by Rio Youers
He sat at the bar with the TVs flashing off his skin. Eight different football games and two news stations crowded his brain. The news stories could have been looped from the day he left: eighty dead following air strikes in Mosul; SCOTUS set to hear oral arguments in racial gerrymandering cases; three-year-old shoots his mom with a loaded gun; another high-profile PED scandal in major league baseball. Martin pulled his eyes away from the screens and looked at the menu. He was hungry, but the thought of rich food—greasy wings and loaded nachos—did nothing for him. He felt the same way about beer, even though beer had been number nine on his list of things he most missed from home. He ordered a Caesar salad with grilled chicken and a glass of water.
A clock behind the bar displayed 3:46 in glowing red digits. By the time he left—after he’d eaten and when the rain had eased up—it was 5:31 and dark outside. There was no point going to the library now; it would be closing its doors soon, if it hadn’t already.
He checked into a hotel on East Genesee Street and went directly to his room, where he sat in a comfortable amount of light and thought about his girls. This was his third favorite moment of the day, bested only by Edith’s goodbye hug and Alyssa’s kiss. A smile touched his lips and remained there as he drifted off to sleep. He jerked awake some time later—he didn’t bother to look at the clock—with a crick in his lower back and an old taste in his mouth. City lights glared though the window. Two sirens howled in the distance. Martin undressed, brushed his teeth, then stepped into the shower. His fourth favorite moment of the day. The water was hot and it soothed him. After toweling himself dry, he slipped between the cool bed sheets and slept until morning.
* * *
Derevaun Seraun wasn’t Latin. It wasn’t anything, really. The odd phrase originated in the short story “Eveline” by James Joyce, and had proved a source of debate among scholars. Many believed it was a reworking of Gaelic that loosely translated to “The end of pleasure is pain.” Others suggested it was a corrupt take on the West Irish dialect, with “The end of song is raving madness” being a more accurate translation. Neither definition was particularly appealing, Martin thought. He defaulted, as he did throughout high school, to CliffsNotes, which interpreted the phrase “probably gibberish.”
So what now? Martin thought. The phrase was not associated with any society or group, and Mother Moon’s real name—Valerie something-or-other … Keller, perhaps?—didn’t flash across the screen with red flags attached. An encouraging sign, of course, but he’d only scratched the surface so far.
“I have to keep looking,” he murmured. “That’s what now.”
He opened a new window, went to Google, and typed DEREVAUN SERAUN HALCYON into the search field. It brought back fewer than sixty hits. Martin scrolled through them all, clicked on a couple, but none were useful. He tried DEREVAUN SERAUN VALERIE and paused, his brain whirling. What was her surname? Both Alyssa and Nolan had told him at some point. Keller? Kemp? Kent? Something beginning with K. He tried all three and drew nothing of interest—a review of Dubliners written by a “Valerie Kent” in Arkansas, but that was all.
Martin sat back in his seat and brought the ring to mind. And it was the ring, more than the inscription, that had unsettled him. The fact that it was hidden beneath a false bottom, behind lock and key, sealed the deal. If Martin had discovered it in one of Mother Moon’s drawers, or on top of the nightstand, it wouldn’t have troubled him as much.
He googled DEREVAUN SERAUN SECRET SOCIETY and then DEREVAUN SERAUN CULT and spent the next forty minutes clicking, scrolling, and reading. All to no avail. Nearly every link pertained to Joyce or “Eveline” or the meaning of Derevaun Seraun. It eventually got to where he wasn’t paying attention anymore. At one point a pop-up ad for the newly opened Onondaga Mall infiltrated the screen, promising unbeatable Black Friday deals, and he spent ten brainless minutes clicking through the links thinking, I helped design that food court … That fountain was my idea … The back-painted glass really—
He blinked hard, as if stirring from a vivid daydream. He’d been on the computer for three hours already and there was a mild throb in the center of his brow. It had the makings of decent headache—the kind that might force him into a mid-afternoon nap with a cold cloth draped across his forehead. It had been a while since he’d sat for any length of time in front of a computer. He had to acclimate to that just like everything else.
