Red Moon Rising

by J. T. Brannan

  5

  I am in the departure lounge of Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport just ninety minutes later, waiting for the early evening flight to Minneapolis.

  I have a plan, of sorts.

  I’d raced back home to grab my passport, not telling Amy exactly where I was going, what I was doing, only that I’d be gone for the rest of the day. She hadn’t objected in the slightest, glad to be looking after the horses, the dogs, the house. She is a saint, that girl, I think as I look nervously around the lounge, journal hidden in my carry-on bag, my eyes scanning for cops, still fearful that they are coming for me even though I know that this is highly unlikely. After all, I know I don’t wake up in a jail cell tomorrow, I wake up in Ben’s bed, and he knows nothing about Menders.

  But still, I am nervous.

  I think again of Amy, how I need to find some way of thanking her, when all this is over. If it’s ever over.

  I scrub the thought from my mind, looking up as my gate is called.

  I still haven’t managed to get through to Ben, but have left him a voicemail, cancelling our date tonight. I haven’t given a reason, or told him where I’m going, or why I’m going; with everything that’s happened to me lately, I am sure he will understand if I just want a bit of space.

  Not telling people where I’m going is a part of the plan, in a way; I will be free, for a while at least, free of Alaska, the people here. It will give me time to get my head straight, to sort myself out.

  The only problem is time; I need to stay awake for the entire twelve-hour journey to Gainesville, otherwise I’ll probably be zapped to another day before I ever get there and I’ll never speak to Dr. Kelly, never find out what’s wrong with me.

  And I need to find out.

  I need to find out for sure, once and for all, if I’m crazy or not.

  Hopefully, Dr. Kelly is the key to that.

  All I need to do is stay awake.

  My flight leaves at 17:10, which is 21:10, Florida-time. After changing at Minneapolis, and then again at Atlanta, I should arrive at Gainesville Regional at 9:26 tomorrow morning, local time.

  I stand, finishing off the super-size cup of Starbuck’s Blonde Roast and throwing it in the nearest trash can. The leaflet said that it had the highest amount of caffeine – 475mg for the Venti – and that was good enough for me. I can already feel my eyes opening a little wider.

  Which is good, because I am starting to come down from the massive burst of adrenaline I’d experienced at Menders’ cabin, that had been sustained as I’d fled the scene. It has left me wrecked, empty, and absolutely exhausted; and I still have a half-day journey and jet-lag to contend with.

  I walk toward my departure gate, taking a last look at the local news on the TV screen as I go.

  Still no news on Menders, and I breathe a sigh of relief.

  Hopefully, I’ll keep awake on the plane through the extreme over-abuse of coffee and energy drinks, and it will give me a chance to have an initial read-through of Menders’ journal. By the time I reach Gainesville, I should have some idea if there’s anything of use in there; and then after I’ve spoken to Kelly, I hope I will also have some more information on my medical condition – if you can call it that.

  I’ve booked a return ticket (if my departure is investigated, a one-way ticket would look highly suspicious), but I know I won’t have to travel back the same way; my aim is to speak to Kelly, call Ben if I find anything of use in the journal, then book myself into a hotel and go straight to bed. If the past few days are anything to go by, I’ll wake up on another day again, probably back in the Mat-Su valley.

  If the past few days are anything to go by.

  But by now, I know that there are no guarantees with this thing.

  I gladly accept the cup of black coffee and the can of Red Bull from the stewardess, smiling in the friendliest way I can manage.

  We are cruising at thirty-eight thousand feet now, a blanket of clouds obscuring the outline of Alaska below us.

  “Tired?” she asks with a smile of her own.

  “More than a little,” I agree, the initial kick of the Blonde Roast desperate now to be topped up.

  “If you want, I can bring you a pillow and a blanket? We’ve got five hours until we land at St. Paul.”

  “That’s okay,” I say, tapping the journal which lies on my lap. “I’ve got some work to do before we land.”

