Low Red Moon

by Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  “It’s getting dark,” Chance whispers, too hoarse now to speak any louder, her throat too dry, and the child shakes its head and looks up at the sky through the rear windshield.

  “No, Mother,” it says. “It’s still only afternoon. There’s still a lot of day left.”

  “Not a lot,” Chance whispers. “Just a little, just a little more, that’s all.”

  “Maybe it’s enough, though,” the child says reassuringly, still smiling, but Chance knows better. The long drive almost over so everything’s almost over. And just beginning, as well, but she’d rather not think about that part. Easier to accept that it’s ending and whatever the werewolf has in mind, there won’t be anything else for her afterwards. She looks at the back of the monster’s head, its shaggy blonde hair tangled and moving like restless, writhing vines. Some colorless plant that can’t grow aboveground, the opposite of photosynthesis for it to live, tendrils to drink up the blackness from the hidden places deep beneath the world.

  “You don’t give up,” the child says, leaning close, its soft lips pressed to her ear. “That’s not what happened.”

  Another contraction then, but no real pain, too much of the werewolf’s morphine in her veins, clogging up her brain, for the pain to make it through. She gasps anyway, though, surprised at the force of the sensation, the pull of tightening muscles, and sits up a little.

  “Be careful, Mother,” the child says. “Don’t wear yourself out. You’ll need your strength.”

  Chance starts to ask why, then decides she really doesn’t want to know, that she has a pretty good idea already, and, besides, she’s sitting up enough now that she can see more than sky. Her back braced firmly against the door of the big steel-gray Lincoln they stole after the diner. After the fire, and Chance watches the unfamiliar countryside rushing by outside, the land turning flat and sandy, the last low tree-crowned hillocks of glacial till quickly giving way to the salt marshes and a small river winding along between the rushes and reeds.

  “Where the hell are we, Narcissa?” she asks, speaking as loudly as she can, forcing the words out as the contraction ends.

  “Almost home,” the werewolf growls back at her, watching her in the rearview mirror for a moment with its yellow eyes.

  “Don’t talk to her anymore,” the child whispers. “That just makes her stronger.”

  “I have to know where it’s taking you,” Chance tells it, and then she draws a deep, hitching breath, breathing deep while she can, before the next contraction begins. The stink of the marshes is getting in through Narcissa’s open window, the musky, sweet salt and mud smell before the sea, more pungent than the smell of the ocean Chance held inside her for so many months, her own private sea until her water broke and that warm tide emptied out between her legs and across the backseat of the Lincoln.

  “She likes the way your fear tastes,” the child says. “Every time she hears it, she gets a little bit stronger.”

  “He isn’t coming,” Chance whispers and lies down again, too weak to sit up any longer, too stoned, and there’s nothing out there she wants to see, anyway. “He would have come, if he could. But there’s no time left.”

  “Did you really think he would?” the werewolf asks. “You think this is all some fairy tale, and the brave woodsman saves Red Riding Hood at the last. Hell, lady, that’s not even how that story’s supposed to end. He got drunk. He got drunk and forgot all about you.”

  “Don’t listen to her,” the child says. “Please, please don’t listen to her. She wants you to give up.”

  Chance turns her head towards the child again, and there are tears running down its face. “He didn’t get drunk,” she says. “I know he didn’t do that. And he didn’t forget about us, either. But he isn’t coming.”

  “If that’s true, how can I be here?” the child asks and then looks at its wristwatch again. “If that’s true, I wouldn’t be here talking to you, would I?”

  “It’s all a dream,” Chance says and gently touches the child’s forehead, brushing the hair from its green eyes. “You’re here so I won’t have to die alone. You’re here with me now because I’m not going to get to see you later.”

  “No, Mother, that’s not true. But if you start believing it’s true, she can make it true.”

  Chance closes her eyes, silently counting off seconds, waiting for the next contraction. “What time is it?” she asks the child.

  “Three thirty-seven,” it replies.

