Low Red Moon (10 page)

On the morning of Narcissa’s thirteenth birthday she began to bleed, crimson stains like rose petals tattooed onto her sheets, her thighs, and that afternoon two upstairs windows and a porcelain figurine in the parlor shattered. She’d always hated the figurine, two Irish setters and one of them with a dead pheasant gripped in its jaws.
I think Aldous is afraid of me now,
she wrote on one of the blank pages in her mother’s diary. Lying on her bedroom floor that night as one year died and another was born, corpse of 1987 traded for 1988, and
He doesn’t want me here,
she wrote.
He’s never wanted me here. I’m something he wants to forget.

Aldous swept up the pieces of the Irish setters, but ig nored both the broken windows, and the fierce Atlantic gales blew snow into the house that gathered in small drifts upon the stairs.

And three nights after the new year, Narcissa awoke with Aldous standing there beside her bed again. This time he was naked, his pale and wrinkled flesh draped loose on spindle bones, worn-out old man with tears rolling down his sunken cheeks. He had the carving knife, though she’d hidden it under a loose floorboard after his last visit.

“I
know
what you’ve been thinking, girl,” he said. “Every dirty little thought. Every lie—”

“Go back to bed, Grandfather,” she said, keeping her eyes on the carving knife. “I need to sleep.”

“I told you not to call me that ever again.”

“Then what would you have me call you, instead?”

His head bobbed up and down and then slumped forward so his chin rested against his chest. His eyes flashed iridescent gold and red and orange in the dark.

“Go the fuck back to bed, Aldous,” she said, trying to sound groggy, slipping her hand beneath her pillow.

“There’s a yellow house in Providence,” he said, “a house on Benefit Street full of monsters. There are entire cities built from the bones of the dead.”

“You’ve been having bad dreams again,” Narcissa said.

“My father…he walked streets paved with human bones. They took him to Providence and showed him the roads winding down to the very bottom of the universe. They showed him every goddamn thing he ever asked to see.”

The old man stopped talking then, nodded, and stared silently for a moment at the knife clutched in his left hand as if he’d forgotten it was there.

“I saw him last night, Narcissa, watching me from the beach. I nailed the cellar door shut, but there he was on the beach.”

“You saw your father?”

“He said that
I
had to finish this. He said there wasn’t any other way. They aren’t ever coming for you.”

“Are you sure, Aldous? Are you absolutely certain this is what you want?”

“I’m so sorry, child,” he said and raised the carving knife high above his head.

And Narcissa plunged the ice pick deep into his skinny chest, burying it all the way to the handle, piercing his heart, and the knife fell from his fingers and clattered loudly to the floor. Aldous stumbled backwards, crashed into her dressing table and collapsed. So much simpler than she’d ever dared to imagine, and Narcissa sat on the edge of the bed, amazed, listening as his breath grew shallow and uneven, hearing all the sounds an old man makes dying. His eyes were open, straining towards the sagging, water-stained ceiling or the night sky, the cold and treacherous stars he would never have to see again.

When it was almost over, Narcissa went to him, crouched on the floor and wiped the tears from his cheeks with the hem of her flannel nightgown.

“Thank you,” he whispered, his voice wheezing raggedly out between blood-flecked dentures.

“No. Don’t try to talk,” she said, and outside, somewhere among the dunes, something began to howl, a long, low, mournful sound, more human than animal. Aldous Snow’s chest rose one last time, shuddered, and was still. Narcissa glanced over her shoulder at the bedroom window, then closed his eyes and stayed with him until the thing in the dunes stopped howling and there was only the wail of the January wind around the eaves of the house.

She dressed, then packed her clothes—everything she wasn’t wearing—into a big canvas suitcase that she’d found in the very back of her mother’s closet: her clothes and
Cultes des Goules,
Caroline’s diary, the French-English dictionary and all the pages of her transcription. She pulled the ice pick from Aldous’ chest and covered his body with the sheets and blankets from her bed, impromptu shroud because it didn’t seem right to leave him lying there naked on the bedroom floor. Narcissa packed the ice pick and the carving knife in the suitcase, as well, and went downstairs, taking the steps one at a time, careful not to slip on the tiny drifts of snow that had accumulated beneath the shattered windows.

She opened both the front doors, letting in the storm, left the suitcase sitting on the snow-covered porch, and walked quickly through the silent, empty house, truly alone now for the first time in her life and only the echo of her own footsteps for company. The door to the old man’s study wasn’t locked, wasn’t even shut, and she used a heavy brass paperweight shaped like a sleeping lion to smash the glass fronts of the walnut barrister cases. Narcissa lit the lamp from his desk, then took her time searching the spines and covers of all the books until she found the ones she was looking for, the ones that she knew would be there somewhere, rare and terrible volumes that François Honore-Balfour had mentioned or quoted. She packed them carefully into an empty cardboard box and carried it and the kerosene lamp back through the entryway to the place on the porch where she’d left her suitcase.

