Low Red Moon

by Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  “I’ll say it was an accident. I was cleaning the gun, and it went off.”

  You think they won’t ask to see a permit? And what if they run the plates on the car? What if they look in the trunk?

  The mockingbird cocks its head to one side, and she knows damn well that birds can’t fucking smile, but maybe this one’s smiling at her, anyway. And all she has to do is pull the trigger and there won’t be anything left of it but a sticky spray of blood and bone and feathers that will never go peeping in windows at anyone again.

  “It’s just a lousy bird,” Narcissa says, because whether she believes it or not the words feel good to say, and the mockingbird bobs its head and hops a few inches along the sill, taps once at the glass with its beak. “I’m not blowing out that windowpane over a goddamn, stupid bird.”

  Remember the crows in Philadelphia? a woman’s voice asks her from the closet. Remember that black dog outside Richmond? What were they, Narcissa?

  “Shut up,” she says, and the mockingbird taps at the window again, harder than before. In Philadelphia, crows watched her for days, dozens of them following her through the city, perched on sagging power lines or watching her from the lawn of Logan Circle, always there when she looked for them. She’d killed the black dog and left it hanging from a highway sign.

  They know your every move, Narcissa, the woman’s voice says. Every breath, every step, every time you take a shit, they’re watching you. They can take you any time they want.

  “Then why the hell haven’t they?”

  Soon now, the woman whispers. Soon they will.

  The smiling mockingbird taps at the glass, and Narcissa fixes it in the pistol’s sights. Fuck the windowpane, fuck the noise. No one’s going to hear it and even if they do, who’s going to give a shit? No one ever wants to get involved, and if they do, so what? It’s not as though she hasn’t dealt with cops before. Cops are easy. Cops are a fucking walk in the park.

  The wind rattles the leaves.

  “Say bye-bye, you nosy little shit,” and she pulls the trigger, but there’s only the sharp, metallic thunk of the Colt jamming. The bird taps on the glass one last time, taunting her, and then it spreads its wings and flies off in a blur of gray-white feathers.

  “Shit!” Narcissa growls and hurls the pistol at the window. It tears through a couple of the plastic Levolor slats and disappears from view; the sound of glass breaking is very loud in the empty room.

  Behind her, one of the voices from the closet begins to giggle hysterically to itself, and she gets up and slams the door, then opens it just for the pleasure of slamming it again.

  You’re so close, Narcissa, a voice that almost sounds like her dead grandfather says. So goddamn close now. You gonna throw it all away over a bird? That wasn’t a spy. Keep your head, girl.

  “Why don’t you leave me alone? Why don’t all of you please just leave me the hell alone? Let me finish this.”

  You wanted our lives, and this voice could be the hitchhiker from Atlanta, or the waitress from Myrtle Beach, or someone that she’s forgotten altogether. Narcissa knows it doesn’t matter anyway, one ghost as good as the next, all of them buried deep in the soft convolutions of her brain to drive her insane before she can finish, all of them spies. You wanted our lives, and now you have them. You took us inside you, digested us, made us a part of you, and you’ll never be rid of us.

  “Yeah, I know,” Narcissa says, and she nods her head and stares at the white closet door; all the voices have fallen quiet now, and in a few minutes she goes outside to find the gun.

  From the first night that she read her mother’s diary, first night that she held it in her hands, Narcissa knew there were missing pages. Ragged bits of paper left behind to show where they’d been torn out, whole days skipped, entries that ended or began in midsentence. All these evidences to prove the point, but easy enough to imagine that Caroline Snow had written things she’d come to regret. That she’d ripped those pages out herself, and for years the only thought that Narcissa ever gave the matter was to wonder what confidences had been lost to her, what might have been said on those missing pages.

  October 9—I’m beginning to understand it now. But I can only say these things in fragments. The whole is too terrible. Father has started bringing me the paper again, but he always slides it under my door and won’t ever look me in the face or answer my questions. I think he’s seen the whole, seen it all at once, and now it’s driving him insane. Yesterday, in Glen Savage, Penn. three people watched a “black monster” floating above a field. In Montevideo, MN a woman named Helena Myers cut her own—

  —almost three days. I sit at the top of the stairs when he doesn’t know I’m watching him. I can never see who he’s talking to. I think about leaving this house all the time now. Maybe I could get away. Maybe I could save my baby. I could go to Boston, anywhere but here. I don’t think he would even try to stop me. I almost think he would be relieved to see me go.

