Moon Regardless

by Nick Manzolillo

  “How do you know Tiff is dead? Have you ever seen what they do to the people they take?”

  “Time to time, I seen the after-party mess. If she not dead, then she lookin’ forward to it.” Otis traces the dull side of his knife over the tattoo along his wrist. It’s not the same blade he used earlier. That one’s still lying on the kitchen floor like a dog’s chew toy. That knife he used to stab Officer Dylan how many times in the chest before mutilating his eyes? Doing something like that to somebody goes beyond insanity.

  “Why not walk into that building and…and shoot everyone you see?” Hap asks. He can picture that standard rifle in all his first-person shooters. Left bumper, right bumper of the controller and then activate rage mode, god mode, annihilate every enemy on the screen. Then Hap remembers the horrible shootings he’s seen reported on the news; he starts to feel sick all over again. Otis is laughing at him. Yeah, yeah, that’s what you have to do. Laugh. Hap matches his guttural barks with a rolling chuckle of his own. You have to laugh! Because if you don’t realize how ridiculous this is, then you go crazy and stupid and rabid all at the same time, and that’s how they get ya. You’ve got to laugh, stay mad, and stay smart.

  “A gun means only one chance for you go down. No cowboys living no more for a true reason.” Otis admires his knife, taps it below his eye. “Call a blade a key to knowledge, yeah?” He flicks his eyelid. “Opens good doors.”

  Hap shudders, remembering the whole eye-stealing thing, and that is a message and a half. Could he really get behind doing that to somebody? To somebody that would hurt Tiff…a mother…a woman or a child—not even fucking Scarface crosses that line.

  “Maybe…maybe she is alive.” Otis changes his tune, and the tightness across Hap’s chest goes to his stomach, ready to evacuate his tossing and turning body.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe she’s alive. They nuts! All possibilities with them. You with me, extra sight.” He taps his eyes. “Two of our bellies can fit more of them. We work our way up ‘cause they planning something big. Homeless, orphans, lost boys and girls. Now American college girls with boy lovers, all getting swallowed up and disappeared fast like they no care who’s looking now. No covering up, no secrets, big things coming. They ain’t about waiting for the stars. Maybe they’re saving an’ storing. Mind won’t be good on the girl. She’ll be wanting to know death, but alive? Yes, she may be, maybe.” Otis bites down on his knife, clenching it between his teeth like a pirate. “Ya can’t go home,” he says with his mouth full. “What else?”

  “What else…?” Hap repeats. He won’t kill anybody, and he won’t watch or help Otis hurt anybody, either. The cops and other seemingly unbendable forces have gone crooked. He probably can’t go home. Would they go so far as to hurt his parents? “Why do you take their eyes? What’s the real reason?” he asks at last.

  “To see.” Judging by Otis’s frown, the way his eyes are starting to tighten and glare, he thinks Hap is insinuating he’s demented.

  “Can’t we get them any other way? If we can’t arrest them, and let’s say we don’t kill anybody, how can we hurt them? How can we see if…how could we find Tiffany?”

  Otis’s smirk drips out the sarcasm before he even makes a sound. “Suppose we ask and let them go, ta kill again. We have other ways, other moves, in a meantime.” He points to Hap, then to himself. “Two man jobs—we wait for ‘em; we cut another one of ‘em, plenty to do in between.” Otis points the knife at Hap and then says, “You and me.” Revolving the knife back to himself, he steps into his home and looks over his shoulder.

  Something cries out in the forest, a small thing that’s not fast enough to escape the coyotes, fisher cats, and owls that rule the dark. The cry cuts off, and the crickets resume their song. What other move could there be? Tiff is still missing; there is an answer somewhere. If Otis should happen to cut the throat of some cult killer after they reveal exactly what happened to Tiff, then—well, how could that be such a bad thing? Hap follows Otis, wiping the tears from his eyes with the edge of his thumbs until his skin stings raw.

  Chapter 13: The Ripper’s Heir

  There is a fear so powerful it becomes something real. If Hap were to paraphrase Otis’s weird way of talking, then the guy is telling him that in the grand scheme of the earth and all her ancient scars, the Moon Shack is new. It is a product of the last three hundred years, where the dread and malice of man have become unbearable for the laws of the cosmos. As with all newcomers, it is the older things that fear it most. Now that the cruelty of man has become a living thing, all the old evils are lesser. Fuck if Hap knows what any of that means, but he keeps asking questions, and Otis keeps telling him nonsense.

