Christmas Moon

by J. R. Rain

  You usually do, Fang replied.

  What do you know of silver auras?

  They're common, although they're usually associated with other colors, why?

  I saw a silver aura today, but a bright one. Perhaps the brightest I'd ever seen. A radiant, glorious silver.

  No other colors?

  I shook my head, even though he couldn't see me shaking my head. Just silver, I typed.

  Hang on.

  There was a long pause, and I suspected Fang was either thinking or Googling or consulting what I knew to be a vast, private occult library. I knew something of occult libraries. . . having met a curious young curator of such a library, six months ago.

  I waited. My house was mostly silently, other than Anthony's light snoring. Was it normal for an eight-year-old to snore? I wondered if I should have that checked. These days, after the ordeal with Kawasaki disease, I was constantly on guard with Anthony's health.

  Fang came back, typing: Please describe him to me, Moon Dance.

  Tallish, I wrote. Well-built. Narrow waist. Broad shoulders. Smiled a lot.

  What did he say to you?

  I thought about that. Said he knew me, and had known me from way back, that he worked with me. . . or implied that he had worked with me. He knew my name.

  But did you recognize him?

  No.

  What about your inner alarm system? Did he trigger it? Were you on guard?

  Quite the opposite, I wrote. If anything, I felt at peace.

  There was a long delay, then finally, Fang's words appeared in the IM chat box:

  Unless I'm mistaken, Moon Dance, I believe you just met your guardian angel.

  Chapter Five

  Charlie lived in a single-wide trailer.

  Although the trailer looked old, it appeared well-enough maintained. As I approached the door in the late evening, I realized that I had never been inside a single-wide trailer.

  Somehow, I controlled my excitement.

  The exterior was composed of metal siding, and there was a lot of junk piled around the house. Controlled junk, as it was mostly on old tables and shelving. Lawn mower parts, fan belts, engine parts, and just about everything else that belonged in a garage, except the mobile home didn't have a garage.

  The front door was, in fact, a sliding glass door. Charlie, apparently, used the mobile home's rear door as his front door. A quick glance around the home explained why: the front door had no steps leading up to it.

  Leading up to the sliding glass door was a small wooden deck, which I used now. I peered inside. It was the living room, and where the exterior had controlled mayhem, the interior was a straight-up mess. Charlie Anderson, it appeared, was a hoarder. The shelving theme from outside was extended to the inside. Shelves lined the walls, packed with plastic containers, themselves filled with computer parts, cables, and other electronic doodads. Interestingly, not a single book lined his book shelves. The floor was stacked with newspapers and speakers and car radios and old computer towers in various stages of disarray. Boxes were piled everywhere. And not neatly. Dog toys and old bones littered the floor. A huge TV sat in the far corner of the room, draped in a blanket, while a much smaller TV sat next to it, currently showing something science-fictiony. Zombies or robots, or both.

  I was just about to knock on the glass door when a fat little white terrier sprang from the couch and charged me, barking furiously. All teeth and chub. But at the door, it suddenly pulled up, stopped barking, and looked at me curiously. I looked back at it. It cocked its head to one side. I didn't cock my head.

  Then it whimpered and dashed off.

  As it did so, I heard more movement. . . the sound of someone getting out of a recliner, followed by Charlie Anderson's happy-go-lucky, round face.

  He let me in, asking if I'd found the place okay. I assured him I had. Once inside, I could fully appreciate just how much crap Charlie had. And yet. . . I had a sneaking suspicion that Charlie knew exactly where all his junk was.

  "Nice place you have here. " I was speaking facetiously, and a little in awe, too.

  But Charlie took it as a real compliment, bless his heart.

  "Thanks, but it's just home. I used to worry about cleaning and stuff like that, but I figured what's the point? My friends call me a hoarder, but I just like junk. I think there's a difference. "

  "Sure," I said.

  He looked at me eagerly. "So, you agree there's a difference?"

