Dark Shadows: Wolf Moon Rising

by Lara Parker

  Leave me tranquil. Leave me be! Get thee to the depths of hell, before I rip out your tongues, before I tear out your eyes.

  She hovered nearer, floating in a black flame, and her hair was a mass of writhing snakes with long bodies slithering out from her head, red-eyed snakes that leapt and twisted in the air.

  I will leave you only with ears so you can hear the furies of the night coming into your rooms. And they will come, my darlings, like ravenous serpents. And they will devour you, finger by finger and toe by toe, while you scream for mercy—silent screams that no one will hear!

  And then she did make a sound. She laughed, a cruel mirthless laugh that reverberated through the forest.

  As if the laughter had been their cue, the coyotes leapt over the snow and fell on her tormentors with growls and gnashing teeth; and—reduced to sniveling infants—the boys found their bodies and catapulted into the drifts, tripping over gravestones as the black wave undulated above their heads and the yapping animals nipped at their legs. Yowling like babies they fled the bloodied jaws, vaulted the fence, and took off into the night.

  * * *

  When Jackie woke, the moon had risen, and shadows of trees scarred the snow’s metallic sheen. She had flown into a large oak and fallen asleep in the branches. She looked out upon a world as bright as day, but with no color, as though she were watching an old black-and-white movie.

  Something was beneath her, circling her tree, its dark body huge and black-furred. It was sniffing the ground like a hound that had treed a coon, but so clumsy and formless, its paws making no sound as it trod in a circle, its breathing raw and heaving. She pulled against the trunk and held her breath. And then the creature lifted up and placed its feet against the bark of the tree and Jackie saw the red-rimmed eyes and bloody teeth, the huge lolling tongue, and heard the cavernous growl that seemed to come from the center of the earth.

  It was a tremendous wolf, its jaws dripping saliva as it panted and snapped at her feet, and its crimson eyes looked deep into hers. It gathered its body and leapt for her branch, and she sucked her body closer. It panted, claws ripping the trunk, then leapt again and howled in frustration, before it fell to four feet and lumbered away into the trees. She knew if it did not find food it would be back.

  Her raven flew to the branch above her head and looked down at her with its red eye, bounced its head, then flew off again, leaving its sign and its permission. Welcoming the night’s cover, she spread black wings and flew out of the forest.

  She came down in a clearing, and releasing her wild form, struggled to her feet and, lugging her books to her chest, began to plow through the snow again. She felt a dull ache in her stomach, knowing her mother would be angry and they would argue as always, and she felt, as well, a groggy nausea, the residue of the spell.

  An itch pricked in one of her ears, and her mouth tasted sour. Her feet and hands tingled from the cold, and the wind whistled like flutes through the pines. Then she heard the whine of David’s snowmobile back toward Collinwood, and she realized he had been looking for her but had gone on without her. Her head throbbed and she remembered she still had homework to do before she could take her medication—or better still, drink the potion she made from herbs—and sleep for real, enter the world of her unconscious.

  Wearily, she climbed the rise of the lawn behind the house, adjusting her books to her hip and slogging through the deep drifts. She was shivering in the frozen air that tasted of ice. She knew she must have fallen asleep in the tree, although she could not remember sleeping, only that she had sunk into a trance and had been awakened by the cries of the coyotes, not yapping as they did when mating, but heart-chilling, desolate screeches, more like tied-up dogs left to die. Now she heard the huge wolf howl again, this time farther away and more desolate, and she stopped, chills creeping down her neck, and a pulse between her legs that she knew was fear. There was another sound, much closer, a faint moan beneath the whine of the wind.

  The house was just ahead and she could see the lights of the drawing room winking through the trees, and a rosy shimmer where the fire was still glowing. There was something on the snow, a dark shape like a fallen log, yet thicker, or, it seemed to her, like a sleeping bear. As she drew nearer, the moonlight revealed black splotches and areas where the snow had been packed, as though trampled by a herd of dogs.

