Low Red Moon (28 page)

“You’re all wound up, freaking yourself out,” she says again, but she can’t even remember what the words are supposed to mean. She glances back at the mirror, and the impossible seascape is there again, if it ever went anywhere else.

“Not real,” she whispers and takes a step towards the sink. “Not real at all.”

A gull soars high above the whitecap sea, and she can hear it, its caw and the low roar of the surf against the shore.

“Alice,” she says, but the sound of the ocean has grown suddenly so much louder, drowning her out. She shuts her eyes, but when she opens them, nothing in the mirror has changed.

“Don’t turn around again,” a woman says, her voice as wild as the whirling hurricane clouds inching their way across the sky, as wild and as dangerous, and Chance doesn’t take her eyes off the mirror. She can see the woman standing in the distance, beyond the point where the white bathroom tile ends and sand and sea oats begin, much too far away for Chance to be able to hear her above the wind and the raucous, screeching gulls, but she can hear her, anyway. The woman is tall and wears a blue coat, a long navy-blue peacoat, and her eyes sparkle gold in the gloom. She’s holding a knife, and she looks over her shoulder at the waves.

“Mother Hydra,” she says. “Don’t mind her. I don’t think she’s ever going to wake up again.”

And as the first contraction hits, the first hot pain to drive the breath from Chance’s lungs, the woman in the navy peacoat raises her arms to the terrible, hungry sky. The second contraction and Chance’s knees buckle so she has to grip the edge of the sink for support. Lightning flashes across the gray sky and blood begins to drip from the woman’s outstretched hands.

“Not
real,
not real at all,” Chance says, and the woman balls her hands into tight, bleeding fists as the seascape comes apart in shredded kaleidoscope tatters, everything swept away in an instant by salt-damp wind and mercury-silver brilliance. And then there’s only the bathroom wall behind her, and the closed door, and the kettle screaming from the kitchen like a dying gull.

When Scarborough and the girl named Jane have finally finished talking, have done with their long and impossible story of monsters and changelings, secret societies and half-breeds, when she’s finished stitching up the gash from the broken glass, Deacon sets down the lukewarm can of Coke he’s been sipping. He stares at his bandaged left hand, maroon blotches showing through the gauze.

“This is bullshit,” he says. “And I’m going home.”

“It’s the truth,” Starling Jane replies flatly, sitting on the floor in one corner of the shabby little motel room, her knees tucked up beneath her chin.

“It’s total fucking
bullshit,
and even if it
was
the truth, that’s all the more reason I should be at home. I should be home with Chance.”

“Why? Because you still think you can protect her?” Scarborough asks. He’s just come out of the bathroom again, keeps having to get up from his seat on one of the beds to get fresh toilet paper because his nose won’t stop bleeding. There are crimson-stained wads of tissue scattered like strange flowers about the room.

“Because I think I’m supposed to be there to try.”

“That’s what she’s counting on, Deacon,” Jane says. “As much as Narcissa has a plan, killing you before she kills your wife is part of it.”

Scarborough laughs softly to himself and sits back down on the bed closest to the door. Deacon watches him from the other bed, taking what small satisfactions he can from the raw tapestry of cuts and bruises on the man’s face, his ruined nose, the left eye already starting to turn a bright reddish purple, and it’ll be a real shiner by morning.

“Your friend Sadie hurt her,” Scarborough says. “Maybe even slowed her down just a little, if we’re real damn lucky.”

“Yeah, well, I’m the luckiest motherfucker on the planet,” Deacon mutters, and Scarborough laughs again.

“A whole lot luckier than you have any goddamn right to be,” he says.

“I should have punched you in the mouth, instead.”

“You should stop running from the things you know better than to disbelieve. You should start trusting what you
see,
Mr. Silvey, not what you think you know.”

“If you’ll help us, we might be able to stop her,” Jane says from her spot on the floor. “With your sight.”

“Listen,
screw
my sight, okay? I mean, if I hadn’t led the cops to Mary English, this crazy bitch would never have come looking for me and Chance.”

“You can’t undo the past, Deacon,” Jane tells him. “You can only see it for what it is, what it truly is, and then try to set the present in order again. You’ve always known that.”

“Fuck me,” Deacon whispers and runs his fingers through his hair, looking at neither the girl nor Scarborough Pentecost now, staring straight ahead at the cheap wallpaper, faded yellow-green with tacky flecks of gold and a bamboo pattern, bamboo stalks and leaves. Someplace for the tigers to hide, their eyes burning bright as the golden eyes of madwomen.

