Did you think they’d just give up? one of the voices whispers, taunting her, someone coiled beneath her sleeping bag. You can keep killing them from now until Doomsday and it won’t make any difference.
“What do you know?” Narcissa asks it. “You’re just a scrap of something I couldn’t digest.”
We see things over here, the voice says, and now it sounds more frightened than scornful. Hell is full of windows. Some of them are your eyes, Narcissa.
“Shut up,” she says and pokes at the kidney again. “I knew they were coming. This doesn’t change a thing.”
You didn’t know they would go to find the seer, Aldous mumbles smugly from his place in the closet. And you didn’t know that he’d listen to them. I bet you didn’t know that.
“It won’t matter.”
They’ve warned him about you, Narcissa. And that one, he just might be smart enough to listen.
“One day, old man, one day I’m going to cut you out of my head like a cancer. One day I’m going to seal your soul in a bottle and toss it into the sea.”
And Narcissa glances from the dismembered rat to all her careful, irrelevant plans thumbtacked to the bedroom wall. Her photocopied map of the city and the diamond that she drew there, the one small red circle where she killed the boy three nights ago, the other points to complete the configuration.
You’ve made too much a game of it, Aldous sneers. You always have to make a game of everything, sadistic little games when all you have to do is slit a throat or two and walk away.
“The fucking game,” and then she stops herself, licks anxiously at her lips, and continues. “The plot, that was for me. I wanted them to see. I wanted them to appreciate what I can do.”
But they don’t care, child, her grandfather says. They don’t give a shit and a holler about all your silly schemes.
“Shut up,” Narcissa snarls and realizes how empty her stomach is, reaches inside the circle of salt and powdered sage and eats the rat’s heart and lungs.
You’re not safe in this house, the voice beneath the sleeping bag says. They’ll come here soon. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re already on their way.
“They won’t stop me,” she says. “They’re only changelings.”
And what are you, Granddaughter? Just what the hell are you?
“What am I?” she replies, a question to answer his question, and Narcissa turns her head to face the rising sun. “I am everything you could never be, old man. I’m exactly who and what you made me.”
What will you do? a very small voice inside her asks, a nervous, twitching voice, and Narcissa realizes it’s the dead rat, and that makes her smile.
“Everything I came here to do,” she says and slowly rubs her flat, muscular belly, her hard and haunted flesh. “But it is a shame I’ll have to rush things now.”
Narcissa turns back to the morning sunlight, warm and reassuring against her face and shoulders, her breasts, warm against the place she cut her face with the razor blade two nights before. The shallow slice along her chin, and she knows that it’ll heal like all the others have before it, will leave behind no sign of a scar, no dent or blemish in her resilient, damning mask. The sunlight smells like squirrels and moldering, fallen leaves, and Narcissa flares her nostrils, breathing in the day, trying to remember why she ever went to the trouble to rent this house. Time she thought she’d have, maybe, a place to be alone with her work and no paper-thin motel walls to worry about.
“One more, though, just to get Mr. Silvey’s attention.”
But he already knows, the voice beneath the sleeping bag reminds her. They told him last night.
Narcissa shuts her eyes, wishing the sun didn’t feel so good, wishing she were stronger and could slip forever into the gentle darkness beneath Miss Josephine’s house in Providence, the endless tunnels and cellars and wells linking a hundred graveyards.
You’re insane, Aldous mutters. No one else should have to die because you’re insane, but Narcissa ignores him, listening instead to her heartbeat, steady as waves on the ocean, and the twittering ghost of the rat lost and drowning in her stomach.
Sadie Jasper curses and squints at the morning stinging her sleepy eyes, hardly ever up this early, 8:35 by the pink plastic Kit-Kat clock hanging on the kitchen wall. She pours her third cup of coffee, hot and black and bitter, and sits down on her stool beside the window, the kitchen much too small for a table so she has to make do with the stool and a patch of counter space. In the winter, she has to sit farther from the window, because of the heat and steam from the half-sized radiator squeezed in beneath the sill. Her bowl of Lucky Charms is starting to turn soggy, but she isn’t really hungry, anyway. She sips at the coffee and stares out the window at the street and the cars and a woman walking her ugly little terrier dog.
