Moon Regardless

by Nick Manzolillo

  The elevator descends to the eighth floor before it begins to shake, and the little beams of light overhead start to flicker. Like the song of a whale, except broken and formed by moss, something begins to cry mournfully from above. Hap isn’t sure if it’ll work, but he jabs at the “Open” button for the elevator’s doors. Of course, nothing happens for a moment, but then they peel back, and the elevator begins slowly pulling upward. The square threshold leading to the seventh floor corridor becomes jagged, like a closing mouth, as Hap lurches himself forward, stepping onto solid ground. Some great force is slowly sucking the elevator back toward the upper floors behind him. There’s a crying thing who sings a song that’s at once both beautiful and capable of making Hap want to jab nails into his ears.

  The flickering lights transform the hallway into an eerie strobe. Behind Hap, there begins the sound of gnawing of metal that reminds him of those goddamned garbage trucks that would tear down America Street at four in the morning and cause him to think the world was falling apart. The Else. The Moon Shack was real enough as a hut on a rooftop beside a collection of rusty cages. Otis said it travels, but Otis was insane. The Else, though. Maybe he wasn’t that insane. Man is worth fearing more than any boogeyman. The Else. Something sings like no living beast Hap has ever dreamt up; as it does so, he realizes the sounds he’s hearing are something eating its way down the elevator shaft. He takes off running for the stairwell; God save him.

  Chapter 22: The Place Where Bad Men Lay Their Heads

  The Southerner’s lungs are used to smoke and chemicals of all sorts, but he finds himself hacking as he leaves the Miskatonic. The back of the Parks Department pickup truck is now empty of its treasure trove of flammables. There is some thermite, too, that’s meant to ensure the structure will collapse when the fires grow hot enough. The Southerner’s got two partners with him, a pair of boys from a crazy city along the Massachusetts border called Woonsocket. He’s taken to calling one kid “Woon” and the other “Socket.” The Southerner likes to make his job as fun as possible.

  They’ve each got brand new handguns with the serial numbers scraped off. The Southerner was told he’d get to keep his if he didn’t use it; right now, it’s looking that way. Hotel’s been evacuated since the shooting. The Southerner was told there were people who live here full-time. The special kind of criminals that operate alongside this pathetic city’s idea of a mob, which is more like an underground network of associates, nothing like the genuine gangs the Southerner grew up around. The Southerner was told to expect resistance of some sort, but nothing. They went up as far as the third floor without seeing another soul.

  This fire might just be The Southerner’s best yet. There was nothing more satisfying than tossing his Red Sox cap right into the thick of the flames as the hotel’s golden embroidered walls started to melt around him. Whatever city he’s called to, he always wears the local team’s hat; in New England, go figure, it has to be the mortal enemy of the Yankees, the team the Southerner was raised loving. It won’t be long now before the fire really starts popping. Best to get a move on.

  “Hey there,” an unfamiliar voice says from behind the Southerner. The roundabout in front of the Miskatonic is just far enough removed from the city sidewalk that the Southerner figured parking in front of the black sphere erected between the grass and purple flowers at the center of the roundabout was enough. The man addressing him looks like he’s covered in mud. Three more filthy fools are behind him, and one of them is a chick.

  “You been inside, yeah?” the woman asks.

  “Yeah, turned out it’s locked down, so we gotta go.” The Southerner acts out of logic first. They’ve been seen, so it’s time to get a move on. Won’t matter these rats know his face, given how little he operates on this side of the country. The hotel’s security cameras are troublesome, but there won’t be much tape left after the flames are through. Instinct comes last, as he recognizes just how filthy these people are. There’s an open sewer next to the parking lot of the closest building. Something is wrong.

  “Moon Shack,” one of the trio says. Then the other two join in with a unanimous “Moon Shack.” The man, wide as an ox and at least six-foot-five, with skin that appears bulletproof, says again, “Moon Shack?” and the Southerner realizes it is a sort of question. A code word meant to gauge the Southerner’s reaction. It is a familiar name to the Southerner, one that he has often woken up muttering. A dream place, though the Southerner’s never been one for clubs or gangs. Just cash from the closest buyer.

