“Who are you?” Hap cries.
The familiar face of the bartender is changing, warping ever so slightly again. At first, the skin ripples like water. The nose is growing and then shrinking, the cheekbones realigning. Something like a crown—no, a pharaoh’s headdress molds out of Randal’s skin to become an inky black accessory.
“I am merely the abdicator of coincidence. I met the female you seek. I gave her the stone idol that brought you and the Moon Shack denier together. I am pleased with this outcome, so I’ll tell you something you are not to repeat.” Randal crawls closer to Hap and whispers in his ear. “Your children have playhouses. You know they are plastic and false, but children believe them to be real, and they are never told this is not so. They go on believing until they forget, or they become those that live on street corners, in tents, believing what is not. Have no worries for the Moon Shack because none of those who exist both outside and in between fear it. Some, like me, are amused. You have your playhouses. Your Moon Shack. You men have given me a new joy to prod and poke, just when I thought I was done with you.”
Randal seems to grow taller than ever before. His skin grows blacker than his crown, blacker than mere melatonin in the skin, and blacker than strange metals locked below the earth. Hap backs away on his hands and knees as Randal, a many-faced thing worshipped by old, rotten cults, strides toward him. The crown of a pharaoh appears across his skull as if forged by the smoke itself. Done with Hap, Randal walks past him, disappearing around the bend of the corridor. Hap doesn’t get a chance to wonder an almighty “What the fuck?” The Shack has appeared in the hallway as the flames begin to trickle up from the floor below.
Tiffany’s face distracts Hap from reading the words carved into the half-moon door. Tiffany’s face exists, pale and unharmed, beyond the pane of the front window. She raises a hand, pressing it to the glass. The ghostly Moon Shack sits amidst a hungry fire unscathed. Behind her, Hap can see the shadows of other people. One of them flickers, and Hap recognizes one of the men who held him down in the ballroom. An old man with a white beard steps out from the shadows behind Tiff, placing his hands upon her shoulders as he leans forward to whisper something in her ear. He smiles and looks at Hap as he does so.
From Hap’s seared eye, there is only the pale glow, which is a step beyond the blackness. What they made her do, resounds in Hap’s mind as he stares at Tiffany and that blonde hair he wants to run his fingers through. He’s already paid the price of entry. Oh Tiff, what they made her do….
Hap rolls over onto his stomach, and it’s as if a bubble has broken, and the smoke is eating his insides as he sees a thousand twinkling stars. The Shack has vanished if it was ever there to begin with. If he closes his remaining good eye tight enough, maybe he could fall asleep. That’s what dying is. He’s sure of it. Like going to sleep. Tiffany wasn’t a killer; no, she’s dead. Hap begins to sob. He hopes she’s dead. He remembers the night he checked into a room here. He remembers Tiff’s ring moving. There was something else, a shadow, standing over him. That was her ghost. Another spirit to wander the haunted hotel. That’s what she is. What she has to be because he refuses to accept the alternative. He can feel her right now, yes. Her ghost. Her ghost standing over him while he curls up to asphyxiate and then burn. Her ghost, prodding his shoulders, caressing his cheek, whispering in his ear that he can’t give up.
Haps pushes himself to his feet. With his eyes closed, he can see Tiff standing beside him, crying yet happy, happy that they got the chance to love one another. Yes, that’s how this story goes. Hap runs as fast as he can toward the window at the end of the hotel hallway. He doesn’t break the glass when he runs into it and instead bounces off, bruising his body once more. He slaps at the windowpane with weakening hands, and he swears he hears Tiffany calling through the fire behind him. Fuck it. Hap smashes his head forward, shattering the glass as he swings his legs through. For a few brief seconds, he flies.
Epilogue: The Gun-in-Your-Mouth Selfie Stick
They have shipped him out of Rhode Island and dumped him on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. When he hears the train most mornings, he imagines his dad sitting on it with his legs crossed, reading a newspaper while everyone else holds tablets. The walls of Hap’s special hospital for special people aren’t padded, and Hap’s arms remain free from any straitjackets. Regardless, he is still forced to dress in the ceremonial white scrubs of the soulfully ill.
