Moon Regardless

by Nick Manzolillo

  The car twists once more before the tall man pulls into the short gravel driveway of a single-story home with peeling paint and black windows that remind Hap of the haunted house on Federal Hill. Oddly, there’s a candy cane Christmas decoration glowing in the front window.

  The Eye Doctor kills the ignition and leaps out of the car, crunch-crunching on the gravel over to Hap’s side. He’s hauled out of his seat and tossed onto the gravel as The Eye Doctor pats his handcuffed wrists behind his back. Hap looks up, trying to avoid gravel going up his nose. The stars out here, funneling along the Milky Way, would be breathtaking under different circumstances. The Eye Doctor trots toward the house, creaking up a front stoop. Immediately, a lamp beside the front door comes to life, and the tall man claps giddily before dragging Hap into his lair.

  The house stinks worse than piss, and it’s dusty, but it’s a home—small, but arguably livelier than Hap’s current apartment. Christmas lights hang dead along the walls. In the corner of a living room inhabited by a couch full of wool blankets and a coffee table stacked with junk, there stands an artificial Christmas tree with a toy train track encircling it. More than junk, the coffee table is cluttered with books, scraps of paper, and what look like stacks of loose-leaf filled with crude handwriting and drawings, all of which is weighed down by several knives and a hammer. The Eye Doctor ushers Hap toward the couch.

  “Tell me about your girl.” The Eye Doctor has his knife out as Hap takes a seat. There are knives on the coffee table. These potentially deadly weapons are closer to him than to the tall man, but considering how shit Hap’s luck has been, it’s useless to make a move for them.

  The Eye Doctor’s eyes are more sunken than Hap could make out in the night’s shadows, and his beard is even more mismatched than it first appeared. The killer reaches up to his face and tugs at his beard, explaining the patches along his jaw. This neurotic tic seems to confirm Hap’s worst fears about this guy’s sanity.

  “My girlfriend,” Hap says, “Tiffany, she disappeared at the Miskatonic hotel where she was working. Nobody’s done anything.”

  “Was she cleaning? A maid?” The Eye Doctor asks. There’s a small kitchen table near a stove and a sink just behind the living room. The Eye Doctor pulls over a chair, sits in it backwards, and rests his beard on his arms. His pupils are massive in the light; is he doped up on something?

  “No, just working an event,” Hap says.

  “School girl?” Otis asks.

  “Yeah, we were about to grad—”

  The tall man flings the chair into the coffee table, scattering papers and tools. He points his knife directly at Hap.

  “I’m stupid? American school girl? Nah, not them. They’re not stupid, and I’m not stupid. They chose you wrong, little lyin’ killer.” The Eye Doctor pulls Hap up by his hair, exposing his throat to the awaiting blade.

  “They took her, and she’s gone!” Hap pleads. “Where is she?” he yells, as the killer begins to dig the knife into his throat.

  “In your lies!” The Eye Doctor screams into Hap’s ear loud enough to leave behind a faint ringing.

  “Did you kill her? You fucking animal, you piece of shit murderer!” Hap’s throat stings. He’d do anything to make this man hurt and cry and moan and beg. He’s tossed back against the couch, his hands immediately rising to his throat, feeling for a massive slit that turns out to only be a scratch. The Eye Doctor tilts his head and screams into the ceiling, kicking a knife on the floor across the room and into the Christmas tree.

  “The Moon Shack is for man. I can’t trust man. I can’t trust you!” The Eye Doctor points the knife at Hap, causing him to cower into the couch. The Eye Doctor lowers his weapon, pressing the blade to his lips as his sunken eyes narrow.

  “What is the Moon Shack?” Hap sobs.

  “Harbor.” The Eye Doctor rushes to Hap’s side and leans over him, the knife arced down, ready to stab. “For killers who slaughter out of desire.”

  “Like you?” Hap doesn’t understand. Didn’t this guy just confess to being The Eye Doctor killer in the car? The tall man howls and throws his knife against a wall, grabs Hap by the ankle, and pulls him across the couch, bashing a fist against his eye, once, twice; Hap can’t stop sobbing in chest-tightening gasps. This lunatic is going to kill him.

