Low Red Moon

by Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  “That was back when I still thought maybe I had a choice in the matter, before your little pal jabbed her thumbs in my eyes and gave me the nickel tour of Hell.”

  “And now you want the two-bit tour?”

  “No, but I’d appreciate you telling me who Narcissa Snow is,” Deacon says. “I mean, if she isn’t one of you, or one of your Morlock buddies, then where’d she come from?”

  Scarborough shakes his head and cuts the steering wheel right, guiding the sleek black Cadillac off Twentieth and onto Sixteenth, this narrow avenue to carry them closer to the top of the mountain.

  “Narcissa Snow’s just an unfortunate oversight,” he replies. “A mess that someone should have cleaned up twenty-six years ago.”

  “So I guess that sort’a makes you like a janitor,” Deacon says and turns back to the window.

  “Yeah, Mr. Silvey, I suppose it does. But a house is only as strong as the people who keep it in order.”

  Deacon chuckles to himself and stares out at the lights of the soggy, rain-shrouded city laid out below; it only takes him a moment to locate Morris and the roof of his apartment building, the safe place where Chance is waiting for him.

  “That’s a good one,” he says. “If you ever get tired of pointing guns at people for a living, maybe you could get a job writing fortune cookies.”

  Scarborough runs a stop sign, bounces through an over-flowing pothole, and the rear of the car fishtails slightly. Behind them, someone blows their horn.

  “You know, if you get pulled over for driving like a lunatic, it could put a real crimp in your plans for the evening.”

  “How about you let me worry about that, Mr. Silvey. You just worry about whether or not we get to her before she gets her shit together and makes a beeline for your wife.”

  “And what am I supposed to do when we find her?” Deacon asks and then wipes his handprint off the Cadillac’s window. High above Birmingham, lightning flashes and stabs searing, electric fingers at the world. A split second of noon and then the rainy night washes back over everything.

  “Try not to get yourself killed,” Scarborough says and turns another corner.

  Chance is sitting on the sofa in a carefully arranged nest of cushions, her feet propped up on the coffee table and another cushion under them. The television is still on, the National Geographic Channel and the Sphinx, because Alice hasn’t thought to turn it off. Chance rests her dizzy head against the back of the sofa and stares up at the ceiling, the heavy wooden beams and crisscrossing pipes of the old factory.

  “Were they contractions or not?” Alice asks, and Chance shuts her eyes. Better in the darkness, the near-dark behind her eyelids, better to pretend the things she saw in the mirror were never there at all.

  “They stopped,” she says. “I don’t think it was anything at all. They wouldn’t have come so close together.”

  “Chance, just tell me if you want me to call Dr. Capuzzo, and I’ll do it.”

  “No, I’m fine now. I think I’ll be okay.”

  She can hear Alice get up from her chair and begin to pace about the room again, her window to window to window circuit, and she starts grumbling about the police cars. Fifteen minutes ago, a cop named Conroy Adams came to the door and told them there’d be three cars watching the building until Detective Downs said the coast was clear. She’d laughed when Alice told her that, that the man had actually said “when the coast is clear.”

  “It couldn’t have been Braxton-Hicks,” Alice says. “Not if they hurt.”

  “I’m not even sure they hurt.”

  “You said they hurt.”

  Chance opens her eyes, and all the beams and pipes are still up there, the sprinkler system and smoke alarm like a tiny white flying saucer hovering fifteen feet overhead.

  “Will you please turn off the television?” she asks. “It’s making me nervous. I think I’d like to listen to some music,” hoping it might calm her nerves, that something easy and familiar might make here and now more real than the gulls and gray-blue sky, the woman with the knife and golden eyes.

  “I wouldn’t know what to play,” Alice says. “You know all those cars are parked on the same side of the building? Shouldn’t they have someone around back?”

  “I’m not a cop, Alice. I don’t know where their cars ought to be.”

  “Well, they shouldn’t be all bunched up together like that.”

  Chance shuts her eyes, asks Alice again to please turn off the TV, to put on a CD, instead, and Alice Sprinkle mumbles a handful of disparaging words about compact discs.

  “I don’t even know what you want to hear,” she says.

