Red Moon

by Benjamin Percy

  Malerie rolls her eyes at Max and continues her story. All this week she’s been filling, which she hates, because you don’t get to talk to anyone. She likes old people and old people like her. They’re sweet. That’s why she was happy to get bumped to the drop-off window. So she could talk to people—and do the job Max asked her to do. The job that, by the way, could easily get her ass fired. Not that she wasn’t willing to stick her neck out. “Anything for Max,” she says, her eyes on Patrick.

  At the window, she takes in prescriptions as people drop them off or when the fax whirs out an order. She scans the Rx into the computer and then types the info and sends it to the pharmacists for review. So she normally enters her initials and an alphanumeric password, which is kind of a problem, since she’ll be tagged to anything she does, but luckily, one of the pharmacists hadn’t logged out, so it was doubtful anyone would look twice at the record. She opened up the work queue and searched Volpexx and it listed everyone who’d picked up their prescription in the past ten days. All their information is included in their profile: name, address, phone number. She could have print-screened anything she found, but that was too risky because the printer sits by the pharmacists. She keeps a little notebook in her pocket. Everybody does. For passwords and common overrides needed for various insurances. So nobody thought anything of her scribbling away. “And here I am. Here it is,” she says and holds out the sheet of paper to Max, at first teasing it away when he reaches for it, then handing it over when he stares hard at her and says, “This isn’t a joke, Malerie.”

  He tells her she can go and she lingers a moment in defiance before turning so quickly her tail whips around her leg. She tromps up the stairs and everyone watches her go except for Max, who scans the names for a long thirty seconds and then raises his eyes to study the group. “Let’s do this.”

  They wear camo jackets and pants tucked into black combat boots. They pull white pillowcases over their heads with eyeholes and crooked mouths scissored into them. They shove their hands into black leather gloves. “Keep them on, no matter if you get hot,” Max says. “No fingerprints.” And then they pile into three cars and caravan to the first name on the list, a Mr. James Duncan, at 312 Terrabonne Road.

  Trick-or-treating took place earlier in the day, before nightfall, so no children crowd the sidewalks, the side roads mostly empty. Pumpkins glow on porches, the candle flames within them sputtering in the breeze and making their triangle eyes and toothy grins tremble with shadows.

  “You’re with us, right?” Max says to Patrick, and Patrick says, “I’m with you.”

  They park blocks away from their target. Their boots drum out an angry song on the sidewalk. The night is cold and their breath blooms gray. On Terrabonne, with baseball bats, they smash out the windows of the car parked in the driveway. On Macintosh and on Ridgeway, they spray-paint a pentagram on a garage door, the hood of a car. On Thirteenth Street, they toss an M-80 with a spitting fuse into a mailbox and run like hell and turn around in time to see the white-orange carnation of flame—the thunder of the explosion knocking them back a step and making them holler with pleasure.

  In the Malibu Village trailer court, they navigate the maze of single-wides, the chicken coops, the rusted-out cars up on blocks with mullein flowers spiking through their engine blocks, and find the trailer, a gray vinyl dead whale of a thing. There is a bare-branched tree in the front yard decorated with fishing lures and empty cans of Budweiser and they soak it with lighter fluid and spark a Zippo and it lights like a blue torch.

  At the B&B auto detailer, they scale the chain-link fence and move across the asphalt lot lit by high-intensity arc lights. They stare into the security cameras, not worried, hidden by their hoods, when they spray-paint LYCAN across the office windows in dribbling black capital letters.

  All this time Patrick tries to think of the plane—the lycan exploding from the bathroom, the blood sluicing down the aisle, the bodies stacked and splayed all around him—and he admits to feeling good. Hurting back those who hurt him is a good thing. His heart beats madly, as if it were a poisonous toad trying to leap out of his chest.

  When they roar through a high-end development—most of the windows dark at this hour, but a few living rooms still swimming with the blue light of televisions—he is the one who hurls a brick through a window and rains the living room with glittering shards of glass.

