Malus Domestica (61 page)

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The road sign moved in the breeze, nodding and jiggering like the palsy of an old woman.

Underwood Road. It stood at the edge of a clearcut shoulder stubbly with juts of broken hickory, a weathervane pointing in uncivilized directions. The Suburban was still parked by the side of the road where she’d gotten out to blow chunks. Robin leaned against the car with the door open, her forehead on her arm and her arm on the frame, trying to let the fresh air settle her stomach.

“You okay?” asked Wayne. He had taken off his glasses and was buffing the lenses with his shirt.

“Yeah, it was…the Percocet, the bourbon, being cooped up in the car,
this
thing—” She shrugged the shoulder with the bloodworm hanging out of it. “Got to be a little much for me. Needed some fresh air.”

Kenway was beside her. He followed the line of her eyes to the road sign and put his hand on her back. The tendril curled as he did so and she felt him tense up, but he didn’t snatch his hand away. God, but she loved him for that. She really did.

“Are you
sure
you want to do this today?” he asked.

For sure, she was having second thoughts; her mother had been locked inside that tree for half a decade now, and a few days wouldn’t make much of a difference.

But—

“—They’ve got Leon,” she said. “I can’t leave him there.”

Gratitude loosened Wayne’s features. She could tell he wanted to say something like,
My dad’s tough, he would understand if you wanted to psyche yourself up before you jump into Hell,
but the relief, and the eagerness to rescue his father, kept him from opening his mouth.

She hoisted herself into the seat and pulled the belt across her lap. “Let’s go. Make hay while the sun shines. Strike while the iron’s hot.”

Kenway lingered in the door, assessing her.

Finally he slithered into the back of the Suburban next to the dog and she pulled the door shut,
clunk.
Gendreau put on his blinker, waited for a Camaro to go shushing past, and pulled back out onto the highway.

The Suburban crossed both lanes and eased into a crotch of asphalt slicing through the grass median, nose pointed across the northbound lanes. He paused in what could have been propriety—there were no other cars coming; the highway was clear in both directions—and pulled into Underwood Road.

The magician drove like a car commercial. His pale, slender fingers handled the steering wheel in a delicate but businesslike way, a conductor-motorist that poured the Suburban down Underwood’s sinuous length. The constant trees enclosed them on both sides with wet, skeletal trunks still stained a raw strawberry-blonde by the weekend’s rains.

N
O
T
RESPASSING
. The sign was still nailed to a tree, speckled with bullet-holes.

It occurred to Robin that the South had a lot of these signs distributed throughout the wilderness, as if the great landgrabs of the colonial days had never truly ended, the countryside still scissored into a patchwork of a thousand discrete estates protected with musket and handaxe. She had seen a lot of these signs in the past few years, less of them up north until you got into Canada, and almost none in New England except for Maine and swaths of upstate New York. The commune in Oregon had them, but only because the hunters that used to own the property had put them up; the witches didn’t need them, didn’t
want
them

(welcome, sir, welcome, have a seat, have a beer, welcome to hotel california)

 
because they
liked
it when trespassers showed up uninvited. The things she’d seen in her travails criscrossing the country, following Heinrich’s leads, following Heinrich’s orders…the human finger-bones hanging from porch eaves in gruesome wind-chimes, the skulls full of burnt blood, the decaying figures sitting in iron cages,

(so much like mummies, shriveled ash-brown skin glued to thin rods of bone, hands clawed around their knobby knees, stiff lips stretched across yellowed piano-key teeth)

the cries of children locked in cellars, their minds wiped bare by the Gift of illusion, yes, it worked both ways you know, the crones can make you see things and they can make you
not
see things as well.

But those horrible sights are still buried down there deep beneath the surface, memory-sharks that only breach and flash their cuttlebone teeth in the dead of night. Those children, all grown up, will sit straight up in the bed next to their wife or husband as the last foaming tide of a nightmare ebbs into the darkness of sleep. Nightmares of things they saw as children but have forgotten as adults, their recognition stolen by smiling hags with chips of ice in their eyes, hobgoblins who would have stolen their hearts for an ageless star-beast if not for hungry Robin and the gleaming silver dagger in her hand.

