Under the Wicked Moon: A Novel

by Abe Moss

  “Grandma,” she urged, though she already knew what to expect. The fact her grandmother’s rested eyes didn’t open surprised her not at all. She’d seen this before.

  “Are they dead?” Jessup asked in a high, quavering voice.

  “No. But we’re not alone.”

  She jolted as a sound drew her attention back to her grandmother’s face. A strange click. Almost wet. Her grandmother’s mouth had fallen open, she saw. She watched with bated breath, waiting for more.

  “What is it?” Jessup asked, stepping closer.

  Maria watched with increasing horror as her grandmother’s eyes slid open. From her open mouth, a dry rattle. A soft, deathly breeze from her sleepy lungs.

  “What’s wrong with them?” Jessup asked.

  “Shh,” Maria said.

  Did the corners of her mouth move, Maria wondered? A slight curl at both ends? Ramona’s eyes stared indolently toward the ceiling, empty and cold. And then…

  The corners of her mouth were moving, and the rattling continued trailing out like an insect buzz. Her open eyes, dim with sleep, warmed with color. Sour yellow. That low rattle grew higher in pitch, louder in volume. It began to hitch, again and again, and suddenly Maria realized it was the sound of laughter.

  Maria and Jessup gasped as her grandmother rose to a sitting position, smiling and looking between them with stolen eyes. Simply looking into those eyes, witnessing Ramona’s body as it was subjected to such wickedness, Maria felt her heart turning black with despair.

  “Pretty girl,” came a voice. Not Ramona Ramirez’s voice. “It’s been a while…”

  “What’s happening?” Jessup asked, his voice on the brink of hysteria.

  “It’s them,” Maria muttered. “This one’s name is Talma.”

  The head witch. Mother of abomination.

  “Oh, you remember,” Talma said, and her yellow eyes moved shiftily around the room. “I’m flattered.”

  “Get out of her,” Maria demanded.

  “Not until you apologize for all the trouble you’ve caused my sisters and I…”

  “Your sister, Hiltrude, is dead,” Maria told her. “And I’m coming for you next.”

  Her grandmother’s face slackened. Only the yellow eyes remained animated, and they turned to slits.

  “You must feel so powerful,” Talma said bitterly. “But you’re the same little girl as when I saw you last. Only now your luck has run out.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Maria…” Harvey’s voice unfolded from thin air beside her. “The wolf is coming.”

  Maria paused, mind reeling. Her grandmother was smiling again, and though it didn’t amuse her at all to be reminded of it, she couldn’t help thinking of Little Red Riding Hood.

  “What’s wrong?” Talma asked mockingly, and that dry rasp of a laugh choked out of Ramona’s stiff mouth. “Where did you get that black eye?”

  “Go,” Harvey warned. “Now.”

  Maria went for the bedroom door, where Jessup stood frozen, unable to peel his eyes away from the macabre spell on her grandmother.

  “Jessup, we have to go—”

  Pain struck her, like a bolt of lightning to the side of her face. She teetered sideways, stumbled against the doorframe on her way through it. She put her hand to her face as a hot, scorching sensation wrapped itself around her brow and cheekbone. A fearsome pounding behind her eye. Deep inside the socket. Behind them, Talma cackled from her grandmother’s vocal chords, high and shrill and agonizing against the blind pain in her skull. Maria cried out, falling to her knees.

  Jessup crouched next to her, hands on her arms.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “We… we have to leave,” she told him again, holding the side of her face where it felt as though she’d been punched by an electrified set of brass knuckles.

  He helped her to her feet. Behind them, Talma continued her hellish laughter. Standing again, Maria looked into Jessup’s face, wondering why they weren’t moving, and saw him looking back once more, spellbound.

  “Jessup, please…” She squeezed her pulsing eye shut as it threatened to blow her head off her shoulders like a bomb at any moment.

  “Leaving grandma so soon?” Talma asked.

  Behind them, her grandmother was standing now, out of bed, staring with those sick, haunting eyes.

  “You can’t go yet,” she said. “Not without a kiss goodbye.”

