Low Red Moon

by Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  “Do you?” Narcissa asks. “Do you really?”

  “Yes,” Chance tells her. “I do.”

  “Then I’ll have to watch myself. I shall have to be very careful, shan’t I?”

  “Go to the window now,” Deacon says, talking fast because he knows he’s running out of time, that Narcissa is almost done with the second lock. “Open a window and start screaming. Scream your goddamn head off. Someone will hear you. Someone will hear you and—”

  “You’re wasting your time, Deacon,” Narcissa says, and when he turns around again she’s crouched there in the open doorway, watching him with her golden eyes, backlit by the soft crimson glow of the emergency lights in the outer hall. “You know she can’t hear you. She can’t do the tricks we can do.”

  “I’ll find you,” he says. “I’ll find you if it takes the rest of my life.”

  “I’m sure you’ll try, poor thing,” she replies and drops down on all fours, her nude body slicked with blood and gore, the wiry mane running down her back matted and tangled with it. And then she isn’t even Narcissa Snow anymore, something else terrible creeping towards him on long legs and claws that click against the floor. Its eyes are on fire now, the gold irises gone molten and burning away to show some stranger metal underneath.

  “Oh god, no,” Chance whispers and drops the knife.

  “Too late to start praying, little pig,” the monster growls. “Unless maybe you want to try praying to me.”

  “Give it up, Mr. Silvey,” Scarborough sighs from some other world, the haunted place where Deacon’s losing his tenuous hold on the wet bone buried inside the wall, the time when all this is already history. “Stop torturing yourself like this. You don’t want to see any more, believe me.”

  “Please,” Deacon whispers, pleading with the monster as it comes closer, moving low to the floor like a cat stalking a bird or a squirrel. “Don’t do this again.”

  “You think you can change the past, Deacon?” it asks him. “You listened to those changeling lapdogs. You fucked it all up, let me get to her, let me have her, and now, now you think I’m going to give you a second chance?” And then the thing in the hallway laughs at its own joke, and acid drips from its scalding jaws and hisses on the floor. A single paw to shatter him like crystal, to send the jagged shards skittering away as Deacon loses his grip and the wall spits him out. Spits him up and out of the dream, back into the sunshine streaming through the thin motel curtains, back to the stink of whiskey and vomit and sweat. He lies still a while, half lost in the migraine and the fading shreds of dream, before he finally opens his eyes.

  Tuesday afternoon, and Deacon finally goes to see Sadie, because there’s no one and nothing else left for him. Nothing but The Plaza, and Sheryl has already made it abundantly clear that she’s not going to let him sit there on a stool and drink himself to death. So, he goes to the hospital, with its sterile waiting rooms and endless hallways, its suspicious, watchful nurses and disinfectant air. He put on a clean T-shirt and underwear first, but he can still smell himself, the sour reek of old sweat and alcohol trapped in the elevator with him. A bell dings too loudly, counting off the floors. Every floor a fresh nail driven into his aching head, his roiling stomach, and he’s beginning to wish that he’d stayed in his room at the Travelodge motel on Twenty-first Street, the place where he’s sleeping because he can’t stand to be in the apartment with the police and the FBI agents. Not after the things he’s seen, awake and dreaming, not with all the empty places where Chance isn’t.

  The elevator doors slide open, and he walks quickly past the nurses’ station in the lobby, a bouquet of yellow gift-shop daisies clutched in his hand, and Deacon grits his teeth, smiling for their leery glances and clean blue and white scrubs. One of them, a woman with a stethoscope hanging around her neck, smiles back, but it’s a wary, conditional sort of smile. Down a long hall to a private room at the very end, he stands outside her open door for a moment, listening to the voices coming from inside; Sadie’s voice, drowsy and thin, and another, older woman’s, and Deacon guesses that it’s her mother. He looks back the way he’s just come, thinking again that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Nothing Sadie can say to make any difference at all and nothing he can say to take back the harm he’s done to her, so what’s the fucking point?

