Under the Wicked Moon: A Novel

by Abe Moss

  UNDER THE WICKED MOON

  ABE MOSS

  Under the Wicked Moon Copyright © 2020 by Abe Moss. All Rights Reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Abe Moss

  Visit my website at www.abemoss.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing: March 2020

  ASIN -

  ABE MOSS NOVELS

  THE WRITHING

  BATHWATER BLUES

  BY THE LIGHT OF HIS LANTERN

  LITTLE EMMETT

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  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  Bright, blinking lights—gold, red, blue, green, purple—illuminated the four men as they stomped rowdily along the sidewalk, squinting their tired, contented, inebriated eyes in the passing headlights. A car honked in the street, anonymous in the stop-and-go current. Brakes whined. Engines idled. From rolled-down windows, slurred voices shouted into the Vegas night, punctuated by drunken laughter.

  Although it was starting to wind down, Harvey Samson was having the night of his life. In the bustling hubbub of The Strip, with the help of plenty of alcohol, he was completely at peace. One of his friends—Blake, lighting a cigarette between his lips—joked as they waited at the crosswalk, much to the agreeable uproar of the others. Though he hadn’t heard the joke, Harvey laughed, too. Why not? Another of his friends—Jackson—turned to him, sleepy with drink, grinning ear to ear, and threw an arm around his neck, pulled him in so that their heads bonked playfully.

  Harvey took a deep breath, full of Blake’s second-hand smoke, and turned his face to the sky, eyes closed. He swayed dreamily, the night alive and friendly. He listened to the noises of the surrounding crowd. Strangers living similar nights. Giggling. Guffawing. Chattering into their phones.

  Opening his eyes, he looked beyond the crosswalk beside them, in the direction they weren’t headed, where one individual in particular caught his attention on the other side of the street. A beautiful woman in a yellow dress, waiting her turn to cross. She stood alone, between the groups of others like his, unnoticed by anyone but him. At least, he liked to think so. Was she looking back, he wondered? They were far enough apart, he thought, it was impossible to tell. He stared shamelessly.

  Under the vapors of car exhaust and Blake’s cigarette, he caught a sudden whiff of an open sewer grate and scowled.

  Facing forward, the crosswalk was active and his friends were already gone, vanished into the throngs of walkers ahead of him. He stumbled forward, moved as hurriedly as his floating legs would carry him. He gently shouldered his way through others crossing, sloppily pivoted around them until he reached the other side. He paused. He stood on tiptoe, peering over dozens of heads in search of those belonging to his friends. Which way was it, he thought vaguely? He couldn’t remember. Standing on the corner, he turned in a circle, hoping he’d miraculously see them nearby. Where was their hotel, again?

  “Blake?” he called.

  No heads turned.

  “Shane? Jackson?”

  He listened to the sounds of feet slapping and scuffing the sidewalk, voices upon voices, cars rolling by indifferently. He picked a direction at last. Following the sidewalk, a man approached him spouting Spanish, uncomfortably close, slapping a deck of cards in his hand. Harvey glimpsed the pornographic scene on the card offered to him and shrugged away.

  “Jackson?”

  His own voice sounded strange to him. Stupid. Slow. His mind was sobering, but his faculties—not so much.

  “Shane?”

  He stopped and pulled out his phone. Shoulders brushed him on either side. He stepped back, against the building there. Biting his lip, he scrolled his contacts. Blake. He dialed the number. He put the phone to his ear, watching passersby nervously as he listened to the ring, searching every face coming and going, hoping one of them would be familiar. Did he feel a headache coming on?

  “Fucking hell…” he muttered as his call went unanswered.

  He scrolled further. Scrolled further. A pounding in his left temple.

  Jackson.

  With his thumb positioned over the name, a flowery fragrance tickled his nostrils, hidden beneath the nauseating aromas of the street. He glanced up.

  And there she was again.

  She stood at the opening of the alley beside him, her yellow dress brighter than the headlights glaring by. She smiled curiously. There was no denying it at this distance. As he stared dumbly, mouth agape, she lifted her hand and wiggled her fingers in a delicate wave. He lowered his phone. For a moment, the urgency with which he’d been trying to contact his friends was forgotten. The woman moved toward him, hands clasped prettily—politely—below her stomach.

  “Excuse me,” she said, flashing her white teeth behind those soft, lovely lips. “I’m supposed to meet some friends, and I’m, well…” She looked at the ground between them, embarrassed. “I’m completely lost, honestly. Would it be all right if I borrowed your phone real quick?”

  She laughed, and Harvey thought it might have been the most infectious laugh he’d ever heard. He wanted so badly to hear it again, mind racing for something to say to elicit another, that he didn’t even seem to notice his hands freely offering the phone to her. She took it from him, her big, grateful eyes thanking him wordlessly.

