Under the Wicked Moon: A Novel

by Abe Moss

  “Was that your boy?” the woman asked. “You look much too young to be a mother.”

  Maria laughed some more, and her laughter came so forcefully as to sound mocking, when in truth she found it difficult to control her voice at all in the presence of this strange woman.

  “Sorry,” she said, struggling to meet the woman’s stare in the mirror any longer. “No, he’s my brother. I’m, um… I’m only seventeen.”

  Thinking of Michael now, Maria realized she’d better return to him soon. Not that anything might happen, but…

  “What I’d give to be your age again,” the woman said. “Must be nice.”

  Maria hesitated, hands held wet and useless before her. The woman stepped aside for her to grab paper towels.

  “You’re beautiful, though…” Maria said timidly. She dried her hands with her head low, eyes focused on the task, afraid to see the look the woman wore. “You make me wish I was… whatever age you are.”

  The woman made an appreciative, amused sort of hum. “That’s sweet of you to say.”

  As Maria continued drying her hands, afraid to look, afraid to move, she wondered why the woman didn’t just leave already. She felt her standing near the bathroom door, simply watching, keeping their conversation alive despite hardly qualifying as conversation at all. Maria got the distinct impression the woman found her amusing for some reason.

  “I’m sure you’ve no shortage of admirers,” the woman went on. “You catch the eye of every gentleman, I imagine. The dogs unfortunately, too, no doubt…”

  Maria noticed absently the peculiar way the woman spoke. Not like anyone she’d met before. Unusually eloquent. Mature in an… alluring kind of way.

  “Well, I have to find my brother,” she said, trashing the wet paper towel and looking purposefully toward the door at the woman’s back. Somehow the woman didn’t seem to get the hint.

  “Can I ask a quick favor?” the woman said, furrowing her brow pitiably. “Before you go.”

  Suddenly it made sense to Maria, or so she thought. The flattery. This woman, gorgeous as she was, was probably used to asking for things and getting them thanks to that very beauty. In a strange way, Maria felt much less intimidated all of a sudden, having something this woman wanted.

  “Do you have a phone I could borrow? I just need to make a quick call.”

  Maria thought for a bit, finding the whole situation slightly disorienting.

  “Um, sure…” she said, gathering herself. “Mind if we do it outside? I need to get back to my brother.”

  In an abrupt and unexpected shift, the woman’s face transformed into something much less than beautiful. A dark scowl fell over her. She clenched her jaws as her eyes turned away, as though she couldn’t believe the inconvenience.

  For an instant, she was ugly.

  “Never mind,” she uttered under her breath, and yanked the bathroom door open behind herself and escaped into the store.

  Stunned, Maria remained in the bathroom. The door swept shut. She stood in the quiet, alone and perplexed, wondering what the hell had just happened.

  “Woah…” she said aloud. “Alrighty, then…”

  Cautious, a little reluctant, she stepped out. She passed by each of the registers, smiling at the owner still keeping watch in a bored daze. The woman in the green dress was nowhere in sight.

  She continued outside into the parking lot, seeing no sign of her there, either.

  Or Michael for that matter.

  She froze. The curb was deserted, though her half-empty bottle of soda remained. She scanned the parking lot, spotting not a soul. All that was missing was a tumbleweed rolling through.

  “Michael?”

  She returned inside the store. The owner glanced up as she entered, her attitude much warmer than the first time they’d come in.

  “Did you see my brother come back inside by chance? While I was in the bathroom?”

  The woman shook her head that she hadn’t.

  Was there a chance he’d gone back to the motel for some reason, she wondered? Some ridiculous, moronic, pea-brained reason?

  “Okay. Thanks…”

  She left outside once more and wandered through the parking lot toward the street, not much else to see besides, and the closer she came to leaving the grocery store parking lot the more her insides began to knot themselves up. She stood on the sidewalk, peered in both directions, shielding her eyes from the summer-in-March sun. No sign of Michael. Their motel waited visibly a few minutes walking distance away, no one coming or going.

