1
Present Day
Forty yards back, a steel pole as bbig around as Michael DePalatis’s arm stretched across the overgrown dirt road. Pulling the police cruiser up to the gate, he unbuckled his seat belt and started to open the door.
“I got it.” Owen checked the gate and found there was, indeed, a chain confining the gate to its mount, and a padlock secured it. Two of them, in fact.
Hypothetically, they could go around it, if not for the impenetrable forest on either side. “Shit.” Mike got out of the car anyway. “Looks like we’re walking.” He hopped over the gate, his keys jingling. The grass beat against Mike’s shins, and hidden briars plucked at his socks. “When we get out of here, you might want to check yourself for ticks. Few years ago, I was part of a search effort out in woods like this, and when I got home, I found one on my dick.”
“Oh, that’s nasty,” said Owen. He laughed like a kookaburra.
Conversation slipped into silence. The two men walked for what felt like a half an hour, forging through tall wheatgrass and briars. Mike glanced at his partner as they walked. Officer Owen Euchiss was a scarecrow with an angular van Gogh face. The black police uniform looked like a Halloween costume on him.
They called him Opie after the sheriff’s son on The Andy Griffith Show because of his first two initials, which he signed on all of his traffic citations. His constant sly grin reminded Mike of kids he’d gone to school with, the little white-trash hobgoblins who would snort chalk dust on a dare and brag about tying bottle rockets to cats’ tails. Middle age had refined him a little, but the Scut Farkus was still visible under Opie’s mask of dignified wrinkles.
“Ferris wheel,” said Owen, snapping Mike out of his reverie. He straightened, peering into the trees.
The track they were walking down widened, grass giving way to gravel, and skeletal machines materialized through the pine boughs. They emerged into a huge clearing that was once a parking lot, and on the other side of that was an arcade lined with tumbledown amusement park rides, the frames and tracks choked with foliage.
Had to admit, the place had a sort of postapocalyptic Logan’s Run grandeur about it. A carnival lost in time.
The two policemen walked aimlessly down the central avenue, heels crunching on the gravel. “What did Bowker say we’re supposed to be looking for?” asked Owen.
“You heard the same thing I heard.”
“‘Something shady.’”
They came to a split, facing a concession stand. Owen took out his flashlight and broke off to the left, heading toward a funhouse. “I’ll check over here.”
Mike went right. A purple-and-gray Gravitron bulged from the woodline like an ancient UFO. Across the way was a tall umbrella-framed ride, chains dangling from the ends of each spoke like something out of Hellraiser. He contemplated this towering contraption and decided it had been a swing for kids, but without the seats, it could have been a centrifuge where you hung slabs of beef from the chains and spun the cow blood out of them. Or maybe it was some kind of giant flogging-machine that just turned and turned and whipped and whipped.
When the rides had been damaged enough and lost so much of what identified them, they became alien and monstrous.
Third-wheel mobile homes made a village in the back, caved in by the elements. Bushes cloaked their flanks and bristled from inside. He slapped a whiny mosquito on his face.
Blood on his fingers. He wiped it on his uniform pants.
After wandering in and out of the carnie village, Mike decided none of them were in good enough shape to sustain life. He headed back into the main arcade.
At this point, he had developed an idea of what Wonderland looked like from above: an elongated I like a cartoon dog-bone, the arcade forming the long straight part down the middle. Mike stood at the west end of the dog-bone, staring at the concession stand, and took his hat off to scratch his head.
He took the left-hand path, walking toward the funhouse. Behind the concession stand to his right was a series of roach-coaches: food trucks with busted, cloudy windows, wreathed in tall grass. A Tilt-A-Whirl, an honest-to-God Tilt-A-Whirl. Bushes and a tree thrust up through the ride, dislodging plates of metal and upending the seashell-shaped cars. A wooden shed with two doors stood behind the Tilt-A-Whirl, quite obviously an improvised latrine.
