Under the Wicked Moon: A Novel

by Abe Moss

  “What for?” he asked.

  She shrugged pitifully. “I couldn’t get to you…”

  He stepped into the bathroom, arms folded across his bare chest. He looked her over and shook his head at her diminished state.

  “You’re alive, aren’t you?”

  She frowned. “Not for long…”

  He observed the bathroom sink where the pieces of her hardened eyeball were scattered. He came closer, then crouched low to see her better.

  “You’re not dying,” he told her. “Hey, look at me.”

  She squeezed her eye shut, resisting the shame she felt in meeting his gaze. “I don’t want your dangling ghost balls to be the last thing I see before I die…”

  “You’re not dying.”

  “I am.” She held out her arm to show him the snake bites. “I can feel it. I can barely move, let alone stand up.”

  She opened her eye as she heard him moving toward her, and to her unimaginable shock, she felt his hands upon her, his arms around her.

  “Then let me help you,” he said.

  He lifted her with the strength of a regular man. Her legs trembled under her own weight, but she stood with Harvey’s help even so. Once she was on her feet, she looked over her shoulder, glanced to the ground where she’d previously sat, expecting to see herself there, as though she were already dead and crossed over.

  “How are you doing this?” she asked.

  “Maybe you’re so close to death that we’re touching planes. I don’t know. I figure it’s something to do with that night I died, the connection between us. I don’t know. You were there, remember?”

  “I remember…” she grunted, as Harvey walked her gently toward the bathroom sink, which she leaned herself against, weak as ever. “But it’s over, Harvey. I can’t save you…”

  “What about your friend?” he asked. “You’re just going to let them have him, too? They’ll do to him what they did to me. You know that.”

  She hung her head so she wouldn’t have to see herself in the mirror again. “What can I do?”

  “Nothing’s changed.”

  She did look in the mirror then, and she barely recognized the image she saw. Harvey was wrong. Something had changed. She had changed. For better or worse, that couldn’t be known, but she’d changed, all right. There was no denying that.

  “What is it with you always appearing in bathrooms?” she asked.

  Harvey grimaced beside her, standing back to give her space.

  “Maybe if you weren’t always running and hiding in them.” She had to admit, he made a good point. “Venom or not, you’re alive and standing right now, aren’t you?”

  Through the mirror’s reflection, she looked him in the eyes and he didn’t flinch from staring right back. In fact, he gave her a pitiful smile.

  She moved away from the countertop and let herself stand on her own two feet. She looked to the bathroom doorway, to the dim hallway across its threshold. She stepped into it, knees shaking. At one end of the hall lay her grandmother’s bedroom door. She walked toward the other end, shuffled on her numb legs into the front room, empty and quiet, and faced the front door which Annora had left wide open on her way out. Through that door was darkness and uncertainty, but the night was old and waning.

  “All right, Harvey,” she said. “Show me the way.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  UNDER THE WICKED MOON

  She knocked fearfully on her grandmother’s bedroom door, but there wasn’t an answer. Cautiously, she opened it and peeked inside. Ramona lay on the ground, eyes closed, the demon in possession of her apparently departed. Maria kneeled next to her, touched her, lowered her ear to her grandmother’s lips and felt breath. She was alive. Too weak to get her back in bed, Maria took the pillow from her side and placed it under her head on the ground. She checked on Paddy while she was at it, and found him in a similar state.

  “I’m sorry,” she told them.

  With Jessup’s gun in her hand, she stepped into the hall and closed the door behind her.

  In taking Jessup, so were the car keys in his pocket taken. Fortunately, Maria found the key dish on her grandmother’s kitchen counter and took the keys to the white SUV parked behind the trailer instead. She also brought her purse full of knives. With Harvey’s help, she was able to check Jessup’s pistol and discovered it had two bullets left.

