Otis backs away, leaning out of the bathroom to throw his knife across the living room with a metallic crash.
“Aw,” Augustine giggles. “Did somebody take your girlfriend? I probably watched her get fucked. We take names, though, we give them, and there’s nothing I like better than dying hair, ‘specially if it’s all sticky with blood.”
“Fuck you, fuck you.” Hap can’t think of a threat, only the intention of scaring her into telling him where Tiff is. “Fuck,” he mentions again. He wants a knife to show it to her, although he could never touch her with it.
Otis returns with a plate of mostly untouched chocolate cake. “Here ya are.” He puts it on the sink out of Augustine’s reach. “Ya want it when ya hungry enough. Maybe you get it.” Otis puts a hand on Hap’s shoulder but, no, not yet—he’s gotten nothing about Tiff, just some starry church full of cult bullshit.
“You’re gonna get hurt; you’re gonna die. Where is she? What do you do?” Hap asks aimlessly, and he’s trying not to cry. He has to ask questions; he has to get her to talk.
“You worked there, huh? You….” Augustine’s laughing again to herself, “You sneaky snoop, you were looking for her at the Miskatonic? A regular detective. Try somebody’s belly; inspect everybody’s teeth for bits of her hair. Check all the bathrooms; maybe a pair of strapping boys with dicks twice the size of yours have shacked her up like you two have me. She’s probably been handcuffed to a bathroom radiator, listening to you hoof bags down the hallway. How about it?”
Otis is pulling Hap’s shoulder, leading him out of the bathroom as he slams the little door behind them. Hap can’t cry anymore. There’s a tingling sensation coming from behind his eyelids; he can’t stop his hands from clenching, forming fists.
“There is a church I know. We shall pray and pry, and we come back and—sorry for the world, sorry for our souls—hurt her more and inchy inch ourselves toward knowing what we gotta know, to maybe save the people who are not her.” A cat brushes by Hap’s ankles, softly purring, and there is a heavy quiet from the thing in the bathroom.
“Need rest?” Otis asks as if that’s possible after what they just did. Hap shakes his head, feeling the urge to pee instead. He stares at the bathroom door, and, yeah, he’ll take a leak outside.
Chapter 15: The Thing Who Sits, Smiles, and Rots
Parked outside of a boarded-up Providence church, Otis rambles on and on. “His fear made him tremble; mine had me doing something else. They were there, in a hole, whispering, almost like they saying my name. We had followed the drums like the piper pied, diddling his flute to steal the children. Old broken places sometime see more people than the new. Things live in cracks, ya see, in between; then ya have folks celebrating them ones moving about the muck of a bay, celebrating with they music, parades an dances, like ol’ Mr. Hanson. Church’s propped up, and what can ye say to they who worship tha’ deathless?”
Hap can only listen to so much, but from what he can interpret, there is another cult in addition to the citizens of the Moon Shack. There are other pagan sects worshipping strange gods that the Miskatonic cult hates. Otis can’t begin to describe these weird gods, which causes Hap to wonder if that means they’re more complicated than this Moon Shack shit. The idea that there’s somehow a worse cult than the Moon Shack carries with it more hopelessness than Hap is willing to tolerate.
Augustine said they would find hope here. They were forced to drive down a wonky series of side streets to avoid passing the Miskatonic, which acts as a prime spot hogging the nexus of Providence’s limited roads. Johnson and Wales University is hardly six blocks away. Across from the church’s thick doors, there’s a long row of parked cars with their meters interchangeably flashing red and green. On a street corner beside a brick building with dark windows, it’s less of a crumbly castle of belief than Hap imagined. Instead, it’s compressed, its walls mummified and warped as if its foundation is coated in some strange preservative.
He raises his camera and snaps a picture of the church, forgoing all instinct to set up his shot. The church’s spire, needling up into the eye of the sky, doesn’t feature a cross like every other Christian house of worship. As if Otis’s nonsense is slowly becoming fact, on both of the church’s doors, there is the same five-limbed branch that’s been stabbed into Hap’s arm. The Elder sign.
