Red Moon Rising

by J. T. Brannan

  I wash the sick out of my mouth, then buy some mints from a machine on the wall and immediately start work on two of them.

  My stomach still feels queasy, acidic, but I don’t think I am going to be sick again.

  Finally, I straighten up and check my appearance in the mirror; and then I’m hit with heavy déja vu as I vividly remember checking myself in the bathroom mirror of my West Side apartment, the morning I was shot.

  It’s only now, that I realize how different I look, how I’ve changed over these last months. Back then, I was concerned with a stray hair being out of place, everything had to be just-so, as perfect as it could be; it was all part of the image, the job, it was all about an impression of exquisite professionalism I was trying to project. Now, I’m just happy not to have vomit on my hair and jacket.

  How times change.

  I splash a bit more water on my face, think briefly about adding make-up, but decide I don’t have either the time, or the inclination. That side of me is gone now, perhaps forever.

  Only the truth remains, and my quest to find it.

  I get a taxi into downtown Gainesville, then another to Pine Hills; I avoid a direct route, in case anyone is following my tracks, and I think about how easy it is, how simple, to fall into the authority-dodging behavior of the inveterate criminal.

  I booked myself into a hotel in the city center when I was there, preparing for later; I know I’ll need a safe place where I can fall asleep, hopefully save myself a twelve-hour journey home.

  I’ve left my overnight bag there, along with the journal, and now I feel naked and unprepared as I approach the house of Dr. Glen Kelly. The journal ties me to Palmer, to Alaska – in a way, to Lynette Hyams – and now, in this strange place, I am confused, as if I have lost my purpose, my reason to be here.

  The house is right in the heart of Pine Hills Retirement Village, next to the tennis courts, gymnasium and open-air swimming pool, with the three on-site restaurants only a stone’s throw away too. The village is landscaped with lakes and lawns and flowerbeds, and consists of neat individual homes like Dr. Kelly’s, low-rise blocks of “independent living” apartments, and – in a separate, hospital-like building – what are labelled “assisted living” apartments.

  The lady in the plush reception hall by the parking lot wasn’t the same person I’d spoken to on the phone yesterday, and didn’t know if my message had been passed along, but – when she’d put a call through to Kelly’s home and told him that I was there – he had agreed to see me.

  But now that I am right outside, I am starting to have doubts. Why am I here? What am I hoping to achieve? What do I want to find out?

  The truth; you want to find out the truth.

  But what if the truth is something I don’t want to hear?

  Grow up, I tell myself. You’re a big girl now – just do it.

  I do as I’m told, before I think better of it, and reach for the doorbell. It echoes in the house beyond, and it is not long before I hear the pad of feet in the hallway beyond, hear the snick of a lock, and watch as the door opens to reveal Dr. Glen Kelly.

  He is a small man, neat and trim, with a white mustache and short, silver hair; despite his age, he doesn’t wear spectacles, and there is a youthful vigor in those dark brown eyes that I instantly like. He seems familiar, like a distant relative seen at a funeral, but I do not consciously recognize him.

  “Dr. Kelly?” I ask tentatively.

  “Yes,” he says, and his face breaks into a warm, friendly smile. “Jessica. It’s been a long time.” And then he holds up a copy of the Anchorage Daily News, open at a page that shows my name, my picture, in connection to the investigation into the death of Lynette.

  He nods his head slowly, knowingly. “Yes,” he says, smile still on that friendly, familiar face. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  7

  We sit in his living room, drinking weak coffee and eating biscuits. He lives alone, I’ve already discovered, his wife having died of cancer years before; he freely admits that part of living in this retirement community is to find someone new, and I get the impression that he is not short of options in that department.

  Turns out he won that tennis tournament yesterday too, and I can only imagine that this will have increased his standing with the retired ladies even more.

  “It was the veteran, veteran category though,” he says self-deprecatingly. “Over-seventy-fives, so the competition wasn’t too fierce. Not the US Open, anyway. Do you still play?”