  She stepped toward them, wobbled one foot after the other like a marionette with strings on its limbs. To Maria’s horror, Jessup lifted the gun, pointed it at her grandmother.

  “No!” she screamed.

  She swatted it from his hands, watched it go tumbling across the carpet. Her grandmother loomed closer. With no other choice, Jessup threw an arm around her as he herded them into the hallway. He turned and pulled the bedroom door shut behind them just as it was met with a flurry of knocking fists.

  “Maria!” Talma called from the other side. “Help me, Maria! Help me!”

  They made it two steps farther down the hall before Maria was hit by another blinding surge of intense pain. She threw her head back, screaming, and crumpled to her hands and knees. Jessup’s hands floundered across her body as he tried to get her standing again.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  Dazed, barely allowed a fully-formed thought through the agony, she lifted her gaze toward the living room. The hallway tilted side to side, back and forth like a boat on rough waters. At its end, swimming and out of focus, a dark shape stepped into view.

  “Jessup,” she groaned. She could hardly raise her hand to point out their newly arrived company.

  “Oh, fuck…”

  Maria nearly vomited as Jessup hoisted her up with his hands around her middle, and carried her through a doorway immediately to their left. Inside, he dumped her to the floor where she lay and listened as the door slammed shut. The lock clicked. Jessup flipped on the light, revealing the tiny trailer’s single bathroom.

  Maria picked herself up off the floor. She reached for the bathroom counter, braced herself against it as she climbed to her feet. Jessup moved toward her, put a hand on her arm, but she waved him away. Leaning over the sink, she looked into the mirror, rolled her eyes toward her nightmarish reflection. Looking over her shoulder, Jessup gasped.

  “Holy shit,” he said, subtle as ever. “Your eye.”

  It was black, just as he’d said earlier. But—likely not the case at that point in time—it was hardly an eye at all now. Rough and scaly, like the surface of a dry stone. Or…

  “What is that?” Jessup asked, and Maria wished irritably—distantly—that he’d shut the fuck up.

  It gritted painfully in her socket as she observed it, rolling in place like an otherwise-ordinary eyeball should.

  “Maria…” a voice crooned outside the bathroom door. “What are you two doing in there?”

  Maria couldn’t concentrate on either of them. As she studied her transformed eye, it continued to pulse. To grind. Its pain radiated into the rest of her skull. Endless. If she thought she could do it without passing out, she might have dug it out with her own fingers then…

  “How’s the eye?” the voice asked through the door. “Are we twins yet?”

  It was Annora, of course, though Maria wasn’t in any kind of headspace to answer her. All she could do was endure the torturous transformation taking place. She could hear it now, vibrating through her bones. Grainy, like sand in her skull. Her eye moved on its own. It tapped. Or rather… something inside it did.

  “You okay?” Jessup asked over her shoulder.

  She wished he wasn’t there. She wished he wasn’t anywhere. His questions certainly weren’t helping anything…

  “Tell him how worthless a locked door is to someone like me, Maria.”

  “It hurts…” Maria managed to say.

  The pain was incapacitating. She only barely managed to hold herself up against the bathroom counter, as her legs nearly buckled
underneath her from the pain. She took shallow breaths. For an instant, she thought it might be subsiding, but she was wrong. She was slipping. The bathroom was growing fuzzy. The light above their heads seemed to dim. The colors on the walls washed out to an almost gray. As much as she wished to faint then, to be oblivious to the pain, she feared even more what might happen if she did. Where she might wake up…

  “What can I do?” Jessup asked.

  There was a knock on the bathroom door.

  “Mind if I come in?” Annora asked. “I know a thing or two about losing an eye, after all.”

  “I have a gun!” Jessup lied.

  “Oh, good. Use it now, and put sweet Maria out of her misery. It’s about to get worse.”

  Just then, the dial in Maria’s brain twisted to its MAX for suffering. It was so much, she could hardly find her voice to scream. The tapping inside her head, the scratching in her hardened eye, grew in volume with the elevated pain until she heard a distinct crack.

