Low Red Moon
Page 41
When he sees the big yellow house on Benefit Street, Deacon isn’t surprised, even though he didn’t genuinely expect it to be there. He wonders if it’s the right yellow house, how many yellow houses there might be up and down this road, but pulls over to the curb and kills the engine. There are at least a half-dozen grinning jack-o’-lanterns on the porch, each one flickering orange light from its carved pumpkin skull, but all the windows are dark. Sitting in the car, staring up at the old house painted the color of caution, the color of sickness, Deacon begins to feel the way he felt the night he followed Sadie Jasper into the Harris Warehouse and Transfer Building, the way he felt the day before when he first saw the narrow, winding waters of the Manuxet River.
“You’re gonna have to wait here,” he says to the baby, but it’s sleeping now. He looks over his shoulder at Chance, and she doesn’t look like she’s sleeping at all. She just looks dead. He thinks that when he’s done, he should find a blanket or a sheet to cover her with, before the sun comes up.
“I’ll leave the radio on for you,” he tells the baby, but turns the volume down a little. A Rolling Stones song ends and is replaced by Bob Dylan and The Band. “Don’t you worry,” he says. “I’ll be back before you know it. I won’t let you out of my sight,” and he reaches for the slender leather satchel lying on the passenger-side floorboard. But then he waits until the Dylan song ends and the DJ starts talking before he gets out of the Lincoln.
He walks quickly across the cobblestone sidewalk and climbs the creaky wooden stairs to the front porch, already wishing that he’d stayed in the car, wishing he’d just kept driving when he came to the exits for Providence. The porch boards creak even more loudly than the steps, and Deacon stops and glances back at the parked car.
“You took your own sweet time getting here, Mr. Silvey,” someone says, and he turns around again and sees a girl he hadn’t noticed before, either because he wasn’t looking or she just wasn’t there. She’s sitting in a rocking chair, dressed in jeans and a gray cardigan, and her silver eyes flash back the jack-o’-lantern light. “We were about to give you up for lost.”
“Were you?” he asks, unable to look away from her white face, her white lips, those eyes like polished ball bearings.
“The rest of the house is already sleeping,” she says and leans towards him. “I told them all you weren’t coming. I told them we’d have to send someone out to find you.”
“So I guess you were wrong.”
“I suppose I was. It’s not the first time. Do you have something for me, Mr. Silvey?”
Deacon hands her the satchel, and she nods her head, smiles but doesn’t open it, sets it on the porch at her feet.
“I owed her,” he says. “She helped me.”
“Did she?” the silver-eyed girl asks. “That was very thoughtful of her, I suppose.”
“It got her killed.”
“Well, you know how that goes. No good deed and all that. Besides, it happens to the best of us, sooner or later.”
“I just didn’t want you people thinking she hadn’t tried.”
The girl nods again and then turns her head, looking past him, past Benefit Street at the land sloping steeply down to the Providence River and Federal Hill, the western sky still dark as midnight but not for very much longer.
“I’d ask you in for tea and biscuits, Mr. Silvey, if there was time. Miss Josephine regrets she wasn’t able to meet you herself. Perhaps if you’d come a little earlier in the evening.”
“I have to be going anyway. I have to make a phone call.”
The girl watches him a moment, still and pale as a waxwork, and then she rocks back in the chair and blinks her silver eyes.
“Does the child have a name yet?”
“No,” Deacon says. “No, she doesn’t.”
“Well, see that she gets one soon. It’s not safe for a child, being adrift in the wide, wide world without a name.”
“Do you have one?” Deacon asks her. “A name, I mean?”
“Not one that you ever want to learn,” and then she reaches for the satchel and stands up; behind her, the empty chair rocks itself back and forth a few more times. “Not one I leave lying around where just anyone can get at it.”
“I should go now,” Deacon says. “I have to make that phone call.”
“You’ll have an easier time with the police than you expect.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see. I just didn’t want you to think—”
“She hadn’t tried,” the girl with shining eyes says. “Good-bye, Mr. Silvey. I’m sorry about your wife, but you have your daughter, and you have your own life. That’s something.”
“Yes, I guess it must be.”
“Never come here again. And never speak of this place to anyone, do you understand? If it ever did, this house no longer has a quarrel with you.”
Deacon looks around at the jack-o’-lanterns and shrugs his shoulders. “Who the hell would I tell?” he asks her, but doesn’t wait for an answer, turns and walks quickly down the steps and back across the sidewalk to the Lincoln. Before he opens the door, he looks back at the wide front porch of the yellow house one last time, and the girl is putting out the candles inside the jack-o’-lanterns, one by one.
Caitlín R. Kiernan has written seven novels, including Threshold, Low Red Moon, Murder of Angels, and Daughter of Hounds, and her award-winning short fiction has been collected in four volumes—Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; To Charles Fort, With Love; and Alabaster. Trained as a vertebrate paleontologist, she lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Web sites:
www.caitlinrkiernan.com
greygirlbeast.livejournal.com