Low Red Moon (41 page)

“What the fuck were we doing in the house?” Deacon asks again, whispering, but he can hear the edge creeping into his voice, the anger that won’t take very long to grow too big for whispers.

“Narcissa took things, important things, things that we had to try to get back from her. Scarborough hoped that she’d hidden them somewhere in the house.”

“What are you telling me? That you used Chance as
bait
so the house would be empty?”

“She’s only one woman. There are many lives at stake here, Deacon.”

“No way,” Deacon says, looking down at his broad right hand now, the deep lines in his palm, the fine wrinkles and creases at the ends of his fingers, wondering if he can kill her before Officer Merrill figures out what’s going on and stops him. “You did. You fucking used her as bait.”

“I tried to stop her, Deacon. I stood between Narcissa and Chance as long as I could.”

“And Scarborough took me along for the ride because he thought maybe I could help him find whatever the hell it was the two of you were after. You were using us all along.”

“It was his idea, Deacon.”

“But
you
went along with it.”

“Yes, I did. I didn’t see any other way. But it was also my idea to go to your apartment, to try and stop her. I was dead anyway, after all the things I showed you at the motel.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean, you were dead anyway?”

Jane glances towards the closed door, then sighs and slips her sunglasses back on.

“When we are taken,” she says, speaking slowly, carefully, the way a teacher addresses his pupils, “when we’re still just babies, we’re bound to the hounds by an irrevocable blood oath. And if we ever break that oath, as I did last night by showing you images of the Providence necropolis, then we forfeit our lives. I was already dead. I’m dead now. I’m just waiting for them to send someone to—”

“What about the cop out there? You’re protected.”

“He can’t stop them, any more than the police can stop Narcissa, any more than Scarborough and I could have stopped her.”

“So you’re just sitting here waiting to die?”

Jane rolls the wheelchair forward an inch or two, then rolls it back again. “I can’t very well run,” she says. “Besides, I knew the price of my actions. I don’t think it would be right of me to run, do you?”

Deacon closes his eyes and rubs hard at his temples, wishing that Downs had never followed him into the restroom, wishing he’d taken the bottles and gone straight back to the Travelodge.

“Is she still alive?” he asks without looking at the girl in the wheelchair.

“I think so,” Jane says, no longer whispering, but not speaking very loudly, either. “We know a little about what Narcissa’s trying to do. If we’re right, she has to keep Chance alive until moonrise on the thirty-first. But she’s not sane, Deacon. Something might have happened.”

“Something,” Deacon says, and when he opens his eyes, Jane’s standing at the foot of the bed, staring back at him through her sunglasses.

“We told you about Narcissa,” she says. “About her grandfather, Iscariot, and her father, Aldous. About her intentions.”

“Yeah,” Deacon says. “You told me. She’s ticked off because she wants to be a real monster and the other monsters won’t let her join the club. She thinks giving them our kid will buy her way in.”

“And there’s a…a birthing ceremony,” Jane says, and her voice is growing hesitant, shaky. “But it can only be performed at moonrise on certain nights, only on four nights each year. The next is All Hallow’s Eve. That’s when Narcissa will call up the hounds to receive your child.”

“This is entirely fucking insane, you know that?”

“Deacon Silvey, I have already given up my life so you would believe me. You’ve seen them for yourself. You’ve
stood
in—”

“Yeah, but what I see—”

“—isn’t always the truth?” she asks, finishing his declaration as a question, turning his defenses back on him. “Does it really matter whether or not you believe? Do you think it matters to Chance, or to Narcissa?”

“Will they come to her?”

“Yes, they’ll come. She’s learned enough that they’ll have to come. There are rules.”

“But not to take her back?” Deacon asks, and Jane glances nervously towards the door.

“Oh, they’ll take her back,” she says and smiles, a furtive, vengeful smile. “But not the way that Narcissa thinks, not the way she
wants
. They have plans.”