  “Your father is a good man,” Chance says. “Whatever she tells you, whatever anyone else says, don’t you believe them. He’s a strong man. He would have found us if he could have.”

  “He’s a drunk,” the werewolf grunts. “A drunk and a coward.”

  “It’s okay. I know she’s lying,” the child whispers in Chance’s ear, and its breath smells faintly of cinnamon. “I know what’s true and what’s a lie.”

  “That’s good,” Chance says, “that’s very good,” as a contraction starts, and she grips the fake leather upholstery. Her flesh like folding earth, she thinks, like continents grinding one against the other, changing the face of a planet, changing her.

  “Can you sleep?” the child asks. “It would all be easier if you could sleep,” and Chance manages to cough out a rough laugh.

  “No,” she says. “But I wouldn’t want to. It would change the dream, wouldn’t it? I want to be with you as long as I can.”

  She opens her eyes, fixing them on a thin watercolor brush stroke of clouds set high in the blue New England sky, white clouds going yellow-orange and indigo around the edges as the sun slips closer to the coming night, the coming darkness as unstoppable as the contractions. She watches the clouds and tries to remember to breathe, keep breathing for the baby, keep breathing because she still can because the monster driving the car hasn’t taken that away from her yet. It will, the way it took the lives of all the people in the diner, but not until later, so she still has work to do, time to live through until the end.

  “It’ll be okay,” the child says. “He is coming. He’s coming fast with the starling girl to drive a stake through her black heart.”

  “I think that only works with vampires,” Chance mumbles as the contraction finally releases her, and she turns her head to face the child. But it’s gone, and now there’s only the empty space behind the front seat where it was sitting, nothing but a couple of soft drink cans and a crumpled McDonald’s bag lying there on the floorboard.

  “Oh,” she whispers. “No. Please come back. I can’t do this by myself,” but the only reply is the chilly wind whipping in through the open window, the angry rock music blaring from the car stereo, and the sound of the monster laughing softly to itself.

  So many long red years since Narcissa Snow has passed through Ipswich, since she’s driven this route north and east along Argilla Road, winding between the tall, swaying grasses of the Great Marsh and the dusky waters of the narrow Manuxet River, on this path of asphalt and potholes that eventually leads down to the bay and the sea. The road home, just exactly like she told the crazy woman lying in her backseat talking to children who aren’t there, the ruins of the house her grandfather—not Aldous, but her real grandfather, Iscariot Snow—built in the dunes more than eighty years ago.

  The home you burned, Aldous sneers from someplace inside her crowded head. The home where you killed me.

  Narcissa ignores the ghost, too many years and too many miles, far too much murder done, to allow him to ruin this moment, this and all the moments soon to come. This is the evening she’s worked for since the Benefit Street ghouls finally turned her away for the last time, and no memories of the distant, sour past will be permitted to spoil it, no matter how loudly they jabber and whine for her attention. Hardly an hour left until moonrise, but that should be time enough, time to find whatever the sea and wind have left of the house, the long, indestructible stone slabs upon which Iscariot Snow built it.

  “Them stones were here before the Indians came,” Aldou
s told her when she was a child. “Them stones might have been here since before there were people anywhere in the world. Sometimes, late at night, they sing.”

  And that much was true. More than one night, she slipped out of the tall house and sat in the sand listening to the great blocks of black stone visible just beneath the bricks and mortar, their swooping, trilling song whenever the moon was bright and full and the stars shimmered overhead. A wordless, alien melody Narcissa could never quite remember the next day, no matter how hard she tried, and sometimes the stones gave her dreams of ancient days when the waters of the newborn Atlantic were as warm as summer and the skies were thick with dragons.

  “You keep on listening close enough, child,” Aldous said, “and one of these nights they’ll serenade you all the way to Hell.” But she listened anyway, almost every opportunity she got, not sure that Hell would be so very different from her life in the old house.

  Guess you’re home free, Aldous murmurs. Guess even old Neptune on his throne of gold and starfish couldn’t stop you now.