The mouldering orange recliner flickered into view through the picket-fence trees.

Like she’d done a hundred times growing up, Robin tried to imagine what that ancient tweed chair smelled like. She wondered what, if anything, lived in it. Maybe it was full of spiders, an arachnid apartment building—or maybe it was full of paper, rinds of pulp machined by the clockwork jaws of a hundred chewing wasps.

She was still lost in thought when Gendreau stopped at a stop sign. Another highway interceded, running perpendicular to Underwood Road, and as soon as Robin’s eyes drifted north, she knew that it ran all the way out to Miguel’s Pizzeria in the mountains. They had met the road on the other end of her childhood home, the ‘shortcut’ Kenway had driven when he had first taken her back to her skeezy candy van to lie in the dark and cold, miserably horny and staring at the ceiling. (Plumbing indeed.)

Robin twisted in her seat and looked through the rear window. Kenway did as well, and then Sara. Eduardo panted obliviously, eyes cocked to either side.

“Did we pass it?” she asked.

Kenway faced front again. “I think? I guess we did?”

“I don’t even remember going through the neighborhood and seeing the trailer park on the left.” Maybe she wasn’t paying attention. She was pretty deep in her own head there for a few minutes.

Gendreau said over his shoulder, “Shall I turn around and go back? Or are we on the wrong road?”

“It’s the right road,” said Lucas, still wearing his slick wasp-eye shades. “Underwood.” He reached under the front seat and brought out a folder, opening it and displaying the contents to the driver. “That’s what the file says.”

“It’s right.” Robin scanned the road behind them. “It’s the right road, but something’s wrong.”

The Suburban dipped into the southbound lane, doing a U-turn back onto Underwood, and Gendreau piloted them into the woods again. This time Robin clutched the passenger headrest in front of her, her head on a swivel as she watched the road for landmarks.

Power poles kept a steady cadence on the left side of the car, and the familiarity of almost twenty years tinged every leaf and sign they passed. Robin stared at the mile markers cruising past the window, but they were useless, numberless reflective discs. The familiar swoop and sway of the road’s subtle waveform settled over them once more, but this time Gendreau slowed until they were at a funereal pace, the asphalt grumbling under their tires, trees parallaxing past at walking speed.

“Wait a minute,” said Robin.

She stared through the right-hand windows of the Suburban, where a power pole loomed by the road’s shoulder.

Kenway shifted. “What is it?”

“The power lines are on the right side now.” Robin looked through the left window, then over Kenway’s shoulder through the rear window. “They cross the road at the Lazenbury. I know because the line comes down from the pole in front of my old house, then the lines cross the street to the transformer in front of the Lazenbury, where lines go up to the hacienda and over to the trailer park, and from there the lines stay on that side until it gets to the highway.”

Making a three-point turn, Gendreau maneuvered the Suburban east again, putting the lines on their left.

A few minutes later, Lucas said, “Now the lines are on the other side.”

“Karen Weaver is hiding the house.” Sara Amundson peered up at an angle through her gray window. The tint layered a sullen darkness over the world outside. “I know it. She has cropped that
whole quarter-mile
out of the road. Like cutting the middle out of a string and tying the ends back together.”

Gendreau put the Suburban in reverse and they whined backward—slow at first, and then faster, until they were racing west ass-first, the engine whining with an inhaling burr like an electric track-car.

“Stop,” said Sara. “Let me out.”

They drew up short, catty-cornered in the eastbound lane. Robin threw open the door and got out, followed by Kenway and then Sara. The illusionist clawed the Murdercorn wig off her head and tossed it into the back seat, letting the wind comb fingers through her brilliant red hair.

“Look. You can see it there.” Sara pointed east, at the south side of the road.

A splintery power-pole towered over them sixty feet away, topped with gray beehive electricity components. Rubber-coated wires emerged from the couplings, protruding into the air some twenty or thirty feet, where they just…
faded away,
as if God had stooped down with a giant Pink Pig drafting eraser and rubbed it out of existence.

“What the hell?” asked Kenway, shading his eyes against the drab white sky. “What is this, the Bermuda Triangle?”

