Red Moon

by Benjamin Percy

  She leans hard on the doorknob when she steps into the high-ceilinged room. The wainscoting is dark slatted wood. The windows are framed by thick curtains, and through them she can see untamed hedges, knee-high grass in the steadily brightening dawn. She does not have time to wonder at her surroundings. Escape is all that matters.

  She tries to imagine the seeming size of a house like this, the rooms stretching on and stacked up all around her, like some vast honeycomb in which barbs and venom lie in wait. The hardwood groans with her every dragging step and threatens to give her away. She is weak, naked, unarmed, but her temper is as hot as blood in the vein when she thinks about anyone stopping her after she has made it this far. She goes to the fireplace—her bare feet cold on its soot-stained tiles—and grabs a poker to serve as a weapon and a cane.

  She can see down a short hallway and into what appears to be the foyer. Her way out. She starts toward it and then midway across the room stops short. From this new vantage point she can see a wide spiral staircase reaching upward—and she can hear what sounds like footsteps shuddering down it. Her first impulse is to sneak beside the doorway and raise the poker like a sword—ready to swing its prong into the skull of whoever passes by—but she knows her body is too ungainly to fight, her muscles too weak to even hold the poker wobblingly overhead.

  There is a swinging door beside the fireplace. She uses her back to push her way through it, into the kitchen, with its black-and-white rubber-stamp floor and its walls and cabinets painted a blinding white. Something is cooking. Meat. Her body aches at the smell—only for a moment.

  In the center of the kitchen is an island. And upon the island lies a naked body. A thin, pale-skinned man with a beard wisping along his cheeks and neck. His mouth and eyes are open and she might think him alive if not for his hollowed-out belly, the skin scissored away beneath his sternum, guts gone. A large metal bowl—the same as the one Caliban used to clean her—sits beside him. Flies orbit the air above. One of them vanishes into his mouth.

  She hears a creak. It comes from the sitting room, the hardwood floor depressed by the weight of someone walking. She must hide. She goes first to the pantry, but when she opens the door, she is greeted by another body, a man hanging upside down and bleeding out into a mop bucket. She nearly cries out in surprise. She spins around and sees a square of space beneath the island where someone might stack pots or bowls. It is empty now and she slides into it the moment the kitchen door swings open.

  From here, she can see only to his waist but knows him immediately, his trunked legs, his boots big enough for a child to climb inside, the giant Magog. He never visited her in the basement, his one grace, for his weight and size would be an unimaginable torture. He wears black jeans that disappear behind an apron spattered with blood. She hears a tick-tick-tick-tick that she at first believes to be the radiator across the room. Then she notices that the poker is tapping the wall of her hiding place, jarred by the slamming of her pulse.

  She wants to look away but cannot. She needs to know where he is, needs to know the moment his body stiffens at the sight of her so that she can try to uncurl from her hiding place and stab the poker into his knee or groin. He goes to the counter near the sink. He runs the water, and under the noise of it she shifts her body to better observe him. His red hair spills down his broad back. He picks up a cleaver and sharpens it—fifty times on one side, fifty times on the other—the scraping of the blade, the steel-on-steel sound so tangible that he might have drawn it along her bones. He tests it with a thumbnail and the razor edge peels away a curl.

  Then he approaches the island. So close that she can smell him, so close that she can touch him, that she considers attacking him from below. Her hands grip the poker so tightly her knuckles whiten. If only she weren’t so weak.

  There comes a thwack from above. So powerful that the island shakes around her. He has brought down the cleaver. She hears the meaty release of the blade when he lifts it. And then he brings it down again. And again. There is a ripping sound of wet fabric. And then something plops into a bowl. A ten-gallon trash can stands a few feet away. Into it Magog tosses the man’s head. The skull has been cleaved, the brain scraped from it.