  They run. And when they do, he might hear a voice calling angrily behind him—“I’m going to kill you, you sons o’ bitches!”—as if this were his fault, as if he wanted this to happen, his life’s goal to see his parents split up, his father shipped off to war, a plane full of passengers slaughtered, and when he finally takes the opportunity to lash out and abandon all the vinegary pain stewing inside him, somebody has the gall to threaten him? Part of him wants to rush back with a baseball bat—and the other part of him wants to yell over his shoulder, sorry, he thought things would turn out differently.

  Chapter 18

  IN THE FOOTHILLS of the Cascades, near the base of the North Sister, the forest opens into a red rocky clearing where the air smells sulfuric and steam rises in columns as if from secret chimneys. These are the Blood Bath Hot Springs, pockets of grainy water stained red from the iron in the ground. Around the springs lie tangles of clothes, heaps of beach towels. The rocks are warm to the touch and free of snow. And people, old men and women mostly, are bobbing in the red water up to their chins.

  Many believe the water has a medicinal effect. That is why Alice is here with her husband, Craig, who is suffering from a head cold. He is naked now, his coat and collared short-sleeve shirt and pale blue jeans and white tennis shoes stacked on the rocks next to him. His hair is flecked with gray. He wears owlishly round-framed bifocals. And though he is thin, his cheeks are a bit jowly, making his mouth appear downturned, sour. He has a fondness for whistling Christmas carols year-round. You might peg him as the most normal man in the world, but Alice knows better. His breath smells of the tonic water he drinks all day. He has one testicle and a small, thin, uncircumcised penis. She once watched him kill a puppy—that she had brought home from the shelter and that messed on the rug—by stomping on it. He meets people on the Internet and forces her to have sex with them while he watches. He says it’s good for her.

  Just as he said it would be good for them to visit the hot springs, to soak in them nude, along with the rest of this strange mix of hippies and tourist Europeans floating in the pools around them. She can’t tell if his eyes are open or closed, his glasses fogged over, when he sighs deeply and says, “That’s better. That’s the ticket.”

  His contentedness will not last long, she knows. Soon he will go back to his sharp-voiced bullying, reminding her how fat she is, how dumb, how boring. She tries to enjoy the moment and leans her head back against the stone lip of the spring and takes in the view. The North Sister rises like a fang. The air is blurry with snow, none of it touching down on the springs, erased by the updraft of heat, and it is as if an invisible dome surrounds them.

  Her face drips with sweat. Her heart thuds slowly in her chest. Her skin feels scorched by the heat of the water that she lowered herself into with a hiss. She can see, rising up the nearby hillside, a glacier-fed creek running through a glen fringed with browned ferns that give way to thickly clustered noble firs. Her eyes pause on a log or a boulder—it is hard to tell with snow fuzzing the air—maybe two hundred yards away. She’s drowsy from the heat, and her eyelids slip closed—and then snap open as the thing in the glen, whatever it is, a deer or a bear, rises and bounds off into the woods.

  “Craig,” she says, standing up so quickly she makes a wave that crashes against his face. “Craig, I saw something.”

  He licks his lips, tasting what splashed across his mouth. His glasses are spotted with water. He takes them off and streaks a thumb across their lenses and sets them on top of his pile of clothes. “You got water on me.”

  “Up there. Like a wild animal. It was—”
<
br />   “Shut up. Just shut up. Shut your mouth. Okay? I’m so sick of you. Your voice. It’s like a bird being strangled. God.”

  She realizes her nakedness and sinks into the scalding spring.

  She expects him to say something more, but his eyes are closed. It is a relief, not having his gaze on her. In the corner of their bedroom, he arranged a chair, a wooden chair they bought from the Saturday market, rough-hewn and whorled, and this is where he sits when he watches her on their bed. A stranger tearing open a foil packet or smearing oil across her back. Craig never masturbates. He only sits there, so still, his chin in his hand, watching, his eyes swimming behind his glasses.

