And the red rain began to fall.
And the werewolf, the terrible, broken thing that’s spent its life snared between the unseeing world of men and the unseen world of monsters, began pulling itself free, moth from its chrysalis shell, serpent from its egg, truth from the secret or the lie that’s held it prisoner for so long. Chance fought not to lose sight of the child, so perfect, so fragile, beautiful beyond words or comprehension, clutched in the creature’s claws, and how could she have ever fooled herself into thinking Narcissa Snow was only a woman, only something as frail and simple as herself?
It’s over, she thinks, as her numb fingers lose their hold on the slippery walls of the pool, the moss-slicked masonry, and her head slips beneath the surface again. Saltwater flooding her nose and mouth, saltwater and the metallic, meaty taste of her own blood mingled with the blood from the ruptured sky. The water burns her throat and sinuses, but it’s only more pain, only a very small pain, and she knows she’ll never really hurt ever again.
I could stay here, Chance thinks. I could stay down here forever, in the cold and the dark, until my bones are sand, but then Narcissa has her by the throat, hauling her back into the air that’s even colder than the water. Chance opens her eyes, and Narcissa is cradling the crying baby in her other arm.
“I said I keep my promises,” it growls, acid from its black lips, and she leans closer so Chance can see the child better.
“A girl,” Chance tries to say, but she’s shivering too hard to talk, crying even though she can’t feel the tears.
“Yeah, you did a real good job, crazy lady. The moon is pleased with her. Mother Hydra is stirring in her sleep.”
A girl, and it sounds much better if she doesn’t try to say it out loud, if she only speaks the words inside. My baby is a girl.
The werewolf takes its hand from around her throat, growls contentedly and shakes itself, spraying thick droplets of the blood across the rocks and the water and Chance’s face. Then it crouches at the pebbly edge of the pool and begins to lick the child clean.
Chance turns her face upwards, gazing into the foul, stinging rain, searching the clouds for some belated glimpse of the face of a god she’s never believed in. There’s a blue-white flash of lightning; it blinds her for a second, and she lets herself slip beneath the surface again. Too weak to fight any longer, fighting when there’s no point left to fighting, when losing is inevitable, when she’s already lost, and at least it’s not as cold beneath the water. Her contractions haven’t ended, her body still struggling to expel the empty placenta, but the pain seems safely far away, held apart from her now, and the thought of drowning is not so bad. Only the dizzying, endless ache of regret to give her pause—that this monster has taken her child, that she’ll never see Deacon’s face again, that Alice is dead—and regret isn’t nearly strong enough to keep her alive.
Go ahead, daughter. Turn loose now, the black water murmurs softly in its gentle seaweed and fish-scale voice, caressing her, wrapping her up in amniotic folds of numbness and oblivion; it soothes the cuts from Narcissa’s sharp knives, the ragged wounds from her razor claws and teeth.
Come back to me. Back here to the start, where it all began, where everything always ends.
Chance opens her mouth, so the air in her lungs can get out, and the water whispers to her how easy death will be, letting it inside her, just letting it in to wash her away like a stain. She breathes out, and the silver bubbles stream from her lips and nostrils. But then there are hands beneath her, buoying her up, forcing her back to the surface.
“I’m not going to let you die this time,” the child says, and Chance opens her eyes, coughs and stares amazed into its pretty face. Not its face, her face, her green eyes and mouse-brown hair, the face of her and Deacon’s child already half grown. “I figured it all out. You only have to hang on a little bit longer. Daddy’s almost here.”
The werewolf stops licking her baby and looks up at Chance, blinks at her with its searing golden eyes and runs its long pink tongue about the edges of its muzzle. “I thought you were dying,” it sneers. “Would it be easier if I gave you a stone to weigh you down?”
“It doesn’t have to end the same way,” the child says. “I know that it doesn’t have to end the same way every time.”
“I would tie it around your throat,” Narcissa snarls, “but there’s no time left. They’re coming,” and she looks over her shoulder at the crumbling entrance to the tunnel near the pool, the flooded basement of a ruined house.
