Low Red Moon

by Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  “But we’re almost there,” she called back and kept going.

  And then there were no more stairs left to climb, a final landing and a single small window, but at least it wasn’t quite so dark at the top as it had been at the bottom. Deacon leaned against the wall, wheezing, trying to catch his breath. His sides hurt and his legs ached; he stared out through the flyblown glass at the streets and rooftops below, a couple of cars, and it all seemed a thousand miles away, or only a film of the world, and if he broke this window, there would be nothing on the other side at all.

  “Over here,” Sadie whispered, and the closeness of her voice did nothing about the hard, lonely feeling settling over him. “This hallway here,” and she jabbed the flashlight at the darkness like a knife as he turned away from the window.

  “The first time I saw it, I was tripping,” she said, “so I didn’t think it was real. But I started dreaming about it and had to come back to see. To be sure.”

  Deacon stepped slowly away from the window, three slow steps and he was through the doorway and standing beside Sadie. “There,” she said and switched the flashlight off. “All the way at the other end of the hall.” For a long moment Deacon couldn’t see anything at all, a darting purple-orange afterimage from the flashlight and nothing much else while his pupils swelled, making room for light that wasn’t there.

  “Do you feel it yet, Deacon?” she asked, and he started to say that he didn’t feel a goddamn thing, but would she please turn the flashlight back on. And then he did feel something, cold air flowing thick and heavy around them, open icebox air to fog their breath and send a prickling rash of goose bumps down his arms. And it wasn’t just cold, it was indifference, the freezing temperature of an apathy so absolute, so perfect; Deacon took a step backwards, one hand up to cover his mouth, but it was already too late, and the gin and his supper came up and splattered loudly on the floor at their feet.

  “Damn,” she said, sounding surprised now, maybe just a little frightened. “Are you okay?” and he opened his eyes, wanted to slap her just for asking, but he only managed to nod his head as it filled with the cold and began to throb at the temples. “Do you want me to help you up?” and he hadn’t even realized he was on the floor, on his knees, and she was bending over him. His stomach rolled again, and Deacon stared past Sadie, down the hall, that long stretch of nothing at all but closed doors and another tiny window way down at the other end.

  “There,” she said. “It’s there.”

  Sadie was pulling him to his feet, but Deacon didn’t take his eyes off the window, the distant rectangle less inky by stingy degrees than the hall. And he knew instinctively that what he was seeing was only the dimmest shadow of the thing itself, that fluid stain rushing wild across the walls, washing watercolor-thin over the windowpane; a shadow that could be the wings of a great black bird or long, jointed legs skittering through some deep and secret ocean. But it was really neither of those things, and nothing else he would ever understand, no convenient, comprehensible nightmare, and he shut his eyes again. Sadie was holding his right hand and squeezing so hard it hurt.

  “Don’t you see it?”

  “Don’t look at it,” he croaked, his throat raw from vomiting, raw from the cold, and he imagined that the floor beneath him and Sadie had begun to soften, to tilt, and soon it would send them both sliding helplessly past the closed doors, towards the window, towards it.

  “It doesn’t want to be seen,” he said, tasting blood and so he knew that he’d bitten his tongue or his lip. “It wasn’t ever meant to be seen.”

  “But it’s beautiful, Deacon,” Sadie replied, and there was wonder in her voice and an awful sadness that hurt to hear.

  Then suddenly there was the smell of burning leaves and something sweet and rotten, something dead left by the side of the highway, left to bake beneath the summer sun, and the last thing, before Deacon lost consciousness, slipped mercifully from himself into a place where even the cold couldn’t follow, the very last thing—a sound like crying that wasn’t crying and a wind that wasn’t blowing through the long hall.

  After Deacon has finished talking—the police and Soda’s mutilated body, all the things he saw when he touched the bed, the nightmare—he stares down into his empty coffee cup and waits for Sadie to say something. The light brown stain there at the bottom of his mug like muddy water, and right now he’s so thirsty he could drink a whole goddamn river of whiskey. Sadie lights another cigarette, and the pungent white-gray smoke leaks from her parted lips like an escaping soul.

