Moon Regardless

by Nick Manzolillo

  The Caddie picks up speed as Hap notices those barbed wire fences entangled by the water. He spots Providence Water Supply, Do Not Trespass signs faded and yellowed, stuck across the fence and accompanying tree trunks.

  “Now I only see the ugliness they made it beneath that fucking glass surface.” Otis takes something away from Hap; the town suddenly seems smaller, severed, as they drive through three blocks of life.

  They pass a neon-ridden diner across from a McDonald’s and a soccer field. Cindy’s Diner flickers in old yellow atop a blue building, and it’s the kind of place he and Tiff would’ve swerved off the road to get breakfast.

  Pulling down a side road next to what looks to be an actual, bona fide video store next to a pizza shop, Otis again pushes his RPMs, and the abrupt curves of the road give more warning than a twenty-five-miles-per-hour sign. Hap flashes back to when his brother first got his driver’s license and how he would try to terrify Hap and his sister on the way to and from school. At one point, Otis glances at Hap for too long a moment with his eyes off the road, and Hap isn’t sure if he yelps out loud or if his terror stays in his head, but the old lunatic cackles anyhow.

  It’s not quite a house they pull up to, with the small paved parking lot stemming from its front walkway. A cutesy yellow picket fence distinguishes it as a place that’s meant to draw attention. It’s in the same sort of scattered neighborhood of country houses Otis lives on the fringe of. A sign stabbed into the ground and embroidered with fancy lettering announces Cidalia’s Breakfast Inn. Nobody else is here.

  “No veggie-tarian, are ya?” Otis tears his cap off and tosses it across his dashboard.

  “No,” Hap says.

  “Good, have ta kill ya.” It’s almost as if Otis is trying to joke with him. Hap’s stomach still shrivels up.

  Hap flinches as Otis reaches across his lap to open the glove box, pushing away a pack of playing cards; no, those gypsy things, tarot cards, before settling his fingers over a yellow pack of Mavericks. “Like prison, good currency,” Otis says. He taps the box in Hap’s face before springing out of the car, running a hand through his knotted hair and pulling his pants up.

  The old woman who greets them at the front door and immediately embraces Otis is a sudden source of comfort to which Hap wishes he could cling. When the woman smiles and says how it’s nice Otis is bringing a work friend along with him, Hap wants to hug her too. She takes the Mavericks Otis offers, stuffing them into a front pocket of her lace shirt. He wants this woman to be one of many who will fix things, who will tell him that Otis is a good but strange man, that Hap and he are going to tidy everything up, that the real, warm, and sane people of the world are rooting for them to bring down the cult of the Moon Shack. It’s when Cidalia puts a hand on Otis’s arm and follows him back into her inn that Hap realizes she’s blind.

  “Dear, is your shower working? Both you Parks Department boys are sure stinky, huh? But I suppose it is summertime; you can’t help but sweat out there.”

  She leads them to a wide room with just three circular dining tables. Each table has a pair of black and white salt and pepper shakers shaped like cats, which causes Hap to dip partially back into last night’s dreams. They are alone, and the other dining tables are so close to theirs that this seems less like an inn and more like a house a blind woman desperately wants to be an inn. Almost immediately, there’s a sizzling sound from a room or two over, as if Cidalia already had a pan heating on the stove before they arrived.

  “Used to sit me when I was a boy, with Mom and Uncle workin’.” Otis plays with the salt shakers, rubbing a greasy finger with a long nail over one of the cats’ heads. “There’s family we don’t know, family we make. As a Lusk, I am descended from rippers, I come to find. Who my father was, maybe the Moon Shack knows. Coincidence?” He shakes his head. “Don’t think Mom or I are privy to it.”

  “What do you mean, descended from rippers?” Hap asks. Otis is a code to crack.

  “Follow my family tree, according to wise folk I met over the sea, there a famous killer in my blood. I figure, you look back long enough, somebody in all our families have gone and killed somebody, some point, war or otherwise. We all alive; we all come from blood at some point. Makes me wonder ‘bout you, Mr. Shit-Hap. You really lost boy looking for lost girl?”