  She could see footprints, and she was jarred with a suspicion that the coyotes had come here, that they had chased and cornered the wolf. The splotches grew larger, faintly tinged with a dull maroon, and she could smell the acrid scent of blood. What could it be, that dark mass beneath the last of the trees?

  Six

  David’s breath spilled out in misty spurts as he eased the throttle, gripped the handlebars, and rose up out of his seat. He could smell the snow, vaguely like tin and chalk, or the interior of a meat locker, along with the acrid odor of gasoline and exhaust. He had forgotten his gloves and wore only a windbreaker, but he was warmed by adrenaline pumping though his body.

  Drawing on his sixteen-year-old instincts, which he felt were pretty good, he assessed his plan. Neither Jackie nor Toni had any memory of moving the painting, or at least they insisted they had none. He thought Antoinette would cover her tracks if it meant not making Quentin angry, and Jackie was unreliable, not only because she suffered from—he might as well admit it, even though it made his breastbone ache—some sort of mental disturbance. She had been diagnosed as schizophrenic, and he knew she often skewed reality to shape it more to her own world. Still, there was something strange about everyone he knew, so what did it matter that she was a little different. All he knew was that he wanted to protect her, keep all her monsters at bay.

  The engine whined and sometimes screamed when he pushed on the throttle, and the wind whirred in his ears. He leaned back from the windshield, opened his mouth, and felt the flakes landing on his tongue. The cold threaded into his nose and down his throat, and the frozen air tasted like dirt-flavored ice. He smiled thinking of last week, when he and Jackie had made snow cones with Tang in a cup while they sat together on the back steps of the Old House and sucked the sweet juice until their mouths were bright orange inside and her lips were glossy as cherries.

  He did not possess Jackie’s clairvoyance, but he believed he was more than exceptional at finding things. Maybe he was telepathic. His mother had been otherworldly, he was certain. Surely he had inherited something from her. He could still see her face in the fire, her voice calling him—he remembered it clearly, even though he had been so young. He tried not to think of how much he missed her, and instead he blasted down the back road from the Old House to Collinwood. He squeezed the throttle lever and bounced through the snow, the treads digging into the ruts and the skis swiveling on patches of ice.

  Frustration at having only an old Ski-Doo as a means of transportation triggered thoughts of his cousin Barnabas’s Bentley, now sitting abandoned in the carriage house. It had been months since it had been driven, and David had begun to contemplate taking it out some night while the family was asleep. In his fantasy he always pictured Jackie beside him, her eyes glowing with excitement.

  Willie, of course, had the keys and would never be talked out of those, and, except for a driving lesson or two supplied by Barnabas before he had essentially disappeared during the day, David was a long way from taking his driver’s test. Not that anyone cared. He was used to being alone, growing up without a mother and having a distant father. Who was there to stop him? If he did take the Bentley, just along the sea road, when there were no other cars about, he was sure he would be fine.

  It was growing dark, and an orange moon hovered behind the trees, close to the horizon. The full moon rises at dusk, he remembered, but for an instant this moon was a flame within the dark cedars, like the burning shed where his mother had been when she called to him, and it flickered as he sped along. Up ahead he could see the Collinwood cemetery surrounded by its railing of iron spears.

  There was a do
wn slope so he slammed in on the throttle and floated the sled in curves on the new snow, thrusting his body from one side to the other as he carved wide turns. He thought of Helios’s son who had stolen his father’s chariot of the sun and driven the fiery horses across the sky. What was his name again? Phaeton? Phaeten? Phaëthon. He had flown too close to the earth and set it on fire, and then had taken the coach too high, whereupon the earth had frozen over.

  David sped up and—bouncing recklessly—roared through the drifts, his fingers curled around the handlebars, imagining he had hold of the reins. Deep in his muscles, he could feel the other boy’s terror when he could not control the galloping horses, the sun blazing behind him, his hands raw from grasping the leather. Wild with fear, the raging steeds exploded into the sky, and he drew back with all his might, tugging the reins to his chest.