  I shake my head. “No,” I say. “Not for years.”

  “A shame,” he says, “you used to be quite good, as far as I remember. Saxon courts you played at, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I say with a laugh. “It was. So, I guess you did used to know me.”

  “Oh, I did, Jess. Yes, I certainly did. And it doesn’t surprise me that you can’t remember any of it, not after what they did to you.”

  I can hear some bitterness in his voice, and I can tell that – whatever “treatment” I received back then – Dr. Kelly was not a fan of it.

  “What did happen to me?” I ask. “And why did you think I’d come and visit?”

  “I’ll deal with that second question first, if that’s okay; that one’s a bit easier to answer, the first will . . . take some time.”

  “Okay,” I urge, rubbing my dry eyes, trying to get some blood flow back into my face.

  “You’re tired,” Kelly comments. “Of course . . . You’ve been trying to keep yourself awake, haven’t you? Scared that if you sleep, you might . . . travel, unexpectedly.”

  I nod my head, scared but at the same time relieved that there is someone who might actually understand my condition, what I am going through.

  “When did you last sleep?” he asks with concern.

  “I’m not sure, I guess . . . thirty hours ago, maybe more.”

  “Jet lag too,” he says. “I’m sorry I didn’t think about it sooner. Wait there.”

  I begin to protest, too keen to hear what he has to say, but then he is gone, and I am left sipping at the light-brown coffee, eyes starting to droop despite all the caffeine that must still be in my system.

  He returns, and my eyes open. Did I fall asleep? I’m not sure, but if I did, then it wasn’t deep enough to have any effect.

  “There,” he says, passing me what looks like a smoothie. “Drink that.”

  “What is it?”

  “Oh, a natural mix, it’ll help keep you awake, for a while at least. Bee pollen, ginger, maca root, yerba mate tea, lemon juice. Tastes pretty bad, but try some.”

  I do, and it’s not as bad as it sounds. In seconds, it’s all gone.

  “Good,” he says, like a doctor happy with a patient who has taken their medicine.

  “So,” I say, already feeling the effects of the drink, “you were going to answer that second question first . . .”

  “Yes,” he agrees, “okay. Well, after I was . . . dissuaded from pursuing my profession by some of my contemporaries, I followed your subsequent career from a distance, I guess I was . . . curious, perhaps, to see if any of the peculiar characteristics of your condition were ever to resurface. But I couldn’t keep in touch, not directly – if the treatment was effective, I wouldn’t have liked to upset the applecart, so to speak. But I monitored your career, watched as you took off in New York. Followed the press coverage of that diabolical situation outside the courthouse. When you woke up, I couldn’t help wondering if . . . the bullet might cause some . . . how do I put this? Cause some regression.

  “But you moved to Alaska, everything seemed to be okay, and then . . . I read this.” He taps the newspaper article. “I’ve had it sent to me since you moved there.” Suddenly, he looks awkward. “Sorry if I sound like some sort of stalker, but your case has had a pretty profound impact on my life, and I’m a curious man.”

  I suddenly feel terribly guilty, thinking about how I might have ruined this man’s career. “I’m –”

  Bu
t Kelly holds up a hand, cutting me off. “No,” he says firmly, “I’m not looking for an apology, I don’t want sympathy, I’m just explaining to you, making you understand why I’ve been monitoring things, even at my age. I guess I’m one of those people that just can’t let go, right? Like a dog with a bone.

  “Anyway,” he continues, tapping the paper again, “I read this, that you’ve been arrested over some sort of homicide, I naturally look into it in a bit more detail, then I find out the reason, that you gave details of a murder to the police before it even happened. ABI naturally assume you must have had some sort of foreknowledge of it, right? Aiding and abetting right there, minimum.” He shakes his head in seeming disbelief.

  “How did you get those details?” I ask, knowing the reason for my arrest was never made public, at least not that I am aware of.

  “Ms. Hudson,” he says with a smile, “I’m eighty-one years old, I’ve been around long enough to know plenty of people, in all lines of work. And some of ’em owe me favors.”

