Low Red Moon

by Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  “You here to see your wife?” the old man asks around his loose uppers.

  “No sir,” Deacon says uncomfortably, watching as the round white buttons with black numerals printed on them light up, one after the next. “I’m not. I’m here to see a friend.”

  “I’m here to see my wife,” the old man replies. “She’s got a bad heart. Doctors keep telling us she’s gonna die any day, but she keeps not dying. Swears she ain’t gonna die till Judgment Day.”

  “Oh,” Deacon says, because he doesn’t know what else to say and doesn’t want to say anything at all.

  “Yeah, she keeps on sending money to one of them TV preachers, but you ask me, I don’t think she’ll make it that long.”

  Then the button with a 5 printed on it lights up and the elevator doors open.

  “My floor,” Deacon says. “Hope your wife feels better soon.”

  “She always does,” the old man replies. “You watch yourself, boy. You keep hitting the bottle like that, and they’ll stick you in one of these rooms, sooner or later. Mark my word.”

  “I’ll do that,” Deacon says, as the silver doors shudder and then slide slowly shut again, taking the old man away. Deacon turns around and there’s a very small waiting area, just a few chairs and a table buried under old magazines, a potted plant that looks wilted even though it isn’t real, artificial rhododendron leaves covered with a thick veneer of dust. He has the room number written on the back of the matchbook from The Plaza—Room 534—and he tries not to make eye contact with anyone at the nurses’ station. There’s a plastic jack-o’-lantern, orange and black and grinning like a skull, filled with candy, sitting on the counter.

  “Can I help you?” one of the nurses asks him anyway, and Deacon tells him he’s looking for Room 534. The man in mint-green scrubs consults a clipboard, then a computer monitor. “That’s our Jane Doe,” he says. “She’s not allowed visitors. Police orders.”

  “I have permission,” Deacon says uncertainly, wondering if the call’s come through, if maybe Agent Gorman decided it wasn’t such a good idea. “Detective Downs was supposed to call.”

  “Ah, wait a sec,” the nurse says and pulls a yellow Post-it note off the computer monitor. “Here we go. Are you Deacon Slivey?”

  “Silvey,” Deacon corrects him. “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “Just take the hall on the left, turn at the first right, and you’ll have to check in with Officer Merrill.”

  “Thanks,” Deacon says and then starts walking before the nurse decides that he’s not Deacon Slivey after all. Down the hall, and he turns at the first right, stopping outside the room with #534 on the door and a bald policeman sitting in a chair that’s much too small for him, reading a copy of Field & Stream.

  “Detective Downs sent me,” he says, feeling like an idiot, and the cop stops reading and eyes him suspiciously.

  “You don’t say?” the cop asks, closing his magazine; there’s a photograph of a wild tom turkey on the cover. “You that Deacon Slivey fellow?”

  “Silvey,” Deacon says. “Deacon Silvey.”

  “You got some kind of ID on you, Mr. Silvey?”

  “Just my driver’s license. Will that do?”

  “Not if you don’t show it to me, it won’t,” the cop says, so Deacon takes out his wallet and finds his license, hands it to the policeman who looks at it a moment and then looks at Deacon again.

  “You drunk, Mr. Silvey? You smell like you’ve been drinking.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “No,” the cop replies, handing back Deacon’s license. “Agent Broom said you might be, that’s all. Sorry as hell about your wife.”

  “Yeah,” Deacon says, and then the cop frisks him before opening the door.

  “Okay, you’re clean. You got thirty minutes with her, that’s all. I’ll be right out here if you need anything.”

  “I feel safer already.”

  “Hey, man, joke all you want. But that’s a spooky little lady in there. Damn good at gin, too.”

  “You’ve been playing cards with her?”

  The cop opens his magazine and goes back to reading. “It was her idea,” he says. “Thirty minutes, don’t forget.”

  “Don’t worry,” Deacon says and goes in, shutting the door behind him, half expecting the bald cop to open it again, but he doesn’t. The girl named Jane is sitting in a wheelchair near the window, staring at him. Either she’s wearing the same raggedy clothes as the last time he saw her, or different raggedy clothes that look exactly the same as the others.

