Low Red Moon (47 page)

“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.

H
ardly 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, strung 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.

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.