Hap can see the familiar rooftop of the Miskatonic peeking from between a row of buildings and city hall in the distance. Otis turns in almost a full circle in his seat, squinting his crater eyes at every parked car along their row. He’s looking for watchers, but how could he even tell them apart from, say, the beefy looking Hispanic dude coming around the corner of the church?
“How do we get in?” Hap asks.
“Find a loose spot and push ‘er kick.” Otis gives one last long look down the road before creaking open his door. Hap follows, wanting to crouch. It’s hard to believe an hour or so ago, they left the city with a woman in their trunk. Between dancing creeps in crypts and Otis’s knife disappearing in and out of Officer Dylan, will Hap be clawing his own eyes out by nightfall? Augustine said they would find hope here.
They casually disappear down the side alley between the church and the empty brick building with windows so black Hap wants to smash them just to see if anyone’s hiding behind them. Picking their way through weeds, Hap is surprised to find beetles and even a few bees fluttering around the overgrowth, desperately looking for wildflowers. Where do the bugs come from? How do they creep into a little alley like this, surrounded by miles of concrete and asphalt?
Otis trails a hand along the cement of the outer wall, prodding his fingers into yellowed moss. There’s graffiti behind it, long, snaking green tendrils intermixed with streaks of red. The artist’s tagging of their name is more symbols than words.
Otis chooses a blank spot along the fading brown of the wall and presses his ear against the cement as if he could hear anything from inside. Hap wonders where he hides the knife or two he surely has on him; the pockets of the killer’s jeans seem shallow. They must be under his sleeves, tucked along his wrists. Otis is like a grease-monkey mechanic, and a two-bit, sleight-of-hand magician all rolled into one homicidal lunatic. Otis crouches down, pulling aside clumps of yellowed grass, and there’s a blackened basement window so sunken into the earth that the ground has begun to swallow up the glass. With a sharp kiss of his boot, Otis kicks in the window. There’s a tink from the glass and a gasp of air as if the church itself is taking its first breath in years.
Swishing his foot in a circle, Otis knocks away the remaining chunks of glass before crawling onto his hands and knees. He pulls a little tube of a flashlight from his back pocket, shines it into the thick black ahead, shrugs once, and then sticks his head through the window. Hap imagines the window’s glass suddenly reforming and slicing off Otis’s head. If only he had his damn phone; he hasn’t used a flashlight since he was a little kid exploring his backyard in the dark with his big brother Darren. He doubts Otis has a second flashlight; he should just stay outside…unless Tiff is down there.
Otis is muttering to himself as he slips through the opening, sticking his arms out straight and rotating his shoulders so he can fit. There’s a wet plop from within when Otis disappears inside, and it’s Hap’s turn, isn’t it? He already crawled through that tomb in the cemetery; what’s a little old church? The sun’s leaving. Will he be alive to witness its return tomorrow? He could just stay out here and watch it melt away.
Otis’s face with a flashlight under his chin illuminates the black of the window, resembling a portrait of a coal miner. “Comin’?” Otis asks. Despite being fearless enough to abduct and murder, it sounds like he doesn’t want to go any farther into the dark without Hap by his side. How much of Otis’s life has he spent alone? How many other allies has he driven away? How many has he killed? Hap grimaces at the touches of dirt and grease pooling along Otis’s face like war paint. Hap�
�s already got the tattoo; he’s part of Otis’s tribe. Give Hap a couple of months, and he’ll have a beard too. Who knows; maybe he’ll be talking gibberish soon enough.
“Do I need to?” Hap remembers the bodies tucked into that crawlspace at the abandoned veterinarian clinic. He’s lying to himself if he doesn’t think, doesn’t know, that there are dead things in this church. What if, by hope, Augustine meant she was giving him Tiff in an attempt to crush him? What if this is finally it? He doesn’t need to see that. He takes back all those ideas of seeing her again if she’s dead. He has his camera, all those pictures of her from the great before. He could just look at those instead and kill every part of him that isn’t memory.
“I go alone, it easy for me not to come back. Up here, too,” Otis taps his forehead. “Need ya.” He whispers those last words.
Hap sighs and falls to his knees, holding the camera close to his chest as he crawls toward the old mouth of a broken window. Will it spit him back out or swallow him forever?