“Good-bye, old man,” she said, wanting to sound brave, but her voice seeming very small and insignificant, a child’s voice lost inside the rambling, dark house looming up around her like the tomb it had always been. She hurled the lamp into the gloom, and it burst against a wall, spilling fire, and the flames spread quickly to the floor and up the stairs, a roaring, burning creature devouring everything it touched.

I could stay,
she thought.
I could stay and burn, too,
and she imagined her charred skeleton jumbled among the timbers and blackened masonry, her bones abandoned to the weather and time, and before long there’d be nothing left of her at all. Nothing to hurt, nothing to be afraid of what was coming next, nothing to hope that the world could ever be any different than it was.

Go, Narcissa,
Aldous growled angrily from the whirling red-orange heart of the fire.
Go now, while there’s still time,
and she turned and left the house, gathered her things and pulled the doors shut behind her. Outside, the storm wrapped her in a million shades of gray and white and black, and the freezing banshee wind hurried her stumbling towards the future.

Hours after dark and her face staring back at her from the mirror above the bathroom sink, the face of someone who has never had any trouble passing for human, Narcissa holds the razor blade between her thumb and index finger and pretends that she has the courage to cut away the mask and find the truth secreted beneath her skin. Her yellow eyes the only outward hint, the windows of the soul, and even they’re proof of nothing at all; plenty enough normal people born with yellow eyes, T. S. Eliot had yellow eyes, and they only get her stared at every now and then. Her face as pretty as every runway model’s, unlikely Hollywood pretty: the fine, arched line of her un-plucked eyebrows, her thick blonde hair and full lips, the delicate bridge of her nose. A monster locked helpless somewhere inside this shell, chained to this waxwork perfect husk, and sometimes, like now, staring at that face staring back at her, she wonders if half the things she remembers ever happened at all. If perhaps there never was a house beside the sea, and Madam Terpsichore and Benefit Street are only a schizophrenic’s delusion, shreds of truth warped inside out by a mind unwilling or incapable of facing dull reality.

No more or less a monster than any killer.

Only a lunatic lost in the labyrinth of her own dreams, in stray lines from ghost stories she might have read as a child she can’t remember ever having been. Only a murderer.

Weary of myself, and sick of asking…

You’re getting sloppy, girl,
Aldous Snow mutters at her from the bathtub.
Renting a house, shitting where you eat. You’re getting sloppy.

“I’m getting close,” she replies and sets a corner of the blade against her chin. “He’s here, old man. I saw him yesterday. And when I carry his child back, they’ll have to take me in.”

If they wanted the child that bad, they’d come here and take it themselves. They don’t need you doing them favors.

A sting when the razor finally draws blood, and Narcissa watches as it gathers on the blade and her pale fingertips and drips into the rust-stained sink.

You don’t have the nerve, do you?
one of the corner voices taunts.
You fucking coward, you fucking phony. Why don’t you go ahead and see what’s waiting under there. It’s only meat, isn’t that what you always say?

“They’ll
have
to take me,” she says again.

Who are you talking to, Narcissa? Who do you think is listening?
and she shuts her eyes, and the razor makes hardly any sound at all when she lets go and it falls into the blood-spattered sink.

D
ark by the time Alice Sprinkle pulls up in front of Chance’s building, shorter days as autumn spins the world farther away from summer, and from the sidewalk Chance can’t see any lights burning in the windows of their third-floor apartment. She opens the door of the pickup, and Alice peers doubtfully up through the windshield.

“Do you think he’s home?” Alice asks. “Want me to see you to the door?” and Chance shakes her head.

“He’s probably just taking a nap or something. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, of course I’m sure.”

“It’s no trouble.”

“I’ll be
fine,
” Chance says again, trying not to sound annoyed. “Thank you.”

“Then I’ll wait here until you get inside. Turn on a light so I know you’re okay.”

And Chance starts to tell her that’s silly, but there’s no point arguing once Alice has made up her mind, and all she really wants now is to sit down and take her shoes off.

“See you tomorrow,” she says and closes the truck door.

She can feel Alice watching her as she enters her code into the security pad by the front door, types *0 and BUFO, and the door buzzes and the lock clicks open. Inside, the brightly lit lobby smells faintly of disinfectant and cigarette smoke, and she turns and waves at Alice, who smiles and waves back at her.

“Alice dear, you’re going to drive me absolutely bugfuck before this is over,” she mutters quietly to herself and waddles to the elevator, pushes the white plastic
UP
button and waits impatiently while invisible gears and cables whir and groan and creak to life. She fishes her keys from the bib pocket of her overalls, and when the silver doors slide open, she inserts her elevator key and pushes another white plastic button with a black
3
on it.
Like peppermint and chocolate,
she thinks, wishing she had a York peppermint pattie, wondering if there’s anything in the apartment to eat.