  “One for each of them,” she said, and stuffed the gun into her purse as well.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  It wasn’t long at all before she was on the road once more. The sky was murky but blooming brighter, she could tell. Morning was coming. Through the thinning patchwork of clouds, the moon shined bright, yet to relinquish its hold on the dying dark. Far as Maria could tell, it was full, or mostly full, just as it had been on that fateful night one year ago…

  “Harvey, you’ll have to help me,” she said, hands on the wheel, eye on the rearview where his naked apparition accompanied her in the backseat. “I don’t remember exactly where…”

  She spoke of the place where she was found, bleeding out from her throat on the side of the highway. It was many miles from Wellwyn, she knew, or any other town for that matter. Isolated and lonesome and vulnerable. But close enough that she might have time to save him, she thought.

  If she hurried.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “You’re getting close,” Harvey warned. “I can… feel you.”

  Maria glanced awkwardly into the rearview, back to the road, into the rearview, back to the road again.

  “All right…”

  “Our connection just feels stronger, is all.”

  The road hummed noisily beneath them. Maria looked in both directions on either side of the road, nothing but identical, sprawling desert terrain as far as the eye could see.

  The eye.

  She sighed. She supposed if she believed she’d make it out of this alive, she’d be much gloomier about her current condition. However, there were more important things to worry about at the moment…

  “Tell me when you think I should—”

  “Here,” Harvey said. “Turn right.”

  She slowed. She gradually pulled away from the road, swaying and knocking back and forth in her seat as she rolled onto the uneven desert terrain. The headlights swept from the asphalt into the weeds and sagebrush. In no time at all, the road vanished behind them and they were cutting their way across the dead landscape like a submarine into the ocean’s depths.

  “Do they know I’m coming?” Maria asked.

  “Not that I can tell.” Harvey paused. “Annora thinks she left you for dead.”

  If not for Harvey, Maria thought, she may have been right.

  “You’re sure I’m not dying?” Given the signals—there wasn’t a joint in her body that didn’t ache, or a muscle that didn’t throb, and her empty eye socket had suddenly begun to pulse warmly deep in her brain—she felt it was just around the corner. She was reminded of that morning so many mornings ago, when she’d stumbled through this very desert toward the very road in her rearview, feeling like little more than a wandering corpse.

  “You’re not dead yet, are you?”

  “Obviously.”

  “Then don’t worry about it. Worry about them.”

  And she did. The farther into the desert she drove, and the closer she came to arriving at their den, wherever it was, the faster and harder her heart hammered. She found she couldn’t take a full breath of air. It was easy for Harvey to suggest, as he was already gone. He had nothing more to lose. Well… nothing more than his eternity, she supposed…

  “How about when I get there?” she asked. “How do I stop them?”

  “By any means necessary.”

  She glanced at the purse on the passenger seat, stuffed full of lethal kitchen utensils and a gun with only two bullets, including the bullet already in the chamber. She hated being cynical, but she already knew both those bullets—if she even got the chance to fire them—would end up lodge
d either in the dirt or a cave wall.

  “They have magic…” she said in a low voice, barely loud enough to hear herself.

  “Their magic isn’t what you think,” Harvey explained. “It’s prepared carefully, and it’s limited. It’s not just a matter of shouting fancy Latin and creating sparks in the air. It’s old, and it requires time and effort to get it right. Their attack on you in your apartment wasn’t spontaneous. They came prepared to do the things they did. And your grandmother’s was an ambush.”

  Maria thought she understood, and she felt a mild relief in hearing him say it. She hadn’t been sure before. So long as it wouldn’t be a matter of her barging in, guns blazing—for two shots only, of course—against an infinite source of hocus pocus at the whim of their fingertips, she thought maybe this whole journey wasn’t destined for futility.

  “But their magic is real, and it’s dangerous,” he went on, “so don’t be careless. Remember, you’re trespassing on their turf now. They have access to anything they might use against you. And don’t forget, they’re old. Which means they’ve survived this long…”

  “Thanks. I was beginning to feel like I had a chance.”