  “Are you getting off at Minneapolis?”

  “No,” I say. “Atlanta.” I don’t tell her that I’m then taking a regional flight from Atlanta to Gainesville; the less people know about my movements, the better.

  “Atlanta?” she repeats with a raised eyebrow. “You’re going to need a few more coffees and Red Bulls, I guess.”

  I laugh. “Don’t I know it.”

  She leaves, and I nervously thumb the journal. I’ve got an aisle seat, and the middle-aged couple next to me are minding their own business. The woman by the window is reading an e-book, and the guy in the middle is watching one of the in-flight movies. Looks like some sort of horror flick, and I don’t look for long; I’ve had enough horror for a lifetime.

  I’m mindful, however, of how I angle the journal, to make sure that nobody else can see it. I might be paranoid, but with good reason.

  But I’ve got five hours to kill, and I finally open the journal and get down to work.

  By the time the plane starts its decent into Minneapolis-St. Paul International, I’m about two-thirds of the way into Menders’ book.

  Two-thirds in, and I still don’t really know what to make of it. The way it is written – not only his scrawled, barely legible handwriting, but also the irregular spelling, the sometimes-nonexistent grammar, as well as the barely coherent structure – makes it far from an easy read. Most of my time has been spent trying to decipher parts of it that seem to defy explanation.

  There are a lot of passages that deal with the stars, mixed in so deeply that sometimes they are hard to separate from the rest of it. More than once, I’ve been reading a sentence about Menders’ daily habits, or about a book he was reading, or his thoughts on women, and don’t immediately realize when he has gone off into a diatribe about astronomy.

  Thinking about his attitude toward women, I re-read a section from just a few pages back, still trying to get my head around what might make a person hate so much.

  fucking whors shood all fucking die, die, die, yes fucking bitches DIE I hate them so much they stink so bad I wish I coud just get rid of you all why why why why why do you do it you Whors. I dont no why you dont all fall into HELL and DIE if I coud I woud FUCK you all to HELL and back. I woud STRANGEL and KILL and BLAST you all to the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant and pulsar wind nebula found in the constellation of Taurus –

  Bizarrely, the passage then goes on – in very neat, perfectly-spelled writing – to describe the Crab Nebula in exquisite detail, possibly a passage copied from a textbook or website.

  But it makes me wonder about the man, makes me wonder if he was just sat there at his desk reading and writing about astrology, then got hit by an irresistible urge to commit his hatred of women to paper, to purge it from his system, to let it all out into this journal.

  It makes for severely uncomfortable reading, as I am drawn into the dark netherworld of Menders’ disturbed mind, but so far, I have found no details of anything he saw down in the valley. There are vague mentions of other women, possibly from Palmer or Anchorage, but no names, no details. It is clear that he was still stalking people on occasion, would follow them, but it is hard to ascertain how far this went. It is clear that – even in the most crazed phases of his writing – he was reticent to give up any details, anything that might incriminate him in a court of law, if the journal was ever found.

  My mind is hurting, but not just from the turgid handwritten notes I have been concentrating on – I am on my eighth coffee and my sixth Red Bull, and I am fearful that my skull is simply not big enough to take the pounding of my b
rain against the inside of its shell.

  I have been fighting sleep for the past hour – really fighting it – and I close the journal as the big Boeing 757 touches down on the St. Paul runway, grateful for the chance to go for a walk, maybe visit the airport restrooms and splash some water on my face.

  The rest of the journal will just have to wait.

  We are in the air over Illinois when I see it, eyes bleary, mouth as dry as if it has been stuffed with cotton balls.

  I miss it at first – for a long time now, the words on the page have been floating in front of me, forcing me to read, then re-read, then re-read again before anything truly sinks in, my exhaustion threatening to overwhelm me, to destroy me, despite the several grams of caffeine I must have ingested over the past several hours.

