousand after-school specials, regardless of the nerdy eyeglasses. That kid was
hauling ass.

“Don’t stop,” she panted, clawing handfuls of air with each step. “She’ll kill you when she’s done with me.”

“My dad. What?”

“Familiar. Witch put a cat in him.”

“A cat?” He glanced over his shoulder, losing a bit of ground.

“Tell you if we get out. Focus!” She jabbed a finger at the night ahead like a Civil War general. “Don’t slow down!”

The ground shook, the grapevines rustled, and Robin could hear a growing rumble—the three-note gallop of the William Tell Overture:
boom-boom-boom, boom-boom-boom.
Something big was chasing them. She ran backwards for a few steps, checking her six, but if there was anything back there in the dark, she couldn’t see it.

Echoing from the vineyard to their left was a great noise of grinding and snuffling like an engine made of meat, and it was only after it had faded away that she understood it as beastly, inhuman laughter. Wayne shouted, “What is—” and the arbor trellises to Robin’s left exploded in a fury of wood and wire as the thing that was Theresa LaQuices smashed through them.

Ivy whipped across the air and she smelled the sick syrup of mashed rotten grapes. Theresa kept going, crossing the row and crashing through the other side.

We’re never going to outrun this monster,
she thought, and poured on a little more speed, snagging the hood on the kid’s shirt. He yelped at first and she said, “Hold up,” and Wayne skidded in the wet grass, wheezing.

Robin pulled him through a gap between two of the vine lattices and shoved him down in the grass, lying down next to him. “We can’t outrun it,” she told him. His breath came over her face in waves, redolent of steak. “We’ll hide—
pant
—and sneak out when—”

Boom-boom-boom, boom-boom, CRASH!
The trellis some thirty yards to the south went down in a tangle.

Whatever the witch had transformed into trampled across the grape arbor until it was halfway to merlot and crossed several rows, smashing sidelong through the vineyard. Apparently the coven didn’t care about wine or grapes anymore, because she was giving it hell, tearing down fences left and right.

“Y
OU
CAN
’
T
HIIIIDE
” roared the Theresa-beast, snorting a blast of air and aerosolized mucus. “I
CAN
SMELL
YOUUU
”

Lifting her head a bit, Robin peered up the row. The sky’s last light traced blue sweat across the shoulders of some mammoth creature. Heat lightning whispered across the sky and she caught a flicker of pink, a glimpse of scimitars of bone jutting from the lips of a snot-slick muzzle. Theresa’s black hair had become a mane of coarse wool bristles, and fat nipples jutted from a swinging bitch-dog belly.

It turned and scooped up air with the glistening nostrils of a boar. Theresa had become a giant amalgamation of boar and old woman, an abomination of varicose veins and stretched tattoos.

Striations of cottage cheese skin sagged down her naked ass like jagged granite. A picture of a crescent moon on her shoulder had been taffy-pulled into something like a yellow scythe-blade.

Robin swore and pushupped to her feet, pulling Wayne up with a pop of shirt-stitches and shoving him through a gap in the ivy into another row.

The three-beat gallop came at them and Theresa plowed up the trellis where they’d been hiding with her tusks. Her stony hooves pounded the grass flat in a thunderous jig. The witch-hunter and the boy zig-zagged across the vineyard, coursing down rows and cutting through gaps, wending and weaving back and forth.

Suddenly the trellises fell away and she found herself in an open space where a white gazebo waited in a grotto garden. Pergolas made a cage of the arbors, grapevines hanging from their rafters in sweet stinking curtains.