Low Red Moon (37 page)

“Is that the way you want it, Aldous? Like that?”

“That’s one,” he says, and Narcissa nods her head and begins retracing her steps to the diner door.

T
he same dream every time Deacon closes his eyes long enough to begin drifting down towards sleep, the same dream or close enough that it may as well be, all the horrors of Sunday night replayed again and again as if he’s looking for some way to make it all come out differently. Some alternate, happy ending yet to be discovered, hidden deep within the minutiae, right there for the taking if only his stubborn subconscious self is allowed to pick through the broken pieces enough times. Guilt and regret and a loss that he’s only just beginning to comprehend, not even two days between him and the loss of her, and there’s only the bourbon in his belly and the migraine that doesn’t get any better no matter how much he drinks.

“Where the hell were you, Deke?” Downs asks him again, but then Deacon remembers that it’s only the dream, so this time he doesn’t have to answer if he doesn’t want to. He’s standing in the hallway outside the apartment, looking at the bloody handprints on the open door, deep gouges in the wood like someone’s been at it with a knife or an awl or some other sharp, gouging tool.

“Or claws,” one of the policemen says. “That’s what it looks like to me, like a big ol’ dog’s been at the door. You got a dog, Mr. Silvey?”

And for the fifteenth or twentieth time he says no, no, he doesn’t have a dog, he hasn’t had a dog since he was a kid, and the cop shrugs his shoulders, for the fifteenth or twentieth time, and says well, it sure looks to him like something a dog would do. Deacon tries to ignore him and steps quickly across the threshold, before he can think better of it and change his mind, change his mind and wake up, because then he’ll just have to start the whole dream all over, and there’s absolutely nothing behind him that he ever needs to see again. The meandering blood trail from the parking garage, beginning at the butchered mess that used to be Alice Sprinkle, winding up the fire stairs and down the third-floor hallway, all the dark and drying splotches and smears, the boot prints on the scruffy brown carpet leading to the door and into the apartment and then leading back out again.

“You know, maybe he had a dog with him,” the cop says, and “Who?” Downs asks. “Maybe who had a fucking dog?”

“The perp,” the cop replies. “It’d help explain the condition of the body down—”

“Are you a goddamn detective?” Downs asks him. “Is anyone paying you to be a goddamn detective? Did some asshole hand you a promotion when I wasn’t looking?”

“Look, all I said was—”

“Carter, why don’t you just shut the hell up until someone’s stupid enough to
ask
for your goddamn opinion.”

Deacon wants them both to shut up and go away, but knows they won’t, not yet. He’s been here and now enough times to know that they’ll follow him inside, Downs watching him like a hungry, attentive vulture, the street cop sulking in the detective’s shadow.

Scarborough Pentecost is standing near the bedroom door, his blood-stiff clothes and one of Chance’s fossils, a dark, tightly coiled ammonite, in his right hand, the black hole like a third eye in the center of his forehead.

“Jesus, man, you look like shit,” Scarborough says and then goes back to inspecting the fossil.

“You been anywhere near a mirror lately?” Deacon asks him and then turns his head, his eyes following the boot prints towards the front of the apartment, the raisin-colored streaks along the tall hallway walls. Halfway to the living room, there’s a huge circle drawn on the wall in blood with a smeary line of charcoal underneath. The circle and the line, Sadie’s red moon for a werewolf, red moon for vengeful Gaelic fairies.

“Well, hell, at least you haven’t lost your sense of humor,” Scarborough sighs and sets the fossil back down in its place on a small walnut curio shelf hung on the wall between the bedroom and the nursery.

“Isn’t this shit bad enough already, without having to talk to you every fucking time?”

“Hey, it’s not my dream,” Scarborough replies. “I’m not the one who keeps sticking me here.”

“It looks like she put up a fight,” Downs says, and Deacon knows he can’t see or hear the changeling’s ghost skulking about at the end of the hall. “She didn’t go easily. There’s a knife in the kitchen we think she might have tried to use as a weapon.”

“Where were your men?” Deacon asks, reciting the question like a stray line from a play, something learned through painful, tiresome repetition, and the detective coughs but doesn’t answer him.