  “Why don’t you shut up,” Narcissa says, watching for the turn-off to the house, past the lower falls now, and the sun is glittering brightly off Ipswich Bay. “You lost the war, old man. You lost, and now it’s time for you to be a good phantom and just fade the fuck away.”

  In the backseat, Chance moans loudly and asks what time it is.

  I suppose you’re right. Ain’t too much left for me to say, the old man sighs, and she can feel his bony ectoplasmic fingers slither across the convolutions of her brain. You got the book, you got all the magic words, you got an offering fit for old Orc himself, all wrapped up safe and sound in its momma’s innards.

  “They turned up their noses at me,” Narcissa replies bitterly. “But now they’ll see. They tried to kill me, just like you, old man. They’re never going to underestimate me again.”

  Too damn bad Mnemosyne and that old whore Terpsichore couldn’t have been around to see that pretty little piece of work you did back in Pennsylvania.

  “Oh, they’ll have heard,” Narcissa says, remembering the way Chance sat perfectly still while she shot the people in the diner, one by one by one, the men and the women, the two children. Remembering the sound of her gun, the gas tanks going up as they drove away. “I’m sure the crows will have told them everything by now.”

  No doubt, Aldous snickers. And one day soon, they’re gonna write ballads about you, child. One day, your name’s gonna be carved in the ebony door at the bottom of the Well of Despair.

  “Mock me all you want, Aldous, but you’ll see. Very soon now, you’ll see,” and then she’s come to the sandy, overgrown road leading down to the dunes and the place where the house once stood. Narcissa pulls over, bumping off the blacktop onto the low shoulder, and Chance cries out behind her.

  “How you doing back there, crazy lady?” Narcissa asks and glances at Chance in the rearview mirror. “How much longer you think you’ve got?”

  “Who were you talking to?”

  “No one,” Narcissa replies. “No one at all.”

  “You’re making fun of me,” Chance moans and shuts her eyes, gritting her teeth together.

  “Well, I’d say you’re about ready to pop,” Narcissa tells her and then looks down the crooked, rutted trail leading away from Argilla Road. “You better hang on to something back there. I’m afraid this is going to be a rough ride.”

  You can’t get a damn Lincoln Continental through there, Aldous says. It’s hardly even a decent deer trail anymore.

  “Well, I’m sure as hell not carrying her fat ass.”

  Make her walk, then. It’s not that far. Walking her will speed the delivery. Narcissa starts to ask him how he knows that, but I made your mother walk, he says. Didn’t do her no harm.

  “She wasn’t drugged,” Narcissa replies. “And I bet she had a level floor to walk on.”

  “I’m not walking anywhere,” Chance says, the words puffed out between her ragged breaths.

  “Shut up, crazy lady. You’ll do what I tell you to do.”

  “Why? Why should I? You’re just going to kill me anyway.”

  She’s got a point, you know, Aldous says and laughs, and the noise of his laughter wakes up the other voices in her head. Maybe you’re gonna be carrying her fat ass after all.

  Where are we? one of the dead children from the diner asks, and another voice answers it. The end of hope, it says, and All the way back at the start, another mutters.

  Narcissa leans over, reaching for the pistol tucked safely out of sight beneath her seat.

  “You can finish it here,” Chance says. “Whatever the fuck it is, you can finish it here.”

  There isn’t any difference, another voice chimes in. The start and the end, they’re not even two sides of the same coin anymore.

  He’s only a child, a mother’s voice cuts in as Narcissa flips off the safety, turns around in the seat, and aims the pistol at Chance’s head. It’s not fair for you to expect him to understand something like that.

  “You won’t kill me,” Chance says, her foggy eyes staring directly at Narcissa and the muzzle of the gun. “Not yet. You won’t kill me, because you might kill the baby.”

  “Just when did you decide you have any idea what I will or won’t do?” Narcissa asks her, wishing the voices would shut up again so she could think clearly, so close to pulling the trigger and unable to remember how much longer she needs to keep Chance alive.

  “That would ruin everything for you, wouldn’t it, if my baby dies?”

