Low Red Moon (19 page)

The cage was locked, but he found the key ring hanging not far away on a railroad spike driven into the rocky wall, a loop of wire with a dozen keys, and while he searched for the one that would open the cage, he talked to the motionless form of the child.

“Jessica, can you hear me? I’ve come to take you home.”

The woman sat down on the floor, no fight left in her, no effort to escape, and she pulled her knees up underneath her chin and wept and watched Deacon with her mossy, angry eyes.

“You don’t know what you’ve done,” she said. “But you will, yes sir, one day, one day they’ll
show
you what—”

“Just shut the hell up,” he barked at her and came to the very last key on the ring, an antique brass thing with a small crimson gemstone set into the filigreed bow and letters he didn’t recognize carved into the shaft. He slid it into the padlock, and the tumblers rolled and clicked and maybe the red stone on the key sparked and shimmered for a moment, a tiny wink of ruddy light, and maybe that was only his imagination. But the hasp popped open, and the child in the cage made a frightened sound, and far overhead he heard Vincent Hammond shouting his name.

An hour past midnight, and the girl who calls herself Starling Jane finds Deacon alone in a small park at the end of a dead-end street. She stands in the trees for a while, silently watching him where he sits at a picnic table beneath the tar-paper roof of a weathered gazebo. Not far away is a limestone blockhouse set into the mountainside, the gated entrance to a tunnel, and it makes Starling Jane nervous. She thinks about going back to their motel room and telling Scarborough that she couldn’t find Deacon Silvey, or that she found him but he wouldn’t listen to her, whichever lie is most convenient. The old tunnel seems to watch her warily from its two small windows, square and simple holes on either side of the entrance.

“You just mind your own business,” she whispers at the tunnel. “I haven’t got any interest in the likes of you tonight.”

“Who’s there?” Deacon asks, standing up quickly, startled, and she steps out of the shadows beneath the trees so he can see her.

“Me,” she says. “Only me.”

Starling Jane can’t see the expression on his face, too much dark gathered there inside the gazebo, but she can feel his surprise dissolving quickly into anger.

“Oh,” he says and sits back down. “Where’s your little friend? Did he have words with that big fucker’s shotgun?”

“No,” she replies. “He’s fine.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Scarborough thought I should talk to you alone. He thought—”

“Well he thought wrong, so fuck off,” and he lights a cigarette, his face framed momentarily in the glow from a match.

“I wish I could do that, fuck off,” she says. “I don’t like this place.”

Deacon doesn’t reply, just sits there, staring towards the tunnel and smoking his cigarette. She takes a few steps nearer the gazebo, and her feet make hardly any sound on the concrete path.

“What is that place?” she asks and points towards the tunnel.

“Go away,” Deacon grumbles, and the tip of his cigarette flares orange red.

“It’s some kind of tunnel, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s some kind of tunnel.”

“People should be more careful where they dig holes.”

“I’ll remember that. Now leave me alone.”

Starling Jane takes another step towards Deacon. “I’m sorry we upset you before,” she says. “I know Scarborough can be a real asshole sometimes.”

“Oh, you’ve figured that out, have you?”

Two more steps and she’s standing under the gazebo. She lays the manila envelope on the picnic table in front of him, and Deacon pretends not to have noticed, still watching the blockhouse, the ink-black eyes and mouth of the tunnel.

“I have to make you understand what’s at stake here,” she says. “Can I sit down?”

“Can I fucking stop you?”

“Your life’s in danger, Deacon. And the lives of your wife and unborn child. That’s why she’s here, the woman you’ve seen in your visions.”

Deacon turns his head and stares at her, his hard face slack, expressionless, his eyes hidden in the night. For a moment, she’s almost more afraid of him than of the tunnel.

“And you two are my guardian angels, is that it?”

“No,” Starling Jane says and sits down across from him. “No, we’re not. But we can help you.”

“
If
I help you first,” Deacon says, and she nods her head. He laughs and slowly grinds his cigarette out on the table-top, flicks the butt away. “What if I say no? Why would I want to get myself mixed up in this shit?”

“That’s what Scarborough was trying to tell you. You’re mixed up in it already. You have been since the day you led those cops out to Mary English’s house. That’s why she’s here, Deacon, the woman you saw, the woman who killed your friend, to find you and your wife.”