The elevator smells more strongly of cigarettes, and there’s a small puddle of dog piss in one corner. At their front door, 307 in tasteful black sans serif, she unlocks the dead bolt and the brass doorknob and steps into the dark apartment.

“Yo, Deke,” she calls out, reaching for the switch on the wall beside the door. A moment of silence as she flips the switch and one of her grandparents’ antique lamps, stained-glass willow boughs beneath a gnarled bronze trunk, illuminates the small foyer. She takes off her sweater and hangs it on the coat-tree.

“Deacon? Are you asleep?”

Two hallways branch off the foyer, a short one leading to their bedroom and the unfinished nursery, and a longer one leading towards the front of the building, to the living room and kitchen. Either way, there’s only darkness beyond the warm edges of the lamplight, and Chance calls to Deacon again.

“In here,” he calls back, his voice drifting to her down the long hallway leading to the living room. She leaves the light behind, following his voice like bread crumbs.

“Deke, why are you sitting here in the dark?” and she turns on another lamp, another of her grandparents’ Tiffany relics, and Deacon curses and immediately covers his eyes with his left hand. He’s sitting on the big sofa, and there’s a pint bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the coffee table in front of him. She stares at Deacon and the whiskey bottle for a second or two, long enough to be sure that it hasn’t been opened. There’s a prescription bottle on the table, too, a month’s worth of powder-blue Fioricet tablets inside amber plastic.

“What’s that?” she asks and points at the whiskey.

“That, my dear, is a bottle of Tennessee bourbon.”

“Were you going to drink it?”

Deacon curses again and slowly lowers his hands, blinks and squints at Chance. “I was thinking about it,” he says. “Will you please turn the light back off? I’ve got a headache.”

“No, I will not turn the light back off. I want to know what the hell’s going on.”

Deacon shuts his eyes and leans his head against the back of the sofa, the timeworn upholstery almost the same shade of brown as his hair, and Chance picks up the bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

“I had a very bad day,” Deacon says.

“So you bought this fucking bottle of whiskey, and you’ve been sitting here in the dark trying to decide whether or not you were going to get drunk?”

“I had a very,
very
bad day, Chance.”

She looks at the bourbon, the tea-colored liquor inside the sealed bottle, and thinks a drink or two wouldn’t be such a bad thing right now, something for the pain and the worry, something to make her forget the rest stop and the blood she thought she saw dripping from the mouth of the fiberglass
Megalopseudosuchus.

“Why didn’t you call Harold?” she asks Deacon and sets the bottle down a safe distance away, out of reach, on top of the television.

“I didn’t
want
to talk to fucking Harold. I wanted a drink.”

“You could have called Dr. Winman. You could have said something when you called me.”

“I have a headache,” Deacon said and rubbed at the furrowed spot between his eyebrows. “And I don’t want to have this conversation right now.”

“Well that’s just too bad, Deke. Because I’m not going to let you throw away everything you’ve accomplished over one bad day.”

Deacon opens an eye and glares at her.

“No offense, babe, but you don’t have any goddamn idea what you’re talking about.”

“Then why don’t you
enlighten
me,” Chance replies, pushing down the anger, resisting the weary, exasperated part of her that wants to give the bottle right back to him and tell Deacon to go fuck himself.

“You remember a guy named Soda? Skinny little fuck with a skateboard.”

“No,” Chance says. “I don’t. What about him?”

Down on the street a horn blows, and Chance remembers Alice, waiting dutifully in her truck. “Shit,” she hisses and crosses the room to one of the tall front windows. She waves, and Alice honks the horn again.

“What the hell is that all about?” Deacon asks, and “It’s just Alice,” Chance tells him. “She wanted to make sure I got inside okay.”

“Maybe you should have married her, instead.”

Chance ignores him and watches as the old Toyota pulls away from the curb and heads east down First Avenue.

“I’m sure Alice would’ve made you a fine husband.”

“Deke, can we please not do this tonight?” and she rests her forehead against the windowpane, stares down at the sidewalk bathed in the glow of streetlights. “I’ll talk if you want to talk, but I haven’t had such a good day myself, and I just don’t think I’m up to fighting tonight.”

“Whatever,” Deacon says, and when she turns around he’s popping the top off the bottle of Fioricet.

“How many of those have you taken today?” she asks him.

“Not nearly enough, obviously.”

Chance clumsily eases her body into an armchair near the window and watches while Deke dry-swallows two of the tablets. Maybe if she’d listened to Alice and stayed in Birmingham, or maybe if she’d had a little more time when he called, and
If wishes were horses,
she thinks,
beggars would ride.

“What happened to Soda?” she asks.