Deacon stops rubbing his head, not like it’s making the pain any better, the pain that only gets bigger and bigger, that only wants to swallow him alive. He stares at the silent television screen, because it’s better than the girl’s smile. A fire somewhere, and there’s video that must have been filmed from a helicopter, aerial views of a column of black and billowing smoke and the red-orange flames writhing just underneath. An eager, pricking sensation at the back of Deacon’s neck and déjà vu so strong it sends chill bumps up and down his arms.

“Where’s the remote?” he asks, and Jane doesn’t answer, but looks back over her shoulder at the television on the wall.

“I don’t like television,” she says. “The noise bothers me. I don’t know how people stand it all the time.”

“I need to hear this.”

“It’s just a fire,” she says. “You can see it’s a fire without the noise, can’t you?”

The remote is lying on the table beside the bed, and he aims it at the set, hits the mute button, and the anchorwoman’s voice fills the room.

“—the scene near Red Bridge, Pennsylvania, this morning. The fire is still burning out of control, and officials have yet to comment on what could have caused the blaze. But they are saying that as many as seven or eight people may have died in the fire.”

“Oh,” Jane says, turning her back on Deacon, removing her sunglasses and squinting up at the television. “I see.”

“
What
do you see, Jane? What the fuck’s going on? How did I know that—?”

“Because there are rules,” she says again and takes a step nearer the TV. “And there are lines, lines in the void that tie us all together.”

“It’s impossible to say at this time what may have ignited the tanks,” the anchorwoman says as the camera circles a safe distance from the roiling boundaries of the inferno. “Fire crews from nearby Chambersburg are still fighting to contain the flames.”

“It was her, wasn’t it?” Deacon asks. “Narcissa did that,” and the girl nods her head very slowly, not taking her eyes off the screen.

“Like I told you, she’s not sane. Something was bound to happen, sooner or later.”

“Then she’s only made it as far as Pennsylvania?” he asks. “She still has a long way to go, right?”

“Yes,” Jane says. “If she’s still alive.”

“Where’s she going, Jane?”

“I can’t tell you that,” the girl says and holds one hand up like she’s about to touch the screen, but she doesn’t. “I can’t
tell
you, but I
can
take you there. There’s still time. Get me out of here, Deacon, and I can take you there.”

“What do you mean you can’t tell me?”

“Get me out of here, and I’ll
take
you there,” Jane says again.

“And just how the fuck am I supposed to do that? We got Officer Friendly sitting right outside your door, and the police and the FBI are both breathing down my neck.”

“You would never find it on your own, Deacon. Not in a hundred years. But I can show you. I know the way.”

“Maybe you got more going on in there than a concussion,” he says and touches his thumb to the side of his aching head. “Maybe it’s affected your hearing, too.”

She turns, then, and that hungry smile is back, that smile and her pupils dilated until her irises are only eclipse rinds of color to ring ebony pools.

“I can deal with the policeman,” she says. “I’ve already been working on him, just in case,” and she produces a dog-eared playing card, the ace of spades held between her thumb and middle finger, as if she’s plucked it from the sterile hospital air.

“I don’t think he’s going to be impressed by card tricks,” Deacon says.

“You let me worry about him. But I’ll need you to create a disturbance of some sort. Something that will get everyone’s attention,” and she looks quickly back over her shoulder at the television and the burning gas station. “Find a fire alarm,” she says. “Find a fire alarm and pull it.”

“She’s
dead,
” Deacon says, getting up from the bed, fighting back the dizziness and nausea. “I
know
she’s dead.”

“You don’t
know
anything,” Jane says, her smile fading now, becoming an angry, impatient scowl. “Until you see her corpse, until you hold it in your arms, you don’t know anything, and I’m tired of listening to you whine.”

“I’m leaving,” he says and takes a step towards the door, but she holds out a hand to stop him.

“Find an alarm,” she says. “You won’t get another opportunity. Neither of us will.”

“You just said you were good as dead, that they would send someone to kill you for showing me what you did.”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t still have a duty. If we hurry, and help each other, maybe it’s not too late to do the things we were supposed to do to begin with. In my dreams, I saw you, Deacon. I heard you tell Narcissa you would
find
her.”