“We need you to believe us,” Jane says, and she stands up then, brushing absently at the seat of her jeans. “And there’s really no more time for us to convince you.”

“Fine. If you two need to go find this woman, that’s your business. But I have to go home now. Thanks for keeping me sober.”

And then Scarborough takes out his pistol again, slips it from the black leather shoulder holster, and points it at Deacon’s chest.

“You won’t shoot me,” Deacon says, trying hard to sound like he believes it. “I’m no good to you dead.”

“No, but it doesn’t sound like you’re going to be any good to me alive, either. And I gotta tell you, Mr. Silvey, it’d sure as hell be satisfying to pull this trigger.” A trickle of blood leaks from Scarborough’s right nostril, and he licks it away. “And, to tell the gods’ honest truth, I couldn’t give a sick what happens to your wife
or
your kid. That’s not why I’m here. That’s not why they sent me down here to this backwards shithole of a city.”

Deacon swallows, his mouth gone dry despite the sticky soda aftertaste from the Coke. “Tell me this, Scarborough,” he asks. “Can you even take a piss without that thing in your hand?”

“There’s no more time for talk,” Jane says, scowls a disapproving, furtive scowl at Scarborough, and then she steps between them, between Deacon and the barrel of the gun. “We’ve told you as much of the truth as we’re allowed, a lot more than we should have told you. So now I’ll have to
show
you, because you haven’t left me any choice, and there’s only one way this night can end.”

“You better get out of my way, little girl,” Scarborough growls. “I’ve had enough of this prick. I can take care of this—”

“You just shut up for a goddamn minute,” she snaps back, and he does, disappointment smeared across his face like a mean dog coming unexpectedly to the end of its chain, but he doesn’t put the gun away.

“Show me what?” Deacon asks her.

“Secret things,” she replies and gently presses her middle fingers to his temples. “Terrible, beautiful things. Whatever it takes to make you believe.”

“Not everything I see is true. You know that.”

“Yes, Deacon, I do,” and then Starling Jane bends down and kisses him on the lips, her breath like tendrils of cinnamon and newly turned earth slipping down his throat, up his nose, spilling into the convolutions of his brain. Before he can blink them away, she presses her thumbs lightly against his open eyes, and the last dregs of the migraine dissolve like sugar sinking into warm water.

“You stay close,” she says. “It wouldn’t do to get lost, not where we’re going.”

And the world slips, or cracks, or was never really there to begin with, unless it’s only him that’s come apart, shattered by her touch. Falling into her, the deepest, softest folds of her, and if there are even colors here, he’s never seen them before and wouldn’t know what to call them; if there is light here, it’s the alien light hidden beyond the edges of the spectrum open to simple human eyes.

“All your life, since you were a child,” she says, her voice dripping down from the uneasy place where the sky should be, “you’ve lived at the muddy boundaries of so many different worlds—the past, the present, life and death, waking truth and dreaming truth. The borders are thin for you, but there are still borders, and they’ve almost driven you insane. In time, Deacon, they will.”

He tries to shut his eyes, but her thumbs are still in the way, her grip like iron wrapped round his skull. There’s more familiar light now, flickering yellow-white candle points, luminescent insects burning themselves alive, and the sudden smell of mold and cellar dust, like the basement of Chance’s old house. Something moves, bristling fur and eyes like gold coins washed in blood. “What are you doing, Jane?” a cold and guttural voice asks from the swarm of candlelight.

“I couldn’t find any other way,” she replies.

“For your sake, child, indeed, for
all
our sakes, I hope you are wiser than you seem.”

“Will it matter, Master Tantalus, if the mongrel has her way?” and the darkness, which he knows was never really true darkness at all, releases Deacon Silvey to the candles and the milder glow of phosphorescent fungi clinging to the walls of the vast ossuary. Jackstraw pillars of thighbones and toothless skulls that seem to rise up forever, broad arches of dry brown ribs and vertebrae, and all of it only a frame for the creatures squatting in the shadows. The wire-haired things watching him with glittering eyes, crouched there on their spindly legs, and he sinks to his knees in the filth and bits of bone covering the floor of the necropolis.

“The Land of Dreams,” Jane whispers in his ear, and now he sees that she’s standing there beside him. “Mary English’s Land of Dreams. And Narcissa Snow’s Land of Dreams, too.”

The smell and taste of rotting flesh and age-brittled bones so thick in the air that he gags, and Jane kneels down beside him and wipes the tears from his eyes.