  But finally it sinks in, something . . . something . . .

  I blink my eyes, trying to moisten them so I can see straight; my vision clears, blurs again, then clears, and I read the section again.

  component stars remain near 100 solar masses, making them among the most massive stars recorded and the star arrives at the base, it is a little star, a young star taken into the base not struggling maybe sleeping so they have another one, Another littel star for their constellation what shoud I name this one??? ab3-7 I think. yes that is right definitely right. I wonder what they do with this littel star I woud love to be there I woud love to help them I woud love to try it myself oh yes yes yes

  – and then it switches back to more information on something called Pismis 24, which again is clearly something copied out of a textbook. I wonder if he is genuinely interested in this part of his writing, or if it’s just a way of hiding the other passages; was Menders hopeful that if someone ever found his journal, if they were to give it just a cursory glance, they might think it was only an astronomical notebook? If so, he was even crazier than I thought – there is such a huge difference in style, spelling, layout and appearance between the sections that you would have to be blind not to see it. Another alternative is that he was sitting at his desk, copying notes, when something occurred to him or – as in this case – caught his eye, and he immediately jotted his thoughts or observations down into the same book.

  I can imagine him there alone at his desk, writing about Pismis 24, when he sees a vehicle approach, somewhere down in the valley. He checks his telescope, sees a “little star” – ab3-7, Lynette Hyams, someone else? – being taken “into the base”, and I have to assume that he is talking about one of the ranches he can see down there in the valley, I have to assume that he was witnessing the passage of a victim into the murder-house.

  Which means that it is someone down in the valley, someone within the little hamlet of homesteads which surround me.

  I think of Larraine Harrigan and Artie Jenkins; retired Judge Tom Judd, alone in his big house; the Eberles, with their large house and even larger family; the solid and dependable Latimers, the old Townsend couple . . .

  Could any of them be involved in this? One of them? Some of them? All of them?

  Menders says “they”, an indication that – as De Nares suspects – there is more than one person involved. But who are “they”?

  And could Douglas Menders see anywhere else from his desk? I reflect now on how I should have carried on looking through the telescope, tried to find out if he could observe any other areas of the Mat-Su valley from his cabin. But I was too wrapped up in what I’d seen, was too terrified by the fact that he could see me, to investigate further.

  And why did he label the girl – if that’s what the “little star” refers to – by the title “ab3-7”? What does that mean? Are those her initials? Is the number an age, or range of ages? Is that the number of suspected victims, somewhere between three and nine? Thirty-nine?

  Hell, I still don’t know anything, and I order another coffee – with milk this time, to help soothe my churning stomach – as I race back through the journal from the beginning, trying to find any similar references that I might have missed before, tired as I am.

  And then I do start to see reference to other “littel stars”, appended by Menders’ unknown system of coding. There are ab3-3, ab3-4, ab3-5 and ab3-6, all lost within the tangle of genuine astronomical information. Some of that stuff was so dense, I must not have noticed when Menders’ true voice interceded. So maybe his method of keeping his secret diary worked?

  But I know why this final one stood out over the others, it is because he interjects just a little too much of the personal with this one – the fact that he wants to help them, his excitement at the idea. The previous entries lacked this element. Perhaps by the time of ab3-7, he’d had time to consider what was going on down there, to work himself into a fever pitch about it?

  Except for this personal spin, all of the other entries reveal the same information – references to “they”, to the “base” and to “their constellation”. I have to think that he is witnessing the result of abductions, girls taken off the streets, maybe from their homes, and brought back to one of the farms that make up my little area of the world.

  An area I’d thought was safe.

  I remind myself that there are other options – maybe he was monitoring other areas, maybe it describes something else altogether, maybe it means nothing at all, just another part of Menders’ twisted psyche?

  But I know I am onto something, and speed-read my way through the rest of the journal, now I know what I am looking for.

