Low Red Moon

by Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  “It was a terrible mess a few years back,” the woman said. “Just falling apart. A bunch of hippie kids used to live up here, and they’d let it go. A shame. It’s a good old house, really.”

  “I’m sure,” Narcissa said.

  “Did you live in Savannah long? I have an aunt—”

  “It’s exactly what I’m looking for,” and Narcissa smiled and thought that the woman’s expression might have changed, then, a flickering, almost imperceptible shift, there and gone again, fear or something finer, and “Very good,” the woman said. “We can take care of the paperwork back at the office.”

  The house was built more than a hundred years ago, the real estate agent said, raised at the other end of that late, bloodred century so recently deceased; war and murder, deaths and shattered minds, broken spirits, the shit and piss that men have dragged themselves through in their hunger for an end.

  “I see you,” Narcissa says, aloud though she knows this house could hear her perfectly well without words, without her voice, that a house like this hears everything. The house it is because of everything it’s heard and seen and felt playing out inside its walls, beneath its ceilings. Mad house, sour place, once upon a time ago good place driven insane by happenstance, driven sick by the minds that have lived and dreamed inside its rooms. Not evil, no, Narcissa knows evil houses well enough to be sure—not evil, only mad. Left at last to rot in this lonely patch of trees and strangling kudzu vines on the side of this mountain, and Narcissa imagines how much the house would have welcomed that decay. I will die, finally, it must have thought. I will forget everything, forever, but then the hateful carpenters and painters and plumbers, their busy hammers and brushes and PVC transplants, to patch it back together again and haul the house on Cullom Street back from the precious edge of oblivion.

  “Maybe, when I am done,” Narcissa tells the house, “maybe then I will burn you to the ground. I can be merciful.” But it can see inside her, and the house knows she’s a liar.

  Narcissa takes the slender leather satchel from the passenger seat and gets out of the Olds, the car she stole in Charleston almost a month ago. “Just a few more bad dreams, that’s all,” she says, and the house cringes, floorboards drawing back the smallest fraction of an inch, the stiff flinch of tar-paper shingles and goose bumps down cloudy windowpanes.

  “You don’t have to be afraid of me,” she says. “You’re a far, far more terrible thing than me, after all. Think about it,” but she can tell that the house has no intention of believing anything she says. The doubtful shadows crouched apprehensive on the wide front porch, a stubborn darkness clinging there despite the noonday sunshine and the blue October sky sprawled above the trees.

  “Well, then. Have it your way,” Narcissa whispers. “We could have been friends, though. And I don’t think you’ve ever had many friends. We could have told each other stories.” She glances back towards the rear of the Oldsmobile, thinks about her heavy suitcases in the trunk, a cardboard box with her books, another, larger satchel with her knives and scalpels, her tools, but all those things can wait until later. There will be plenty of time to unpack later, and she walks slowly across the weedy, leaf-littered front yard to the door.

  All Narcissa’s life like someone else’s fever dreams locked up inside her head and wanting out, or something scribbled down by a crazy woman for her to have to live through, red-brown words stolen from her mother’s diary; all her days chasing delirium’s legacy, measuring the ever-narrowing space between nightmares and visions, and she cannot even remember a time before this was the way she saw her life. No guiltless beginning, no damning moment when childhood’s hollow innocence melted into disillusionment and all the casual atrocities of her twenty-six years.

  Her birth on the last freezing night at the end of a long year of horrors—earthquakes in Burma, volcanic eruptions in Hawaii, a subway wreck in London that killed forty-one people, the fiery crash of a Vietnamese cargo jet carrying two hundred and forty-three orphans. And all of these things written down in her mother’s diary, all of these and a thousand more, a pregnant woman’s book of splintered days, and then her mother died in childbirth, before she saw Narcissa’s face, before she even heard her child draw its first breath and cry. One life lost, one life gained, tit for tat, and the only daughter of Caroline Snow was raised by her grandfather, Aldous, in his tall and crumbling house by the sea. He read to her from his strange books, reading by beeswax candles and oil lamps because the electricity had been shut off long ago, and she walked with him along the rocky Massachusetts beach below the house.

