Moon Regardless

by Nick Manzolillo

  An old librarian with classic-looking glasses looks Haps up and down, sniffs once to confirm that he needs to find a shower soon, and then points him to the computer section. Google solves as many questions as Hap can think to ask. He returns to the CVS and buys some Nyquil and a big bottle of Tylenol.

  Back at Otis’s, Augustine continues to chant and call Hap and Otis every dirty word in the book. As if she’s a worthless seagull, Hap tosses two sandwiches into the bathroom without looking at her. There’s an awful stench in there. Has she not been using the toilet? She’ll need something to drink, too, especially with the muggy resurgence of August’s heat. There must be a swamp nearby. It’s as if the humidity is making the walls of Otis’s house themselves ooze and stink.

  Otis’s fever has only increased while Hap was gone, and, according to Google, that’s how the bacteria dies. If his body temperature gets high enough, that’s how the fever paradoxically kills him. To keep some of the fever down, Hap pours a small cup of Nyquil between Otis’s lips. He’ll have to see how much the guy can take before pushing him further.

  “I don’t know if you can hear me,” Hap starts to tell Otis, feeling corny. He’s never stood over somebody’s potential deathbed before. “Just wake the fuck up, man. You’re going to get hot before you get better. You gotta boil before you kill this thing.” Hap says “thing” as if it’s more than bacteria making Otis loopy. He remembers that bullshit Mr. Hanson mentioned, but contrary to all talk of the Moon Shack and ancient gods from other dimensions, the superstition that disease is from an evil spirit is full on Salem-witch-trial nonsense.

  “Been Egypt,” Otis drools, his spittle creating a spider web through his beard.

  “You can hear me…can you open your eyes? You, uh, want a sandwich?” Hap winces as Augustine’s frantic chanting grows into a howling. If Otis manages to moan anything else, Augustine drowns it out. Hap wonders if that witch will melt if he splashes her with water. He’d be so lucky.

  He has to slide apart the bathroom door to look at Augustine, and he doesn’t want to feel bad. The idea that there is a woman in the bathroom slowly dying of thirst and maybe contemplating drinking toilet water is enough to make him vomit. This is a time for bravery, possibly revenge and even insanity, but he will not feel guilty. As Hap gets a good look at Augustine, the surprising sight before him recalls a multitude of feelings, but guilt is not among them. Nearly gagging before he can comprehend what he’s looking at, Hap sees that the cats are dead and that they have pissed and shit themselves all over the floor in the process of dying. Cue the blood on the walls, sopping Augustine’s skin and dripping from the jagged ends of raw, red bones—the cat’s own bones, torn from their bodies—clutched in both her hands. Tossed into the sink are the mutilated corpses of both Otis’s pets. She did this with her bare hands. The half-moon on her skull has been replaced with a bloody star, that familiar seven-pointed star with seven orbs spiraling from every point.

  Hap vomits up his sandwiches all over the floor and partially into the mug of water in his hand, which he then drops, as he’s consumed by a stomach-folding retching as Augustine’s laughter seems to echo off the bathroom walls. She’s throwing something that bounces off the front of his shirt and dribbles to the floor—a cat’s eye. Augustine grins at him, and she spit it; she didn’t throw it. There’s another eye in her mouth that she clutches between her teeth as she sneers, spitting it up into the air.

  “It came to me in my sleep. The Shack needs another purple queen. If your girlfriend isn’t dead, then she’ll do. They don’t keep people chained up unless they have a plan. D’you have a plan, little boy? What do you want to do to me? Cause I’ve seen the moonlight. I’ve heard the ringing of the dinner bell.” She smacks her fistful of bones against the floor, swings her arm around to the wall, and a seven-pointed star and its vortex of planets have been scratched across the tiles.

  Hap hurls himself out of the bathroom, whimpering, slamming the door to that portal to hell as hard as he can. It’s satisfying doing something with true force for once. He bumps into the fridge in an effort to get to the sink and rinse his mouth out a thousand times. The black ceramic cat on the top of Otis’s fridge, a totem that in a way mocks and rivals the horrible toad sculpture, shatters across the floor.