“An alarm,” he says doubtfully. “A fire alarm,” and she nods her head. Deacon wipes sweat off his brow and looks down at his bandaged hand for a moment. “Have you ever been to jail?” he asks her.

“I’ve been lots worse places,” she says, sitting down in her wheelchair again, as the door opens and Officer Merrill sticks his bald head into the room.

“Time’s up, Mr. Slivey,” he says and then taps his wristwatch to prove the point.

“Yeah, I guess it is,” Deacon whispers, and Jane nods her head.

“Thank you for coming,” she tells him. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help. But don’t worry, they’ll find her.”

Deacon glances at the TV again, the firemen with their swollen hoses, white arcs of water to keep a demon at bay. “I suppose we’ll see,” he says, and, as he leaves Room 534, Jane asks the cop if he feels like another game of gin.

“I
t’s three thirty-four,” the child says, looking at the wristwatch that was Chance’s grandfather’s, the watch she’ll never give her son or daughter for his or her tenth birthday. The child is sitting on the floorboard behind the front seat, wiping the sweat from Chance’s forehead and cheeks with a scrap of cloth torn from the hem of its T-shirt. Chance turns her head so she can see its face, its perfect, pale skin, porcelain and morning light, that face, and the child smiles for her and wipes her forehead again.

“It’s getting dark,” Chance whispers, too hoarse now to speak any louder, her throat too dry, and the child shakes its head and looks up at the sky through the rear windshield.

“No, Mother,” it says. “It’s still only afternoon. There’s still a lot of day left.”

“Not a lot,” Chance whispers. “Just a little, just a little more, that’s all.”

“Maybe it’s enough, though,” the child says reassuringly, still smiling, but Chance knows better. The long drive almost over so everything’s almost over. And just beginning, as well, but she’d rather not think about that part. Easier to accept that it’s ending and whatever the werewolf has in mind, there won’t be anything else for her afterwards. She looks at the back of the monster’s head, its shaggy blonde hair tangled and moving like restless, writhing vines. Some colorless plant that can’t grow aboveground, the opposite of photosynthesis for it to live, tendrils to drink up the blackness from the hidden places deep beneath the world.

“You don’t give up,” the child says, leaning close, its soft lips pressed to her ear. “That’s not what happened.”

Another contraction then, but no real pain, too much of the werewolf’s morphine in her veins, clogging up her brain, for the pain to make it through. She gasps anyway, though, surprised at the force of the sensation, the pull of tightening muscles, and sits up a little.

“Be careful, Mother,” the child says. “Don’t wear yourself out. You’ll need your strength.”

Chance starts to ask why, then decides she really doesn’t want to know, that she has a pretty good idea already, and, besides, she’s sitting up enough now that she can see more than sky. Her back braced firmly against the door of the big steel-gray Lincoln they stole after the diner. After the fire, and Chance watches the unfamiliar countryside rushing by outside, the land turning flat and sandy, the last low tree-crowned hillocks of glacial till quickly giving way to the salt marshes and a small river winding along between the rushes and reeds.

“Where the hell are we, Narcissa?” she asks, speaking as loudly as she can, forcing the words out as the contraction ends.

“Almost home,” the werewolf growls back at her, watching her in the rearview mirror for a moment with its yellow eyes.

“Don’t talk to her anymore,” the child whispers. “That just makes her stronger.”

“I have to know where it’s taking you,” Chance tells it, and then she draws a deep, hitching breath, breathing deep while she can, before the next contraction begins. The stink of the marshes is getting in through Narcissa’s open window, the musky, sweet salt and mud smell before the sea, more pungent than the smell of the ocean Chance held inside her for so many months, her own private sea until her water broke and that warm tide emptied out between her legs and across the backseat of the Lincoln.

“She likes the way your fear tastes,” the child says. “Every time she hears it, she gets a little bit stronger.”

“He isn’t coming,” Chance whispers and lies down again, too weak to sit up any longer, too stoned, and there’s nothing out there she wants to see, anyway. “He
would
have come, if he could. But there’s no time left.”