  “Exit West by Daria Parker. It’s right there on top of the stereo. If you can’t find it—”

  “I found it,” Alice says. “Exit West. Isn’t this that girl from Birmingham?”

  “Yeah,” Chance says, “that’s her,” and she swallows against her nausea, wishing she had the unfinished cup of Red Zinger tea now to settle her queasy stomach. “She used to be in a punk band, but now she does mostly folky stuff.”

  “God, I fuckin’ hate punk,” Alice says. “It was almost worse than disco. Don’t you have something else?”

  “It’s not punk. I said that she used to be in a punk band. Do you like Sarah McLachlan?”

  “I liked Fumbling Towards Ecstasy.”

  “Then you’ll like this, too. Anyway, she’s also a big old dyke, so you’ll probably fucking love her.”

  She hears Alice’s heavy, brusque footsteps, crossing from the kitchen window to the television set, switching off the narrator halfway through something about Nubian slavery during the reign of Khafre. For a few long seconds, there’s only the noise of the rain beating hard and steady against the roof of the building, a sound that’s never made Chance nervous before, but it does now. Alice starts cursing at the stereo buttons, but Chance keeps her eyes closed, looking for deeper shades of black hiding inside herself, trying to ignore the rain, and finally she hears the tray on the CD player slide slowly open.

  “You don’t even own a turntable, do you?” Alice asks, and the tray slides shut again.

  “Just press play,” Chance tells her, and in a moment the room fills with piano chords and the watery sounds of a twelve-string guitar, the gentle, rolling susurration of synthesizer keys and drum machines. The first track, “Carbon White,” and Chance opens her eyes and blinks at the ceiling; no sanctuary left inside herself anywhere, only onionskin layers of doubt and fear, and she wishes Deacon would come home.

  “You gave me a scare in there, kiddo,” Alice says, sitting down again.

  “I think maybe it was just the stress.”

  “Are you going to tell me why there are three police cars all bunched up together outside your building?” Alice asks, and Chance suppresses a groan, only wanting to pay attention to the music.

  “Just let me listen to this song,” she says. “I feel better now, really.”

  “I didn’t ask how you felt, Chance. I asked why there’s a goddamn stake-out downstairs.”

  But Chance is trying not to think about the police, too busy concentrating on the music, the words, the singer’s voice like sandpaper against velvet. “Deacon saw her a few times when she was still in Birmingham,” she says. “Before she got famous. I never went to shows. I think she lives out in San Francisco now.”

  “Lucky her,” Alice whispers. “I need a cigarette.”

  “You could go out to the stairwell. Deacon smokes there when it’s raining.”

  “I don’t think I should leave you alone.”

  Chance turns her head towards Alice, her cheek pressed against the soft fringe at the edge of a cushion. She smiles, trying to put Alice at ease before she gives them both a heart attack, but that only makes her frown more dramatically.

  “I’m fine, really. I promise. I’m just going to sit right here and listen to the music. You won’t even be more than a hundred feet away from me.”

  “I might not be able to hear yo
u—”

  “That doesn’t matter, Alice, because I’m okay now, and there’s not going to be anything for you to hear.”

  Alice cracks her knuckles and glances anxiously at the blank TV screen, stares at it as though there might be some answer hidden somewhere inside the dark glass. But only the wide room reflected back, a subtly convex doppelgänger to mock her unease, and she sighs and cracks her knuckles again.

  “I won’t be more than five minutes,” she says. “I swear.”

  “Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Alice gets up, her strong, broad shoulders eclipse the warm light of the nearest lamp, and she stands beside the coffee table, looking worriedly down at Chance.

  “You know how much I care about you,” she says, her voice grown softer by scant degrees, but a fine distinction Chance can hear right away. “You know how much you mean to me.”

  “I think I know,” Chance replies.

  “If anything ever happened—”

  “No, Alice. Don’t say that. Nothing’s going to happen. I’ve got Deacon, and I’ve got you, and I’ve got three whole carloads of police sitting outside. I’m probably the safest pregnant lady in Alabama right now.”

  “I told your grandfather I’d always watch after you,” Alice says, and then lightning and a thunderclap so loud there’s no point in anyone saying anything else until it’s done and the big windows have stopped rattling.