Scarborough laughs and shakes his head. “Aren’t you getting tired of this yet, Mr. Silvey? It isn’t ever going to get any prettier, you know.”

“She isn’t dead,” Deacon says, but that only makes Scarborough laugh again.

“Yeah, well, maybe not, but she may as well be. In fact, right about now, she’s probably starting to wish she were.”

“She isn’t dead,” Detective Downs says, straining to sound hopeful, and Deacon takes a deep breath before he touches the blood smeared down the wall. The throbbing in his head swells expectantly.

“You keep picking at that thing,” Scarborough whispers, “it ain’t ever gonna heal.”

Deacon sets the tips of his fingers against the drywall at the center of Narcissa’s circle, and the wall feels soft and warm, sticky, and he’s done this enough times now to be pretty sure it has a pulse. He presses gently, and there’s a faint popping sound before his hand sinks in up to the knuckles.

“We’re going to find her,” the detective says. “But you gotta help us, Deke. You gotta start telling us the
truth.
”

“Maybe he don’t know the truth,” the cop named Carter says. “Maybe he don’t even
want
to know the truth.”

“Didn’t I just fucking tell you to shut the hell up?” Downs snaps, and Deacon’s hand sinks deeper into the wall, wet and living flesh closing tightly about his wrist and holding him there, too late to turn back now, and he glances past the bickering cops at Scarborough before it begins.

“Better be careful,” Scarborough says, looking around the corner at Deacon. “I’ve seen people lose fingers that way.”

“Frankly, it’s not my fingers I’m worried about,” Deacon replies, and now he’s digging about inside the wall, plaster and raw muscle, greasy lumps of fatty tissue and fiberglass insulation, and he’s starting to think maybe this will be one of the dreams where he can’t find what he’s looking for. One of the dreams where he doesn’t even get on the roller coaster, and it’ll cost him another half-pint of booze just to stand in line again. “Come
on,
” he snarls, grimacing, driving his arm in up to the elbow, forcing it past the reluctant lips of the slit.

“It might be a breech birth,” the cop named Carter says, glancing over Deacon’s shoulder. “My wife had a breech birth with our second girl.”

“So now you’re a goddamn obstetrician?” Downs grumbles.

“No, but we’ve had three girls, and you learn a few things if you pay attention.”

Deacon closes his eyes, shutting them all out, the cops and Scarborough Pentecost, as the entire universe pulses to the sick rhythm of his headache and then slowly contracts down to a single speck of pinprick brilliance. The whole cosmos to pass effortlessly through the eye of a needle, and Deacon knows he must be in the wall up to his shoulder now, can smell the rotting flesh, the mildewed softwood studs.

There it is,
he thinks through the blur of pain and stars.
Right in there.

And then his hand closes around bone, a rib or the smooth shaft of a femur, something Chance would know blind, would know by touch alone, but it really doesn’t make any difference to him. The brass ring, that’s all it is, and he holds on tight as the universe begins to swell, reexpanding about him. The wall makes an angry, squelching noise and tries to push him out again. No place he was ever meant to see, nothing he was ever meant to touch, the infinite, slippery dimensions crammed in between time and space, flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood. Something broken deep in his soul, that he knows these things at all, can slip back along these paths that have been rolled up forever and hidden away from prying eyes and curious brains.

The scraping sound, like claws against the apartment door, stainless steel claws to dig deep gouges before Narcissa Snow is done having her fun and simply picks the locks. Deacon opens his eyes, but it’s still too dark to see, still dark because the lights are out all over town.

“Little pig, little pig,” Narcissa whispers through the door. “Let me come in.”

“Fuck off, bitch!” Deacon shouts back, wondering why no one even tried to help, the neighbors on both sides, until he remembers that the guy in 306 was out of town and 308’s still sitting empty.

“Little pig? Can’t you hear me? Aren’t you listening?”

“Leave her alone,” he shouts, and the scratching sounds stop, a moment or two of nothing but the thunderstorm raging overhead before he can hear her start to work on the locks.

