Low Red Moon

by Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  “Run, Deacon,” Jane calls out. “Run fast,” a gurgling, wrecked phantom of her voice, and then there’s a loud cracking noise, wet snap of living bone, dry snap of metal, and he fires the pistol. The roar of the gun is deafening, like thunder belched up from the gut of the bottom of the world.

  “Jane!” he shouts, his voice muffled by the painful ringing in his ears; no answer, but a few handfuls of sand and tiny bits of stone sift from a crack in the ceiling of the tunnel. A second or two later, and there’s an awful tearing sound before the girl named Starling Jane screams and is silent.

  In the inky darkness up ahead, something begins to laugh.

  And Deacon raises the gun, taking aim at the face of the pale shape lurching towards him through the tunnel, its skin streaked with blood and gore, its seething eyes to scald and shrivel the souls of angels.

  “You think I still have what you’re looking for, little man?” she asks. “You think you can take it away from me?”

  Narcissa Snow, only a woman and nothing remotely human, and when she smiles, he pulls the trigger again.

  Neither dreaming nor awake, living nor dead, Chance listens to the gunshots echoing from the mouth of the tunnel by the sea. She can’t remember how long she’s been lying there, wrapped tight in the strange girl’s raincoat and Deacon’s jacket, shivering and watching the stars moving overhead. All the constellations that her grandparents taught her to recognize—Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Draco, Cassiopeia—and other stars she doesn’t know, and the wind flutters the edges of the blue-white banner lying crumpled in a corner of the ruins, the one that reads at the ocean’s edge: fish with feet, when it ought to read AT THE RIVER’S EDGE, but Alice said it wasn’t worth getting into an argument over. The sky so vast and brilliant, nothing like the sky above Birmingham, dull city sky half hidden behind city lights, and she’s beginning to think a few of those stars might take pity on her, might streak, screaming across the velvet night, and show her how to die.

  But then the gunshots, and the girl’s voice before that, words Chance couldn’t make out, but the fear plain enough to hear.

  “He needs you now,” the child says. She’s been sitting at the edge of the pool where she was born, dipping her fingers into the freezing water, playing tag with the tiny silver fish and phosphorescent trilobites, the waving arms of crinoids, and now she turns and looks sadly at Chance.

  “Just let me lie here a few more minutes, please,” Chance replies. “Just let me rest my eyes.”

  “There isn’t time,” the child says, and then she smiles and dips her finger in the water again. “No, that’s not right, is it? There’s always time.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Chance says, because she’s just remembered how she got here, and that the werewolf took her newborn daughter into the tunnel. “But I couldn’t stop her.”

  For a moment or two, the child watches Chance, still smiling, and then leaves the pool and comes to stand beside her. All around the remains of the basement, warm night breezes rustle the branches of towering tree ferns and cycads, and a gangly young Giganotosaurus pauses to watch them, mother and daughter, with its flashing, nocturnal eyes, before vanishing into the foliage again.

  “I made this place for you,” the girl says. “I sewed it from pieces of your soul. When we’re finished, you can stay here as long as you want. There’s always time.”

  “You’re very clever,” Chance tells her, trying to sit up, and the girl bends down to help.

  “But we have to hurry now,” she says. “He’s hurt.”

  “Who? Deacon?”

  “His gun ran out of bullets, and he didn’t have time to reach Starling’s shotgun before Narcissa got to him.”

  Chance closes her eyes, hoping this is only a dream after all, her brain spitting up memories and wishful thoughts and white noise at death’s door. The tropical Mesozoic air is sweet, and it would be easy to sleep now, she thinks. Easy never to open her eyes again, and this is so much better than drowning in a muddy, freezing pool with a stone on her chest.

  “Wake up, Mother,” the child insists and shakes her hard. “I’ll help you, but you have to do this. It won’t be finished until you do.”

  “It’s finished now,” Chance says, opening her eyes, and the girl is frowning down at her. “What’s your name?” Chance asks.

  “I’m not allowed to tell you that. You’ll find out later.”

  “You can’t tell me, can you? Because you don’t know. Because I never made up my mind about a girl’s name, so you don’t have one.”