  “It calls to me when I shut my eyes. I don’t sleep without the dream. The door’s opening for me as I walk without wantin’ to walk. One day, I will wake and find it to be real. One day I may stop running, the dream shack. I’ll turn around and head inside. You don’t know about the Moon Shack? Your hands are spotless, bloodless. You want to know what’s inside?” Hap doesn’t respond. His tears make the throbbing spots along his cheekbone and forehead worse. “It’s full of burning stars, and they talk and tell you about the moon and how bright she is, how she lets the dark in, like a door. The dream speaks for it. Other men, with my knife to their head, they tell me elsewise. They tell me inside is one big party for blood spillers. Well, the party’s gonna end soon. I’m gonna burn it down.” The Eye Doctor’s voice grows distant. He’s back on his feet, moving toward the kitchen. Hap wipes his face along the couch before sitting up. His eyes feel like they’re swelling shut. He’s starting to get used to maneuvering with handcuffs behind his back.

  The killer pulls open the fridge, taking out a slice of cake on a plate and an unlabeled bottle of what appears to be Dirty Look brand whiskey with the label scraped off. Above the refrigerator door, a black ceramic cat sits perched, watching over the kitchen. The Eye Doctor returns to Hap and places the food and drink on the opposite corner of the couch before righting the coffee table, kicking at some papers scattered across the floor. “I can’t trust no one. You no killer, though. They have some who are clean from blood-spill, but not treachery. You a boy; how old?”

  “Twenty-two,” Hap says with hesitation. His face had only just started feeling better after the incident with the deer a couple of days ago.

  “Young, not a puppeteer. Just a mad Arab. Eat. You have seen nothing worth taking. You live.”

  Does that mean the interrogation is over? The Eye Doctor gestures toward the paltry meal. The cake looks new, store bought. Even if his hands weren’t still bound behind his back, Hap doesn’t think he could stomach anything.

  The Eye Doctor looks away for a moment before turning back to Hap. He tugs at his beard and says, “My name is Otis Lusk.”

  “My hands are still cuffed,” Hap shrugs. Immediately, Otis runs out of the house, leaving the front door open behind him. Hap hears a garage door being heaved open with a metallic whine, and a second later, Otis returns with a pair of bolt cutters. Hap tells Otis his name before the clippers dig under the bracelet around his wrist.

  Otis pauses, lifting his stinking beard to Hap’s face. “Hap? Shit happens? Are you a joke?” The serial killer who takes people’s eyes laughs and snips Hap’s other handcuff off. “Call ya self Shit Happens, the mad Arab.”

  “I’m actually Indian.” Hap instantly regrets his mocking tone, but for Christ’s sake, the kind of racist, kind of joking around kids at his old high school weren’t half as bad. Otis pays no mind as he repositions the kitchen chair, heads past the massive 90s-style television opposite the Christmas tree, and rights the coffee table. Then he kicks his boots off, scattering more scrawled papers across the floor as he reveals horribly rancid feet with overgrown toenails.

  “When did you last see the girl?”

  “Almost two months ago.” Hap doesn’t mention that it’s been exactly fifty-four days because he’s been trying to forget the exact number every morning he wakes up. Otis pushes the liquor bottle Hap’s way, and Hap shakes his head.

  “It’s raw then. When they’ve taken from you, that’s when you start hearing things. The old things, whispering. Telling you what the world is really about. You from India?” Otis asks.

  “I’m from Pennsylvania,”
Hap says.

  Otis snorts. “No goddess Kali of death? Hah. No vengeance for girl? You’re playing Miskatonic boy, snooping around. You know anything?”

  It’s hard to follow the way Otis talks, but Hap is getting the gist of it. He mentioned his mother and Hap shouldn’t bring that up if only to avoid getting beaten again. How did she disappear? How long ago? He needs to be careful. “The cops are in on it?” Hap asks.

  “Everybody they need is theirs. Providence is infested worse than most cities, and I have been to many: Athens, Cairo, Orleans; nothing on Providence. Boy in blue tonight? They make him do anything long as he has people he loving, whether he wants to or not. Sooner or later, Moon Shack will call and if he answers? Stops a heartbeat? They grow.”

  “The Moon Shack.” Hap tries the name out loud. It doesn’t sound that threatening. Whatever Otis has been through has fucked him up in the head. Nothing he says is clear. “What’s it have to do with the Miskatonic? Is the Shack the Miskatonic, like a code?”