“To settle the score, right?” and he laughs again, a weary and hollow laugh like a very old man, someone who’s tired of living, but too afraid to lie down and die. “To teach me not to go poking my nose where it don’t belong. No good deed goes unpunished.”

“It’s complicated, Deacon.”

“So, what’s the score? Is this some sort of Mafioso shit, these
people
you work for? Some sort of gang?”

“I can’t tell you who they are. Who they are doesn’t matter, not as far as you’re concerned.”

“No, of course it doesn’t.”

A sudden breeze blows through the trees, and the dry leaves still clinging to the branches rattle and scratch loud against each other. Starling Jane shivers and hugs herself, glances nervously over her shoulder at the blockhouse.

“What do you want me to do?” he asks, and she turns to face him again.

“Two days from now, on Sunday, call the detective who took you to see the body. Tell him you need to talk to him again.”

“And what do I
need
to tell him?”

“That you’ve seen the killer, here, in your mind,” and she puts her left thumb against her temple.

“Look, if I start telling him what I’ve seen, the last thing he’s going to do is believe me.”

“You
don’t
tell him what you saw. You describe a man, a white man in his mid-forties. A man with a swastika tattooed on his back. There are a few more details in the envelope.”

Deacon picks up the envelope and turns it over in his hands. “You want me to fucking lie to the cops,” he says.

“You’ve lied to them already. You told them you didn’t see anything when you did.”

“Yeah, well. You’ve just got all the answers, don’t you?”

“There’s an address in the envelope. You tell them to go to that address, and they’ll find the evidence to support almost everything you say.”

Deacon puts the envelope down again and scratches at his chin.

“I don’t get it. You say she’s come after me and Chance, and that you’re trying to help us, but now you’re protecting her.”

“We’re not trying to protect her. We’re here to kill her, Deacon. But you have to understand, the cops can’t stop her, and if they get close, she’ll run.”

“If she runs, she’s not my goddamn problem anymore.”

Another gust and restless, windblown leaves whisper among themselves, murmuring Starling’s name in their wordless autumn language, and she says a silent prayer that Narcissa Snow hasn’t learned to listen to the trees yet.

“She’s not going anywhere until she finishes what she came here to do, Deacon. She believes that her life depends on it. If the cops catch on, she’ll run, but not until after you’re dead and your wife is dead.”

“And that’s all I have to do, this one little lie to the cops, and I’m free and clear?”

“No,” she says. “There will be other things, later on, but that’s the first of it.”

Deacon reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a crumpled piece of paper, slides it across the picnic table to Starling Jane. She looks at it a moment, then looks back to him.

“That symbol,” he says. “She drew it on the wall above Soda’s bed, in his blood. What does it mean?”

“I don’t know,” she lies, because she’s said everything she was sent to say, because there are too many things she can never tell him, things connected to other things, and she hands the sheet of paper back to Deacon. “We knew it would get your attention, that’s all.”

“What I said back at the bar, I meant it, you know. If either of you fuckers comes anywhere near Chance, I’ll kill you. I wasn’t kidding. She’s the only thing I have left in the world.”

“Then why aren’t you with her, Deacon? Why are you sitting here in the dark by yourself? She needs you.”

“And you promise you’ll leave her out of this?”

“I can only promise I’ll do my best,” she says, and then there’s a scrambling noise back towards the tunnel, and Starling’s heart flutters and misses a beat. The adrenaline burning hot in her veins, hotter than crank or cocaine, and she draws the pistol from the shoulder holster inside her sweater and points it at the tunnel.

“Relax, okay?” Deacon says. “It’s just a raccoon. They’re all over the place up here. They live under the kudzu and come out at night to eat from the garbage cans.”

But Jane doesn’t relax, all the trees still whispering among themselves, the night too full of phantoms or the threat of phantoms, and the gate to the tunnel like a gaping, hungry jaw full of wrought-iron teeth.

“It’s only the old water works tunnel,” Deacon says. “It runs all the way under the mountain to Homewood. Me and Chance and a friend of hers got stoned one night and broke into it, years ago, but Chance chickened out. We didn’t get very far.”

