Moon Regardless

by Nick Manzolillo

  He knows how people in real life get drunk via a bottle of whiskey or something similar and then, obliteration. But with Tiff, even after hitting twenty-one, he only ever had a couple of Bud Lights when they went out. Even then, he was never really comfortable with the resulting buzz. Something about losing control didn’t jibe with him. He only ever got drunk on his twenty-first, primarily because of the shots Tiff’s roommates kept pouring into him. If he closes his eyes, he can still smell the resulting puke.

  The main strip of restaurants and bars on Federal Hill, Atwells Avenue, is not the place, with all that noise and local kids going wild on a Saturday. Hap crosses the far side of Broadway, conscious of how bad his fresh wounds must look. He will look like a fighter, a troublemaker. The funny thing is, the ache across his face almost feels good. It’s something to concentrate on, as opposed to the meandering explorations of the Miskatonic. Tangible things are better than ethereal. Something to touch is better than a memory or an idea.

  Today has been full of ideas that didn’t go anywhere. Hap finally explored the Miskatonic’s Garden Room, and big surprise, there were a lot of plants. He learned that its walls are stacked with potted green things, some of which have the faintest exotic flare to them, while others are no more spectacular than the weeds sprouting up from the cracked ends of the sidewalk. In the Garden Room, there is something of a sunroof, though the ceiling seems to mostly be covered in a mirror that reflects into the plants. In the center of the room, there’s a large boardroom-style table where the hipsters of the business world presumably meet. If they really want to be clever, then they’d call it the Oxygen Room.

  The one exception to the Garden Room is that there is a half-moon carved along the top of a wall facing from the east. The Miskatonic is built by the occult; that’s obvious to anybody, even Luke, who says the place was built in the golden age of gypsies, Aleister Crowley, and tarot cards. Notably, this morning, Hap asked Randal, the bartender, if he knew of anybody going missing in the hotel. The response he received was some new-age philosophy about how buildings are more alive than suspected, how places can swallow you up, especially when they seem comfortable.

  Just as cities have personalities, certain buildings have “appetites,” as Randal put it. Color him a superstitious foreigner, but he’s the only person who almost says something Hap wants to hear. There is something he said that stuck with Hap after he helped a guest to her room and walked by himself down the lonesome corridor to the elevator. There’s a theory that hotels’ mazes can trap ghosts. For some reason, when Hap thinks of ghosts, it’s always graveyards, spider webs, pumpkins, and pale wispy things in the dark. Graveyards are mazelike if they are big enough because most of the tombstones look the same. Spider webs, too, could play a part in trapping spirits as orchestrated patterns spun from the back end of a creeping thing. Maybe they trap ghosts; maybe ghosts lurk in every lonely place full of cobwebs. Maybe there is a big old spider that lives within the Miskatonic, spinning its spirit-trapping pattern over and over. What would a giant spider want with a person like Tiff? A meal? What would a ghost want with her? Company?

  Blowing his cover as an indifferent clock puncher after a few weeks of dry leads, Hap asked Randal what he knew about what was really going on in the Miskatonic.

  Randal’s bemused response, lacking the playful ideology that set Hap’s imagination briefly spinning during their first encounter, was that he never goes farther than the first floor. He then added, “Believe half of what you see but nothing that you hear. You don’t need to set foot in here. You stand outside in the park, and you look at this building compared to the ones beside it; this place pulls you in. You can feel this place. It comes from your head. Then it comes for your head.” Luke then appeared beside Hap, mentioning how he couldn’t wait to finally receive his stupid paycheck. It seemed like Randal was going to continue and give Hap more of the slivers of ideas he had been craving, but Luke ushered him away. Randal had finished packing up for the night, and Hap couldn’t find him after his own shift ended a few minutes later.

  There’s what looks to be a dark bar with no sign on the corner of a square. Hap has never noticed. It’s right off Broadway, and he’s surprised he hasn’t discovered it before. Cities and their hidden fucking corners. There’s a street called John Parkington Lane; Hap doesn’t know who that is, but the guy’s probably another politician or doctor or civil rights activist. Why aren’t things named after the people who go missing? Why isn’t more done to try and remember them? To find them?

