Low Red Moon

by Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  Dépêchez-vous.

  The revelations given up to her in stingy, oblique bits and pieces, murky enlightenments, and by early October she was finally finished, or at least as finished as she ever thought she would be. Several pages of the book had been written in languages other than French, and those would remain closed to her for many more years. But she’d gleaned enough to begin to understand, at last, the things her mother’s diary had only hinted, her grandfather’s fear and anger, her own golden eyes—that there was a world behind and beneath the world she knew, as hidden from the minds of men as the bottomless black depths of Mother Hydra’s drowning oceans. Hidden, but there were intersections, thin places where the one sometimes met the other, and there were the children of these meetings, the forsaken creatures Comte d’Erlette had simply called les métis.

  “Do you see now?” her grandfather asked, watching from the safety of the bedroom doorway, his face become a skeleton mask by the light of his kerosene lantern. When she didn’t answer him, he asked again, “Do you see, Narcissa?”

  Narcissa didn’t bother to look up from the stationery pages crowded with her sloppy handwriting, pages of pencil and fountain pen scrawl, pretending to read the words she’d written there.

  “Leave me alone. Close the door and leave me alone,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t have given you that book, but I still thought they would take you away. I shouldn’t have—”

  “Are you going deaf, Aldous?”

  “It was old Iscariot. He started all of this. It wasn’t me—”

  “Do you really think that matters, who started it?”

  “It isn’t my fault,” he mumbled ruefully, staring down at the floor, at the threshold of his lost Caroline’s bedroom, his eyes grown wet and distant. “I’m the same as you, Narcissa.”

  “No, old man,” she snarled, baring her sharp white teeth for him. “Whatever you are, you’re not the same as me. You’ll never be anything like me,” and she got up and crossed the room, slammed the door in his face and then stood there listening to the sound of his slippers shuffling slowly down the long corridor towards his own bedroom door.

  “Nothing like me, you lying bastard,” she whispered, her lips pressed hard against the door, driving her voice through the wood like nails. “Nothing like me at all.”

  November 18—They all left the cellar last night and danced around a big bonfire Father built in the dunes behind the house. He spent the whole day gathering enough driftwood. I sat on the porch, bundled up in my coat and gloves and read the newspaper while he walked up and down the beach talking to himself. The things I read in the paper seem less and less important. I thought they were the key, but maybe they’re something else altogether. Maybe they’re only a distraction. Small evils, small cataclysms. It’s all a game, and there’s no time left for me to learn the rules. They howl all night long from the dunes, and my baby kicks in my belly as if it wants to join them and run beneath the moon. Be patient, dear. Your damnation will find you soon enough.

  On the morning of Narcissa’s thirteenth birthday she began to bleed, crimson stains like rose petals tattooed onto her sheets, her thighs, and that afternoon two upstairs windows and a porcelain figurine in the parlor shattered. She’d always hated the figurine, two Irish setters and one of them with a dead pheasant gripped in its jaws. I think Aldous is afraid of me now, she wrote on one of the blank pages in her mother’s diary. Lying on her bedroom floor that night as one year died and another was born, corpse of 1987 traded for 1988, and He doesn’t want me here, she wrote. He’s never wanted me here. I’m something he wants to forget.

  Aldous swept up the pieces of the Irish setters, but ig nored both the broken windows, and the fierce Atlantic gales blew snow into the house that gathered in small drifts upon the stairs.

  December 3—My daughter came to me last night. She told me not to be afraid anymore, that it’s almost over now. She was beautiful and wore a necklace of small blue flowers, seashells and fish bones bleached white by the sun. She kissed my cheek, and I was a gull soaring high above this awful place. I could see the marshes and the Manuxet shimmering silver beneath the full moon, the glittering lights of Ipswich and the beacon at Cape Ann. I turned towards the ocean, and she said, “No, mother, don’t look at it.” I shut my eyes and was back in my bed again. My daughter leaned close and whispered in my ear, so that Father wouldn’t hear. She had her father’s eyes.

  And three nights after the new year, Narcissa awoke with Aldous standing there beside her bed again. This time he was naked, his pale and wrinkled flesh draped loose on spindle bones, worn-out old man with tears rolling down his sunken cheeks. He had the carving knife, though she’d hidden it under a loose floorboard after his last visit.

  “I know what you’ve been thinking, girl,” he said. “Every dirty little thought. Every lie—”

  “Go back to bed, Grandfather,” she said, keeping her eyes on the carving knife. “I need to sleep.”

  “I told you not to call me that ever again.”

  “Then what would you have me call you, instead?”

  His head bobbed up and down and then slumped forward so his chin rested against his chest. His eyes flashed iridescent gold and red and orange in the dark.

  “Go the fuck back to bed, Aldous,” she said, trying to sound groggy, slipping her hand beneath her pillow.

  “There’s a yellow house in Providence,” he said, “a house on Benefit Street full of monsters. There are entire cities built from the bones of the dead.”

  “You’ve been having bad dreams again,” Narcissa said.

  “My father…he walked streets paved with human bones. They took him to Providence and showed him the roads winding down to the very bottom of the universe. They showed him every goddamn thing he ever asked to see.”

