“Give this to Madam Terpsichore, please,” she said. “I almost forgot. She’s expecting it.”
“Yes, of course, and do come again.”
Coward, the corners whisper. Pull the goddamn trigger and get it over with.
And that’s all it would take, one sizzling, bright instant, more pain than even she can imagine, and then oblivion or hell, whichever she has coming.
“I don’t usually do this sort of thing,” the hooker said.
“What? What don’t you usually do?” Narcissa asked and rolled the Mustang’s window down a crack to get some fresh air, despite the cold rain beating against the glass. The woman smelled like cigarettes and sweat, cheap perfume and stale, careless sex.
“Chicks,” the hooker said. “I’m not into that. I don’t usually sleep with chicks. I’m not a dyke.”
“I’m paying you enough,” Narcissa said very quietly, holding everything in because she wouldn’t have to hold it in much longer, and yes, the woman nodded, yes, and she looked down at the three one-hundred-dollar bills wadded together in her hand.
“How many men you gotta blow to make that much cash?”
“I just wanted you to know.”
“Baby, I don’t really give a shit one way or the other,” Narcissa said, and then they were at the motel on Oak Street, pulling into the parking lot and at least the hooker stopped talking for a little while.
Go on and do it. We’re getting tired of waiting.
And the last thing the girl said, before Narcissa opened the Italian stiletto and cut her throat from ear to ear, the very last thing she said before she died, “I still go to church, sometimes.”
Hurry up, girl. Pull the fucking trigger. That phone’s never going to ring.
Narcissa closes her eyes and grips the barrel of the gun with her teeth.
You’re not a monster. You’re just a crazy girl. Just a pathetic freak who hears voices, and one day, Narcissa, they’ll catch you and lock you up forever.
She starts counting backwards from ten, and all the corners and the head stuffed in the Hefty bag get quiet and listen.
And when she reaches three, the telephone on the table beside the bed begins to ring.
PART I
The Children of the Cuckoo
There are no longer any gods whom we can invoke to help us. The great religions of the world suffer from increasing anemia, because the helpful numina have fled from the woods, rivers, and mountains, and from animals, and the god-men have disappeared underground into the unconscious. There we fool ourselves that they lead an ignominious existence among the relics of our past. Our present lives are dominated by the goddess Reason, who is our greatest and most tragic illusion.
—CARL JUNG (1961)
CHAPTER ONE
Deacon
“You feelin’ any better, Mr. Silvey?”
Deacon doesn’t answer the cop, stares instead out the front of the coffee shop at the autumn-bleached sky above Third Avenue. Palest pale blue, almost white, that shade of blue, and hung so very high, so completely out of reach.
“Is your coffee okay?”
“Yeah. My coffee’s fine,” Deacon says, but keeps his eyes on the plate-glass window. There’s an airplane up there, the chalk streak of a jet’s contrail, and he imagines himself sitting on that plane, thirty thousand feet above the city, far away above the world, him and Chance going anywhere else but Birmingham.
“How’s your head?”
“Just getting started.”
“I think I have a bottle of Excedrin out in the car. Want me to go get it?”
“You’ve never had a migraine, have you, Detective Downs?”
The cop doesn’t answer right away, like maybe he’s not so sure exactly what Deacon’s asking him, and outside the coffee shop a city bus glides ponderously by in a charcoal cloud of diesel smoke.
“No,” he replies, after the bus noise has faded.
“Lucky son of a bitch,” Deacon whispers and stares back at himself from the plate glass, imperfect, see-through reflection peering out between the Halloween decorations Scotch-taped to the window. Jesus Christ, he thinks, I look like death on a cracker. The stubble on his hollow cheeks, because he hasn’t shaved in days, and the circles beneath his eyes gone dark as bruises, and he thinks he probably looks a lot more like the hard end of fifty than thirty-nine.
“We didn’t know you knew the victim,” the cop says. “I swear to god, man, we didn’t have any idea.”
