Malus Domestica (67 page)

Now the pain had abated to a constant arthritic ache. Whatever Gendreau did, had blended her skin with the demon-skin; the cells combined in a jagged, organic fashion, interlocking and growing together, like splinters embedded painlessly in her flesh. It was as if she’d been born this way, and in light of Joel’s pep talk, she supposed she had been.

She slammed the demon-hand against the grille again, producing a slap-bass thrum of steel. More foul dirt crumbled onto them.

Kenway spat and coughed. “Man, that is heinous.”

“Can we hurry this up, please?” complained Gendreau from the darkness behind them. “My knees are killing me.”

Robin steeled herself and took a deep breath of cold fouled air, then whacked her demon-hand against the grille,
CLANG,
and again,
CLANG,
and again, again, again,
CLANG CLANG CLANG.
Each strike was accompanied by a grunt of effort.

Finally the grille began to come loose, scraping and shifting upwards.

“There, I loosened it for you.”

Kenway stood up in the drain, shoving the metal free. “Hardy-har,” he said, and let it fall to the side, the hinge chiseling up more of the loamy grease-dirt. He lifted himself out and then gave Robin a hand up, and the two of them helped Wayne, Gendreau, and Lucas out.

The pitter-patter of little feet made Robin look into the pit. Eduardo Pendergast whimpered, only visible by the patch of white on his face.

“Sometimes the abyss looks back.” She reached in and hauled him out by his collar.

The dog gave a great big shiver, jitterbugging across the garage floor, shaking off the muck. Robin stood straight and appraised them all, and found a bunch of dirty-faced street urchins. They all looked like coal-miners from 1920 West Virginia. “You guys are gonna need a shower.”

“And a trip to the mall, no doubt,” said Gendreau, smelling his shirt.

Robin followed Kenway upstairs to his apartment, careful to wipe her feet on the doormat at the foot of the stairs. Wayne and the magicians pursued her like a brood of ducklings.

At the top, Lucas whistled. “Nice digs, dude.”

“Thanks.”

“These are the paintings I was talking about,” Wayne said, heading into the open kitchen area.

All Kenway’s works of art hung on the wall over the fridge and cabinets, intricately arranged so that each made room for the other and left little of the wall itself uncovered. Robin noticed that the darker, more introspective paintings were down at the ends, framing the brighter, lusher ones in the middle, which made the presentation feel like a mosaic of a sun in outer space, as if viewed through a mail slot.

Gendreau spooled off some paper towels to wipe at the grease on his plush-looking jeans, even though his shirt was a fingerpainting. “Very nice work, I must say, Mr Griffin. Do you ever sell any?”

“I’ve had some offers….”

Wayne put his ring to his eye, looking up at them. Then he let it dangle from its chain and climbed up onto the kitchen counter, pushing aside a bag of chips, and very carefully slid up onto the top of the fridge. He put the ring to his eye again and pressed on a tall portrait depicting a horse’s white foreleg, each muscle and vein rendered in exquisite, almost nightmarish detail.

“…But considering why I painted em,” said Kenway, “where the inspiration came from—it seemed a bit morbid. Or maybe like I was tryin to capitalize on my friend.”

The canvas billowed a little bit like sailcloth, but otherwise didn’t move. No dice.

“Morbid—?” Gendreau tilted his head as he pulled his jacket back on, tugging the lapels. “What happened, Mr Griffin, if you’ll pardon my curiosity?”

Wayne turned on his butt, kicking a fridge magnet off onto the floor, and splayed his hand on the surface of a painting of a shirtless woman as viewed from the back. Like the horse leg, this one was also in bright, washed-out colors and sharp photographic detail.

“Ask me later, Mr G.”

With a faint
click,
the painting swung inward on darkness. They all paused to regard it in awed, stony silence.

Gendreau pontificated with his arms wide. “I’ve seen a lot of things in my time—boson redistribution, tactile mass hallucinations, even psychokinesis—but this is remarkable, simply remarkable: an inter-dimensional crawlspace.”

Wayne smiled proudly.

“You understand, of course, that my theory of Karen Weaver’s de-conjuration on Underwood was just that: a theory. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life, you know.”