  Gripping the steering wheel with her white-knuckled fingers, Maria glared into the rearview. Harvey reciprocated her gaze, and gave her another of his sorry smiles.

  “I just want you to be aware of what you’re headed towards.”

  She turned her eye to the desert once more, the sky on the farthest horizon bleeding warm light along the hilltops. The shadows they created across the valley were only that much darker at this hour.

  “I know what I’m headed towards.”

  She wrung the wheel in her sweaty hands. She bit her chapped lips and nervously peeled them with her teeth. The moon appeared again from behind the moving curtain of clouds in the sky, a vanishing spotlight in the strengthening morning light. She returned its watchful gaze.

  “I’ve been there before.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  She expected to need Harvey’s help in telling her when to stop, but instead found she somehow knew it on her own. It wasn’t that she recognized the look of the area, or remembered a landmark, or anything like that. It was simply that as she drew nearer, a firm awareness began to solidify in her core. Her rapidly beating heart reached its full stride, and her anxiety peaked in such a way that it felt like something else entirely. A knowing fear. Dreadful and inescapable.

  “I’m almost there,” she said.

  She slowed, that awareness acting like a tether to her, tied between her and the witches’ den—constricting, pulling tighter the less room between them.

  “It’s me you feel,” Harvey said. “Our connection.”

  She pressed her foot down on the brake until the vehicle was stopped. In the ensuing stillness, she found herself shivering violently. Did she shiver in fear, she wondered, or was it a symptom of the venom which she still suspected was killing her slowly?

  “There is no venom,” Harvey spoke over her shoulder. “Tell yourself that, and believe it.”

  “Get out of my head,” she replied.

  She leaned toward the windshield. The desert, as much a wasteland as it may have appeared, was full of things in hiding, she knew. Full of things waiting for prey, hunting for prey.

  And the prey, of course.

  She reached into the passenger seat and dug through the purse, pulling out her various weapons with her shaking hands, her numb fingers. She pulled out multiple blades and held them toward the glass, observing them under the ambient light, deciding which she liked most—which would slay desert-cave-dwelling witches best.

  “If I’m quick,” she muttered, tracing her gaze along the gleaming edge of her chosen knife, “I might finish them off before they know what’s even happening.”

  She pocketed the gun and, with the longest kitchen knife firmly in her grasp, exited the car. A dry breeze prickled the skin on her arms. She circled the vehicle, waiting for her feeling of place to center her, to guide her the rest of the way. She felt close. That was all.

  “I don’t know where to go now. Help me.”

  “You’re close enough,” Harvey said. “Say it.”

  She turned one way, then the other, observing the horizon in both directions.

  “Huh?” Then, with an excited spark, she remembered it before she could be reminded. She spoke slowly, carefully, speaking the words as they were conjured up in her forgetful mind. “Pale Mother’s heart… reveal your secrets…”

  She swiveled in place, scuffing her shoes in the dirt until it caught her eye. A glimmer. A shimmer. Moving toward it, she was sure it hadn’t been there before she’d recited the incantation. An old wooden frame in the ground with a small metal latch to pull. The glossy, enchanted highlights gradually faded. She bent and, with her fingers hooked through the latch, hesitated. The handle of her knife rolled in her squeezing hand. Bent over the hidden trapdoor, she tilted her head to see the fading moon above her.

  Pale Mother.

  She pulled the latch gently and the door lifted with a faint squeal. She set it open. She straightened, rolled her shoulders, stretched her neck. There weren’t enough stretches in the world to prepare her for what lay below. All she saw was the stuffy murk through the trapdoor’s opening at her feet, and all at once she feared everything.

  What if she was already too late, she fretted? And Jessup…

  “Don’t think about that,” she whispered to herself. She swallowed dryly. “Harvey, tell me something encouraging.”