“I never said you did.”
“Yeah, I know. I just didn’t want you thinking otherwise.”
Silence then, and Deacon sips a little more of the coffee, so sour it might have been brewed last week, bitter and getting cold but it gives him something to do besides stare at the sky or his ragged face in the window. Once upon a time, back in the day, he thought all coffee tasted like this, and he wishes he had a big cup of the Jamaican Blue Mountain stuff that Chance likes so much.
“I don’t believe in all this psychic mumbo jumbo, you know,” Detective Downs says, and he pours another packet of sugar into his coffee, like that’s going to help. “Some sort of fuckin’ voodoo con job, if you want to know the god’s honest truth what I think. I’m only doing this because I got orders. Nothing personal, but—”
“You just didn’t want me thinking otherwise.”
“Look, I got enough problems right now without you busting my balls, all right? I’m just doing what they tell me.”
“You think they believe in this psychic mumbo jumbo?”
“What they do or don’t believe, that ain’t none of my business, Mr. Silvey. Someone in Atlanta says you helped solve a few murders, and someone down here thought maybe we should talk to you. That’s all I know and all I really want to know.”
“Well, hell, I can see how you made detective,” Deacon says, smiles even though it makes his head hurt worse, and the cop pushes away from the table, the legs of his chair squeaking loud across the linoleum floor. Sudden anger on his clean-shaven, twenty-something face, anger and disgust, so maybe now he’ll give up and go away and Deacon can have his headache in peace.
“Nothing personal,” Deacon says and takes another drink of coffee.
The cop shakes his head and runs his fingers through his thinning hair, glares across the table at Deacon. “I thought this guy Soda was a friend of yours?”
“I didn’t say he was my friend. I just said I knew him. I’m not sure Soda had any friends, exactly.”
“So…now you want me to fuck off and leave you alone.”
“Something like that.”
“And you’re not even gonna try to help?”
The brass bell hanging above the coffee shop door jingles, and an old black woman in a Coca-Cola sweatshirt and nappy leopard-print house shoes glances suspiciously at Deacon and the detective on her way to the counter.
“You asked me to look. So I fucking looked.”
“And you didn’t see anything or feel anything or whatever the hell it is you’re supposed to do?”
“No,” Deacon says, wishing it weren’t a lie, wishing that he’d never gotten out of bed and answered the phone, never agreed to take the ride across town to the squalid little apartment where they found Soda’s body. But mostly wishing he had a drink, a bottle of beer, a shot of whiskey, anything at all but the sour coffee and the dry place in his soul.
The detective looks at the old woman and the skinny kid taking her order, then looks back at Deacon and licks at his chapped lips.
“This is the third one we’ve found like this in three weeks,” he says quietly. “So far, we’ve managed to keep the details out of the news. That shit you saw painted on the wall, the things that were done to the body, three times so far. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know it’s gonna be four real soon if we don’t get a break. I want you to think about that, Mr. Silvey.”
“Why would I lie to you?”
“That’s precisely what I’m askin’ myself,” and the detective
takes a white card from his coat pocket and lays it on the table in front of Deacon. “If you change your mind, you call me.”
“Right,” Deacon says, staring out the window again at the blue October sky. The plane is gone, and already its white contrail is fading. The brass bell jingles as the door swings open and shut, and he watches as the cop crosses the street to his car parked on the other side.
“I tried to tell him to put a dead bolt on his fucking door,” Deacon said, and Detective Downs stopped picking at a Band-Aid on the back of his left hand and stared at him.
“What?”
“You gotta be fucking nuts, living in a dump like this with nothing but a chain on the front door.”
“You knew this guy?”
“Half the crack whores and dust heads on Southside crash in this shithole. Fucking junky’s paradise.”
“Mr. Silvey, are you saying that you knew the victim?”
“Yeah, I knew him.”