Robin turned. The power-line coalesced into being on the north side of the road and hooked into the couplings at the top of another power-pole. “They pick back up over there.”

Taken as a whole, the arrangement over their heads seemed to refract like a pencil inserted into a glass of water, the black cables diverting diagonally and invisibly across the sky. There was no visible difference in the unending army of trees all around them, but when you paid attention to the power-cables you could see where Weaver had excised the Lazenbury and everything around it.

To the west, she could see the faint speck of orange where the old tweed chair stood abandoned. To the east, a barbed wire fence marked the beginning of the old horse-farm on the far end of Underwood.

Gendreau got out and went to Sara. His cane rapped on the road twice as he walked, and then he directed the tip at the strange refraction. “Can you nullify it?”

She shook her head and her face darkened with irritation. “I can’t even find the edges. Except for that weird lensing with the power-lines, it’s almost seamless. It’s like trying to open a fire exit from the outside, except there’s not even a door. It’s a blank wall that I know has a door on the other side of it.”

A desolate satisfaction came over Robin. “Now d’you see how powerful they are?” she asked, trying not to sound smug.

“I was
always
aware.” Indignity and sheepishness swirled in Gendreau’s aristocratic face. “I’ve seen this sort of thing before, Miss Martine…but not this well-done. The others, they’ve—you could get your fingers under the illusion, to so speak, and pry it up like a rock so you can find the worms underneath. But this… I can’t find where in the fabric of space and time that the illusion begins and ends. It’s completely flush with reality.”

Robin didn’t fail to notice the irritated way the magician referred to her by her surname.

A bird came sailing across the trees, a big black raven. As it drew near the place where the cable refracted out of view, she almost expected it to disappear, slipping into oblivion as soon as it crossed that invisible boundary and possibly re-appearing a few minutes later, but it passed by without so much as a flicker.

Robin watched it glide away and the visual image of the bird vanishing pushed an idea into her head.

She rounded on Gendreau. “Can you
un
-conjure something?”

He grimaced in baffled contempt, but then lightened. “I’ve never heard of it before, but yes, I suppose you could. I mean, you can conjure things—”

“—So why can’t you
un
-conjure them?”

“That would explain why the illusion is so finely grained.” Gendreau stared at the smearing end of the powerline, rubbing the corners of his mouth. “Yes…yes, perhaps what she’s done is, instead of…yes….” The bull-pizzle cane came to rest on the pavement and he tucked a hand into the breast of his suit blazer. “…It’s not an illusion at all, is it? Weaver has un-conjured the area around the house. She’s pinched a pouch out of the fabric of reality and sewn the gap shut, isolated it, like a pocket hidden in the lining of a jacket.”

He brought out his hand, holding a steel flip lighter, and he stood there absently flipping it open and shut, staring with unfocused eyes, his mind idling high and out of gear.

Sara folded her arms. “Riddle me this, riddle me that: how do you get into a house with no door?”

Wayne suggested from the Suburban, “You make one.”

Goosebumps of excitement tingled across Robin’s scalp. “Yes! Your ring!” She strode straight to him as he was climbing out of the car and clutched the boy against her chest in a one-armed hug. “Your ring! We can use it to get into the isolation!”

He grinned, tugging the ballchain necklace out of his shirt, revealing Haruko’s ring. Gendreau and Sara came over and the thin magician stooped to level his face with Wayne’s, his hands on his knees. A piquant warmth came over him that reminded Robin of Gene Wilder in
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
“Is this it, then? The ring that opens magic doors?”

It sounded about as silly as it possibly could coming out of Gendreau’s girlish cupid’s-bow mouth, but there wasn’t really any way of getting around it. Life is stranger than fiction, as they say. Wayne explained how it worked. “And from inside the dark scary version of my house, all the doors lead to other places in town.”

“Like a hub,” said Robin.

She pushed her fingertips into her jeans pocket and shrugged a shoulder, slowly, deferentially. It was her left shoulder, which sank a shock of blunt pain through her side. “The only problem is, the demon is in that Darkhouse, trapped, waiting for prey to come into his cage. And I’d bet money that magic isn’t
all
he eats.”