  Changing his clothes once more, Hap sits at the foot of Otis’s bed and turns on the old TV. The Nintendo works fine, as a picture of Mario and Luigi fill the screen accompanied by their classic theme song. Otis starts humming in his delirium before saying, “They use storm damage ta cover ‘em up, they do, civil wars an storms an chaos on hospitals,” and then he slobbers back off into humming and moaning. Hap, unable to find a TV remote, presses the buttons on the screen to raises the volume as loud as it will go and begins level one. He will travel back in time, if necessary, to retrace every single step he’s ever taken.

  Chapter 18: The Purple Mother

  “It’s a small mercy, at least, that he didn’t get the chance to mutilate her face,” Johan said over the phone as Paul knelt in the blood. She had been new among the Candle Lighters. Maybe that’s why Johan seemed to not be too upset over her death. She had been so warm, kind. But beyond anything sexual, she seemed to want to make Paul comfortable. She wanted him to know that the Moon Shack wasn’t so scary. And he believed that. The moment he walked into his apartment and saw her corpse lying in a Jack O’ Lantern’s grin of knives, he smiled. It felt like some kind of silly joke to him.

  Johan had Paul leave the house before conducting his own investigation, which was his way of phrasing things, not Paul’s. Augustine’s purse was there, on the couch. Paul didn’t notice it after discovering Lacy. According to Johan, Augustine had been taken.

  Since Lacy’s death, the drinking has gotten worse, as if there were an invisible strainer around him that has been broken. He’s always been happy to have a few, but now he keeps emptying glasses until he pukes.

  Johan has given Paul a room number. Four-four-four. The Moon Shack’s priest mentioned on the phone that four is considered cursed in many oriental cultures, as the word for death in Chinese is the same as four. Just like the number thirteen in Western culture, many buildings in China go so far as to skip a floor, going from three to five. Johan mentioned that Augustine is “dead, surely.” He told Paul, “Fittingly enough, in room four-four-four resides the woman she was to succeed. You will no longer have a wife, Paul. For the public, you will be a charming boy who makes appearances with his previously estranged mother: his best friend, mentor, and accomplice. We’re gonna re-write your history, and we can thank your father for being a true gentleman and not publicly playing off your unofficial mother’s death for political sympathy. I hope this is okay, Paul. Like the marriage, you won’t have to play ball forever. You’ll get what you want. Are you still listening? I promise, Paul, you will get what you want.” Johan’s words were melted caramel, and Paul, as if his lips were chocolate in the sun, met them and agreed. Why did he agree? Why can’t he think straight? He doesn’t even know what he wants. Where has he been this whole time? What the hell are they doing to him?

  Paul doesn’t ask questions because there are certain answers that will make him vomit, keel over, and look up at the stars for what they really are. He hasn’t peered over the edge of the cliff where the Moon Shack sits below, but he has heard the sounds of what goes on down there.

  The hotel is overbooked. Paul, even with his throbbing head and restless gut, has been forced to conduct several job interviews while assigning his leading employee, Cassandra, to interview another half a dozen. In droves, the citizens of the Moon Shack are checking in, staying a while. They’ve been coming from all over the country. Randal works around the clock, and being the machine that he is, he tolerates it with a smile. The bar is left nearly empty, as the kinds of people who drink and order room service are thinning out. It’s gotten to the point that Paul feels sick sitting in front of the eternally bartending Randal,
so he leaves the Egyptian to his room full of limitless poisons and his minimum wage.

  As soon as Paul enters the Miskatonic lobby, he’s pulled aside by Cassandra’s assistant front desk girl, Lindsey, before he can get to the elevators. “Do you know where Cassie is? Did she call out sick or something? She’s not texting me back. I need help up here. Some of the requests I’ve been getting are weird. I called in Jamie and—”

  “That’s fine. Do what you need to.” Paul realizes he’s wearing the same clothes as the night before. Or is it two nights? He can’t remember the last time he brought anything in for dry-cleaning. Hell, he can’t remember the last time he went to the bathroom. He refuses to let himself wonder why the Moon Shack’s citizens are filling the Miskatonic like a beehive. “I’m sure Cassie is just fine,” Paul lies, not daring to think of the likely alternatives before he hurries off to the elevators.