  “You didn’t tell the police what you saw? Not any of it?” she asks, and Deacon shakes his head and sets the cup back down on the coffee table.

  “No, not yet,” he replies.

  “Why not?”

  “Because they probably aren’t going to listen to me. Because Chance doesn’t want me mixed up in this. Because I don’t want me mixed up in this. Take your pick.”

  “But this woman knows your name, Deke,” Sadie says, reaching for an ashtray, and Deacon shakes his head again.

  “That was only a dream.”

  “Are you sure of that?” she asks him and taps ash into a huge opalescent abalone shell. “I keep thinking of what Nietzsche said—”

  “Nietzsche? I’m sorry, Sadie. You just lost me.”

  “You know, from Thus Spake Zarathustra? If you look too long into the abyss, the abyss might begin to look back into you?”

  “Yeah,” Deacon says and rubs slowly at the sandpaper stubble on his chin. “Right. Nietzsche.”

  “No, I’m serious. What you do, when you see these things, you don’t know how it works. If you’re picking up impressions left by other people, then maybe you’re leaving impressions behind at the same time. And if Soda’s killer was also sensitive, it could work both ways.”

  Deacon rubs his chin and stares at the stuffed raccoon on top of the TV. He’s just noticed that it has a gold tooth.

  “Hasn’t that ever occurred to you?”

  “No, Sadie. I can honestly say that has never occurred to me. But I’m sure I’ll sleep much better now that you’ve pointed it out.”

  “Deacon, you should tell the police what you saw,” Sadie says, and he thinks maybe she sounds afraid now. “And you should tell them about the dream, too.”

  “Did you know your raccoon has a gold tooth?” he asks her.

  “He came that way. I found him at a yard sale.”

  “That’s fucked up,” Deacon says and leans back on the sofa.

  “Why are you trying to change the subject?”

  “I’m not trying to change the subject. I just never saw a stuffed raccoon with a goddamned gold tooth before.”

  “Please promise me that you’ll go to the police,” Sadie says.

  “Do you think he got it before or after he died?” Deacon asks and points at the raccoon.

  “Christ, Deacon, I don’t know. He just came that way. Will you please shut the hell up about the raccoon and listen to me?”

  “I should be heading home,” he says, glancing at his wrist as if he wore a watch. “I should at least give Chance a call and let her know I’m not dead or drunk or something.”

  “Why would the cops have come to you in the first place, if they aren’t going to take what you tell them seriously?”

  Deacon turns towards her and silently watches Sadie for a moment while she squints back at him through a restless veil of clove-scented smoke.

  “People don’t always want to hear the answers to the questions they ask you,” he says. “This Detective Downs guy, he’s just going through the motions because someone higher up gave him an order. I guarantee you he was relieved when I told him I didn’t see anything, and he’s probably of the opinion that if he never has to look at my sorry face again, it’ll be too soon.”

  Sadie frowns and stubs her cigarette out in the abalone shell, then immediately lights another one. “Then maybe his boss, whoever gave him the order, maybe he’ll listen,” she says.

/>   “Maybe so,” Deacon tells her, even though he doesn’t really believe it. “And maybe Chance won’t divorce me for getting involved in this shit.”

  “It’s not like you volunteered.”

  “But I could have said no, Sadie. I could have told Downs to go fuck himself, that I had no idea what he was talking about.”

  “Yes, but you didn’t, and now this is something that you have to do. But you already know that, don’t you? You knew that before you even came here tonight.”

  “Did I?”

  “I think so. I think you just needed someone to tell you it was the right thing to do.”

  “Well, then,” he says, sighs, and pats the yellow sofa cushion between them. “Thanks for the coffee, Miss Jasper. And thanks for listening.”

  “You’re very welcome, Mr. Silvey. I wish you would come more often, that’s all. Maybe if you brought Chance sometime, maybe then she’d see I’m not some Jezebel, luring you back to a life of vice and loose women.”

  Deacon smiles, and “We’ll have to see about that,” he says. “After the baby’s born, possibly. Right now, though, I don’t think she’s much for socializing with anyone.”