  “The sea is the mother of the world,” he told her. “The sea is Mother Hydra, and one day soon she’ll rise again and swallow her ungrateful children.”

  “Will she swallow me, too?” Narcissa asked, and the old man nodded his bald head.

  “She will, child. She’ll have us all.”

  May 20—The demons have stopped coming to my windows. They know what has happened to me. They can smell the life growing inside me. Sometimes, when I have only the sound of the waves for company, I miss their faces pressed against the glass. Last week a woman in Maine was convicted of drowning her six-year-old son while he was bathing. She simply held him under the water. I wonder if he opened his eyes and watched her? I thought about taking a coat hanger from my closet and ending this, but I haven’t got the courage. I’m not ready to die.

  The ocean black and green, always-wheeling gulls, the ragged granite and salt-marsh wastes at the mouth of the Manuxet River, and Narcissa did not go to school or play with other children. Nothing for her beyond the house and its jealous secrets, the seashore and the Atlantic horizon running on forever. Everything she needed to know old Aldous taught her—how to read and write, astrology, the rhythms of the tides, history, the cruelty of this life and the ones to come, the red, wet mysteries beneath concealing skins.

  When she was six years old, Narcissa killed a stray dog with a piece of driftwood, beat it slowly to death and then dragged the sandy, flea-seething carcass back up the hill to her grandfather’s house. She cut it open with a kitchen knife, and the old man watched, neither approving nor disapproving. A wooden mallet and cold chisel to break its sternum, her small, bare hands to pry open the bone and cartilage cradle of its rib cage. Then she spread the dog out around her, like the pictures in his books, naming organs for the old man as she cut them free and laid them on the porch. “This is the heart,” she said, naming valves and ventricles, and “This is a kidney. Here’s the other one.” She ate an eye because it looked like the hard candy he sometimes brought her from his rare trips into Ipswich. After that, she killed gulls and wild geese, rats, a fat raccoon, whatever she found that couldn’t get away.

  When Narcissa was eight she discovered her mother’s diary, hidden in a small hole in the wall behind the headboard of the bed where she’d been born and Caroline Snow had died, and it became her bible. She kept it secret from Aldous, though she’d never kept anything from him before; something told her this book, the yellowing pages in her mother’s perfect cursive hand, was hers and hers alone. The book was bound in red leather, with a strip of fine gold cloth to mark the pages. It was only half filled, the last entry made three days before Narcissa’s birth. The first page dated April 29, and “I will put it all down, whatever seems important, everything I can remember,” Caroline had written in ink the color of dried blood.

  Narcissa kept the diary in the hole behind the headboard. It was safe there, she reasoned, because her grandfather wouldn’t come into this room. Some nights he even poured a double line of salt in front of the threshold, if he didn’t like the look of the moon and stars, and he’d written things that Narcissa couldn’t read on the door. Charms to keep something he feared in or out, but nothing to stop her.

  June 27—Lights in the skies above Tennessee yesterday. A school bus hit by a train outside Sacramento, thirteen dead. Father doesn’t like me reading the newspaper, but he keeps bringing it to me, anyway. I’m startin
g to show.

  When Narcissa was nine a shower of blood fell on the house for two hours straight, thick red rain against the gambrel roof like bacon frying in a skillet, and her grandfather watched the storm from his seat by the parlor window.

  “Is this your doing, child?” he asked Narcissa without taking his eyes off the window.

  “No sir,” she said and crossed the room to stand beside him.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Maybe it’s Mother Hydra,” Narcissa said, and she wasn’t surprised by the fear in his eyes or the small tingle of satisfaction it made her feel, deep inside. “Maybe she’s coming back.”

  “You still remember that damn story?” he asked, and his dry voice trembled.

  “I remember everything you tell me, Grandfather.”

