Low Red Moon

by Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  And then the door swings open, and the pair that steps into the bar, the boy and girl like rejects from a Tarantino film, have to be the ones he’s waiting for because they’re white, and the bartender glares at them the same way he’s been glaring at Deacon. The boy is tall and thin as a pole, his leather biker jacket hanging loose on his bony shoulders. He’s wearing tattered jeans and black biker boots, his long hair pulled back in a ponytail. The girl is pale and pretty, and she must be at least five years too young to be hanging out in bars. She stands very close behind the boy, her arms crossed self-consciously and her eyes on the floor; all her clothes look secondhand. The bartender nods his head and points to Deacon’s booth.

  He finishes his drink while they walk towards him down the long, narrow aisle between the row of booths and the bar. Someone whistles at the girl, and she looks embarrassed and buttons her purple cardigan.

  “You two come here often?” Deacon asks as the girl slides into the booth across from him.

  “You know, I saw this place in the phone book and couldn’t resist,” the boy says and slides in after her. “You think that guy behind the counter is Cheese?”

  “Maybe you should ask him,” Deacon replies and crunches on a melting ice cube.

  “Maybe I will. Maybe that’s just what I’ll do.” Then the boy in the baggy leather jacket holds out his left hand to Deacon. “I’m Scarborough Pentecost, by the way,” he says.

  Deacon stares at his slender hand, the long, tapered fingers, the symbol like a rune or Chinese character tattooed onto the center of his palm, but he doesn’t shake it.

  “No shit. Now, tell me why I’m here,” Deacon says. “While you’re at it, you can tell me why you broke into our building and scared the hell out of my pregnant wife.”

  Scarborough sighs, pulls his hand away, and glances sidewise at the girl; she shrugs and smiles sheepishly at Deacon.

  “I wasn’t trying to scare her,” Scarborough says. “I am sorry about that.”

  “Is that a fact? And I’m just supposed to sit here and believe you because—?”

  “Because, right now, Mr. Silvey, your options are somewhat limited.”

  Deacon takes a deep drag off his cigarette, exhales and squints at Scarborough Pentecost through the smoke.

  “We don’t have the time to argue, Deacon,” the girl says, the words spilling out of her in a nervous, urgent gush. “If you really care about your wife, you need to listen to him.”

  Deacon stares at her for a moment and then stubs what’s left of his cigarette out in the cut-glass ashtray on the table. Smoke rises slow and coils from the butt like a question mark or the ghost of a fakir’s cobra.

  “You’ve got twenty minutes,” Deacon says, and he checks the glowing Schlitz clock on the wall behind the bar. In five minutes, it’ll be midnight.

  Scarborough nods, then reaches into his jacket and pulls out a large manila envelope. It’s bent at the corners and has what looks like a coffee stain on one side; he places it on the table between them.

  “All right,” he says and smiles, wide and ugly smile that’s almost a threat, and Deacon lights another Camel. “So much for the bullshit prefatory chitchat. When you were working with Vincent Hammond in Atlanta, you solved a missing-persons case.”

  “I solved a lot of missing-persons cases.”

  “Not like this one,” Scarborough says and taps at the envelope with an index finger. “Fifteen children, mostly infants, boys and girls, taken from their homes over a period of seven years. The last one was a four-year-old girl named—”

  “Jessica Hartwell,” Deacon says so he won’t have to hear her name from someone else. His mouth so dry he wouldn’t be surprised if sand started dribbling from his lips and he raises a hand to get the bartender’s attention. “Yeah, I remember.”

  “The Hartwell girl was the one who tied them all together, but she was also the only one they ever found. You saved her life, Mr. Silvey.”

  “Well, whatever was left of it,” Deacon mutters around the filter of his cigarette, his eyes on the envelope.

  “She just started high school,” the girl says, and when Deacon glances up at her, her eyes dart nervously towards the ceiling. “She still has nightmares, sometimes, but she’s alive. And she’s happy.”

  “How the fuck do you know that?” but then the bartender’s standing beside the booth, wiping his big hands on his apron and frowning down at them, no-bullshit frown to say whatever the three of them are up to, it better not start any trouble on his watch.