“Oh god, man, I’m sorry. I swear, we didn’t have any idea—”
“His name was Soda,” Deacon said and took another step into the bedroom of the tiny basement apartment. Colder than October down there, colder than January, cold like black ice water lapping greedily against his skin, and the smell of blood and mildew so thick he was beginning to think he might be sick before he even touched the corpse.
“Charles Ellis,” the detective said. “At least, that’s what his driver’s license and Social Security card both say.”
“He was just Soda. I never heard anyone call him Charles.”
“So that was a nickname, then? Soda?”
“I never heard anyone call him anything else,” and Deacon swallowed once, swallowing nothing but spit and the stinking, frigid air, and walked quickly from the doorway across the sticky, damp carpet to stand at the edge of the bed. The body was still lying there, of course, because they wanted him to see it all, every little gory detail.
“Where the fuck’s his head?” he asked, and the detective coughed twice before answering.
“In the bathroom, tied up in a pillowcase, just the way we found it. Did your friend here use drugs?”
“What do you think?” Deacon replied and stared at the dark and empty cavity of the torso laid open for the whole world to see; it made him think of cantaloupes at the grocery store, split in half and scooped clean. Both Soda’s arms dangled over the sides of the narrow bed, and his right hand, clenched into a fist, curled up like a dead spider, was lying under a card table a few feet away.
“Are those bite marks on the body? Did the killer bite him?”
The cop chuckled softly, and “Not unless the sonofabitch has teeth like a fucking rottweiler dog,” he said.
“So he might have had an animal with him?”
“That’s my guess,” the detective answered and added, “We haven’t accounted for all the internal organs yet, or the eyes, either.”
“Or the eyes,” Deacon whispered, as though what the detective had said might make more sense if he heard it coming out of his own mouth. Words he understood perfectly well, three simple syllables, but no sense left in them anywhere. He swallowed again and looked past the body and the bed at the wall above the headboard.
“Maybe you can tell us what that means,” the detective said and pointed.
An almost perfect circle drawn in Soda’s blood, a crusty maroon ring maybe three feet across to stain the dingy drywall. And written all around the outer rim were characters that Deacon thought might be Arabic. Below the circle, a line had been drawn in what looked like charcoal, a straight black line drawn parallel to the floor.
“What the hell makes you think I’d know that?”
“Well, I figured it’s part of some sort of pagan ritual, you know, witchcraft or—”
“And some asshole in Atlanta told you I’m an expert in that sort of shit, right?”
The detective started picking anxiously at the Band-Aid again and nodded his head once.
“Well, they lied to you, man. I’ve got just the one trick up my sleeve, and everything I know about witches I learned from watching Dark Shadows on TV.”
“Oh,” the detective said, and “I’m sorry,” sounding more disappointed than apologetic, and Deacon looked from the thing on the wall back to the thing lying spread out on the bed beneath it.
“The lettering could be Arabic,” Deacon said and squeezed his eyes shut tight, wanting to be back out on the street, wanting to be home, wishing he’d told the cops to go to hell.
“Arabic, as in Saudi Arabia? As in A-rabs?”
“Yeah, but I’m guessing. It might just be something the killer invented. It might not be anything at all.”
“Okay, so what next? Is there anything special you need before, you know…” and Deacon shook his head, took a deep breath, filling his lungs with the stench of the place, with its freezing, slaughterhouse air. Without opening his eyes, he reached out and laid his right hand on the footboard of the bed.
“Do you have to touch the bed? I mean, that’s gonna play hell with forensics. We haven’t even dusted—”
“What do you think the press is going to say,” Deacon asked, “when they find out the Birmingham police are using a psychic to do their work for them?”
“They ain’t gonna say jack shit, Mr. Silvey, because no one’s ever going to tell them this happened. I thought we were clear on that point.”
“Clear as mud,” Deacon said, and the detective was still talking, veiled threats for anyone who ever breathed a single, solitary word of this to anyone. But the cop’s voice was growing faint, as though he’d stepped back out into the hallway, as if maybe he were only shouting at Deacon from the sidewalk somewhere outside the old apartment building.