“Soda is dead. Someone—” and then he stops and silently stares at the prescription bottle for a moment. “You really don’t want to hear this.”

“If it’s got you this upset, I have to hear it, Deke. I can’t help you if I don’t even know what’s going on.”

Deacon takes a deep breath and shuts his eyes again. “You’re half right,” he says.

“Damn it, if you’re not even willing to let me try—”

“Did all the fossils make it in one piece? All your little frogs and fishies?”

“I don’t want to talk about the damned fossils right now. I want you to tell me what’s going on.”

Deacon opens his eyes and turns his head towards her; his bleary green eyes grown so much darker tonight, filled with the thirst and all his secret pains, all the things he’ll never tell her no matter how many times she asks. The blind spots he keeps for himself, and most of the time that’s fine by Chance, if that’s the way he wants it, as long as he stays off the booze.

“Someone killed him last night,” he says, the words slipping reluctantly from his lips. “Gutted him like a catfish and left his head in a pillowcase under his bathroom sink.”

“Jesus, Deke.”

“So the cops came to see me this morning, about an hour after you left, because that prick Vince Hammond in Atlanta told them I might be able to help.”

“You might be—” Chance starts, then stops and looks down at her hands folded across her belly.

“I told you that you didn’t want to hear this.”

“But you told them to leave you alone, right?” Chance asks him, almost whispering now. “You told them you didn’t know what they were talking about.”

“No,” he says. “I didn’t.”

“You promised me, Deke. You promised me that was all in the past. You said you didn’t want anything else to do with that shit ever again.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Then why’d you do it? Why’d you go with them?”

“I didn’t say I went anywhere with them.”

“But you
did
. That’s why you’ve got a migraine now, isn’t it? That’s why you bought that bottle of whiskey.”

Deacon sighs and rubs at his forehead again. “I haven’t held down a job in almost a year,” he says. “I sit here, day after day, waiting for you to come home—”

“Your
job
is to stay sober. That’s all I need you to do.”

“Hell, you’re not asking for much, are you?” he mumbles, and the bitterness in his voice, the cold resentment, is almost more than she can handle right now, almost that one last straw. Chance bites hard at her lower lip and keeps her eyes on her belly.

Inside her, the baby moves.

“I’m sorry,” Deacon says and gets up off the sofa, stands there a moment squinting at the bottle of whiskey sitting on the television set. “Sometimes I think it’s eating me up inside, like a cancer.”

Chance nods, because she knows he’s telling her the truth, but she doesn’t look at him. She’s determined that she isn’t going to start crying, not this time, not tonight, not with Deacon so close to the edge.

“So…” she says, and has to stop and swallow before she can go on, her mouth gone as dry as sun-bleached bones. “They asked you to look at Soda’s body.”

“I didn’t know it was Soda. I didn’t know it was him until we pulled up out front of his place. They said they didn’t have any idea I knew him.”

“You think they were telling you the truth?”

“Probably. They didn’t have anything to gain by lying to me.”

“Maybe they thought you wouldn’t go with them, if you knew.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Deacon says, turning away from Chance, and he goes to the refrigerator, the small kitchen divided from the living room by nothing but empty space and imaginary boundaries. She looks up, and he’s standing there framed in the white icebox glare, so tall and thin. Deacon takes out a bottle of water and shuts the refrigerator door again.

“Are you hungry?” he asks her.

“I’m all right. I’ll get something in a little while.”

“I wouldn’t have gone if I’d known it was him,” Deacon says, and then he screws the cap off the bottle and takes a long drink.

“It was your decision,” Chance whispers, speaking so low now she’s not even sure he can hear her.

“God, I hate this stuff,” he says, grimaces and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. “If it comes from the tap, it tastes like a goddamn swimming pool. If it comes out of a bottle, it tastes like plastic.”

“It’s good for you,” Chance says.

Deacon sets the bottle down on the kitchen counter and stares at her across the wide room. Outside, a big truck rumbles past the building, and the windows rattle softly in their aluminum frames.

“I should have told them no,” Deacon says when the truck has passed and it’s almost quiet again, only the muffled sound of someone’s stereo coming from the apartment next door. “I should have told that detective that Hammond was pulling their leg.”

“Well, so what happened? What did you see?” and she watches while he takes another drink from the bottle, wishing she could come in again and start this whole scene over, wondering if there’s any way it could play itself out differently.
No,
she thinks.
It would be the same, exactly the same
.

“You don’t have to humor me, Chance.”

“I’m not humoring you. I just asked you a question.”

Deacon screws the cap back on the water bottle and returns it to the refrigerator. “There’s leftover Chinese in here,” he says, “if you’re hungry.”

“What did you see there, Deke? Did you see the person that killed him?”

He shuts the fridge and stands with his back to her, pretending to inspect the assortment of magnets and sticky notes on the freezer door.