  “Look, she’ll kill him if you don’t get up off your ass.”

  “Will she?” Chance asks, and “Watch your step,” the nameless girl replies, leading her along the wall of the dark tunnel. “It’s slippery in here.”

  “What if he’s dead already? What if we’re already too late?”

  “Then you’ll know that you’ve done everything you could do,” the girl replies. “You’ll have done your best to help him.”

  “That’s not enough.”

  “Then you should talk less and walk faster,” but Chance can’t walk any faster, can hardly walk at all, the child all but holding her up as it is. The stones have bruised and sliced her bare feet, and the water covering most of the tunnel floor is cold and smells like shit. She braces herself against the granite wall, pulls the raincoat tighter about her shoulders and wishes she were back outside in the sultry, jungle-scented night.

  “There’s light up ahead,” the girl says, and when Chance stares hard into the dark she can see it too, a sickly greenish glow, but it’s hard to tell how far away it might be. And then she trips over Deacon’s legs and almost falls. The child catches her, and Chance kneels down beside him, her hands for eyes, and she’s grateful for the blackness now, that she can’t see his battered body slumped against the tunnel wall.

  “Chance,” he whispers. “How the fuck did you get in here?”

  “You’re not dead,” she says and kisses him, tasting the blood drying to a sticky mess on his cheek. “I thought you were. I thought we were both dead.”

  “I couldn’t stop her, baby. I emptied that goddamn gun into her, and I still couldn’t stop her.”

  “Shhhh,” Chance whispers, crying again, but this time from relief and the tears are warm against her chilled skin. “That doesn’t matter anymore. We’re safe. We’re all safe now, Deke. I just have to get you out of here.”

  “She didn’t take the shotgun with her,” Deacon says. “It’s still here somewhere.”

  Look, Mother, the child whispers. Do you see? Do you see where she’s taken me? Chance stares past Deacon at the green glow filling the tunnel only forty or fifty yards farther along, light that seems to pulse faintly, light so terrible she wants to hide herself in Deacon’s arms and never leave the dark again.

  “I don’t understand,” she whispers. “I don’t understand any of this.”

  “She would have killed me,” Deacon says, “but someone down there started calling her name.” He tries to stand up, grunts in pain and sits right back down again. “Just give me a few,” he says. “I’ll be okay. See if you can find that damn shotgun.”

  “It’s right here,” she tells him and picks it up from the tunnel floor. “But we’re okay, Deacon. We’re alive.”

  “She has the baby. She took it to them. Just let me get my breath.”

  The chartreuse light seems a little brighter now, or her eyes are adjusting, bright enough that she can make out Deacon’s face, the wide and ragged cut above his eyes, the clean lines of the gun in her hands.

  “I think I’m dying, Deacon,” she says. “If I don’t do this now, I’m not going to have the strength to do it at all.” He doesn’t reply, and she sees that he’s shut his eyes. Chance leans close enough that she can feel his sour, alcoholic’s breath on her face, can hear the regular rise and fall of his chest.

  “You sleep,” she says and kisses him again. “This won’t take long, I promise.”

  “I wish it did
n’t have to end this way,” the child says. “I wish the story could have a better ending. I wish it could end, ‘And then they all left the tunnel, went home, and never met another monster, and lived happily ever after.’”

  “That would be a fine story,” Chance tells her. “That would be a very fine story.”

  And the child helps her to her feet again, holding her up when Chance thinks she can’t walk another step, tells her not to look when they pass the headless body with the harpoon rising from its chest, but it’s too late, and she’s already seen.

  “She was trying to save us,” the child says. “Daddy told me her real name was Eliza.”

  “Her real name,” Chance whispers, too weak to speak any louder, and now the yellow-green light is so bright she can clearly see the tunnel walls, the face of her daughter, her own tattered flesh beneath the folds of the raincoat.