And nothing at first, and he hoped that meant there would be nothing at all. It happened sometimes, when he was very lucky, the trail grown too cold or his head firing blanks; the process still a mystery to him, which was fine. The less he had to think about it the better, and Please, he thought, please dear fucking god let this one be a dud, and then he could tell Detective Downs to fuck off, thank you very much, and catch the bus back across town, try to pretend this whole thing had never happened. But Deacon Silvey has always had an uncomfortable relationship with luck, at best, and slowly the mold and gore smells were replaced by the sweet and sickly blend of citrus and fish that always accompanied his visions.
“You gettin’ anything?” the detective asked impatiently, and Deacon shrugged. “Well, we ain’t got all day, Mr. Silvey,” Detective Downs grumbled.
“Chill out, copper,” Deacon whispered, trying not to start laughing, riding the storm-front edge of whatever was coming at him from the bed, from however many hours ago Soda had died, licking at his emotions like lightning bolts and thunder.
“What’d you just say?”
“It’s coming,” Deacon said, and it did, then; he gripped the bed so hard his knuckles popped, and hung on as though his life depended on it. His life or only his sanity, and for a moment there was nothing in the world but the pulp of ripe tangerines and the clean white flesh of freshly gutted fish.
“Sorry the place is such a pigsty,” Soda said, that stupid, silly grin he got whenever he was drunk or stoned, and keen silver light glinted off the blade of a knife. “Someday, man, someday I’m just gonna call the fire department and have ’em hose the place out.”
Wind through tall grass and the not-so-distant sound of waves.
“Maybe that’ll kill the fucking roaches, too,” and Soda sat down on the bed, bottle of something in his hand, and the old thirst stinging at Deacon’s throat even through these sights and sounds locked up inside his skull.
“Wish I had a goddamn twenty-dollar bill for every cockroach in this place,” Soda said and set the bottle on the floor beside the bed. “Man, I’d be a millionaire. I’d be Bill fucking Gates by now.”
The knife dividing the air like pure and holy fire, the burning sword of Heaven to cleave the sky from horizon to horizon
, sky above the sea, sky above all Creation, to slice skin and muscle and bone. Red hands busy at their work, hands as sure as a surgeon’s and as careless as a butcher’s. Deacon grits his teeth and opens his eyes, but it’s all still there. Red hands and the sea, grinning Soda swigging from a half-empty bottle of Thunderbird, and the storm turning wild about them all, rolling like a hurricane, a Ferris wheel, the indifferent wheel of fate and fortune.
“Has any mortal name, Fit appellation for this dazzling frame?”
Soda’s brown eyes so wide, so wide and drunk and scared, and the blood flowed from his lips, spilled thick and dark down his chin. The silver blade falling across his face again and again and again, and soon it was not even his face anymore, only raw meat, only a tattered mask for a dead man to wear.
The red hands traced a perfect circle on the wall above the bed and the body.
“I have no friends,” the Lamia said, “no, not one.”
And Deacon slipped off the spinning wheel, sank to his knees on the sticky carpet before the detective could catch him.
There’s a mirror on the other side of the room, and the naked thing squatting above Soda’s body turns its shaggy head and stares at Deacon with eyes like scalding amber stars.
“Shut, shut those juggling eyes….”
“Christ, man, what’s happening to you? Snap out of it,” Detective Downs said, sounding very frightened, breaking the spell, the eggshell moment, and suddenly the storm folded itself closed again, collapsing to leave Deacon Silvey alone at the still, blind center of its soulless soul.
“What the sam hell was that?” the cop asked, and his words, his breath, were so loud, so hard, a hammer to pound the first migraine spike deep between Deacon’s eyes. “What’d you see?”
Deacon looked at the footboard, his hand still wrapped tight about the wood, his fingers numb, white knuckled, and “Nothing,” he lied. “I didn’t see anything at all.”
Low Red Moon Page 2