  “Oh, fuck!” she cried.

  She glanced into the mirror a final time and paled, the blood plunging from her face to her racketing heart. Her blackened eye was opened. Broken outward, rough shards hanging by a thin skin. She blinked—she couldn’t help it—and those broken pieces of shell fell into the bathroom sink.

  At a loss for what to do, how to help—probably just as horrified as she was—Jessup did nothing but shout behind her, pushing his hands through his hair in a panic because what else could he do with them, exactly?

  Another push from inside the shell and Maria doubled over. She couldn’t bear to look in the mirror again, so she stayed there, bent over, gripping the edges of the countertop and clenching her teeth as the noises of the cracking shell filled her ears. She was helpless not to blink her eyes across those horrid, jagged pieces, and she watched as more and more of them fell into the sink. Black and glittery. And then, with her remaining eye, she watched as something else descended into view. Long and narrow and writhing. Impulsively, she grabbed it, wrapped both her hands around it. Smooth and black and slithering out of her. She pulled it from her skull, hand over hand, felt it wriggling against her wrists, a slow release of pressure the more of it she removed. She felt painful pricks against the flesh of her forearms as it sank its fangs into her repeatedly. Eventually, the rest of the shell fell out of her, crumbled into the sink, and her eye was left hollow and bloody.

  And in her hands…

  “Shit!” Jessup shouted.

  Maria dropped the black, hissing snake into the sink. Glistening and weak in its infancy, it coiled along the edges of the ceramic bowl, trapped and harmless there. Maria touched her fingers to her eye and shivered weakly, feeling the loose, deflated flesh of her eyelid with nothing propped behind it. She whimpered. The bathroom faded once more, a wave of shadow across the room. Was it merely pain again? She staggered away from the sink, bumping into Jessup. He grabbed hold of her, balanced her as her legs finally gave in.

  “Woah,” he said. He crouched with her in his arms as she sank to the floor. “Come on, Maria. Stay awake. You have to stay awake—”

  An odd sound entered the room, and for a moment Maria mistook it for the snake’s hissing. It was a hiss of sorts, but something different. The flashing buzz of a flare. Watching the room grow dim around her, she saw the flare’s light touch upon the ceiling for an instant as Jessup cradled her against himself. She glanced toward the door and saw it was open now.

  “What a commotion,” Annora said, stepping through in all her false beauty.

  “Stay back!” Jessup warned.

  The witch grinned. She peered into the sink beside her, marveling at the creature Maria had birthed from her face.

  “Snakes beget snakes, I suppose…”

  She took another step toward them, and in an instant Jessup let go of Maria and lunged toward her. Maria thumped softly onto the bathroom rug. There was a noise, a puff of air, and then Jessup keeled over, fell against the wall like a tall bag of flour. He slumped to the floor. Maria sat up slowly, strained to lift her head in time to see Annora wiping her hand against her dress, smearing some kind of powdery residue on herself—whatever she’d blown into Jessup’s face.

  “Our champion,” Annora remarked, stepping over Jessup’s unconscious body.

  Maria scooted herself back against the bathtub, as far from Annora as she could manage. There wasn’t a single part of her that wasn’t sore. She cringed as Annora bent over her, looking her in the eye.

  The eye.

  “Well, look at that,” Annora said, fascinated by the wound her little curse had left upon her. “Or don’t, actually. It’s rather disgusting.”

  Annora straightened. Casually, she went to the sink and fished out the newborn serpent, held it pinched in one hand, holding it to her face. After a moment’s observation, she pocketed it somewhere in her robes. “What shall I do with you both?”

  Maria opened her mouth with nothing to say, and instead only groaned, shifting against the stiff, cold bathtub at her back. Jessup didn’t move at all where he lay.

