Chance reaches out for the child, imagines her fingertips brushing gently across its smooth white skin, but it pulls away from her and shakes its head.
“There’s no more time left. Are you deaf? Can’t you hear her coming? Can’t you hear her teeth?”
“No,” Chance replies. “I can’t,” and then there’s another blinding flash of lightning, and the thunder comes right behind it—a mindless, booming creature made from clouds and discord, chasing down the fleeing light, nipping at its crackling heels, tumbling at last into the empty place it’s left behind. Chance blinks once, blinking back her tears and the electric afterimage, but now the child is gone, and she’s alone in the living room with the unconsoling sound of the wind and the rain.
Soaked to the skin and shivering from the short dash across the yard, Deacon is crouched on one side of the front door of the spider-girl house, feeling idiotic and terrified at the same time, feeling surprised that he’s still alive. Scarborough’s crouched on the other side, one ear pressed against the wall, his eyes shut, and Deacon thinks again about just shooting him and going home.
“I can’t hear her,” Scarborough whispers and frowns. “I can’t feel her anywhere.”
“I told you,” Deacon whispers back.
“No, she’s here. She has to be here somewhere. It’s just a trick.”
Lightning and the wind blows the rain about like a chilly, invisible veil, driving it up under the cover of the wide porch.
“This is bullshit,” Deacon hisses, and Scarborough opens his eyes and glares at him.
“You just do like I do and maybe you’ll live to see the other side of this thing.”
“I’m fucking freezing to death. And my wife is alone in—”
“Your wife isn’t alone, Mr. Silvey. Not yet. Now stop worrying about her, and keep your mind on the here and now.”
“Fuck you,” Deacon grumbles as Scarborough stands up quickly and tries the cut-glass knob; it isn’t locked and he turns it, moving so slowly, with such confidence and a hint of a smile on his face, that Deacon can almost believe he knows what he’s doing. Whatever he’s getting them both into, and the door swings smoothly, silently open onto total darkness. Another surprise, because in Deacon’s head the hinges should have creaked very loudly, haunted-house cliché to complete the scene, and he glances down at the pistol in his hands as Scarborough slips inside.
“This is crazy,” he whispers and wonders why they’re whispering and sneaking about if Narcissa Snow already knows they’re here. Just keep moving, he thinks and, before he can talk himself out of it, follows Scarborough into the house.
“Stay close,” Scarborough says from someplace near, though Deacon can’t see him, the darkness beyond the porch that complete, and he turns his head to see why there’s no light at all coming in from the open door.
“Don’t let it spook you,” Scarborough says. “It’s only a fascination she’s put on this spot. Just light and shadows. The door’s still right there behind you.”
Deacon takes a couple of steps backwards, and he’s standing on the porch again, the dim light of the stormy night and the shaded porch about him, and a solid wall of blackness held tight inside the doorframe. He puts his right hand into the black and then pulls it quickly out again when it vanishes up to the wrist.
“We don’t have time to play Mr. Wizard,” Scarborough whispers from the inky nothing, and Deacon takes a deep breath and steps through the door again. The blackness closes back around him like frigid, thick water.
“She’s using the house,” Scarborough says. “Using its bad memories against us. All you have to remember is these things are only illusions. She can hurt you. They can’t. They can only cause you to hurt yourself.”
“How are we supposed to find her if we can’t even fucking see each other?”
“‘Chance favors the prepared mind,’ Mr. Silvey,” Scarborough replies. “Louis Pasteur said that.” And then the blackness isn’t quite so black anymore, its perfection marred by a faint bluish glow somewhere in front of Deacon. “That’s sort of appropriate, don’t you think?” but Deacon doesn’t reply, not even sure what he’s being asked, and, besides, he’s much too busy watching the bluish glow ebb and swell, pushing back the edges of the gloom until he can see Scarborough again, his pale face and the small pulsing sphere of light floating just a few inches above his left palm. Vivid powder-blue light that streams towards the ceiling and seems to make the black cringe and flinch, pulling itself back like something scalded, and Deacon laughs in spite of himself. Things too awful and wonderful to be real, but here they are, anyway.