  “Of course,” he said, slightly delayed, and his voice still stretched in its tired, drunken way.

  “Only a minute,” she said.

  She turned from him, dialing a number, and held the phone to her ear. Standing at her back, he traced the back of her head, her neck, her shoulders with goofy, adoring eyes. She spoke to someone, her voice light and cheery. She turned her chin to her shoulder, eyes flitting toward him as she told whomever was on the other end that she was borrowing someone’s phone. A ‘kind, handsome stranger’, she called him.

  Harvey grinned bashfully. He turned away to give her some space.

  Hands on his waist, he observed the ever-flowing stream of tourists crawling through the electric-dazzled street. The endless flow of cars funneling through. Feeling that same peace, his body loose and his mind free, he turned his face to the sky once more, took a lungful of air. With the thousands of lights across the city, there was only one light in the sky to see.

  The moon was a sharp wedge in the washed-out black.

  He wondered if his friends had noticed he was gone yet. Maybe it was a good thing he hadn’t strayed too far from the intersection where he’d lost them. They’d be back looking for him soon…

  Perhaps the woman in the yellow dress could introduce them all to the rest of her friends.

  He turned around, still
grinning like an imbecile, and was stung with a sour dread in his gut when he saw she was gone.

  “What…”

  He spun in place, toes touching the other foot’s heel as he stumbled. No sign of her.

  “You’ve got to be shitting me…”

  On tiptoe again, he peered over the heads of those coming and going and saw not a single yellow dress. Dumbfounded, he hurried along the sidewalk in the direction where she’d last been standing.

  Was that the plan all along, then? A ruse to steal his phone? Surely not. Not her. What did a woman like her need with stealing someone’s phone?

  He glanced down the alley as he passed, the one she’d been standing beside when he first saw her, and caught a glimpse of yellow. A double-take confirmed it.

  “What the hell?”

  She was already halfway down the alley, walking at a leisurely pace. His phone was still held to her ear. The street on the other side of the alley was dark.

  “Hey!” he shouted.

  She showed no signs of hearing him. Looking both ways along the sidewalk, meeting the discomforted gazes of several strangers, he begrudgingly followed into the alley after her. The lane was littered with stacks of wooden pallets and boxes arranged outside the backdoors of businesses. Several small, metal trash bins sat in a row halfway in ahead. Somehow, she’d already managed to reach the other side.

  “Hey!” he called again.

  The woman, still chatting on his phone and seemingly unconcerned by even the possibility of his pursuit, turned out of sight.

  From behind the metal trash bins up ahead, something else stepped out into the dark passage.

  “Woah…” Harvey whispered under his breath. He slowed to a stop as his heart began to race. “What the hell…”

  Dark, matted fur. Dim, invisible eyes. Panting. Smiling. It hung its head low to the ground, watching. Waiting. Somehow, beneath the many odors of The Strip at his back, under the scent of moldy wooden pallets beside him, Harvey caught a hint of the wolf’s wet, mangy fur. Sour death on its breath. In its teeth. What a wolf was doing in the middle of the city, nested in this particular alley at this particular moment, he could never know or understand. As each of his danger receptors began to awaken, sending signals to his quickly sobering brain, raising the hair on his arms, he got the impression he wasn’t meant to understand.

  There was a flutter in the air above him. A whistle of flight over the alley’s opening. He turned his eyes to the narrow corridor of sky overhead, saw nothing but the muddled black night.

  And then it was behind him. A shuffle of feet.

  “Such a kind, handsome stranger.”

  He whirled, the alley rotating in a drunken blur before his eyes as he turned to see whose voice it was. Then, in an instant, those stumbling feet of his were ripped out from under him. He screamed—a choked, high-pitched yelp. He collapsed forward, hands outstretched to catch him, but they never met the ground.

  His feet were in the air. He was in the air. All of him. The brickwork on either side rushed by as the alley pavement shrank farther and farther below, smaller and smaller until he was plucked from it all, pulled into the sky like a fish on the end of a reeling hook.

  Only the moon heard his screams.

  PART ONE

  COMING OF AGE

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE TRIP

  They parked at the curb, headlights off. The dark, quiet suburban street was asleep in all directions. Every home but hers. From the passenger seat, with her head tilted against the glass, Maria Jenkins watched as her family’s silhouettes busied about from behind those illuminated curtains. Each of them packing for their trip, as she was meant to be.

  “I wish I could stay here…”

  A hand fell upon her thigh, squeezing. She turned to her boyfriend sitting behind the wheel.

  “Then do it,” he said, grinning handsomely. “Tell your parents you don’t want to spend spring break looking through your grandma’s old photo albums or whatever the fuck it is you’ll be doing.”

  “I wish.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  Maria looked to the house again, where she now spotted a shadow in her parents’ bedroom window. Her mom, she could tell, pulling the curtain aside to peek out, watching.