  Otis has become somewhat gentle since Hap dug into the cake and poured himself a tea mug of water. “What do they want, besides to hurt people?” Hap asks.

  “To exist, free.” Otis says the Moon Shackers are on the margins of humanity, but Otis portrays them as not without feelings. He speaks of loneliness, fear, and the desire for a family, of sorts. The Moon Shack has a first family. Otis’s words would be better portrayed by a live fire in the cobweb-ridden, black-scorched fireplace behind him. The hum of the fridge and the cry of the forest’s nocturnal things are, rightfully, all the emphasis his fairy tales are given.

  “There is an Else,” Otis begins, tilting his head to the ceiling, prying back the jittery recesses of his blackening mind. “A thing they call Else. It’s not man or woman. Seventeen-eighty-three, Martland, Arkansas, Eighth County.” Otis’s reminiscence of place and date is rattled off like the token of information is a sliver of computer code. “Entire town, hundred or so, clawed their eyes out. All of ‘em folk, in wintertime. Some moms and children found frozen ta death in the woods, trying to escape. Explained by bout of fever, tuberculosis, affectin’ the head, driving ‘em all mad. We know what truth is hiding. Else is first killer, first one from the long ago, so it’s old, perhaps the oldest man, living in tombs and cave holes till the Shack, cozy and warm, came along. It’s the first one, first inhabitant of the Shack. A sight so horrible you become blinded. Have to burn ‘em, one day, with all the rest. Lookin’ forward to stabbing with me eyes shut.”

  All Hap can decipher from Otis’s talk of the Else is a town of dead people. Given that some old cult can bend the integrity of the police and maybe politicians, it’s not hard to believe they’d cover up the butchering of an entire town. Do they get off on it? Hap can’t think of what a real serial killer could be. It has to be sexual, in some way, like child predators and other monsters, an uncontrollable urge that makes them as miserable as they are evil—a broken brain. There is a poem, that poem in the employee bathroom that Hap snapped a picture of. He snatches his camera off the couch and shows it to Otis.

  “Oh how the Moon Shack dreams.

  lo, fire and corporeal doom.

  lo, The Old Ones, Those Who Loom.

  Come, shelter from the cost

  Come, all who live lost

  The weak bleed from our need

  The weak need us to lead

  else?

  what else?

  Else?

  what Else!?”

  “Silly things they make it out to be.” Otis smiles, shrinking away from the camera’s glow. “A child’s war chant, their spite for the sacred books of skin. McKinley, Charles McKinley, southern necromancing fool, he write it.”

  “The astronomer?” The only McKinley Hap knows is the guy Tiffany was into, the star of the Astronomer’s Ball. Hap figured there was no connection between the event and Tiff, not with a haunted hotel and a man carving out eyeballs in the mix of things. McKinley, the author of a poem, scrawled in marker on a bathroom wall. The Astronomer’s Ball. A Moon Shack. Could it all be connected, like some kind of constellation gone perverted?

  “And Rhode Island native, according ta bull’s shit. He was born in Louisiana, this I kn
ow, seventeen-sixty-three.” Which doesn’t add up—it’s more of Otis’s delusions. McKinley’s theories came out shortly before his death in the early nineteen hundreds. Hap was always more interested in Edison and Tesla, as far as innovators from that period go. Otis continues, “Had a plantation once upon a time. The granddaddy of it all, host to the Else, father of a Purple Witch. They brought all they citizens in before they set they eyes to Little Rhody.”

  Hap is afraid to ask any more questions because, between fact and myth, he wishes Otis had some actual blank notebook paper so he could write everything down and organize it. From an Else to the secret life of an astronomical wizard—how the fuck does this help anything? If Hap didn’t know any better, the cult and its Miskatonic would be one big joke, right up there with Scientology.

  “Feelin’ sleepiness,” Otis says, pointing to the couch Hap’s been sitting and sweating in. “Morning time, we do errands you’ll want to see. After that, you in, with me.” Otis points to his wrist, the branch tattoo. “We get you one these. No worries, I got steady hands.”

