Low Red Moon

by Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  “It wasn’t anything at all,” she says, even though she doesn’t mean it, and takes out another Winston. It’s a little bent from riding around in her shirt pocket all day, and she straightens it with her fingers.

  “It didn’t mean anything,” she says.

  Alice flips open the lid on her silver Zippo, thumb on the strike wheel, and then she hears a sound coming from somewhere beneath her. Clattering noises from a lower floor or the parking garage all the way at the bottom of the stairs, and she takes the cigarette from her lips and listens. But there’s only the incessant drumming of the rain against the roof, the low and muted howl of wind around the corners of the building. She looks over her left shoulder at the door to the stairwell propped open with a piece of cardboard, one flap torn off a cardboard box and wedged in level with the doorknob so the lock can’t catch.

  What the hell are you so nervous about? she thinks, returning the Winston to the crumpled pack. Then she remembers the three police cars sitting out front, the telephone call from Deacon and the frightened, furtive expression on Chance’s face. All that forgotten for a few minutes, her mind too busy worrying over the unfortunate kiss, too busy wondering if she’s managed to screw up her friendship with Chance. One foolish, impulsive action that might be strong enough to invalidate all those years, the disproportionate cause and effect she’s seen so many times before. The too-familiar weight of guilt, and Alice shuts her eyes for a second and listens to the rain and thunder. Nothing to be frightened of there, nothing that she doesn’t understand, and she wishes Chance had called someone else to keep her company, then feels ashamed for wishing it.

  On the first or second floor, somebody opens one of the other doors into the stairwell, and there’s a sudden downdraft, musty, warm air sucked in from the third-floor hallway behind Alice, before both doors, the one below and the one at her back, slam shut in unison. Startled, she jumps and drops her lighter. It clatters end over end down the steep cement steps and lies glittering in the dim light of the landing.

  “Motherfucker,” Alice hisses, getting quickly to her feet, and she tugs at the door handle, but it’s locked tight; the useless piece of cardboard has slipped all the way down to the floor, and she kicks it hard enough to hurt her foot. No way Chance will ever hear her, not with the stereo blaring and so much distance, so many walls and doors, between them, so she’ll have to go all the way downstairs and out through the garage, then use one of the call boxes to get Chance to buzz her back into the building.

  She bangs on the door a few times, just in case someone’s in the hall, someone who might hear and let her back in. When no one does, she leans out over the railing and bellows down the stairwell.

  “Why the fuck did you open the damned door, you dickhead?!”

  Only the storm raging above her for an answer, the rain to remind her that she’ll probably end up soaked before this is over, standing in the downpour, waiting for Chance to get to the phone.

  She glares at the locked door one last time, the traitorous hunk of cardboard, then takes the fourteen steps down to the landing and picks up her Zippo.

  “Hell,” she mutters, “the way things are going, I’ll probably drown out there. Or get myself struck by lightning.”

  Alice tries each door on the way down, but they’re all locked, just like they’re supposed to be. Past the first floor and on down to the ground level, a burned-out row of bulbs there that no one has bothered to replace and so the dark has claimed the foot of the stairs for its own. But at least that door opens when she turns the handle, a fluttery second or two of panic when she thought it might not after all, but then the darkness is washed away by the pale fluorescent light from the parking garage. For decades, the building next door was a spice warehouse, and so the air down here stinks of curry and black pepper and paprika, the smell strong enough it always makes Alice’s eyes start to itch and water. She eases the door shut behind her, and the click of the latch seems very loud in the vast silence of the garage.

  Shiny rows of cars divided neatly by yellow lines and square concrete pillars, great teetering piles of junk stacked back against the walls, everything the tenants have no place or use for, but can’t quite bring themselves to throw away, either, so all of it stored down here, almost out of sight and mind. Alice walks past Chance and Deacon’s space, 307 stenciled in canary-yellow numerals on the dirty gray cement and Chance’s Impala parked in front of their own share of the garage junk—big boxes of paperback books, wooden crates of fossils and tools, a bicycle with one wheel, a broken halogen floor lamp.

  Outside, the thunder rumbles furiously, muffled now by these thick walls of brick and steel and mortar. Alice tries the lobby door first, the quickest route to a call box, but of course it’s locked, too.

  “Goddamn paranoid yuppies,” she grumbles and starts to kick the door, then remembers hurting her foot upstairs and thinks better of it. There’s another thunderclap, much louder than the last, and the lights flicker.

  “Oh no, you don’t,” she says, staring up at the ceiling only a few feet above her head. The unsightly tangle of exposed pipes and wiring. “No,” she says again. “The universe has pissed on me enough for one night, and the power is not about to go out and leave me stranded down here in the dark. The lights are not fucking going to go out,” but she forgets all about the lobby and walks quickly to the big electric door on the other side of the garage. Down the short car ramp to the control box mounted on the wall, just two black buttons, UP and DOWN, and she presses UP. Somewhere nearby a motor whirs sluggishly to life, accompanied by the clang and rattle of chains, and slowly the door begins to rise.