  “Well, that was just a tale I made up to keep you away from the sea. It’s greedy, and little girls who aren’t afraid of it might wind up drowned.”

  “I think you were telling me the truth,” she said.

  “You believe whatever you want. I don’t give a damn no more.”

  And he sat in his chair, and she stood at his side until the blood stopped falling from the sky.

  August 14—Last night a motel in Cincinnati burned. 35 people died. A man in Los Angeles shot his wife and two daughters and then hung himself. One of the daughters will live. Father is spending more time in the cellar. He doesn’t think that I notice. He doesn’t think I know about the tunnels.

  On her tenth birthday, Narcissa’s grandfather gave her one of his books, one of the antique volumes that he kept locked inside the walnut barrister cases in his study and the keys always hidden somewhere she was never able to find. He wrapped it in an old newspaper, tied it up neat with twine, and made a bow from a scrap of china-blue silk they’d found on the beach the week before. He left the package lying outside her mother’s bedroom door, where Narcissa had started sleeping months and months before, and she unwrapped the gift sitting on the edge of the dead woman’s bed. The title and author were stamped in gold letters across the brittle black cover—Cultes des Goules by François Honore-Balfour, Comte d’Erlette. There were pictures, terrible, wondrous pictures that she stared at for hours on end, and the book became her most prized possession, even if she couldn’t read the French. She thought the bow was pretty and kept it in the hole in the wall with her mother’s diary.

  She kept other things in the hole: coins and seashells she’d found among the dunes, a shark’s tooth, a black and shriveled mermaid’s purse, pretty shards of blue and green beach glass. An arrowhead. A string of purple plastic beads.

  “Have you read the book yet?” her grandfather asked one day when they were walking along the beach together. She’d just found half a sand dollar and was busy wiping it clean on the hem of her dress.

  “You know very well that I haven’t,” she replied. “You know I can’t read French.”

  He stared at her silently for a moment, as if that had never occurred to him, and then Aldous Snow glanced longingly back towards his tall house, grown small in the distance.

  “We should start back,” he said and rubbed at his chin. “The tide will be coming in soon.”

  “Do you want me to read it?” Narcissa asked him.

  “You’re stronger than your mother ever was. I never would have given her a book like that.”

  “Do you want me to read it, Grandfather?”

  “It’s your book now. Read it if you want. I should have burned that goddamned thing years ago and dumped the ashes into the sea.”

  “Then why didn’t you?”

  But he didn’t answer her, turned around instead and started walking back up the beach towards the house alone. Narcissa stood watching him, listening to the cold wind, the waves, and in a little while she slipped the broken sand dollar into her coat pocket and followed him home.

  The shiny, new silver key the real estate agent gave Narcissa opens the front door, and she eases it shut again before reaching for the light switch on the wall. The foyer’s much darker than it should be, plenty of sunlight from the big living room to her left, but it seems diffused, stretched thin, drained of the simple strength to keep the shadows at bay. The electric light doesn’t work much better, and Narcissa turns the new dead bolt on the door, the dead bolt and the safety chain. Not that such flimsy things would ever keep anyone out, not anyone who really wanted in, but they might buy her time. Locks have bought her time before.

  The air in the old house smells sweet and sickly, fresh paint and a fainter undercurrent of mildew, a smell of age and neglect that the workmen couldn’t scrub away or cover over. There’s a closed door leading off the foyer, and Narcissa reaches for the brass knob, cold metal in her hand, and opens the door to the bedroom where a young woman once hanged herself, where that same young woman’s mother died of cancer years before. These aren’t things that the real estate agent would ever have told her, things she would probably have denied had Narcissa asked, but she knows how to find what she’s looking for on her own. Bruised places, houses with enough misfortune in their past that she can trust them to keep her secrets.

  The bedroom is empty, just like the living room, no furniture and nothing on the stark white walls. The newly refinished hardwood floor glints wetly in tiger stripes of sunlight getting in through the plastic slats of brand-new Levolor blinds covering the big windows. A chintzy ceiling fan, the closet door standing wide open and it’s very dark in there. The faint mildew smell from the foyer is stronger in here.