  There was a bump in the road and David whooped, gunned the sled, hit the rise with the track grinding, leaned in, and lifted the skis up into the air in a gnarly wheelie, but damn! He came down on a hidden rock and twisted and skidded to one side, lost his balance in the snow, and went crashing to the ground. The engine shrieked like a skill saw and then died.

  Knocked out of breath, David lay still for a moment, and then turned over on his side. He was across from the graveyard, looking through the iron railing where he could see the Collins mausoleum and the leaning tombstones with their top hats of snow like children dressed in Halloween costumes. Shaken but not hurt, he brushed himself off and climbed back on the sled, leaned over, and jerked the pull start rope.

  To his dismay the handle broke loose with the cord caught inside. He cursed under his breath, the wooden handle dangling in his hand, and shook his head. He looked up at the sky’s fading light. Time to get out the tool kit. Good thing he had a spare cord. He would have to remove the engine cover in order to get it started.

  Dismounting again, he realized he actually enjoyed working on his sled. He extracted the wrench from the tool pouch he kept under the seat and undid the four bolts that held the recoil in place. There it was, the rope swallowed up inside the plastic. While he was working he heard the sound of boys’ voices shouting—raucous cries like the calls of crows—and he wondered who they could be. No other boys lived around here anymore. With a few dexterous maneuvers, he extracted the rope and fed it back in around the wheel, being careful not to dislodge the spring and leaving enough for the handle. This time he double-tied the knot.

  Clambering to his feet and feeling pleased with himself—at least he could keep his one contraption running—he righted the snowmobile and was about to reattach the cover when he caught sight of a statue that adorned one of the graves deep inside the cemetery. It was an angel with her wings outstretched, and her long cloak caressed by folds of snow. He drew closer, curious as to whose grave it might be, but the stone was obscured. The snow had formed a canopy over her hair and her almost human eyes peered down at him as if in supplication.

  Something about her gave him a creepy feeling, and he was about to look at her more closely when he saw something even more inexplicable—specters, gray and dog-like, circling the tombstones. One stopped and looked at him. It was a coyote, skinny and nervous, its eyes burning and its tongue hanging out. It watched him for a long moment, before it turned and galloped off, becoming a shadow again.

  Then deep in the woods a wolf howled with a forlorn and menacing wail. The lonely sound made the hair stand up on his neck, and for the first time David thought perhaps he should go on home. There were never wolves in the Collinsport woods, and he had never heard one call.

  After he mounted the sled, he pulled up on the throttle and yanked the cord, and the engine rattled, then throbbed to life. He eased the sled forward, thinking there were still traces of Phaëthon’s wild ride, the ends of earth covered with ice at the poles, and volcanoes still trying to spit fire out of their bellies. Clearly, the lesson was never to steal your father’s chariot—or your cousin’s automobile. Still … the Bentley was so elegant, so quiet, and black as a thief in the night, sure to go undetected if he were to take it out after dark.

  As he drove the snowmobile, a little more carefully now, over the tops of drifts and down into dips, David was imagining the painting, one he had never seen, a portrait of Quentin in what Jackie had described as an army uniform with medals, in a gilded frame. David saw it clearly, leaning against a stone, or possibly a brick wall, in a deserted building.

  He decided he would search them all: the pool house, the stables, the bowling alley, the laundry shed, Rose Cottage, even the shattered greenhouse, until he found it, and he was certain he would find it. In exchange, there would be her smile, a grateful hug—both infinitely desirable—but more than that, a moment when her melancholy would lift, and to give her that he would suffer the world.

  But Willie had been so adamant, exhorting a promise that David go only in the daytime, a promise he was breaking at this very moment as dusk was falling. “There ain’t anything out there, Master David, and you don’t have no need to go traipsin’ around those dilapidated sheds and stuff.”