  “I can’t take you any farther,” the child says. “You’ll have to finish this alone, Mother,” and there’s a warm breeze, the ancient smell of the forest that isn’t growing outside the tunnel, and the girl is gone. Chance leans against the stone wall, staring first at the shotgun in her hands, and then up at the place just ahead where the tunnel widens suddenly, the space filled up with the pulsing green light. And there are voices now, gravel-throated voices that hardly sound human, more like dogs or bears that have been taught to talk, some ingenious circus sideshow trick; she rests against the wall and listens and squints into the light.

  “That’s entirely beside the point. We did not ask you to bring us this suckling, Narcissa Snow. Had we wanted it, we would have gone for it ourselves.”

  “She thinks we need the likes of her to do our bidding.”

  “If she thinks, Terpsichore. If she even thinks at all.”

  And then Chance sees her, the werewolf standing naked and bleeding at the center of the chamber, and the baby bundled in a white towel at her feet.

  “Its father wronged you all,” Narcissa says, and Chance thinks that she sounds frightened. “He cost the warrens many infants when he led the police to the changeling Mary English.”

  “He caused us far, far less harm than you have, mongrel.”

  “You blackmail us, murder our charges, then whine that you’ve only taken vengeance on our enemies.”

  “She’s insane, Lucius.”

  “She’s an idiot.”

  Chance shuts her eyes tightly for a second, pressing her weight against the rough granite, waiting for a wave of dizziness and nausea to pass. None of this is real, she thinks. It’s only a dream.

  “There’s nothing left to be said,” one of the guttural animal voices barks. “We are finished with you, Narcissa Snow. It’s a shame your father could not have handled you himself.”

  Chance opens her eyes again, opens up the shotgun’s breech, this gun not so different from the one her grandfather taught her to shoot when she was a little girl, when they pretended to go hunting and usually just spent the days walking in the woods. There are two cartridges inside; she checks to be sure they’re not spent.

  A sound like laughter, if pigs could laugh, and Chance looks back into the cavern. Narcissa is holding a huge revolver, like a prop from an old western film, aiming it at the darkness lurking at the edges of the pulsing green glow.

  “Look there, Terpsichore. Now she’s going to shoot us,” and the tunnel booms with barks and piggy laughter.

  “I’m going to leave this child, and I’m going to walk away,” the werewolf says, her voice trembling now. “I swear, you’ll never have to see me again.”

  “You swear?”

  “But maybe we want you where we can see you, Narcissa Snow. Maybe we want you right where we can see you anytime we like.”

  Chance raises the gun, and maybe it looks like her grandfather’s, but it seems to weigh a ton, something cast in lead instead of made of wood and steel. She blinks away sweat or blood, trying to clear her vision, and then fixes the werewolf in her sights.

  “I fucking belong here,” the monster growls, the stiff mane along its back bristling now, and Narcissa pulls back the hammer on the revolver. “This is my birthright. I am the granddaughter of Iscariot Snow, and this is my home.”

  “Be careful, Lucius. We want something left for the slab. It would be a shame to ruin her.”

  “I’ll make it clean. I’ll make it quicker than she deserves.”

  And then the shadows shift, twisting back upon themselves, folding, and something huge peers out of the gloom, watching Narcissa with blazing golden eyes. She fires the revolver once, and the baby at her feet begins to cry; the werewolf curses and throws the gun at the beast rushing towards her across the smooth cavern floor, something tall and hunched, something to make her seem as harmless as the stolen infant. Narcissa Snow turns to run, to flee back towards the tunnel, back to the surface, but stops when she sees Chance and the shotgun.

  “You,” she says and smiles, smiles as if she’s forgotten the creature bearing down on her, as if the gun in Chance’s hands were only a toy. “Well, what are you waiting for?”

  And Chance pulls the twin triggers and the gun howls, erasing Narcissa’s face in a spray of blood and bone and flesh. The recoil knocks Chance off her feet, sends her sprawling in the mud, and the last thing she sees before the nothingness welling up inside her skull takes her, the very last thing, is the beast standing above her, and the confusion in its burning eyes.