  “Oh god…” she muttered, her insides twisting themselves, wringing themselves like a wet dishcloth. “You stupid asshole… you stupid, little asshole… where the hell…”

  On a hunch, not knowing where else to look, she paced the sidewalk in both directions as she looked toward the store, getting a view of each side of the building and the sprawling, endless desert immediately behind it.

  It was there she finally found him.

  “Michael!”

  He was near the back of the building, standing alone and peering across the hot, barren landscape beyond. Nothing but desert and hot sunlight. Maria stormed toward him across the outskirt of the parking lot, arms swinging, legs swishing.

  “Michael!” she called again.

  At the sound of his sister’s angry voice, he looked over his shoulder. She threw her hands up dramatically.

  “What the hell?”

  “What?”

  “I told you to stay by the front door.” She approached him, eyes briefly glimpsing the empty valley ahead. “I came back and you were gone.”

  “I saw a rabbit,” he said.

  Maria wasn’t sure what to say. “A rabbit?”

  “Yeah, in the parking lot. It was really close to me at first, and then it—”

  “I told you to wait for me,” she said, fuming more now than ever.

  “I didn’t go anywhere! I was right here.”

  “I was looking for you.”

  “I was just right here.”

  Maria breathed deeply, hands on her hips, more annoyed than anything. She searched the ground where he faced, the sagebrush, the weeds.

  “I don’t see any rabbit.”

  “It ran off when you yelled,” he explained. “It wasn’t afraid of me. It was like it wanted to show me something…”

  Maria shook her head impatiently. “Cool. We’re going back to the motel. Then we’re going to grandma’s.”

  They stood facing each other, saying nothing at all, until finally Maria gestured for Michael to lead the way and go already. He went, head bowed, pouting like always.

  “You’re such a dork,” Maria said. “I just want to kill you sometimes.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  MOON CALLS

  The thing she dreaded most wasn’t so bad after all.

  Sandwiched between her mother and grandmother on the living room sofa, a photo album in each of their hands and a stack of them still waiting on the floor by their feet, Maria flipped through page after page of old photographs, feeling bored none whatsoever.

  Thankfully—for all their sakes—her grandmother’s television had satellite, which kept Michael occupied on the floor next to them in the meantime. Maria’s father as well, sitting on the second sofa.

  “Who is that?” Maria asked, indicating a photo of a young, familiar-faced girl sitting at the same kitchen table just across from them now, her face bent toward a bowl of ice cream, spoon in her mouth, eyes turned up to the camera only because the picture-taker told her to, most likely.

  “That’s you,” her mother said. “The last time we were here.”

  Maria stared flabbergasted at the picture, barely recognizing herself.

  “So I was seven? How do I not remember hardly any of it? I still can’t believe it’s been that long…”

  Maria flipped the page, more and more photos, mostly strangers. There were some photos of her deceased grandfather which she lingered on. She turned the page once m
ore.

  “Is this me again?” she asked. “I don’t remember a pool… or…”

  She pointed to an old polaroid of two young girls sitting in a plastic pool together.

  “Oh, no. That’s your mother,” her grandmother said, laughing. “You do look so alike…”

  “Wow.” Maria marveled at the likeness, flipping between the two photos. She was glad to know, at least, she looked more like her mother than her father. “Who’s the other girl?”

  Her grandmother leaned in to get a better look. “I believe that was one of your mother’s close friends. Isn’t that right, Eva? If that’s the girl I’m thinking of… the Powell’s little girl. They were inseparable. I forget her name. Poor thing…”

  “Why poor thing?”

  Her mother sighed then, anticipating whatever story would follow.

  “She went missing around the time this picture was taken, if I remember right.”

  Maria gaped. “Went missing how?”