“Tonight the dream will be different,” the child says, “and when I wake up, you’ll be alive. When I wake up, everything will have always been different.”
The werewolf takes a white towel from its leather satchel and carefully wraps the baby in it.
“I can hear his footsteps, Mother. The starling girl’s coming with him, and they’ll be here any minute. This time, I won’t let you go.”
Chance looks back at the child’s face, the tears streaming down its cheeks, the sorrow and desperation in its eyes, determination like a scar. And then she looks back at the baby, swaddled now in its clean white towel, lying on the ground where Narcissa has left it while she lifts a heavy, rounded stone free of the mud and sand.
“You,” Chance whispers, her voice slurred and weak. She wants to touch her daughter, but can hardly even feel her arms anymore. “It’s only…only a dream.”
“You don’t have to talk. I’m here. I’m holding you, Mother. Just be still, and I’ll hold you till he gets here.”
“It’s only ballast,” the werewolf growls. “Be sure to show it to the ferryman when he comes,” and then she wades back into the salty pool, splashing effortlessly through the insubstantial flesh of the child, though the girl doesn’t seem to have noticed. Narcissa sets the big stone down on Chance’s chest, lets go, and she sinks quickly to the bottom of the shallow pool.
Only a bad dream, she thinks, and now the child is underwater with her, a frantic shadow laboring in the darkness and the cold, trying to move the stone off her, trying to lift her again. A nightmare, and soon I’m going to wake up, any minute now, and I’ll forget it all before I can even tell Deacon.
And the child’s splashing grows more distant, the thundering sky and its bloody moon only a rumor in this perfect, lightless place, and Chance lets go, and falls.
“Is she alive?” Jane asks. “Is she breathing?”
Deacon doesn’t reply, holds Chance close to him while she gags and vomits brine and bile, her skin as pale and chilled as a corpse.
Twenty fucking minutes more, he thinks, rubbing her stiff and half-frozen hands between his own. If I’d only been twenty minutes sooner. Fuck that, only fifteen goddamn—
“Where’s Narcissa?” Jane asks. She’s standing at the edge of the pool, peering down into the glistening black water, as if there’s anything left in there to see, anything left that matters. “Is she already in the tunnels?”
“Give me your coat,” and she does, slips out of the big army-issue raincoat and hands it to Deacon. He wraps it around Chance and holds her tighter.
“Where’s the child?” Jane asks. “Has Narcissa taken the child into the tunnels?” and Chance’s eyelids flutter open, a tremble from her blue lips, and Deacon tells Jane to shut the hell up before he shoots her.
“I think she’s in shock. I think she’s fucking freezing to death.”
“Do you still want to save your child?” Jane asks, staring blankly into the pool again, watching the moon’s rippling reflection.
“Oh, fuck me,” Deacon whispers, trying hard not to see the things that Narcissa has done to Chance’s body, trying not to hear Jane because he knows what’s coming, the choice he’s about to have to make, the gamble, and either way he’s damned. “We got lost, baby,” he says. “We just kept getting fucking lost.”
Sleight of hand and eye, misdirection, wrong turns and trunks stuffed with midnight, all of it playing over and over and over in his head now. What he could and couldn�
��t have done differently, which wasted moments he might have possibly saved. And the cedars are the worst of all, because they were the very last, because they cost him that final handful of priceless, irredeemable minutes. Starling Jane caught up with him shortly after he became lost in the small grove of twisted, wind-stunted cedars only a dozen or so yards from the edge of Argilla Road. The trail leading down to the dunes and the shore had vanished abruptly under a vine-shrouded deadfall, and Deacon had tried to go around it, had taken a few, hesitant steps into the trees and was immediately disoriented, disorientation that turned quickly into panic. His entire life spent in the cities and suburbs, navigating sensible, calculated forests of concrete and steel, asphalt and glass, and the prickling evergreen branches that clung to his jacket and hair, that scratched at his face, might as well have been demons placed there by Narcissa to block his way, to ensure that he would never reach Chance in time. Another fucking trick, another cheat, and Jane found him tangled in thorns and creeper vines, shouting curses at the trees.
