Low Red Moon (2 page)

T
hough I’ve shown great care with the phases of the moon for the month of October 2001, any readers familiar with the marshlands east of Ipswich, Massachusetts, will immediately realize that I have taken considerable liberties with the area. My decision to have the Castle Neck River double for Lovecraft’s fictional (or fictionalized) Manuxet River is based on my own reckoning, drawing largely from comparisons of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” with various topographic and geological sources. I realize this conclusion is at odds with the work of some Lovecraft scholars, though it agrees favorably with the conclusions of still others (see, for example, a footnote in Jack Morgan’s
The Biology of Horror
). I should also note that
Low Red Moon
owes much to the poetry and prose of William Blake, especially
Songs of Innocence
and
Songs of Experience
,
The Pickering Manuscript
,
The Book of Thel
,
America: A Prophecy
, and
The Book of Los
. Once more, I am indebted to Martin Gardner’s invaluable notations to Lewis Carroll’s work (and, of course, to Carroll himself), as well as to the works of Charles Fort (particularly
The Book of the Damned
and
Lo!
), H. P. Lovecraft, Tennyson, John Keats, W. B. Yeats, Angela Carter, Joseph Campbell, and Carl G. Jung. This novel’s title, and some of its matter, was inspired by Belly’s 1993 album,
Star
, and I would also like to acknowledge the influence of Poe’s 2001 album,
Haunted
.

Finally, grateful thanks to my agents, Merrilee Heifetz and Julien Thuan, to my editors, Laura Anne Gilman and William Schafer, and to Jennifer R. Lee, Vann Cleveland, Kathryn (“Minister of Continuity”), Jada, Jim, Byron, Dr. David R. Schwimmer (for bringing dinosaurs to Atlanta), and to Rogue (for coming to the rescue). This novel was written on a Macintosh iBook.

T
he motel room smells like blood and shit and air freshener, the aerosol can sitting empty on top of the television set, and the air in the room
still
smells like blood. Spring Heather, the purple can promises, and Narcissa Snow has never smelled spring heather, but she’s pretty sure it doesn’t smell like an abattoir. She watches the telephone from her place by the window, the hard, uncomfortable chair the color of spicy brown mustard, and her ass keeps going numb. The drapes, which almost match the upholstery on the chair, are drawn against the rainy night outside and the prying eyes of anyone who might walk by and see her naked and crying. She’s left the plastic
DO NOT DISTURB
sign hanging from the doorknob and her gun lying on the table within easy reach, the safety off, just in case.

A watched pot never boils,
someone whispers, one of the corner voices or the hooker’s head wrapped in newspaper and tied up snug in a Hefty bag, either or both or neither. Maybe she whispered it herself and just didn’t notice. A watched pot never boils, and the phone is never going to ring.

Narcissa Snow’s stomach rumbles and rolls like the thunder in the black Rhode Island sky, and she thinks about going to the bathroom to throw up again. She imagines standing under the shower and letting scalding water wash away the blood drying on her face her lips, the blood caked beneath her nails and in her tangled blonde hair. Blood and soap and the sour smell of vomit, she thinks, and goes back to watching the telephone.

“You simply should have known better, dear,” Madam Terpsichore said, scowling Madam Terpsichore three long, long hours ago in the cellar of the old house on Benefit Street. “It’s not as if we’re a club. You don’t apply for membership.” And that made all the other ghouls laugh, of course, set them to chuckling their ugly dog-bark laughter until Madam Terpsichore turned her head and scowled at them.

“But I’m not telling you anything you didn’t know already,” she said. “You’re a very bright young girl, Narcissa, and you know. I don’t have to tell you.”

And then she went back to work, the body on the slab laid open like a holy book, a flick of claws and rusted scalpel blades, an eye lifted from its socket, a severed tendon, and none of them said another word to her. Not another word, just the busy, secret whispers passed between them like scraps of flesh and gristle, nothing meant for her ears, and she watched them for a little while longer from the rickety stairs that led back up to Miss Josephine’s old house filled with antiques and vampires. All their red-yellow eyes and the wary prick of their ghoul ears at the smallest sound from the tunnels or the floor overhead, slender hands and surgeon fingers, everything that Narcissa was not and would never be no matter how many prostitutes and transients she murdered, no matter what exotic victuals she brought them pickled in balsamic vinegar and rosemary. Lucky they were letting her leave with her life, Madam Terpsichore had said, with her skin still on her bones instead of stretched tight and nailed up to dry. Lucky, lucky girl.