  Sometimes Narcissa made up stories to fill in the gaps. She’d peeled off strips of wallpaper and pulled up loose floorboards looking for places where her mother might have hidden the missing pages, but she never found anything but silverfish and dust and spiders.

  When she was twelve, she awoke one muggy July night to find Aldous standing over her. His cloudy yellow eyes glowed softly in the darkness. He held something clutched in his right hand that reflected the scraps of moonlight leaking through the rotting drapes.

  “Grandfather,” she said, and he sighed then, a drawn-out, ragged sound as if he’d been holding his breath for a long time, suffocating, waiting for permission to breathe again. “Is something wrong?”

  “I thought they would come for you,” he said, something in his voice that could have been either disappointment or anger, a little of both, maybe. “I’ve kept you for them, and taught you things, because I thought they would want you. They never wanted me or your mother, but I thought they would want you.”

  “Who, Grandfather? Who did you think would want me?” and she spoke calmly and kept her eyes on the silvery thing glinting cold moonlight in his hand, the same knife she’d used years ago on the beach dog, the knife she’d used on so many other things since. The carving knife from her bureau drawer.

  “I gave you the book…a year ago. But you still haven’t read it.”

  “I still can’t read French.”

  And then he slapped her so hard that Narcissa’s mouth filled with blood and her ears rang. His ragged, thick nails tore a deep gash in her right cheek, and she scrambled to the far edge of the bed, just barely out of reach, ready to run if that was what she was going to have to do.

  “You fucking cunt,” he growled, rabid dog growl from his old throat, and his eyes flashed in the dark. “Don’t you ever talk to me that way again. You hear me?”

  “I hear you, Grandfather,” Narcissa replied quietly, a salty-warm trickle of blood leaking from her mouth, her voice still as perfectly calm as it had been before he struck her.

  “We are damned, Narcissa.”

  And then he leaned across the bed, moving faster than she would have ever thought he could, and held the blade of the knife against her throat. He smelled like sweat and aftershave and the faintest hint of rot on his breath.

  “If I truly loved you, I’d kill you now and get it over with. I’d save you from the shit you’re going to have to try to live through. I’d be doing us both a favor. Yes, little girl, I’d be doing everyone a favor.”

  “Why are we damned?” Narcissa asked. She thought briefly about the ice pick she kept hidden underneath her pillow. “What does that mean, Grandfather?”

  “I’m not your damned grandfather,” Aldous said and took the knife away from Narcissa’s throat. Her skin stung slightly and later she’d find a shallow cut just beneath her chin. “Don’t you ever call me that again, because it isn’t true, and I’m sick of lies.”

  “Why are we damned?” she asked again.

  “Read the book, Narcissa. That b
itch-cur, my mother,” and he laughed then and turned to stare at the window. “We’re mongrels, child, and we can never be anything else.”

  He stood there for a while, silently watching the sea through her drapes, watching the summer night, and she didn’t ask him anything else. She slipped her hand beneath the pillow and gripped the wooden handle of the ice pick tightly, but he left a few minutes later, without saying another word, without even looking at her again, left the carving knife lying on the bureau and shut the door behind him. Aldous Snow would only enter her bedroom one more time in his life.

  October 30—There are terrible noises from the cellar tonight, and I’m too afraid to go see. I’m afraid all the time. I don’t want to know any more. I don’t want to know any of it. This afternoon I watched my father standing at the edge of the sea, talking to the sky. I think he was arguing with the sky. I was all the way back at the old boathouse and couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he did it for over an hour. And I think he’s started keeping animals in the cellar. I can smell them if I stand at the cellar door. I can hear them moving around.