“But she can never come here, Deacon. Narcissa is neither
ghul
nor changeling, neither a lurker in the wastes nor a child of the Cuckoo. But that’s all she desires, and she means to have it.”

“I don’t believe any of this,” Deacon mumbles, and the stooped things in the gloom laugh and bark and click their ebony claws against the earth at their feet.

Jane cleans away the spittle leaking from Deacon’s trembling lips, brushes the sweat-soaked hair back from his eyes.

“It
is
real, Deacon, and somewhere inside, you know that it’s real. That part of you that found Mary English, that part of you that can see what others leave behind.
That
part of you will always know this place is real.”

“You could die for this, Starling Jane,” one of the creatures snarls and squats in the dirt in front of Deacon. “You have broken the covenant.”

“But he had to see. He had to see for himself,” she says, and when the thing curls back its black canine lips and bares its teeth, she shows it her throat and Deacon vomits at its feet.

“Then it has seen enough. Take it back and finish this,” and the creature turns and lopes away into the shadows, trailing the smell of carrion and candle wax.

“
Have
you seen enough, Deacon?” she asks him. “Have you seen enough to understand what’s at stake?”

“She isn’t one of you,” he whispers hoarsely. “But she wants to be. She thinks…she thinks if she brings our child to this place, you’ll have to let her in.”

“Can you stand?”

“I don’t know. What difference does it make?”

“There are things here you shouldn’t be bowing to,” she says, so he struggles to his feet, and the creatures laugh at him again.

“Madam Terpsichore will hear of this,” one of them whispers. “You would be sweet on the slab, child.”

“Tell her what you wish. Maybe she’d prefer to do her own dirty work from now on.”

“Please, get me out of here,” Deacon stammers, his body beginning to shake uncontrollably as he wets himself. He grabs her hand and clings to it, the only still point in the storm raging between their minds. “I can’t stand up much longer.”

“Hold on very tight,” she says, as if there were any chance he’d ever let go, and she folds herself around him again, sews him up inside herself, against that welcoming, starving void, and only this thin girl to keep it from pulling him apart, eating him alive. A moment, or an hour, or ages beyond reckoning, but when Jane takes her thumbs from his eyes, there’s only her face and the light from the lamp between the motel beds.

T
he ride in Scarborough’s long black Cadillac Coupe de Ville, not more than ten minutes between the parking lot of The Schooner Motel and the address on Southside, the house at the dead end of Cullom Street where the girl named Starling Jane said they would find Narcissa Snow. Deacon stares out the passenger-side window of the old car at the streets and buildings flashing past outside, familiar sights made strange and foreboding by this night and its circumstances. Scarborough behind the wheel, watching the road and speaking only when Deacon says something to break the not-quite-silence, the sound of the wheels on the asphalt, a ping somewhere in the Caddy’s guts, the distant sound of thunder from the sky.

“She didn’t have to go,” Deacon says, repeating himself, but it’s better than nothing. “I talked to Downs before we left the bar. The cops are watching the building.”

“When are you gonna wake up and smell the beans?” Scarborough replies and slows down for a red light, looks both ways, and then runs it. “If the police could stop this bitch, I never would have had to fucking leave Boston.”

“Is that where you’re from? Boston?”

“Yeah. Well, most of the time,” Scarborough mumbles and then glances at himself in the rearview mirror. He gingerly touches the end of his nose with one fingertip and winces. “Where the hell did you learn to fight, anyway?”

“Out behind bars, mostly,” Deacon replies. “It used to be sort of a hobby.”

The first scatter of raindrops speckles the windshield, and Scarborough stares up at the clouds slung low above the trees and rooftops. “Just what I fucking need,” he grumbles and turns on the wipers. Deacon watches as the rubber blades smear the water back and forth across the glass, hitching pendulum swing that doesn’t really make it any easier to see.

“Those things she showed me—”

“—are strictly between you and her,” Scarborough says before Deacon can complete the sentence. “Whatever it was, I don’t even want to know.”

“Then I
wasn’t
supposed to see any of it, was I?”

“Jane does things her way, I do things mine,” and Scarborough turns up Twentieth without signaling, leaving behind the small pentangle of bars and restaurants at Five Points, the people and the lights, and heads up the side of Red Mountain. “If she fools around and gets herself killed, that’s just one less thing I have to worry about.”

“Turn right onto Sixteenth,” Deacon says. “It’ll get us there.”

“I know where I’m going, Mr. Silvey. I don’t need you to give me directions.”