  “Yeah,” Alice whispers. “That’s a girl.” She takes a step backwards as the wind whips in, blowing in a spray of icy, cold rain to soak her ankles right through the cuffs of her jeans. Then the lights flicker again, and the door makes a hitching, grinding sort of sound and stops. Alice curses and jabs the UP button repeatedly until it finally clanks reluctantly back to life.

  And the dripping, shaggy thing standing on the other side of the garage door blinks her golden eyes at Alice Sprinkle and smiles. She’s standing over a body, a hunting knife clutched tightly in her right hand, and the convenient rain to wash away the blood.

  “Hey, old woman,” the thing says. “Did you know the sky’s falling?” and then more thunder, and the lights flicker one last time and wink out for good.

  Through the storm, to the shaded place where Cullom Street ends, and the house is waiting for them there like everything else that’s inevitable. No lights from its curtainless windows, only the darkness past the last streetlamp, a hole torn in the night and left like a dry, forgotten well beneath the branches of the old pecan trees.

  “Shit,” Deacon hisses, watching the house through the rain-slicked windshield of the Cadillac. “That fucking figures.”

  “What?” Scarborough asks him, not taking his eyes off the house.

  “The spider-girl house,” Deacon replies and laughs a dry, sick little laugh. “It would have to be the fucking spider-girl house.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Come on, Scarborough. You’re a spooky guy. You’re supposed to be up on this sort of shit.”

  Scarborough frowns and shakes his head, but doesn’t reply, wipes condensation off the glass with the palm of his hand.

  “It’s the local haunted house. Kids get stoned and dare each other to sneak into this place. It’s been going on for years.”

  Scarborough kills the engine and switches off the headlights, and then there’s only the dark and the thunder, the dripping trees and the uneasy sounds the wind makes coming down the side of the mountain.

  “You think this place is haunted?” he asks, and Deacon catches the faintest hint of trepidation in his voice, not quite dread, but close enough for horseshoes.

  “No, I don’t think this place is haunted. It’s just, you know, a fucking urban legend, something all the teenagers pass around to freak each other out. A g
irl who used to live here is supposed to have hung herself in one of the bedrooms. And she kept spiders for pets. Now her tormented ghost is damned to walk the night, dripping poisonous spiders from her hair, blah, blah, blah. So, ergo, it’s the spider-girl house.”

  “But you don’t think any of it’s true?” Scarborough asks, and then he leans closer to the windshield, squinting through the night at the house.

  “I don’t fucking believe I’m hearing this, okay? You go out and whack some guy, gut him like a pig and leave him swinging from his ankles for the cops to find, and now you’re scared of ghost stories?”

  Scarborough Pentecost shakes his head again and reaches into his leather jacket, pulls out the biggest handgun Deacon’s ever seen and checks to make sure that it’s loaded.

  “Bad things happen, Mr. Silvey,” he says. “Very bad things leave behind stains on the world.”

  “Yeah, right, and I read Shirley Jackson, too. You know, while we’re sitting here having this profound moment, Narcissa’s probably slipping out the back door.”

  “No, she’s not,” Scarborough says. “Narcissa Snow doesn’t run. That’s part of the problem,” and now he’s fumbling about beneath the seat with his right hand. He bumps his chin hard on the steering wheel and curses.

  “Did you lose something, chief?” Deacon asks, and then there’s a flash of lightning so bright that it may as well be a summer day, white to sear its way through his pupils and scorch the back of his skull. For half an instant, he can see every single tree, every soggy, fallen leaf piled against the low shrubs, all the vertical and horizontal lines of the house stark as an architect’s blueprints. And something else, something the light can’t touch moving swiftly across the yard, slipping from the shelter of one shadow to another.

  “Do you know how to use one of these?” Scarborough asks, and Deacon turns to see what he’s talking about, but it’s hard to see anything through the swarm of purple-white fireflies the lightning has left in his head.

  “Which is it?” he asks. “A crucifix or holy water?” And he blinks at Scarborough.

  “A gun, Mr. Silvey. It’s a gun,” and then he puts something heavy and cold in Deacon’s hand. “Do you know how to shoot?”

  “Yeah,” Deacon says, blinking down at the gun, turning it over and over in his hands and trying to decide whether or not he should tell Scarborough Pentecost he’s never even held so much as a BB gun before. “You point it at the bad guys and pull the trigger.”

  Scarborough sighs and licks his lips, staring silently out at the dark and patient house.

  “Okay, listen,” he says a moment later, “when the time comes, all you’ll have to do is take off the safety, hold the gun in your good hand, finger off the trigger,” and he demonstrates with his own pistol. “Then you pull back the slide like this, and just let it go. That’ll chamber the first round. And don’t forget that you have to keep pulling the trigger if you want it to keep firing. It’s semiautomatic, not magic. I left the safety on. It’s that little switch on the—”

  “Yeah, sure, I got it,” Deacon grumbles. “So how many bullets do I have in this damned thing, anyhow?”

  “Don’t you worry about that. All you need to know about the bullets is that they make a big hole going in and a very big hole coming back out. One way or the other, this will be over fast, so I can guarantee you aren’t going to need a second clip.”