  Otis’s first reply is a snort.

  “Hotel is a temple for a handmade god, out with the old, in with the new. Citizens Under New Testament, they like sayin’ they is. Cunts, I reply.” Otis’s laughter is rich and full, pouring from the center of his belly, and this goes on until he unscrews the bottle sloppily with his palm, ushering in a silence save for his gulps. When he’s finished, he holds the bottle Hap’s way, and Hap again refuses. The booze is one thing, but where would a man like this get a chocolate cake? It looks good but, no, now is not the time for food. Otis could still slit his throat at any moment.

  “You live here alone?” Hap asks.

  “Me and mother’s footsteps you hear go creek-creek time to time when her spirit remembers me.” Otis leans forward, plopping the bottle onto the counter as his eyes grow wide, filling the sunken depths of his skull. He’s looking beyond Hap, his eyes flickering to the corners of the room. “Her voice echoes from right here time to time when I lie in bed. I smell her cookings, too.” He’s losing it again; the knives are still too close to his reach on the floor. What’s the right question to snap Otis out of it?

  “Never too early for Christmas, huh?” Hap says, and Otis chuckles; score. Making a cop laugh is easy, however crooked that poor rotten bastard turned out to be, but this lunatic? How can Hap get Otis to like him enough not to murder him? Otis’s laugh becomes a lonesome wail as he tilts his head to the ceiling and howls.

  Hand shaking as he tugs at his beard, Otis says, “Was supposed to take them down together, after New Year’s.” He’s getting more emotional, more dangerous. “I’m told she wasn’t there, making beds that night. She called out sick, they say. But I say, where her uniform? Why she take her uniform? All I had was talk of spirits in my memory and one little clue.” Otis shrugs and bends over to pick up something. Hap is shrinking back into the couch, eyeing the door. Can he make it? Can he outrun this fuck?

  Otis has his fists full of the scrawled up notebook paper, and he’s dropping to a knee, frantically scooping up the scraps from the ground. “I was more boy than you when they locked me up the Butler.” Otis giggles. Butler is a mental hospital in Providence that Tiffany told him one of her high school friends had visited while battling an eating disorder. “Uncle eventually helped. All he ever did.” Otis looks up from his paper gathering and bites his lip, staring out the window. From elsewhere in the summer night, a motorcycle rumbles down a lonely back road. “I go everywhere, and I study. Everywhere. Hot, cold, boggy, I learn their words on other continents, forget our own.” Otis giggles and stacks his mess of papers up on the coffee table, pushing them toward Hap. “Still hard to remember words, know too many. Some things I think in Arabic, others Greek. Latin, always in my ears. English speaking not meant for things unknown.”

  The papers are snatched away from Hap before he can make out the scribbles, which are at least orderly enough to stay in between the lines. Why would Otis rip these out of an organized notebook? Otis thumbs through his “notes” and then smacks down something too familiar for Hap to digest. A drawing of the seven-pointed star and its spiral of descending celestial circles. Beneath, mostly legible is the word crops, followed by little arrows to Wiltshire, Eng. Donabree, Braz. California and an assortment of other names of what must be places. Crops as in corn?

  “I’ve seen that three times now. All over Providence.” Hap sneers at the symbol, looking up to Otis. The Eye Doctor’s functional. He’s been doing this for a long time, if his mom really was taken when he was a boy. What else has he been doing all of these years?

  “First I saw, it was cut into farmers’ crops. Aliens, people want to believe.” Otis shakes his head, walking over to the fake Christmas tree where an ornament has fallen. “A way of communicating. Flag raised. Aliens—no, just man.” Otis chuckles again, re-hanging what looks to be a little toy firetruck on a plastic branch. “Not an old symbol. Not in any book.”

  “So they kill people for fun, or like sacrifices? They….” Hap realizes what he’s just said. Information opens doors, but there’s a flood of water behind them; he’s got to stick his head up; he’s got to breathe. A woman like Otis’s mother doesn’t just go missing for decades; she is dead.

  Tiffany, dead. That’s all but confirmed. Killers and a cult, and her. What are the odds they hurt her? What are the odds they didn’t? “Do you hear them?” Otis’s face is nearly pressing against his. “Do they whisper to you too?” Hap’s arms are writhing snakes, shoving out on their own accord, pushing Otis away as he’s leaping from the couch. His throat is cracked and stinging, and his armpits are flooding.

