Low Red Moon (34 page)

“Motherfucker,” she sobs, trying to think clearly through the fear and the haze the morphine has spun behind her eyes, trying to remember how long it’s been since Birmingham. “Where are you, Deke? Where the hell are you?”

“He’s coming,” the child reassures her. “You just have to be strong. You have to be strong for both of us now.”

“Stop it!” Chance shouts up at the vast Appalachian sky. “You’re not real, so stop making me fucking promises!” And then she’s crying too hard to say anything else.

The wind whistles and blows through the trees, rattling the dry leaves, pulling more of them free of the twigs, and the flies buzz undisturbed around the dead thing. In a couple more minutes, Chance wipes herself dry, pulls her clothes back on, and makes her way slowly, carefully, back down to where the werewolf and the child are waiting in the car.

Narcissa drives until the pain from her burned face and hands is finally more than she can stand, until the exhaustion begins to blur and double her vision. Escaping the hilly purgatory of Virginia back roads sometime towards dusk, and she slips as quickly as she dares along US 11, through a sliver of West Virginia and then across the dark Potomac as the western horizon swallows the sun. An even stingier sliver of Maryland afterwards, but she makes it into Pennsylvania, the wilderness just past Greencastle, before she nods off the first time and almost runs off the road.

“You won’t be satisfied until you’ve killed us all,” Chance mumbles, and Narcissa slaps herself hard, never mind the burns, and starts looking for any place safe enough to pull over and rest a few hours, maybe even get some sleep if she’s lucky.

Past the junction with State 16, a few miles more, and she finds the deserted, burned-out shell of a motel, a tall metal sign that she can’t read in the darkness of the mountains. She pulls off the road, across a wide gravel parking lot, and Chance turns and looks into the backseat again.

“I think we’re here,” she says and smiles sadly.

“You’ve gone crazy as a fucking loon, you know that?” Narcissa tells her. “Who the hell do you think you’re talking to back there?”

“No one,” Chance says too quickly, like she’s been rehearsing the response in her head all day, and yesterday, too. “No one at all.”

“Well, you and Mr. No-one-at-all back there are driving me apeshit, and I’m telling you I’m too tired to listen to it anymore.”

The car rolls past sooty brick and concrete ruin, charcoal and melted glass, and the limestone gravel crunches loudly beneath the tires of the rusty old Ford Thunderbird the color of dirty snow that she stole somewhere back in Tennessee.

“Stop giving me the shots and I’ll stop talking,” Chance says. “The shots make me talk.”

“In your dreams, crazy lady.”

“They’ll hurt the baby,” Chance says, a little more forcefully, and Narcissa glances in the mirror at the empty backseat.

“No, they won’t. Well, nothing permanent. Don’t worry about the baby, I did my homework. I always do.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t give a shit.”

Narcissa drives around to the back of the building, well out of sight of the highway, and parks the Ford beneath and between two huge oak trees. Twisted limbs like the massive, knotted arms of the forest, forked branches like its claws, straining to rake the wasted motel and everything else into its leafy gullet.

“I don’t know why you don’t just get it over with,” Chance whispers. “I don’t know why you don’t kill us and be done with it.”

Narcissa shifts into park and cuts the engine. “You got me all wrong,” she says. “No one and nothing is going to hurt your precious fucking baby. I don’t really give a shit what happens to you. In the end, you’re just an incubator, as far as I’m concerned, but nobody’s gonna hurt the kid.”

“Then it doesn’t even make sense,” Chance says, and Narcissa thinks about shutting off the headlights, reaches for the knob, but then something small moves at the edge of the woods and she stops and stares at the patch of briars caught in the beams.

“Well, there’s no money. Not if that’s what you think you’re going to get out of this.”

“I don’t
need
anybody’s fucking money,” Narcissa sneers, still watching the patch of blackberry briars twined in between the roots of the two oaks.

“No,” Chance says. “She’s not going to hurt you. She just said she wasn’t going to hurt you, didn’t she?”

