Low Red Moon (29 page)

“No, Alice. Don’t say that. Nothing’s going to happen. I’ve got Deacon, and I’ve got you, and I’ve got three whole carloads of police sitting outside. I’m probably the safest pregnant lady in Alabama right now.”

“I told your grandfather I’d always watch after you,” Alice says, and then lightning and a thunderclap so loud there’s no point in anyone saying anything else until it’s done and the big windows have stopped rattling.

“And you always have,” Chance tells her, leaning forward a little and upsetting some of the cushions so they tumble off into the floor. “Every single time I’ve ever needed you, you’ve always been there for me. Now, please, go smoke a cigarette and stop worrying for a little while.”

Alice stoops and retrieves the fallen cushions, tucks them back into place around Chance. And then she leans over and kisses Chance lightly on the lips.

The singer’s voice leaking from the stereo speakers, too pretty to be husky, too hard to be sweet,
I’ve lost myself inside your light, and burning doesn’t seem to scare me anymore, here everything is carbon white, and ash.

“Alice,” Chance says uncertainly, and immediately Alice’s cheeks flush bright pink and she backs away, almost tripping over the coffee table.

“I’m so sorry,” Alice mumbles and wipes at her forehead.

“Don’t apologize,” Chance says and touches her lips. “I understand.”

“You think so? Then you’ve got a leg up on me, kiddo.”

“I’m okay, Alice. Go on. I’m just going to sit here and listen to my music for a little while.”

And Alice does go, then walks quickly down the hall to the front door, leaving Chance alone on the big sofa in her nest of cushions. Chance licks at her lips, the faint, musty taste of Alice Sprinkle lingering there, and
Come home, Deke,
she thinks.
Come home now,
because she doesn’t feel anything like okay. The things she saw in the bathroom mirror, the yellow-eyed woman and her carving knife, the angry, gull-haunted sky, and she closes her eyes and tries to think of nothing but Daria Parker’s song.

The fire behind your eyes is burning me alive, no reason left to fight, the light inside you shining, shining carbon white.

“There are many evil places in the world, sick places,
terrae pathologica,
” Madam Terpsichore said, when Jane was only seven and a half, still a whelp but starting to forget her vague, intangible memories of the world before. “And if you should die in a sick place, child, the evil things there will trap your soul and, if it is a very clever sort of evil, you might spend all the rest of eternity looking for a way out.”

Huddled in the leaky shelter of the loading dock of an abandoned warehouse or factory, shivering and trying hard not to let the cold and wet distract her from watching the narrow cobblestone street, Starling Jane can’t keep the
ghul
’s words out of her head. Can’t stop thinking of the dread she felt that first day she and Scarborough came to this city, that day on the overpass above the old iron foundry, or the night she went to Deacon Silvey and saw the blackness crouched jealously just inside the gated tunnel leading deep into the heart of a mountain. Those things and all the dead and crippled that Narcissa Snow has left scattered in her wake like broken toys.

“Even we shun those blighted places,” Madam Terpsichore said and licked her thick black lips, her long tongue slipping about the edges of her muzzle for any stray bits of supper caught in her fur. “Even the darkest folk among us aren’t that bold.”

“Why are the places sick?” Jane asked, and the hounds laughed and then went back to gnawing their bones.

“There were things here ages before us, child, terrible things that will still be here when we’re gone. The sick places are where they sleep, and wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“Don’t ask so many questions,” Madam Terpsichore said. “It’s not healthy,” and then she turned her back on Starling Jane and wandered away into one of the tunnels leading down towards Swan Point Cemetery and the muddy Seekonk River.

“Silly old cunt,” Jane whispers, but it doesn’t make her feel any better, and so she reaches inside the raincoat that Scarborough bought her at an army surplus store back in Atlanta. The reassuring butt of her gun tucked into its holster, the knife tucked into her boot. There’s a brilliant, scalding flash of lightning, then, and she ducks her head, flinching instinctively; the thunder chasing its dazzling heels is so loud that she covers her ears and waits for it to pass.

“Fuck it all,” she whispers, almost able to hear herself over the rumbling sky. Starling Jane pulls her raincoat tighter and watches the old-fashioned lampposts along the street, gaslights with electric hearts. Nothing but the night and the storm, the water gurgling noisily from aluminum rainspouts and filling up the gutters, swirling away down storm drains.

There are lights burning bright in a few of the windows, nineteenth-century warehouses and livery stables gentrified into pricey yuppie cocoons, but at least that’s something this awful, alien place has in common with Providence. History dusted off and smothered under layers of paint and varnish, renovated for the unseeing people of sunshine and blue skies. Across the street, a pretty young man with red hair and glasses stands at one of the windows for a moment and then goes away again.

If things had been different,
she thinks,
if the world had turned another way and the Cuckoo hadn’t chosen me, I might live in a place like that. If things had been different, I might live another night.

“Regret is your worst enemy,” Madam Terpsichore said once, when she found Starling Jane huddled in a corner with a magazine she’d found abandoned on a park bench, crying over the glossy photographs of perfect, smiling people. “You are strong and can survive anything, so long as you keep regret at your back.
This
is the way your life has gone. It will not now go another way.”

Starling Jane shivers and checks her wristwatch. They should be getting to the house soon, and in another half hour it will all be over and done with.

The sudden creak of straining metal overhead, and she looks up, the rain dripping into her eyes, half blinding her before she can blink it away. But not before she sees that there’s something crouched there on the bottom landing of the fire escape only a dozen feet above her, something with iridescent golden eyes peering down between the rusted strips of steel beneath its feet.