  The more Hap thinks about what he doesn’t want to think about, the less likely it seems he’ll just be able to go back to his apartment. Surely other people than Officer Dylan know of him and what was going to happen to him. They probably can’t trace his credit cards or his phone, if he still had it, but to return home? If the cult is what Otis paints them to be, then they will be watching, and they will come at some point. What about his family?

  “So, they are looking for me and you?”

  “‘Cept they know your name.” Otis grips both sides of the table, and his eyes seem like they used to be browner, but as if he’s been staring at the sun for too long, they’ve been bleached hazel. “They gone have evidence, a knife you never touched, a message fulla words you never said. With whatever it is they planning, building up for, I can’t know ‘em. They may do nothing. They see you, though. They do something interesting, for sure. Maybe they got cops ‘tween Connecticut and Mass, little peepers next to the buses and planes. Square state like this, got ye boxed in; maybe there’s something even lookin’ from the water they got in they employ.”

  “But my family in Pennsylvania, are they safe?” Hap asks.

  Otis smiles, and the reason why Hap can’t trust him is because of that right there: that fucking half-smile. Anything that Otis could say in response to a question like the one Hap just asked shouldn’t come with a smile.

  “People disappear, all sorts of reasons. They smart is why they usually leave children, American children, alone. You have big family?” Otis asks, and Hap nods. “They can be fine, but they gonna wanna know what you know. They’ll ask ‘em. If only we could see who’s askin’, do us some good.” Hap remembers what Otis said about him running back into Providence and how, after Hap is killed, he would follow the killers and do his eye thing with them. That doesn’t actually make any sense unless Otis is simple and brain damaged, which does still seem possible.

  “Why don’t you wait outside the Miskatonic and track the weirdos that come in and out? There are back doors everywhere. If it’s really like a temple, then you should have no problem picking them off. Hell, isn’t there, like, surveillance equipment anybody can buy off Amazon? Could get on a building across the street and snap pictures.” Another hotel called the Omni and connected to the Providence Place Mall would be perfect. Why didn’t Hap think of this?

  “Everywhere is what everywhere means. Downtown is a cage full of ‘em. They see me. They put it together. Moon Shack knows my dreams. All I know, there’s much I don’t. I get too close, Moon Shack knows my face, and they get me.”

  Cidalia returns with two heaping plates of bacon, scrambled eggs, and thick stacks of syrupy pancakes.

  “So, where you from? Don’t have much of the famous accent, far as these ears can tell, and they’re sharp as a knife, let me tell you.” Cidalia smiles, her pale eyes staring beyond Hap.

  “Oh, Belfast, Pennsylvania, closer to Pittsburgh than Philly.” The salty crispiness of the bacon throws a delicious veil over the traumatic memory of Otis stabbing into Officer Dylan. Like the warmth of his dreams, the faucet of saliva in Hap’s mouth and the ensuing satisfaction across his tongue free him.

  “Well, you won’t be here forever, I imagine. Otis left home for how long? Over fifteen years? Should have seen me back then; I didn’t need my cane.” Cidalia’s eyes have the faintest touch of color to them—she’s not completely blind after all. “What’s that thing, like a Frisbee?” Cidalia asks.

  “A boomerang?” Hap offers.

  “That’s right.” She grins; her teeth, those dentures, are white and straight; if Hap did
n’t have grandparents himself, he’d believe them to be real. “Throw you away, and you’ll come right back. Hopefully, before you start saying pahk the cah like a real New Englander.” Cidalia makes a little fist and swings her arm before grabbing a few scraggly tendrils of Otis’s beard. “You’re never going to meet a nice, pretty woman, you don’t relearn how to talk straight and shave that thing.”

  “Silliness, I know you. ‘Sides, there work to be done,” Otis says.

  “Oh you.” She pokes him under the table with her cane. “Hap, take this hermit out of his shell. Why, he tells me some of the postcards he sent from, where was it, Nepal? Had pictures of him and his girlfriend. He knows I can’t see it, and I’m still convinced he was trying to fool me. Can you believe it?”