With his arm burning from his crawl into the dark, Hap is forced to grip the back of Otis’s shirt as he swings his flashlight around a sparse, muddy basement full of broken tables and stacked chairs. A couple of life-size Jesus statues are propped beside the busted window and its trail of glass. Symbolism aside, Jesus on the cross is a dying body nailed to a piece of wood. Where does the line between religion and insanity begin?
Hap could use his camera’s flash, couldn’t he? His light soon engulfs Otis’s, and the room is little more than a storage closet. The walls seemed farther apart in the dark. There’s a drift and a whisper, almost like wind. The whisper becomes a faint whistle, and the stillness is comforting. Even Otis takes a moment to hold his breath and see if anything else is alive in here.
“What are you expecting?” Hap whispers and regrets asking immediately. Otis’s madness will take on new life here in the dark. Whatever he talks about, whatever impossibility he hints at, it’s all real here, like telling ghost stories while camping in the woods.
“Hope,” Otis mutters gravely before pulling open a rusted sheet of a door. The ensuing screech of metal sets off a number of skittering noises that seem to echo from every corner of the building. Rats, surely. Otis stumbles, and Hap’s stomach instantly starts hurting as he regains his balance.
“Do you have an extra, uh, knife?” As soon as Hap asks, Otis whisks around, pulling a knife the size of Hap’s middle finger from his boot. He offers it to Hap blade first so that he has to pluck it with his fingers to avoid getting nicked. Otis ignores his reply of “Thanks.”
“Let me see.” Otis turns and grabs Hap’s camera from his hands, pulling his neck along with it. Hap curses and gives it up as Otis exchanges his penlight. Those things moving around...rats? But don’t rats squeak? No, no, they can be silent. They have to be; they must be. There are only rats here, Hap begs to himself.
Is “catacombs” the word for it? What may be coffins line the walls, and carvings are etched into the ovular passage around them. The carvings seem to resemble gargoyle faces, and some have wings seeming to sprout from their heads. The chamber slopes down probably another ten steps’ worth, as Hap and Otis follow it to a barricaded door with a familiar symbol.
Whole tree trunks have been stacked and bolted over the entrance to a room that can only hold bad things. Under Otis’s flashlight beam, the dust along the wood blocks becomes alive and wriggling in the air. Carved over four trunks of wood is that damned symbol of the star and its swirling vortex of planets. On the wood blocking the door in black graffiti are the scraggly words Elder = Swine, which makes no sense unless it’s to mock the symbol bleeding into Hap and Otis’s wrists.
“Couple heaves, we good.” Otis rubs his hands over one of the old beams and pulls, groaning, expecting it to be as sturdy as it looks, bolted to the wall. With a pop that sounds like the accumulative burst of every twig Hap has ever stepped on, the beam snaps and a mess of skittering, black bugs gush out of the hollowed wood. Otis yells, crawling crab-like backwards, his knife never leaving his hand. The camera’s beam of light dances wildly. The bugs, termites or roaches of some sort are vanishing into the blackness as Otis regains his footing, cursing to himself. He lashes out with his foot and kicks through the other twin beams. For the sake of Hap’s jumpiness, only a smaller number of the black insects scurry free from the Styrofoam-like burst of the wood. “Citizens afraid of here,” Otis says, and Hap can’t tell if that’s a good thing or not.
Otis hesitantly reaches his hand to the door without a handle, lightly pressing his fingers to the rust. The bolts in the stone line the frame of the door, still holding small chunks of the devoured wood in place. “Ready to run,” Otis mutters before pushing into the room beyond.
In the center of the circular room, there is a well. Black candles, unlit, circle the rim of the hole in the earth, here in a church’s basement. Around them, the hieroglyphs carved into the walls form a frenzy of dizzying images and illegibly curved words. Hap lets Otis walk ahead to peer into the well in the center of the room. When he sticks Hap’s camera into the lower pit, he can’t help but tell Otis to watch it. At Hap’s words, more things scurry around them, fleeing to the cracks etched amongst the hieroglyphs. Otis mentioned, during his babbling earlier, something about things living in walls, in between the real places.