  “We don’t know,” her grandmother said. “It’s just… something that happens every now and again. Missing children. Not just here, of course, but everywhere. Sometimes they run away from home. At that age, though…” She regarded the photo of Maria’s mother and friend solemnly. “She was just one of the unlucky ones.”

  “Unlucky?”

  “Abducted,” her mother said, speaking up. Her voice was short and stern. “Parents let their kids run wild back then. Anyone could just… pull over, and drive off with someone’s little boy or little girl, if they wanted.”

  Maria frowned, studying the picture now with a morbid curiosity. To think the girl in the photograph might not exist to anyone beyond the time when the photo was captured was strange. And to think her mother had known her…

  “You remember her?” Maria asked.

  “Only a little,” her mother said, keeping her eyes on the album in her own lap, as if she’d rather not look too closely.

  “What was her name?”

  When her mother said nothing, Maria turned to her grandmother instead, who looked to the ceiling as she tried remembering.

  “I should remember…” she said, straining to think. “It’s just been so many years.”

  They each stared into their respective albums for a time, quiet. Maria sensed a discomfort, and wished she hadn’t asked so many questions.

  “I’m starving!” Michael complained suddenly, rolling onto his back, sprawled like a starfish. “Are we having lunch?”

  “Didn’t you eat this morning?” Maria’s mother asked.

  “All I had was an ice cream bar,” Michael whined.

  Maria, feeling both her mother’s and father’s eyes upon her, stared intently at the photos in her lap, pretending she wasn’t listening.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “Can I help?” Michael asked, watching as Maria and their father propped firewood scraps in the firepit that evening.

  “You’re too flammable,” Maria told him.

  Before much longer, they were all seated around the fire with skewers in their hands. The sun was setting behind them. Maria teased her brother by jabbing his hotdog with her own, lowering his into the flames beneath hers.

  “Don’t,” he warned.

  Maria received a disapproving look from her mother and left it at that.

  There was barely a moment’s pause, then, before Michael suddenly burst out pleadingly, “Can we tell scary stories!?”

  “Michael…” their mother said. “I don’t think anyone—”

  Their grandmother interrupted, “I have a few I could share…”

  Michael turned to their mother with doe eyes. After a brief moment of consideration, she shrugged.

  “If you can’t sleep tonight,” she said, “don’t come crawling into our bed…”

  Most of the stories their grandmother shared were from her youth. Stories of being drunk with friends out on the desert, collectively believing they witnessed UFOs observing them from the sky. Or stories about driving home late at night and spotting strange things on the side of the road—people walking in the middle of nowhere, only to suddenly vanish as they stopped to offer a ride. Things like that. It was entertaining enough, and Michael was riveted listening to each of them, so much that he forgot to keep an eye on his hotdog which he dangled carelessly into the fire until it caught.

  “I knew that would happen,” Maria said, which earned her a stuck-out tongue.

  “One time,” their grandmother continued, “when my friends and I—a different group of friends—were out in the desert having drinks and sitting around a fire—”

  “Notice there’s a common theme here,” Maria’s mother pointed out, and mimed drinking from a bottle.

  “Oh, definitely,” their grandmother admitted. “That’s what we did for fun back then. Still do!” She held up her current bottle. “But you still remember certain things with a certain clarity.” She took a sip from her beer. “This one time, though, as we were sitting around a fire, all alone just the four of us—or were there five of us? I don’t recall… Anyhow… as we were enjoying our night away from civilization, one of my friends heard something nearby. I remember we joked that our fire was drawing the attention of wildlife, anything to make ourselves feel more comfortable about it. But… as it got later, we kept hearing it. Footsteps. Rustling. We thought we heard something scuffling around on the other side of our car, but there was nothing there when we checked…”

  Maria stole glances at Michael as the story unfolded, barely containing her laughter as his eyes widened or drifted off into the shadows, staring into nothing as he imagined their grandmother’s words. He would likely have nightmares tonight, she thought. Nightmares he literally asked for…

  “It almost turned into a game,” their grandmother said. “To ease the tension, somebody suggested we drink each time we heard a sound. It was a funny idea, which lasted about a minute.”