  The old man stopped talking then, nodded, and stared silently for a moment at the knife clutched in his left hand as if he’d forgotten it was there.

  “I saw him last night, Narcissa, watching me from the beach. I nailed the cellar door shut, but there he was on the beach.”

  “You saw your father?”

  “He said that I had to finish this. He said there wasn’t any other way. They aren’t ever coming for you.”

  “Are you sure, Aldous? Are you absolutely certain this is what you want?”

  “I’m so sorry, child,” he said and raised the carving knife high above his head.

  And Narcissa plunged the ice pick deep into his skinny chest, burying it all the way to the handle, piercing his heart, and the knife fell from his fingers and clattered loudly to the floor. Aldous stumbled backwards, crashed into her dressing table and collapsed. So much simpler than she’d ever dared to imagine, and Narcissa sat on the edge of the bed, amazed, listening as his breath grew shallow and uneven, hearing all the sounds an old man makes dying. His eyes were open, straining towards the sagging, water-stained ceiling or the night sky, the cold and treacherous stars he would never have to see again.

  When it was almost over, Narcissa went to him, crouched on the floor and wiped the tears from his cheeks with the hem of her flannel nightgown.

  “Thank you,” he whispered, his voice wheezing raggedly out between blood-flecked dentures.

  “No. Don’t try to talk,” she said, and outside, somewhere among the dunes, something began to howl, a long, low, mournful sound, more human than animal. Aldous Snow’s chest rose one last time, shuddered, and was still. Narcissa glanced over her shoulder at the bedroom window, then closed his eyes and stayed with him until the thing in the dunes stopped howling and there was only the wail of the January wind around the eaves of the house.

  She dressed, then packed her clothes—everything she wasn’t wearing—into a big canvas suitcase that she’d found in the very back of her mother’s closet: her clothes and Cultes des Goules, Caroline’s diary, the French-English dictionary and all the pages of her transcription. She pulled the ice pick from Aldous’ chest and covered his body with the she
ets and blankets from her bed, impromptu shroud because it didn’t seem right to leave him lying there naked on the bedroom floor. Narcissa packed the ice pick and the carving knife in the suitcase, as well, and went downstairs, taking the steps one at a time, careful not to slip on the tiny drifts of snow that had accumulated beneath the shattered windows.

  She opened both the front doors, letting in the storm, left the suitcase sitting on the snow-covered porch, and walked quickly through the silent, empty house, truly alone now for the first time in her life and only the echo of her own footsteps for company. The door to the old man’s study wasn’t locked, wasn’t even shut, and she used a heavy brass paperweight shaped like a sleeping lion to smash the glass fronts of the walnut barrister cases. Narcissa lit the lamp from his desk, then took her time searching the spines and covers of all the books until she found the ones she was looking for, the ones that she knew would be there somewhere, rare and terrible volumes that François Honore-Balfour had mentioned or quoted. She packed them carefully into an empty cardboard box and carried it and the kerosene lamp back through the entryway to the place on the porch where she’d left her suitcase.

  “Good-bye, old man,” she said, wanting to sound brave, but her voice seeming very small and insignificant, a child’s voice lost inside the rambling, dark house looming up around her like the tomb it had always been. She hurled the lamp into the gloom, and it burst against a wall, spilling fire, and the flames spread quickly to the floor and up the stairs, a roaring, burning creature devouring everything it touched.

  I could stay, she thought. I could stay and burn, too, and she imagined her charred skeleton jumbled among the timbers and blackened masonry, her bones abandoned to the weather and time, and before long there’d be nothing left of her at all. Nothing to hurt, nothing to be afraid of what was coming next, nothing to hope that the world could ever be any different than it was.

  Go, Narcissa, Aldous growled angrily from the whirling red-orange heart of the fire. Go now, while there’s still time, and she turned and left the house, gathered her things and pulled the doors shut behind her. Outside, the storm wrapped her in a million shades of gray and white and black, and the freezing banshee wind hurried her stumbling towards the future.

  Hours after dark and her face staring back at her from the mirror above the bathroom sink, the face of someone who has never had any trouble passing for human, Narcissa holds the razor blade between her thumb and index finger and pretends that she has the courage to cut away the mask and find the truth secreted beneath her skin. Her yellow eyes the only outward hint, the windows of the soul, and even they’re proof of nothing at all; plenty enough normal people born with yellow eyes, T. S. Eliot had yellow eyes, and they only get her stared at every now and then. Her face as pretty as every runway model’s, unlikely Hollywood pretty: the fine, arched line of her un-plucked eyebrows, her thick blonde hair and full lips, the delicate bridge of her nose. A monster locked helpless somewhere inside this shell, chained to this waxwork perfect husk, and sometimes, like now, staring at that face staring back at her, she wonders if half the things she remembers ever happened at all. If perhaps there never was a house beside the sea, and Madam Terpsichore and Benefit Street are only a schizophrenic’s delusion, shreds of truth warped inside out by a mind unwilling or incapable of facing dull reality.

  No more or less a monster than any killer.

  Only a lunatic lost in the labyrinth of her own dreams, in stray lines from ghost stories she might have read as a child she can’t remember ever having been. Only a murderer.