  Something about the shadows of the bar seems appealing, as Hap glides in without being greeted. He’s met by soft jazzy rifts on a low radio. Shadowy men and women wear their achievements in their wrinkleless collars, and elaborate skirts kick back on plush velvet chairs. Hap is debating turning around and walking right back out, but the bartender, a tall woman with hair so black it seems like a dancing shadow stuck to her head, greets him in a take-it-or-leave-it tone and he is here for a reason. He takes a seat at the bar and stares at a drink menu.

  The bottles on the shelf are all rare brands Hap hasn’t seen before. There are tequilas with strange, robotic owl logos and whiskey bottles warped and crooked, circular and spiraling. A mug bearing the logo of locally brewed Foolproof beer is labeled with the symbol of a leering and devilish jester’s face. Hap would think it was a hipster place, being a nameless bar and all if it weren’t for the upper-class people around him. This is where maybe a mobster would go, or whoever made this place wants to give it that sort of playful vibe. Perhaps “elite” is the more appropriate term. The walls offer carved wooden designs, outlining buildings that faintly resemble downtown Providence. On the fringes of the buildings are winding tree branches and naked, dancing women, some with antlers, some with what look like birds flying from their heads. The shadows cling to just the right places, and Hap can only get a vague notion of the mural wrapping around the bar. There are triangles and vaguely Egyptian trapezoids embroidered both above and to the side of the front door.

  What isn’t occult? What doesn’t pay attention to the strange and the perverse? Coincidences, as far as Hap is concerned when it comes to Tiff, are coming back into play. The killer in Providence is another story. There have been three bodies found now, all with their eyes carved out, which is unique enough to be getting national attention. It makes sense that, instead of some grand conspiracy, Tiff was just killed by a murdering lunatic. This eye doctor, is there any way Hap could find him? He also can’t let the Miskatonic off that easily, what with coincidences and all.

  A drink on the menu has cucumber vodka and banana liqueur. It’s probably light and dorky, so Hap orders it. It’s called a Lost Alice, and its name brings to mind a wonderland of delirium and missing girls.

  With his head down, the shadows are almost like closing his eyes. When he’s halfway through the drink, he feels the faintest tug of disassociation. He remembers Tiffany’s ring, the box opened, the ring on the Miskatonic nightstand. Was it him in his sleep? People black out when they’re drunk. What else scatters memory and turns life and light into fog and dream?

  Alice is lost down Hap’s throat. He thinks he recognizes Tiff’s old landlord, that douchebag called Cort, sitting in a corner of the room with an old woman. At first, it seems like Cort is having a polite drink with an elderly family member, but he’s rubbing the woman’s arm slowly, starting at a dark elbow and reaching, sliding his fingers toward the woman’s face. Cort’s lips quiver with excitement, causing Hap to feel a little sick. What would somebody else do? Walk over to the guy and shout, “Thanks for kicking me out of my fucking bedroom!” and then splash him in the face with banana liqueur? Maybe he could crack the glass across his face, drag him outside, and stomp his heel into his face. Violent people are alien. Hap can’t picture ever crossing that line between fantasy and action. It’s not possible. The bartender is peering at him, asking if he wants another, and, yes, Hap hardly remembers what Alice tast
ed like.

  A third drink becomes overkill. Upon standing, Hap feels as though he’s stuck in the sensation of leaning slightly backwards. Free from the nameless bar, it occurs to him that an additional twenty bucks after buying just three drinks is too large a tip. One move, and you can’t get something back. He forgot to call out Cort for being a prick and a perv, that granny-fucking king rat.

  Hap’s skin is thick as he prods at his fresh bruises from the accident and stumbles down the street. Did he really run into a deer? He’s never killed anything with blood running through its veins before. Where would it have gone if he hadn’t struck it off its course? He’s pretty sure he remembers the blood already around its neck, in that split second flash of the deer thumping against the hood of the car and floating up the windshield; its neck twisted, and he saw its black eyes before his windshield shattered. Where had it been? Hap begins making his way back to the hill. Who, or what, gouged its neck open, and why? There are places to explore, things to investigate.

