Low Red Moon

by Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  At the top floor, the elevator doors slide open, and he walks quickly past the apartments of the neighbors that they rarely ever see to their own door at the end of the hall. Deacon fishes his keys from a pants pocket, the rubber Bullwinkle key ring Chance gave him not long after they started dating.

  “Deacon?” she calls out from the other side of the door. “Is that you?” Her voice is shaky, either very tired or very worried or both, and “Yeah, it’s me,” he says, opening the door, and she’s sitting against the wall by the closet, holding on to one of her rock hammers.

  “Christ, honey, what are you doing?” he asks and sees the folded sheet of paper half a second before he steps on it.

  “There was someone at the door,” she says, and now there are tears leaking from her green eyes, rolling slowly down her cheeks.

  Deacon glances back at the door, still standing open, and the dull pain at his temples starts again.

  “He kept asking for you,” Chance says. “I told him you weren’t here and I was going to call the police, but he wouldn’t go away. I thought he was going to break in.”

  “I don’t think you should be sitting on the floor like that,” Deacon says and bends down to help her up. She doesn’t let go of the rock hammer.

  “Where the hell have you been, Deacon?”

  “Just walking,” he says, and the tip of the pick jabs him in the ribs as he lifts Chance to her feet. “Trying to clear my head, that’s all.”

  “I didn’t think you were coming back,” she says and holds on to him tight, holds him like she’s afraid he’ll vanish if she lets go, and she presses her face against his shirt; he can feel her tears leaking through the fabric, salt-warm drops of her to stain his skin.

  “Of course I was coming back,” he says and hugs her. “I just went for a walk.”

  “He said he knows that you talked to the police,” Chance sobs, and then she points at the piece of paper lying on the floor, tattooed now with the print of Deacon’s boot. “And…and he said he wanted to tell you who the killer is. He said he knows.”

  “We need to get you to bed,” Deacon says, and Chance shakes her head no, lets go of him and wipes her nose on the back of her hand.

  “I’m sorry. I was just so scared. I didn’t know if he’d really gone, or if he was going to come back.”

  “He didn’t tell you his name?” Deacon asks.

  “No. He said you should call him,” and Chance points at the piece of paper again. “He said there was a phone number.”

  “He slid that in under the door?”

  “Yeah, he slid it under the door,” Chance says, wipes her nose again, wipes her eyes, and hands Deacon the rock hammer. “I’m going to sit the fuck down now.”

  And as she heads down the hall, her left hand braced against the wall and her right resting protectively on her belly, Deacon picks the paper up and unfolds it. There’s a ten-digit number and two words written below it, SCARBOROUGH PENTECOST. But he forgets the phone number and the words the moment he sees the thing drawn at the bottom of the page, the perfect circle in red ink and a wide black slash underneath.

  CHAPTER SIX

  As I Have Heard from Hell

  From her high and secret place in the dunes, Narcissa listens to the roaring January gale and watches the tide coming in. The sea, thick and red as a butcher’s heart, is surging into Ipswich Bay, mixing with the muddy, dark water spilling down from the Manuxet’s lower falls. The twice-daily meeting of the waters, the deceitful river spilling all its secrets into the crimson bosom and crawling mind of Mother Hydra, everything it’s learned in its meandering journey across and through the land, and Narcissa shivers and pulls her coat tighter. She squints through the snow at the black and hungry creatures moving about in the water of the bay.

  “Are you planning on spending the rest of your life out here?” her grandfather’s ghost asks. He’s squatting somewhere behind her, digging for pirate treasure in the sand.

  “I might,” she replies, not taking her eyes off the rising tide.

  “Complacency, child. Complacency’s gonna be the bitter end of you yet.”

  “Where else would I go?”

  For a moment, there’s only the howling wind in her ears, and she thinks maybe he’s gone away again, slipped quietly into one of the shallow holes he’s dug and pulled the sand in after him. It wouldn’t be so bad to be alone, she thinks. Genuinely alone and no noises inside her head but her own voice.

  “You had a perfectly good house,” the old man grumbles, so she knows he’s still there somewhere. If she turns around to look, he’ll only hide from her. “Old Iscariot saw to that. But you burnt it down, you ungrateful cur. You burnt it down, so it serves you right, having to live out here in the dunes like an animal.”

  “It was a haunted place,” Narcissa says, still watching the dark things struggling to haul themselves free of the sea; all the shimmering chitin shells and scales and tentacles straining for evolution’s first landward step, each wave to carry them within easy grasp of the rocks, only to drag them back into the bay. Mother Hydra’s jealous womb, her endless tangled umbilici, her silt and barnacled placenta, and the old man laughs at Narcissa.

  “You think these here dunes are any different? You think this whole damn world ain’t rotten to its core?”

  “To tell you the truth, Aldous, I try not to think about it,” and far out beyond Ipswich Bay, beyond Castle Hill and nameless barrier islands, across the crests and troughs of the afterbirth and amniotic depths, Narcissa thinks she sees white sails strung against the storm-dimmed sky.

  “That doesn’t change anything at all,” he replies, but it’s getting harder to tell the difference between the old man’s voice and the wind.