“Did you really think he would?” the werewolf asks. “You think this is all some fairy tale, and the brave woodsman saves Red Riding Hood at the last. Hell, lady, that’s not even how that story’s supposed to end. He got drunk. He got drunk and forgot all about you.”

“Don’t listen to her,” the child says. “Please, please don’t listen to her. She wants you to give up.”

Chance turns her head towards the child again, and there are tears running down its face. “He didn’t get drunk,” she says. “I know he didn’t do that. And he didn’t forget about us, either. But he isn’t coming.”

“If that’s true, how can I be here?” the child asks and then looks at its wristwatch again. “If that’s true, I wouldn’t be here talking to you, would I?”

“It’s all a dream,” Chance says and gently touches the child’s forehead, brushing the hair from its green eyes. “You’re here so I won’t have to die alone. You’re here with me now because I’m not going to get to see you later.”

“No, Mother, that’s not true. But if you start believing it’s true, she can
make
it true.”

Chance closes her eyes, silently counting off seconds, waiting for the next contraction. “What time is it?” she asks the child.

“Three thirty-seven,” it replies.

“Your father is a good man,” Chance says. “Whatever she tells you, whatever anyone else says, don’t you believe them. He’s a
strong
man. He would have found us if he could have.”

“He’s a drunk,” the werewolf grunts. “A drunk and a coward.”

“It’s okay. I know she’s lying,” the child whispers in Chance’s ear, and its breath smells faintly of cinnamon. “I know what’s true and what’s a lie.”

“That’s good,” Chance says, “that’s very good,” as a contraction starts, and she grips the fake leather upholstery. Her flesh like folding earth, she thinks, like continents grinding one against the other, changing the face of a planet, changing her.

“Can you sleep?” the child asks. “It would all be easier if you could sleep,” and Chance manages to cough out a rough laugh.

“No,” she says. “But I wouldn’t want to. It would change the dream, wouldn’t it? I want to be with you as long as I can.”

She opens her eyes, fixing them on a thin watercolor brush stroke of clouds set high in the blue New England sky, white clouds going yellow-orange and indigo around the edges as the sun slips closer to the coming night, the coming darkness as unstoppable as the contractions. She watches the clouds and tries to remember to breathe, keep breathing for the baby, keep breathing because she still can because the monster driving the car hasn’t taken that away from her yet. It will, the way it took the lives of all the people in the diner, but not until later, so she still has work to do, time to live through until the end.

“It’ll be okay,” the child says. “He
is
coming. He’s coming fast with the starling girl to drive a stake through her black heart.”

“I think that only works with vampires,” Chance mumbles as the contraction finally releases her, and she turns her head to face the child. But it’s gone, and now there’s only the empty space behind the front seat where it was sitting, nothing but a couple of soft drink cans and a crumpled McDonald’s bag lying there on the floorboard.

“Oh,” she whispers. “No. Please come back. I can’t do this by myself,” but the only reply is the chilly wind whipping in through the open window, the angry rock music blaring from the car stereo, and the sound of the monster laughing softly to itself.

So many long red years since Narcissa Snow has passed through Ipswich, since she’s driven this route north and east along Argilla Road, winding between the tall, swaying grasses of the Great Marsh and the dusky waters of the narrow Manuxet River, on this path of asphalt and potholes that eventually leads down to the bay and the sea. The road home, just exactly like she told the crazy woman lying in her backseat talking to children who aren’t there, the ruins of the house her grandfather—not Aldous, but her real grandfather, Iscariot Snow—built in the dunes more than eighty years ago.

The home you burned,
Aldous sneers from someplace inside her crowded head.
The home where you killed me.

Narcissa ignores the ghost, too many years and too many miles, far too much murder done, to allow him to ruin this moment, this and all the moments soon to come. This is the evening she’s worked for since the Benefit Street ghouls finally turned her away for the last time, and no memories of the distant, sour past will be permitted to spoil it, no matter how loudly they jabber and whine for her attention. Hardly an hour left until moonrise, but that should be time enough, time to find whatever the sea and wind have left of the house, the long, indestructible stone slabs upon which Iscariot Snow built it.

