Moon Regardless

by Nick Manzolillo

  Moon Regardless

  by

  Nick Manzolillo

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  World Castle Publishing, LLC

  Pensacola, Florida

  Copyright © Nick Manzolillo 2021

  Smashwords Edition

  Paperback ISBN: 9781953271792

  eBook ISBN: 9781953271808

  First Edition World Castle Publishing, LLC, March 22, 2021

  http://www.worldcastlepublishing.com

  Smashwords Licensing Notes

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews.

  Cover: Karen Fuller

  Editor: Maxine Bringenberg

  “I AM PROVIDENCE”- H. P. Lovecraft

  For my wife, Brittany Grace, who showed me how to love Providence.

  For my mom and dad, Denise and Lou, and my grandparents, James, Sheila, Steven, Mike and Carol, for their endless love and support.

  Special Thanks

  This novel wouldn’t have been possible without the incredible guidance and inspiration from my teachers and peers at Western Connecticut State’s Creative and Professional Writing MFA program; to everybody involved in the program, thank you for giving an awkward and introverted storyteller a place to feel accepted. May bad poetry night live on forever.

  Thank you to the late Professor Robert Leuci and his highly energetic creative writing advice at the University of Rhode Island.

  Thank you to Thuglit and the New England Horror Writers for my first professional short story publications.

  Thank you to Mrs. Stormont and Mrs. Willison from Scituate High School for inspiring me to take writing seriously.

  Thank you to Karen Fuller, Maxine Bringenberg, and everybody involved with World Castle Publishing for giving this strange novel a wonderful home.

  Chapter 1: The Girl Persuaded by the Stars

  The more Hap digs, the more he bleeds. The early summer heat percolates from the rusted walls of the dumpster, creating an oven that roasts rancid meat and soiled kitty litter. As he heaves through the sacks of plastic, talons of glass, and cracked slabs of plaster, they seem to come alive to mince Hap into something more digestible. “No, no, no,” he mumbles, sweat accumulating with his blood, searing his eyes. He’s thrown out the only lead he has. The only chance he might have at finding Tiffany.

  Hap has been telling anybody who will listen that he has a girlfriend and he can’t find her. Either she has been raped, murdered, and dumped down a well, or she ran off with some backwoods carnie and is up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Either way, Hap has to know for certain. From outside the dumpster, men are yelling—a group of construction workers, remodeling yet another ancient Federal Hill building. He won’t be able to evade them for much longer, but he has to find it. The totem. His taut and bleeding fingers have only found the winding threads to what may be his own sanity.

  “Hey, buddy, what the hell are you doing?” Someone who doesn’t understand has heard Hap’s rummaging. Nobody wants to help him. The police have done nothing. Tiffany’s parents and friends are spinning in circles that are warping into spirals of paranoia. Hap’s own folks want him to come back to Pennsylvania. He lied, told them he wanted to finish up the year, hand in those last final papers, and earn his filthy media and communications degree, so he has something that makes this all worth it.

  The worker who’s found him whistles over his buddies. Gloved hands snatch Hap by the back of his shirt, hauling him out of the sea of filth like a grime-clad fish. The sun blinds him as he’s laid down on the sidewalk. Men in vests of neon orange peer over him. One of them, a Hispanic guy wearing a hardhat, asks, “What are you on, kid?” But Hap doesn’t care what they think. Clutched in his hand and speckled in blood is the totem. Carved in the vaguest of details and small enough to be swallowed up by Hap’s fist, the obsidian totem is of a toad; it’s squat and lumpy, with several humanoid arms blossoming out of its back.

  He doesn’t remember grabbing it. How long did he search with the totem clenched in his hand, as if there were something else to find in that stink bin of waste? Tiffany….

  Hap springs to his feet, causing the workers to back away, eyes wide. Is Hap grinning? He works his jaw, roves his tongue behind his teeth. His mouth is open. Shit, he must look like a lunatic, bloody and snarling. “I...,” he begins to say, but he’s got nothing but a whole bunch of half-formed excuses he doesn’t have the heart to spew. All these men see is a dark-skinned boy, probably on drugs.