  “You escaped them once before,” he said, not a moment’s pause. “And that was when they had all the power.”

  It was only a second of hesitation, but all her short, stupid life seemed to play for her in that instant, quick and blinding and unstoppable. To think there might not be anything more, well…

  She edged the toes of her sneakers closer to the black hole, which threatened to pull her in and never let her go. She sat down and lowered her legs through. A cool breeze swept over her. The sagebrush chattered. As quietly as possible, she lowered herself in, arms shaking, until her feet touched the cold, hard ground below.

  She stood in the narrow passage and listened, letting the abrupt silence creep over her until she tingled with it, remembering little details of the night she was last here. They sprang into her memory one by one, tiny snippets of things that her mind had done her a favor in forgetting…

  Above her, through the square portal, the sky was turning blue compared to the black of the cave. The clouds slid smoothly over her head, lined with morning light. Looking forward, into the pitch-black tunnel, she thought it might be a good idea to leave the door open behind her.

  She ventured forward, one marshmallow leg in front of the other. Her knife caught against the rocky wall, clattered noisily off of it, and her heart gave a jump. She held the knife closer, daring herself not to trip and fall on it. Every dozen steps or so, she paused and listened. Nothing. She waited for their voices to reach her. Their chanting. Their bickering. Maybe without Hiltrude, there was less of that. She dreaded the sound of screams. Jessup’s screams. She wished to hurry but could not. Her feet would only carry her at their pace, and their pace was a measured one. That was just as well. If she rushed carelessly in her fear for Jessup’s life, she might only cost them both their lives.

  Just breathe, she told herself. Breathe normally.

  The gun was tight in her pocket. She removed it, held it in her weak hand, afraid she’d waste it. Once she arrived in the cave itself, she thought, and could see its light around the bend, she would rush them. She would race upon them viciously before they could register the sounds of her feet, and push the pistol’s barrel against their heads and pull the trigger before their eyes even met hers. And then as the second witch spent her first moment of realization in panic, she’d go to her and do the same. Bam. Bam. Done.

  That was wishful thinking, she knew.

  She walked the narrow passage a while longer—she’
d forgotten just how deep and winding it was—until she finally heard a sound that wasn’t her own.

  A sound that twisted her stomach into a slippery knot.

  Blood of the innocent, blood of the sinner.

  Not the voices of the witches, as she’d imagined. Nor Jessup’s screams, as she’d feared. What she heard was laughter. Child’s laughter.

  O’ child of sin, child of the moon…

  She came to a stop, eavesdropping. She remembered more details yet. Flashes of memory. Words she’d forgotten. The birth. She hadn’t forgotten about that, and yet she had.

  It came again, the laughter. It bounced along the cold walls to her ears, distant and eerie in its guiltlessness. Not a sound for a place like this. Though a place like this wasn’t a place for a child, either.

  She turned her head against her shoulder, speaking to the darkness at her back.

  “Harvey,” she said. “Are you there?”

  “Yes,” he answered. He was always there.

  “What is that voice? I can hear… laughter…”

  “Their child,” Harvey answered simply. “Remember?”

  She remembered. Except the voice she heard now was not that of a one-year-old, either, which was about what it should have been. Sounded more like a five- or a six-year-old. The child must not have been of the usual kind, Maria thought. It had grown quickly.

  But why hadn’t Harvey warned her of it?

  Then it dawned on her.

  “Your child,” she said.

  Harvey sighed somberly and she felt his ghostly breath against the back of her neck. It raised the hairs there, and a chill traveled down along her spine.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But it’s not meant for this world.”

  As if it were even possible to be more afraid than she already was, she felt a stampeding under her ribs, almost a pain as her heart promised to burst.

  “Why didn’t you warn me?” she asked.

  “Just go,” Harvey said. “You have to finish this.”

  A switch was flipped, a revelation which she couldn’t permit herself to acknowledge. It was too crazy to believe, she thought.