“Can I touch it?” he whispers. “Can I hold it?”
“That would be a very bad idea,” Scarborough says, and then lifts the light higher so Deacon can see something scrawled on the wall in what looks like drying paint, but he’s pretty sure is actually drying blood.
“Silly quim,” Scarborough smirks and shakes his head, holding the light in his hand closer to the writing on the wall. “I’ve had about enough of your drama.”
The letters two or three feet tall, smeared neatly across the plaster, and Deacon recognizes the writing from the wall of Soda’s apartment, the exact same alphabet that surrounded the circle drawn above the bed. Nothing he can read, but then it’s really nothing he wants to read.
“Is that the spell?” he asks.
“Not a spell,” Scarborough replies. “Just a fascination—”
“Yeah, whatever. Is that it?”
“No, it’s not. It’s just a sick little love note for you and me, something to waste our time.”
Deacon thinks briefly about asking Scarborough to read it out to him, to translate the strange, flowing letters. “What’s that language supposed to be?” he asks, instead.
“It doesn’t have a proper name. It’s a tongue of the dead, that’s all. She’s showing off.”
Deacon nods his head slowly, as if he even begins to understand what Scarborough’s talking about, and his eyes follow the scabby and meandering trails of blood down towards the baseboard and the floor. There’s a pile of dead birds and chipmunks there, illuminated by the blue light, and he looks quickly away.
“So, what’s next?” Deacon asks, trying not to think about those small bodies heaped together on the floor, matted fur and feathers, dry and gaping wounds.
“We keep looking for Narcissa. She isn’t trying to hide. She just wants to disorient us. She’s looking for an edge.”
“Well, she’s about got me ready to shit myself,” Deacon says. “I don’t mind telling you that.”
“Keep your fear to yourself, Mr. Silvey. I don’t need it cluttering up my head, and neither do you.” Scarborough turns away from the wall, and now Deacon can make out a closed door on their right, and a doorway on their left. Then he catches a faint, greasy smell, like a pork roast simmering in an oven, something out of place in among the musty old house odors, and Deacon notices the blistered spot on Scarborough’s hand, just beneath the blue ball of light.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” he asks and points.
“Like a motherfucker in heat,” Scarborough replies. “But that’s the way it goes. Now, stop asking stupid questions and pick a door, Mr. Silvey. Left or right?”
“What? How the hell should I know?”
“’Cause you’re the dude with the million-dollar eyes, that’s why. You’re the man with a hot line to the past stuck in his head. You don’t think I just brought you along for shits and giggles, do you? Now pick one.”
“This is bullshit,” Deacon says again.
“Almost everything is,” Scarborough chuckles. “Everything under Heaven, anyway. Do we go left, or do we go right?”
“Jesus,” Deacon mumbles to himself and tucks the pistol into the crook of his left arm, his hand too stiff and bandaged to hold it, then presses his right hand flat against the closed door. But it only feels like any door should, smooth wood grain underneath the white paint, neither particularly warm nor particularly c
old—just a door.
“We don’t have all night,” Scarborough says.
“I don’t even know what I’m looking for here.”
“Traps, Mr. Silvey. The kind most people never see until it’s too late to avoid them.”
Deacon takes his hand away from the door and stares down at his palm and fingers for a moment, which makes him think of Scarborough’s scorching flesh again.
“Look man,” he says. “All I can tell you is that’s a fucking door. I’m not getting anything at all.”
“Then what about that way there?” and Scarborough motions towards the open doorway on the right with the muzzle of his gun. “Put your hand on the wall there and tell me if you get anything.”
“You’re starting to sound a lot like the cops, you know that?”
“Just do it,” and so Deacon does, does as he’s told because he only wants this to be over, only wants to get out of this terrible house and back to Chance. He presses his reluctant fingertips to the doorjamb, shuts his eyes, and waits, for the pain and the vision, or for nothing at all. Outside the thunderstorm seems to be building rapidly towards some crescendo, some frenzied epiphany of lightning and rain, pricking at his senses, getting in the way. Five seconds, ten, fifteen, and Deacon opens his eyes to Scarborough’s pulsing blue light and the mangy edges of Narcissa Snow’s darkness.