He stood up. Time for a break.
He ordered a sandwich from the deli across the street and ate it on a cold stone bench in Columbus Circle, using the time away from the computer screen to think things through. He’d discovered nothing, other than the speculative meaning of Derevaun Seraun, in three hours of online searching. Surely that meant there was nothing to discover, that he should abandon his shitty investigation. But Martin couldn’t shake the sense that he wasn’t digging deep enough—that there were stones left unturned. For that reason, he returned to the library, sat down at one of the available computers, and continued his research.
* * *
He googled DEREVAUN SERAUN RING even though ring was too generic a word. As he suspected, it produced 120 pages of links. He started scrolling, clicking on anything that appeared marginally hopeful. And maybe it was because he’d eaten, or because the fresh air had blown the cobwebs from his brain, but his eyes picked two words off the fourth page of searches that struck a curious note inside him.
… animal masks …
“Okay,” he said. “That’s something … maybe.”
He clicked the link. It was a 2006 review of Joyce’s Dubliners, written by a New Jersey “bookaholic” who called herself “wordslave0x9.” Martin read the entire thing twice, but one passage stood out. He read this over and over:
Eveline’s mother wailing “Derevaun Seraun” from her deathbed is supposed to be an emotional moment, but all I could think about was those seven guys getting whacked above a Chinese restaurant in Engine City, and how they were all wearing rings with that weird saying inscribed on it. They were wearing animal masks, too, which is some freaky stuff, when you think about it. I guess the story was covered up at the time (that’s Engine City for you, folks!), but some old cop spilled the beans to the Sternbridge Tribune after he retired in the late nineties.
Until that point, Martin’s thought process could have been drawn with a pencil—a series of short, vague lines. Now it was more like a spray can with a partially clogged nozzle. His mind went everywhere with just the merest squeeze. After ten minutes of erratic conjecture, he closed out the internet, stepped away from the computer, and ambled around the library. Several circuits later, his thoughts had tapered into a somewhat manageable stream. He took them one at a time.
Mother Moon had in her possession (because it was too specific to be a coincidence) a ring and mask belonging to one of the victims of a mass murder—a crime damaging enough to be covered up.
How did she get those items? he thought. They would’ve been zipped into evidence bags.
Not if the murders had been swept under the rug. The evidence would have disappeared in a hurry. And besides, it didn’t matter how she got them. The important thing was why she had them. Martin ruminated on this as he walked through the children’s library. The juxtaposition between the colorful, playful items around him and the dark things tumbling through his mind was jarring, but it helped him focus.
“Macabre memorabilia,” he whispered. A possibility. He recalled reading about certain morbid items selling over the internet: Osama bin Laden’s tooth, Charles Manson’s prison ID card, Lee Harvey Oswald’s coffin. There was an underground market for such nasty curios. Maybe Mother Moon was a collector, or she had a particular fascination with this case.
Or she’s connected to it in some other way.
Connected, okay, but that didn’t mean she was involved. Mother Moon had told Martin more than once that she’d had a hard life. Maybe she’d been married to one of the victims, and kept his ring and creepy tiger mask for the same rea
son Martin kept his wife’s ring on a chain around his neck.
This is different, he thought. Laura was a sweet, gentle soul. The victims of this crime were obviously part of some fucked-up secret society.
Right. Their motto was “The end of pleasure is pain,” for the love of God. If Mother Moon was grieving, why not choose a less sinister keepsake?
Who said she was grieving? He was in the fiction section now, running his forefinger along the worn spines of titles, as if he had any interest in them at all. Maybe those mask-wearing freaks did her wrong, and this is all part of why she founded Halcyon. She keeps the ring and mask as a reminder of the darkness she left behind.
“They’re symbols,” he muttered. “Same as the watch.”