I thought it was
my
theory.
Robin shook her head.

Wayne was wearing the GoPro chest harness; he must have put it on by himself. The fluorescent lights over the kitchen reflected in its soulless black eye. She blinked. How long had he been wearing it? She supposed she’d grown so used to seeing it that her eye had danced right over it. “I’m gonna go in first,” Robin told them, lifting herself up onto the island in the middle. She crouched next to the stove. “If that thing is waiting to amb—”

A huge orangutan arm slithered out of the hole in the wall, black, covered in matted red hair. It was so big it was unreal, a Halloween-spider decoration, with long knuckly fingers and too many of them.

Gendreau shrieked like a horror-film ingénue.

The cacodemon’s hand folded around Wayne’s throat and pulled him against the wall with a
thump,
the bicep flexing, dragging him inside the hole.

It happened so quickly, and had taken Robin so much by surprise, that at first she found her body unwilling to move. But as the boy began to slide through into that deep velvet darkness, he shouted her name,
“Robiiiiiin!”,
and that was enough to animate her. Reaching up with both hands, she grabbed his ankle, and for a brief instant they were playing Tug-of-War with him, and then his foot slid out of his sneaker.

Wayne slipped into the dark.

“No!” She dropped the shoe and scrambled on top of the fridge, thrusting her left arm into the hole before Andras could close it.

The painting slapped shut on her wrist and bounced open again. Before she could second-guess herself or the others could follow, Robin grabbed the edges of the crawlspace and hauled herself through into the upstairs bathroom of 1168 Underwood Road.

❂

She vaulted the sink headfirst and hit the opposite wall, crashing into a towel rack and punching a hole in the sheetrock. Robin bounced off the radiator underneath and onto the floor, where the rotten terrycloth flag that had been hanging from the rack covered her face like a death shroud. The medicine cabinet clicked shut and the mirror shattered, shards of silvered glass crashing into the sink.

“Robiiiiin—!”
screamed Wayne from deeper in the house. The adjuration was pure terror.

She staggered through the bathroom door, which had been torn from its hinges and lay flat, propped up by its own doorknob. The Hell-annexed otherhouse was waiting to blind her with its utter lack of light.

As she made her way down the hall, pinballing back and forth with her hands out, her eyes became used to the dark and a faint glow gave shape to the furniture. It hung in mid-air as a formless fog, a fungal subterranean light. Robin reached the end of the hall just in time to see the cacodemon break for the stairs, Wayne under his arm like a football.

Goddamn but that thing was
huge.
No wonder the children had been so afraid of it. A thrill of terror racked her system.

It was all head and lanky frame, a giant toddler with the jagged, distended jacklegs of a praying mantis. Andras’s oversized skull was as wide as his already ample shoulders, a punchbowl dome feathery with filth. Before he slipped over the banister, he flicked those tennis-ball eyes back at her, those Edison-bulb eyes throbbing sea-green filaments, and then he crashed to the switchback landing below.

Robin hurled herself over the banister. The fingers of her left hand penetrated the drywall on the landing below. She turned and launched herself onto the demon’s broad back.

It was like leaping onto a wicker sofa with a rug thrown over it, with the same dirty-woody smell of neglect and musty filth. Andras’s skin actually
creaked,
and his hair was long and shaggy and crusty. Robin sank the fingers of her black left hand into his hairy-splintery flesh and found that he was, indeed, hollow on the inside. He was a wicker sculpture made of a hundred thousand cords all wound together.

Unlife jostled and rustled inside, as if his heart were a trapped bird.

Andras shrugged his free arm, twisting back and forth with a sound like breaking branches, and the scissor-blades of her fingers drew loose from his dry meat. Robin whipped free of him and tumbled to the floor in the foyer a half-flight below, sliding on a threadbare runner damp with dust.

The demon tossed Wayne down and leapt down to the foot of the switchback stairs. The boy collapsed next to the baseboards; his glasses fell off and skittered across the hardwood.

( w h o
 
a r e
 
y o u )

the monster asked, regarding her. The words flickered in Robin’s head like a pilot-light, a secret match-flame. They were less words than abstract concept-shapes, Rorschach blots.