Here, the tree line marked the end of Wonderland. A chain-link fence tried to separate fun from forest, but sagged over, trampled by some long-gone woodland animal. Tucked between the Tilt-A-Whirl and the smashed fence was a pair of gray-green military Quonset huts. At the end of one of them stood a door with no window in it, secured with a padlock. NO ADMITTANCE—EMPLOYEES ONLY!
“The hell?” Mike lifted the padlock. No more than a couple of years old. Schlage. As he tried the doorknob, the entire wall flexed subtly with a muffled creak. Old plywood? He pressed his palms against the door and pushed. The striker plate crackled and the wall bowed inward several inches.
“Geronimo,” he grunted, and stomp-kicked the door. The entire wall shook.
Another kick set the door crooked in the frame. The third kick ripped the striker out and the whole door twisted to the inside, the hinge breaking loose.
Inside was pure, jet-black, car-full-of-assholes darkness. Dust made soup of the air. Mike took out his flashlight and turned it on, holding it by his temple, and stepped into the hut. A workbench stood against the wall to his right, and a dozen buckets and empty milk jugs were piled in the corner, all of them stained pink. Wooden signs and pictures were stacked against the walls:
VISIT HOOT’S FUNHOUSE!
ARE YOU TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL? DRINK FIREWATER SARSAPARILLA!
GET LOST IN OUR HALL OF MIRRORS!
Three hooks jutted up from the bare cement floor in the middle of the room. Chains were attached to them, and the chains led up to three pulleys.
Old blood stained the floor around the hooks.
“Ah, hell,” said Mike, drawing his pistol.
On the other side of the workbench was a door. He gave the stains a wide berth, sidling along the wall.
Flashlight in one hand and pistol in the other, he crossed his wrists Hollywood-style and pushed the door open with his elbow. Beyond, the polished black body of a Monte Carlo reflected his Maglite beam.
POW! Something exploded in the eerie stillness.
A bolt of lightning hit Mike in the ass. Electricity crackled down the Taser’s flimsy wires, tak-tak-tak-tak, racing down the backs of his thighs, and he hit the floor bleating like a goat. The pistol in his hand fired into the wall between his jitterbugging feet, blinding him with a white flash.
“You had to come in here, didn’t you?” asked the silhouette in the doorway, tossing the Taser aside and plucking the pistol out of Mike’s hands. Chains rattled through a pulley and coiled around his ankles. Strong, sinewy hands hauled him up by the feet and suspended him above the floor. One of those white five-gallon buckets slid into view underneath his forehead, knocking his useless arms out of the way, and then his hands were jerked up behind his back and he was locked up in his own cuffs, dangling like Houdini about to be lowered into a glass booth full of water. “This is what I should have done to that faggot, instead of lettin’ him hang around,” said a man’s voice, reminiscent of Opie but growlier, deeper, more articulate. “But I got his fuckin’ car now. Sweet ride, ain’t it? Did you see it in there?”
Mike’s heart lunged at the snick of a blade being flicked out of a box cutter.
“No, please!” he managed to grunt.
“You live, you learn, I guess.” The man cut a deep fish-gill V in Mike’s neck, two quick slashes from his collarbone to his chin.
Both his carotid and his jugular squirted up his cheeks and over his eyes, beading in his hair. The pain came a full second later, a searing cattle-brand pincering his throat. Mike gurgled, sputtered, trying to ask questions, deliver threats and pleas, but there was nobody in the garage to hear him.
The door slammed shut, leaving Mike in musty darkness.
2
Heinrich’s eyes were intense—not wide and starey eyes, but small, flinty. He’d grown a beard at some point, and it was as gray as brushed steel. He was a big man—not burly or stocky, but long-trunked and long-limbed, with a commanding, arboreal presence. Robin’s witch-hunting mentor looked like a bounty hunter from the Civil War.