Hap hasn’t been a good patient. He bit a nurse on the arm and told her there were stars in her tummy. After that, they put him on medication they said would calm him down, but all it did was make him sleep more. He dreamed and dreamed and eventually saw the Moon Shack; its door kept opening like the smile of a Cheshire cat that continued to grow wider, although it never quite showed him what was inside. It’s as if the Shack were telling him he has to get out of the hospital and find out for himself. For the rest of his wretched life, he will always be welcome behind that ancient, half-moon door.
Sometimes Hap imagines that he sees Otis, if only because the other guests of Wilbur Sanitarium are allowed to grow their beards as long as they want. Hap keeps feeling the urge to tap those unshaven patients on the shoulder and tell them he’s sorry. Sometimes the doctors will suddenly have Randal’s face, and eyeballs will start appearing where their shirt buttons are. Hap tells them he won’t go to that place where the pipes play, and the old undying things dance without rhythm.
Hap’s mom visits, and he hugs her and tells her he loves her. His dad visits and he shakes his hand and tells him he’s trying his best to get better. His siblings cry, and automatically he becomes the youngest, not by age but by special needs. His big brother Darren gives him One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest to read in his room, and before somebody ends up stealing it, Hap feels as pacified while reading that thing as he used to be while playing video games.
He doesn’t walk so well anymore; he needs help getting his food in the cafeteria because, with the crutch in one hand, it’s still too much for him to get used to, but he’s trying. When he jumped out of that window, he landed on a firetruck. He didn’t break his back, which makes him a lucky Jack. Sometimes Hap wakes up reciting a poem he once read on a bathroom wall, except it’s complete in his dreams, and he knows the right way to sing it.
Providence is an empty city. The doctors control Hap’s access to the news, which means no Internet, but during those first days, at the real hospital, he heard everything. The reason why people were moving out of the city and why government funding was being drained wasn’t because some hotel caught fire the day its manager and a few people were shot. It’s because, after the place partially burned down, they found a mass grave of charred bodies somewhere in the basement, a basement that connected to a bunch of sewers that fed into the ocean. Hap tells everybody that Tiff is one of those burnt beyond recognition. He tells so many people that they believe him. People say Tiff’s mother killed her father before turning the blade on herself. Hap says they are wrong there, too, but there is only so much the good people of the world will believe from the lips of a lunatic.
The Providence Journal initially wanted to interview Hap, but his mother wouldn’t let them. She was also confused as to why they didn’t already know him through the internship. Lucky for Hap, after seeing the condition he was in, his mom didn’t push the issue. That was around the time when he started telling everyone as much as he could about the Moon Shack. Corpses were found, but not enough to match the body count of killers in the ballroom. Most of them got away. Hell, aside from Johan, Augustine, and that Woodbury sucker, they all got away. They are still out there, doing what they do best. If the Shack, like a phantom, can appear anywhere its worshippers choose, then it could fit a lot more people than its squat, crumpled walls would indicate. The Miskatonic was burned down by the mob. That’s what the papers said. Some guy with a too-Italian last name was arrested, who then killed himself that very night. Hap doesn’t want to read bet
ween the lines to see how suspicious, how deliciously shady that is. The heart of the cult has left Rhode Island, but dig and dig as inquiring minds might, and there are surely lesser organs that remain.
By rambling on about the Shack and its guests, Hap got the cops to question him in his hospital bed. They wanted to know how he knew about Otis’s house burning down with a woman’s body chained inside. They asked, and they asked, and Hap broke down and told them everything.
“You have been through a lot,” they said, which is true; he has. “You have the rest of your life ahead of you. This small handicap won’t hold you up,” they told him. There may be surgeries for his eye because the doctors, with their many hard-earned degrees, cannot figure out what went wrong with his sight in the first place or how fire could scorch a single pupil but leave the flesh alone. There are surgeries for his leg: more metal to join the stuff they already had to place in his arm and along his ribs. He’s got a good brain, they say, and a college education to boot. Tiff has a gravestone somewhere he would like to visit. He would also like to get dinner at Cindy’s Diner in Scituate and then pay Cidalia a visit to cry for the boy who Otis was. For now, though, Hap needs to focus on getting better.