  “I was beginning to think you wouldn’t come,” she says. She’s wearing dark wraparound sunglasses, and there’s a big white bandage on her forehead. “I thought maybe they weren’t going to let you in.”

  The room is a little smaller than Sadie’s and a lot dingier. There are no flowers or get-well cards, and the curtains are drawn. The little television bolted to the wall is tuned to MSNBC, but the sound’s muted and nothing comes from the anchorwoman’s lips when they move.

  “You knew I was coming?” he asks her; she nods her head and rolls the wheelchair a few feet closer to him.

  “I knew you’d try, sooner or later. Where else would you go?”

  “I wasn’t planning on coming,” Deacon says. “I didn’t really see any point.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “Maybe I haven’t changed my mind, Jane,” he answers and sits down on the bed because his head hurts too much to stand any longer. “Maybe I’m just curious. So, what’s the damage?” and he points at the bandage on her head.

  “Just a mild concussion. I lost a tooth, too. Some scrapes and bruises, a few stitches. Your wife’s friend probably saved my life by opening the garage door when she did.”

  “Lucky her,” Deacon says. “They told you she’s dead, right?”

  “Yeah, they told me. But I saw it happen. There wasn’t anything I could do to stop it. Scarborough’s dead, too, isn’t he?”

  Deacon holds an index finger to his lips and nods towards the door, towards the cop and his Field & Stream.

  “That’s okay, Deacon. I knew he was. I felt it.”

  “What about Chance? Have you felt anything about her lately?”

  Jane takes off her sunglasses and squints at Deacon. “The light hurts my eyes,” she says.

  “The concussion.”

  “Yeah. It’ll pass. Are you asking me if Chance is dead?”

  Deacon stares at her a moment, weighing the consequences of his reply, of any reply, wondering how much less pain there will be if he walks out of the hospital room right now and keeps walking. No answers, no hope, no disappointment, no distance left to fall because he’s already found the bottom.

  “We shouldn’t have lied to you,” she says. “I could tell you it was all Scarborough’s idea, but there’s no reason for you to believe me, is there?”

  “Lied to me? When’d you lie to me?” Deacon asks before he thinks better of it.

  “Scarborough never intended to protect your wife,” she says. “I’m not sure he ever even intended to try to kill Narcissa.”

  “Then what the fuck were we doing in that house?”

  “You might want to lower your voice,” Jane says, barely speaking above a whisper now. “I’ve discovered that our friend in the hall has very keen ears.”

  “What the fuck were we doing in the house?” Deacon asks again, whispering, but he can hear the edge creeping into his voice, the anger that won’t take very long to grow too big for whispers.

  “Narcissa took things, important things, things that we had to try to get back from her. Scarborough hoped that she’d hidden them somewhere in the house.”

  “What are you telling me? That you used Chance as bait so the house would be empty?”

  “She’s only one woman. There are many lives at stake here, Deacon.”

  “No way,” Deacon says, looking down at his broad right hand now, the deep lines in his palm, the fine wrinkles and creases at the ends o
f his fingers, wondering if he can kill her before Officer Merrill figures out what’s going on and stops him. “You did. You fucking used her as bait.”

  “I tried to stop her, Deacon. I stood between Narcissa and Chance as long as I could.”

  “And Scarborough took me along for the ride because he thought maybe I could help him find whatever the hell it was the two of you were after. You were using us all along.”

  “It was his idea, Deacon.”

  “But you went along with it.”

  “Yes, I did. I didn’t see any other way. But it was also my idea to go to your apartment, to try and stop her. I was dead anyway, after all the things I showed you at the motel.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean, you were dead anyway?”

  Jane glances towards the closed door, then sighs and slips her sunglasses back on.