To her eternal surprise, the old man took his coffee as sweet as a granny. She studied his face as he folded his sunglasses neatly, hanging them from the collar of his shirt.
“I watched the video you posted the other day and knew you were heading back to Georgia. Hopped in the car and hauled ass out here. That’s why I haven’t been answering the phone—I’ve been on the road.” They all sat around the kitchen table in the Victorian house at 1168 Underwood, nursing cups of Folger’s and listening to Heinrich recount how he caught up to his protégée. Robin was still a bit dazed from the previous night’s encounter with what the kids called “Owlhead,” the ensuing vision she’d had of her much younger mother summoning it, and the antipsychotic meds she’d overdosed on in an attempt to dispel what she’d thought was a hallucination.
Her GoPro camera lay on the counter next to the coffeemaker, recording their impromptu palaver. “Did you come out here to help me,” Robin asked, “or stop me?”
Taking off his gambler hat with a measured motion, Heinrich placed it in the center of the table, revealing his glossy brown head. He regarded her with a flat stare, Kenway and Leon sitting quietly to either side, and ignored the question. Instead, he asked, “What are the side effects?”
“Ischemic stroke. Anaphylactic shock.” She looked out the window at a slate-gray sky. “… Seizures.”
Heinrich rolled his head in wry agreement. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. You had a seizure last night, according to these men,” he said, giving the eyeshadowed Joel an assessing up-and-down. The pizza-man eyeballed him right back, folding his arms indignantly. “Maybe you do need to ease off.”
“I don’t think you need any more,” Kenway said in a flat growl.
“I have been cutting back.” Robin frowned. “But I need them to stop the hallucinations.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Hallucinations?” asked Leon. “You mean this kind of thing has happened before?” He glanced toward the hallway door, as if his son Wayne were standing there. She could see the protectiveness written all over his face. Embarrassment she hadn’t experienced in a long time made her face burn. She probably wouldn’t have felt this way if Wayne weren’t involved; she could almost hear Leon thinking of ways to keep him away from her.
“On top of the illusions that the witches can plant in your mind, I’ve been seeing strange things for a very long time,” she told him. “Night terrors. Nightmares that might be memories—”
(Go ahead and look, buzzed a stretched-out face.)
She visibly flinched, and a little coffee spilled on the table. Robin mopped at it with the sleeve of her hoodie. “—memories that might be nightmares. And the owl-headed thing.”
“Well, I think we proved Owlhead ain’t a hallucination. I saw it with my own eyes. Maybe all that other shit is real too.” Leon’s taut expression loosened a little. “Maybe you’re not crazy after all.”
“We’ll discuss your meds later.” Heinrich took out a cigar and leaned forward with his elbows on the table, examining it at length as if it were the bullet destined to end his life. “I’m sure there’s some other antipsychotic that won’t fuck you up so much.” He didn’t offer one to anybody else, even though he knew Robin was a smoker. “Anyway. I ain’t here to be your pharmacist, and I sure as hell ain’t here to stop you. I ain’t never been able to stop you before.”
“Speaking of psychotic, we talked to a member of the coven. The young third one, Weaver.”
“What about?” He stuck the slender cigar between his lips and dug a matchbook out of his shirt pocket, the Royal Hawaiian wagging as he spoke. Robin knew what it would be before she even saw the label: Vanilla Coconut. He cupped the cigar with a hand and lit it, shook the match out, and dropped it into the dregs of his coffee. “You two catch up on life ’n shit? Quiche recipes, grandkids, who’s fuckin’ who on The Young and the Restless?”
“She put an illusion on me and left me in a hospital laundry, hallucinating bugs crawling out of my skin. How did you get in without her seeing you?”
Disgust passed across Leon’s face, tinged with sympathy.
“I parked in the trailer park and hung out there for a while to watch the house.” Heinrich took a deep draw, the cherry flaring, and blew it at the ceiling. The rich smell of coconuts floated in a dragon of blue smoke, turning the kitchen into a dingy cabana. “Waited for her to go in the house, went around the side.”