  “Are you here to see Sarah?” someone asks, and Deacon turns back to the door. There’s a tall, thin woman with salt-and-pepper hair and the same pale blue eyes as Sadie standing in the doorway, watching him intently, expectantly.

  “Sarah?” he asks uncertainly, exchanging one question for another, and glances nervously down at the daisies. He wonders if maybe he went the wrong way at the nurses’ station and the blue eyes are just a disquieting coincidence.

  The woman frowns, and an exasperated sigh whistles out past her teeth. “Sadie,” she says. “You probably know her as Sadie.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Deacon replies. “I do.”

  The woman stares at him for a moment, silent and still blocking the doorway, chewing nervously at one corner of her lip. Almost all the pink lipstick’s worn away from that side of her mouth.

  “You’re Deacon Silvey, aren’t you?” she asks finally, and this time Deacon only nods his head.

  “I thought so. I’m Sadie’s mother, Anna.”

  “Well, I brought these for her,” Deacon says and holds out the flowers. The green cellophane makes a loud crinkling noise, but she doesn’t take her eyes off him.

  “I saw a picture of you on CNN this morning,” she says.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m not. You and your wife, actually. But I must say, you did look better in the picture than in person. What happened to your hand?”

  “I cut it,” Deacon says and belatedly hides his bandaged hand behind his back.

  “Are you drunk?”

  Deacon coughs into his good hand and shrugs his shoulders.

  “It’s a simple question, Mr. Silvey. Are you drunk?”

  “I’m not sober,” he says, and offers her the flowers again.

  “I didn’t think so. You smell like a distillery. And not a very clean one, either.”

  “Yeah, well, look. Why don’t you just give these to Sadie for me. Tell her I hope she’s feeling better.”

  But she doesn’t take the daisies, leans an inch or so closer to Deacon, and he catches a hint of something on her breath, gin maybe. “From what I understand, you’re the reason my daughter’s lying in that bed in there,” she says, speaking very quietly now. “You’re the reason she might never be able to use her hand again. Don’t you think you could at least have the decency to give them to her yourself?”

  “Yes ma’am,” he says, and Anna Jasper steps to one side to let him pass.

  “I’m going downstairs to the cafeteria to get some coffee,” she whispers. “I’ll be back in about twenty minutes, and I’d honestly prefer if you weren’t here.”

  “Fine,” Deacon says. “Anything you say.”

  “And I am very sorry about your wife.”

  “I’m sure you are,” he replies, and Anna Jasper nods her head, but doesn’t say anything else, turns and walks away down the hall. Deacon stands in the doorway watching her, listening to the sharp clack of her heels against the linoleum. When she reaches the end of the hallway, stopping there to speak with one of the nurses, he goes into the room and eases the door shut behind him. Sadie’s bed is raised to a sitting position, but her head’s resting on a pillow and her eyes are closed. There’s an IV tube in her right arm leading up to a plastic bag hung on a shiny steel pole, filled with clear fluid.

  “Yo,” Deacon says softly. “Anyone at home?”

  Sadie’s eyes flutter open and seem to take a few seconds to focus, a few seconds to recognize his face.

  “Oh, Deacon,” she says, sounding surprised in a sleepy sort of way, and she smiles a weak smile for him. “I’m so sorry. I saw the news this morning and—”

  “I brought you these,” he
says, before she can finish, and holds out the daisies. “You like yellow, right?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I like yellow a lot.”

  “Good. That’s what I thought,” and he lays the bouquet in her lap instead of trying to hand it to her. “They had white ones, too, but I thought I remembered you liking yellow.”

  She picks up the daisies, her right arm moving stiffly, and she winces before she sniffs them.

  “They doing right by you in here?” he asks, and she nods and smells the flowers again.

  “You’re drunk, Deke,” she says and looks up at him, those eyes like her mother’s, but so much younger, so much brighter.

  “Yes, I am. But I’m afraid you’re just gonna have to forgive me on that count.”

  “I saw the news,” she says again. “You don’t need me to forgive you for anything.”