  Willie had grown more agitated and, in his nervous, whiny voice, practically begged him to stay away.

  “Those buildings are dangerous, Master David. The ceilings could fall in at any moment. Remember there was a fire, and the floors are rotted, no telling what kind of varmints, snakes even and poisonous spiders, live there.”

  David had laughed at such simplistic reasoning but he was becoming more and more aware of the pall that lay over his family—a pervading gloom. Secrets hovered in the air, and in the face of accusations there were only the same averted eyes and the same denials. Crazy things happened and everyone pretended not to notice, and if certain subjects were brought up, Roger would abruptly end the conversation. Someday, if things went as planned, David would inherit the estate. Would he receive as his covenant all the misfortunes and indiscretions that plagued the family?

  With its Grecian colonnade and tall casement windows, the pool house rising out of the snow could have been a small replica of the Old House, even though the Doric columns were not so grand. Drifts thickened the portico roof as though it were thatched with pale white straw.

  He wouldn’t have much time. The family would be wondering where he was and he had homework to do, two pages of math and an overdue book report on Les Misérables. He wanted to write on the subject of loyalty and sacrifice as a life choice, but he had gotten bogged down in the political ramifications of the Revolution.

  When he could steer the snowmobile no longer through the drifts, he killed the engine and dug out the flashlight he kept in the seat to use as a torch. The rising moon caught the windows of the facade and flashed in the row of upper panes, as though something moved inside.

  “What’s the matter with you,” he said under his breath. “You trying to spook yourself?” He approached the door, certain now that he was going to find the painting inside. He could picture it leaning against a wall, wrapped in its blanket, and he imagined Jackie’s bright look when he presented it to her. She would be able to make her mother happy and their arguments would end.

  The wind was whistling and the snow was as high as his knees as he climbed the stair to the porch, glancing around at the lonely expanse of white lawn. The falling flakes obscured even the shadow of Collinwood, although a few lights from the dining room and kitchen winked through the haze like golden sequins stitched in the air.

  The door, as he had been warned, although shaky in the jamb, was securely locked, meaning that the key must be one of the seven on the tarnished brass ring Willie had finally given him. His hands were chilled now and his fingers clumsy as he tried the keys one by one.

  When the largest key found the lock, David jiggled it back and forth, and tantalizingly, but with some rusty resistance, the bolt drew. David pushed open the door but leapt back with a cry when several large clumps of snow fell from the top of the jamb and on his head.

  He peered into the cavernous pool
house. It was gloomy and silent, except for the sound of dripping water. Moving the light around, David remembered that it had been built in the style of a Roman bath, with arches darkening the mullioned glass, and a tiled apron that surrounded the yawning rectangle in the center of the room. There was a sickening odor of old fireplaces where the ashes had frozen and decayed, and as David searched the ceiling, he could see that the entire interior of the pool house was charred, just as he remembered it. The overhead beams were blackened like the timbers in a burned-down house, and dark columns like those of the portico, but scorched with smoke, held an enormous skylight of shattered glass.

  He took a step inside and heard a strange sound like cellophane being crushed in a giant’s fist. Looking up he saw a burst of fluttering near the ceiling, where a colony of bats exploded with jerky screeches up and out of the broken opening into the sky.

  David walked to the edge of the pool, and the putrid odor of rotting compost pricked at his nostrils. Sheets of glass lay like slabs of ice amid decaying sludge, and weeds had grown up through the cracks in the bottom, gone to seed, and died.

  There were sounds of dripping from several openings in the skylight, like an out-of-tune guitar being plucked on separate strings. Snow had fallen through the roof and melted before freezing again, adding an inch or so of ice to the bottom of the pool, where broken rods of a stair led down into the deep end.

  He saw a discarded jacket on a carpet of decay, looking like a corpse with its arms thrown out, and he shivered a little as he cast his beam into the corners of the deck.