  “That’s about the most reassuring shit I’ve heard all night.”

  “She knows we’re coming,” Scarborough says. “I’m sure she’s watching us right now, from one of those windows, so there’s no point even pretending that we’re going to surprise her.”

  “And if she’s not here? If she’s already on her way to—”

  “I told you—”

  “I know what you told me, asshole,” Deacon says, and he cocks the pistol exactly the way that Scarborough showed him. “You just better be right, that’s all I’m saying,” and he wonders briefly if he’s fast enough, if maybe he could put a couple of shots in Scarborough Pentecost’s face and drive away from this place, straight back home to Chance, where he’s supposed to be.

  “You just better be right,” he says again.

  “Just keep your head down, Mr. Silvey, and watch where you point that thing. I’ve already got enough irony in my life without killing this bitch and then getting my head blown off by you. Are you ready for this?”

  “I’m waiting for you,” Deacon replies.

  “All right. On five, then,” Scarborough says, and Deacon listens to him counting and tries not to think about the blonde woman from his visions, or about Chance, or the oil-skinned thing he might have seen rushing across the yard on long and jointed legs.

  The stereo has just begun the fifth track of Exit West when the music stops suddenly and Chance opens her eyes on the darkened apartment. Only the palest watercolor-gray light shining in through the big loft windows, so she knows the streetlights have all gone out as well, that it’s probably a blown transformer somewhere. There are candles and matches in one of the kitchen cabinets, but she decides to wait it out, the darkness not unpleasant and, besides, the power will probably be on again in five or ten minutes. And, besides, Alice is probably already on her way back from the stairwell, convinced Chance is scared half to death.

  “Doesn’t make much difference to you one way or the other, does it?” she asks her belly. “I didn’t think so.”

  A dazzling flash of lightning and another thunderclap, a drawn out, throaty rumble that seems to roll back and forth across the sky.

  “You’re not afraid of nothing, are you, butter bean?”

  She turns her head towards the windows, wondering what the cops parked outside are doing, if they’ll all have to leave now to deal with traffic lights that aren’t working and things like that. But maybe they’ve been told to stay put, no matter what, and the thought of being protected, the thought that she might need to be protected, is too disturbing and so she dismisses it. Chance is still watching the window, the rain battering itself against the glass, when she hears a small, shuffling noise somewhere on her right and turns her head.

  “Alice?” she calls out. “Is that you? I didn’t hear the door.” But no one answers her, and she’s left staring into the deeper night filling up the hallway, the dim window glow barely making any difference at all. And then a curling wisp of oyster-white to ruin the gloom, a formless movement that seems to drift just above the floor, there and already gone again, and Chance gets to her feet as fast as she can.

  “Alice?” she asks again, but she knows this isn’t Alice, knows instinctively this isn’t anyone or anything she wants to see.

  I might not be able to hear you, Alice said.

  “It’s nothing,” Chance whispers, whispering like she’s in a library, like she’s afraid someone might hear. “It’s just the dark, and I’ve never been afraid of the dark in my life.”

  The child steps out of the blackness, then, not out of the hallway, but out of the blackness itself, trailing tattered bits and shreds of the clinging night about its face and shoulders. A soft, intangible brilliance leaks from its wide green eyes, and a warm shimmer off its naked body, like something that knows it can’t be seen unless it learns to make its own light. The child holds out a hand to Chance.

  “She’s coming,” it says in a smooth and completely sexless voice. Chance takes a step backwards and bumps into the sofa.

  “Who are you? How did you get in here?”

  “No, stop asking questions and listen. You can’t waste any more time, Mother. She’s coming. She’s coming now.”

  “Mother,” Chance says, still whispering, but now the tremble in her voice much more than fear, and then the kick inside so hard she gasps and sits back down. She forces herself to look away from the child and stares instead at the safe and simple shadows between her feet.

  “Would you mind coming with me, Piglet?” the child asks. “In case they turn out to be Hostile Animals?”

&n
bsp; “I read you that story,” Chance whispers, and when she looks up again the child is standing very close by, watching her intently with its glinting green eyes. Deacon’s eyes, she thinks. Watching me with Deacon’s eyes, finally beginning to understand, even if she can’t believe.

  “You’ll fight,” the child says and smiles a sad smile for her. “You’ll do everything you can, but it won’t be enough.”

  “Alice will be back soon,” Chance replies and realizes there are tears running down her face. “She’ll be back any minute. Will you wait for her? Will you please let her see you, too?”

  “No, Mother. Alice isn’t ever coming back. But she tried. She fought for us.”

  “Can I touch you?” Chance asks, and the baby kicks again.

  “But you’re touching me now,” the child replies, and something like confusion washes across its face. “You’ve always touched me.”

  “Then I’m dreaming. I was listening to the stereo and fell asleep, and this is only a dream. Alice will be back soon, and she’ll wake me up. I’ll tell her that I dreamed about you, and you were so beautiful.”

  “She’s coming,” the child says urgently. “She’s almost here.”