  The door to Room 444 is open, and when Paul enters, he finds himself bathed in the purple glow of royalty. The walls are violet curtains, the furniture a collection of antiques; this isn’t a hotel room but some kind of apartment. The air smells of antiseptic and plastic. A shade of purple comes alive, elegantly approaching Paul like an optical illusion coming into focus. As his eyes adjust, a kindly old woman unbent by age beckons to him with a diamond-adorned hand.

  “Are you my newest son?” She smiles, taking Paul’s hand and hugging him. She tells him her name is Angie. She whispers in his ear, “Shame we never met at a wedding, no?” She pulls away. Angie’s brown eyes show no senility. She places her fingers to her lips and says, “My life extends instead of ceasing, and I get to be a mother again. That means we should celebrate with a drink!” She goes over to an old-fashioned liquor cabinet built into the wall. Paul’s still hung up on the word “mother.”

  “Were you Augustine’s mother?” Paul asks. There is a hint of glamour to the woman while she pours him a brown burning something in a brandy snifter, matching his drink with a glass twice as full. As she hands it to him, he sees just how perfectly straight and white her teeth are.

  “I am yours,” she says, and there is life beneath those wrinkles. She is not his mother who lives in his head and who will remain in his dreams. “As far as the public will be concerned, the eyes of our citizens are already open to you finding a new wife. In the meantime, as I’m sure you’ve been told, I will be your companion, as unorthodox as it may seem. I will be your number one supporter. A man like you and a gal like me, we’ll make all the citizens who are full of regret come to find relief.”

  “The purple’s nice,” Paul says, although he could care less.

  “I don’t need to tell you I love it,” she says. “There is nothing more unique and special. Purple shows in flowers and gems, far from the common of red and blue. Purple is the miracle that comes from nothing. Why are you not wearing your tie?” Paul remembers that neck choker and how Johan gave it to him right before his first day at the Miskatonic. It was in a fancy box, the sort someone would use to stow a fine cigar or bottle of cognac.

  “Who came up with this idea? I get the whole power-couple thing, even though this ain’t Hollywood, but are people going to look up to me while I’m standing next to my mom? No offense, but name one successful man, name one leader who goes out with his mother.”

  Angie clasps her hands in front of her purple velvet dress, holding up her lightly-drained glass of brandy as she sits on a couch that almost looks like it’s made of the same material she’s wearing. “Dear, who put it in your head that you’re a star? You’re a sweet man, passionate and, from what I hear, primal.” Angie licks her weathered lips, and Paul’s loins shrivel. “I know Johan told you no such thing. Did Augustine give you this idea? May her spirit reside in the great hall within—”

  “Johan said Augustine and I were a power couple. Exact words. I was thinking nightly dinners at The Capital Grille and front row seats at the old performing arts center.” Paul takes a sip of the cognac and remembers being a boy who once threw up all over his father’s kitchen floor after smuggling a single sip from the prettiest bottle left out on the counter.

  “Your ambitions of being a cutthroat politician and the next Buddy Cianci fell short. It’s a beautiful thing only made sad by how crushed you are. I know how you feel, Paul. I know what it’s like to not get what you want. I was going to be a real star, the kind before a camera, but I had a son, a special son with a special appetite who needed me more than anything. More than any audition held at a rat producer’s schedule.” Angie gulps her brandy until it’s no more than a splash. Her fingernails, trailing down to red knuckles, are purple.

  “Listen, you want to know what I do with my time besides sit behind that desk downstairs? You and Johan keep calling me innocent; meanwhile, my dick is covered in ten kinds of skank, and I haven’t been able to keep a solid meal down all week because of this right here.” He thrusts out his glass, spilling its brown poison all over the black and blue carpet that Paul is surprised the old woman hasn’t rebranded her favorite color.

  “In my time,” she says, “which is a healthy chunk of history, I have only heard urban legends of a mayor who was beloved, and those legends were spread by people with bonuses hidden in their front pockets. When a modern man goes to war, what does he have in his pockets?”

  “Naked pictures of his girlfriend.” Paul owes this woman no respect, no courtesy…she is Johan’s, though. Of all the people he has met, she is a kindly old woman. A being who walks too straight and smiles with a suspicious sparkle, as if she swishes shots from the fountain of youth in her mouth and won’t tell her secret to the decaying, walking dead around her.