  I could tell he wanted me to agree, to confirm that he didn't have a hoarding problem, that he was just another guy with thousands of glass jars stacked on a long shelf over his kitchen table. The jars, as far as I could tell, were filled with every conceivable nut and bolt known to man. Thank God they weren't filled with human hearts. I leaned over. The jar cloest to me was filled with - and I had to do a double take here - bent nails.

  "Yes," I said. "There's a huge difference. "

  Charlie exhaled, relieved. I think we might have just bonded a little. "I think so, too," he said, nodding enthusiastically. "Would you like a Diet Pepsi?"

  "I'm okay. "

  "Water?"

  "I'm fine. Maybe you can show me where you kept the safe, Charlie?"

  "Oh, yes. Right this way. "

  He led me through his many stacks of random junk. We even stepped around an old car fender. A fender. Seriously? Laying next to the fender was the upper half of a desk, the half with the doors that no one ever uses. There was no sign of the lower half anywhere. Just the upper. Seriously?

  But there was more. So much more.

  The junk seemed eternal. I already felt lost, consumed. How anyone could live like this, I didn't know. The junk almost seemed to take on a life of its own, as if it was the real inhabitant of the house, and we were the strangers, the trespassers. Indeed, I could even see the chaotic energy, bright and pulsating, swirling throughout the house. Crazy, frenetic energy that seemed trapped and still-connected to the many inanimate objects.

  Energy, I knew, could attach to an object, especially an object of great importance, and so, really, I wasn't too surprised to see the spirit of the old woman hanging around an even older-looking piano. Granted, the piano itself was mostly covered in junk, but the old woman didn't seem to care much about that.

  "Where did you get this piano?" I asked.

  As I spoke, the old woman, who had mostly been ignoring us, turned and looked at me with some interest.

  Charlie, who was about to lead the way down a narrow hallway, paused, and looked back. "My neighbor was throwing it out. "

  "Why?"

  "He was moving. I guess it belonged to his mother, who was a music teacher, I think. She died a few years back. I shored up my floor with some extra jacks underneath and pushed it through the sliding glass door. It wasn't easy, but I got it in here. "

  "Do you play?" I asked.

  "No. "

  "Have you ever, ah, heard it play before?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, have you ever heard it play on its own?"

  He looked at me, seemed to think about, or, more accurately, decide how much he wanted to tell me, then finally nodded. "Yeah, sometimes. Just a few notes. I figure it's mice. "

  "Do you believe in ghosts?" I asked. As I did so, the old lady drifted up from the piano seat where she'd been sitting along with some stacks of automobile manuals.

  "Why do you ask?"

  The woman approached me carefully. She was composed of a thousands, if not millions of staticky, supernatural filaments of super-bright light. Sometimes the filaments dispersed a little. When they did, she grew less distinct. Sometimes they came together tightly, and when they did, she took on more form, more details. As she approached, I could see where light pulsated brightly at the side of her head, and knew that she had died of a brain aneurysm. She reached out a hand, which looked so bright and detailed that it could have been physical. I reache
d out my own and took hers, and as I did so, a shiver coursed through me.

  In that moment, I had an image of a school, with many dozens of children playing this very piano.

  "No reason," I said. "But, wouldn't you think this piano would do some kids some good? Maybe at an elementary school?"

  Charlie blinked hard, thought about that. Giving up his junk, I knew, was a torturous act. He shrugged. "Yeah, I suppose. "

  "Would you do that for me?"

  He shrugged again. "Sure. But why?"

  The old woman, who was still holding my hand, had covered her face with her other hand. Shivers continued up and down my arm. "Seems the right thing to do, doesn't it?"

  Charlie shrugged. "Yeah, I suppose so. I am sort of worried about the floor. Even with the extra jacks underneath. I'll do it tomorrow. I can check around with some schools. "

  "You're a good man, Charlie Brown. "

  He smiled and turned a little red. I released the old woman's hand, who smiled and drifted back to the piano. As I did so, I had a thought, "When did you acquire the piano?"

  "Last week. "

  "Before or after the theft of the safe?"

  "After. Why?"