  “And you always have,” Chance tells her, leaning forward a little and upsetting some of the cushions so they tumble off into the floor. “Every single time I’ve ever needed you, you’ve always been there for me. Now, please, go smoke a cigarette and stop worrying for a little while.”

  Alice stoops and retrieves the fallen cushions, tucks them back into place around Chance. And then she leans over and kisses Chance lightly on the lips.

  The singer’s voice leaking from the stereo speakers, too pretty to be husky, too hard to be sweet, I’ve lost myself inside your light, and burning doesn’t seem to scare me anymore, here everything is carbon white, and ash.

  “Alice,” Chance says uncertainly, and immediately Alice’s cheeks flush bright pink and she backs away, almost tripping over the coffee table.

  “I’m so sorry,” Alice mumbles and wipes at her forehead.

  “Don’t apologize,” Chance says and touches her lips. “I understand.”

  “You think so? Then you’ve got a leg up on me, kiddo.”

  “I’m okay, Alice. Go on. I’m just going to sit here and listen to my music for a little while.”

  And Alice does go, then walks quickly down the hall to the front door, leaving Chance alone on the big sofa in her nest of cushions. Chance licks at her lips, the faint, musty taste of Alice Sprinkle lingering there, and Come home, Deke, she thinks. Come home now, because she doesn’t feel anything like okay. The things she saw in the bathroom mirror, the yellow-eyed woman and her carving knife, the angry, gull-haunted sky, and she closes her eyes and tries to think of nothing but Daria Parker’s song.

  The fire behind your eyes is burning me alive, no reason left to fight, the light inside you shining, shining carbon white.

  “There are many evil places in the world, sick places, terrae pathologica,” Madam Terpsichore said, when Jane was only seven and a half, still a whelp but starting to forget her vague, intangible memories of the world before. “And if you should die in a sick place, child, the evil things there will trap your soul and, if it is a very clever sort of evil, you might spend all the rest of eternity looking for a way out.”

  Huddled in the leaky shelter of the loading dock of an abandoned warehouse or factory, shivering and trying hard not to let the cold and wet distract her from watching the narrow cobblestone street, Starling Jane can’t keep the ghul’s words out of her head. Can’t stop thinking of the dread she felt that first day she and Scarborough came to this city, that day on the overpass above the old iron foundry, or the night she went to Deacon Silvey and saw the blackness crouched jealously just inside the gated tunnel leading deep into the heart of a mountain. Those things and all the dead and crippled that Narcissa Snow has left scattered in her wake like broken toys.

  “Even we shun those blighted places,” Madam Terpsichore said and licked her thick black lips, her long tongue slipping about the edges of her muzzle for any stray bits of supper caught in her fur. “Even the darkest folk among us aren’t that bold.”

  “Why are the places sick?” Jane asked, and the hounds laughed and then went back to gnawing their bones.

  “There were things here ages before us, child, terrible things that will still be here when we’re gone. The sick places are where they sleep, and wait.”

  “Wait for what?”

  “Don’t ask so many questions,” Madam Terpsichore said. “It’s not healthy,” and then she turned her back on Starling Jane and wandered away into one of the tunnels leading down towards Swan Point Cemetery and the muddy Seekonk River.

  “Silly old cunt,” Jane whispers, but it doesn’t make her feel any better, and so she reaches inside the raincoat that Scarborough bought her at an army surplus store back in Atlanta. The reassuring butt of her gun tucked into its holster, the knife tucked into her boot. There’s a brilliant, scalding flash of lightning, then, and she ducks her head, flinching instinctively; the thunder chasing its dazzling heels is so loud that she covers her ears and waits for it to pass.

  “Fuck it all,” she whispers, almost able to hear herself over the rumbling sky. Starling Jane pulls her raincoat tighter and watches the old-fashioned lampposts along the street, gaslights with electric hearts. Nothing but the night and the storm, the water gurgling noisily from aluminum rainspouts and filling up the gutters, swirling away down storm drains.

  There are lights burning bright in a few of the windows, nineteenth-century warehouses and livery stables gentrified into pricey yuppie cocoons, but at least that’s something this awful, alien place has in common with Providence. History dusted off and smothered under layers of paint and varnish, renovated for the unseeing people of sunshine and blue skies. Across the street, a pretty young man with red hair and glasses stands at one of the windows for a moment and then goes away again.