She was up most of the night with Deacon’s sketch, the circle and the line, searching through her books for anything like it and coming up empty-handed. It might be Egyptian, she thought at first, maybe two hieroglyphs used together, but that was only a hunch, and her hunches are usually wrong. About three thirty, ready to give up and go to bed, she found herself staring groggy-eyed at the frontispiece of Blake’s Europe: A Prophecy, “The Ancient of Days,” Urizen the measurer crouched inside the yellow sphere of the sun and reaching down towards an unseen world with his vast compass. And she wondered if it could be that simple, Deacon’s symbol meant to be the sun, sunrise or sunset, and the black line underneath nothing more than the horizon.
“Yuck,” she says and pushes the cereal bowl across the counter until it bumps into the microwave, a Christmas gift from her parents because she hates using the cranky old gas stove. Sadie reaches for her cigarettes and lights one, exhales tobacco and cloves. A draft immediately pulls the smoke out the open window. She glances at the clock again, and the hands don’t seem to have moved at all. The cat’s bulbous eyes rock lazily from side to side, its eyes and its rhinestone-studded pendulum tail, and Hell, she thinks, I should have slept at least another fucking hour.
And that brings her back to the question she’s been asking herself since Deacon left the night before: Who’s she doing this for? And why the hurry? Sadie sips the scalding chicory coffee and watches the Kit-Kat clock, her head nodding in time to its tail. There was a month or two when she thought she might be falling in love with Deacon Silvey, though she doubts he ever had any idea, the days and nights they spent talking books and drinking, but him in love with Chance all along—the school-smart girl from another world so far from Sadie’s that it might as well have been another goddamned planet, the normal girl who didn’t hang out with the freaks and slackers and ne’er-do-wells, didn’t waste all her time in bars and punker clubs.
After the wedding—just a minister at the Jefferson County courthouse, so no big deal, none of Deacon’s friends invited—a week or more of people asking her if she’d heard the news yet. “Did you hear Deacon married that girl he was seeing?” “Did you hear she’s rich?” “Did you hear she’s boring as Hell on a Sunday afternoon?”
And then one night at The Plaza, Sadie getting drunk on White Russians, and Sheryl had asked her if she was okay, if she needed to talk to someone. Sadie shrugged and finished her drink, stared a moment at her reflection in the big mirror behind the counter, her too-blue eyes framed in a smudgy raccoon mask of eyeliner.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said and used a paper napkin to dab milk off her waxy black lipstick.
“Are you sure? Because I know how you felt about him—”
“I don’t need Deacon Silvey around to remind me how to be a loser, Sheryl. Believe me, I know all about it.”
“Okay,” Sheryl said, okay but her voice full of uncertainty. “I just wanted you to know I’m here, if you do need to talk.”
“Yeah, well, whatever,” and Sadie ordered another White Russian. Sheryl said something motherly about how it was better to try and talk some of it out than get shit-faced, that talk was a lot cheaper tha
n booze and didn’t give you a hangover, but she brought Sadie’s drink anyway.
Sadie watches the pink Kit-Kat clock, and “That shit’s ancient fucking history, ladybug,” she says, setting her coffee mug down on the counter. It doesn’t matter who she’s doing it for, she reminds herself, only that she’s doing something that might make a difference somewhere down the line, that one day someone might say, Oh yeah, it was Sadie Jasper finally figured that out. Didn’t you know? She helped catch the killer, and maybe she’ll even be there to see the disbelief and confusion on the faces of all the people who’ve never thought she’d ever amount to anything.
The clock’s minute hand grudgingly moves ahead one tick, one tock, sixty seconds closer to nine; Sadie finishes her coffee and cigarette, then sets her cereal bowl in the sink, something she can deal with later, and goes to get dressed.