Okay. That sounded plausible, but there was more to it. And although he’d read nothing to suggest Mother Moon was complicit in any wrongdoing, he couldn’t ignore the uneasy feeling that had settled in the pit of his stomach.
Something’s not right …
Or maybe that had more to do with the dream he’d had his first night on the island, when Laura revealed what was in the lockbox. It had been a bullet in the dream, of course, but it still felt like a warning—like his dead wife was trying to tell him something.
Alyssa had said it wasn’t a premonition, but what if it was?
What if that psychic mojo ran in the family?
He needed more information.
* * *
The Sternbridge Tribune’s online archives went back to January 2002, not far enough to uncover the retired cop’s tell-all. Martin had more information now, though, and was able to dig in different directions. He eventually found the story on a site called Engine City Spaghetti, which dedicated itself to New Jersey’s mob scene in the second half of the last century. Sternbridge’s Warehouse District, aka Engine City, featured heavily.
It was a gaudy, gratuitous site that looked like it had been built in the early 2000s and not updated since. Martin would have taken everything he read with a pinch of salt, except it had a photograph of the actual Tribune article on screen. The quality was poor and not all of the text was legible, but he managed to extract the relevant information.
The retired cop was Sergeant Peter Baines, who hung up his badge in 1998 after thirty-three years of service, first in Newark, then Sternbridge. Most of the article focused on his dealings with the mob, how they all but ran the Warehouse District during Baines’s time on the force. He recounted turning a blind eye to many a misdeed—even being made to falsify statements and hide evidence. “It’s what you did,” he said, “if you wanted to keep your job. And your life.” Toward the end of the article, Baines got to what he called “the White Lantern Massacre.” He didn’t exactly spill the beans, as wordslave0x9 had suggested, but he revealed enough information for Martin to want to know more.
We were so used to making crimes disappear, but the White Lantern Massacre was something different altogether. It wasn’t a mob job, to begin with. It was pure hack ’n’ slash. And sure, a few crazy versions of this story have leaked out over the years, but the truth is nobody knows what went down in that room. The whole thing was cleaned up quickly. Very hush-hush. My guess is that the vics were important and respected members of society who were into something they shouldn’t have been into. And no names were released because, hey, there was no crime, right? Anyway, that whole thing with them wearing animal masks was true. The rings, too. Like a championship ring but with a big green eye set into it. They were clearly into some messed-up stuff, but they met their match in that room. Must’ve raised the devil himself because, let me tell you, I’ve never seen anything like it.
Engine City had cleaned up its act over the last twenty years, and was now a thriving riverfront community with million-dollar condos, Reiki practitioners, and organic coffee shops. The White Lantern was still open for business. It had a 4.1 Google review rating and apparently served the best Kung Pao chicken in New Jersey. Martin—clicking links fluidly now—discovered that Sergeant Peter Baines hadn’t fared so well; he had died of prostate cancer in 2002.
With the help of specific search filters, Martin also nailed a date on the White Lantern Massacre: May 1986. Guesstimating Mother Moon to be in her mid-fifties, this meant she was in her early twenties at the time. It was difficult to associate someone so young with such a violent crime.
But the ring and mask in her possession suggested she was associated, either as a daughter or young wife of one of the victims. Or a victim herself.
Martin closed the open windows and sighed. He’d spent most of the day pinballing around the internet and all he had to show for it was more questions. Only one thing was certain: he couldn’t return to the island with a partially uncovered story. Some unholy shit had transpired and he needed to determine Mother Moon’s involvement. He’d taken it as far as he could online.
“It’s time to get down and dirty,” he said.
He was going to Jersey.
26
The dead woman lay on her side. Both her legs were missing and she was still burning.
No, Edith thought. Not again.
She pushed with her mind, looking for her garden. She’d become incredibly efficient at accessing it in the months since her mom had died. But not now. The window had opened with devastating force. It consumed her.