  “You brought this on yourself,” Annora said, standing over her. “The curse upon your eye was quickened by your proximity to this place. I’d hoped to have you suffer a great deal more before its climax. But now there’s death running through your veins, and your blood is wasted to us.” She turned toward Jessup, pouted her lips sympathetically. “As for him…” She squatted and, to Maria’s amazement, heaved Jessup up off the ground in her arms with a mannish grunt. “His virgin blood will have to do, I suppose. Perhaps give his mother a call, and let her know his help was worth it…”

  With that, Annora carried Jessup’s body into the hallway. Maria, propped against the side of the tub, listened until her footsteps faded into the front room, and then disappeared entirely.

  All at once the house became much too silent. She remained in the bathroom for several minutes, too weak to move, too defeated to try. She’d be dead soon, she thought. She wondered how long before the venom did her in…

  She lolled her head to the side and lifted her arm to observe the tiny wounds along the inside of her wrist, where the snake sank its fangs into her. She resisted the temptation to touch her empty eye again, to feel the baggy looseness of her eyelid. It hurt like a bitch, but at least her head wasn’t exploding anymore.

  A buzzing in her pocket shook her slightly upright. Carefully, she pulled out her phone and was filled with despair to see it wasn’t a text, but a phone call.

  And it was her mother.

  “Impeccable timing…” she droned listlessly.

  She stared as it continued to buzz, and the longer it buzzed the more confident she was she wouldn’t answer it. What could she say to her? Would she tell her mother she was dying? Tell her she loved her in her final moments?

  How the hell could her mother be calling her at this precise moment?

  As she sensed the buzzing about to stop, for the call to be missed, she was filled with a sudden rush of last-second desperation and she answered it with fumbling hands. She held it to her ear and hoped she didn’t sound too ill.

  “Mom…”

  “Did I wake you?”

  It was strange, she remembered making a similar call already that night. She hesitated, unsure how to answer. She wouldn’t tell the truth, she decided. She knew that from the start. But she couldn’t bring herself to lie, either.

  “No,” she answered simply.

  “I couldn’t sleep after you called last night, and…” Her mother paused just as she began to lose control of her voice. “I was so worried, I… I just can’t stop worrying about you…”

  “You don’t need to worry about me,” Maria said, and was surprised to feel rather unemotional as she said it. An odd sense of relief washed over her, and she vaguely realized her pain was much less. Perhaps it was happening now. The end…

  “I keep having this feeling that… something’s wrong. I don’t know what it is. I think about you every day and I… I hope t
hat you’re not… that you’re not…”

  Broken, Maria thought.

  “I’m afraid you’re alone,” her mother blurted out.

  “It’s okay, mom,” Maria tried to say, but her mother kept going, not hearing her.

  “We’re all going through this together, and it just worries me that you’re alone over there…”

  “Mom—”

  “I know you don’t want to see his grave, and I understand. You don’t need to do that. I just want to see you, is all. I want us to see each other more. It’s good for all of us, to be together.”

  “Okay, yes,” Maria said. “I agree. We should… see each other more. I want to see you, too…”

  “Will you come out sometime this next week, then?” Her mother’s voice sounded so hopeful, Maria’s heart couldn’t take it. “We can come pick you up any time.”

  She was conveniently forgetting that Maria already told her she had plans with friends, but it was likely her mother didn’t believe that to begin with. Maybe she knew Maria too well…

  “Let me think about it,” Maria said. “I’ll… I’ll let you know by tomorrow for sure…”

  A heavy breath on the other end of the line. It could have been relief or disappointment, Maria wasn’t sure.

  “Please do,” her mother said.

  “Okay…” Maria took a deep breath, imagined what her mother might sound like if she could see her now, the way she was. “I have to go now…”

  “Oh. All right. Well…”

  “Love you,” Maria said. She leaned her head back over the edge of the tub, blowing out her held breath. “Will you tell dad I love him, too?”

  Her mother paused on the other end of the line, thinking something, wondering something.

  “Of course. Let me know when you’d like us to come get you.”

  Now, please, Maria thought.

  “I will. Talk to you soon…”

  Maria ended their call and dropped her hand into her lap exhaustedly. Then, lifting her head up, she gave a start as she noticed someone standing in the bathroom doorway.

  “Harvey…” She looked at him somberly, full of guilt and failure. “I’m sorry…”