“Nothing,” he says, not caring if Scarborough hears the relief in his voice. “Nothing there at all.”
“You’re absolutely sure about that?”
“I’ve never been sure of anything in my whole goddamned life, so don’t you expect me to start now,” and he takes the pistol in his good hand again and is surprised to find some faint solace in the weight and solidity of it.
Scarborough glances uncertainly from one side of the tiny foyer to the other, left to right and back again, and mutters something hard and angry through his gritted teeth that Deacon can’t make out.
“Hell, maybe we should flip a coin,” he says. Scarborough glares at him.
“I can’t hold on to this thing forever, Mr. Silvey,” and he nods at the ball of light hovering above his hand. The blistered spot on his palm has grown much larger, seared almost black at the center. “I’m not much of a magician. I’ll have to release this soon or it may be beyond my control.” Deacon can see that there are beads of sweat standing out on his forehead now, or it’s only the rainwater leaking from his wet hair and trickling down his brow, crystal droplets to catch the blue light and flash it back more brightly.
“Tell me the truth, Scarborough,” Deacon says, looking back to the high and bloody letters scrawled on the wall, the mound of empty, dead things lying underneath. “This isn’t exactly what you expected, is it?”
“Not exactly,” Scarborough replies, and his hand trembles beneath the light.
“And we’re in some very deep doo-doo, aren’t we?”
For an answer, Scarborough raises his pistol and points it at the open doorway on the left; Deacon wonders if he’s going to pull the trigger, as though the darkness clotted there was something he could drive away with bullets and gunpowder.
“You just stay real close,” he says and steps through the doorway, the blue light parting Narcissa Snow’s blackness like a living curtain of latex and India ink. Deacon hesitates only a second or two, the brief space squeezed in between heartbeats that it takes for the murk to begin to reclaim the foyer, for the cold to sink its teeth into him, and then he follows Scarborough and the fading blue glow. He steps quickly across the threshold, trading one room for the next, falling farther in, but Scarborough’s impossible beacon gutters and grows dimmer instead of growing brighter.
“I can’t see you,” Deacon calls out, shouting and to hell with the whispering if she knows they’re there anyway.
“Over here,” Scarborough calls back, and his voice seems stifled and very far away. And then something soft and damp brushes across Deacon’s cheek, and he winces, but doesn’t cry out. The incongruous salty sweet smells of the ocean and rotting meat washing suddenly over him like a poison breathed out by the darkness, and the woman’s voice behind him so close that he can feel her hot breath against the back of his neck.
“It’s cold in Heaven,” she says. “Cold and dark, and the stars are farther away than God.”
Deacon spins around and blindly aims the gun at the nowhere place her voice might have come from. His finger on the trigger, but he can’t find the safety, can’t remember if it’s on or off.
“She’s here!” he shouts to Scarborough.
“I know she’s here,” Scarborough calls back from at least a mile away.
“No, she’s here,” and the sticky, wet thing brushes against Deacon’s face again, leaving behind the smell of decay and the sea, salt and putrescence, and he realizes the thunder isn’t thunder anymore, but waves pounding against a rocky shore, picking apart the world one ancient quartz grain at a time.
“Did you think you could come for me the way you came for poor Mary English? Did you really think it would be that easy?”
Deacon squeezes the trigger, and the gun clicks uselessly.
“Scarborough, where the fuck are you, man?” and now there’s no answer at all, or there’s so much distance between them it simply doesn’t matter anymore.
“The changelings can’t help you, Deacon Silvey,” the woman says, the mad woman from his dreams and visions, the woman with eyes of molten gold. “They never could.”
Deacon takes a step backwards, one step away from the taunting voice, and fumbles for the safety.
“Did they tell you that I was insane?” she asks, and the darkness around him flutters like hundreds of small and leathery wings. “Did they tell you I was only a half-breed mongrel whore?”
“They didn’t have to tell me jack shit. You tried to kill Sadie,” and then Deacon finds the safety and flips it off with his thumb. He squeezes the trigger three times and the gun roars, deafening demon voice to shatter the nothing packed in all around, to cut great, ragged slits and let the light come pouring through, and the unexpected recoil knocks the pistol out of his hand.