She growled, pivoting about to face him on the fulcrum of her human hand, pinwheeling the rotten carpet into a pile against the wall.

She would not give this violating devil the dignity of an answer. Robin flourished the strange left claw and ran at him, fury compounding inside of her. She meant to sink those coal-daggers into him again and tear him apart, rend him by pieces and see what was inside.

( t h e
 
r i n g )

he said, flinging one hand across his chest in a capeless parody of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula,

( i
 
w i l l
 
f i n a l l y
 
b e
 
f r e e )

the demon told her, and as Robin came at him he backhanded her. That long insectoid arm battered her out of the way, a beam of hard bone piling against her right flank, and she flew aside.

She hit the wall with an
OOF
and crashed through a curio arranged with dusty pictures, sprawling on top of jagged things that hurt her side.

( w h o
 
a r e
 
y o u )

repeated the demon the children called Owlhead.

“I’m Annie’s daughter, you son of a bitch,” Robin told Andras, even though it had no mother of its own, she was sure. Her heart thundered in her chest and she was flushed with an incredible heat, almost embarrassing in its fury. “This is all
your
fault.” The knot in her throat burned.
“You
are why I’m here, and why I am the way I am, and why my mother is dead.”

Cambion. Crooked woman, half-monster.
She wanted to cry, to sob in defiance and rage at this monstrous creature, this avatar of corrosive lust, but she refused to give him the satisfaction.

Andras grinned with a rack of teeth like jags of broken wood, serrated prongs long enough to bite clean through her neck.

Closing her eyes against those darning needles, she plunged the hand he had given her into his belly, breaking skin too hard for her human hand to damage, and pulled it open like Christmas wrapping.

Fluttering sensations whickered up her arm and touched her face. She opened her eyes and pure disgusted fear shot an iron bolt through her core.

Spiders.

He was full of spiders,

fucking
spiders,

THOUSANDS
OF THEM.

They crawled out of the empty darkness inside his body and up her arm, a legion of bristling marbles marching toward her face.

Each one was a nightmare unto itself, she sensed, each one an embodiment of some base desire, each one a walking prejudice or an evil thought; in the three seconds that passed as they scuttled out of hiding, Robin caught intrusive snippets—flashes of murder, physical violation, undiluted hatred or lust.

Andras picked her up by the scruff of her neck as if she were a kitten. He held her against the wall.

( y o u
 
a r e
 
m e )

he said, and she could hear the grin in his mind-voice

( y o u
 
a r e
 
m e
 
a n d
 
i
 
a m
 
y o u )

and to her shock and terrified surprise the swarthy skin of her draconic left arm began to
spread,
leeching across her collarbone and into her shirt, filling her in with its wicked black hardness.

—Crooked, more crooked than ever—

The black widows poured out of him and enveloped her from left to right, carrying a payload of licorice-smelling ink, engulfing her breast until it was a round bulb of wicked thatch. The soft pink-brown smear of her nipple transformed into a rusty bolthead.

Spiders crawled into her mouth, tangled in her hair. Andras was spreading the darkness, infecting her, infesting her,
changing
her.

Robin looked down, her neck crackling like cellophane, and saw her heart behind her chest; she could actually
see
it like the sun in a picnic basket, burning and blazing inside of her with a warm amber light. Rays sifted through layers of pigiron twine, sending blades of gold shimmering across the ceiling.

My God, is that me? Is that mine?
she thought, her lips stiffening, her eyes burning, her hair turning to crimson jackstraw. Her tongue began to harden into a pitted black blade.

A framed photo hung on the other side of the hallway.

Her own reflection swam in the cloudy glass. Her face was blackening and warping; her eyes bulged and shined from deep within, dirty green foglamps. Her pupils were sharp electric pinpricks.

( I
 
A M
 
Y O U )

Andras laughed. It was the sound of a whetstone coughing down the length of a sword-blade.

—Cambion, crooked cambion—

“No!”
she cried.

Her voice was a watery scrape. She inhaled and the breath shook dirty cords in her chest.
Grrrahuhuh.