  “Do you need a phone?” an older guy with a graying beard and some kind of badge on his vest asks.

  If something can happen to a girl like Tiff, then you have no friends, just varying degrees of enemy. Hap presses the totem to his chest, spots an opening between the men, and takes off running. Nobody chases after him.

  Federal Hill, an old Italian district full of restaurants and bars and only a twenty-minute walk away from the Johnson and Wales campus, has become just another noisy distraction. Weaving through the twisting roads, he wishes that the buildings in his way were sheets he could pull and throw aside.

  Nobody greets Hap when he enters the apartment. One of the girls, Erin, is lying on the couch, her eyes puffy, red, and glued to her laptop screen. Tiff has been gone for four days. By the end of that second day, when the idea of what happened to her began to grow dark, the other girls stopped acknowledging Hap’s grief. He remembers how hopeful they were when he first told them he hadn’t seen her. That she hadn’t come home from her event at the downtown Miskatonic Hotel, where she was helping to organize a ball for the weekend-long astronomy convention. These girls, with their eyes now run red and raw from all their tears, once told Hap not to worry and that everything would be fine.

  Of course, Tiff’s parents were the first to really worry, but that’s their job as parents. They were the ones who called the cops the first night of Tiff’s disappearance. Tiff’s mother had yelled at Hap because he slept until three in the afternoon that day, even though he had no idea she was missing at the time. The cops were full of the annoying kind of questions. They asked Hap if he and Tiff had any big fights, if she was depressed, if anyone was bothering her. No, no, and no.

  In his poster-strewn bedroom, Hap sets the totem back where Tiff first placed it on his Xbox. What an ugly thing. He gave it the nickname The Lord Over Joy because there it sat, an outsider in the mix of Hap and Tiffany’s personalities scattered around the room. His original painted Jimi Hendrix and Star Wars portraits mesh with a map of the (real) galaxy and Tiff’s Native American dream catchers. The apartment may be one thing, but their room, however small, is precisely connected to each of them. The totem is an invader.

  Tiff got the damn thing as some sort of party favor for helping set up the ball. It’s not something you would expect to get from what’s essentially a geek convention honoring Charles McKinley, a relatively obscure astrophysicist. Tiffany used to go on about him being the next Galileo when his theories about the elemental charging of the universe and parallel dimensions start being proven in the next ten years; Hap didn’t know enough to dispute any of that. The people hosting the ball were more spiritual than scientific, according to Tiffany. A lot of the costumes and dresses for the ball were “grotesque,” in her own words, and she only elaborated that there were
a lot of awkward leather and masquerade masks. Hap was only half listening at the time. She always seemed to tell him about her day when he was playing Halo. There’s no real explanation for the toad of a totem, The Lord Over Joy, except that maybe art and science should respect a well-defined line.

  The totem sits on his Xbox, gloating over his grief once more. At night it eyes him through the orange streetlight-striped darkness of the bedroom, which, despite being nearly closet sized, now feels massive. He couldn’t help throwing the damn totem away after that first night with Tiff gone. He didn’t tell the cops about it. It didn’t seem to matter, but now he remembers the little legends about the Miskatonic Hotel. Rumors about ghosts haunting the place. The cops tune out the moment they hear the word ghost, but there’s a philosophy to myth and how it blurs reality. It makes no difference to him whether a dead thing or a man in a white sheet stole Tiffany away. All that matters is that something about the Miskatonic was off to begin with.

  Hap sifts through his leather briefcase and retrieves his camera. He will not open it and look through album upon album of digitally stored photographs until he sees her again. Not until he can get down on one knee and do what he was meant to. A black box tumbles out of his bag, nearly rolling under the bed.