A thunderclap, lightning, and the rain grows suddenly harder, countless tiny drumbeats against the top of the car, and Scarborough curses and switches the wipers to a faster setting.

“So I guess you’re the original coldhearted motherfucker,” Deacon says, pressing his good right hand against the window to leave a print in the condensation there. “You watch your own ass, and the devil take the hindmost.”

“I haven’t met anyone yet that I’d be willing to die for, if that’s what you mean.”

Deacon draws a circle around his handprint, five points inside a circle like a charm to keep back the storm and whatever else is coming at them through the night.

“What about these…these things you work for? The Great Old Ones, whatever the fuck you call them?”

“I said that I haven’t met any
one
I’m willing to die for, not that I hadn’t found any
thing
.”

“There’s a difference?”

“They gave me a life, Mr. Silvey,” Scarborough says and stares straight ahead at the rain and the wet street and the metronome sweep of the wiper blades.

“Or took one away from you.”

Scarborough glances away from the road just long enough for Deacon to see the look in his eyes, the slow-burn fury to tell him it’s time to shut up or at least change the subject.

“Am I allowed to ask questions?”

“Haven’t you seen enough already? I thought you were the
reluctant
clairvoyant. I thought you didn’t want anything to do with this freaky shit.”

“That was back when I still thought maybe I had a choice in the matter, before your little pal jabbed her thumbs in my eyes and gave me the nickel tour of Hell.”

“And now you want the two-bit tour?”

“No, but I’d appreciate you telling me who Narcissa Snow is,” Deacon says. “I mean, if she isn’t one of you, or one of your Morlock buddies, then where’d she come from?”

Scarborough shakes his head and cuts the steering wheel right, guiding the sleek black Cadillac off Twentieth and onto Sixteenth, this narrow avenue to carry them closer to the top of the mountain.

“Narcissa Snow’s just an unfortunate oversight,” he replies. “A mess that someone should have cleaned up twenty-six years ago.”

“So I guess that sort’a makes you like a janitor,” Deacon says and turns back to the window.

“Yeah, Mr. Silvey, I suppose it does. But a house is only as strong as the people who keep it in order.”

Deacon chuckles to himself and stares out at the lights of the soggy, rain-shrouded city laid out below; it only takes him a moment to locate Morris and the roof of his apartment building, the safe place where Chance is waiting for him.

“That’s a good one,” he says. “If you ever get tired of pointing guns at people for a living, maybe you could get a job writing fortune cookies.”

Scarborough runs a stop sign, bounces through an over-flowing pothole, and the rear of the car fishtails slightly. Behind them, someone blows their horn.

“You know, if you get pulled over for driving like a lunatic, it could put a real crimp in your plans for the evening.”

“How about you let me worry about that, Mr. Silvey. You just worry about whether or not we get to her before she gets her shit together and makes a beeline for your wife.”

“And what am I supposed to do when we find her?” Deacon asks and then wipes his handprint off the Cadillac’s window. High above Birmingham, lightning flashes and stabs searing, electric fingers at the world. A split second of noon and then the rainy night washes back over everything.

“Try not to get yourself killed,” Scarborough says and turns another corner.

Chance is sitting on the sofa in a carefully arranged nest of cushions, her feet propped up on the coffee table and another cushion under them. The television is still on, the National Geographic Channel and the Sphinx, because Alice hasn’t thought to turn it off. Chance rests her dizzy head against the back of the sofa and stares up at the ceiling, the heavy wooden beams and crisscrossing pipes of the old factory.

“Were they contractions or not?” Alice asks, and Chance shuts her eyes. Better in the darkness, the near-dark behind her eyelids, better to pretend the things she saw in the mirror were never there at all.

“They stopped,” she says. “I don’t think it was anything at all. They wouldn’t have come so close together.”

“Chance, just tell me if you want me to call Dr. Capuzzo, and I’ll do it.”

“No, I’m fine now. I think I’ll be okay.”

She can hear Alice get up from her chair and begin to pace about the room again, her window to window to window circuit, and she starts grumbling about the police cars. Fifteen minutes ago, a cop named Conroy Adams came to the door and told them there’d be three cars watching the building until Detective Downs said the coast was clear. She’d laughed when Alice told her that, that the man had actually said “when the coast is clear.”

“It couldn’t have been Braxton-Hicks,” Alice says. “Not if they hurt.”

“I’m not even sure they hurt.”

“You
said
they hurt.”

Chance opens her eyes, and all the beams and pipes are still up there, the sprinkler system and smoke alarm like a tiny white flying saucer hovering fifteen feet overhead.

