Apricot brandy (31 page)

“Damn right.”

The sun was getting near the horizon as he mounted the bike.

“I do not see what will happen.” It was Quetzal, at his side.

“Then you don’t see me dying. You don’t see
her
dying.”

“I don’t see
her
dying in any case. If Xibalba takes her, then, as the green god’s consort, she would live forever, underneath the earth.”

“Give me some power. Give me some luck.”

“
Hijo!
You already have everything I can give! You’re still alive, aren’t you? Has luchado como demonio and you’ve survived everything you fought!”

Unable to otherwise express his reverence for the powerful old woman, Kyle reached out and wrapped his arms around her. The witch seemed not displeased by this rude expression of regard. She pressed his craggy face between her palms and smiled. “Hijito! Que coraje tiennes! And you have a heart. I pray you will find her alive. Go swiftly!”

With no intention of bravado, but merely in his urgency for haste, Kyle popped a shrieking wheelie, riding a comet-tail of smoke for fifty yards, before he got both wheels down and screamed off to the south.

Looking after him, the witch made a beckoning gesture at the air and a shape came down and hung close before her. The two of them, the fleshly and the airy woman, conferred a while, before the airy shape sped off, following him.

The witch watched him dwindle in the distance, her seamed smile remembering an early love of her own… and then she spoke to the ghosts who bore her. They lifted her and swept her to an already-plundered hardware store. From here, a moment after she flew inside, she emerged holding a sickle aloft like a bright-edged crescent moon. Gripping this tool like a talisman, she came hovering down above the lead vehicle of the departing caravan, the stake-bed truck manned by Sal, Helen, Cherry, and three other veterans of the Battle of Gravenstein. They were leading their own townsfolk and the hollow-eyed folk of Dry Creek southward out of town.

“Fight as we’ve learned to do,” the witch told them. “If you move quickly, you’ll have only dragons to fight on your rear. Use gas and torches and keep moving towards the mountains. If we are lucky, we will win some time. We’ll meet you in the mountains near midnight.”

“You won’t be with us now?” Sal asked. His gesture took in the whole airborne army of ghosts. His and his companions’ eyes showed fear.

“The ground ahead of you rises and grows more stony,” said Quetzal. “The green god cannot rise through it so quickly. If you push east into the mountains, you can gain ground and win breathing space. With luck, con suerte, mis queridos, we shall all meet again!”

But when Quetzal had led her airy army to its next engagement, it would have baffled Sal and his allies, had they witnessed it. For she and her followers— just outside of town— settled like a flock of birds upon the golden pastures which had devoured the flocks of Black Angus. Here, Quetzal and the ghosts set to work on those long, tawny grasses. The ghosts twisted and braided the growth and the witch, with her stone knife, scythed each twist of grass free of the earth. And soon, each leafy figure gripped one of these tawny fasciae in his or her grip and, just as the sun began to set, the whole fleet of them, their grassy clubs held high, flew south.

As Karen drove back up the acres, the shed’s embers glowed behind her in the west, like a second sunset, back where the day had died half an hour ago and sunk below the horizon. The zenith was already darkened to indigo and here and there stars sparked its deepening darkness, while the full moon’s upper edge— like a silver scimitar’s blade— had inched up above the eastern hills. Her eyes kept lingering on the red coals in her rearview and how their bloody light stained the big black maggot of the compost heap. That was a victory, wasn’t it? Those sinking embers of Dad’s shed, they were an ancient Enemy laid low.

But now, up there ahead, was the house, far more terrifying. The very temple of her childhood, the place of horror where her new-grown body had been vandalized. How large it loomed! All black-windowed, except for one lamp in the living-room. The shed was an outpost, Dad’s sentry-box, a place where he lurked while his poisoned thoughts evolved. But the house… .

Getting out of the truck, she hung the shotgun on her shoulder again and patted the .45 in her coat pocket. She took the gas can, went around to the front, and climbed the porch. She would enter here, formally. This place was not her house now, but only the Enemy’s, and she had come to call on that enemy, and to administer him his last rites.