  “I called my AA buddy first, told him what had happened—well, no, some of what happened—and he started going on about surrendering to my Higher Power and taking things one day at a time. I listened for a few minutes and then told him to go fuck himself and hung up.”

  Sadie smells the daisies again. “It was her, wasn’t it?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” Deacon says. “It was her.”

  “So, what have you told the police?”

  “Sadie, how about let’s not talk about the police, okay?”

  “Then what do we talk about?”

  Deacon doesn’t answer her right away, rubs absently at the stubble on his face and stares at the daylight slipping in through the window on the other side of the room.

  “Who says we have to talk about anything,” he says finally. “I just wanted to see you again, that’s all,” and then Deacon sits in a chair near the foot of the bed. It’s good to have the weight off his feet, good to be sitting down so that things don’t spin so much and gravity isn’t such a pressing concern.

  “I thought talking might help.”

  “Just look where it’s gotten us so far.”

  “I know there’s a lot you haven’t told me. How do you know if it would help or not if you won’t even try?”

  Deacon leans back in the chair, tilting it up on two legs and squints at Sadie with her yellow daisies and IV drip. “Don’t you think you’ve already been hurt enough because I didn’t know when to keep my goddamn mouth shut?”

  “Now you’re starting to sound like my mother.”

  Deacon lets the front legs of the chair rock back to earth, bump to the floor, and he turns towards the closed door, half expecting Anna Jasper to come walking in fifteen minutes early and right on cue.

  “You’re not gonna like what I’m about to say,” he mumbles, reluctant to take his eyes off the door. “But you are gonna listen.”

  “Now you sound like my father,” Sadie says, and the cellophane crinkles so loudly that Deacon turns back to the bed to see if she’s getting ready to throw the whole bouquet at him. But she’s only pulled one of the flowers free of the rest and is rolling the thick green stem back and forth between her right thumb and index finger.

  “Maybe it’s time you started listening to them.”

  “And maybe you’re drunker than you look.”

  “Chance is gone, Sadie,” he says, says it out loud like the words have no power over him. “Gone. And it’s a miracle you’re not dead. This isn’t a game. It isn’t fucking tarot cards and Ouija boards, and it isn’t fucking Scooby-Doo. So, from here on, you can play Nancy Drew on someone else’s dime if that’s what it takes to get you through the day. But you might be the very last person left alive I give two shits about, and whatever demons I have to deal with, I can do it without you.”

  Sadie hasn’t stopped rolling the flower stem between her fingers, her head bowed slightly as she watches the spinning petals and chews her lip like her mother. He can tell she’s close to tears, and maybe that’s exactly what he wants, what he needs, the real reason that he came here, to hurt her enough he’s sure she’ll stay the hell away from him forever.

  “You came to me,” she says, still watching the flower. “You wanted someone to talk to. You asked for my help.”

  “That’s because I’m an asshole, Sadie. Sooner or later, you probably would have figured that part out on your own.”

  Sadie snaps the stem between her fingers, and the broken daisy falls onto the hospital sheet covering her legs.

  “You have no idea how bad I need a cigarette,” she says and wipes her nose.

  “I want you to tell me that you heard what I just told you. I want you to tell me you fucking understand what I’m saying to you.”

  “But I saw her, Deacon. How the hell am I ever supposed to forget that? How am I supposed to forget what it means?”

  “You saw a crazy woman, and that’s all you saw.”

  “You don’t believe that. I know you don’t believe that.”

  He opens his mouth to reply, but then the words get lost somewhere between his brain and his tongue, and he sits staring at Sadie Jasper, listening to the clock on the wall ticking off the seconds and all the antiseptic hospital sounds seeping through the walls. There are tears running down both her cheeks now, wet streaks on her pale skin, and she closes her eyes and turns her head towards the window and the sun.

  “But I hear you,” she says. “I hear you loud and clear.”

  “That’s all I wanted you to say.”

  “I’m always going to worry about you, Deke, and, I swear to God, I will always miss you. I don’t think you’re ever going to know how much I’ll miss you.”