  “Do you think they…? What do you think…?” Does Hap want to know? “What did they do to Tiff?” he asks. His face collapses. The tears come, encased in the hysteria that stretches down his lungs and rattles his stomach like a coiling spool of barbed wire.

  “Have you not been paying attention? Tell me, detective, what you think they did to her?” Otis says.

  “Fuck you!” Does Hap run outside? Where would he go? The woods are dark and the roads winding, but it’s summer; it’s still warm. He doesn’t need to be here; if only Otis would let him go….

  The madman’s bending over, picking up one of the knives—a little shank without a handle. Otis lifts his worn and sweat-stained sweater, and his skin is a map, carved from ink and scars. He trails his knife along an overdose of ominous symbols, each one a token of pain from (probably unwashed) needles. There are skulls, flying worms with bat wings and eyes, clusters of eyeballs looking out through faded ink. The scars do not coexist with the drawings; they are invaders with no purpose, a testament to the strength of Otis’s victims. There’s a fresh, oozing scratch across his chest, and Hap imagines a young girl with long nails doing the damage. “You follow the clues. You get raw; you heal, become more; you repeat. I have had friends, lovers, full of wisdom. The Moon Shack is young compared to the great old ones. I have nothing now. I come back home. I am the great worm Ouroboros; I will eat myself, soon. The Moon Shack will be empty, abandoned, boarded up, burned.” Otis’s eyes are separate from his body; they’re living, squirming things entrapped in those craters below his eyebrows.

  Hap walks out the front door because his shivering has become unbearable. He keeps waiting for the cold knife to dig into his back, but it doesn’t come, as the still air seems to press him further into a plastic bag. Hap stops at the edge of the front door’s light, just beyond the strip of dirt serving as a driveway. He tries to focus on the song of the crickets and mosquitoes. Out of Hap’s imagination, he sees Tiffany, crying, choking, whimpering, and then going still, while some leering lunatic wearing an animal’s face thrusts himself inside her and throws a peace sign to the moon, the two moons that have gone by now while Hap has patiently waited for her to turn up. This is what always happens. There is always a skinny blonde girl filled with all the love in the world, and she is likely raped, choked, and killed in the dark. Any ot
her outcome is a fucking fairy tale.

  Hap is on his knees, and things are creeping along the crackling underbrush of the forest. The thought of being swallowed up seems cozy. He’ll be a part of something, he…. Hap looks up at the stars, and those are eyes looking down on him, begging him to give them a show. They deserve to be torn to the earth and stomped until their glow bursts into chunks of glass.

  “If you’re leavin’, let me follow. After they kill you, I’ll follow the killers. I’ll get more of them. Then I’ll see what they see,” Otis says, sitting on the porch, carving something into the wooden paneling on the side of his house; it’s the symbol of that five-limbed stick.

  “Why don’t you just burn that fucking place down?” Hap looks over his shoulder, realizing he’s kneeling in the dirt. He wants a dark room, a bed. He wants to cry harder. Maybe he can get everything out of him. What the hell was Tiff anyway? A bed partner? Somebody to fill the passenger seat of his car? A mother to his future children? What is that warmth, that ache? The idea of a life partner is ludicrous.

  “I’ve started many fires. They rebuild and repopulate. You cannot take the killer out of man, but you can make him homeless, alone. Sum of one, never superior to the many.” If Otis is seeking revenge, he seems restrained, even for the knife-wielding, voices-hearing murderer Hap knows him to be. He’s smarter than he sounds, he’s careful, and he thinks out every big move he makes.

  Hap finds his way to his feet, swaying as if he’s drunk. The shakes still have him. “They took your mom when you were a kid? How’s it taken you this long?”

  This time, Otis doesn’t show any reaction to the mention of his mother. “All alone,” he says. “Minus me, you know nothing. You’d be dead. Takes time to learn. You get to cheat cause I’ll tell ya all I know, save you time.” Otis gestures at him. “Ya youth, ya get.” He chuckles, holding the tip of his blade to his teeth. “No reflexes, though. Arms limp, four miles an hour, tops, your legs…useless,” Otis says, as if Hap really needs to know how weak he is.