Robin started to take a sip and put the mug back down. “Weaver told me I’m a puppet. Your henchman, your human shield.” Your personal Jesus, interjected some weird neuron in her brain. “Said you groomed me to be a witch-hunter so you could quit the game and pull a D. B. Cooper.” She leaned over her coffee. “You didn’t teach me how to fight so I could avenge my mother, did you? You did it so you could hide in your fortress in Texas, and let me do all your dirty work.”
“I’m turning sixty-six this year.” Heinrich ashed the cigar into his coffee mug. It was white and had a picture of Snoopy on it, fast asleep on the roof of his doghouse. “I can’t fight the good fight forever. Somebody’s gotta take over, and you were ready to be sculpted, a block of marble ready for Michelangelo’s chisel.”
Robin battled the urge to throw her coffee in his face. “I’m not your bitch.” She took a deep, shaky breath and let it out in a sigh.
“She told your tall dusty ass,” interjected Joel, clutching a cup of coffee.
“You were never meant to be.” Heinrich ashed his cigar again and leaned back. “They’re turning you against me, Robin. Fragmenting the opposition. If you’re gonna make the decision to come back here and fight, you’re gonna have to keep your head together. Don’t let Weaver tie you up in knots. That’s what she’s good at. They’ve all three of them got specialties, and hers is getting inside that dyed-up volleyball you call a head. Remember how I told you back in the day how they’ll use tricks and lies to keep you from getting close? Well, this is it.”
“Maybe.” She sipped coffee, trying to read the expression on Kenway’s face. The anger over the Abilify was new. It wasn’t scary, but it left her feeling cold and hollow inside.
Heinrich stared at the table, woolgathering.
“I saw a little girl with a lot of hurt and hate in her heart.” The old man’s voice was torn between defensiveness, compassion, and anger. “I seen good people turn to shit trying to burn it all out with drugs. When I found out Annie had a daughter and she was in the mental hospital, I knew I had to get to you before the streets did. Or, worse, you tried to fight Cutty with no preparation.” He took another draw and talked the smoke out. “Bein’ homeless ain’t no joke. The hell you think you’d be if I hadn’t taken you in?”
Reaching across the table as quick as a cobra, he grabbed Robin’s wrist and turned it, held it up to the dim morning light. The pink rope of scar tissue running down the inside of her wrist shimmered with a faint opalescence.
Fresh concern came over Joel’s face at the sight of the scars. She wrenched her arm out of the old man’s hand, his fingertips slipping shut on empty air.
“You’d be dead in a gutter,” said Heinrich, pointing at her with the two fingers pincering the cigar, “that’s where your skinny white-girl ass would be. So, listen to your heart and use your head, Robin Hood. Ain’t nobody against you but them. Don’t let ’em talk you in circles. That’s their first trick. You know that. You know better. I didn’t take you in and teach you what I know for you to fall for their bullshit.”
The sun continued to fill the kitchen with morning light. “I saw my mother,” Robin said eventually. “In a dream, when I had my seizure.”
She recounted the contact with Owlhead and the demon’s stolen vision from start to finish, from the ritual Annie performed on Weaver’s husband to the demon crawling out of the hole. Leon choked on his coffee and got up to fetch a paper towel to mop it up off his shirt. “There’s a hellhole in my goddamn basement?”
“I don’t know what it is, specifically, but—” Robin started to say.
“No, that’s exactly what it is,” said Heinrich. “Sounds like what happened was Annie thought she had sacrificed Edgar Weaver to draw a demon into our world to kill Cutty, but what she did was sign a blood contract that allowed Hell to annex the house.”
“In plain English, please,” said Kenway.