  “I have some fossil shark teeth and trilobites my uncle sent me from Morocco. I could show them to her. We could bond.”

  This time Deacon doesn’t answer her, sits staring at his hands, the thick, callused ends of his fingers, his yellowed nails, thinking about the blonde woman from his vision, the woman from his dream. You have a lovely wife, Deacon Silvey, growled in that animal’s voice, and he tells himself again that part was only a nightmare. Only his aching head and his anxiety, his worries over Chance and the baby getting caught up in the crazy shit he’d seen in Soda’s apartment, his subconscious playing a game of mix and match.

  “Do you have a pencil and a piece of paper?” he asks Sadie.

  “Yeah, sure,” she says, not asking what he wants it for. “Just a sec. I’ll get it for you,” and she goes away and comes back with a few sheets of blank typing paper and a nubby black pencil. The eraser’s missing, and Deacon can see her tooth marks gouged into the wood.

  “Maybe you’ll find something like this in one of your books,” he says and draws the circle from the wall above Soda’s bed, the hard black line beneath it. “Like I said, there was some kind of writing all around the edges, but I can’t remember it. If I can get photos from Downs, I’ll bring copies of them by to you later.”

  “Sure,” she says, and Deacon hands her the drawing. “If I find out anything at all, I’ll let you know. And you’re going to call them in the morning, right? The police?”

  “Unless Chance kills me tonight for wandering off like this.” And he thanks her again for the coffee, the coffee and the company and the raccoon with one gold tooth, and she walks him to the door.

  “Maybe you ought to call a taxi, Deke,” she says, standing in the doorway, and Deacon’s already on his way down the stairs. “This really isn’t the best neighborhood after dark.”

  “Before dark, either,” he replies. “But no, I’ll be fine. I’m a big boy,” and then he’s gone, and Sadie stands staring at the drawing, the circle and the slash, until she hears the front door of the apartment building slam shut.

  Chance is eating salty microwaved popcorn and watching television, an old black-and-white western, Jimmy Stewart in Winchester ’73, when there’s a knock at the apartment door. And her first thought is that it must be Deacon, that he forgot his keys when he left. She sets the half-empty bowl of popcorn down on the arm of the love seat and gets slowly, clumsily, to her feet.

  “You’re just going to have to hang on a minute, Deke,” she mutters. Once she’s standing, Chance pauses to get her breath, ignoring the pain in her back and feet, and stares down the dark hall leading to the door. The only light in the apartment is coming from the TV screen, flickering salt-and-pepper light that doesn’t even reach into the hallway, and so she switches on the floor lamp beside the love seat. But the far end of the hall is still very dark.

  The knocking starts again, more insistent than before.

  “I’m coming!” she shouts at the door, and the knocking stops.

  Halfway down the hall there’s a switch for the overhead light in the foyer, and she flips it on.

  And the knocking starts again.

  “Jesus Christ, Deacon,” she says, because it has to be Deacon, all the locks and security codes downstairs to keep everyone else out, so it’s either Deacon or a neighbor, and all the neighbors keep to themselves. “I’m coming as fast as I can.”

  Chance reaches the door, turns the dead bolt, and “Deacon?” she whispers loudly through the wood. “That is you, isn’t it?” She wishes there were a peephole, but there isn’t because the landlord says the building is secure enough already and they don’t need a peephole. She’s asked Deacon to install one himself, but it’s on the long list of things he still hasn’t gotten around to doing.

  “Deacon?”

  A tense moment of silence, just the abrupt sound of gunfire from the television, and Chance takes her hand off the doorknob and begins to back away.

  “Mrs. Silvey?” a man’s voice calls out from the other side of the door. “I’m here to see your husband.”

  “My husband isn’t here,” she replies, then thinks better of it and adds, “but he’ll be home any minute now.”

  “I need to speak with him. It’s very important. He’s expecting me. Didn’t he tell you he was expecting me?”

  “No,” Chance says. “He didn’t tell me he was expecting anyone,” but she reaches for the door again. The little voice in her head telling her that she’s overreacting, and it’s easy enough to imagine Deacon making an appointment to talk to someone and then forgetting all about it.