  The sky is alight overhead in fluttering, snaking yellow, via a sudden crackling burst as the stars are brought to Providence, and burning green tendrils slowly creep down over Broadway. Fireworks, from the weekly water fire festival downtown. In a city this small, there are no concerns about the rockets hitting a stray office building. They just angle the bombs over the flatland slums of East Providence and rest their worries. What weekend is this? The Fourth? It’s already the Fourth, yes; there are too many American flags and people saying congratulations to each other, so they don’t forget to be happy. Where did June go?

  Just as he’s wondering why he hasn’t been invited to any cookouts, Hap remembers both the missed calls and voicemails from his mom and his brother Derrick. Fuck the Fourth. That was his motto, wasn’t it? Another rocket splits the sky, erupting into more multi-limbed magnesium tentacles that grip the city in its celebration.

  There’s a liquor store nearby, and he lets the headlights on either side of him rely on their driver’s reflexes as he strolls along a crosswalk, staring straight ahead. He selects a cheap six-pack of blueberry-flavored Newport Storm bottles because he got a sample of it one time at a festival in that aforementioned seaport town with Tiff. The cashier asks Hap for his ID and then a second form of ID. Hap drops his wallet, fumbling for his now-expired school one.

  A second clerk appears; they’re both Pakistani, so of course, there’s no kinship with Hap. One of them mentions that Pennsylvania fake IDs are the most popular because they’re the easiest to make, which is funny because Tiff had a fake ID from Pennsylvania under a fake name when Hap first met her, which made their relationship seem even more like destiny. At last, the clerks take Hap’s money, and before he’s even fully out the door, he pops the cap off one of the beers and starts guzzling.

  He wanders over to the abandoned Federal Hill house. The six-pack is too much, so he places it by one of the fence posts. The firework show’s grand finale is erupting behind him, so he casts one obligatory glance over his shoulder at the pretty orgy of lights before refocusing on the den of pure fucking evil before him. He tilts his bottle back for a good long sip, studying the peeling paint and unshuttered glass windows that reveal only blackness. The thin porch is cracked in as if somebody hacked away at it with a bat; this is the building farthest in from the sidewalk around here. The porch of every other house practically dumps on the road, yet this one has an actual front yard if you call broken glass and weeds a yard. The front door is locked, so Hap picks up a chunk of the crumbling cement walkway and throws it through a first-floor window. Knock-Knock.

  The breaking of the glass seems to mesh well with the fading echo of the fireworks show, as Hap finds another slab of cement and uses it to chip away the sharper edges of the remaining glass that’s sunk into the waterlogged gums of the window frame. There’s a chill to the air in the house that causes Hap to shiver after he scrambles inside before the bloated warmth of alcohol once more seeps over him.

  The walls must be full of dead, rotting things. Entire generations of mice and squirrels have been swallowed by the house. Hap finishes his blueberry beer and throws the bottle at a silent husk of a refrigerator, but it doesn’t shatter like he expects; it just clinks and rolls off into a dark corner of the dingy kitchen. Dust, spider webs, and rot, all spectacular and terrifying if this exact scene wasn’t replicated in the laundry room of both his new and former apartment building basements.

  “Is anybody home?” Hap yells, after a cursory check of the barren room abutting the kitchen. He crouches and listens, holding his breath. There is a faint, clicking scurry, but it’s something small. He burps, and his throat burns while he glances over a bathroom that seems to be made of black mold. He takes to kicking at walls, trying to see if any are hollow, but he isn’t exactly sure what sound he hopes to hear, as his shoes leave black marks along the faded white walls. Hap finds stairs leading to the second floor just as he discovers the basement door. Where would they keep a prisoner?

  He doesn’t ask himself who “they” are before ripping open the basement door and yelling, “Hey, Tiff?” His voice cracks, and he’s silent, pausing to listen for a response before bounding down the wooden steps. His alcohol-wobbled legs cause him to repeatedly bump against the walls. The basement is nothing but a burial ground for green and blue molded boxes, a child’s rusted tricycle, and an old bathtub with a coat hanger emerging from it. The hidden things, they won’t be obvious. It’s not enough to glance over. Hap has to actually search. He kicks over the boxes and shines his light into the tub. He goes over every inch of the walls, remembering the intricate woodcarvings of the bar he just left.