  “What you want now?” he says.

  “Do you have Jack Daniel’s?” Deacon asks, and the bartender shakes his head.

  “You want bourbon, all we got’s Wild Turkey.”

  “Wild Turkey will do just fine, straight.”

  The bartender points at Scarborough. “What about you two. Those things you’re sitting on ain’t park benches, you know.”

  “I’ll have a Coke,” the girl says.

  “No you won’t, ’cause we ain’t got no Coke,” the bartender replies. “We got Pepsi.”

  “I like Pepsi, too,” she says and smiles her shy, sheepish smile again. “Pepsi will be fine.”

  “That’s good, ’cause that’s what we got.”

  Scarborough orders a beer, and the bartender goes away again, still wiping his hands. “I thought you’d given up the hooch, Mr. Silvey,” he says, and Deacon ignores him and picks up the manila envelope. It isn’t sealed, and he pulls out a sheaf of newspaper clippings and black-and-white photographs, police reports and several pages photocopied from a handwritten diary. There’s a photo of a small and dilapidated old house on top of the stack, the wide front porch draped with crime-scene tape.

  “Where’d you get these?” he asks.

  “We’re not police, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Scarborough says. “And we don’t work for the police.”

  “Great, but that still doesn’t answer my question.”

  “It doesn’t matter where we got them, Mr. Silvey.”

  Deacon lays the photo of the house facedown on the table, and under it is a close-up of the front door. The wood looks dry and rotten, the paint peeling in ragged strips and patches like dead skin sloughing off the belly of a snake; there’s a sign nailed to the door—BEWARE OF DOG.

  He swallows, no spit, but he swallows anyway, and “What does the Hartwell case have to do with Soda’s murder?” he asks and lays the photo of the door facedown on top of the photo of the house. The next picture is almost identical, except the BEWARE OF DOG sign has been removed and there’s a symbol carved deep into the wood it was covering.

  “The people we work for, well, let’s just say they had a vested interest in those children in Atlanta,” and then Scarborough nods at the papers in Deacon’s hands. “Same thing with the murder of your friend Soda.”

  “Who is she?” Deacon asks without bothering to look up, and the next photograph is from inside the old house, the intricate arch at the door leading down to the cellar, woven from human bones and dried creeper and kudzu vines. Three skulls nailed above the arch and each one wearing a crown of rusted barbed wire, the words LAND OF DREAMS printed in neat black letters on the door underneath.

  “You were the first person to go into the house, weren’t you?” Scarborough asks, pointing at the photograph.

  Deacon licks his parched lips and eyes the bar desperately, the thirst grown so big and the memory of the horrors from that day at the house almost enough to swallow him whole, enough to leave him as bare as the bones in the police photos. But now the bartender is busy talking to a skinny man in a Panama hat and shows no sign of getting their drinks.

  “You’re the one who found Jessica Hartwell.”

  “Hammond was right behind me,” Deacon says and lays the picture of the arch and the doorway down on the table with the others he’s already seen. Now he’s looking at one of the photocopied pages from the journal of a dead woman, her sloppy cursive filling up the whole page from top to botto
m.

  “But you saved her life, Deacon,” the girl sitting next to Scarborough Pentecost says again. “Mary English would have killed the child if you hadn’t stopped her when you did.”

  “I opened the cage,” Deacon replies, hardly speaking above a whisper now. “But Hammond, he came in right behind me.”

  “Yes,” Scarborough says. “But you opened the cage. Policeman or no policeman, you’re the one who saved Jessica Hartwell’s life that day.”

  Deacon drops the remaining contents of the envelope on the table and takes a drag from his cigarette, but the smoke only makes him thirstier, and he crushes it out in the ashtray. Scarborough’s still talking, his voice as smooth and dark as molasses.

  “Hammond gave you a drawing they’d found in the girl’s bedroom, and when you held it you saw a vision of the house where she was being kept, Mary English’s house in the woods. You saw the door leading down to her cellar, her ‘Land of Dreams.’ Did you know she took that from William Blake?”