  “Go back to sleep, Aldous.”

  “You don’t know how things work,” he sighs. “They won’t let you stay out here forever. There are rules, even rules for a cur bitch like you.”

  “They’ll never find me here.”

  “Don’t you start in fooling yourself again, Narcissa. Every grain of sand is a staring eye, and every gull a mouth to sing them songs. You know—”

  “Go on back to sleep, old man. You’re dead. You’re nothing now but ashes.”

  Down among the rocks and mud, a great mass of raw pink muscle and slime has escaped the sea and lies still, gasping from a dozen puckered mouths, from the gill slits behind its bulbous eyes.

  “You better wake up, child. They’re coming.”

  Beneath the waters of the sea,

  Are lobsters thick as thick can be—

  “Hell, they’re almost here now.”

  They love to dance with you and me,

  My own and gentle Salmon.

  Narcissa turns to face him, to drive him off again, but Aldous has gone, and in the sandy hollow where her lean-to and the charcoal smudge of her driftwood campfire had been there’s only an open door suspended on taut piano wire. She cranes her neck and stares up at the sky, trying to get a glimpse of whatever the wires are attached to, but they vanish into the low clouds somewhere overhead. When she takes a step towards the door, she can see the wooden stairs leading all the way down to the cellar of the house on Benefit Street.

  Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?

  “I’ve been there, Grandfather. I’ve been there time after time, and they turned me away.”

  Behind her, down on the shore, the gasping thing starts making a sound like kittens and water draining from a sink, and she knows better than to turn and look. Knows the sea is waiting for her to make that very mistake. Instead, she takes another step towards the open door, because it’s beginning to rain and maybe all those other times won’t matter. She catches a whiff of the musty cellar air and stops.

  Would not, could not, would not, could not, could not join the dance.

  “Apostate,” the cellar hisses bitterly between dry ebony lips. “You think you can run from us? You think there’s more than one way this can possibly
end?”

  “Wake up, child,” Aldous Snow whispers from the sand and snow beneath her feet, and Narcissa opens her yellow eyes. The Colt gripped tight in her sweaty right hand, and only an instant’s disorientation before she remembers where she is, when she is, and Narcissa lies very still in her sleeping bag, listening to the big, empty house on Cullom Street. Listening for any sound that shouldn’t be there, any anomalous creak or rustle, and There, she thinks. There you are.

  The rat hears her, too, and stops halfway between the sleeping bag and the door leading out to the foyer. When she rolls over and points the gun at it, the rat shits on the floor and stares helplessly back at her with its terrified black eyes.

  “Am I awake?” she asks the rat. “Or is this only another sort of dream? Am I ever truly awake, rat?”

  Narcissa glances at the digital travel clock-radio perched on the books near her pillow, 11:30 P.M. in the soft absinthe light of sunless worlds. So almost an hour since she closed the antique volume on Persian thaumaturgy and lay still, listening to the branches and twigs scraping loud against the house until she fell asleep. She flips the safety off the pistol and cocks the hammer.

  “What did they promise you, rat? What did you owe them? Or maybe you thought you’d get lucky and find a thorn in my paw?”

  The rat blinks at her, its eyes darting from her face to the barrel of the pistol and back again.

  “Do all good mice go to Heaven?” she asks it and squeezes the trigger, shattering the night crowded thick inside the house and wiping the last sticky strands of the nightmare from her head.

  Deacon is sitting alone on the sofa, chewing a thumbnail and staring at the creased and wrinkled sheet of paper with the phone number, the circle and the line, the two words printed in black ink—SCARBOROUGH PENTECOST—while Chance pretends to watch television. One of her old movies from the cardboard boxes of videotapes she keeps beneath the bed, her dead grandfather’s videos, westerns and war movies, John Wayne and Henry Fonda, James Stewart and Gregory Peck. Sometimes they seem to make her feel better, and so he’s never told her how much he hates most of them. Black-and-white heroics, guns and cows and horses. He touches the center of the circle drawn on the sheet of paper and looks at Chance on the love seat.

  “Are you going to call him?” she asks.

  “Don’t you think I should call the police instead and give this to them?” Deacon motions towards her with the sheet of paper, and Chance turns back to the television screen.

  “I don’t know what you should do, Deacon. But I know you never should have gotten us involved in this. I know that.”

  “I wasn’t trying to get you involved in anything.”

  “But that’s what you did. Me and the baby. And you don’t even know what’s happening.”

  “Fuck,” Deacon growls and crumples the paper into a tight little wad in his fist, imagining all his anger and confusion and fear, his thirst and the pain in his head, crushed into something so small, something he could hold in the palm of his hand. Something that would burn. Then he takes a deep breath and carefully smoothes the paper flat again.

  “I couldn’t have stopped him,” Chance says, speaking to the cowboys on television. “Not if he’d really wanted in.”

  “Whoever it was, he just wanted to scare you.”

  “Well, he succeeded.”

  “This isn’t about you, baby. I’m the one he’s looking for.”