“You think you’re talking to the kid, don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Chance whispers very quietly. “I don’t know what’s happening to me anymore.”

“Must be a bitch, that big ol’ rational brain of yours trying to take all this crap in, trying to trick it into something scientific.”

“The drugs…” Chance mumbles, trailing off, and closes her eyes.

“Yeah, that’s right. Blame it on the morphine. Keep it up as long as you can. None of this is real.”

“None of this is real.”

“Maybe it’s all just a bad dream,” Narcissa says and reaches across the seat, brushing Chance’s sweat-stringy bangs from her face. “Maybe you’ll wake up soon and open your eyes, and before you’ve even finished breakfast, you won’t be able to remember my name.”

“I
can’t
wake up,” Chance mutters. “I’ve been trying to wake up forever and ever.”

“Then maybe you’re trying too hard. Didn’t you think of that?”

“Where are we going, Narcissa?”

“Down to the sea,” she replies and leans closer to Chance. The smell of her, sweat and urine, the spittle dried to a crust on her lips and chin, her breath, and Narcissa flares her nostrils, taking it all inside. “A secret place I know.”

Chance opens her eyes, flinches when she sees how very close Narcissa is, and immediately shuts them again. “You’re in pain,” she says. “You got those burns when you tried to kill Sadie Jasper, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. It’s a shame you don’t have her determination, her resourcefulness. You might not be in this fix right now.”

“A shame you didn’t fucking die in that fire,” Chance whispers, and Narcissa laughs and licks at her left earlobe, just a little taste, and Chance screams. The sound is very loud, trapped there inside the closed car with them.

“Oh, come on now,” Narcissa growls softly. “It can’t really be as bad as all that,” and she nips playfully at Chance’s ear, catching it and holding it between her sharp teeth. Feeling Chance’s whole body grow tense before she finally lets go, and then Narcissa doesn’t say anything else for a few seconds, sits savoring the salty, living taste of this woman, salt and a bitter hint of the drug coursing through her veins. Enough that Narcissa forgets the pain for a moment, almost enough that she could forget herself and reach for the butterfly knife tucked beneath the seat.

“Your friend, Alice—that was her name, wasn’t it, Alice? She didn’t seem to mind—”

“I
know
you killed her,” Chance says, spitting out the words like venom and nails, and now there are tears streaking her cheeks. “You don’t have to tell me what you did to her.”

“No,” Narcissa says, sitting up straight again, and she looks back at the briars tangled between the trees. “I guess I don’t. I expect you’ve figured most of it out for yourself by now.”

“I know you
killed
her.”

“She shouldn’t have tried to stop me,” Narcissa says, and the something at the edge of the woods moves again, its small, bright eyes flashing back the headlights. A lanky jackrabbit cowering in the thorns, and Narcissa takes a pair of silver handcuffs from a pocket of her leather jacket and cuffs Chance to the steering wheel.

“You getting hungry, crazy lady?” she asks, and when Chance doesn’t answer, Narcissa glances in the rearview mirror again. “Well, what about you, Mr. No-one-at-all-back-there? You ready for some solid food yet?”

“Fuck you.”

“I’ll be back soon,” Narcissa says, not taking her eyes off the rabbit, helpless and cringing in the lights. “Scream if you want. Blow the horn if you want. But I don’t think anyone’s going to hear you way out here.” And then she opens the door and slips out of the Ford and into the night, the darkness a balm against her blistered flesh, and leaves Chance alone for a while.

When there is little more left of the rabbit than skin and the bones she’s broken open to get at the marrow, Narcissa sits shivering in the underbrush, trying to ignore the pain from her burns and watching the Thunderbird parked behind the motel. The headlights are still on, and if she doesn’t go back soon, the battery will run down and they’ll be stranded.

“It breaks my heart to see you like this, child,” her grandfather says. Aldous Snow is sitting behind her on a fallen sycamore log, smacking his gums and picking through the discarded remains of the jackrabbit. “Lost and adrift in the wide, wide world.”

“I’m not lost,” she murmurs. “I know exactly where I am. I know where I’m going.”