  The day Tiff didn’t come home from work, Hap had been practicing his proposal. He’d been taking a knee in front of his mirror and laughing at himself uncontrollably. He had gone over every possible way he could propose to her. Inside a bowl of chicken wings at the rather contradictory Federal Hill New York Pizza parlor? Under her pillow? At the downtown water fires? He had to get it right because, according to his younger sister, Tiff probably had been imagining this proposal business since she was a little girl.

  The night that Tiffany should have been home, there was a full moon, and even though Hap’s never been one to send his wishes to the stars, he originally took that as a good sign. The plan evolved to include meeting Tiff at a pub on College Hill near Brown University, eating wings, and then walking three blocks over to Prospect Terrace, a humble little East Side park with a view overlooking the entire city. The proposal would have been perfect bathed in moonlight.

  He had pictured her saying, “I just sent my graduation robes to get resized, and now you want me to buy a fucking wedding dress?” But Hap knew she would’ve said yes. Hell, she’s the one who was supposed to be making near sixty grand a year right after graduation, probably at some international hotel. Hap figured he’d be lucky if the Providence Journal even considered him for an internship come winter. Hap and Tiff have already signed a lease for an apartment between Atwells Avenue and the beginning of Federal Hill. Hap had been planning on paying for his share of the rent and every other expense with the credit card his mother still covers the bills for back home in Pennsylvania.

  Hap tucks the wedding ring back into his briefcase and falls onto the mattress, holding his camera, a top-of-the-line Canon his dad got him for high school graduation, up to the ceiling. The girls who worked the Astronomer’s Ball with Tiffany told the police they never noticed her leave. The people who ran the event were artsy and relaxed, letting the girls come and go when they wished to, especially on that last night. Tiff must have hated how loosely structured it was. She would have stayed until the event was over, doing everything she could to stick out as a motivated employee.

  The Astronomer’s Ball wasn’t the first event she coordinated from Providence to Newport, being a hospitality major and all, but it was the first event she seemed passionate about. If Hap’s head is in the clouds, he’s always imagined hers being in the stars. He’s never used the two-thousand-dollar telescope in their bedroom, but for every cosmic event streaking across the sky, Tiffany always made sure he gets an eyeful, city lights be damned.

  Hap aims his camera at the telescope in the corner of the bedroom and snaps a picture. The lighting’s off, but he’s too lazy to get up and flick a switch. Fuck, he’s getting dumpster grime all over the bedsheets. Right now, Hap can’t get behind the idea of showering, of being naked and all the more exposed. He kicks his shoes off, and that’s good enough. There were many nights when he passed out to the fine sight of Tiff’s squeezable thighs poking through her shorts, her blonde hair streaked across the silver of the scope while she hunched over, motionless, gazing onto other worlds. He has the totem. He has nothing left he can possibly do but dream and wait, and, with that thought, Hap closes his eyes and sees Tiffany again.

  When he opens them, the totem is watching. A flurry of rapid, childlike knocks rattles against the bedroom door, startling Hap fully awake just as the group of girls comes barging in. Most concerning of all is that one of Tiff’s roommates, Lexi, is hiding behind Erin and holding a baseball bat. “We need you to go,” Erin speaks up as if it’s such a simple request. It’s only been a few hours, but he took his clothes off at some murky, dream clogged point, and now he’s under the covers in only his underwear.

  The girls have discussed their decision without him. He’d been dreading this. When the girlfriend of a twenty-two-year-old boy goes missing, the world knows who to blame.

  “All right, but what if she comes back?” Hap begs.

  “We don’t know if you had something to do with it. Our parents….” Erin’s trying to explain. Given that she’s the loudest one of the bunch, the other girls have clearly put her up to this.

  “You really think I did something? You seriously think I’d hurt her?” Hap could cry for them if they really needed to see some sincerity.

  “We don’t know you. We haven’t gotten to know you for how long now? You don’t talk,” Lexi says from behind Erin, and there it is. He tries to be quiet and respectful as Tiff’s boyfriend and all, and they think he’s a freak. It’s like they’ve never met an introvert before.