“Them stones were here before the Indians came,” Aldous told her when she was a child. “Them stones might have been here since before there were people anywhere in the world. Sometimes, late at night, they sing.”

And that much was true. More than one night, she slipped out of the tall house and sat in the sand listening to the great blocks of black stone visible just beneath the bricks and mortar, their swooping, trilling song whenever the moon was bright and full and the stars shimmered overhead. A wordless, alien melody Narcissa could never quite remember the next day, no matter how hard she tried, and sometimes the stones gave her dreams of ancient days when the waters of the newborn Atlantic were as warm as summer and the skies were thick with dragons.

“You keep on listening close enough, child,” Aldous said, “and one of these nights they’ll serenade you all the way to Hell.” But she listened anyway, almost every opportunity she got, not sure that Hell would be so very different from her life in the old house.

Guess you’re home free,
Aldous murmurs.
Guess even old Neptune on his throne of gold and starfish couldn’t stop you now.

“Why don’t you shut up,” Narcissa says, watching for the turn-off to the house, past the lower falls now, and the sun is glittering brightly off Ipswich Bay. “You lost the war, old man. You lost, and now it’s time for you to be a good phantom and just fade the fuck away.”

In the backseat, Chance moans loudly and asks what time it is.

I suppose you’re right. Ain’t too much left for me to say,
the old man sighs, and she can feel his bony ectoplasmic fingers slither across the convolutions of her brain.
You got the book, you got all the magic words, you got an offering fit for old Orc himself, all wrapped up safe and sound in its momma’s innards.

“They turned up their noses at me,” Narcissa replies bitterly. “But now they’ll see. They tried to kill me, just like you, old man. They’re never going to underestimate me again.”

Too damn bad Mnemosyne and that old whore Terpsichore couldn’t have been around to see that pretty little piece of work you did back in Pennsylvania.

“Oh, they’ll have heard,” Narcissa says, remembering the way Chance sat perfectly still while she shot the people in the diner, one by one by one, the men and the women, the two children. Remembering the sound of her gun, the gas tanks going up as they drove away. “I’m sure the crows will have told them everything by now.”

No doubt,
Aldous snickers.
And one day soon, they’re gonna write ballads about you, child. One day, your name’s gonna be carved in the ebony door at the bottom of the Well of Despair.

“Mock me all you want, Aldous, but you’ll see. Very soon now, you’ll see,” and then she’s come to the sandy, overgrown road leading down to the dunes and the place where the house once stood. Narcissa pulls over, bumping off the blacktop onto the low shoulder, and Chance cries out behind her.

“How you doing back there, crazy lady?” Narcissa asks and glances at Chance in the rearview mirror. “How much longer you think you’ve got?”

“Who were you talking to?”

“No one,” Narcissa replies. “No one at all.”

“You’re making fun of me,” Chance moans and shuts her eyes, gritting her teeth together.

“Well, I’d say you’re about ready to pop,” Narcissa tells her and then looks down the crooked, rutted trail leading away from Argilla Road. “You better hang on to something back there. I’m afraid this is going to be a rough ride.”

You can’t get a damn Lincoln Continental through there,
Aldous says.
It’s hardly even a decent deer trail anymore.

“Well, I’m sure as hell not carrying her fat ass.”

Make her walk, then. It’s not that far. Walking her will speed the delivery.
Narcissa starts to ask him how he knows that, but
I made your mother walk,
he says.
Didn’t do her no harm.

“She wasn’t drugged,” Narcissa replies. “And I bet she had a level floor to walk on.”

“I’m not walking anywhere,” Chance says, the words puffed out between her ragged breaths.

“Shut up, crazy lady. You’ll do what I tell you to do.”

“Why? Why should I? You’re just going to kill me anyway.”

She’s got a point, you know,
Aldous says and laughs, and the noise of his laughter wakes up the other voices in her head.
Maybe you’re gonna be carrying her fat ass after all.

Where are we?
one of the dead children from the diner asks, and another voice answers it.
The end of hope,
it says, and
All the way back at the start,
another mutters.