  She surveys the woods, and then this humped and jumbled acre of red rock, wondering if anybody else saw what she saw. An animal. Central Oregon is known for its outdoor recreation, but she can count on one hand the number of hikes she’s taken. All of her time is spent at her job, as an office manager for Grayson Insurance Company, or at home, making a hamburger hot dish or folding Craig’s underwear into white triangles. The closest she gets to wildlife is the occasional dead deer smeared across the side of the road.

  She hears muted conversation, laughter that sounds a long way off. Then a splashing. From one of the springs crawls an old man. Saggy skin, egg-white belly. “My bones,” he says and sighs contentedly and stands there a moment, stretching, the water dripping and the steam rising off his skin. When he reaches for his towel, she spots the first lycan.

  Though she doesn’t immediately recognize it as such. It is standing at the edge of the clearing, seen through churning steam, so still that it appears a part of the forest. A troll, she thinks, a troll like something out of the fairy-tale books she used to read as a child, something that lives in the woods, under bridges.

  The old man has a towel over his head like a shroud. He does not see the lycan when it scrabbles across the rocks on all fours and then rises behind him and reaches a claw and pulls away his throat. The old man staggers. The towel remains over his head as a red beard of blood curls down his chest. His arms are outstretched as if to welcome someone into an embrace. But there is no one there to meet him. He falls into the spring from which he rose a minute ago—and the effect is that of a trapdoor. He vanishes from sight. A splash is followed by screams that sound, from a distance, a little like laughter.

  Alice joins the noise, crying out. The woods come alive—three, four, five lycans exploding from the trees—clambering across the rocks to enclose the bathers. Water sloshes as people turn in panicked circles or clamber from the springs, running naked across the rocks, the rocks shredding their feet and making them stumble and fall.

  She startles at a noise behind her, a clatter of displaced rocks, and spins around to see a lycan approaching them, a small one, the hair on its head the white-yellow of lightning. “Craig,” she says, and then again and again, in a rapid-fire string.

  Her husband opens one eye to observe her. “Didn’t I tell you to shut up?” The eye closes.

  She has never seen a lycan before, not outside of a magazine or television program, and what bothers her most are the teeth, too big for their mouths, arranged in bleeding grins. One look and you recognize evil. Unlike her husband—who might as well wear a mask—his ugliness hidden from the rest of the world. She wishes all danger was as obvious as this—a black cape, a third eye, a bleeding grin.

  And she can’t help but smile back when the lycan moves forward another two steps, its grin seeming to widen as it balances at the opposite edge of the pool, as though considering a soak. Then its arms shoot down and latch hold of her husband and drag him out of the water by his head. He barely has a chance to respond, and then it is too late: the lycan has burrowed its snout into his neck as though to seek out the darkness inside him that is selfsame with its appearance.

  She can’t help but think, when she turns to run, that she would like to stay. For once she would like to be the one to watch.

  Chapter 19

  SNOW DUSTS THE CLEARING. Their footsteps track a dark stream through it. A minute ago, Miriam led Claire from the cabin, telling her nothing except to strip, and then motioning with her hand to follow. The sun glows through the clouds like a hazy specter but offers no warmth, and when they stand there, Miriam seeming to stare into her, Claire begins to shiver, naked except for her underwear.

  Finally Miriam says, “Enough bullshit. It’s time.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think of the Tall Man. Think of what he did to your parents.”

  Claire’s throat tightens. “Don’t.”

  Her voice is low and slow, almost a chant. “Think of the bullets cutting through their flesh. Think of them trying to cry out. Think of the footsteps pursuing you. Think about after. After you left. The breath of those men rasping through your house, filling it up. Think of their hands ripping open drawers, digging through them.”

  “Stop.” She feels something deep inside her—maybe fear or fury—springing open like a black umbrella. Tears make icy trails down her cheeks.

  “Go back to that night.”

  The clouds hang low, a dark ceiling that seems to press downward as if it might collapse under the weight of the sun. Her body no longer shivers—it tremors. She can hear the scuff of her feet shifting beneath her.