Otis picks up a stone and tosses it into the well, lowering his ear to the hole. “Water,” he mutters after a few seconds. “People I met, overseas an’ in lower America, they think mister Roger Williams found somethin’ beneath the city. Lies, I’m sure. Can’t all be true. Hole runs deep, though. Plays they imagination, same as ours. You see Prospect Park? Statue? It lines with the moon, worshippin’ it.”
“I have seen it,” Hap says, remembering pieces of his drunken delirium that night he hit the deer and trashed the hill house. “The water fires, they have anything to do with the cult?”
Otis chuckles and turns away from the well in a rush as if he’s afraid something may drag him down into the unknowable depths. “Worshippers here is the reason man built the church, to hide they people in. They know some stars have appetites.” Hap thinks Otis is trying to say the people who built this mock church had a religion they were ashamed of, which is funny, because wasn’t Providence built as a city to embrace all faith?
There is something along the wall, along both walls, lined up with the well. Are those bells? Hap points them out, and Otis’s smirk fades. “Rituals, two things every un needs, candles, a whistle, bells. Let’s go. Don’ think ‘bout touchin’ ‘em.” He grabs Hap’s shoulder and steers him toward the busted entranceway.
Ascending to the upper floors of the church, they come through a pair of double doors leading to a familiar room of worship, if only in the shadow of memory. Rows of pews and ghostly, cobweb-covered candles on poles cluster around an empty, coffin-like altar. The altar’s surrounded by disgusting statues that…wait…they are familiar carvings. That totem Tiff had…there are similar statues the size of large dogs scattered about the room. Perverted images, creatures twisted into mutants, monsters. There are things with wings and tendrils pouring out of their many-eyed heads, hunched over with twisting limbs that end in talons.
Aside from being larger, they are made of cement or some kind of sculpting clay, unlike the near obsidian stone that was Tiff’s totem. The ugly statues are surrounded by chunks of their crumbled brethren, scattered in heaps of mangled appendages. Pews are overturned. There is glass and graffiti tossed over everything as if there were a sudden snowfall of the stuff. Graffiti proclaiming “Fuck” and “Elder,” along with other illegible profanity, blackens the church’s insides like ash.
There is actual ash in the center of an aisle, a stack of it framed by the remnant bindings of textbooks. Otis crouches by it, picking up a charred page containing an inky red drawing of the same kind of ugly abomination as the sculptures. “Burnin’s of the forbidden texts. Good
and bad. Good ‘cause wrong people won’t know what they need to know to be wicked. Bad ‘cause knowin’ is only tool we got ‘gainst the Shack.”
Hap’s little penlight comes across a torn-up banner on the floor. Its symbol is that of the Elder sign, stuck across his wrist.
“What the fuck is this?”
“What tha’ Moon Shack is so afraid of.” Otis tilts his head, and there are faint tears in his eyes as he pats a hand over a statue of a spidery thing with goats’ hooves and worms for a spine. “Allies….” He laughs in a way that could mean he’s on the verge of crying. “…hope.”
Chapter 16: The Man Upstairs
Otis pulls into a random side street next to a liquor store. The arms of a tree that has grown too fat to be rooted into the sidewalk scrapes against the Caddie’s roof. Otis hums to himself, tugs at his beard, and repeatedly retightens his grip on the steering wheel. “Tell me again,” he says, after a few moments, too many passes while Hap fidgets in his seat, matching Otis’s twisting of his facial hair. With a great sigh, Hap repeats himself. He mentions the horrible totem Tiff brought home from the Miskatonic and how it looked eerily similar to the larger stone idols at the church.
“She got from the hotel,” Otis says so slowly that Hap grinds his teeth and makes his gums throb as much as his head and wrist are aching.
“Yes!” Hap lets his frustration ring out while Otis remains silent, pulling at his beard with such frenzy that it almost seems sexual.
“Impossible.” He waves his hands Hap’s way. “Nazi flag in oval office. One,” he holds up a finger on one hand and then a middle finger on his other. “Two,” he says, and then he prods them against each other like opposing spears. “Not friends. Not swappers and renaming conquerors like Romans and Greeks. The totem, your girl…I must see it. Everythin’ changes now. Yes, must see it.” Otis shakes his head; is he crying or just angry? A tear trickles down his cheek and disappears into his stubble before he can wipe it away.
Moon Regardless Page 18