  The butchery continues for the next ten minutes. Him circling the island and slashing and peeling and tearing, the blade occasionally shrieking against bone. Blood oozes to the floor and pools in a puddle, and in it she can see the reflection of Magog raising and dropping the cleaver, like the terrible god of some tiny red planet. When the muscles in her back and legs begin to spasm and knot, she puts her hand in her mouth and bites down on it to get through the pain.

  Somewhere in the kitchen an alarm chirps. Magog drops the cleaver with a clatter and walks to the oven and raspingly pulls from it three pans of meat, long thin strips browned to a crisp. From her hiding place she can smell the hellish breath of the oven—and she hates that it smells good, that her stomach gurgles with a hunger she wishes she could correct.

  From one of the cupboards he lugs a Cuisinart. He snaps a shredder into place and punches the power and grinds the cooked meat against it until the container fills with flakes. What he is doing makes no sense to her. But none of this makes sense to her—the stacks of iodine, the old mansion, the harvested bodies—so that she wonders whether madness has finally seized her and she remains strapped to her basement bed, lost in some waking nightmare where the alien and ghastly behavior of her fellow lycans makes her question whether they really are men, as they like to claim, or merely beasts hidden in human robes.

  The kitchen door swings open and she ducks back into her hole. She spots sneakers, jeans. “She’s escaped,” a voice says. Then, as quickly as he appeared, he is gone, followed by the booming footsteps of Magog.

  They could return any second, she knows, but her muscles are in such a state of distress that she has no choice but to immediately slide out of the island and onto the floor, her body crabbed up. Slowly she straightens each leg and rubs hard at the muscles. She breathes through her teeth. It takes several minutes before she is able to hoist herself upright. She stares at the pile of meat and bones on the table, no longer recognizable as a man, a body unpuzzled. She doesn’t know whether to run or remain hidden. They are looking for her now, and if they find her, she doesn’t want to imagine what they will do to her.

  There is a short hallway adjacent to the counter where Magog was working a moment before. She peers down it and spots a door with a square window that looks out onto an expansive lawn edged by hedges and rhododendrons. She sees—but it can’t be—a heifer, a sheep, and several goats grazing there. She thinks again that the alien logic of this place better suits a nightmare. A jacket hangs from a hook and she pulls it down and zips it around her nakedness before scrambling for the doorknob and pushing outside before she can second-guess the decision to run.

  She does not look back. Looking back will not help. She keeps her eyes on the wall of rhododendrons ahead, narrows all of her attention on them so that the rest of the world falls away. Glossy green leaves, bright red explosions of flowers. If she can just get to them, if she can just cross these next twenty yards unopposed, she will be out of sight of the house. One step at a time, one decision at a time. First to the rhododendrons. Then to the ironwork fencing. Then to the woods beyond. One step leading to the next, every step crutched by the poker in her hand. She would run if she could, but the best she can do is hobble.

  Her muscles scream. Her breath comes out of her throat in a wounded rasp. Her eyes water with tears of pain and fear and relief, making her vision uncertain, so that she at first can’t tell if the rhododendrons are shaking.

  They are only ten paces away and she wants only to crash through them, the leaves like waxy knives, the blooms as big as fists battering her, a momentary discomfort, like the past few months, that she will grit her teeth through and endure and then emerge out the other side scratched and sticky with pollen, but alive. Then everything will be okay.

  At last she is
there—she has made it—and her body collapses into the tangle of branches, hidden, safe for now. She can go no farther, even though her legs stubbornly continue to jerk, as if she wants to keep walking.

  She hears a rustling and snapping. She raises her head weakly. Twenty yards away, she sees a body push through the rhododendrons, stepping onto the lawn. And another. And another. All of them with shaved heads and American-flag T-shirts. They wear backpacks. They carry shotguns. They do not make sense. Like everything else. She tells herself that they are like the antique furniture and the dissected body and the goats grazing all around her—hallucinations—dreams she can dispel by pinching her skin and saying, wake up.

  At first she believes they are hunting for her. No, she thinks. No. That wasn’t the deal. If she made it this far, she would be safe. She will not allow them to take her. She clutches the poker two-handed, ready to drive it into any who come near.