  “What is that?” Hap says, instead of asking why he should get some stupid tattoo that’s probably more pagan nonsense.

  “Elder sign. Might as well be a holy cross to them citizens, like they vampires. Sign on our arm makes them nervous, ‘fraid of us. We hurt them enough, do enough non-killing things to them like you want, we’ll get all they secrets. Who’s alive and who’s not. Like McKinley, girls….” Otis pauses for a moment as if he’s discovering an old idea. “…mothers.”

  Hap’s not going to say out loud that getting a tattoo to scare your superstitious enemies and forever scar yourself is a stupid idea, mostly because Otis has already gone and branded himself. Also, it looks like Otis is going to bed; he won’t kill Hap tonight, which means he’s sort of trustworthy, sort of a friend. Hap wouldn’t want to go and ruin this merciful development. Otis says nothing as he passes through the kitchen, and to Hap’s numbed amusement, enters a bedroom with an old Spiderman poster taped to the door.

  With Otis in his little boy’s room neglected by a long-absent mother, Hap sets about thumbing through the stacks of notes. The handwriting is scattered, like Otis’s brain. It’s more of a journal, out of order; even if it were organized, it’d still be illegible. The word “kill” appears an awful lot, always written so that the letters ls melt together; Hap spots things like “shit” and “fuck” repeating one after another for a whole line. Mention of McKinley pops up, while Otis usually mentions the moon and the Shack separately. Wood devils, groundskeepers, clowns, lizards, and words that are in no way actually real mix with other words that are all vowels. There are also impossible spelling combinations that seem like names and places written in such a messy way that it appears as if Otis were literally spitting and coughing through his pen.

  Hap tries to focus on the drawings and symbols, but aside from the seven-pointed star with its orbit of circles, they’re illegible, unfamiliar, and useless. Taking his camera, Hap makes himself comfortable on the couch before he flicks through the pictures he’s taken of the Miskatonic. Soon the throb in his head outweighs his shaking stomach, alongside the buzzing nerves still dancing through him. He shuts off the lights and attempts to find sleep. He ignores the idea of how Tiffany would feel, spooned and cuddled against him. He closes his eyes and kisses the ugly lips of his dreams.

  He doesn’t wake up screaming, but he keeps rolling over, feverish from his anxiety, repeatedly making eye contact with the black ceramic cat atop the refrigerator. At times he experiences a reoccurring dream. In it, the ceramic beast purrs louder than the humming refrigerator, nuzzles his hands, and crawls along his chest. There’s also the briefest touch of nervousness when Hap opens his eyes in the middle of the night to stare at the front door. In his fluttering half-dreams, a stranger keeps knocking on it and the handle twists and pushes inwards, and he keeps jumping up, rustling the scratchy blanket off his legs.

  Come morning, an orange and brown tabby cat curiously prods its face against Hap’s nose; Otis really does have a cat. The meaning of Hap’s dreams instantly becomes nonsense of a different sort. He cranes his neck, still keeping the rather adorable cat on his chest. He can see that the black ceramic feline on the fridge hasn’t shed its ceramic casing and come to life. The front door blasts open, and in bounces a raging madman with a scraggly beard and sunken eyes. It’s Otis, waving around some kind of drill instead of a knife.

  Was Hap that deep into his dreams that he didn’t hear Otis walk by him? He wonders if Otis watched him sleep, hovering over him with a knife in hand. That’s what Hap gets for—what? Trusting a guy who tears out eyeballs? A second cat follows Otis inside, a skinny Siamese with an especially lengthy tail, which begins playing with the dangling power cord hanging from Otis’s drill.

  “Given ya her morning blessings, is she?” Otis sounds like a different man, a separate force from the bloody, raving thing Hap barely survived the night before.

  “What’s her name?” Hap asks.

  “Dunno, she don’t talk much.” Otis chuckles, slamming the drill down onto the coffee table and rattling a plate full of cake crumbs. “Ever ink ya self before?” Otis holds out his wrist and, what did he call it? The Elder sign, that five armed twig. He’s still going on about fucking tattoos?

  “I think I’m all set,” Hap says.

  “Ya? When somethin’s chewing on your neck, crawling up yar ass, and laying babies in your insides? Better than a rabbit’s foot, luck.”