“No? Well, that’s okay,” Narcissa says. “I can let myself in.”

And when Deacon turns his head, there is a little light back that way, right there behind him, hazy gray light through the tall living room windows and Chance silhouetted at the end of the hallway. She’s standing very still, staring through him towards the door, and there’s a bread knife in her right hand. He can’t see her face, her eyes, but he
knows
how afraid she is, can hear her heart racing and can smell the electric adrenaline charge coming off her. The air around her sizzles and cracks, and she takes a step towards him.

“No,” Deacon says. “You can’t stop her, Chance. Nothing can stop her.”

“I have a gun,” Chance says, trying to sound brave but her voice too unsteady, unconvincing, and she grips the handle of the knife tighter. There’s a loud click, then, as the dead bolt is unlocked, the rolling of well-oiled tumblers like the thunder from the sky, and she takes a step back towards the living room.

“Do you?” Narcissa asks. “Do you really?”

“Yes,” Chance tells her. “I do.”

“Then I’ll have to watch myself. I shall have to be very careful, shan’t I?”

“Go to the window
now,
” Deacon says, talking fast because he knows he’s running out of time, that Narcissa is almost done with the second lock. “Open a window and start screaming. Scream your goddamn head off. Someone will hear you. Someone will hear you and—”

“You’re wasting your time, Deacon,” Narcissa says, and when he turns around again she’s crouched there in the open doorway, watching him with her golden eyes, backlit by the soft crimson glow of the emergency lights in the outer hall. “You know she can’t hear you. She can’t do the tricks we can do.”

“I’ll find you,” he says. “I’ll find you if it takes the rest of my life.”

“I’m sure you’ll try, poor thing,” she replies and drops down on all fours, her nude body slicked with blood and gore, the wiry mane running down her back matted and tangled with it. And then she isn’t even Narcissa Snow anymore, something else terrible creeping towards him on long legs and claws that click against the floor. Its eyes are on fire now, the gold irises gone molten and burning away to show some stranger metal underneath.

“Oh god, no,” Chance whispers and drops the knife.

“Too late to start praying, little pig,” the monster growls. “Unless maybe you want to try praying to me.”

“Give it up, Mr. Silvey,” Scarborough sighs from some other world, the haunted place where Deacon’s losing his tenuous hold on the wet bone buried inside the wall, the time when all this is already history. “Stop torturing yourself like this. You don’t want to see any more, believe me.”

“Please,” Deacon whispers, pleading with the monster as it comes closer, moving low to the floor like a cat stalking a bird or a squirrel. “Don’t do this again.”

“You think you can change the past, Deacon?” it asks him. “You listened to those changeling lapdogs. You fucked it all up, let me get to her, let me
have
her, and now, now you think I’m going to give you a
second
chance?” And then the thing in the hallway laughs at its own joke, and acid drips from its scalding jaws and hisses on the floor. A single paw to shatter him like crystal, to send the jagged shards skittering away as Deacon loses his grip and the wall spits him out. Spits him up and out of the dream, back into the sunshine streaming through the thin motel curtains, back to the stink of whiskey and vomit and sweat. He lies still a while, half lost in the migraine and the fading shreds of dream, before he finally opens his eyes.

Tuesday afternoon, and Deacon finally goes to see Sadie, because there’s no one and nothing else left for him. Nothing but The Plaza, and Sheryl has already made it abundantly clear that she’s not going to let him sit there on a stool and drink himself to death. So, he goes to the hospital, with its sterile waiting rooms and endless hallways, its suspicious, watchful nurses and disinfectant air. He put on a clean T-shirt and underwear first, but he can still smell himself, the sour reek of old sweat and alcohol trapped in the elevator with him. A bell dings too loudly, counting off the floors. Every floor a fresh nail driven into his aching head, his roiling stomach, and he’s beginning to wish that he’d stayed in his room at the Travelodge motel on Twenty-first Street, the place where he’s sleeping because he can’t stand to be in the apartment with the police and the FBI agents. Not after the things he’s seen, awake and dreaming, not with all the empty places where Chance isn’t.