Heinrich swept a hand down his face, pulling at his cheeks. His lower eyelids were rimmed in red; he obviously hadn’t slept. “Basically, like Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States, this house is now a territory of Hell. It has been for about two decades. I imagine it’s why ain’t nobody lived in it since Annie died.” He pointed toward the living room. “The dark version of it that little boy in there found with his mama’s ring? That’s the Hell-side of this house.”
Everyone stared at Robin, making her want to shrivel up. “I thought you said there wasn’t a Hell,” said Kenway.
The old witch-hunter grimaced, tossing a hand. Ashes dusted the tabletop. “Of course there’s a Hell.” Heinrich swept them off onto the floor. “Is she filling y’all’s heads with her Dalai Lama God-is-love-and-Hell-is-regret bullshit?”
They smirked at him. Robin gave him the finger.
“There for a while last year, she got real deep into Nichiren Buddhism,” said Heinrich. “She even had me chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo over and over again, doin’ yoga and shit and eatin’ rabbit food. Me—! The last time I did the Downward Dog, I got crabs and a night in jail.”
“Y’all nasty,” said Joel.
“The demon,” said Heinrich, getting up from the table. “The hallucinations. Owlhead was drawing you here.” He paced slowly up and down the foyer hallway, one hand in his pocket, the other holding the cigar to his mouth. “He wants you here for some reason.”
“But why now?” asked Robin. “I’ve always seen him, but it’s only been every now and then. The first nineteen years of my life, I saw him four times. Once when I was as young as that little girl in there, once in middle school, and twice in the mental hospital. The last two years, I’ve seen him at least fifteen times. It’s like he’s leading me here. What’s special about now?”
“You turned eighteen. Came of age. Maybe he thinks you’ve passed some kind of threshold that would make it possible for you to let him manifest in our world? You are the daughter of the woman that summoned him, after all. Maybe there’s a link somewhere.”
“If he’s looking for a virgin, he’s barking up the wrong girl.”
Heinrich laughed.
“And if he wants me to let him loose, I ain’t doing that. I wouldn’t even know how.” She eyed the cigar smoke in the air. “You’re the research wonk—do you know if there’s another part to that ritual beyond cleaving off a shadow-clone of the house to imprison him in?”
The old man shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know, I’d have to look at the materials she used.”
“What are demons, anyway?” asked Joel. “That thing with the owl-head didn’t look like any demon I’ve ever seen. I would’ve expected, y’know, the usual—cloven hooves, pitchfork, horns, the whole nine yards. Not a dilapidated animatronic owl from a haunted pizzeria.”
“Demons, at their simplest,” explained Heinrich, “are viruses.”
“I ain’t pickin’ up what you’re throwin’ down.”
“All right, a virus is basically a piece of DNA wrapped in protein. You could say it’s dead, but it would have to have lived to be dead, and it’s never been alive. But it wants to be alive. And the only way a virus can assume some semblance of life is by infecting a living being. I like to think of it as a Terminator—a facsimile of life that’s never been alive itself, wrapped in meat.” He sighed and took the cigar out of his mouth, staring at it as he rolled it in his fingers. “The way it’s been explained to me is, there are two kinds of souls. The souls that come out of Creation’s oven well formed and functioning find their way into a living body at some point. The souls that come out deformed don’t get a body. They sorta float around out there in the dark, in the void of Purgatory. Demons are those two-faced, water-headed, heart-on-the-outside, too-fucked-up-to-live souls. And the only way they can reach the same level of life we enjoy is to possess a living body, the same way a virus possesses a living cell.”
“You say ‘Creation’s oven,’” said Leon, wiping his hands dry with a towel as he came back to the foyer. “So, you’re tellin’ me there’s an actual God up there, cranking out souls in His spiritual bakery?”
Heinrich guffawed, leaning back to laugh at the ceiling.
“That’s the million-dollar question, ain’t it?” He stubbed the cigar out on the sole of his boot. “Welcome to the clergy.”
Copyright © 2020 by S. A. Hunt