“Is
that
what I am?” Narcissa Snow mutters, asking the walls, the blood-soaked sheets and carpeting, the bits and pieces of the dead woman she hasn’t bothered to gather up yet. “Am I a lucky, lucky girl?” The corners whisper and snicker the contemptuous way that only corners can whisper, and
Damn straight,
they reply.
You’re the luckiest goddamn girl alive.

“Fuck you,” she spits back. “I wasn’t asking you. I wasn’t really asking anyone at all.”

And how many hours left until dawn, how many days now since the last time she slept? No answers from the whisperers in her head, and she closes her eyes, wishing the room didn’t smell so bad, that she didn’t
think
it smelled bad, because that’s one of the reasons they didn’t take her. Like her smooth, pale skin and pretty face, and she can’t even keep down a bellyful of fresh meat and kidneys.

“Your great-grandfather was a fine man,” Madam Terpsichore said and licked her thick black lips. “Now
there
was a man who knew his way around a stew pot. Yes, indeed. I can
still
taste his sweetbreads with cloves and cinnamon.”

They cut out the dead man’s tongue and set it aside in a blue porcelain bowl; Narcissa reached into her leather jacket, laid her right hand on the butt of the pistol, the full clip of .45-caliber cartridges, and
I could kill them all,
she thought.
I could kill them all right now, this minute, and slice them up with their own knives. I could dump their bodies in the Seekonk River for the fish and seagulls. I could strew them across the land like fallen leaves.

The one named Barnaby glanced at her nervously, his eyes shining in the candlelight, and maybe he knew exactly what she was thinking. Maybe they
all
knew and were only waiting, biding their time until she was stupid enough to try something. She winked at him and smiled, and the ghoul snarled silently and went back to work.

“Ring,” she whispers urgently to the telephone beside the bed, but it doesn’t, and the corners all laugh at once. The hooker’s head in the garbage bag has started crying again, begging to be let out, begging for its body, its intestines draped about the motel room like Christmas garland.

“Shut up,” Narcissa Snow growls. “
All
of you just shut the hell up right
now,
” but they ignore her, every one of them, and she picks up the gun, slides the barrel across her lips, her teeth, slips an index finger through the trigger guard. The sudden, sharp flavors of gunpowder and steel, metal cold against her tongue, the sight blade tickling the roof of her mouth, and she gags.

Do us all a favor,
the corner voices whisper.

And the telephone does not ring.

“Will we ever be seeing you again?” Miss Josephine asked too cheerfully, taking Narcissa by the hand and showing her to the tall front doors. She shrugged, tried to smile, but the woman’s hand was like ice and marble, her eyes like silver pools of mercury. “I hope so,” Narcissa said and gave her the sealed manila envelope with the videotape inside, the tape and the motel’s phone number and maps of the necropolis beneath Swan Point cemetery and Boston and Stonington, Connecticut.

“Give this to Madam Terpsichore, please,” she said. “I almost forgot. She’s expecting it.”

“Yes, of course, and do come again.”

Coward,
the corners whisper.
Pull the goddamn trigger and get it over with.

And that’s all it would take, one sizzling, bright instant, more pain than even she can imagine, and then oblivion or hell, whichever she has coming.

“I don’t usually do this sort of thing,” the hooker said.

“What? What don’t you usually do?” Narcissa asked and rolled the Mustang’s window down a crack to get some fresh air, despite the cold rain beating against the glass. The woman smelled like cigarettes and sweat, cheap perfume and stale, careless sex.

“Chicks,” the hooker said. “I’m not into that. I don’t usually sleep with chicks. I’m not a dyke.”

“I’m paying you enough,” Narcissa said very quietly, holding everything in because she wouldn’t have to hold it in much longer, and yes, the woman nodded, yes, and she looked down at the three one-hundred-dollar bills wadded together in her hand.