  The day after Aldous held a knife to her throat, Narcissa walked and hitchhiked into Ipswich. She didn’t tell him that she was going, not because she thought he would try to stop her, but because she didn’t care whether he knew or not. She was starting to think that he couldn’t hurt her, that if he could, he would have done it already. She crossed the dunes behind the house, then followed the Argilla Road until a man in a green pickup truck stopped for her.

  “Where you bound?” and she told him Ipswich.

  “But you ain’t no runaway?” he asked suspiciously, and Narcissa shook her head no, told him the story she’d made up that morning about her sick grandfather and how their car had broken down a week ago, how she had to pick up his heart medicine from the drugstore in Ipswich. Narcissa had never ridden in a car and the thought of gliding along so effortlessly on those black rubber tires made her a little dizzy.

  “Well, I guess you better get in, then.”

  The man didn’t say much on the drive into town, glanced at her in his rearview mirror from time to time, hesitant, nervous glances, but just before he let her out on Market Street, “You ain’t by any chance any relation to Old Man Snow?” he asked.

  “Yes sir,” Narcissa said politely. “He’s my grandfather. How’d you know that?”

  “You just got that look about you,” the man said and shrugged, not looking at Narcissa, pretending to watch a woman pushing a baby carriage along the sidewalk. “You got the old man’s eyes.”

  “Thank you for the ride,” she said and got out of the truck.

  “Anytime,” the man said. “Hope your granddad’s feeling better soon,” and then he drove away. Narcissa walked past the drugstore to a smaller shop that sold books and magazines and bought a paperback French-English dictionary with five dollars she’d taken from one of the snuff tins Aldous kept his money in. On the way back, no one stopped to pick her up, and it was almost dark by the time she got home.

  After she found the Colt where it had landed beneath a crape myrtle bush and unpacked the car—four trips from the porch to the Olds and back again, four trips across the dandelion- and pecan-cluttered yard, but all her boxes and bags finally safe inside the house—Narcissa fell asleep near the broken bedroom window. No sleep for almost forty-eight hours and the sunlight, the clean, afternoon-warmed air through the broken window, almost as good as the tiny violet Halcion tablets she takes when the voices won’t let her sleep. She promised herself that she was only going to close her eyes, only for a moment, a ten-minute nap at the most, and she lay down with a stolen motel pillow beneath her head and the gun within easy reach.

  “Rise and shine, girl,” her grandfather growls at her from some fading dream place; in an instant Narcissa is wide awake, adrenaline sharp and her heart pounding loud as thunder. The long shadows and half-light filling the white room, so she knows she’s slept for hours, not minutes. The day is almost gone, and she closes her hand around the butt of the pistol, its comforting, undeniable weight, and listens for whatever it is that woke her—not her grandfather or his ghost, something flesh and blood, something that can hurt and die.

  But there’s only the brittle rustle of the wind playing with leaves, two squirrels chattering angrily at each other somewhere nearby, the distant, steady sound of traffic. Down the street, a woman calls out.

  “Taylor! It’s getting dark! Time to come in!”

  Narcissa takes a very deep breath and holds it, waiting impatiently as her heart begins to return to normal, as her body quickly burns away the adrenaline clogging her bloodstream.

  “Five more minutes. It’s not even dark yet.”

  “Now, young man!”

  Narcissa exhales and sits up, slides across the floor until her back is pressed firmly against the wall, and then she steals a glance out the window at the porch and the yard cut up into neat twilight slices by the blinds. Nothing that shouldn’t be there. The sleek black car almost lost in the gloom. The untrimmed shrubbery lining the driveway. One of the noisy squirrels races itself from the trunk of one tree to another.

  “It was nothing,” she whispers. “It was nothing at all,” and she turns to face the almost-empty room again, three closed doors, the map thumbtacked to the wall, her papers scattered on the floor.

  And from somewhere in the house, the creak of a floorboard to contradict her.

  “Old houses make all sorts of sounds,” one of her voices whispers reassuringly from a corner. “You know that.”

  Narcissa raises the Colt and rests the barrel flat against her left cheek, straining her ears to see if the voice is right or wrong. She flips the safety off with her thumb and takes another deep breath.

  Old houses make all sorts of sounds.