  “Perhaps.” Angie smiles, and Paul bets she was a slut in her day. All you’d have to do to make a porn star a saint is have her become a soft old lady. “But it would be for more than just a pair of breasts to lust over. She would become something more than a nymph in his head. A soldier carries pictures of his family. A soldier on the battlefield looks at an image from his dreams, from an alien world he fears he no longer recognizes. You’re a living picture of what our citizens remember, flawed as you are, while they march ahead to make a stand against true evil. You’re a middle-aged man partying like James Dean, and that desk you sit at below us is a throne.”

  “What do I do?” Paul asks, and he can’t believe he’s never made the connection before, but he’s like a pig being fattened. A pig or a goat.

  “Let us love you. When we find you a wife, you’ll be happier. You’ll have children. Children who will grow to both appreciate the Shack and understand it. You may even have a few on the way. Who knows. It’s summer. Fertile season.” Angie’s mouth drops open as she dances over to Paul with raised arms, embracing him. The brandy goes from bitter to sour in his stomach. Where is the puke when you need it? “We’re going to turn you into the human dream. You’ll be that picture in the wars to come. Safely in the Shack, waiting for us to come in from the front lines. You and your beautiful wife and dutiful children will be the reason we persevere.”

  Paul sets the glass on the countertop beside the old-school liquor cabinet. He leans in close to Angie’s perfect mouth. “If I wanted kids, I wouldn’t have made my ex-wife get an abortion,” he says—compliments of his first failed marriage, one month into their divorce negotiations. Angie doesn’t even blink. What was that she said about war? Paul’s nightmares are beginning to glow-in-the-dark.

  “Paul, did you love Augustine? While everybody had hoped…we didn’t expect you to fall for each other so soon into your arrangement. I’m sorry if you’re hurting… she would have looked so beautiful, wearing purple down that aisle in the ballroom.” The old woman’s raising a hand to his cheek, brushing away a few tears that shock Paul into realizing he’s crying. He feels nothing for Augustine, though. Lacy wasn’t even twenty-five, he’s sure of it. He’d never even gotten her opinion on Augustine.

  “I have to get to work,” Paul says, and m
ore than anything, he has to sit down.

  “We should talk more,” Angie says. “You should come back and visit me every day to tell me how you’re feeling. We’ll make do with what we have, and we’ll find you a new wife. The hotel’s booked, after all. Our citizens will be impatient. This could be the summer our world ends, after all. But until you are situated, they mustn’t raise arms against our foe.” Angie folds her hands along the empty glass, standing like a looming purple specter as Paul wipes away his tears.

  “I need to know one thing,” he begins, standing, swaying. “And I know it’s like I’ve been told, over and over. But the Moon Shack…I know the why, but what is it? Besides shelter, besides the afterlife for people like you….” Paul thinks of Hap, the boy who did nothing wrong and the thought, a submerged memory from the past week, sinks into his gut like a knife. “…and like me.” The dread rolls off his tongue and numbs him.

  “Isn’t it obvious, darling?” the Purple Witch says, brushing her hands against Paul’s cheeks. “You are the Moon Shack.”

  A dam breaks in his mind. As the flood begins, Paul steps out into the hallway. Just before reaching the elevator, he hears a scream from somewhere else on the fourth floor. It’s a single short cry from a woman who goes silent before she can truly let it all out. He pretends that little scream doesn’t belong to Cassandra. He starts crying again once the elevator doors close.

  Chapter 19: The Doom that Came to the Dreamlands

  Hap is consumed by brown fur as he tries to lift himself back off the hotel bed. Pulsing along his chest is a spider with too many legs that all end in goats’ hooves. Black lumps that are really eyes prod out and blink at him beneath the fur. “Momma,” something croaks behind Hap. He can’t pull himself out of the thing in the bed that’s letting loose an erotic moan, like a running loop of orgasms. He tries to shake himself free. One of those hooves snakes around to his mouth, prying him back and bending his spine. The many-legged thing burrows its hooves into the back of his throat. “Us next, Momma. Us next, Momma,” croak a number of pale and stumpy humanoid figures aligning the corners of the room.