“How many men you gotta blow to make that much cash?”

“I just wanted you to know.”

“Baby, I don’t really give a shit one way or the other,” Narcissa said, and then they were at the motel on Oak Street, pulling into the parking lot and at least the hooker stopped talking for a little while.

Go on and do it. We’re getting tired of waiting.

And the last thing the girl said, before Narcissa opened the Italian stiletto and cut her throat from ear to ear, the very last thing she said before she died, “I still go to church, sometimes.”

Hurry up, girl. Pull the fucking trigger. That phone’s never going to ring.

Narcissa closes her eyes and grips the barrel of the gun with her teeth.

You’re not a monster. You’re just a crazy girl. Just a pathetic freak who hears voices, and one day, Narcissa, they’ll catch you and lock you up forever.

She starts counting backwards from ten, and all the corners and the head stuffed in the Hefty bag get quiet and listen.

And when she reaches three, the telephone on the table beside the bed begins to ring.

“Y
ou feelin’ any better, Mr. Silvey?”

Deacon doesn’t answer the cop, stares instead out the front of the coffee shop at the autumn-bleached sky above Third Avenue. Palest pale blue, almost white, that shade of blue, and hung so very high, so completely out of reach.

“Is your coffee okay?”

“Yeah. My coffee’s fine,” Deacon says, but keeps his eyes on the plate-glass window. There’s an airplane up there, the chalk streak of a jet’s contrail, and he imagines himself sitting on that plane, thirty thousand feet above the city, far away above the world, him and Chance going anywhere else but Birmingham.

“How’s your head?”

“Just getting started.”

“I think I have a bottle of Excedrin out in the car. Want me to go get it?”

“You’ve never had a migraine, have you, Detective Downs?”

The cop doesn’t answer right away, like maybe he’s not so sure exactly what Deacon’s asking him, and outside the coffee shop a city bus glides ponderously by in a charcoal cloud of diesel smoke.

“No,” he replies, after the bus noise has faded.

“Lucky son of a bitch,” Deacon whispers and stares back at himself from the plate glass, imperfect, see-through reflection peering out between the Halloween decorations Scotch-taped to the window.
Jesus Christ,
he thinks,
I look like death on a cracker
. The stubble on his hollow cheeks, because he hasn’t shaved in days, and the circles beneath his eyes gone dark as bruises, and he thinks he probably looks a lot more like the hard end of fifty than thirty-nine.

“We didn’t know you knew the victim,” the cop says. “I swear to god, man, we didn’t have any idea.”

“I never said you did.”

“Yeah, I know. I just didn’t want you thinking otherwise.”

Silence then, and Deacon sips a little more of the coffee, so sour it might have been brewed last week, bitter and getting cold but it gives him something to do besides stare at the sky or his ragged face in the window. Once upon a time, back in the day, he thought all coffee tasted like this, and he wishes he had a big cup of the Jamaican Blue Mountain stuff that Chance likes so much.

“I don’t believe in all this psychic mumbo jumbo, you know,” Detective Downs says, and he pours another packet of sugar into his coffee, like that’s going to help. “Some sort of fuckin’ voodoo con job, if you want to know the god’s honest truth what I think. I’m only doing this because I got orders. Nothing personal, but—”

“You just didn’t want me thinking otherwise.”

“Look, I got enough problems right now without you busting my balls, all right? I’m just doing what they tell me.”

“You think
they
believe in this psychic mumbo jumbo?”

“What
they
do or don’t believe, that ain’t none of my business, Mr. Silvey. Someone in Atlanta says you helped solve a few murders, and someone down here thought maybe we should talk to you. That’s all I know and all I really want to know.”

“Well, hell, I can see how you made detective,” Deacon says, smiles even though it makes his head hurt worse, and the cop pushes away from the table, the legs of his chair squeaking loud across the linoleum floor. Sudden anger on his clean-shaven, twenty-something face, anger and disgust, so maybe now he’ll give up and go away and Deacon can have his headache in peace.

“Nothing personal,” Deacon says and takes another drink of coffee.