“Raccoons,” Starling Jane says, taking a deep breath and lowering the pistol.

“Yeah, raccoons. Or maybe somebody’s cat. Chill out.”

Starling checks the safety and returns the pistol to its holster. “It’s good that Chance was afraid. People should be more careful where they dig holes.”

“You said that already.”

“I have to go now, Deacon,” she says, standing, stepping out from underneath the gazebo. “But everything you need to know is there in the envelope. And you have the number if you should need to reach us.”

“I don’t even know your name.”

“Jane,” she tells him. “Just call me Jane. Everyone else does.”

“Don’t fuck me over, Jane,” he says. “You tell Mr. Pentecost I meant what I said at the bar.”

“He knows that. I’ll see you later, Deacon Silvey. You just do what we’ve asked and this will all be over soon.”

And then she turns and walks quickly back down the winding path to the road, wanting to be far away from that haunted tunnel and the tall gossiping trees.

T
he sun comes up slow and cold, heartless blue-white light to worm its way through the trees crowded close about the old house on Cullom Street and find Narcissa still squatting naked on the floor in front of the remains of the dead rat. A deep gouge in the wood from the bullet, and she’s picked the rat apart with her nails, has spread its innards and bones, its fur and teeth, like a deck of tarot cards. A meaning to every drop of blood, unspoken significance in each speck of flesh or tiny vertebra, and she has squatted there for hours teasing understanding from the gore. And finally, their intentions revealed to her in the torn membrane of a kidney, the acute angle of a femur to a rib, their intentions
and
their names, and, what’s more, that they have gone to the seer. Narcissa grinds her teeth and stares at the morning light, then licks a bit of rat off her thumb and looks back down at the mess on the floor.

Did you think they’d just give up?
one of the voices whispers, taunting her, someone coiled beneath her sleeping bag.
You can keep killing them from now until Doomsday and it won’t make any difference.

“What do you know?” Narcissa asks it. “You’re just a scrap of something I couldn’t digest.”

We
see
things over here,
the voice says, and now it sounds more frightened than scornful.
Hell is full of windows. Some of them are your eyes, Narcissa.

“Shut up,” she says and pokes at the kidney again. “I knew they were coming. This doesn’t change a thing.”

You didn’t know they would go to find the seer,
Aldous mumbles smugly from his place in the closet.
And you didn’t know that he’d listen to them. I bet you didn’t know that.

“It won’t matter.”

They’ve warned him about you, Narcissa. And that one, he just might be smart enough to listen.

“One day, old man, one day I’m going to cut you out of my head like a cancer. One day I’m going to seal your soul in a bottle and toss it into the sea.”

And Narcissa glances from the dismembered rat to all her careful, irrelevant plans thumbtacked to the bedroom wall. Her photocopied map of the city and the diamond that she drew there, the one small red circle where she killed the boy three nights ago, the other points to complete the configuration.

You’ve made too much a game of it,
Aldous sneers.
You always have to make a game of everything, sadistic little games when all you have to do is slit a throat or two and walk away.

“The fucking game,” and then she stops herself, licks anxiously at her lips, and continues. “The
plot,
that was for me. I wanted them to see. I wanted them to appreciate what I can do.”

But they don’t care, child,
her grandfather says.
They don’t give a shit and a holler about all your silly schemes.

“Shut up,” Narcissa snarls and realizes how empty her stomach is, reaches inside the circle of salt and powdered sage and eats the rat’s heart and lungs.

You’re not safe in this house,
the voice beneath the sleeping bag says.
They’ll come here soon. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re already on their way.

“They won’t stop me,” she says. “They’re only changelings.”

And what are you, Granddaughter? Just what the hell are you?

“What am I?” she replies, a question to answer his question, and Narcissa turns her head to face the rising sun. “I am everything you could never be, old man. I’m exactly who and what you made me.”

What will you do?
a very small voice inside her asks, a nervous, twitching voice, and Narcissa realizes it’s the dead rat, and that makes her smile.

“Everything I came here to do,” she says and slowly rubs her flat, muscular belly, her hard and haunted flesh. “But it is a shame I’ll have to rush things now.”