  “Maybe you should come back later,” she says. “He should be home soon.”

  “It’s very important that I speak with Deacon, Mrs. Silvey.”

  “I understand that, but he isn’t here. Maybe you should wait for him in the lobby.”

  On the other side of the door, a woman laughs softly and then mumbles something Chance can’t make out.

  “There’s no reason to be afraid of me, Mrs. Silvey, I assure you. I only want to talk to Deacon.”

  “I believe you,” she says, trying to sound calm, trying to sound friendly, but she lets go of the doorknob for the second time. “I’m sorry. But he wouldn’t want me to open the door to strangers when he isn’t here. You should wait downstairs.”

  “I don’t have a lot of time, Mrs. Silvey,” the man says, and he’s beginning to sound impatient. “I’ve come a long way to talk to your husband.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “If you would just open the door, I can explain.”

  Chance glances over her right shoulder at the coat closet, the white folding doors pulled shut; some of her field gear is stored in there, a geologist’s pick and a few chisels, and she takes a step towards the closet.

  “Please, Mrs. Silvey. That’s really not necessary,” the man says, and the woman laughs again. “You don’t have to worry about defending yourself. No one’s going to try to hurt you. I only want to talk to—”

  “I’m calling the police now,” Chance says, all the calm draining out of her voice as she opens the closet and searches for the pick on the shelf above the coats.

  “Deacon’s already talked with the police, hasn’t he?” the man asks. “That’s why I need to speak with him.”

  “I have a gun,” she says, though she can’t even find the pick and the most dangerous thing in the closet seems to be an umbrella. Her heart’s racing now and her mouth’s gone dry; from the television comes the sound of running horses.

  “No, you don’t, Mrs. Silvey. Please, don’t be afraid. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I’m sorry.”

  Chance’s hand closes around the leather-bound handle of the pick, and she pulls it free of a tangle of wool scarves and extension cords. One of the electrical cords tumbles off the shelf and lies
like an orange rubber serpent at her feet.

  “Leave now, or I will call the police. I fucking swear!” she shouts at the door.

  “Yes,” the man says. “I suppose you will.”

  “You’re goddamn right I will.”

  “You shouldn’t get so excited, Mrs. Silvey. I’m sure it isn’t good for you or the baby.”

  “I’m not going to tell you again, asshole,” Chance says and grips the pick tighter, raises it above her head, the point aimed at the door and whoever is standing on the other side.

  “Okay. I’m leaving,” the man replies. “But Deacon will want to talk to me. Tell him that I can help him. Tell him I know who killed his friend.” And then he slips a small, folded piece of paper beneath the door. Chance stares at it, her heart pounding so loud now that she hardly hears what the man says next.

  “Please have him call me at that number. It’s a cell phone, so he can call me anytime. And I am very sorry that I frightened you, Mrs. Silvey. I don’t mean you or your husband any harm.”

  “Just go,” Chance tells him and then listens to the sound of their footsteps growing fainter, the muted ding of the elevator all the way at the other end of the building. She doesn’t reach for the piece of paper, but eases her body slowly, painfully, down to the hardwood floor, her back pressed against the wall and her strong legs to control her descent. And then she sits there, still clutching the pick, and waits for Deacon.

  All the way home, all the bloody sights from Soda’s apartment playing over and over again behind his eyes, the unquiet theater of Deacon Silvey’s skull, and crossing the duct-taped bridge above the tracks he thinks that maybe his headache is coming back. The faint throb at his temples, like iron fingers tapping gently at his flesh, and he pauses and looks east towards the streetlights along Morris, picking out his and Chance’s apartment from the rest. But no lights in their windows, so he figures that Chance is probably watching an old movie, or else she’s given up on him and gone to bed early. Farther east, past other bridges, other roads, the stovepipe ruins of Sloss Furnace stand straight and tall as rusted watchmen, guarding the night from sunrise. A white and waxing moon hanging cold above the city, and Deacon moves on, takes the narrow alleyway at the end of the bridge down to Morris Avenue. By the time he’s walked the remaining block to their building, the pain in his head has faded away again, false alarm, and he almost feels relieved.