Could she really do it? Actually burn this place down? A cold sweat dewed her face. The sheer size of what her heart had chosen to do terrified her. Was she up to this? Big enough? Brave enough? Or was she still Daddy’s little girl? Daddy’s little victim?

She stepped inside. It was like entering the lungs of some giant alien, breathing the air of a hostile planet, and the breathing giant would kill her if he could. But she had the use of her body and he no longer did. It seemed he’d blown his brains out, poor man. Dear God, this whole place was
unearthly
. The spirit that had ruled it was
not human
. Could she torch it? Yes! It had betrayed her heart, had turned from a home to the lair of a monster. The faint smell of gasoline from the can heartened her. She set the can on the floor.

“Excuse my not knocking!” she shouted at all the shadowy rooms around her. “No, I’ll stay armed, thanks. I’m quite comfy with my shotgun and my automatic. I won’t be staying long. Neither will
you
, for that matter.” It felt good to mock the place aloud— keep it at a distance, keep it from becoming Home again. “Such a pity you’re too shy to come out and meet me!
You’re
not shy of shotguns? I mean, to judge by how you looked when we last met? And I’m sure you don’t mind if I drench the carpet in here with a bit of gas?” Picking up and waggling the can. “It smells bad, but not to worry, it’ll burn right out once I’ve lit the match.”

“You know I’m really disappointed in your cowardice, you just skulking around here, not daring to face me!” It had suddenly become much scarier to talk aloud and so her voice grew abruptly shriller. It had begun to seem that her voice, breaking into this silence, was wakening— oh so faintly!— echoes. Echoes of an impatient, heavy tread. Of a
come on down here to me now girl!
Putting her voice out into this air, which she had breathed from her life’s beginning, was to shake loose all the sounds that had stirred it back through the years. To speak here was to wake everything that had ever been spoken.

“Really disappointed!” she said even louder, her voice beginning to tremble. “Such a brave brute you were when you towered over a little girl! Where are you now, you piece of shit?”

Almost screamed, this last syllable… followed by silence… silence… and then— a sharp noise, from beyond the couch, from somewhere near the fireplace. Karen’s heart was falling, falling, though she stood like stone.

Eeeee… eeeee… eeeee
— a shrill noise of dry wood from the other side of the couch, moving towards her, closer and closer, something small moving with a decided will of its own… .

The brandy cannon trundled across the carpet on its wooden wheels, moving all alone, all by itself, its amber contents sloshing gently within its faceted sides. To see this happening was terror itself, but not the worst terror. The worst was the fact that
she
was
not
moving. Not until the cannon came to rest at her feet… then the worst was something new. She was bending over, and lifting the cannon, and holding it up to the light before her face. She did this without willing it, without wishing it, without being able to stop it.

Apparently, it was the incised design around the cannon’s neck— its
barrel
— that Karen was particularly concerned to study. At first she found the emblem to be just what she had found it to be before: a scaly dragon twisting around the crystal spout, a naked woman clamped in its hind claws, while her loins were plundered by the serpent’s loins, and her head and shoulders were engulfed. But now not by a dragon’s jaws, no, that had changed. For the monster had a
man’s
head now, though his jaws were monstrously large. Now it was this human maw that was swallowing the doubly-pillaged woman. And this monstrous man’s eyes… Did Karen
know
these eyes?

She raised the cannon’s spout to her lips and drank. Smacked her lips and cheerfully cried, “To the bride and groom!” Down in the oubliette of her body, Karen Fox wept and gnashed her teeth and screamed, while her body betrayed no sign of that anguish, but with perfect calm returned the cannon to the hearth and set it down on the mantel. “Love by moonlight among the trees,” she said. “A honeymoon, and then, eternal life!”

She stepped out into the full moon’s light and walked down the same central lane she had just taken in her truck, when she’d had a body to work her own will. Now she moved solemnly, sedately. Apparently, her captor’s mood had changed from what it had been on that first awful night. He did not mock her as he had in her first captivity, with that vile soliloquy and that antic movement of her body. On this night, a strange gravity replaced that hellish satire, although Karen writhed just as limbless, just as helpless, just as hopeless within her paralysis as she had that first time.