  He winks conspiratorially, and I smile, a little girl again.

  “Well, I immediately had to ask myself the question, did she see it again? Has it started again?”

  “Has what started again?” I ask quickly, desperate to know what he knows. “Did I see what again?”

  “The Red Moon,” Kelly says gravely. “It always starts with the Red Moon.”

  We are sitting outside now, discussing my case over lemonade and cucumber sandwiches at a café that overlooks the tennis courts; even when he’s not playing, he likes to keep an eye on the competition.

  “The problems started when you were eleven,” Kelly says, just before taking a bite of his sandwich. The sun is in my eyes as I look at him, but the warmth is a welcoming change from the snowy wastes I have come from. I was going to order a coffee, but he thinks that the citric acid in lemon juice might be better for me. “Around about the same time you started menstruating, if I recall.”

  “What?” I say, surprised – shocked – by his knowledge of such information.

  “Jess,” he says with a wave of his hand, “I am – well, I was – a doctor. Your doctor, for a certain amount of time. These are just medical facts.”

  I sigh; I know he is right, it is just strange to talk to this man about this subject. He might well have been my doctor, but I still do not remember him, and after everything that has happened recently, I have a hard time trusting strangers.

  “Well anyway,” he continues, undeterred, “I only mention it because some of my colleagues believed it was important, that your mental image of the Red Moon was linked to it in some way, a mental projection, if you will, of your emergence into womanhood.”

  There is an underlying implication in his words, something I don’t immediately grasp. “Why would I project something about that?” I ask eventually. “Did it scare me?”

  For a moment, Kelly looks uneasy, and he takes a short break to sip lemonade through a long, green straw before looking back at me.

  “Jessica,” he says, “do you remember a man called Desmond Curtis?”

  Desmond Curtis? I do know that name, in fact I only thought of him the other day, for the first time in years. Blue eyes behind steel-framed glasses . . . grey mustache . . . a friend of my father’s? And then I remember the terror, the horror associated with that name, and my stomach cramps up and – for just a moment – I feel terribly alone.

  “I . . . yes, vaguely. The name makes me uncomfortable though, I don’t know why.”

  Kelly looks at me carefully, as if judging how I will handle what he has to tell me. “That makes sense,” he concedes finally. “Because the first instance of your . . . unique problem, let’s call it . . . was directly related to Mr. Curtis.”

  “How?”

  “You claimed that he sexually assaulted you.”

  “What?” I gasp, not believing him – but the way he holds my gaze, the honest and nonjudgmental way he looks at me, makes me wonder if he is right. And if he is, what does it mean? Why can’t I remember?

  “Nobody believed you, of course, and with good reason,” Kelly continued. “Because you made the complaint before you’d actually met him.”

  “What?” I repeat, stunned.

  “Mr. Curtis was a business partner of your father’s, played a bit of golf with him too. But he’d never been to your house, you’d never met him at the club, at your father’s office, anywhere. You claim he assaulted you in your bedroom in Westford, during a birthday party held for your mother. A party that hadn’t happened yet.”

  The parallels with my current situation are incredible, and I want to ask questions, but don’t dare interrupt his story.

  “Anyway,” he continues, “you then claimed that you’d gone back in time, he had assaulted you, but in the future. And you can just imagine what your parents thought, what the doctors thought.”

  “They must have thought I made the whole thing up,” I say instantly. “So what happened?”

  “Well, you never did meet Desmond Curtis in the end – the police had been called in because of your complaint, and it rather soured his relationship with your father. He never went to that party.”

  “So I wasn’t assaulted?”

  “Well, yes and no. In the reality most of us exist in, no. In your reality – at least, I believe – yes.”

  “But,” I say, “I remember him, remember what he looked like . . . and yet you say I never met him.”

  “That’s what everyone else believes. I believe you did meet him – and I think he did assault you, just as you claimed – just not in the same reality as the rest of us.”

  “You believe that I traveled back in time, that I changed my own history?”