“Will you please turn off the television?” she asks. “It’s making me nervous. I think I’d like to listen to some music,” hoping it might calm her nerves, that something easy and familiar might make here and now more real than the gulls and gray-blue sky, the woman with the knife and golden eyes.

“I wouldn’t know what to play,” Alice says. “You know all those cars are parked on the same side of the building? Shouldn’t they have someone around back?”

“I’m not a cop, Alice. I don’t know where their cars ought to be.”

“Well, they shouldn’t be all bunched up together like that.”

Chance shuts her eyes, asks Alice again to please turn off the TV, to put on a CD, instead, and Alice Sprinkle mumbles a handful of disparaging words about compact discs.

“I don’t even know what you want to hear,” she says.

“
Exit West
by Daria Parker. It’s right there on top of the stereo. If you can’t find it—”

“I found it,” Alice says. “
Exit West.
Isn’t this that girl from Birmingham?”

“Yeah,” Chance says, “that’s her,” and she swallows against her nausea, wishing she had the unfinished cup of Red Zinger tea now to settle her queasy stomach. “She used to be in a punk band, but now she does mostly folky stuff.”

“God, I fuckin’ hate punk,” Alice says. “It was almost worse than disco. Don’t you have something else?”

“It’s
not
punk. I said that she
used
to be in a punk band. Do you like Sarah McLachlan?”

“I liked
Fumbling Towards Ecstasy
.”

“Then you’ll like this, too. Anyway, she’s also a big old dyke, so you’ll probably fucking love her.”

She hears Alice’s heavy, brusque footsteps, crossing from the kitchen window to the television set, switching off the narrator halfway through something about Nubian slavery during the reign of Khafre. For a few long seconds, there’s only the noise of the rain beating hard and steady against the roof of the building, a sound that’s never made Chance nervous before, but it does now. Alice starts cursing at the stereo buttons, but Chance keeps her eyes closed, looking for deeper shades of black hiding inside herself, trying to ignore the rain, and finally she hears the tray on the CD player slide slowly open.

“You don’t even
own
a turntable, do you?” Alice asks, and the tray slides shut again.

“Just press play,” Chance tells her, and in a moment the room fills with piano chords and the watery sounds of a twelve-string guitar, the gentle, rolling susurration of synthesizer keys and drum machines. The first track, “Carbon White,” and Chance opens her eyes and blinks at the ceiling; no sanctuary left inside herself anywhere, only onionskin layers of doubt and fear, and she wishes Deacon would come home.

“You gave me a scare in there, kiddo,” Alice says, sitting down again.

“I think maybe it was just the stress.”

“Are you going to tell me why there are three police cars all bunched up together outside your building?” Alice asks, and Chance suppresses a groan, only wanting to pay attention to the music.

“Just let me listen to this song,” she says. “I feel better now, really.”

“I didn’t
ask
how you felt, Chance. I asked why there’s a goddamn stake-out downstairs.”

But Chance is trying not to think about the police, too busy concentrating on the music, the words, the singer’s voice like sandpaper against velvet. “Deacon saw her a few times when she was still in Birmingham,” she says. “Before she got famous. I never went to shows. I think she lives out in San Francisco now.”

“Lucky her,” Alice whispers. “I need a cigarette.”

“You could go out to the stairwell. Deacon smokes there when it’s raining.”

“I don’t think I should leave you alone.”

Chance turns her head towards Alice, her cheek pressed against the soft fringe at the edge of a cushion. She smiles, trying to put Alice at ease before she gives them both a heart attack, but that only makes her frown more dramatically.

“I’m fine, really. I promise. I’m just going to sit right here and listen to the music. You won’t even be more than a hundred feet away from me.”

“I might not be able to hear you—”

“That doesn’t matter, Alice, because I’m okay now, and there’s not going to be anything for you to hear.”

Alice cracks her knuckles and glances anxiously at the blank TV screen, stares at it as though there might be some answer hidden somewhere inside the dark glass. But only the wide room reflected back, a subtly convex doppelgänger to mock her unease, and she sighs and cracks her knuckles again.

“I won’t be more than five minutes,” she says. “I swear.”

“Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

Alice gets up, her strong, broad shoulders eclipse the warm light of the nearest lamp, and she stands beside the coffee table, looking worriedly down at Chance.

“You know how much I care about you,” she says, her voice grown softer by scant degrees, but a fine distinction Chance can hear right away. “You know how much you mean to me.”

“I think I know,” Chance replies.

“If anything ever happened—”