Narcissa turns back to the morning sunlight, warm and reassuring against her face and shoulders, her breasts, warm against the place she cut her face with the razor blade two nights before. The shallow slice along her chin, and she knows that it’ll heal like all the others have before it, will leave behind no sign of a scar, no dent or blemish in her resilient, damning mask. The sunlight smells like squirrels and moldering, fallen leaves, and Narcissa flares her nostrils, breathing in the day, trying to remember why she ever went to the trouble to rent this house. Time she thought she’d have, maybe, a place to be alone with her work and no paper-thin motel walls to worry about.

“One more, though, just to get Mr. Silvey’s attention.”

But he already knows,
the voice beneath the sleeping bag reminds her.
They told him last night.

Narcissa shuts her eyes, wishing the sun didn’t feel so good, wishing she were stronger and could slip forever into the gentle darkness beneath Miss Josephine’s house in Providence, the endless tunnels and cellars and wells linking a hundred graveyards.

You’re insane,
Aldous mutters.
No one else should have to die because you’re insane,
but Narcissa ignores him, listening instead to her heartbeat, steady as waves on the ocean, and the twittering ghost of the rat lost and drowning in her stomach.

Sadie Jasper curses and squints at the morning stinging her sleepy eyes, hardly ever up this early, 8:35 by the pink plastic Kit-Kat clock hanging on the kitchen wall. She pours her third cup of coffee, hot and black and bitter, and sits down on her stool beside the window, the kitchen much too small for a table so she has to make do with the stool and a patch of counter space. In the winter, she has to sit farther from the window, because of the heat and steam from the half-sized radiator squeezed in beneath the sill. Her bowl of Lucky Charms is starting to turn soggy, but she isn’t really hungry, anyway. She sips at the coffee and stares out the window at the street and the cars and a woman walking her ugly little terrier dog.

She was up most of the night with Deacon’s sketch, the circle and the line, searching through her books for anything like it and coming up empty-handed. It might be Egyptian, she thought at first, maybe two hieroglyphs used together, but that was only a hunch, and her hunches are usually wrong. About three thirty, ready to give up and go to bed, she found herself staring groggy-eyed at the frontispiece of Blake’s
Europe: A Prophecy,
“The Ancient of Days,” Urizen the measurer crouched inside the yellow sphere of the sun and reaching down towards an unseen world with his vast compass. And she wondered if it could be that simple, Deacon’s symbol meant to be the sun, sunrise or sunset, and the black line underneath nothing more than the horizon.

“Yuck,” she says and pushes the cereal bowl across the counter until it bumps into the microwave, a Christmas gift from her parents because she hates using the cranky old gas stove. Sadie reaches for her cigarettes and lights one, exhales tobacco and cloves. A draft immediately pulls the smoke out the open window. She glances at the clock again, and the hands don’t seem to have moved at all. The cat’s bulbous eyes rock lazily from side to side, its eyes and its rhinestone-studded pendulum tail, and
Hell,
she thinks,
I should have slept at least another fucking hour.

And that brings her back to the question she’s been asking herself since Deacon left the night before: Who’s she doing this for? And why the hurry? Sadie sips the scalding chicory coffee and watches the Kit-Kat clock, her head nodding in time to its tail. There was a month or two when she thought she might be falling in love with Deacon Silvey, though she doubts he ever had any idea, the days and nights they spent talking books and drinking, but him in love with Chance all along—the school-smart girl from another world so far from Sadie’s that it might as well have been another goddamned planet, the
normal
girl who didn’t hang out with the freaks and slackers and ne’er-do-wells, didn’t waste all her time in bars and punker clubs.

After the wedding—just a minister at the Jefferson County courthouse, so no big deal, none of Deacon’s friends invited—a week or more of people asking her if she’d heard the news yet. “Did you hear Deacon married that girl he was seeing?” “Did you hear she’s rich?” “Did you hear she’s boring as Hell on a Sunday afternoon?”

And then one night at The Plaza, Sadie getting drunk on White Russians, and Sheryl had asked her if she was okay, if she needed to talk to someone. Sadie shrugged and finished her drink, stared a moment at her reflection in the big mirror behind the counter, her too-blue eyes framed in a smudgy raccoon mask of eyeliner.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said and used a paper napkin to dab milk off her waxy black lipstick.