The cop shakes his head and runs his fingers through his thinning hair, glares across the table at Deacon. “I thought this guy Soda was a friend of yours?”

“I didn’t say he was my friend. I just said I knew him. I’m not sure Soda had any friends, exactly.”

“So…now you want me to fuck off and leave you alone.”

“Something like that.”

“And you’re not even gonna try to help?”

The brass bell hanging above the coffee shop door jingles, and an old black woman in a Coca-Cola sweatshirt and nappy leopard-print house shoes glances suspiciously at Deacon and the detective on her way to the counter.

“You asked me to look. So I fucking looked.”

“And you didn’t
see
anything or
feel
anything or whatever the hell it is you’re supposed to do?”

“No,” Deacon says, wishing it weren’t a lie, wishing that he’d never gotten out of bed and answered the phone, never agreed to take the ride across town to the squalid little apartment where they found Soda’s body. But mostly wishing he had a drink, a bottle of beer, a shot of whiskey, anything at all but the sour coffee and the dry place in his soul.

The detective looks at the old woman and the skinny kid taking her order, then looks back at Deacon and licks at his chapped lips.

“This is the
third
one we’ve found like this in three weeks,” he says quietly. “So far, we’ve managed to keep the details out of the news. That shit you saw painted on the wall, the things that were done to the body, three times so far. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know it’s gonna be four real soon if we don’t get a break. I want you to think about that, Mr. Silvey.”

“Why would I lie to you?”

“That’s precisely what I’m askin’ myself,” and the detective takes a white card from his coat pocket and lays it on the table in front of Deacon. “If you change your mind, you call me.”

“Right,” Deacon says, staring out the window again at the blue October sky. The plane is gone, and already its white contrail is fading. The brass bell jingles as the door swings open and shut, and he watches as the cop crosses the street to his car parked on the other side.

“I tried to tell him to put a dead bolt on his fucking door,” Deacon said, and Detective Downs stopped picking at a Band-Aid on the back of his left hand and stared at him.

“What?”

“You gotta be fucking nuts, living in a dump like this with nothing but a chain on the front door.”

“You knew this guy?”

“Half the crack whores and dust heads on Southside crash in this shithole. Fucking junky’s paradise.”

“Mr. Silvey, are you saying that you
knew
the victim?”

“Yeah, I knew him.”

“Oh god, man, I’m sorry. I swear, we didn’t have any idea—”

“His name was Soda,” Deacon said and took another step into the bedroom of the tiny basement apartment. Colder than October down there, colder than January, cold like black ice water lapping greedily against his skin, and the smell of blood and mildew so thick he was beginning to think he might be sick before he even touched the corpse.

“Charles Ellis,” the detective said. “At least, that’s what his driver’s license and Social Security card both say.”

“He was just Soda. I never heard anyone call him Charles.”

“So that was a nickname, then? Soda?”

“I never heard anyone call him anything else,” and Deacon swallowed once, swallowing nothing but spit and the stinking, frigid air, and walked quickly from the doorway across the sticky, damp carpet to stand at the edge of the bed. The body was still lying there, of course, because they wanted him to see it all, every little gory detail.

“Where the fuck’s his head?” he asked, and the detective coughed twice before answering.

“In the bathroom, tied up in a pillowcase, just the way we found it. Did your friend here use drugs?”

“What do you think?” Deacon replied and stared at the dark and empty cavity of the torso laid open for the whole world to see; it made him think of cantaloupes at the grocery store, split in half and scooped clean. Both Soda’s arms dangled over the sides of the narrow bed, and his right hand, clenched into a fist, curled up like a dead spider, was lying under a card table a few feet away.

“Are those bite marks on the body? Did the killer bite him?”

The cop chuckled softly, and “Not unless the sonofabitch has teeth like a fucking rottweiler dog,” he said.

“So he might have had an animal with him?”

“That’s my guess,” the detective answered and added, “We haven’t accounted for all the internal organs yet, or the eyes, either.”