  “No,” Deacon says. “I never knew what it meant.”

  “It was all right there in her journal—‘Dear Child, I also by pleasant streams, Have wander’d all Night in the Land of Dreams; But tho calm and warm the waters wide, I could not get to the other side.’ You held the drawing, Mr. Silvey, and saw that doorway to the Land of Dreams, and you led Detective Hammond to it.”

  “What are you getting at? I don’t see what any of this has to do with Soda’s murder.”

  Scarborough leans a little ways across the table, and Deacon catches a whiff of something sweet and rotten on his breath. “Have you ever paused to consider the relativity of heroism?” he asks. “How one man’s David is inevitably another man’s Goliath?”

  “I didn’t come here to listen to riddles.”

  “It’s not a riddle, Deacon,” the girl says. “It’s not even a secret, anymore.”

  “She’s right, Mr. Silvey. These days it’s almost a truism. A goddamned fact of life.”

  And then the fat, white-haired bartender is standing over them again with a tray in his hands, two glasses and a bottle of Bud, and he sets the shot of bourbon down in front of Deacon. “That’ll be six-fifty,” the bartender says gruffly, and Scarborough hands him a ten and tells him to keep the change. Deacon doesn’t argue, too busy staring into the perfect pool of amber liquor to tell the creep on the other side of the booth that he can buy his own damned drinks. For a second or two, there’s nothing else in the world but that one precious glass of whiskey, the universe collapsing down to a single wet point, a decision as simple as swallowing.

  “You still with us, Mr. Silvey?” Scarborough asks, snaps his fingers, and when Deacon looks up the bartender has gone and the girl is sipping at her Pepsi.

  “I’m right here,” Deacon replies. “And if you don’t stop calling me ‘Mr. Silvey,’ I’m going to punch you in the face, Mr. Pentecost.”

  “Told you,” the girl says.

  Scarborough picks up the photograph of the arch of bones and the cellar door, examines it for a moment, then turns it around so Deacon can see it again.

  “Okay, Deacon. As I was saying—”

  “I hope you were about to get to the fucking point, because you’ve only got about five minutes left,” and then Deacon lifts the shot glass and a few drops of the whiskey slosh out onto his fingertips. He quickly sets the glass down again, his hand shaking so badly he almost drops it.

  “That summer day you walked through this door, you might have become a hero, but you also became a villain. Now, are you following me, or are you too busy trying to decide whether or not to lick the Wild Turkey off your fingers?”

  “Scarborough, can we please just get this over with,” the girl says. “I don’t really want to spend the rest of the night in this dump.”

  “What do you want from me?” Deacon asks, and Scarborough lays the photograph down again.

  “That cellar was Mary English’s own Land of Dreams, and you, Deacon, you were her nightmare.”

  “She was a murderer. She killed fourteen children before we found her.”

  “The police never proved that. There were no bodies found, no graves.”

  Deacon reaches for his cigarettes, only one left in the pack and he fishes it out. “She had photographs of every one of the missing kids,” he says. “She had clippings of their hair and fingernails.”

  “That proves she had contact with them, but it certainly doesn’t prove she killed a single one of them, does it?”

  “Look, motherfucker,” Deacon growls. “I’ve had just about enough of this bullshit,” and all the men sitting at the bar glance up from their drinks and conversation, their cigars and salted peanuts, and turn towards the booth. The bartender reaches for something beneath the cash register.

  “Maybe you’d better lower your voice,” the girl whispers, and then she smiles and waves to the men at the bar. “I think we’re beginning to wear out our welcome.”

  Deacon looks at the unlit cigarette and then glares at Scarborough. “The bitch was a murderer,” he says again, lowering his voice. “What the fuck is it to you two, anyway?”

  “Just tell him,” the girl says and stirs the ice in her glass with a green swizzle stick.

  “Little birdie, one of these days real soon you’re gonna have to learn to keep your mouth shut.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe one of these days you can try to teach me.”

  Deacon pushes the glass of whiskey away, more of it sloshing over the rim onto the table, spotting some of the papers from the manila envelope. “Time’s up,” he says.