  “Yes,” Kelly answers simply. “I do. You changed it in a way, but in actual fact, for you, it was too late – the damage had already been done. You’d been assaulted, but nobody else would ever see it.”

  “But couldn’t I describe him? Tell people what he looked like?” I say, thinking about Pat Jenkins, how I’d known he had a beard without ever “really” having met him.

  “He was a society figure,” Kelly says, “had his picture in the papers regularly, on the local news, that sort of thing. It was assumed you’d seen his picture, perhaps become fixated on him, and come up with the whole story as some sort of way of making a connection with him.”

  “Accusing someone of rape is one hell of a way of making a connection.”

  “People have done much stranger things, believe me. And nothing you said, no ‘evidence’ you supplied was good enough. Nobody believed you.”

  “You know, I don’t really remember what happened, not exactly.”

  “That’s not because it didn’t happen; you remembered for a long time afterward, believe me. It was your treatment that finally made you forget.”

  “You didn’t agree with the treatment?”

  “Oh, there was probably nothing wrong with you forgetting that horrific incident, it wasn’t that I argued against that. It was just that I wasn’t sure if your condition could actually be treated. Or if it even should be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “As a young girl, you remembered what happened to you, what Desmond Curtis had done to you, and it was very difficult for you to handle. You’d gone back, changed the circumstances, stopped him ever coming to the house. But for you, the attack had still happened. But during other episodes –”

  “There were more?” I interrupt, amazed at what I am hearing.

  “Yes,” Kelly says, “several. And in those cases, you were able to actually help others – people who had no recollection of their ‘alternate’ fates, and couldn’t possibly remember what you had saved them from. Simply because, due to your intervention, what you saved them from had no longer happened, the circumstances no longer existed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, let’s take one example. Marie Langford. Do you remember her?”

  “Yes . . . vaguely.” I r
emember the name, maybe a face, a friend from school maybe?

  “Well, at the time you were best friends. And then you saw her killed by a car, hit her square on and drove off without stopping.”

  My mind is a blank; I remember none of it.

  “So anyway, you woke up the next day crying and moaning about Marie being dead. It really frightened everyone, as you might imagine, especially when they realized that she was alive and well. Then you found out that it was two days before you thought it was, and so you claimed that you must have fallen asleep and woken up two days earlier, that you traveled through time as you slept. But whatever the reality, you spent those two days making sure you did everything you could to stop Marie going near that road.”

  “And?”

  Kelly shrugs. “And she didn’t. She’s still alive and well today, married with three kids in Connecticut.”

  “So I saved her?” I ask, the implication clear.

  “You did,” Kelly says with a proud smile. “You did. Of course, nobody except you ever realized what you’d done; not even you, in the end.”

  “You realized,” I say.

  “Yes,” Kelly agrees, “but I came rather late to your case. You were thirteen by then, you’d had many episodes and I think your parents were at their wits’ end. They just didn’t know what to do with you, they were being pressured into the electro-shock therapy approach by some of the biggest names in the industry, you know, and I think they didn’t want to go down that road but were running out of options.”

  “So they brought you in.”

  “Yes. Your parents were a real mess, they’d already sold the house at Westford, moved the whole family to the city, mainly so that you could have constant access to medical help, psychiatric help, counselling, everything you needed. He didn’t want you riding anymore either, he was terrified that if you had a fall, you would be even more damaged, even more disturbed.”

  I put my drink down, things falling into place for the first time. Suddenly, my father’s decision to sell-up, to move us to Boston, to get rid of the horses, at last makes sense; and the realization sends another huge surge of guilt through me, as I understand, for the first time, that maybe he is not the monster I have always thought, that perhaps he did only want the best for me. First this, and then Jack killing himself not so many years later, it must have been too much for him to bear; my mother too, what must she have thought, what must have been going through her mind? Perhaps my father’s workaholic lifestyle and my mother’s vapid, gala-obsessed social obsessions, were just evidence of how they were struggling to cope?