  Ghosts, I knew from firsthand experience, made for excellent witnesses. Unfortunately, the timing didn't line up here. "No reason," I said.

  Charlie studied me, shrugged for the millionth time, and led me over to the furnace, which was located about halfway down the hallway. Once there, he removed the metal cover, set it down, and grabbed a flashlight from the nearby bathroom.

  "I kept the safe in here," he said, and shined the light at an empty space above the furnace. "I just set it in there. "

  "It wasn't bolted in?"

  "No. It's heavy, but so's the furnace. The safe just sat right where the old blower used to be. The thing broke ages ago. That's it right over there. "

  He pointed the flashlight over to a dome-shaped, metal-encased fan. Surrounding the fan were a lot of old baggies full of random screws and washers. One of the baggies even had baggies in it. Hoarding at its purest.

  "Can you give me a minute alone?" I asked.

  "Sure. . . you gonna dust for prints or something?"

  "Or something," I said.

  He nodded and smiled eagerly, anything to please me. No doubt anything to please anyone. He stepped back through his labyrinthine hallway, contorting his body this way and that, and when he was gone, I went to work.

  Chapter Six

  First, I scanned the hallway.

  I noted a window directly opposite the furnace. The window was covered by both blinds and a curtain. Upon closer inspection, I saw that the blind wasn't really made for this window. It was a half inch too narrow. . . perhaps just narrow enough for someone to see through.

  I next ran my fingers along the dusty curtain, and what struck me immediately was how thin the material was. Thin and see-through. Individually, the blinds were too narrow and the curtains too thin. But together, they should have done the job of keeping away prying eyes.

  I thought about that as I scanned his hallway. . . and spotted the oscillating fan at the end. The fan was turned off, but I had another thought.

  I went over to it and turned it on. It faced into what appeared to be Charlie's bedroom. Then it started oscillating, turning briefly toward the hallway. The blast of air from the fan wasn't much. But it was enough. A moment later, the hem of the curtain fluttered up.

  I watched three or four revolutions of the fan, and each time, the hem of the curtain fluttered higher and higher. I went back to the window and studied it, and as I studied it, an image began to form in my thoughts.

  The image coalesced into that of a young man standing just outside the window. I closed my eyes and the image came into sharper focus. A young man who was watching Charlie. Standing just outside the trailer. Late at night.

  Who the person was, I hadn't a clue. Why he happened to be standing just outside the trailer, I didn't know that either. My psychic hits are just that. Hits. Not all-knowing information. Glimpses of information. Snapshots of information. It was up to me to dig deeper, to decipher, to probe, and ultimately to figure out what the hell it all meant.

  I went back into the living room, walked around the upper half of a recliner - just the upper half, mind you - and found Charlie scratching his fat little pooch. The dog saw me, promptly piddled on the carpet, and dashed off into the kitchen. Or what should have been a kitchen. In Charlie's world, it was just another storage room.

  "Rocko!" he shouted, but Charlie didn't really sound angry. He sounded shocked, if anything. He immediately produced a rag from somewhere on his person and went to work on the pee stain in the carpet. "I don't know what's gotten into him. "

  "Maybe he smells my sister's cat on me," I said, since it seemed safer to say than: It's probably because I'm a blood-sucking fiend, and dogs, for some reason, can sense us.

  "Maybe," said Charlie. "But dogs are going to be dogs, ya know? You can't get mad at them for being dogs. "

  I smiled at his simple philosophy. I asked, "Do you ever leave Rocko alone?"

  "Sometimes, but he likes to ride in the car with me. "

  "So there are times when your house is completely empty?"

  "I suppose so, yeah. "

  As he cleaned, I asked him how often he checked on the safe. He looked up at me from the floor, a little sweat already appearing on his brow as he worked at the dog pee. "Well, I don't really check it. "

  "What do you do?"

  He looked away, suddenly embarrassed. He stopped scrubbing the floor. His balding head gleamed. "I guess I sometimes look at it. "

  "Look at it?"