  Deacon Silvey hears the dry crackle of the fire, the hungry cries of the gulls, smells the ocean and the smoky fire before he opens his eyes. The distant, muted crash and sigh of the breakers, and he blinks and squints painfully into the late morning sunshine bathing the high, windswept dunes. He lies still a while, his head aching like he’s been drunk six weeks straight, like he’s just come down from the bender to end all benders, and watches the small fire burning itself out a few feet away. And then the baby in his arms, wrapped up safe inside the raincoat with him, begins to cry softly, and he rolls over and lays it down in the sand at his side. And he sees Chance, her lifeless body stretched out on the other side of the fire, her eyelids half open, as if she’s watching her husband and child through the smoke.

  Someone has put her in an old black dress, Puritan black and simple, and the cloth is stained and torn. He stares at her while the wind moans and whistles across the land between the marshes and the sea, while it all comes back to him in the time it takes to be sure that he’s awake. And then he turns back to the baby, its fat pink face and the deep blue eyes of a newborn, eyes that haven’t yet been scarred some plainer shade by all the things they will witness later on. He holds the child close, humming a song to comfort it because he isn’t sure what else to do, and the wild unending Atlantic gale seems to know the tune and carries it for him when Deacon finally begins crying too hard to sing anymore.

  EPILOGUE

  The Land of Dreams

  Hardly an hour left until dawn, and the long gray Lincoln cruises slowly along Angell Street, as unlikely a hearse as Deacon Silvey has ever imagined. The old trees and older homes of College Hill rise stately and mute on either side of the car, shielding him from the stars. Most of Providence is still mercifully asleep at this hour, but he wonders if he’s waited too long, too close to sunrise and maybe he’ll be turned away, maybe he won’t find the house at all because maybe it doesn’t exist. The radio is blaring to keep away the awful silence of the November morning, classic rock out of Boston, the Doors and the Byrds and Credence Clearwater Revival, but the baby doesn’t seem to mind, seems capable of sleeping through just about anything.

  It was almost dark by the time Deacon managed to get both the baby and Chance’s body back to Narcissa Snow’s car, retracing the path through the dunes to Argilla Road. And this time there was no deadfall waiting to send him wandering through the treacherous cedars, and no smothering blackness filled with scuttling legs when he put the boxes Jane had removed into the trunk again and slammed it shut. The keys were waiting for him in the ignition, s
trung onto a shiny brass key chain engraved with the initials C.A.S. Jane hadn’t even bothered to check for them before she’d started jimmying locks. He laid Chance out in the backseat, her arms crossed on her chest, and used one of the cardboard boxes, lined with his jacket and the towel, its contents dumped in on top of everything else in the Lincoln’s trunk, as a makeshift crib. Deacon secured the box with the seat belt, and then drove away from the sea, through the whispering marshes and pines, through Ipswich to the highway.

  Coming at last to the end of Angell Street, he glances at the brightly colored map folded open on the seat between him and the baby’s cardboard box, “A Visitor’s Map to Greater Downtown Providence,” and sees that he’s overshot the Athenaeum by several blocks. There are three teenagers standing on the corner of Angell and Benefit, drinking something from a paper bag and smoking cigarettes. They stop talking among themselves and stare at the Lincoln, only staring because it’s something to see, but their eyes make Deacon nervous, anyway.

  Driving all night, skirting Boston because he didn’t want to be that close to so many other people, people and their gaudy lights to keep the night at bay. When the car finally ran low on gas, he stopped at an Exxon station near Concord, bought a small carton of milk for the baby and a six-pack of Budweiser for himself. Then he used a pay phone to call Birmingham, dialing the number of their apartment on Morris because he figured that the FBI would still be there, waiting with their line-tapping machines and tape recorders, waiting for a break, and he might as well give them one. He told a groggy Agent Peterson that he’d only talk to Downs, no one else, that he’d call back at 6 A.M. and Downs should be there if he wanted to talk, and then Deacon hung up. In the parking lot of the Exxon, he fed the baby a little of the milk, as much as it would take, and then headed south with no destination in mind, just driving because it seemed the only bearable course of action left to him. Sometimes he would glance at Chance’s body in the rearview mirror, but mostly he kept his eyes on the road.