  If things had been different, she thinks, if the world had turned another way and the Cuckoo hadn’t chosen me, I might live in a place like that. If things had been different, I might live another night.

  “Regret is your worst enemy,” Madam Terpsichore said once, when she found Starling Jane huddled in a corner with a magazine she’d found abandoned on a park bench, crying over the glossy photographs of perfect, smiling people. “You are strong and can survive anything, so long as you keep regret at your back. This is the way your life has gone. It will not now go another way.”

  Starling Jane shivers and checks her wristwatch. They should be getting to the house soon, and in another half hour it will all be over and done with.

  The sudden creak of straining metal overhead, and she looks up, the rain dripping into her eyes, half blinding her before she can blink it away. But not before she sees that there’s something crouched there on the bottom landing of the fire escape only a dozen feet above her, something with iridescent golden eyes peering down between the rusted strips of steel beneath its feet.

  “Do you even know why you’re hunting me, little girl?” the thing on the fire escape asks. “Has anyone even bothered to tell you?” Its voice is sweet and smooth as honey on lead crystal, worming its way into her head so she can’t think straight, blurring her thoughts like the rain’s already blurred her vision.

  “For the things you’ve done,” Jane says very quietly and slowly reaches for her pistol.

  “No,” the thing on the fire escape growls back at her. “Because you’ve been ordered to hunt me. That’s why you’re here. Don’t pretend you’re doing something noble. Don’t pretend you’re anything but a lapdog.”

  Starling Jane draws the gun and aims it carefully at the darkness framed between t
hose flashing amber eyes. Sighting down the pistol’s snubby barrel, she knows perfectly well that she’ll only get one shot, if she’s really fucking lucky she’ll only get one shot off before Narcissa Snow slips over the edge of the fire escape and tears her apart.

  Narcissa laughs at her, and it’s a sound so cold, so absolutely empty, all the wasted places of the earth sewn up in that laugh, that Jane almost drops the gun and runs.

  “You’re not going to use that,” Narcissa says confidently.

  “Why the hell not?” Jane whispers.

  “The three police cars out front, that’s why the hell not. Don’t you think they’ll hear the shot? What if you missed? How can you keep all your precious fucking secrets if you miss and they find your body and have to come looking for me themselves? What if they catch me, instead? All the things that I could tell them, all the things that I could show them.”

  “Asylums are full of lunatics,” Jane says, flipping off the safety and tightening her grip on the trigger. “Every one of them knows the secrets of the universe.”

  “But I have the proof, baby doll. That’s the difference.”

  She wants you to keep talking, keep listening, she wants to confuse you. Pull the trigger and she’s dead, pull the trigger and it’s all over.

  “No one would ever believe anything you said,” Jane replies, not even persuading herself.

  “Then shut up and shoot me. Even a ribsy little bitch like you should be able to hit me from this distance.”

  But Jane lowers the gun, instead, releasing the trigger, praying to all the dark gods of the hounds that there’s time to draw the dagger tucked into her boot before Narcissa gets to her.

  “Smart girl,” Narcissa purrs, and the rusty fire escape pops and creaks, swaying just a little as she shifts her weight, as she moves like a living, liquid shadow flowing down to engulf and drown Starling Jane.

  Alice finishes her cigarette and stubs the Winston out against the railing, flicks the butt away into the spiraling depths of the stairwell. There are others littering the steps, dirty little secrets no one has bothered to sweep up, so the building keeps them to itself, here where hardly anyone will ever see. Dozens of Camel butts and she figures those might be Deacon’s, though they could just as easily belong to someone else on the third floor. She looks at the half-empty pack of cigarettes lying next to her, there where she’s sitting on the topmost stair, and thinks about lighting another one. Her nerves already shot before that messed-up little scene with Chance, the silly fucking kiss, and she swears to herself she’d give up a year of her life just to take back that one moment. The whole thing fucked up in more ways than she cares to count, never mind that Chance is pregnant, that she’s married and pregnant, plenty bad enough that Alice could be her goddamned mother, that she made so many promises to Joe and Esther Matthews.