“Are you sure? Because I know how you felt about him—”

“I don’t
need
Deacon Silvey around to remind me how to be a loser, Sheryl. Believe me, I know
all
about it.”

“Okay,” Sheryl said,
okay
but her voice full of uncertainty. “I just wanted you to know I’m here, if you
do
need to talk.”

“Yeah, well, whatever,” and Sadie ordered another White Russian. Sheryl said something motherly about how it was better to try and talk some of it out than get shit-faced, that talk was a lot cheaper than booze and didn’t give you a hangover, but she brought Sadie’s drink anyway.

Sadie watches the pink Kit-Kat clock, and “That shit’s ancient fucking history, ladybug,” she says, setting her coffee mug down on the counter. It doesn’t matter who she’s doing it for, she reminds herself, only that she’s doing something that might make a difference somewhere down the line, that one day someone might say,
Oh yeah, it was Sadie Jasper finally figured that out. Didn’t you know? She helped catch the killer,
and maybe she’ll even be there to see the disbelief and confusion on the faces of all the people who’ve never thought she’d ever amount to anything.

The clock’s minute hand grudgingly moves ahead one tick, one tock, sixty seconds closer to nine; Sadie finishes her coffee and cigarette, then sets her cereal bowl in the sink, something she can deal with later, and goes to get dressed.

The Akeley Collection something the library’s never gotten around to cataloging, a couple dozen books in two cardboard boxes, lots one and two from the Estate of Mr. Charles L. Patrick Akeley, donated in November 1963. Sadie fills out a request form and gives it to the balding, gray-haired librarian.

“I swear,” he says. “I don’t think a single solitary soul has ever once asked to look at those old things but you. One of these days, I’m going to have to find the time and money to take better care of them.”

“You really should do that,” Sadie replies. “There are some very rare books in those boxes.”

“Well, like I said, one of these days,” and the librarian smiles, showing off his perfect dentures, and reads the slip of paper in his hand. “You only need Lot Two today?”

“I think so.”

The librarian nods his head slowly and stares at her, his thick glasses magnifying his eyes just enough that he reminds Sadie of Mr. Magoo.

“I hope you won’t think I’m being too nosy or anything,” he says, “but do people ever stare at you? On account of the way you dress, I mean?”

Sadie frowns and glances down at her long black dress, the spiderweb design woven into the velveteen, her black-and-white candy-striped hose and tall Doc Marten boots.

“I’m sorry,” the librarian says. “I never should have asked you a personal question like that.”

“No, it’s okay. But yeah, people stare at me. Sometimes they do more than just stare,” and Sadie lowers her voice an octave and affects a thick redneck drawl. “‘Yo, Morticia? You s’pposed to be some kind of vampire or somethin’? You wanna drink my blood?’”

“You don’t, do you?” the librarian asks her.

“What? You mean drink blood? Oh no, not since I was a kid.”

The librarian nods again and seems to consider that a moment, scowls at the slip of paper she’s handed him, and then he looks back up at her.

“If you don’t mind my asking, why
do
you dress like that?”

And Sadie just wants to get to work, the librarian’s attention wearing thin, so she leans close to him and whispers the first thing that comes to mind.

“There are people, you see—mostly members of certain secret alchemical orders—who believe the world ended a long, long time ago, and all the stuff we think we see and hear and all the people walking around,
everything’s
only a ghost of that world which still hasn’t figured out it’s dead. So, it seems to me like someone ought to dress for the funeral.”

The librarian’s eyes grow the slightest bit larger behind his spectacles, and he manages a dubious, slightly embarrassed smile.

“Well, all right then,” he says and goes away, disappears into the claustrophobic maze of shelves behind his desk and leaves Sadie alone in the stuffy, overlit archives room in the basement of the library. The dropped ceiling so low that she can almost touch it, and there are long wooden tables with a few green-shaded banker’s lamps despite the rows of fluorescents overhead. The white walls are decorated with antique maps of Alabama and the other southeastern states, priceless hand-tinted maps from the Civil War and colonial days. The room is crowded with file cabinets and a microfiche reader taking up one whole corner, a drooping, anemic-looking potted plant in another.