  “We don’t know if you’re telling the truth, and this room doesn’t belong to you. Your name’s not on the lease, which me and Lex and Rachel are planning on renewing,” Erin says, and go figure, three out of the four other girls aren’t graduating on time. “We’ve called Cort,” Erin says. Cort, the landlord, a punk in his thirties who often shows up unannounced and hasn’t done anything about the mice problem the building’s had for the past three years. “Your name is not on the lease. With her gone…you shouldn’t be here. You should go home.”

  Hap tries to swallow with a throat gone dry, and in as neutral a tone as possible, tells the group of girls to fuck off. They back out of the room, not wanting to turn their backs to him. It’s not until they slam the door shut that Hap realizes he’s still flaked in dried blood and dumpster dung.

  They want him gone? Good. He’s done here. He…the totem catches Hap’s eye, and why did he set it back onto the Xbox? He slaps it to the floor, tosses his backpack onto the bed, and begins packing. The girls are yelling at one another. One of them is crying. Through all of the dramatic chaos they’ve experienced over the past three years, from cheating boyfriends to failing grades to fights amongst one another and their dirty cats, their wrath is now set upon Hap.

  Cort, the landlord, a skinny ginger man, shows up before Hap can even begin emptying Tiff’s room of his stuff. The guy walks right into the bedroom wearing a baby blue golf polo and points a finger at Hap. “I’m calling the cops if you’re not out of here in five minutes.” Five minutes? He hasn’t even had a chance to book a bus or call his brother to pick him up tomorrow morning.

  “That’s bullshit. I haven’t done anything wrong. I can’t even get home.” Hap hates the panic that tinges his words, making him seem unstable. He hates the sobs that linger at the back of his throat, weakening his argument.

  “Do I need to get the lease? You’re harassing my tenants,” Cort sneers. Allegedly, he has ties to the mob. That’s supposedly a thing on Federal Hill, it being the chief Italian neighborhood in Rhode Island and all. If some kind of mob still exists, Hap figures they probably use people like Cort as a tampon.

  Th
e little moments are vanishing. Too many days have gone by already. There’s no arguing with Cort. Getting arrested won’t do. Hap emerges onto Federal Hill with his backpack and a duffel bag, thankful he remembered to grab his Xbox and camera. As soon as he hears Cort tell the girls, “Everything is going to be okay,” he kicks over a pair of trash bins. If he knew what kind of car Cort drove, he’d kick that too.

  Hap leaves the hill for Broadway, one of those classic primary streets that run through the heart of Providence. His heart is beating loud enough to dull the world around him. When he calls his mother, he’s practically in a trance.

  The voice of the woman who reared him and his four siblings is a loudspeaker over several distant hills behind him. He tells her he has no place to stay. She tells him to just come home, that she’ll order him a bus ticket right this minute, that all he needs to focus on is heading home. When Hap hangs up, he can’t remember what he’s told her. His soothing bullshit seemed to comfort her, but it’s lost to him. He can’t think of a good lie that will stop him from doing something stupid.

  He recalls that special something about the Miskatonic Hotel, that little bit of nonsense he heard kids repeat both his freshman year and while he was a hall advisor. The out-of-town students were quick to demand, eat up, and then regurgitate the stories about the one mad thing every city has: ghost stories. There is something whispered about the Miskatonic Hotel that Hap begins to remember.

  Rhode Island took Prohibition in stride despite its Puritan hierarchy, and it was notorious for being its own little booze-soaked plain of rebellion. According to kids newly exposed to the private exclusivity of frat parties and sorority socials, the Miskatonic is the grandfather of private events. Government men and their law enforcement spawn would drink for free in private rooms and ballrooms, sheltered by the enclosed privileges of the hotel. Complete with complimentary prostitutes and rooms where cigars were manufactured, one English professor mused that the hotel was probably a paradise out of The Great Gatsby. Like any other criminal watering hole, violence came in heavy chalices.