  “Go back to that night. Instead of running, I want you to fight. I want you to kill those men.”

  The new Claire likes this idea very much. She knows that if one of those men—in their black body armor—were before her now, she would, without hesitation, claw the skin from his face, revealing a red skull with bulging eyeballs and a tongue that trembles when it screams. She imagines the warm blood gushing when she brings her mouth to his soft white belly, hollowing him out.

  And then, as if a key has toothed its way past the rusted tumblers and sprung a stubborn lock, she gives in. She begins to transform.

  “Good,” Miriam says, but her voice sounds far away.

  It is different this time. She doesn’t resist the feeling, doesn’t push back. She summons it and lets it grip her completely. Her heartbeat spikes with the rush of adrenaline. Her skin goes warm and prickles with hair. Her bones make noises not unlike a series of wet gasps. When her gums recede, she tastes the coppery blood flooding her mouth. For the briefest moment the sun breaks through the clouds and her shadow appears suddenly before her, tethered to her feet and shifting like a tree in a hard wind.

  She has more energy sizzling through her than her body can contain. And a door seems to have swung open in her mind to allow everything in at once. A vole scurries through the underbrush. An owl breaks a bone with its beak. Sagebrush rattles against the breeze. She hears and smells and sees it all. It is as if, up to this point, her brain was muffled, everything experienced through a filter of wet wool. And now so many senses emerge from the blur. She has changed—she has opened up and tuned in to some dead transmission that has suddenly buzzed to life inside her and allowed in all the richness of the world.

  It is then that she hears the car engine.

  In the near distance, maybe a quarter mile away, a faint rumble. When the vehicle turns down their driveway, the gravel rattling its undercarriage, she jerks around and tears off in the direction of it—driven by some animal impulse that responds to trespass. It is the Tall Man, she is certain. Miriam wanted her to fight. Miriam wanted her to kill. And now Miriam is going to get her wish.

  Claire doesn’t hear, or doesn’t care to hear, her aunt yelling “No!” behind her.

  * * *

  Patrick drives the road that winds out of La Pine and toward the Cascades, feeling sweet abandon, the best kind of risk. He saved her. He keeps going back to that. He saved her, and when you save somebody that means your life and hers are irrevocably linked. The feeling inside him must be similar to what a parent feels, a fawning sense of creation, ownership.

  He brakes, signals, steers down the rutted driveway, bumping along the washboard, following the lines of the ponderosa pine
s. Fifty yards in, a deer bounds in front of him, so fast his foot hasn’t even reached the brake before it is gone, diving into the woods, its raised tail a white flash. He skids to a stop just as two more follow, slower, trotting, their heads low, their hooves tocking the gravel. He laughs with relief.

  The laugh is cut short when he catches a glimpse of movement out his driver’s-side window and the Jeep lurches. He assumes he isn’t so lucky after all—another deer has come vaulting out of the woods and struck him.

  Then the nylon shell rips open. The fog of his breath is sucked away by the breeze rushing freely into the Jeep. He looks up and there she is. He knows her instantly, despite her changed appearance, like someone recognized through a Halloween mask. The bloodshot eyes and bleeding mouth. A lycan.

  He feels a jolt of fear, as if run through with electricity, when she reaches for him, snatches his shoulder. He barely feels her claws pierce his skin, too overwhelmed by the sight of her, as if he has somehow fallen back in time, back into his hiding place on the plane, only this time the lycan has found him. This time he will be as dead as everyone else.

  He cannot breathe. He cannot move. She can do with him what she will. Her arm pulls back, he assumes for a slash, but no, she is retreating from him, dropping from the Jeep, stumbling away, breathing heavily and observing him with eyes that glow with recognition. She is crying. He isn’t sure why, maybe as a side effect of transforming, but she is crying and her tears are red and trailing down her face.

  She turns away from him and launches herself into the woods and vanishes from sight.