  “Because it’s important to my mom.”

  “Isn’t everyone always saying we should enjoy our youth while it lasts? Tell your mom that’s important to you.”

  Maria gave him a smile for his effort.

  “One week isn’t going to make or break my youth.”

  “Not going on this one trip isn’t going to make or break your grandma, is it?”

  “Funny.” Maria sighed. “It’s not that simple.”

  “I thought she usually came here, anyway…”

  “She can’t make the trip this time.”

  “Why, she sick?”

  Maria pursed her lips as she continued watching her mother’s silhouette in the window. Couldn’t she tell that Maria saw her spying there?

  “She is, actually.”

  Her boyfriend—Nick, was his name—was silent for a time.

  “Oh. I don’t think you ever mentioned that. Did you tell me that?”

  “No.” Then, before he could ask, “It’s cancer.” She turned to see him, then—his dumb, cute face at a loss for words, and she smiled. “And it’s going to be an awkward trip, too, because apparently she’s had it a while and only told my mom about it a couple weeks ago, when she knew she was in remission.”

  “What is remission?”

  “She’s getting better, hopefully.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s good, then…”

  Maria shrugged. “Now I just wonder when she would have told us if she wasn’t beating it…”

  “Well, it’s a good thing she is, then…” Nick leaned toward her. He gave her thigh a squeeze and Maria shrieked with laughter. Kissing the shelf of her jaw, her neck, he whispered, “You’re so hot when you’re thinking about death and stuff…”

  “Wow!” Maria exclaimed, though she still couldn’t stop laughing.

  As he kissed her neck lower and lower, her eyes flashed outside the car, glimpsing the house, the shadows in the windows. Her mother was no longer watching, at least not that she could see. Nick kissed further down, until his lips left her neck altogether.

  “Okay, all right…” Maria said, catching her breath after all the amusement. “Hey…”

  “What?” Nicked looked up, picking at the fabric of her shirt with his teeth.

  “Not here…”

  “Why not?”

  “Not outside my house, with my family all… all…”

  She gently pushed her hand against his face until he was back sitting in his own seat, beaming with pride.

  “Put that away,” she said, pointing to his mouth, “before you drool everywhere.”

  “I already am.”

  Maria let out a deep sigh. “I’d better go inside.”

  “That’s it? Not gonna see each other all spring break, and nothing to remember you by?”

  “You’ve got plenty to remember me by.”

  Nick shrugged, pretending to pout. “Agree to disagree, I guess.”

  “Aww. There, there, baby… It’ll be all right.”

  She gave him a quick peck on the cheek. As she reached for her door handle, he followed, turned her face back to him and kissed her on the mouth. Once, twice, three times. He cupped her breast in his hand and she pulled back, gently pushing him away a second time.

  “Okay, that’s all,” she said. “No more.”

  Before anything else could be said, she opened her door and quickly stood from the car at the curb. She bent in and gave her boyfriend a final smile.

  “Have fun without me,” she said.

  “I guess I’ll have to try.”

  “I’m sure you’ll manage.”

  He kissed the air and she gave him a wink.

  “Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  She
shut the car door and turned up the sidewalk toward the front porch. A cool, spring night, noisy with crickets. She looked once over her shoulder as she reached the door, preparing to head inside and face her family, and his car was already gone.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “Was that your boyfriend?”

  Maria’s little brother, Michael, greeted her at the bottom of the stairs as she came through the front door, wasting no time in his endless mission to annoy her.

  “Were you watching us? Pervert.”

  “No, mom was watching you first. Then I watched you.”

  “So you’re both perverts.”

  “Mom!” Michael shouted, crawling up the stairs on all fours. At the top, panting, he called, “Maria called you a pervert!”

  Maria reluctantly followed behind him. Heading for her own bedroom, she spotted Michael in their parents’ bedroom doorway.

  “Did you hear what I said?” he asked.

  “Your sister’s right,” she heard her father say. “Your mother is a pervert.”

  Maria entered her bedroom. Flipping on the light revealed a floor covered in clothes. Most of them hadn’t been worn, but merely tried on. She got down on her hands and knees to peer under the bed, where she dragged out her empty luggage bag. She unzipped it, peered around her messy room to begin deciding on what to bring.

  Michael entered, tiptoeing between her clothes before finally deciding to kick them around instead.

  “Leave my stuff alone,” Maria told him.

  “Your room looks like garbage.” He took a seat at the end of her bed. “Are all your clothes on the floor?”

  “Don’t you need to pack, too?” Maria asked, wishing to get rid of him.

  “Already did. I did it in five minutes.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “I did. I don’t have all the girly stuff to pack like you do.” He bent and picked up a pair of socks, images of cat faces on the toes. “I’ve never seen you wear these.”

  “Shouldn’t you be in bed? I’m guessing that’s why you’re in your pajamas.”