  The Southerner draws his gun just as the big man lunges. He’s wearing a long-sleeved shirt in the middle of summertime, and he has something long and sharp up his sleeve. The impact from the pike, the freaking vampire-slaying stake that’s jabbed through the Southerner’s chest, hurls him backwards to the ground, but not before he completes his draw and puts a fat bullet into the fatter man’s skull.

  The Southerner bleeds while a woman shrieks. They are warriors, lunatics. One of them has a sawed-off, which he fires at poor, terrified Woon and Socket. “Aim true, Minnie, aim true!” The madman is talking to his gun. Woon and Socket begin firing back, and time slides back to the fireworks of the Fourth of July. The approaching opposition is cheese-grated with bullets as they run and duck around the pickup truck. Either Woon or Socket, the Southerner can’t remember who is who, is knocked over the hood of the Park’s Department truck, and a gleaming knife wielded by the wild woman goes in and out of him. Either Woon or Socket fires a bullet through the woman’s skull before they begin screaming, choking on their own blood. The Southerner looks to the sky as a dirty man leers down at him.

  “Let it ooze out, brother. I could smell the killer in you. I am true.”

  The stench of a fire burning more than wood and paper consumes the Southerner’s nostrils. The sky into which he helplessly stares grows hazy from smoke before becoming black. And then there is a distant glow. Silver, like the moon.

  ***

  There is a chance Hap can live. Tiffany is gone, dead. He will never forgive himself for everything he’s done, but he wants to live. He wants to continue eating and breathing and drinking. He wants to keep enjoying little things despite how crooked they have been bent.

  Hap slips on his own blood that runs sleek and thick from his butchered arm, and he sails above the last three steps his foot would have otherwise contacted. The almost thrilling sense of free fall ends just before the elbow of his raised arm connects with cement. The slivery knife Johan gave him goes sliding away, rendered useless against the dissolution of reality that seeks him. With his arm paralyzed and throbbing, it only takes Hap receiving a new wound to make him forget about his previous injury. He is beyond wishing for sleep and rest. Hap is alive, with a rapidly pulverized body by his hand, that of others, and his own stupidity. From somewhere above comes the sudden pop and drawing crackle of organic fireworks as something comes for him.

  The banister along the stairs is there for a reason, as Hap puts as much of his weight on it as he can. He makes it halfway down another floor, and the numbers are mixing up in his head. Each doorway leading to each hall is numberless, and he is remembering Randal the bartender and his talk of the hotel being a maze that could trap spirits within eternal loops. Maybe this is the fate that awaits him. Maybe Hap’s throat has already been slit, and now he’s damned to flee the Else for eons in purgatory. In the stairwell above, he can hear footsteps. Something is creaking as it descends upon steps made of cement.

  The approaching thing is rendered inaudible by the screwdriver down an eardrum blare of a fire alarm that seems to come from the very cement walls of the staircase itself. Hap’s nostrils begin burning, and it takes him another half a flight of stairs before he registers the pungent, sense-flaying aroma of smoke. This place will burn to the ground, and Hap is cool with that. If only whoever started the blaze hadn’t forgotten to let him out. He can no longer hear the Else or tell how close it is.
The smoke-poisoned air, at first imperceptible in the dull grey of the corridor, billows like a black cloud. He heads into the smoke, his lungs giving out instantly, and the tears won’t leave his eyes; he can’t catch a deep breath. He lurches toward another set of stairs and bursts through a set of double doors, emerging into a corridor that immediately brings a soothing blast of clean air across his face, into his lungs. He’s collapsing onto his hands and knees across a familiar carpet embroidered with flowers that seem to form a pair of eyes that stare into him.

  The alarm owns him. It is a mask the Else has slipped on. Ahead of him, toward the end of a hallway, a window is open. If there is a fire below and a legion of murderers above, then he’s going to have to jump. Maybe those bastards will burn. Maybe, slippery as they are, there is a way to escape. He will not stay for the flames or teeth of something, some Else that he doesn’t understand.

