Low Red Moon

by Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  “Just be cool, baby,” she whispers, trying to make the words sound exactly the way that Deacon would make them sound. “You’re all wound up and starting to freak yourself out.” But she doesn’t sound much like Deacon, and Chance wipes her hand on her overalls and reaches into the bathroom again. This time there’s only the plastic switch and switch plate.

  “Silly goose,” she says, and that’s her grandfather’s voice inside her head, Joe Matthews scolding her for being afraid of thunder or the sound of pecan branches scraping against the window of her attic bedroom. She flips the switch and clean white light floods the bathroom, washes the forest-green walls, the colorful Mucha prints hanging on her left.

  “Silly goose,” she says again, because it felt good the first time, and she smiles at herself in the big mirror. Chance steps into the bathroom and eases the door shut behind her, closing out the noise from the television. She starts unbuttoning the bib of her overalls, but stops after only one button.

  And miles to go before I sleep…

  In the mirror, the door and the bathroom walls behind her have completely vanished, and in their place there’s a wide gray sky spread like a million mockingbird wings pinned above a narrow beach and a stormy sea. She can even smell the salt breeze and the faint, unpleasant odor of dead fish. Her heart like something small and frantic, caged in flesh and wanting out, and Chance takes a deep breath and turns around very slowly. But there’s only the door, the dark green walls, everything exactly as it ought to be.

  “You’re all wound up, freaking yourself out,” she says again, but she can’t even remember what the words are supposed to mean. She glances back at the mirror, and the impossible seascape is there again, if it ever went anywhere else.

  “Not real,” she whispers and takes a step towards the sink. “Not real at all.”

  A gull soars high above the whitecap sea, and she can hear it, its caw and the low roar of the surf against the shore.

  “Alice,” she says, but the sound of the ocean has grown suddenly so much louder, drowning her out. She shuts her eyes, but when she opens them, nothing in the mirror has changed.

  “Don’t turn around again,” a woman says, her voice as wild as the whirling hurricane clouds inching their way across the sky, as wild and as dangerous, and Chance doesn’t take her eyes off the mirror. She can see the woman standing in the distance, beyond the point where the white bathroom tile ends and sand and sea oats begin, much too far away for Chance to be able to hear her above the wind and the raucous, screeching gulls, but she can hear her, anyway. The woman is tall and wears a blue coat, a long navy-blue peacoat, and her eyes sparkle gold in the gloom. She’s holding a knife, and she looks over her shoulder at the waves.

  “Mother Hydra,” she says. “Don’t mind her. I don’t think she’s ever going to wake up again.”

  And as the first contraction hits, the first hot pain to drive the breath from Chance’s lungs, the woman in the navy peacoat raises her arms to the terrible, hungry sky. The second contraction and Chance’s knees buckle so she has to grip the edge of the sink for support. Lightning flashes across the gray sky and blood begins to drip from the woman’s outstretched hands.

  “Not real, not real at all,” Chance says, and the woman balls her hands into tight, bleeding fists as the seascape comes apart in shredded kaleidoscope tatters, everything swept away in an instant by salt-damp wind and mercury-silver brilliance. And then there’s only the bathroom wall behind her, and the closed door, and the kettle screaming from the kitchen like a dying gull.

  When Scarborough and the girl named Jane have finally finished talking, have done with their long and impossible story of monsters and changelings, secret societies and half-breeds, when she’s finished stitching up the gash from the broken glass, Deacon sets down the lukewarm can of Coke he’s been sipping. He stares at his bandaged left hand, maroon blotches showing through the gauze.

  “This is bullshit,” he says. “And I’m going home.”

  “It’s the truth,” Starling Jane replies flatly, sitting on the floor in one corner of the shabby little motel room, her knees tucked up beneath her chin.

  “It’s total fucking bullshit, and even if it was the truth, that’s all the more reason I should be at home. I should be home with Chance.”

  “Why? Because you still think you can protect her?” Scarborough asks. He’s just come out of the bathroom again, keeps having to get up from his seat on one of the beds to get fresh toilet paper because his nose won’t stop bleeding. There are crimson-stained wads of tissue scattered like strange flowers about the room.