The Akeley Collection something the library’s never gotten around to cataloging, a couple dozen books in two cardboard boxes, lots one and two from the Estate of Mr. Charles L. Patrick Akeley, donated in November 1963. Sadie fills out a request form and gives it to the balding, gray-haired librarian.
“I swear,” he says. “I don’t think a single solitary soul has ever once asked to look at those old things but you. One of these days, I’m going to have to find the time and money to take better care of them.”
“You really should do that,” Sadie replies. “There are some very rare books in those boxes.”
“Well, like I said, one of these days,” and the librarian smiles, showing off his perfect dentures, and reads the slip of paper in his hand. “You only need Lot Two today?”
“I think so.”
The librarian nods his head slowly and stares at her, his thick glasses magnifying his eyes just enough that he reminds Sadie of Mr. Magoo.
“I hope you won’t think I’m being too nosy or anything,” he says, “but do people ever stare at you? On account of the way you dress, I mean?”
Sadie frowns and glances down at her long black dress, the spiderweb design woven into the velveteen, her black-and-white candy-striped hose and tall Doc Marten boots.
“I’m sorry,” the librarian says. “I never should have asked you a personal question like that.”
“No, it’s okay. But yeah, people stare at me. Sometimes they do more than just stare,” and Sadie lowers her voice an octave and affects a thick redneck drawl. “‘Yo, Morticia? You s’pposed to be some kind of vampire or somethin’? You wanna drink my blood?’”
“You don’t, do you?” the librarian asks her.
“What? You mean drink blood? Oh no, not since I was a kid.”
The librarian nods again and seems to consider that a moment, scowls at the slip of paper she’s handed him, and then he looks back up at her.
“If you don’t mind my asking, why do you dress like that?”
And Sadie just wants to get to work, the librarian’s attention wearing thin, so she leans close to him and whispers the first thing that comes to mind.
“There are people, you see—mostly members of certain secret alchemical orders—who believe the world ended a long, long time ago, and all the stuff we think we see and hear and all the people walking around, everything’s only a ghost of that world which still hasn’t figured out it’s dead. So, it seems to me like someone ought to dress for the funeral.”
The librarian’s eyes grow the slightest bit larger behind his spectacles, and he manages a dubious, slightly embarrassed smile.
“Well, all right then,” he says and goes away, disappears into the claustrophobic maze of shelves behind his desk and leaves Sadie alone in the stuffy, overlit archives room in the basement of the library. The dropped ceiling so low that she can almost touch it, and there are long wooden tables with a few green-shaded banker’s lamps despite the rows of fluorescents overhead. The white walls are decorated with antique maps of Alabama and the other southeastern states, priceless hand-tinted maps from the Civil War and colonial days. The room is crowded with file cabinets and a microfiche reader taking up one whole corner, a drooping, anemic-looking potted plant in another.
Sadie sits down at one of the tables to wait for the books, takes Deacon’s drawing out of her notebook and stares at it, trying hard to imagine the design as he must have seen it the first time, not graphite on a rumpled sheet of typing paper, but traced in drying blood on a wall above Soda’s bed, the dark line beneath the circle drawn in charcoal. The same thing, but something entirely different, something awful. Deacon said there was writing all around the circumference, and she wishes she knew what it was, wishes she had the photographs the forensics people must have taken.
“Here you go,” the librarian says and sets the cardboard box down in front of Sadie. “Lot Two of the Akeley Collection.”
“Thank you,” and Sadie opens her notebook to a blank page.
“No ink, remember. Just pencils.”
“I remember,” Sadie says. “Thanks.”
The librarian lingers, wringing his hands and gazing down at her with his wide Mr. Magoo eyes.
“I hope you’re not offended,” he says. “I honestly wasn’t trying to be offensive.”
“I’m not offended,” she says, which is mostly true, since she’s only annoyed.
“You’re absolutely sure?”