  Otis studies Hap with his sunken eyes while he finishes his meal. The food’s not settling well in Hap’s stomach. After clearing his plate, Cidalia’s sad to see them go, and Hap wishes she could see him and how much he needs to be her adopted grandson and stay here in the woods and rest and cry and eat and never have to fear for his life again. Instead, he thanks her for the food before following Otis back into his murder-mobile.

  Near the center of town, Otis pulls up to a small white church no bigger than Otis’s house; there’s a cemetery behind it, bordering the reservoir. From the trunk, Otis retrieves a tin box with fancy cookies on the cover. No way there’s treats in there.

  There’s always a familiar last name in a graveyard, breaching the reality of death. Making a beeline off a loosely graveled path, Otis heads toward the woods at the edge of the cemetery. Beyond a prickly-wired fence is a shimmering portion of the reservoir. Otis falls to his hands and knees before a grave marker bearing the last name Sterling, which features a large circular stone covering a square cement block along the ground. Actually, it’s not a grave; it looks more like a sewer cap. Otis runs his hands along its sides, and he’s moving it, moaning—no, singing to himself, softly.

  “What are you doing?” Hap asks.

  “Nobody ‘round, right?”

  Otis is looking up, pushing aside the stone with ease. There is something glowing below. Hap scans the rows of slowly eroding tombstones and the graveyard entrance that’s overshadowed by the church with an empty parking lot. It’s a Sunday, isn’t it? There was a bigger church they passed just before Cindy’s Diner. Maybe that’s where the heaves of backwoods religious folks could be. This is an empty town.

  “‘Magine my surprise when I learned of graveyard scribes an’ found un in my own backyard, ah?” Otis rolls onto the ground and sticks his feet through the hole that’s just a few inches wider than his waist. There must be some sort of ladder within. Hap wonders what the hell a scribe is.

  “I’m not going down there,” Hap says.

  “Stay. You don’t follow, you don’t see, stay. Try an’ do something with nothing, hah.”

  All Hap can see is the Red Sox logo on Otis’s hat before he takes a step from the bottom rung of the ladder and disappears from sight. There is no stench, so maybe there is nothing dead in there. Follow the leader it is.

  The fresh earth brings a cool air that resurrects October. Once down in the little tunnel, Hap whispers for Otis to stop, but he’s a dozen feet ahead, hunched over and shuffling toward a wider room.

  “Mr. Lusk, Mr. Lusk, what do you bring us?” A man’s voice a few octaves too high echoes through the tunnel, and it’s immediately blotted out by Otis’s bark.

  “Hap, cover the hole! Move a stone, quick!”

  Hap can’t move for a moment due to the snarl rolling off Otis’s tongue. With jelly legs, he rushes back to the entrance, clambering partly up the dirt-clogged wooden stepladder. He prods at the edge of the circular stone with his fingers, and with one hand, he manages to drag the dead weight of the stone back over the entrance, sealing him in the darkness haunted by the glow of an inhabitant. The scribe?

  Not having to crouch as much as Otis, Hap follows the madman into a circular room that is, indeed, a tomb after all. Silver coffins form a pentagon, stacked and gleaming in each corner of the room. A chandelier swings above a dancing man who’s nearly all bones, covered in grey powder and wearing nothing but his underwear. The chandelier’s powered by some source of electricity, almost like this is a real place. There is a solitary chair in the center of the room; Hap can imagine this skinny man, with all his ribs ready for counting, just sitting in that old thing, among the six coffins. Or maybe he just dances down here in the dim light.

  The dancing man has the tin cookie box from Otis’s trunk clasped in both hands. “A boy? What’s inside?” The dancing one shrieks; he’s clearly crazier than Otis.

  “Maybe good intentions,” Otis replies, his hands hanging limply by his sides. This dancing freak must be cool, but didn’t Otis say he has no friends?

  “What is this?” Hap asks.

  “Appeasement for an appetite we will never dream of!” the dancing one says, rattling the cookie tin above his head. Something seems to clunk around inside.

  “This is good for you; lucky a lord’s day it is, much better than his office, this his real office,” Otis mutters, his eyes never leaving the half-naked man…no, that tin. Otis’s eyes never leave the tin. Hap isn’t going to ask what’s in there. It’s not cookies, that’s for sure.

  “Why are we here?” Hap asks.