  “Because I think I’m supposed to be there to try.”

  “That’s what she’s counting on, Deacon,” Jane says. “As much as Narcissa has a plan, killing you before she kills your wife is part of it.”

  Scarborough laughs softly to himself and sits back down on the bed closest to the door. Deacon watches him from the other bed, taking what small satisfactions he can from the raw tapestry of cuts and bruises on the man’s face, his ruined nose, the left eye already starting to turn a bright reddish purple, and it’ll be a real shiner by morning.

  “Your friend Sadie hurt her,” Scarborough says. “Maybe even slowed her down just a little, if we’re real damn lucky.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m the luckiest motherfucker on the planet,” Deacon mutters, and Scarborough laughs again.

  “A whole lot luckier than you have any goddamn right to be,” he says.

  “I should have punched you in the mouth, instead.”

  “You should stop running from the things you know better than to disbelieve. You should start trusting what you see, Mr. Silvey, not what you think you know.”

  “If you’ll help us, we might be able to stop her,” Jane says from her spot on the floor. “With your sight.”

  “Listen, screw my sight, okay? I mean, if I hadn’t led the cops to Mary English, this crazy bitch would never have come looking for me and Chance.”

  “You can’t undo the past, Deacon,” Jane tells him. “You can only see it for what it is, what it truly is, and then try to set the present in order again. You’ve always known that.”

  “Fuck me,” Deacon whispers and runs his fingers through his hair, looking at neither the girl nor Scarborough Pentecost now, staring straight ahead at the cheap wallpaper, faded yellow-green with tacky flecks of gold and a bamboo pattern, bamboo stalks and leaves. Someplace for the tigers to hide, their eyes burning bright as the golden eyes of madwomen.

  “We need you to believe us,” Jane says, and she stands up then, brushing absently at the seat of her jeans. “And there’s really no more time for us to convince you.”

  “Fine. If you two need to go find this woman, that’s your business. But I have to go home now. Thanks for keeping me sober.”

  And then Scarborough takes out his pistol again, slips it from the black leather shoulder holster, and points it at Deacon’s chest.

  “You won’t shoot me,” Deacon says, trying hard to sound like he believes it. “I’m no good to you dead.”

  “No, but it doesn’t sound like you’re going to be any good to me alive, either. And I gotta tell you, Mr. Silvey, it’d sure as hell be satisfying to pull this trigger.” A trickle of blood leaks from Scarborough’s right nostril, and he licks it away. “And, to tell the gods’ honest truth, I couldn’t give a sick what happens to your wife or your kid. That’s not why I’m here. That’s not why they sent me down here to this backwards shithole of a city.”

  Deacon swallows, his mouth gone dry despite the sticky soda aftertaste from the Coke. “Tell me this, Scarborough,” he asks. “Can you even take a piss without that thing in your hand?”

  “There’s no more time for talk,” Jane says, scowls a disapproving, furtive scowl at Scarborough, and then she steps between them, between Deacon and the barrel of the gun. “We’ve told you as much of the truth as we’re allowed, a lot more than we should have told you. So now I’ll have to show you, because y
ou haven’t left me any choice, and there’s only one way this night can end.”

  “You better get out of my way, little girl,” Scarborough growls. “I’ve had enough of this prick. I can take care of this—”

  “You just shut up for a goddamn minute,” she snaps back, and he does, disappointment smeared across his face like a mean dog coming unexpectedly to the end of its chain, but he doesn’t put the gun away.

  “Show me what?” Deacon asks her.

  “Secret things,” she replies and gently presses her middle fingers to his temples. “Terrible, beautiful things. Whatever it takes to make you believe.”

  “Not everything I see is true. You know that.”

  “Yes, Deacon, I do,” and then Starling Jane bends down and kisses him on the lips, her breath like tendrils of cinnamon and newly turned earth slipping down his throat, up his nose, spilling into the convolutions of his brain. Before he can blink them away, she presses her thumbs lightly against his open eyes, and the last dregs of the migraine dissolve like sugar sinking into warm water.