  “That’s real goddamn comforting, Deacon.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, apologizing to Chance for the thirtieth or thirty-fifth time since he came home and found her sitting on the floor holding the rock hammer. “I didn’t think—”

  “Bingo,” she says and then turns around in the love seat and glares at him. “You didn’t fucking think. You didn’t stop to consider that your life isn’t only your life anymore. Everything you do now affects me, and it affects the baby.”

  “Yeah,” Deacon whispers and reaches for Chance’s cell phone lying on the coffee table.

  “Can you even tell me why this was so important that you’re willing to risk our lives?”

  “This woman’s out there killing people, Chance.”

  “And you’re not a fucking cop. It’s not your job to stop her.”

  Deacon sets the phone down again and glares back at her. “Then what is my job? What exactly is it I’m supposed to be doing day after goddamn day?”

  “You know what I need from you. You know the only thing I need from you,” but now the fire is deserting her, and he can tell from the tremble in Chance’s voice, the wet glint of her green eyes, that she’s close to tears.

  “I’m sober,” Deacon says and runs his fingers through his hair, staring down at the paper again, the name, if it is a name, the phone number. “You wanted me to be sober, and that’s what I am. But this is different. If I do what you’re asking this time and wash my hands of the whole business, what do we do the next time she kills someone?”

  “What do you mean, what do we do? This hasn’t got anything to do with us.”

  He watches her silently for a moment, looking for words that aren’t there, explanations that have never been within his grasp and aren’t there now.

  “If you’d ever seen the things I’ve seen,” he says finally, speaking slowly and softly, looking her directly in the eyes, her face washed in the gray shades of TV light and shadow. “If you’d ever seen the blood and the shit and the fucking rotting meat that one person can turn another person into, you wouldn’t have to ask.”

  And then Deacon glances back to the note and the cell phone, impatiently waiting for her to tell him how full of it he is, and when she doesn’t say anything at all, he looks up at her again. Chance is staring at the television, and there are tears rolling down her cheeks.

  “I’m not some kind of goddamned martyr,” she says. “I understand what’s my responsibility and what’s not.”

  “You didn’t see what she—”

  “You don’t know what I see, Deacon. You don’t even have the faintest idea,” and she wipes her nose, her voice grown fierce again despite the tears. “Lately, I don’t even know what I see.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing,” she says. “It’s crazy. And I’m not going to be crazy, too. One of us has to stay sane.”

  “What do you see, Chance?” and Deacon can hear the apprehension in his own voice, the guarded urgency, and maybe Chance hears it as well, because she turns her head and stares at him.

  “I’m not crazy,” she says again.

  “Nobody’s going to think you are.”

  “Only crazy people see things that aren’t there.”

  “Chance, just tell me what you’re talking about.”

  She looks quickly back at the TV, the tall, determined man with his six-shooter, as if maybe there’s some way he can save her, too. And then Chance tells Deacon about the drive to Atlanta and the blood that was and wasn’t on her forehead, the diorama and the gore dripping from the mouth of the Megalopseudosuchus. Deacon sits still and listens to everything she has to say, and when she’s finished, he picks up the cell phone and dials the number written on the piece of paper.

  Deacon hasn’t been inside a bar in almost a year, not since the binge that finally landed him in the hospital, and “You’ve got a choice, Deke,” Chance told him. “Either me or the liquor. Take your pick.” He’d forgotten just how close he came to choosing the liquor, but now, sitting in a booth in the back of Cheese’s Blues and Oldies Club, sipping ginger ale, he remembers it very, very well. The sweet funk of spilled beer and decades of cigarette smoke, the eternal night behind painted windowpanes or drawn blinds, the gentle pastel wash of neon. Deacon lights another Camel and stares past the old black men sitting at the bar, watching the door, waiting for a face he’s never seen.

  “I don’t go to bars,” he told the voice on the other end of the cell phone.

  “Well, tonight you’re going to have to make an exception,” Scarborough
Pentecost replied.

  “Look, asshole, we’re gonna do this my way, or I hang up right this minute and call the cops.”

  “No you won’t,” Scarborough Pentecost said confidently.

  “Why the fuck not?”

  “Because I’m not your enemy. Maybe I’m not exactly your friend, either, but for the moment, I’m the best you’ve got.”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do. You’ve seen her, Mr. Silvey. Do you really think the police can protect you and your family from that?”

  Deacon didn’t answer, and for a moment there was only strained silence on the line while he tried not to remember the face from his nightmare, those blazing eyes, and wished he’d taken the piece of paper straight to Detective Downs.

  “You still there?” Scarborough Pentecost asked.

  “Yeah,” Deacon said and looked across the room at Chance standing at the window, her back turned to him. “I’m here.”

  “So, do we do this or not?”

  “Just tell me where,” Deacon replied, so now he’s sitting in a booth at Cheese’s, listening to Screaming Jay Hawkins blaring from the jukebox and watching the front door. Every now and then, the fat, white-haired bartender or one of the customers gives him a suspicious look, and he smiles his best Don’t mind me, I’m just a crazy white man having himself a glass of ginger ale and a few smokes smile, and they frown and turn back to the bar.