  He finds a fire axe with rust that looks like blood. On top of a couple of dozen volumes of Reader’s Digest, there’s a Halloween costume magazine from 2004 for a locally famous store in Warwick that has a giant inflatable pumpkin on its roof every year. A bloody bunny mask occupies one corner of the magazine’s cover, and a George Bush mask another. He finds Easter Bunny decorations with the famous white rodent’s smile having faded to a sinister grin. Hap picks up a book with the picture of some great serpent embroidered across its cover, along with words that read in an eerie font, Solomon Kane. Believing it to be a spell book of some sort, his hands shake with anticipation as he illuminates the first page and drops it to the floor. It’s just some pulp fantasy novel; these are all pieces of nothing.

  In a second floor bedroom, it takes Hap’s alcohol-fogged mind a moment to correlate the symbol formed by black tape along a closet door—a seven-pointed star with seven circles descending in size from each point. Not quite a satanic pendant, but something celestial. Through the uproar in Hap’s skull, he believes it to be one of the same symbols he saw at the black star restaurant on Broadway.

  Hap chucks himself forward and pulls open the dual closet doors, scattering the tape and destroying the symbol. He’s ready to kick at whatever lies within, but a snarling, hissing black thing darts at his feet. As he stumbles back, falling onto his ass, he knows he is going to die alone, drunk, and confused. It’s not until the creature moves into the hallway and meows crankily that he realizes it’s just a stray cat. It didn’t even scratch him.

  He sighs and pushes himself up, his hand closing over a rubber band. With drunken amusement, Hap prepares to fire it across the black-dusted room right before realizing it’s not a rubber band but a hair tie. A familiar hair tie, decorated with little psychedelic suns, stars, and moons. Tiff had a whole collection of them she bought at some shop downtown. Hap drops it to the floor and begins to laugh. He’ll wake up every goddamn mouse and bat in this place. There could be hundreds of girls in Providence who bought those things, and it probably means nothing in an abandoned house that has empty beer bottles and used condoms kicked into every corner.

  Hap howls out his exasperation and kicks through the symbol over the closet door, enjoying the crack of fragile wood. There’s an empty jar in the corner of the room tha
t he grabs and smashes against the bedroom window. He finds an old metal part of a pipe frame and decides to beat the truth out of this place, and he begins to smash everything in sight.

  Later, having puked from all the physical excitement, Hap remembers, dearly, his remaining five beers. Of course, when he wanders out of the house, he discovers that they’re gone, plucked up by some eagle-eyed passerby. His wrists hurt from swinging that pipe around and breaking some of the windows and every spare dish in the house. His ankle wants him to limp as he hops over the fence and heads toward another liquor store.

  Drinking a tallboy of Twisted Tea out of a paper bag, Hap’s drunk legs deliver him to the weekly summer water fire festival. One of the first unique things about Providence that he discovered his freshman year were these literal water fires, erected on blocks of wood in the middle of a canal that runs through downtown and tended to by volunteers in gondolas. As some sort of artist’s statement that may be in conjunction with the RISD, there are all sorts of food vendors and tents where actual artists sell their work. Along the waterway, a speaker system pumps out eerie, ambient sounds and opera-like wailing.

  He and Tiff paid for a private gondola ride once. While they were coasting along the canal, somebody up on a bridge threw them a rose that Hap still prides himself for catching against all of his athletic inhibitions. Now, the overcrowded walkways and police conducted street corners and crossways leave Hap nothing but agitated as he sips and seethes. At one point, he bumps into a dirty, bearded guy in a Patriots beanie, sipping a frozen Del’s lemonade that he spills all over Hap’s white, dust-stained T-shirt before being swept up by the crowd.

  Overlooking the water, Hap realizes that a series of ten fires form a massive circle in the middle of the largest portion of the river, overshadowed by the Providence Place Mall and a cluster of fancy restaurants. The eerie music loses its beautiful touch as Hap takes note of the water fire volunteers, dressed from head to toe in black and silently paddling around the waterway on gondolas of their own, adding logs to the fires. This is a ritual of some pagan sort if Hap has ever seen one. Is the whole city haunted? Who really started the water fire tradition, and what does it mean?