“Or the eyes,” Deacon whispered, as though what the detective had said might make more sense if he heard it coming out of his own mouth. Words he understood perfectly well, three simple syllables, but no sense left in them anywhere. He swallowed again and looked past the body and the bed at the wall above the headboard.

“Maybe you can tell us what
that
means,” the detective said and pointed.

An almost perfect circle drawn in Soda’s blood, a crusty maroon ring maybe three feet across to stain the dingy drywall. And written all around the outer rim were characters that Deacon thought might be Arabic. Below the circle, a line had been drawn in what looked like charcoal, a straight black line drawn parallel to the floor.

“What the hell makes you think I’d know that?”

“Well, I figured it’s part of some sort of pagan ritual, you know, witchcraft or—”

“And some asshole in Atlanta told you I’m an expert in that sort of shit, right?”

The detective started picking anxiously at the Band-Aid again and nodded his head once.

“Well, they lied to you, man. I’ve got just the one trick up my sleeve, and everything I know about witches I learned from watching
Dark Shadows
on TV.”

“Oh,” the detective said, and “I’m sorry,” sounding more disappointed than apologetic, and Deacon looked from the thing on the wall back to the thing lying spread out on the bed beneath it.

“The lettering could be Arabic,” Deacon said and squeezed his eyes shut tight, wanting to be back out on the street, wanting to be home, wishing he’d told the cops to go to hell.

“Arabic, as in Saudi Arabia? As in
A
-rabs?”

“Yeah, but I’m guessing. It might just be something the killer invented. It might not be anything at all.”

“Okay, so what next? Is there anything special you need before, you know…” and Deacon shook his head, took a deep breath, filling his lungs with the stench of the place, with its freezing, slaughterhouse air. Without opening his eyes, he reached out and laid his right hand on the footboard of the bed.

“Do you
have
to touch the bed? I mean, that’s gonna play hell with forensics. We haven’t even dusted—”

“What do you think the press is going to say,” Deacon asked, “when they find out the Birmingham police are using a psychic to do their work for them?”

“They ain’t gonna say jack shit, Mr. Silvey, because no one’s ever going to tell them this happened. I thought we were clear on that point.”

“Clear as mud,” Deacon said, and the detective was still talking, veiled threats for anyone who ever breathed a single, solitary word of this to
anyone.
But the cop’s voice was growing faint, as though he’d stepped back out into the hallway, as if maybe he were only shouting at Deacon from the sidewalk somewhere outside the old apartment building.

And nothing at first, and he hoped that meant there would be nothing at all. It happened sometimes, when he was very lucky, the trail grown too cold or his head firing blanks; the process still a mystery to him, which was fine. The less he had to think about it the better, and
Please,
he thought,
please dear fucking god let this one be a dud,
and then he could tell Detective Downs to fuck off, thank you very much, and catch the bus back across town, try to pretend this whole thing had never happened. But Deacon Silvey has always had an uncomfortable relationship with luck, at best, and slowly the mold and gore smells were replaced by the sweet and sickly blend of citrus and fish that always accompanied his visions.

“You gettin’ anything?” the detective asked impatiently, and Deacon shrugged. “Well, we ain’t got all day, Mr. Silvey,” Detective Downs grumbled.

“Chill out, copper,” Deacon whispered, trying not to start laughing, riding the storm-front edge of whatever was coming at him from the bed, from however many hours ago Soda had died, licking at his emotions like lightning bolts and thunder.

“
What’d
you just say?”

“It’s coming,” Deacon said, and it did, then; he gripped the bed so hard his knuckles popped, and hung on as though his life depended on it. His life or only his sanity, and for a moment there was nothing in the world but the pulp of ripe tangerines and the clean white flesh of freshly gutted fish.

“Sorry the place is such a pigsty,” Soda said, that stupid, silly grin he got whenever he was drunk or stoned, and keen silver light glinted off the blade of a knife. “Someday, man, someday I’m just gonna call the fire department and have ’em hose the place out.”

Wind through tall grass and the not-so-distant sound of waves.

“Maybe that’ll kill the fucking roaches, too,” and Soda sat down on the bed, bottle of something in his hand, and the old thirst stinging at Deacon’s throat even through these sights and sounds locked up inside his skull.