This can’t—
Her head jerked backward. She saw a row of stores with their fronts blown inward and everything burning inside. Bodies were sprawled across the floor, dusted with ash. A wild-eyed woman sifted among the debris, crying out. Her voice was lost in the chaos.
A scream built on Edith’s lips. She reached for her garden again.
Please …
But there was nothing. Not a single petal. Not a glimmer.
Fire trucks and police cars tore across a jammed parking lot. Edith saw banks of shattered TVs and clothes burning on their racks. She saw checkouts with bodies draped over the conveyors and cash registers. More bodies littered the aisles and some were piled three and four deep.
No, please …
Edith got out of bed and stood slumped, coated in sweat. The room was dark but she knew Shirley’s bed was empty. Shirley was in Mother Moon’s cabin and would probably stay there all night. Desperate for shelter, Edith reached for her in the other way, the old way.
Shirley, I need you—
But her sister wasn’t there. That door—that connection—was closed. Permanently, it seemed.
The stream shifted. She saw melted mannequins and shelves half-filled with blackened toys. A smoldering sign promised 50% OFF. Other signs read WHY PAY MORE? and BLACK FRIDAY SPECIAL. This latter—a long banner—had been draped over a row of corpses: a temporary shroud. Their legs poked out from beneath.
“Friday … pay,” Edith said.
She made drawing motions with her right hand but it wasn’t enough. The window pressed against her eyes and crushed her skull. She stumbled in the darkness, bumped into the nightstand. There was a glass of water on top and she knocked it to the floor.
“Pay.”
The glass broke. Edith dropped to her knees and picked up one of the shards. The window dropped with her. There was no chronology in the things it displayed. One moment she was looking at a motionless escalator with a dead body slumped at the bottom, then the stream cut to crowds of bargain hunters pouring through open doors. Edith drew the piece of glass across her forearm. Her blood flowed. She saw smoke rolling through an empty food court, a news reporter in tears, and—from behind—a teenage boy in a bulky jacket pushing through waves of shoppers.
That’s him, Edith thought. He’s the one. He’s—
But there was something about his punky black hair.
The stream switched. More horror. More death and smoke. Edith dipped two fingers into her blood and started to paint on the white bed sheets. First a P, then an A.
As she started to paint a Y, she saw the boy in the bulky jacket again. Except it wasn’t a boy. The window focused on
the teenager and Edith suddenly understood why the stream was so invasive, and why she couldn’t escape to her garden. Like the shooting at Flint Wood High, this was too close to her. She was connected by blood, and couldn’t turn away.
Shirley pushed through the crowds of shoppers. Her face was sick-pale. Sweat glistened on her throat. She stopped moving. People surrounded her, carrying boxes and packages, pushing carts.
Oh my God. Edith dropped the piece of glass and thrust out one hand, as if she could reach through the window and snatch her sister free.
Shirley, no—
Shirley lowered her head, muttered something, and pulled down the jacket’s zipper. One moment she was there—whole and real, feeling and living—then the window filled with a burning light and when it faded she was gone. Everything was gone.
The scream that had been building inside Edith finally let loose. She fell backward, flailing on the floor, droplets of blood splashing from her arm. She was vaguely aware of a light switching on and arms reaching for her. A familiar voice—Alyssa’s—whispered close to her ear.
“Ede, sweetie, it’s okay now. It’s—”
Edith fell again, but differently, not down or backward, but into. Her brain lit up as if someone had plugged it in. The window closed like a shutter slamming and Edith found her opening. She floated for a while and then emerged beneath the branches of a tree. A bird sang from high up and the sound calmed her.
She was in her garden. It stretched endlessly. All the color she could want.
Edith lay for a while in bliss before realizing that someone was trying to get in there with her.
27
They’ll go away, Valerie thought after the first knock on the door, even though she knew it was late, and therefore urgent, but she struggled to even open her eyes let alone get up off the sofa. Besides, she had the girl snuggled in her arms, and the girl was warm.