  “What happened?” Michael asked.

  Both their parents sniggered secretly beside him, watching the same as Maria.

  “We heard a voice.” Their grandmother said this plainly. After a moment, she looked down at herself, held up her arms. “Look. Still gives me goosebumps.” She held her arm out for everyone to see that it was true.

  “What kind of voice?” Michael asked.

  “That’s the weirdest part,” she said. “I think we each recognized it almost right away. It was a woman’s voice. For a second, I remember none of us were sure we heard what we thought we heard, so we just got really quiet, listening, no one saying anything, not at first. Then we heard it a second time, and we realized what it was saying…”

  Their grandmother shivered in place, still affected by the experience after all these years. Despite being amused and somewhat detached from the story, distracted watching for her brother’s reaction, Maria found herself covered in goosebumps as well.

  “‘Jacob,’ it said. Our friend’s name, sitting right there with us. I remember he looked around at each of us, and we were all just as scared as he was. He didn’t even ask if we were playing a joke. He could see it on our faces we weren’t.”

  “Did you say anything back to it?” Maria asked, shamelessly drawn into the story as much as her brother was. It also occurred to her only after she’d asked the question—that she referred to the voice as it. Realizing what she said sent yet another wave of chills down her shoulders, her arms, her neck.

  “I know we were scared as hell,” their grandmother said. “After a moment, our friend Jacob, he says… ‘what?’ and we all waited. And waited. And then it happened again. One last time. We hear the same woman’s voice. ‘Jacob.’ Somewhere out in the desert, just out of our fire’s reach, someone or something was saying his name. We didn’t say anything back after that. We waited for a minute, and I remember looking to each of my friends and we all had the same face.” Their grandmother dropped her jaw to demonstrate. “And then one of us—I think it was Grace—she said, ‘let’s get out of here’ and no one argued
. We started the car, put out the fire, and we came straight back home.”

  Maria looked to her parents to gauge their reactions to the story. Her dad bunched up his lips, eyebrows raised, appearing impressed. Her mother, on the other hand, looked completely unaffected.

  “Have you heard this before?” Maria asked her mother.

  Her mother nodded. “Mom, you forgot the last part—”

  “Oh, that’s right!” their grandmother slapped her leg, remembering more still. “As we were driving home, one of my friends speaks up and says, ‘is it just me, or did that sound like Grace to any of you?’ And we all gasped. I remember, I said in the car then, ‘when I first heard the voice, I immediately looked at Grace because I recognized it as her voice, even though she was sitting right next to me’. Whoever was with us that night in the desert, calling out Jacob’s name, sounded just like her, but she was there with us the whole time. That experience was… well, I’ll remember it until the day I die.”

  Maria’s family became extra quiet all of a sudden, then—her grandmother’s ending to the story catching everyone off guard. Perhaps she realized it, too, as she self-consciously ran her hand over her smooth, bald head.

  “What do you think it was?” Michael asked.

  Their grandmother took another swig. As everyone leaned in to hear her opinion of the experience, Maria checked her phone for messages. She had a total of two, but neither was from Nick.

  Paddy said something across the fire, which got a laugh from everyone. Maria smiled, pretending to have heard it.

  The first message was from a friend of hers—Chantel. Classmates.

  It read: How’s your trip going?

  Maria responded that it was fine, aside from the whole being-in-the-middle-of-the-desert-with-her-little-brother-for-three-days thing.

  The second message was from Kayleen, another friend.

  The message read: Did Nick tell you he was bringing Tiffany Sommers to Brian’s party?

  She stared at her phone for a short while, hearing her family’s voices around her but not actually hearing them. Then she did the first thing which came to her.

  She opened her conversation with Nick and wrote: How’s the party going?