  But they are already jogging away from her, toward the mansion, their backpacks jingling with ammo.

  It is then that she smiles. Only for a second. Her face quaking with happiness. The expression does not come easily. And it feels alien to her and the horror of her circumstances. But she cannot stop herself. She is going to make it after all. She is going to live.

  * * *

  When the bullets spray their campsite, Patrick bolts in one direction, Claire another. She has her revolver in one hand and her backpack slung over her shoulder and she isn’t sure how long and how far she runs, but by the time she stops, her throat is ablaze, her side is cramped, and she is alone. In the distance she can still hear the crack of gunfire, the whop-whop-whop of a helicopter. At first she is in a fury, her body shaking with the dynamite of the moment.

  She doesn’t understand how they found the campsite, and she doesn’t understand why they are here, but it must be because of Patrick. For this she might have shot him if given the chance. He has betrayed her again. She should not have trusted him. She should not trust in anything, not even herself, weak and forgiving as she seems to be.

  She keeps going—to where, she doesn’t know. Away. For the moment, movement is all that matters. She is used to it. It is what she is best at. Running. She tries to hurry, but the ground steepens into a hillside tangled with vines and spongy with deadfall. With every step, her anger lessens, replaced by worry as she wonders whether Patrick is all right.

  She clambers up battlements of basalt and finds herself in a dry riverbed and follows it up and up. She remembers his surprise, his panic. The way, when the gunfire began and they sat upright and blinked away sleep, he put a hand protectively to her chest, the way her father did when he was driving and had to stop suddenly. It was the same hand, as rough as a hunk of pine, that touched her all last night, combing fingers through her hair, tracing the outline of her jaw and neck. He loved her neck, he said. It was the most delicate thing about her. She touches the place he touched, just above her collarbone, and feels there the beating of her pulse.

  She tries to make him ugly. Knobby knees. Big ears. Flat butt. His face spooned. Too much white around his eyes. But it doesn’t help. His rightness, that electrical feeling, engulfs everything else. She wants him. Right now she wants him more than anything in the world.

  All of her running has made her mouth cottony, given her a headachy, dehydrated feeling. She climbs up this dry riverbed, what feels like an immense rainspout, and eventually it peters out and she clambers through a notch and discovers that she is at the top of the hill. She stands on a shelf of rock overlooking a hundred-foot drop. She gets that feeling she sometimes gets. The fall would be long and terrifying—followed by serenity.

  For a moment she wobbles there with a sensation not unlike vertigo. Then she climbs down another way, onto a slippery wash of red clay that takes her eventually to an asphalt trail. It is strewn with leaves and half-hidden by mud, but she can still see what appear to be yellow paw prints painted onto it. Though she should have noticed them long ago, she was too caught up in her thoughts and only now observes the buildings rising out of the woods, many of them mossy and vine strangled. The air smells curiously sweet, fecund. Above a glass entryway hangs a sign that reads, in white lettering, EAGLE LANDING.

  The zoo. She is at the Portland Zoo of all places. She remembers, yesterday, when studying the map with Tío, seeing it on the other side of the Hoyt Arboretum. She is so far from where she thought she would be, only a day ago.

  She tucks the .357 into her hip holster. She wanders the trails and passes by replica ice floes and snow caves, artfully stacked logs, a miniature train rusting on its tracks with seven cars to haul red-faced children and camera-lugging adults. She sees, beyond the fencing and moats, the faded orange coat of a dead tiger, the sunken hummock of a grizzly. A giraffe that died with its body on one side of the fence, its head on the other, trying to reach the leaves of a nearby tree, its long neck rotted through and spiked with white vertebrae. Behind a plate-glass window she spots a stuffed mountain lion unendingly roaring, the only thing here that appears alive. She wanders over to a pond and finds it full of flashing color, orange and red koi that come boiling to the surface when she tosses a handful of pebbles into the water.