The dust beneath her muted her tread. Moonlight lay on not-quite-earthly trees. It felt as if her captor was himself… a stranger here, and moved as much in awe as she. She felt as though this rite, whatever it was to be, would change the very earth she walked upon and this moon, this sky would be themselves no longer when the ceremony was done.

The lane steepened downward. She shrugged off the shotgun and let it fall behind her. Still farther down she could see the shed’s embers and the moon’s milky pallor on the compost’s great black slug. She shrugged off the canvas coat, with its automatic. Paused to pull her shoes off next and, a bit farther down, her jeans and her sweater. The night’s cold nibbled her nipples hard. She stopped, some two hundred yards from the compost heap. Confronting its blackness naked caused a deep tectonic shift beneath her captive spine. An unspeakable thought stirred deep within her mind.

She
must stir. She must not tamely let this come to pass. When her possessor seated her upon the ground and began to lay her back upon the dust of the lane, she understood the pattern and posture intended for her: to lie back, hands behind her head, legs akimbo, voluptuously self-offered on the ground. As her body moved into its position, she desperately thrust her will against her moving muscles and, with huge effort, forced a tiny alteration, such that her broken hand was thrust an inch more deeply beneath her shoulder as she lay back upon the ground. This was all!

Above her, a few stars had sparkled to life within the flood of moonlight. Then, her eyes went to the compost heap at the foot of the lane she lay in. She heard the rip of tearing plastic and understood what she had not dared to understand. Now there existed, in all the world, two and only two places. There was, in a straight line a hundred meters from her, a puncture and a bulge in the plastic flank of the compost heap. A tenting of the plastic and wrinkles radiating from this small peak, wrinkles accentuated by the moonlight. There was this place and only one other place: where her cast-bound hand was wedged between her back and the earth. For in this cramped place, she
must
cause movement. Tears dimmed her eyes.

The plastic ruptured. Flabby black lips puckered out and black sludge vomited forth. Again the wound bulged, the rupture grew, and a more copious feculence slopped out, raising pale dust in the moonlight. Karen’s whole universe became a tiny fracture line in one of her carpal bones. Around its littleness she gathered her awareness, to find in the tissue surrounding it some pain, some absence of her captor’s will. There it was. Inside that minute pearl of pain was a shred of torn tissue, a mangled muscle-fiber. She could feel it twitch so faintly, unmastered by the Outsider… . And inside that damaged tissue was a slender muscle she could move and with the tiny movement, increase the pain!

More sludge extruded from the heap in ropy coils.The rupture lengthened and around one ragged rim, a pallid starfish thrust— a sinewy hand which gripped the plastic, pulled, and dragged a filth-crowned head out into the moonlight. It lifted its eyes to her— Wolf’s eyes, but soft as fungi and whitely luminous.

Another muscle fiber woke within her zone of pain. She tensed it, tore it, as the pain bloomed, her whole hand twitched within its cast and with that freedom she moved it with all her strength within the vise formed by her shoulder and the ground. A blessed bright crimson awoke her arm and galvanized her shoulder. Karen thrust the wounded arm out and hammered it against the ground. Pain like a lightning-bolt flashed through her frame and she wrenched her back away from the earth and struggled to her knees.

Wolf slithered from the black heap’s steaming cloaca. His lips and eyes and ears were fat glowing fungi, his sex a plague rod all furred with mold.

Again Karen hammered her cast on the earth, crying out in agony and triumph as she surged to her feet. Her legs, so stiff, so slow, but at last she turned and staggered away. Still, Wolf strode with a machine-like tread, devouring the distance faster than Karen could stumble. She seized up her jeans and dragged them on and staggered forward, desperate to reach her canvas coat, as she heard Wolf’s soggy tread grow louder at her back. Where was the coat? It should show dark against the pale sand of the lane. Her legs, still sodden,
would
not waken to a run…

There! A dark shape on the grass by the lane. She almost toppled bending for the automatic lying near the coat, but then straightened, the gun held two-handed.

It almost flung from her grip in her terror, as she fronted Wolf not two strides from seizing her, his face a seething moon aswarm with tomb-life, his tongue a forked black thing that strained for her as avid as his phallus.