  And sure enough, I see entries for ab3-8, then – twenty pages later – another for ab3-9. I keep scanning through the pages, nearing the end now, and then I see something else that I missed before, once more lost in the technical jargon of the amateur astronomer –

  An O-type star has a temperature in excess of 30,000 Kelvin, and is a hot, blue-white star of spectral type O and what is this ab3-9 is moving acros the void free of the base its owners are in the cluster the littel star is down down the littel star is down. gone? essence uplifted to the true constellations? gone gone gone how did they let this happen is this the end for them I wonder I cannot believe what I have seen the pretty littel star free for just one beootiful moment, racing acros space like a comet, a meteor, a falling star. a dead star and I wonder wat will hapen now, O-type stars are located in regions of active star formation, such as the spiral arms of a

  – and then it ends, segues into more information on O-type stars, and I am left stunned, for here in my hands I am holding an eye-witness account to what I believe must be the escape of Lynette Hyams (ab3-9) across the void (the fields) to my own home. But the eye-witness is dead,

  (murdered)

  – no, killed in self-defense –

  (murdered, by you!)

  – shut up! –

  and can add nothing more to the account. But it seems to be the implication that the “owners” (the abductors, the torturers, the killers) were at Artie’s party that night (isn’t that what the “cluster” must mean?).

  There is so much information here, and yet I barely understand any of it.

  What does it all mean?

  Was Lynette being held somewhere in the valley? At someone’s house? In an outbuilding? In an underground chamber of some sort?

  And who the hell are “they”?

  Everyone from the hamlet was at the party, most of Palmer too, so that doesn’t narrow down the field much.

  But I have to believe that Lynette was being held somewhere near my own house, maybe another six “littel stars” alongside her. And what became of them?

  The coffee and Red Bull threaten to rebel in my stomach and I grab for a paper bag from the seat-back in front of me, holding it up to my nose and mouth and taking in big gulps of air to stop me from vomiting – in, the bag collapsing; out, the bag expanding; in, out, in, out.

  Finally – the couple next to me giving me no more than a cursory glance – I am okay, I can breathe again, I am not going to be sick.

  But the horror remains, as I struggle to come to terms with t
he fact that there might be a further six victims out there. I don’t know where they are, or what has happened to them, but the only thing I am certain of is the horrifying reality that – if the body of Lynette Hyams is anything to go by – they might be better off dead and buried.

  6

  Eyes clenched tightly shut, I vomit violently into the toilet bowl in the restrooms of Gainesville Regional, the caffeine finally catching up with me and causing my stomach to rebel.

  But I have made it, I am still awake, and I am here in Florida; at times it was close, I was half-asleep, but each time I managed to catch myself.

  And now here I am, sick and tired, but here.

  I open my bleary eyes, see a black pool in front of me; see the toilet bowl as my eyes focus, see the vomit turn to blood in front of me, a bowl full of thick, clotting blood; I pull away, scared and frightened, and reach for the flush, but what comes out is yet more blood, blood to wash away blood, and I watch in horror as it pours out of the toilet onto the floor around me, and I yank open the door and run from the cubicle, but the blood follows me, sweeping across the tiled floor after me; I collapse against the sink, hands braced on the edges and open my mouth to scream, when –

  I look into the mirror, see everything is normal around me; there is no blood, nothing chasing me; just the face of a tired, exhausted woman looking back at me from the mirror, bags deep under her eyes, lines crisscrossing her features where there were none before.

  What is happening to me?

  The horrible taste in my mouth tells me that I have been sick, but the rest must have been some sort of vivid hallucination, brought about by lack of sleep. And stress too, I guess.

  But I’m okay now, I tell myself as I look in the mirror; I’m okay now.

  I ignore the curious looks of the two other women in the restroom and splash water on my face, then some more, and more again; the feeling is refreshing, rejuvenating, invigorating. It doesn’t make up for a good eight hours’ sleep, but it makes me feel better anyway.