  “Offering. The Moon Shack has enemies among the stars. Appetites, as Mr. Hanson says. I feed ‘em sight, from my doctorings, yeah?”

  Hap starts to think of missing eyeballs on murder victims, and he doesn’t have to wonder what was in that tin anymore…Dylan, the cop.

  “He’s here in this town, your town, and he knows everything? I thought you were alone?”

  “I think, while I sleep, that maybe my dad left my mom here for a reason. Don’ know him. I meet Hanson in Regensburg; I learn small places are full. Only eighth time he does this, ever, cause of me. He’s a man of books, till I show him my studies. He does not fear the Moon Shack, nor hate it, he just curious. Gives me, us maybe, a blessing, from the things the inhabitants of the Shack shiver at.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Some religions be made by man. Others, not. This one of ‘em. All sorts of worship, lookit the olden Greeks with Pan and horns an’ gods that make Christians invent the devil. Necessary evil.”

  Otis is shrugging away from Hap, travelling back down the tunnel and not casting a single glance back toward the dancing man. The twirling skeleton is mumbling gibberish words that make no sense even under Latin illumination.

  Otis peeps through a crack beneath the stone circle before mumbling to himself and sliding it free. Eighth time, he said. How many murders have there been? Five according to the news and including Officer Dylan, but have there been killings undiscovered and not reported?

  “Otis, this isn’t working for me,” Hap says, as the man slides the stone sphere back into place. “You’re fucking with my head when what we need to be doing is getting some kind of evidence. I mean, no way the Moon Shack and the Miskatonic reach the FBI or even all of Rhode Island, right?”

  “Not noon yet.” Otis ignores the question, lurching back toward the cemetery path. He saved Hap, right? That should count for something. But what the fuck did he just show him down there? This is not forward progress; these are two camps of lunatics. Who’s going to save Hap when Otis has a knife to his back…or eye sockets?

  “When are we going to figure things out?” Hap asks.

  Otis snorts and comes to a stop by a slab of stone with angels’ wings engraved beside a name. “Well, we start fine and quick, soon as you spit out the name of every Miskatonic man an’ woman you met.” Otis smirks, showing off a glimmer of his yellow teeth. Hap could kill him.

  Chapter 14: The Abductors

  Augustine, growing bored, runs a hand along the walls outside of Paul’s apartment as she saunters over to
the front door. One of the owners of the building is a citizen, and he gave her a key without the need for an explanation. At first, she thought Johan was playing another game with her when he said Paul was going to be the new face of the organization. She tries to keep her nose out of the citizens’ business, with their mottos and rituals, but even without lying to herself over who they really are, she can’t imagine her career ever taking her someplace else. Where to, after visiting Narnia?

  She enjoys their unapologetic devotion for the same reasons Paul must. Nobody throws a better, more primal party than the freaks. Nobody treats you better than a weirdo does. She knew Paul before Johan suggested his importance, but before that, he was just another guy who was all talk with no game in bed. During that act, months ago, Paul wasn’t even thinking of her. She was sure of it, so she had to do the same, and all she really remembered about him was how painfully old he was. Now, though, she sees a lick of it: the importance Johan always talks about. Paul does have something bright and shiny behind his eyes and around the corner of his smile, but it’s nothing new, nothing dangerous. A relic. It’s an old light that makes her remember the first boy she ever kissed, when her mother bought her a dress she had ogled in a magazine, and when the lights went off, and the stage lit up at her first fashion runway. She remembers leaving her first interview, excited, crying, shaking her resume folder in her hands because she was going to be in charge one day; she was going to have people want to be her!

  The idea to ambush him came to her on a whim. It was a trick she’d pulled on an old boyfriend before she became a purple woman of the Shack. Of course, his apartment cost half the price of Paul’s and had a fire escape to climb up instead of a superintendent’s strings to be pulled, but it worked. In a few minutes, Paul will walk into his apartment, and she will jump onto his back. She will turn his panic into something fresh because now that she sees that special glow to him, it’ll be like travelling to the past and reliving a greatest hit of sorts. She will feel all she has forgotten as she enters ecstasy. And if Paul already has a girl with him, then surely she’ll be the sort that is willing to join in on the fun.