  All at once, every single doorway in the hall before Hap slowly opens at the same time. Where there were once panels of brown, there are now portals of black, and Hap can’t even jump out a window with ease. Who, or what is waiting for him in those square portals of blackness? Hap digs his foot into the floor and tries to form a runner’s pose. Moving was easier with a banister to brace his weight. The lights begin to dance on and off, and Hap runs and screams through his scorching lungs. His own voice becomes a fuel of sorts as he hobbles and barely surpasses a jog. Something moves in front of the window, shifting down from the bend of the hallway out of sight. It’s a mist, a dust cloud with something in the middle, lightly blue and stretching to the very ceiling. A song of humanity cries from the hulking, humanoid thing before Hap. He gets a glimpse of hideous skin made of ice, flaking blue pigments of flesh mixed with moss, and it is as if the farthest depths of a sentient cave tried to give its best impression of a human being.

  Hap turns and flees into one of the open rooms, embracing the arms of the looming boogeyman he doesn’t know as opposed to the devil before him. The lights within the rooms flicker for just a moment. It’s not a guest room, but one massive chamber, an entire hallway’s worth of rooms connected and disguised by doors that give the illusion of singular domains. The massive chamber holds a scattering of couches and beds and gleaming things displayed along the walls that are puffed out with soundproof foam padding. Strange masks and colorful helmets sit waiting in storage cubbies. If they kill people here, what do they do with the bodies?

  Like an S&M dungeon devolved into the land of snuff, there are shackles and whips and old-fashioned stocks. Ropes dangle from the ceiling with half-tied nooses. Hap stomps on a fluff, a red clown’s wig. This hidden series of rooms to which he never delivered baggage is a Halloween store of disguises and playthings. Swords, scimitars, battle-axes and spears, and then military-grade cutting dispensary. There are cattle prods and barbed baseball bats next to stone mallets and what looks to be the entire power tools section from Home Depot scattered along the floor. This is where the Moon Shack’s citizens went to unwind with their victims. A separate side of interconnected rooms lies just beyond this one. How many other torture chambers are there?

  The Else has doubled around, cutting him off from the floor below, moving faster than Hap thought possible. Is it toying with him on the staircase? Is it even a solid thing? Half mist, half an abomination of appendages. Hap will have to venture down below into the smoke and growing pockets of carbon monoxide. Will he just fall asleep? Will death come so easily?

  In an instant, he is running too fast to stop before he’s turning, slamming his flailing arm into the back wall by the door closest to the staircase. The Else’s miserable song cuts through the alarm. It is the alarm. The wall into which he has collided seems to sink and slide, and as he squeezes through the tight, black space, he begins to understand rats and roaches in a way he never thought he could.

  He finds a smaller staircase within the walls, and the smoke has not yet tainted this hidden place. Instead, he’s assaulted by mold and mothballs. He walks and slides his way down narrow steps until he comes into a circular pocket of a room with its walls formed of black mirror. Hap sees different versions of his mangled self frowning and shivering. From the carvings along his chest to his arm being more blood than flesh, he is equally as haunting as any emissary of the Moon Shack.

  Fearing he is trapped in the bubble of black glass, it takes Hap a moment to snap out of the illusion and realize the sliver of dark space that doesn’t have his worrying reflection peering back at him is the way out. As he enters a narrow staircase once more, he feels something pressing on the walls around him. Tap, tap, tapping. The dark is pure. There is only the siren and the Else following him along the walls. It has found him. The secret places are just for fun. He hears the faint whale song of the Else just before its claws tear through the dark, and Hap is pulled into the flickering, ailing hallway light in a burst of bending limbs and crumbling plaster that sneaks up his nose and fills his mouth.

  He has made it down another floor, maybe to the fourth or fifth. If this were all a test to race to the bottom, then he gets a D, which is still passing. Good enough. The Else bends Hap’s body back, and he squeezes his eyes as tight as he can. The heat from the looming fires disappears. The Else, above all things, is a void. Hap’s wounds stop aching for just a moment. It’s a hand around his throat, as rough and bristled as it feels. It’s just a hand. Neither man nor woman, Otis said. The Else was once a human. This is still recognizable, just like the groups of masked men who march along a road of beheaded heretics in some godforsaken desert or the backroom trumpeting of modern-day slavers, tugging along naked starving things addicted to opiates they can’t get on their own. Hap won’t open his eyes to get a good look at the Else’s face, both because he doesn’t need to see and because he realizes, now, how true everything Otis said was. Don’t look the Else in the eyes. Otis never told him why not that it matters. Otis wasn’t as crazy as he sounded, so with all Hap’s heart, he trusts that son of a bitch.