  Did Hap promise Otis he’d get the tattoo last night? He didn’t come close to agreeing, did he? “Let’s hold off on that, for now. I don’t know. Maybe that’s a couple steps away.” Tiffany had a tattoo of a shooting star just above her hip. She was complaining about it itching when she first met Hap; he remembers being turned on by it when she stripped for him that first time. Otis plops a container of ink on the table and crosses his arms, immediately breaking form to pull at his beard with both hands.

  “It’s on me, but they see nothing worth fearin’ in you, and I’m left with just a boy, and my teeth are sharp, but my fangs ain’t as big. Think this is the role I play for any other reason? We need a wear a mask worse than theirs.” Otis disappears into his bedroom, leaving Hap to watch the two dancing cats as they saunter over to the faux Christmas tree to play beneath its branches. Jingling keys and sporting a dank, crumpled-up Boston Red Sox hat, Otis tells Hap it’s time to go. Somehow, the coziness of sleep still clings to the couch, and it takes Hap an ounce of extra willpower to lift himself up.

  Hunger pains rip across his stomach as he walks to the Caddie. In the daytime, the car’s tan coat of paint loses out to the encroaching rust. The heat from the morning sun promises a stifling day void of wind and comfort. Despite the notion of sleep, he’s hardly as rested as he believed himself to be; his back hurts from being thrown around by Otis at the abandoned vet’s, and bruises from Otis’s fists feel like they’re scattered all over his face. Power lines weave through the trees. They’re not as in the middle of the woods as the night led Hap to believe. There’s the edge of a yellow house about half a mile down the road, and there are other homes only lightly shrouded by flat lands of foliage. It’s not that there’s a lack of light; it’s just facing in the other direction.

  Sitting beside Otis, Hap again wonders how a man so obviously a derelict like him can go out in public and not get thrown into some kind of kennel. A baseball cap tucked over his eyes only adds to his alienation. Otis changed his clothes, but they’re still weathered, potentially unwashed, and smelling of stale sweat, as if he keeps them in a clothes hamper and pretends his mom washes them. Just what has he been doing since he was a boy? Mentioning a few foreign countries doesn’t exactly cover enough decades to make Otis appear to be in his mid to late thirties.

  Maybe it was the fresh murder Hap witnessed or the knife that may have been hungry for his pupils, but he didn’t notice how viciously ab
surd a driver Otis was until the guy nearly jack-knifed the great boat of a Cadillac onto what should be a reassuringly paved road. They pass a church, a spikey, domed blur. How close is Coventry to Scituate? Tiffany’s parents’ house must be no more than fifteen to twenty minutes away, as the general distance between most towns in Rhode Island seems to be.

  Otis slows the Caddie to a crawl when they come to a massive stretch of water, familiar yet refreshingly beautiful. A rippling reservoir that mirrors the trees and the sky and the idea of the morning sun, emulating the world as if to say, “I can do it better.” Old ruins, the foundation of a submerged house, poke through one corner of the reservoir by the shore.

  “Beautiful, no?”

  Otis’s sarcasm is out of place. Hap has driven through here before, with Tiff last summer. There’s a parking spot the length of two cars up ahead where they pulled over to marvel at the water. Hap had joked about hopping the barbed wire fence to go skinny-dipping, and then that led to revealing whether they had gone skinny-dipping before. Hap said “no” and Tiff said “yes.” She wouldn’t tell him the details, and it drove him a little mad, picturing her swimming naked with some other guy.

  “Used to ride bicycle by here, every nice day I saw. I would look here and think and think. Better than White Mountains of New Hampshire, I’d say. Right outside my house, even.” Otis shakes his head. “Scituate,” he says, pronouncing it like shit-you-ate. “The place was something so much more than was taken away by the demands of the people runnin’ Providence. For they water supply, they needed a source. All that water ya drink in ya city, boy? Cursed. Providence water sharks is what them pushers and half a mobsters were called in the old, golden days when the wood of the Moon Shack was fresher. Water sharks came with they offers and notices, lookin’ as men of the government. Scituate was once South Scituate, too, and there was Richmond, Ashville, towns all condemned; people kicked out, compensated with nothing but estimated costs for they homes. People were killin’ themselves, goin’ straight to the poor house while great Providence flooded their land and drank from it. Looks pretty now, uh?”