“Be still,” she said, cutting him loose with the small hunting knife she’d bought at a truck stop back in Tennessee. “You’re only making it worse.”
When he was free, she folded her knife closed and led him through the cedars and the underbrush, walking in what seemed like an endless series of circles, dead ends and switchbacks; a twilight maze without walls, that space so many times larger inside than out. And just when he decided that they were going to spend the rest of their lives wandering through those trees, they were standing beneath the sky again, standing on the other side, the dirt road only a few feet away on their left, and Deacon looked up and saw the low red moon risen clear of the horizon now.
“What time?” he asked her, and she squinted at her watch, then shook her head. “You don’t want to know that,” she replied. “Just keep walking.”
“There can’t be very much time left,” Jane says, and Deacon shakes his head.
“There isn’t any time left,” he replies, wiping wet hair from Chance’s eyes. “Baby, you gotta tell me what to do now. You tell me, because I can’t make this decision on my own.”
“I don’t think she can talk,” Jane says unhelpfully, without looking away from the pool. “Do you want me to go on without you?”
“Go,” Chance says, her voice raw as the wounds carved into her thighs and chest. “Find her,” and then she pukes up more saltwater.
“There. You heard her.”
“I can’t just leave her here. She’s fucking dying.”
“She just told you to go. You asked her what to do, and she told you what to do. And now you have to ask yourself if you have the strength, Deacon.”
“Jane, she’s my wife. She’s dying.”
“Simple question, Deacon. In or out, yes or no. I don’t need to hear an explanation.”
And he stares at her until she looks up from the pool and meets his gaze, her dark eyes as closed to him as the night pressing in around the ruins of the old house.
“You bitch,” he hisses, and Starling Jane only nods her head and unshoulders the big shotgun. “You want Narcissa dead so bad it’s the only thing left you give a shit about.”
“You’re wrong. The hounds will take care of Narcissa. She’s called them here and now they’ll deal with her. They don’t need me to kill her anymore. But they’ll take your child, as well.”
“Please go,” Chance whispers, her teeth beginning to chatter as her body steals a little of Deacon’s warmth and she starts to shiver again. “Find her.”
“It might not be too late,” Jane says, and turns her back on the pool, turns to face Deacon. “If the hounds haven’t found Narcissa yet, then maybe we can do it.”
“You said we couldn’t fucking stop her.”
“Yes, but maybe we won’t have to. Maybe we only have to find her first.”
“Please,” Chance says again and shuts her eyes.
Deacon holds on to her tighter and strokes her hair, glances from Jane to the mouth of the tunnel leading into the black coiled beneath the fallen timbers and cracked foundation stones.
“Where does it go?” he asks.
“I can’t tell you that,” Jane says. “You don’t need to know that. You just need to start moving.”
He stares silently into the tunnel entrance for a moment, the darkness there, beyond the reach of the moonlight, as absolutely solid as anything Narcissa might have fashioned, and for all he knows she did. “I don’t want to leave you,” he says, and Chance shivers, but she doesn’t say anything.
“Now or never,” Jane says.
“Go on ahead. I’ll catch up,” and she doesn’t argue with him, three quick, short steps and the tunnel swallows her whole. He looks back down at Chance and kisses her forehead, pulls the old raincoat tighter around her before he takes off his own jacket and covers her with it, as well. “I’ll be right back, I swear,” and she doesn’t open her eyes, doesn’t speak, but nods her head for him. And Deacon lays her gently beside the pool, the pool where he found her weighted down with a stone on her chest, and follows Jane before he can change his mind.