  The Else, while bending and twisting and inspecting Hap, spreads its hand to the back of his head. The hand is rough, almost like sandpaper. It tilts Hap’s neck back, and despite the bruises along his face, he’s using every muscle he has to keep his eyes shut. Maybe this is the trick, a simple trick to survive an encounter with the Else. Like a fairy tale, keep your eyes closed, and the monster will go away.

  The Else presses down the edge of its thumb and pries open one of Hap’s eyelids. It cocks its pale head, enshrouded with long frizzled black hair that drags on the floor. Mist rises from its body like that of a vampire smoking in the sun. Its eyes are glazed blue, and its fingernails are impossibly long and curled up like a Guinness Book of World Records nominee gone wrong. Beneath the sagging skin lies a sex that belongs to neither man nor woman. In its open maw lie rows of backwards teeth.

  Hap makes out an image, a waking dream of something singing to itself in a cave, holding a bloody stick that pokes a pile of humanoid corpses with primitive, deformed faces. Something beneath the earth is screaming, reaching up, pushing through black walls to reveal a multitude of stalk-like arms. The song turns to a scream as the primitive human runs out into a lightning-streaked sky before falling to its knees in the rain and mud, utterly alone and lost. The Miskatonic crinkles to black; all Hap can see with his single eye is fading, searing white.

  He’s unaware that it has let go of his eyelids as he falls to the floor, blinking and staring at the carpet as the wispy presence around him is sucked away. That mournful song of the Else rises above him before fading. His nose burns from the pungent odor of rising smoke. There’s what sounds like rain on a rooftop, bringing to mind the vision, the hallucination of that person all alone in the dirt. It’s not raindrops but the crackling of the fires below. The Else has left him. Hap sobs and buries his face in the carpet. He’s blind in one eye. His sight will forevermore be halved. The Else has left with a part of him.

  He lies on the floor, listening to the c
rackling flames, wondering if he’ll pass out from the cloud of looming carbon monoxide or if he’ll somehow find the strength to escape through a window. An elevator dings, and before Hap can stand up, Johan is sticking his head out of the metal box and giving him a gander. “Hap? You hear me? You’re alive.” He staggers from the elevator, leaning against the open doors. Elevators and fires, isn’t there something about that? Then again, Johan wanted Hap to kill him. “Your eye has gone white. Who…who did you kill?” Johan raises a hand to his chest as he limps toward Hap, his mouth hanging open.

  Hap moans, and he wants to either cry or scream, which is a good want because he still wants to feel. He is still human. He is still alive, and he wants to feel. He wants the pain to end.

  “It doubted you…challenged you. I…in all of my years…. Oh Hap….” Johan’s smiling, reaching to help Hap stand. From the staircase at the end of the hall, Paul Jones comes barging forward in his usual black shirt and purple tie. Hah. Hap knew that pathetic son of a bitch was in on this.

  “No!” Johan turns, his face growing pale, the last of his priest’s demeanor bursting like a bubble. He reaches into his tuxedo for something while lurching back toward the elevator. Paul Jones is suddenly twenty feet closer than he was half a moment ago. A part of his arm becomes an inky black tendril that extends and retracts in a single blink of Hap’s last remaining eye.

  Johan falls, plopping wordlessly across from Hap. Something has happened to his head. It doesn’t fit the rest of his body; it’s been crushed and twisted. “I do hate to use anything but words.” Paul’s face shifts and melts to form that of another as Randal leans down over Hap, his lips grim. He extends a hand, and Hap reaches for it, hoping to be helped to his feet. His own pain is an anchor. Randal’s hand instead seems to grow as it slowly closes over Hap’s. “I would offer you a trip to a place you cannot dream of on your own,” Randal says, “where the mad pipes will have you dance and laugh around and around. You will get there, however, in time, in your own way.”