“Do you even know
why
you’re hunting me, little girl?” the thing on the fire escape asks. “Has anyone even bothered to tell you?” Its voice is sweet and smooth as honey on lead crystal, worming its way into her head so she can’t think straight, blurring her thoughts like the rain’s already blurred her vision.

“For the things you’ve done,” Jane says very quietly and slowly reaches for her pistol.

“No
,” the thing on the fire escape growls back at her. “Because you’ve been
ordered
to hunt me. That’s why you’re here. Don’t pretend you’re doing something noble. Don’t pretend you’re anything but a lapdog.”

Starling Jane draws the gun and aims it carefully at the darkness framed between those flashing amber eyes. Sighting down the pistol’s snubby barrel, she knows perfectly well that she’ll only get one shot, if she’s really fucking lucky she’ll only get one shot off before Narcissa Snow slips over the edge of the fire escape and tears her apart.

Narcissa laughs at her, and it’s a sound so cold, so absolutely empty, all the wasted places of the earth sewn up in that laugh, that Jane almost drops the gun and runs.

“You’re not going to use that,” Narcissa says confidently.

“Why the hell not?” Jane whispers.

“The three police cars out front, that’s why the hell not. Don’t you think they’ll hear the shot? What if you missed? How can you keep all your precious fucking secrets if you miss and they find your body and have to come looking for me themselves? What if
they
catch me, instead? All the things that I could
tell
them, all the things that I could
show
them.”

“Asylums are full of lunatics,” Jane says, flipping off the safety and tightening her grip on the trigger. “Every one of them knows the secrets of the universe.”

“But I have the
proof,
baby doll. That’s the difference.”

She wants you to keep talking, keep listening, she wants to confuse you. Pull the trigger and she’s dead, pull the trigger and it’s all over.

“No one would ever believe anything you said,” Jane replies, not even persuading herself.

“Then shut up and
shoot
me. Even a ribsy little bitch like you should be able to hit me from this distance.”

But Jane lowers the gun, instead, releasing the trigger, praying to all the dark gods of the hounds that there’s time to draw the dagger tucked into her boot before Narcissa gets to her.

“Smart girl,” Narcissa purrs, and the rusty fire escape pops and creaks, swaying just a little as she shifts her weight, as she moves like a living, liquid shadow flowing down to engulf and drown Starling Jane.

Alice finishes her cigarette and stubs the Winston out against the railing, flicks the butt away into the spiraling depths of the stairwell. There are others littering the steps, dirty little secrets no one has bothered to sweep up, so the building keeps them to itself, here where hardly anyone will ever see. Dozens of Camel butts and she figures those might be Deacon’s, though they could just as easily belong to someone else on the third floor. She looks at the half-empty pack of cigarettes lying next to her, there where she’s sitting on the topmost stair, and thinks about lighting another one. Her nerves already shot before that messed-up little scene with Chance, the silly fucking kiss, and she swears to herself she’d give up a year of her life just to take back that one moment. The whole thing fucked up in more ways than she cares to count, never mind that Chance is pregnant, that she’s
married
and pregnant, plenty bad enough that Alice could be her goddamned mother, that she made so many promises to Joe and Esther Matthews.

“It wasn’t anything at all,” she says, even though she doesn’t mean it, and takes out another Winston. It’s a little bent from riding around in her shirt pocket all day, and she straightens it with her fingers.

“It didn’t
mean
anything,” she says.

Alice flips open the lid on her silver Zippo, thumb on the strike wheel, and then she hears a sound coming from somewhere beneath her. Clattering noises from a lower floor or the parking garage all the way at the bottom of the stairs, and she takes the cigarette from her lips and listens. But there’s only the incessant drumming of the rain against the roof, the low and muted howl of wind around the corners of the building. She looks over her left shoulder at the door to the stairwell propped open with a piece of cardboard, one flap torn off a cardboard box and wedged in level with the doorknob so the lock can’t catch.

What the hell are you so nervous about?
she thinks, returning the Winston to the crumpled pack. Then she remembers the three police cars sitting out front, the telephone call from Deacon and the frightened, furtive expression on Chance’s face. All that forgotten for a few minutes, her mind too busy worrying over the unfortunate kiss, too busy wondering if she’s managed to screw up her friendship with Chance. One foolish, impulsive action that might be strong enough to invalidate all those years, the disproportionate cause and effect she’s seen so many times before. The too-familiar weight of guilt, and Alice shuts her eyes for a second and listens to the rain and thunder. Nothing to be frightened of there, nothing that she doesn’t understand, and she wishes Chance had called someone else to keep her company, then feels ashamed for wishing it.

On the first or second floor, somebody opens one of the other doors into the stairwell, and there’s a sudden downdraft, musty, warm air sucked in from the third-floor hallway behind Alice, before both doors, the one below and the one at her back, slam shut in unison. Startled, she jumps and drops her lighter. It clatters end over end down the steep cement steps and lies glittering in the dim light of the landing.

“Mother
fucker,
” Alice hisses, getting quickly to her feet, and she tugs at the door handle, but it’s locked tight; the useless piece of cardboard has slipped all the way down to the floor, and she kicks it hard enough to hurt her foot. No way Chance will ever hear her, not with the stereo blaring and so much distance, so many walls and doors, between them, so she’ll have to go all the way downstairs and out through the garage, then use one of the call boxes to get Chance to buzz her back into the building.

She bangs on the door a few times, just in case someone’s in the hall, someone who might hear and let her back in. When no one does, she leans out over the railing and bellows down the stairwell.

“Why the
fuck
did you open the damned door, you dickhead?!”

Only the storm raging above her for an answer, the rain to remind her that she’ll probably end up soaked before this is over, standing in the downpour, waiting for Chance to get to the phone.