“And that’s the reason you’ll
stay
lost,” he says.

“Only two days till the full moon,” she says. “Two days until Halloween. And there she is, right there in the car. They’ll come for her, old man.”

“They’ll come all right,” he grumbles and tosses aside a handful of ribs and fur. “They’ll come to put an end to you, once and for all.”

The wind whispers cold through the tall trees, and there’s an owl hooting loudly somewhere close by, probably close enough she could see it if she only turned her head and looked. But she doesn’t. Doesn’t take her eyes off the Ford.

“It’s a shame Death didn’t see fit to make you any less bitter,” she says. “It’s a pity you’re such a jealous ghost.”

“Oh ho,” Aldous exclaims. “You missed a speck of something here. I think it might be liver.”

“Because they wouldn’t come for you or mother, you would have killed me to keep them from coming up for me.”

“Yes, it
is
liver.”

“You can’t eat, old man. You’re a ghost. Put it down. Leave it for the ants and maggots.”

Narcissa imagines that there’s movement from the car, then, sudden movement behind the windshield, but it’s probably only Chance shifting in her morphine-flavored dreams. Nothing for her to be afraid of, nothing left to stop her now. The late October breeze breathes unkindly against her face and sets off a new wave of chills, and she shuts her eyes for a moment, waiting for them to pass.

“I’ll eat whatever I damn well please,” Aldous mutters behind her. “Arrogant little hussy. Selfish, arrogant bitch.”

“Fine, old man,” she says, gritting her teeth together to try and stop shivering. “Knock yourself out.”

“You’re hurting, aren’t you?” he asks and then smacks his gums uselessly around the mean scrap of rabbit flesh. “Why don’t you just use a little of that shit you’re shooting into your Madonna down there? Fix you right up, I bet.”

“I have to keep my head clear, Aldous. It’s not over yet.”

“Your head doesn’t seem too clear to me, child. Sitting up here in the dark, talking to ghosts and hurting like you are.”

“So fuck off,” Narcissa says. “I didn’t invite you.”

“Didn’t you? Are you sure?”

“Mother Hydra will stir with the moonlight,” she says, ignoring his inconvenient questions. “Like you told me, old man. In her sleep, she’ll open one great black eye for me, and keep me safe from harm.”

“I never told you that. You made that up, hiding in that room of yours, talking to yourself.”

“Mother Hydra, Father Kraken. They guide my hands,” Narcissa says and shivers again. “But you, you tried to poison my mind against her, make me fear her like you wanted me to fear the tunnels beneath the house. Like you wanted me to fear
everything
that mattered.”

More movement from the car, and this time Narcissa gets slowly to her feet, brushes her left hand against a creeper vine and almost cries out when a thorn tears its way through a blister to the new, raw skin growing underneath. She bites her tongue, hard enough to taste blood, and doesn’t make a sound, but Aldous laughs at her. Chance has rolled her window all the way down and is resting her head on the doorframe, half in, half out. Probably just wanting a little fresh air, that’s all, and Narcissa considers staying beneath the sheltering forest a while longer. Wishes that she weren’t too anxious to close her eyes and drift off for ten or fifteen or twenty minutes. Wishes she
could
pop a few milligrams and sleep until she began to feel more like herself again.

“‘Below the thunders of the upper deep,’” she whispers to herself. “‘Far, far beneath the abyssal sea—’”

“How precious,” Aldous sneers. “Our Lady of the Cephalopods, Patron Saint of Mollusks. It was only a fairy tale, Narcissa, and if it wasn’t, you best hope it was. Ain’t no one and nothing down there watching out for you. No one at all.”

“‘Until the latter fire shall heat the deep,’” she continues, speaking fast, forgetting lines, but it’s the thought, the faith, that counts. “‘Then once by man and angels to be seen, in roaring—’”

“You’re pathetic,” Aldous says and goes back to digging noisily among the scraps of bone and skin. “That’s only a sorry bit of fucking Tennyson. You make it sound like scripture.”