  “No. Please wait,” and the girl reaches quickly across the table, taking his hand in hers and squeezing gently.

  “These people that we work for, Mr. Silvey,” Scarborough says, “well, let’s just say that Mary English worked for them, too. And the woman who killed your friend, the woman you’ve seen in your visions, she’s become something of a problem to them.”

  “He’s telling you the truth,” the girl says, but Deacon shakes his head and pries her fingers from around his wrist.

  “Right now, I can’t begin to imagine what sort of sick game the two of you are playing—”

  “Yes, Deacon,” the girl interrupts, “you’re right. It is a game. But not the sort you think. It’s a terrible game.”

  “—or how you know what you know, but I’ll tell you this, both of you. If either one of you ever comes anywhere near my wife again, if you so much as look at her from across the fucking street, I will kill both of you. That’s a fucking promise.”

  Scarborough rubs his forehead and laughs a gravelly, dry scrap of a laugh. “Sit back down,” he tells Deacon. “We’re not finished.”

  “Fuck you, you psychotic son of a bitch,” and then the bartender’s talking, his voice booming like thunder, and when Deacon turns around the first thing he sees is the long, slick barrel of a shotgun aimed at his chest, its twin muzzles gaping like cannons. The fat man eases the hammers back, and they click loud over the noise from the jukebox.

  “I think it’s about time you folks took your party somewheres else,” he says, “if you get my drift.”

  “Yes sir,” Deacon says. “I was just leaving. But I’d be grateful if you’d keep an eye on these two here until I’m gone.”

  “You got exactly two minutes,” and now the big man points the gun at Scarborough Pentecost, instead.

  “Thanks,” Deacon says and walks quickly to the door and out into the chilly October night.

  Not the last case Vincent Hammond brought Deacon, not the one that finally broke the camel’s back, and so what if Hammond had gotten him a shit job at an all-night coin-op and slipped him twenties and fifties now and then. Not the last, but definitely the worst, and if he’d had the sense God gave a rock, if he’d had the courage or self-confidence to tell the detective to fuck off, if he’d ever been sober for five minutes at a stretch, it would have been his last.

  “What do you see, Deke?” Hammond asked.

 
Deacon looked up from the girl’s drawing, the crayon lines and angles, waxy blacks and greens and blues. “A fat cop,” he said. “Too lazy to do his own damn work.”

  “You’re a goddamned comedian, bubba, that’s what you are. A goddamn Groucho fuckin’ Marx.”

  “I do have my moments,” Deacon said and looked back down at the drawing in his hands. What might have been a face at a window, or something else entirely, those smudges that could have been eyes opening wider and wider, spilling a scalding kaleidoscope of broken sounds and images into him. The wild woman at the window, the witch who cries and whimpers and stares until you have to let her in, and then she drags you off to meet the goblins, off to the wild, dark places underground to become a Child of the Cuckoo.

  O, what Land is the Land of Dreams?

  What are its Mountains and what are its Streams?

  The heady smell of dirt and pine straw, blood and rotting meat, shit and spiders, and two hours later, still clutching the drawing, he led them to the old shanty house in the woods somewhere west of the city. Down a long dirt road, narrow logging road crammed with five police cars and an ambulance, their sirens to drown the locust wail from the trees, but not the voice whispering furiously to Deacon from Jessica Hartwell’s crayon geometry. That voice growing louder and louder, swelling until he thought it would crack his skull in two and splatter his brains across the dashboard, Does the Eagle know what is in the pit? Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?

  O, what Land is the Land of Dreams?

  “You wait right here, you hear me?” Hammond said as the car rolled to a stop in a cloud of orange dust, but Deacon was already out, already running across the weedy yard towards the front door of the house. Hammond shouted at him to stop, ordered him to come back to the car, but the sun had grown much too bright, the June heat and the voice squeezing itself between the cracks in his soul, and Deacon kept running. Three cinder-block steps up to the sagging front porch, and the door wasn’t even locked. As he turned the brass knob and stepped into cool shadows, the voice became a hurricane behind his eyes, raging, singing, swirling around the still and silent heart of his pain.