  “Have you seen this?” someone says. “You should really see this.”

  For two years she has imagined him always behind or beside her, like a shadow she can’t shake. For two years she has not so much as taken a shower without a weapon in arm’s reach. For two years she has dreamed of him and what he will do to her when he finally finds her. She will try to run, but her legs will feel entangled in mud. He will strike her. She will stumble. He will strike her again and she will fall. “You’ve made me angry,” he will say. “You’ve made me so, so angry.” She will close her eyes and whimper and there will be a crackling sound and the smell of smoke and when she looks at him again his terrible melted face will have been set aflame by his anger and his volcanic eyes will regard her as dry tinder.

  And now here he is, the Tall Man. He wears a black suit despite the heat of the morning. A Glock dangles from one of his hands, gripped as casually as a closed umbrella, but there in case he needs it, there for her to see. His bald, ruined head is spotted with sweat. He withdraws a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and runs it across his brow. He stands ten yards away, next to a short fence past which the ground slopes to a pond with an island in its center. On the island is a chaotic wooden structure with ropes and tires hanging off it, the grass below it littered with bones.

  “He’s been eating the others.” The Tall Man tucks away the handkerchief and motions to the island with the Glock. “And now he’s eating himself.” She follows the pistol and sees the ape squatting among the bones. Its thinness is obvious despite its shaggy red coat. It has the wrinkled face of an old man. It is gnawing on its arm and she can see even from this distance the bone peeking out from beneath its fur.

  “Anything to stay alive. Amazing resolve.” He smiles wretchedly, the burned skin so tight around his skull that it appears it might split at the effort. “But it looks like he doesn’t have much time left. It looks like this is the end of the road.”

  “You followed me?”

  “From the woods? Yes. What a surprise to see you there. But of course I’ve been following you for a long time, Claire.” He touches his face. “To thank your father properly for what he did to me. Did you know that my nerves have been damaged in such a way that they feel constantly aflame? All this time I have been burning.”

  She should shoot him. She should reach for her revolver and shoot him. She feels unsteady on her feet, as she did minutes before at the cliff, drawn to the edge. If she moves, she could die, but so could he, so could they both. But she is unable to move, arrested by his gaze, and so spins on an axis that can’t find its course. His eyes are so gray they are almost black. Absent of light. But there is little, she knows, that they do not see. The moment her hand twitches, he raises his gun and studies her down the long line of his arm.

&nbs
p; The ape that has been silent up to this point now begins to screech. It has spotted them. It lopes to the shore and swings its good arm into the water, pounding, splashing, trying to get their attention. The Tall Man turns to acknowledge it. It gives a short leap and races in a circle and returns to the water to slap once more.

  When he turns away, it is easier. His face is eclipsed by the faces of Miriam, of her father and mother, of Matthew, and the thought of them gives her the gravity she needs.

  The ape cries out and the Tall Man brings a finger to his lips to tell it shh—and his finger is still there, still at his mouth, when he turns to face Claire as if to silence her drawn revolver before it reports.

  She remembers the tree behind the cabin. She remembers the way her bullets bit through it. She remembers its slow collapse. He falls in much the same way.

  * * *

  It takes five slugs to bring down the giant, and even then, he is still alive. His breath whistles and bubbles through the holes in his chest and throat. He lies in the foyer of the mansion, like a fallen grandfather clock, with the Americans standing over him, commenting on what a huge piece of meat he is. He says nothing when they ask him where to find Balor. He only raises a hand to swat away the shotgun Max aims at his face, but it is too late. A second later a thunderclap fills the air and his arm falls heavily at his side.

  They make their way methodically through every room on the ground floor, killing two others, before climbing the stairs. Someone fires down on them and they toss a grenade onto the landing and duck down. Plaster clouds the air. The ceiling cracks. In the dusty silence that follows the blast they continue upward. There is a metal gate secured at the top of the landing, and then another at the doorway to a master bedroom at the end of the hall, both of which they blast through with C-4 charges.