The doctors are steering his therapy in the direction his heart was always pointing. Eventually, Hap is delivered his pictures from Otis’s Cadillac. The actual camera is still held up in evidence, but some kind detective goes through the trouble of uploading the pictures to a USB that he then gives to Hap’s doctor. On a day when Hap is inconsolable and filled with memories of the Miskatonic, he is presented with a gift: a new digital camera with the pictures already uploaded. The ones of him and Tiff and… four years. Their four years.
In his room, Hap waits for the first light of a full moon in order to see out of his new, damned eye. Hap has discovered that moonlight makes his eyesight good as new. In the face of endless suffering, there are strange miracles to be discovered.
Hap begins with the most recent pictures. He remembers instantly when the first photo he sees is unmistakably that of the Miskatonic ballroom, where it is empty of people and decorated for an Astronomer’s Ball. Models of plants, glow-in-the-dark stars, and rocket ships intermingled with cutout displays of the meteors and the Moon. The next photo shows one of Tiffany’s coworkers. Another is a selfie of Augustine, Tiffany, and a man…no, Woodbury, the naked killer now wearing clothes in the photo. All of them appear to be helping to set the Astronomer’s Ball up. More photos. More people Hap can almost remember from his final visit to the ballroom. He totally forgot that he let Tiff borrow his camera the day before she disappeared. He tries to tell himself that the evidence on his camera wouldn’t have mattered anyway, but boy does it leave a bitter taste in his mouth.
Hap knows he has done everything he could, as he hunches over the warm glow of his camera, interchangeably crying and laughing. He looks at the picture of Tiff trying on her graduation gown. He sees his and Tiff’s last birthdays, both spent at their favorite wing restaurant, Boneheads, in Warwick. He relives their trips to the White Mountains of New Hampshire and that famous Massachusetts beach town, Silverport, with its magical beach that sparkled. He can’t help but smile over the snapshot of Tiff’s former fake ID that she wanted a visual memory of in case it got confiscated. On the ID, she gave herself a fake name for shits and giggles: Lacy Miyamoto. There’s a photo of the day Hap first moved in with Tiff and had all of his junk spread over the floor. Pictures of lakes, the woods, birds, Newport, Tiff’s dog Snack, a dozen chicken wings for a dozen restaurants, the starry night sky, and, with every passing month for nearly four complete years, a picture of the full moon, through fog and the cracks of tree branches with every scar of a crater visible. Through hundreds of pictures, Hap knows he can still become free, free to be lost in the 1,347 days of memory logged between the first and final picture. He will look back, both over his shoulder and through time, until his neck snaps. There are no more moves left to make.
Nick Manzolillo’s short fiction has appeared in more than 60 publications, including Thuglit, Red Room Magazine, The Terrifying Tales Podcast, and Wicked Witches: A Journal of The New England Horror Writers. He currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife and two well-read cats. He currently spends most of his time growing a beard and hiking. Learn more at nickmanzolillo.com.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: The Girl Persuaded by the Stars
Chapter 2: The Prince of the Candle Lighters
Chapter 3: The Providence Detective Agency
Chapter 4: The Dripping Mandibles of Dr. Dream
Chapter 5: The Extinct Giant Sloth
Chapter 6: The Festivities
Chapter 7: The Mid-Summer Ritual
Chapter 8: The Last Gulp (of Fresh Air)
Chapter 9: The Constellations, Painted
Chapter 10: The Eye Exam
Chapter 11: The Damned One
Chapter 12: The Alphabet Chart
Chapter 13: The Ripper’s Heir
Chapter 14: The Abductors
Chapter 15: The Thing Who Sits, Smiles, and Rots
Chapter 16: The Man Upstairs
Chapter 17: The Brain Fungus
Chapter 18: The Purple Mother
Chapter 19: The Doom that Came to the Dreamlands
Chapter 20: The Problem with Maniacs
Chapter 21: The Initiate
Chapter 22: The Place Where Bad Men Lay Their Heads
Epilogue: The Gun-in-Your-Mouth Selfie Stick
Moon Regardless Page 26