“When I was still a little girl, the moon bled for me,” the woman says. “One of these days, she’s going to bleed again.”
Deacon looks down, blinks at the daylight stinging his light-starved eyes, and the pistol’s lying in the brown- and white-sugar mix of sand and snow at his feet, and the crash of the breakers and the shrieking wind through the dunes are even louder than the gunshots were. Reverberating sound like deep-sea pressure, how many decibels per square inch before his skull finally collapses and the cacophony grinds his sorry soul to jelly?
“You really have no notion how delightful it will be,” Narcissa Snow begins to sing in a tittering voice stolen from a crazy child, a voice that rises somehow clearly above the seashore’s wail. “When they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea!”
And Deacon finally sees her then, standing at the crest of a dune and looking down on him. The wind whips her blonde hair about her white face, blonde coils to hide and then reveal her blazing eyes, her naked body shimmering, skin like pearls, beneath the maritime sun. Slowly, he stoops down and reaches for the gun, never taking his eyes off her. Narcissa’s voice sails to him on wheeling gull wings, woven tightly into the gale.
“‘What matters it how far we go?’ his scaly friend replied. ‘There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.’”
His hand closes around the butt of the pistol, and he lifts it slowly from the sand.
“Yes. That’s right, isn’t it?” she asks and smiles, showing him her glistening dagger teeth. “You’ve read the stories, haven’t you? All the pretty fairy stories. You have to try to be the hero, don’t you, Deacon? Slay the ogre, save the princess—”
“You’re not an ogre,” he yells back at her, and the greedy wind snatches his voice from his lips and scatters it carelessly across the dunes. “You’re nothing, nothing but some twisted little girl who
wanted to grow up to be a monster and didn’t get her wish!”
“Am I not monstrous?” she shouts at him, the smile fading, and she looks up at the low and steel-bellied sky. “What I am, the things I’ve done?” and Narcissa lowers her head, and her feral eyes flash scalding embers at Deacon. “The things I’ll do before I’m done?”
Deacon squints into the stinging wind, struggling to keep his hand steady as he aims the barrel of the gun at a spot just above her left breast. Narcissa takes a step towards him.
“They’ve been lying to you, using you, you sad, stupid man. The Children of the Cuckoo,” she sneers. “A couple of lapdog curs, that’s all they are, those two. That’s all they’ll ever be.”
He pulls the trigger, but the shot goes wide; Narcissa doesn’t even flinch. She takes another step forward, her bare feet in a drift of snow, her long legs and those eyes to burn his resolve to cinders.
“They need you, Deacon. They need your sight to find what I’ve taken from them.”
“Shut up,” he says and tries to steady the gun by propping it against his bandaged left wrist. She’s no more than ten feet away from him now, and Narcissa takes another step, closing the space for him that much more.
“Who’s watching Chance?” she asks. “Who’s minding the baby?”
Deacon pulls the trigger, and the slug tears a hole in the soft depression beneath her windpipe; blood sprays out across the sand, and she stops, staggers, and puts a hand over the wound, the smile returning to her lips.
“Your child will be such a prize,” she says hoarsely. “She has her father’s eyes.”
He fires again, and this time the shot catches Narcissa squarely between her breasts and knocks her to the sand. She sits there, smiling triumphantly up at him, a trickle of blood escaping from her open mouth, blood leaking thick and dark between the fingers still pressed futilely to her throat. But the hole in her chest isn’t bleeding at all.
“See me now, Mother Hydra,” she croaks. “Lady of the Abyss, Kraken Daughter,” and then she stops talking and shuts her eyes. Deacon takes a cautious step towards her, and the sea salt and rot smell grows suddenly stronger than before, the stench so thick it seems to cling to the insides of his nostrils. He gags helplessly, and Narcissa reaches out, taking his hand and the pistol and pressing it against her forehead. She opens her eyes again, but the fire is gone from them, leaving behind only sickly yellow irises and shrinking black-hole pupils.
Low Red Moon Page 28