“Yes, I’m absolutely sure,” she says. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Well, you let me know if you need anything else. Oh, and I’m afraid the Xerox machine’s broken down again,” he says and goes back to his desk.
Several years now since Sadie discovered the meager remains of Charles Akeley’s library, these two boxes willed to the archives upon his death, but she knows there must once have been a hundred times this many books, the bulk of them sold off by his heirs. Akeley was the wealthy grandson of a Birmingham steel baron who never married and spent most of his time traveling in Europe and Asia, chasing ghosts and collecting odd books on the occult. He even wrote one of his own, late in life, and published it himself—The Mound Builders and the Stars: An Archaeo-Astrological Investigation—though Sadie’s never actually seen a copy of the volume for herself. In the 1950s, he briefly served on the library’s board of trustees, but abruptly resigned in disgrace following rumors of homosexuality and strange goings-on in his great-grandfather’s mansion over the mountain. Finally, he committed suicide in 1963, only a few hours after the Kennedy assassination. From time to time, Sadie’s entertained the idea of writing his biography, but has never gotten any further than a few pages of typed notes.
She takes a couple of books from the box marked LOT 2 in red Magic Marker, copies of Magnien’s Les Mystères d’Eleusis and Benoist’s Histoire des Albigeois et des Vaudois, sets them both aside because she hasn’t had French since high school, and they’re not what she’s looking for, besides. There are volumes on the Grail and alchemy, witchcraft and Masonry and the Knights Templar, a battered copy of Erich Neuman’s The Great Mother and The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto. The pleasant, nostalgic mustiness of the old paper, but she’s more than halfway to the bottom of the box and Sadie’s beginning to think this might be the wrong lot after all, is already dreading another encounter with the librarian when she finds what she’s looking for hidden beneath a first edition of Charles Fort’s Lo! Nothing stamped on the fraying cloth cover, but Sadie knows this one by sight, has read most of it at one time or another. She places it carefully on the table and opens the book to the title page, Werewolvery in Europe and Rituals of Corporeal Transformation by Arminius Vambery, London 1897.
“There you are,” she whispers to the book, and gently turns its brittle yellow-brown pages, past medieval maps and woodcuts, a man with a wolf’s head gnawing a bone. Searching for a passage she remembers or only thinks that she remembers, and Sadie pauses to read Vambery’s narrative of the Beast of Gévaudan, la Béte Anthropophage du Gévaudan; contemporary accounts quoted from the Paris Gazette and Saint James’ Chronicle of something huge and wolflike that roamed the Fre
nch countryside from 1764 to 1767, something murderous that was said to stand on its hind legs to gaze into the windows of peasants. Stories of slain women and moonlight sightings, strange tracks and the frustrations of the Chevalier de Flamarens, King Louis XV’s Grand Louvetier. Vambery finishes with Gévaudan and goes on to describe other attacks in other places, other years, a creature that stalked Cumbria in 1810 and another in Orel Oblast, Russia, in July 1893. When Sadie glances at the clock, an hour has passed, and she still hasn’t found the passage. She looks at the sheet of typing paper and Deacon’s drawing and turns another page.
“Indeed,” Vambery writes, “many of these accounts may be divided from fatal attacks upon persons by mere carnivorous animals, in the singular and grisly commonality that so few of the bodies are ever entirely devoured. Instead, the beasts frequently remove only the meanest portion from the corpse, often a vital organ such as the heart or liver, or have only drained the victim of his blood. No doubt, these selective, indeed almost surgical, habits must be related to rituals which remain unknown to us.”
“How’s it going?” the librarian asks, and Sadie jumps, drops her pencil, and it rolls away under the table.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“No,” she says, “that’s okay,” ducking beneath the table to retrieve her pencil, but it’s nowhere to be seen. “I didn’t know you were standing behind me, that’s all.”
“I thought you might need something else.”
“No, I’m fine. I found the book I was looking for,” and she gives up on the pencil, sits up again, and the librarian is reading Vambery over her shoulder.
Low Red Moon Page 18