  “You stay close,” she says. “It wouldn’t do to get lost, not where we’re going.”

  And the world slips, or cracks, or was never really there to begin with, unless it’s only him that’s come apart, shattered by her touch. Falling into her, the deepest, softest folds of her, and if there are even colors here, he’s never seen them before and wouldn’t know what to call them; if there is light here, it’s the alien light hidden beyond the edges of the spectrum open to simple human eyes.

  “All your life, since you were a child,” she says, her voice dripping down from the uneasy place where the sky should be, “you’ve lived at the muddy boundaries of so many different worlds—the past, the present, life and death, waking truth and dreaming truth. The borders are thin for you, but there are still borders, and they’ve almost driven you insane. In time, Deacon, they will.”

  He tries to shut his eyes, but her thumbs are still in the way, her grip like iron wrapped round his skull. There’s more familiar light now, flickering yellow-white candle points, luminescent insects burning themselves alive, and the sudden smell of mold and cellar dust, like the basement of Chance’s old house. Something moves, bristling fur and eyes like gold coins washed in blood. “What are you doing, Jane?” a cold and guttural voice asks from the swarm of candlelight.

  “I couldn’t find any other way,” she replies.

  “For your sake, child, indeed, for all our sakes, I hope you are wiser than you seem.”

  “Will it matter, Master Tantalus, if the mongrel has her way?” and the darkness, which he knows was never really true darkness at all, releases Deacon Silvey to the candles and the milder glow of phosphorescent fungi clinging to the walls of the vast ossuary. Jackstraw pillars of thighbones and toothless skulls that seem to rise up forever, broad arches of dry brown ribs and vertebrae, and all of it only a frame for the creatures squatting in the shadows. The wire-haired things watching him with glittering eyes, crouched there on their spindly legs, and he sinks to his knees in the filth and bits of bone covering the floor of the necropolis.

  “The Land of Dreams,” Jane whispers in his ear, and now he sees that she’s standing there beside him. “Mary English’s Land of Dreams. And Narcissa Snow’s Land of Dreams, too.”

  The smell and taste of rotting flesh and age-brittled bones so thick in the air that he gags, and Jane kneels down beside him and wipes the tears from his eyes.

  “But she can never come here, Deacon. Narcissa is neither ghul nor changeling, neither a lurker in the wastes nor a child of the Cuckoo. But that’s all she desires, and she means to have it.”

  “I don’t believe any of this,” Deacon mumbles, and the stooped things in the gloom laugh and bark and click their ebony claws against the earth at their feet.

  Jane cleans away the spittle leaking from Deacon’s trembling lips, brushes the sweat-soaked hair back from his eyes.

  “It is real, Deacon, and somewhere inside, you know that it’s real. That part of you that found Mary English, that part of you that can see what others leave behind. That part of you will always know this place is real.”

  “You could die for this, Starling Jane,” one of the creatures snarls and squats in the dirt in front of Deacon. “You have broken the covenant.”

  “But he had to see. He had to see for himself,” she says, and when the thing curls back its black canine lips and bares its teeth, she shows it her throat and Deacon vomits at its feet.

  “Then it has seen enough. Take it back and finish this,” and the creature turns and lopes away into the shadows, trailing the smell of carrion and candle wax.

  “Have you seen enough, Deacon?” she asks him. “Have you seen enough to understand what’s at stake?”

  “She isn’t one of you,” he whispers hoarsely. “But she wants to be. She thinks…she thinks if she brings our child to this place, you’ll have to let her in.”

  “Can you stand?”

  “I don’t know. What difference does it make?”

  “There are things here you shouldn’t be bowing to,” she says, so he struggles to his feet, and the creatures laugh at him again.

  “Madam Terpsichore will hear of this,” one of them whispers. “You would be sweet on the slab, child.”

  “Tell her what you wish. Maybe she’d prefer to do her own dirty work from now on.”