  He thought some more. "Well, I guess it reminds me of my dad, you know? And my grandfather. We all had the at one time or another. We all talked about it. And sometimes. . . " But Charlie suddenly got choked up and couldn't continue.

  So I finished for him. "And sometimes when you looked at it, or when you touched it, you could feel your father and grandfather nearby. "

  Charlie wiped his eyes and nodded and looked away.

  Chapter Seven

  Admittedly, the blood wasn't very Christmassy.

  It was late and I was alone in my office with a packet of the good stuff, freshly delivered today from the slaughterhouse in Norco. As I slit open the top of the plastic bag with a fingernail that was a little too thick and a little too sharp, I reflected on what I knew about blood.

  Fresh blood energized me, lifted me, made me feel more than human. With fresh blood flowing through my veins, I felt like I could do anything. And for all I knew, maybe I could.

  Acquiring fresh blood is another issue altogether.

  I'm not a killer, although I have killed. To drink fresh blood implies two things: it has either been taken. . . or freely given. The freely given part was a concept I was still wrapping my brain around. One of the perks of dating Kingsley these past few months was that he always kept a fresh supply of hemoglobin for me. Where he got it, I may never know, and he wasn't telling. All I knew was that it made me feel like a new woman. Hell, like a new species.

  But I will not take blood unwillingly from humans, although I certainly could if I wanted to. I imagined there were others like me out there who took from others when and where they wanted it. I suspected that many of the missing person cases around the world were a result of this, although I could be wrong, since I'm not exactly immersed in the vampire sub-culture. I'm immersed in my kids and school and work, and dealing with an ex-husband who had revamped his efforts to bring me down. How he would do this, I don't know, but if ever there was someone who ran hot and cold, it was Danny.

  Bi-polar, as my sister put it.

  I studied the semi-clear packet of blood. The packet was no bigger than my hand. I didn't need much blood, and a packet this size would keep me going for three or four days. I didn't need to drink nightly, although I could, if I cho
se to. As I studied the packet, a thick animal hair rotated slowly within. Shuddering, I fished it out and flicked it in the waste basket.

  Blech.

  Hating my life, I brought the packet to my mouth, tilted it up, and drank deeply as the thick blood filled my mouth. I ignored the bigger chunks of flesh, and only gagged two times. I kept drinking until the packet was empty, until I'd squeezed out every last drop.

  When I did, I shuddered and closed my eyes and willed the blood to stay down. I kept my fist over my mouth and kept shuddering. When I opened my eyes, I saw him standing there, in the far corner of my office, watching me.

  The man from the dollar store.

  Or, as Fang put it. . . my guardian angel.

  Chapter Eight

  I gasped.

  I might be a creature of the night, but that doesn't mean I don't get startled. My first instinct was to dash toward the door of my office, which is what I did, blocking the stranger from further access into my house. One moment I was sitting at my desk, downing a packet of cow blood, gagging, and the next, I was standing guard at my office door.

  "I didn't mean to startle you, Samantha. "

  "Of course not, asshole. Which is why you appeared suddenly in my office. You have five seconds before I throw you through that wall. "

  I was a mixture of rage and confusion. The adrenaline-fueled rage for obvious reasons. The confusion because my inner alarm system had been completely bypassed. What the hell was going on?

  I kept an ear out towards my kids, listening hard, but all I could hear was Anthony's light snoring. Tammy wasn't snoring, but I could sense her there in her room, curled up in her bed, one arm tucked under her pillow.

  "Your extrasensory skills are progressing rapidly, Samantha. "

  "What do you mean?" I asked, perplexed, angered, wracking my brain for an explanation of how he had appeared so suddenly in my office. I found none.

  He watched me from the corner of the room, hands folded in front of him, smiling serenely. His blondish hair seemed to lift and fall on currents of air that I sure as hell didn't feel.

  He cocked his head slightly to one side. "Your image of your sleeping daughter, of course. Your psychic hit is completely accurate. "

  At any other time I might have rushed the guy. At the least, slamming him up against the wall to get some straight answers. But I held back. For now.