  From the north side of the house, the living room or perhaps the kitchen, somewhere off to her left, there’s another, louder creak and then a third immediately after that. She stands up very slowly, keeping the wall at her back, silently cursing herself for having fallen asleep.

  “You can’t expect to stay awake forever,” the voice in the corner sighs.

  “But she’s getting careless,” another voice whispers. “These fuckers, you screw up just once and you’re history. Just once, and you’re toast.”

  Narcissa takes one cautious step towards the door leading to the foyer, and the floor squeaks softly beneath her bare feet.

  “If you can hear them, you better bet they can hear you,” one of the voices chuckles, and Narcissa stops and aims the pistol at the corner the voice came from.

  “Best ignore all that chatter in your head,” her grandfather grumbles from behind the closet door. “They’re just trying to distract you, Narcissa. They still think it’ll save them, if you get yourself killed.”

  The sudden flutter of wings then, a hundred wings hammering the air somewhere above the house, ink-black feathers battering the dusk, and she fires two shots through the bedroom ceiling.

  “You should have killed that damned bird when you had the chance,” her grandfather says.

  Sheetrock dust like powdered sugar settles to the polished floor from the fist-sized hole in the ceiling, hangs suspended in the air, drifting lazily through the last rays of the setting sun. The birds are already far away, high above the city, crying her name to anyone who will listen. And now there’s a new sound coming from the other side of the door, something animal pacing back and forth out there, its steel claws click-click-clicking against the wood, its breath the endless rise and fall of ocean waves against granite boulders.

  “You can run,” one of the corner voices sneers. “But you know they can run faster.”

  “I’m tired of running,” she says, and never mind if the thing on the other side of the door can hear her; after the birds, she can’t imagine it matters much whether she’s quiet or not. “I’m sick to fucking death of running. I’m going to find what I fucking came here to find, and then I’ll never have to run
again.”

  “Open the door, half-breed,” the thing in the foyer snarls, and she can smell it now, decay and red, raw meat, ashes and gasoline.

  “You’re such a disappointment,” Aldous Snow mumbles from his closet. “My only daughter died for you.”

  “Not your only daughter, you twisted old fuck,” one of the corners reminds him. “Now shut up and go back to sleep.”

  “Make it easy on yourself,” the thing behind the door says. “Save us the trouble. You might as well. This story ends exactly the same, either way.”

  And Narcissa looks down and sees the thick red-black liquid leaking into the room from beneath the door, viscous soup of shit and blood and rot, bile and half-digested hair, and backs away as it spreads itself out across the bedroom floor. She raises the pistol and fires three times at the door, and the shots are as loud as the world cracking itself apart at the end of time.

  “Wake up, girl,” her grandfather says.

  —The vision ended. I awoke

  As out of sleep, and no

  Voice moved—

  “There’s someone here to see you.”

  Narcissa opens her eyes, the dream spitting her back into herself, back into the sunny-bright afternoon room, sweat-soaked and gasping for air like a drowning woman. She lies still for a moment, staring up at the bedroom ceiling, waiting for her heart to stop pounding. Waiting to be absolutely sure it isn’t all a trick, some magic far too subtle for her to have ever learned; but no monsters have followed her back here, no black-bird spies, and in a few more minutes she rolls over and hides her face in the stolen pillow, crying as quietly as she can so the voices won’t hear.

  As her twelfth summer dissolved into a bleak and drizzly twelfth autumn, Narcissa sat alone in her room in the tall house by the sea. Day after night after day, alone with Cultes des Goules and her French-English dictionary, impatiently struggling to tease some sense from the book’s crumbling yellow-brown pages and archaic grammar, fragments of sentences adding up to no more than fragments of meaning. Slowly transcribing the text onto stationery that she’d stolen from a drawer in her grandfather’s study, writing paper that had once belonged to MR. ISCARIOT HOWARD Q. SNOW, ESQ., and she was pretty sure that must have been her great-grandfather’s name. The relic and her cipher and little time left over for anything else, pausing only for the bland meals Aldous left outside her door twice a day and as little sleep as she could get by on. This blind urgency something new to Narcissa, like passé simple and the baffling French conjugations, this small voice in her head that whispered incessantly, Hurry, there’s not much time left, hurry.