  “When we are taken,” she says, speaking slowly, carefully, the way a teacher addresses his pupils, “when we’re still just babies, we’re bound to the hounds by an irrevocable blood oath. And if we ever break that oath, as I did last night by showing you images of the Providence necropolis, then we forfeit our lives. I was already dead. I’m dead now. I’m just waiting for them to send someone to—”

  “What about the cop out there? You’re protected.”

  “He can’t stop them, any more than the police can stop Narcissa, any more than Scarborough and I could have stopped her.”

  “So you’re just sitting here waiting to die?”

  Jane rolls the wheelchair forward an inch or two, then rolls it back again. “I can’t very well run,” she says. “Besides, I knew the price of my actions. I don’t think it would be right of me to run, do you?”

  Deacon closes his eyes and rubs hard at his temples, wishing that Downs had never followed him into the restroom, wishing he’d taken the bottles and gone straight back to the Travelodge.

  “Is she still alive?” he asks without looking at the girl in the wheelchair.

  “I think so,” Jane says, no longer whispering, but not speaking very loudly, either. “We know a little about what Narcissa’s trying to do. If we’re right, she has to keep Chance alive until moonrise on the thirty-first. But she’s not sane, Deacon. Something might have happened.”

  “Something,” Deacon says, and when he opens his eyes, Jane’s standing at the foot of the bed, staring back at him through her sunglasses.

  “We told you about Narcissa,” she says. “About her grandfather, Iscariot, and her father, Aldous. About her intentions.”

  “Yeah,” Deacon says. “You told me. She’s ticked off because she wants to be a real monster and the other monsters won’t let her join the club. She thinks giving them our kid will buy her way in.”

  “And there’s a…a birthing ceremony,” Jane says, and her voice is growing hesitant, shaky. “But it can only be performed at moonrise on certain nights, only on four nights each year. The next is All Hallow’s Eve. That’s when Narcissa will call up the hounds to receive your child.”

  “This is entirely fucking insane, you know that?”

  “Deacon Silvey, I have already given up my life so you would believe me. You’ve seen them for yourself. You’ve stood in—”

  “Yeah, but what I see—”

  “—isn’t always the truth?” she asks, finishing his declaration as a question, turning his defenses back on him. “Does it really matter whether or not you believe? Do you think it matters to Chance, or to Narcissa?”

  “Will they come to her?”

  “Yes, they’ll come. She’s learned enough that they’ll have to come. There are rules.”

  “But not to take her back?” Deacon asks, and Jane glances nervously towards the door.

  “Oh, they’ll take her back,” she says and smiles, a furtive, vengeful smile. “But not the way that Narcissa thinks, not the way she wants. They have plans.”

  Deacon stops rubbing his head, not like it’s making the pain any better, the pain that only gets bigger and bigger, that only wants to swallow him alive. He stares at the silent television screen, because it’s better than the girl’s smile. A fire somewhere, and there’s video that must have been filmed from a helicopter, aerial views of a column of black and billowing smoke and the red-orange flames writhing just underneath. An eager, pricking sensation at the back of Deacon’s neck and déjà vu so strong it sends chill bumps up and down his arms.

  “Where’s the remote?” he asks, and Jane doesn’t answer, but looks back over her shoulder at the television on the wall.

  “I don’t like television,” she says. “The noise bothers me. I don’t know how people stand it all the time.”

  “I need to hear this.”

  “It’s just a fire,” she says. “You can see it’s a fire without the noise, can’t you?”

  The remote is lying on the table beside the bed, and he aims it at the set, hits the mute button, and the anchorwoman’s voice fills the room.

  “—the scene near Red Bridge, Pennsylvania, this morning. The fire is still burning out of control, and officials have yet to comment on what could have caused the blaze. But they are saying that as many as seven or eight people may have died in the fire.”

  “Oh,” Jane says, turning her back on Deacon, removing her sunglasses and squinting up at the television. “I see.”

  “What do you see, Jane? What the fuck’s going on? How did I know that—?”

  “Because there are rules,” she says again and takes a step nearer the TV. “And there are lines, lines in the void that tie us all together.”