  “Please, get me out of here,” Deacon stammers, his body beginning to shake uncontrollably as he wets himself. He grabs her hand and clings to it, the only still point in the storm raging between their minds. “I can’t stand up much longer.”

  “Hold on very tight,” she says, as if there were any chance he’d ever let go, and she folds herself around him again, sews him up inside herself, against that welcoming, starving void, and only this thin girl to keep it from pulling him apart, eating him alive. A moment, or an hour, or ages beyond reckoning, but when Jane takes her thumbs from his eyes, there’s only her face and the light from the lamp between the motel beds.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Pool of Tears

  The ride in Scarborough’s long black Cadillac Coupe de Ville, not more than ten minutes between the parking lot of The Schooner Motel and the address on Southside, the house at the dead end of Cullom Street where the girl named Starling Jane said they would find Narcissa Snow. Deacon stares out the passenger-side window of the old car at the streets and buildings flashing past outside, familiar sights made strange and foreboding by this night and its circumstances. Scarborough behind the wheel, watching the road and speaking only when Deacon says something to break the not-quite-silence, the sound of the wheels on the asphalt, a ping somewhere in the Caddy’s guts, the distant sound of thunder from the sky.

  “She didn’t have to go,” Deacon says, repeating himself, but it’s better than nothing. “I talked to Downs before we left the bar. The cops are watching the building.”

  “When are you gonna wake up and smell the beans?” Scarborough replies and slows down for a red light, looks both ways, and then runs it. “If the police could stop this bitch, I never would have had to fucking leave Boston.”

  “Is that where you’re from? Boston?”

  “Yeah. Well, most of the time,” Scarborough mumbles and then glances at himself in the rearview mirror. He gingerly touches the end of his nose with one fingertip and winces. “Where the hell did you learn to fight, anyway?”

  “Out behind bars, mostly,” Deacon replies. “It used to be sort of a hobby.”

  The first scatter of raindrops speckles the windshield, and Scarborough stares up at the clouds slung low above the trees and rooftops. “Just what I fucking need,” he grumbles and turns on the wipers. Deacon watches as the rubber blades smear the water back and forth across the glass, hitching pendulum swing that doesn’t really make it any easier to see.

  “Those things she showed me—”

  “—are strictly between you and her,” Scarborough says before Deacon can complet
e the sentence. “Whatever it was, I don’t even want to know.”

  “Then I wasn’t supposed to see any of it, was I?”

  “Jane does things her way, I do things mine,” and Scarborough turns up Twentieth without signaling, leaving behind the small pentangle of bars and restaurants at Five Points, the people and the lights, and heads up the side of Red Mountain. “If she fools around and gets herself killed, that’s just one less thing I have to worry about.”

  “Turn right onto Sixteenth,” Deacon says. “It’ll get us there.”

  “I know where I’m going, Mr. Silvey. I don’t need you to give me directions.”

  A thunderclap, lightning, and the rain grows suddenly harder, countless tiny drumbeats against the top of the car, and Scarborough curses and switches the wipers to a faster setting.

  “So I guess you’re the original coldhearted motherfucker,” Deacon says, pressing his good right hand against the window to leave a print in the condensation there. “You watch your own ass, and the devil take the hindmost.”

  “I haven’t met anyone yet that I’d be willing to die for, if that’s what you mean.”

  Deacon draws a circle around his handprint, five points inside a circle like a charm to keep back the storm and whatever else is coming at them through the night.

  “What about these…these things you work for? The Great Old Ones, whatever the fuck you call them?”

  “I said that I haven’t met anyone I’m willing to die for, not that I hadn’t found anything.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “They gave me a life, Mr. Silvey,” Scarborough says and stares straight ahead at the rain and the wet street and the metronome sweep of the wiper blades.

  “Or took one away from you.”

  Scarborough glances away from the road just long enough for Deacon to see the look in his eyes, the slow-burn fury to tell him it’s time to shut up or at least change the subject.

  “Am I allowed to ask questions?”

  “Haven’t you seen enough already? I thought you were the reluctant clairvoyant. I thought you didn’t want anything to do with this freaky shit.”