The tunnel is hardly even as high as Deacon is tall, the walls and ceiling, the low roof, all braced with rotting timbers, and the only light comes from his sputtering Zippo. He counts his footsteps from the entrance, leaving bread crumbs that will lead him back to the orange harvest moonlight and Chance. The walls are wet, dripping and fractured stone, and in places the uneven tunnel floor is flooded knee-deep with brackish pools concealing muddy, slick bottoms, and he tries not to dwell on the things that might live in those pools. The soft, venomous things with stalked eyes and sharp pincers, needle-toothed jaws and stinging tentacles, and Deacon keeps moving, keeps counting. He’s reached sixty-seven when the tunnel turns sharply away from the sea, turning south, sloping deeper into the earth, and Jane’s standing there in the dark, waiting for him. He lets the lighter flicker out, too hot to hold anymore, and squats to cool the brass casing in the water at their feet.
“What’s the story?” he asks, drying the lighter on the hem of his T-shirt.
“Not so loud,” she whispers. “I thought maybe we’d be able to hear the baby, if it’s crying.”
Deacon listens to the darkness crowded between the tunnel walls, and there’s hardly any sound at all, only the dripping ceiling and his own heart hammering inside his chest.
“I don’t hear anything,” he whispers.
“Do you still have the pistol?”
“Yeah, I still have the pistol.”
“Well, you just make sure it’s cocked and the safety’s off,” she whispers. “If we find them, we’ll have to be ready.”
“You fire that shotgun in here and you’ll probably bring this whole place down on our heads,” Deacon mumbles, glancing up at the tunnel ceiling hidden somewhere in the darkness overhead.
“It’s more stable than it looks.”
“Great. So what the hell are we waiting on?” and there’s a long moment of nothing but the measured plop plop plop from the dripping stone, and then Jane whispers, “You said you knew my name, Deacon. Were you lying?”
“My wife is dying out there,” he replies. “My child is lost in here somewhere. I don’t have time for this right now.”
“I might not have time for it later. Were you lying?”
“No,” Deacon says and flips the strike wheel again, white-hot sparks and then the little flame to show their faces, etched starkly in the gloom. “I wasn’t lying. Downs told me.”
“I never…I didn’t think anyone would ever know.”
“We have to go,” Deacon says. “We have to go now.”
“Tell me,” she whispers, leaning closer to him, her eyes gleaming faintly in the light from the Zippo. “Quick, and then we’ll go.”
And at first he thinks he might have actually forgotten the name the cop gave him, the infant vanished from its crib fifteen years ago. But there it is, waiting behind the fear and urgency. “Eliza,” he says. “You
r real name’s Eliza Helen Morrow. You were born in 1986, I think.”
“Eliza,” Jane whispers, speaking so softly there’s hardly more than the movement of her lips, and she smiles a sad and secret smile. “My name is Eliza Morrow, and I might be fifteen years old.”
“We have to go now,” Deacon says, and “Yeah,” she replies. “Thank you, Deacon. Thank you for keeping that for me,” and without another word she turns and heads deeper into the tunnel.
He follows her, carrying his puny light, walking fast to keep up with her. The air is growing warmer by degrees, but has begun to stink of mold and dank, rotting things. Deacon keeps counting, picking up at sixty-eight, nothing else to mark the time or distance; when he reaches one hundred and thirty-five, Jane stops and looks back at him.
“I think this opens into a cavern,” she whispers. “I expect that’s where she’s waiting for them. Unless they’ve already come and gone.”
“I still don’t hear anything,” Deacon says doubtfully.
“You wouldn’t,” she replies, but then he does hear something, a sudden shhsssh through the still and stinking air, and then Jane drops the shotgun and clutches her chest with both hands. Four or five inches of rusty, bloodstained steel are jutting from her chest, the ugly, double-barbed point of some antique spear or harpoon, and she crumples silently to her knees in front of him. A dark gout of blood rushes from her open mouth, leaving maroon bubbles on her lips, and she grabs for Deacon. He sees the long shaft of the harpoon between her shoulder blades, sees that it really is a fucking harpoon and sees the rope tied to it; he reaches for her, their fingertips brushing as the rope goes taut and she’s dragged away into the greedy blackness beyond the Zippo’s reach. There and then gone so fast it can’t possibly be real, as impossible as the rest of this shit, and he raises the pistol and aims into the dark.
Low Red Moon Page 39