  “It’s impossible to say at this time what may have ignited the tanks,” the anchorwoman says as the camera circles a safe distance from the roiling boundaries of the inferno. “Fire crews from nearby Chambersburg are still fighting to contain the flames.”

  “It was her, wasn’t it?” Deacon asks. “Narcissa did that,” and the girl nods her head very slowly, not taking her eyes off the screen.

  “Like I told you, she’s not sane. Something was bound to happen, sooner or later.”

  “Then she’s only made it as far as Pennsylvania?” he asks. “She still has a long way to go, right?”

  “Yes,” Jane says. “If she’s still alive.”

  “Where’s she going, Jane?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” the girl says and holds one hand up like she’s about to touch the screen, but she doesn’t. “I can’t tell you, but I can take you there. There’s still time. Get me out of here, Deacon, and I can take you there.”

  “What do you mean you can’t tell me?”

  “Get me out of here, and I’ll take you there,” Jane says again.

  “And just how the fuck am I supposed to do that? We got Officer Friendly sitting right outside your door, and the police and the FBI are both breathing down my neck.”

  “You would never find it on your own, Deacon. Not in a hundred years. But I can show you. I know the way.”

  “Maybe you got more going on in there than a concussion,” he says and touches his thumb to the side of his aching head. “Maybe it’s affected your hearing, too.”

  She turns, then, and that hungry smile is back, that smile and her pupils dilated until her irises are only eclipse rinds of color to ring ebony pools.

  “I can deal with the policeman,” she says. “I’ve already been working on him, just in case,” and she produces a dog-eared playing card, the ace of spades held between her thumb and middle finger, as if she’s plucked it from the sterile hospital air.

  “I don’t think he’s going to be impressed by card tricks,” Deacon says.

  “You let me worry about him. But I’ll need you to create a disturbance of some sort. Something that will get everyone’s attention,” and she looks quickly back over her shoulder at the television and the burning gas station. “Find a fire alarm,” she says. “Find a fire alarm and pull it.”

  “She’s dead,” Deacon says, getting up from the bed, fighting back the dizziness and nausea. �
�I know she’s dead.”

  “You don’t know anything,” Jane says, her smile fading now, becoming an angry, impatient scowl. “Until you see her corpse, until you hold it in your arms, you don’t know anything, and I’m tired of listening to you whine.”

  “I’m leaving,” he says and takes a step towards the door, but she holds out a hand to stop him.

  “Find an alarm,” she says. “You won’t get another opportunity. Neither of us will.”

  “You just said you were good as dead, that they would send someone to kill you for showing me what you did.”

  “That doesn’t mean I don’t still have a duty. If we hurry, and help each other, maybe it’s not too late to do the things we were supposed to do to begin with. In my dreams, I saw you, Deacon. I heard you tell Narcissa you would find her.”

  “An alarm,” he says doubtfully. “A fire alarm,” and she nods her head. Deacon wipes sweat off his brow and looks down at his bandaged hand for a moment. “Have you ever been to jail?” he asks her.

  “I’ve been lots worse places,” she says, sitting down in her wheelchair again, as the door opens and Officer Merrill sticks his bald head into the room.

  “Time’s up, Mr. Slivey,” he says and then taps his wristwatch to prove the point.

  “Yeah, I guess it is,” Deacon whispers, and Jane nods her head.

  “Thank you for coming,” she tells him. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help. But don’t worry, they’ll find her.”

  Deacon glances at the TV again, the firemen with their swollen hoses, white arcs of water to keep a demon at bay. “I suppose we’ll see,” he says, and, as he leaves Room 534, Jane asks the cop if he feels like another game of gin.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  At the River’s Edge

  “It’s three thirty-four,” the child says, looking at the wristwatch that was Chance’s grandfather’s, the watch she’ll never give her son or daughter for his or her tenth birthday. The child is sitting on the floorboard behind the front seat, wiping the sweat from Chance’s forehead and cheeks with a scrap of cloth torn from the hem of its T-shirt. Chance turns her head so she can see its face, its perfect, pale skin, porcelain and morning light, that face, and the child smiles for her and wipes her forehead again.