  Weary of myself, and sick of asking…

  You’re getting sloppy, girl, Aldous Snow mutters at her from the bathtub. Renting a house, shitting where you eat. You’re getting sloppy.

  “I’m getting close,” she replies and sets a corner of the blade against her chin. “He’s here, old man. I saw him yesterday. And when I carry his child back, they’ll have to take me in.”

  If they wanted the child that bad, they’d come here and take it themselves. They don’t need you doing them favors.

  A sting when the razor finally draws blood, and Narcissa watches as it gathers on the blade and her pale fingertips and drips into the rust-stained sink.

  You don’t have the nerve, do you? one of the corner voices taunts. You fucking coward, you fucking phony. Why don’t you go ahead and see what’s waiting under there. It’s only meat, isn’t that what you always say?

  “They’ll have to take me,” she says again.

  Who are you talking to, Narcissa? Who do you think is listening? and she shuts her eyes, and the razor makes hardly any sound at all when she lets go and it falls into the blood-spattered sink.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Gyre and Gimble

  Dark by the time Alice Sprinkle pulls up in front of Chance’s building, shorter days as autumn spins the world farther away from summer, and from the sidewalk Chance can’t see any lights burning in the windows of their third-floor apartment. She opens the door of the pickup, and Alice peers doubtfully up through the windshield.

  “Do you think he’s home?” Alice asks. “Want me to see you to the door?” and Chance shakes her head.

  “He’s probably just taking a nap or something. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, of course I’m sure.”

  “It’s no trouble.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Chance says again, trying not to sound annoyed. “Thank you.”

  “Then I’ll wait here until you get inside. Turn on a light so I know you’re okay.”

  And Chance starts to tell her that’s silly, but there’s no point arguing once Alice has made up her mind, and all she really wants now is to sit down and take her shoes off.

  “See you tomorrow,” she says and closes the truck door.

  She can feel Alice watching her as she enters her code into the security pad by the front door, types *0 and BUFO, and the door buzzes and the lock clicks open. Inside, the brightly lit lobby smells faintly of disinfectant and cigarette smoke, and she turns and waves at Alice, who smiles and waves back at her.

  “Alice dear, you’re going to drive me absolutely bugfuck before this is over,” she mutters quietly to herself and waddles to the elevator, pushes the white plastic UP button and waits impatiently while invisible gears and cables whir and groan and creak to life. She fishes her keys from the bib pocket of her overalls, and when the silver doors slide open, she inserts her elevator key and pushes another white plastic button with a black 3 on it. Like peppermint and chocolate, she thinks, wishing she had a York peppermint pattie, wondering if there’s anything in the apartment to eat.

  The elevator smells more strongly of cigarettes, and there’s a small puddle of dog piss in one corner. At their front door, 307 in tasteful black sans serif, she unlocks the dead bolt and the brass doorknob and steps into the dark apartment.

  “Yo, Deke,” she calls out, reaching for the switch on the wall beside the door. A moment of silence as she flips the switch and one of her grandparents’ antique lamps, stained-glass willow boughs beneath a gnarled bronze trunk, illuminates the small foyer. She takes off her sweater and hangs it on the coat-tree.

  “Deacon? Are you asleep?”

  Two hallways branch off the foyer, a short one leading to their bedroom and the unfinished nursery, and a longer one leading towards the front of the building, to the living room and kitchen. Either way, there’s only darkness beyond the warm edges of the lamplight, and Chance calls to Deacon again.

  “In here,” he calls back, his voice drifting to her down the long hallway leading to the living room. She leaves the light behind, following his voice like bread crumbs.

  “Deke, why are you sitting here in the dark?” and she turns on another lamp, another of her grandparents’ Tiffany relics, and Deacon curses and immediately covers his eyes with his left hand. He’s sitting on the big sofa, and there’s a pint bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the coffee table in front of him
. She stares at Deacon and the whiskey bottle for a second or two, long enough to be sure that it hasn’t been opened. There’s a prescription bottle on the table, too, a month’s worth of powder-blue Fioricet tablets inside amber plastic.

  “What’s that?” she asks and points at the whiskey.

  “That, my dear, is a bottle of Tennessee bourbon.”

  “Were you going to drink it?”

  Deacon curses again and slowly lowers his hands, blinks and squints at Chance. “I was thinking about it,” he says. “Will you please turn the light back off? I’ve got a headache.”

  “No, I will not turn the light back off. I want to know what the hell’s going on.”

  Deacon shuts his eyes and leans his head against the back of the sofa, the timeworn upholstery almost the same shade of brown as his hair, and Chance picks up the bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

  “I had a very bad day,” Deacon says.

  “So you bought this fucking bottle of whiskey, and you’ve been sitting here in the dark trying to decide whether or not you were going to get drunk?”

  “I had a very, very bad day, Chance.”

  She looks at the bourbon, the tea-colored liquor inside the sealed bottle, and thinks a drink or two wouldn’t be such a bad thing right now, something for the pain and the worry, something to make her forget the rest stop and the blood she thought she saw dripping from the mouth of the fiberglass Megalopseudosuchus.