  Narcissa shuts the door and thinks briefly about closing the blinds, too, wiping that ugly chiaroscuro pattern from the floor. But the voices haven’t found her yet, and she doesn’t want to encourage them; they’ll track her down soon enough—they always do—and right now she needs to think, needs her head clear to consider the work and the days ahead. She sits down on the floor and undoes the straps and buckles on the leather satchel, folds it open and removes a thick sheaf of papers and spreads them out in front of her. There’s also a new box of thumbtacks in the satchel and she takes that out, as well.

  “‘Poor fragments of a broken world,’” she whispers and smiles vacantly, stray line from an old poem she memorized as a little girl, words meant to console herself, but they never do, never any consolation anywhere except the grim, violent work, and already last night seems like something from months and months ago. The skinny, tattooed kid with the skateboard that she picked up in a park just after sundown, the one who told her his name was Soda. Narcissa closes her eyes tight, remembering his fear, the musky taste of him, the way his lips kept moving long after she’d slashed his throat. Thin, pale lips to shape a silent prayer or curse or plea for mercy.

  Shit, maybe the stupid motherfucker was just pissed at me for killing him.

  She opens her eyes, takes a deep breath, and slips her pistol from its shoulder holster hidden beneath her jacket, checks the clip, the safety, and then sets it down beside the satchel. There’s a red Sharpie pen in her jacket, and she takes that out, too.

  Narcissa selects a dog-eared, photocopied map from the careless scatter of papers on the floor, Birmingham with its roads laid out neat as a game of ticktacktoe, the grid of streets running northwest and southeast, avenues running northeast and southwest, but everything getting warped and tangled when it reaches the foot of Red Mountain, ancient topography to foil the contrivances of men and their machines. She pulls the cap off the Sharpie and draws a very small red circle around the spot where she killed the boy named Soda. A circle at one apex of the nearly perfect diamond she plotted on the map the day before, sitting in a Southside diner drinking coffee and chain-smoking, waiting for the sun to set, reworking her plans again and again in her head.

  “That’s one,” she says, because the first two Birmingham kills don’t count, not really, only rehearsals, and she uses the Sharpie to carefully trace over the line leading from the circle she’s drawn to another corner of the diamond. “One for sorrow,” and Narcissa snaps the cap bac
k on the pen.

  “Two for mirth.”

  Outside, a sudden breeze rattles all the bright, dry leaves that haven’t fallen to the ground yet, this slow Southern autumn so strange to her, and Narcissa turns her head and watches the restless limb and branch shadows.

  Only the wind. Nothing out there but the wind.

  “Three for a wedding,” she says, speaking low just in case the voices have slipped in on the breeze and are listening. If walls have ears, if plaster and lath and paint could talk, and the wind subsides as suddenly as it began.

  Narcissa opens the box of thumbtacks and uses one to pin the map to the closest of the white bedroom walls. Then she sits cross-legged on the floor and gazes out the windows at the trees, the red-gold-brown leaves, the shifting swatches of sky, and “Four for a birth,” she whispers. All the long months since she left Providence, all the roads and cities and empty rooms leading her here, all those other circles she’s drawn on other maps pinned to other walls. How many sides, if she were to add them up, how many dimensions necessary to accommodate that polygon? Geometry of blood and time, pain and misdirection, but this is where it ends, where it all begins itself over, and Madam Terpsichore and her Benefit Street lapdogs will never laugh at her again.

  There’s a bird on the windowsill watching her intently with its beady yellow eyes, a big gray mockingbird staring in through the blinds like she has no business being here. Narcissa picks up her gun and aims it at the bird, but it doesn’t fly away. So many spies to take so many forms that no one could ever keep count, and so it’s always better to be safe than sorry.

  Someone will hear, a voice mumbles from the open closet, voice like someone talking with his mouth full, and it’s a wonder she can understand a word he says. Someone will hear the shot and call the police.