  He stands up, and there’s a moment of dizziness, the world playing carnival-ride tricks on him, and he leans against the bed until it passes. When things are reasonably still and level again, he goes to Sadie and kisses her lightly on top of the head, but she doesn’t open her eyes or turn to face him.

  “I gotta go now,” he tells her. “Your mother will be back soon, and I think it’ll be better for all concerned if I’m not here.”

  “You’re going to find Chance,” Sadie says, almost whispering. “I know you don’t believe it, but you will.”

  “Yeah, well, how about you just concentrate on getting better and getting out of this place before your mother drives you nuts.”

  “Don’t give up on her, Deacon. Don’t you dare.” And then she’s crying too hard to say anything else, and he leaves her alone with the flowers and sunshine and walks back down the long hall to the elevator.

  Deacon has been sitting in the small room alone for almost fifteen minutes, small room with dark gray walls and a tiny window looking out on the street below, a table and four chairs, air that smells like nothing much at all but the smoke from his cigarettes. There’s a security camera mounted on the ceiling in one corner, and it stares at him with its glassy cyclops eye, the red light to tell him that it’s recording his every move. The FBI field office, because he refused to go back to the apartment, told Downs they could stick his ass in jail if they wanted, but he’s not ever going back there again. One of the agents showed him to this small room and left him alone, promised they’d be with him soon, assured him there was nothing to be nervous about, just routine questions with a case like this. Gaps they hope he can help them fill, and anything he can do makes it that much more likely they’ll find her alive. Deacon takes a drag off his cigarette and then taps it against the rim of the ashtray on the table. He looks at the red light on the camera and then at the tiny window, then watches the door, waiting for it to open, starting to wonder if it ever will.

  He stubs out his Camel and immediately lights another. His headache isn’t any better, and, worse yet, he’s beginning to feel the first solid edges of sobriety. He glances up at the clock, mounted not far from the security camera, is busy trying to remember just how long it’s been since he finished off the pint bottle of George Dickle before leaving the motel to visit Sadie, when the door opens and spills Detective Downs and two FBI agents in matching blue suits into the room.

  “Sorry that took so long,
Mr. Silvey,” one of the agents says, and the FBI men take seats at the table. Downs shuts the door, but doesn’t sit, walks over to the window and turns his back to Deacon.

  “No problem,” Deacon replies. “I got time to burn.”

  “We do appreciate how cooperative you’ve been through all this,” the other agent says. “We understand how hard it must be for you right now. But…we still have a few more questions we hope you can answer.”

  “And I’m afraid that a number of discrepancies in your story have turned up,” the first agent adds.

  “My story,” Deacon says and takes another drag off his Camel, exhales and blinks at the agents through the smoke floating just above the table. “Do you two have names, or should I just feel free to make something up?”

  “They’re here to help, Deacon,” Downs says from his spot at the window, but doesn’t turn around. “You need to keep that in mind.”

  “It’s all right, Detective,” the first agent says, and then, to Deacon, “Yes, Mr. Silvey, we have names. I’m Agent Broom and this is Agent Gorman. I’m with the Birmingham office, and Agent Gorman’s from our office, up in Atlanta.”

  “Where’s that guy I talked to yesterday? Peterson, wasn’t that his name?”

  “He’s still at your home, Mr. Silvey, in case the kidnapper tries to make contact.”

  “I already told him, nobody’s going to be making contact with anyone. She’s got what she wants.”

  “And how can you be so sure of that, Mr. Silvey?” Agent Gorman asks. He’s older than the Birmingham agent, his red hair going gray at the temples, and he has a long scar just above his left eye.

  “Hasn’t anyone told you?” Deacon asks. “I’m a fucking psychic.”

  “We’re aware of your work with the police in Atlanta, and with Detective Downs here,” Agent Broom says. His hair is the color of a tea stain, and his small dark eyes remind Deacon of the pet rat he had when he was in college. “I can’t say that I personally buy into the whole extrasensory thing, but there’s no denying you have an impressive record.”