  “Are you really that brave, crazy lady?” Narcissa whispers and raises the barrel of the 9mm before she squeezes the trigger. The gun roars, and the window above Chance explodes in a diamond-shard rain of safety glass. She screams, but Narcissa’s head is already too full of the dead voices and the sound of the gun to hear her. The bitter, hot smell of gunpowder is hanging in the shocked air and the sparkle of the glass scattered all over Chance and the backseat like confetti, the spent shell lying on her chest, and Narcissa lowers the barrel again.

  “It isn’t a long walk,” she says, her own voice barely audible over the ringing in her ears. “I’ll help you.”

  Chance screams again, louder than before, and then covers her face with both her hands; there’s a deep gouge near her left elbow, dark blood leaking steadily from the wound, and Narcissa wonders if there’s any point in bandaging it.

  Did you hear that? one of the dead children asks, frightened, and What? an old woman’s voice calls back. Did we hear what?

  The thunder. Did you hear the thunder coming?

  Where’s it coming from? the old woman inside Narcissa’s head asks, and another, younger voice giggles to itself and adds, What’s it gonna want when it gets here?

  “Tell them to shut up, Aldous,” Narcissa growls. “Tell them all to shut up right this minute.”

  What makes you think I could do a thing like that? the old man replies. What makes you think that I would even try?

  Listen, the old woman mumbles, I will tell thee what is done in the caverns of the grave, mumbling because she has no teeth, and now Narcissa remembers killing her in Baltimore or some other city that starts with a B.

  What does she mean? one of the children asks.

  Nothing, someone reassures it. She isn’t well. She’s old and isn’t well.

  “I fucking mean it, Aldous. Make them stop.”

  You’re wasting time, child, sitting here talking to yourself when there’s still so much left to do.

  A noise outside the car, a sudden rustle from the tall grass growing at the edge of the road, and she looks away from Chance, looks up to see the old man standing in the fading daylight, watching her with the empty sockets where his eyes used to be. There are crows perched on both his shoulders, ebony birds with fiery red eyes and their beaks drip something thick and white. The ice pick is still embedded in Aldous’ chest, right there where she planted it almost fifteen years ago.

  “It wasn’t my fault
they wouldn’t have you, old man,” she says, uncertain if he’s listening to her, but she says it anyway.

  He smiles, or snarls, his lips folding back to bare tarnished silver teeth and rotting black gums. With one hand, he points a finger towards the sky.

  Does not the worm erect a pillar in the moldering churchyard? the old woman’s voice asks from some wet and writhing crevice of Narcissa’s brain. And a palace of eternity in the jaws of the hungry grave?

  “We have to go now,” Narcissa says. “It won’t be so hard. I’ll help you walk.”

  Chance has moved her hands and is staring at Narcissa, more blood on her face, blood seeping from a dozen tiny cuts. Her eyes so wide and afraid, drowning in her tears, and she nods her head very slowly.

  “First, you have to promise me you’ll let me see it,” Chance sobs and then shuts her eyes as another contraction hits. “Just promise me that, and I’ll do whatever you want.”

  “Aren’t you afraid that will only make it harder?”

  “Please, Narcissa. Promise me.”

  “How do you know I won’t lie to you, that I won’t say yes now and then do something else later on?”

  Chance opens her eyes and takes a deep, gasping breath. “You told me you keep your promises,” she says. “And I don’t have any choice. Just promise me you’ll do it.”

  Narcissa takes her finger off the trigger and glances back at Aldous and the crows, but they’ve gone.

  “Sure,” she says. “I promise. Maybe I’ll even let you hold it, if you’ll stop giving me so much shit for—”

  “Whatever you say. Whatever you want, I fucking swear.”

  Narcissa stares out across the marshes towards Castle Hill and the sea. Inside her head, the voices have all fallen silent and now there’s only the sound of Chance sobbing and the distant, rowdy cry of a gull. She wishes she could see the beach from here, the cold waves throwing themselves against the shore, but tells herself it won’t be much longer and opens the door of the Lincoln.