Under the Wicked Moon: A Novel

by Abe Moss

  “You didn’t just want me to free you. You wanted me to come here so I—”

  “Go,” he urged. His voice was choked with urgency and grief. “You have to do this.”

  She looked down at her hands, still invisible in the dark. She turned the blade over, and lifted the gun as if to observe it. No matter what, she thought, Harvey was right. It was horrendous and bloodcurdling and necessary. She couldn’t do it. She had to do it.

  She swayed on her tired feet. She inhaled so fully, her lungs were pained by it. She let it out slowly, dry as a desert breeze, and proceeded toward the sound of the child’s laughter.

  The knife grew heavy in her fist with the terror of it. The wrongness of it.

  A couple more twists and turns, and she saw light along the rock. Dim, warm firelight. Flickering. The child shrieked with play, and his feet slapped the cave.

  “Careful,” came another voice. Hoarse and strained. Annora’s voice. Her old and ugly voice. “You’re going to knock something over.”

  The child said nothing in response, and the sounds of his activities diminished none. In the meantime, Annora’s sounds reached Maria more and more clearly the closer she came. Clinking of jars. They thudded and whispered as Annora arranged them on the table, or on their shelves, whichever. A new voice joined in, a low sound. A soft moan.

  A man’s moan.

  Maria’s attention perked at the sound. Her heart swelled. She feared the moment she would see him. How intact would he be, she wondered? Would she turn the corner and see nothing but a stump against the wall? Perhaps only his head, animated with an ugly sneer as they further tortured him. All thanks to her…

  “Hand me that,” another voice said. Talma, this time.

  “What?” the little boy asked.

  “That bowl, there…”

  Around the next turn, the light was much brighter on the passage wall. Their odor, too, was stronger. Rancid. Maria stopped at the corner there, listened. The thought of peeking her head out to see them dizzied her with terror. That she might spy on them only to find all their eyes on her already, waiting with nasty grins upon their beastly faces…

  Another moan. Maria’s once-swelling heart began to sink.

  “Why’s he doing that?” the boy asked. Then, in a deliciously mocking tone for a child, he mimicked Jessup’s sounds and moaned back to him.

  “Because he sees the writing on the wall,” Talma explained. “Or rather, the heads…”

  Annora chortled. “Where soon his will also hang.”

  Annora laughed harder then, laughed herself into a wheezing, coughing fit. A nauseating sound. Once her laughter subsided, and she regained her composure, there was a long, sad sort of sigh. Then agitated muttering, the words of which Maria couldn’t quite make out.

  “Worry not,” Talma said. “Hiltrude’s death won’t be for nothing.”

  “But it was for nothing… It was my fault…”

  “You only feel that way now because it didn’t go as you planned. I know if it were me—if I bore your scars—I would want my revenge just the same.”

  “Revenge… bah! We got ahead of ourselves. Overestimated ourselves. I shouldn’t have underestimated them…”

  “They’re children,” Talma corrected. “Very lucky children, that’s all. If anything, it was fate.”

  “Fate? How could you say such a thing?”

  “We’ve been around this many years, and never have we been so caught off guard… by such a sniveling brat, of all things. It wasn’t a matter of being ill-prepared, dear sister. It was a matter of time.”

  Annora scoffed. “I don’t see how you can be so nonchalant. Our sister is gone now, because of me. Over something so… so petty…”

  “We are but petty creatures. I would never blame you for that, and I must insist you stop blaming yourself.”

  Annora gave an anguished whine. “It’s going to be so lonely without her!”

  “We’re still alive,” Talma reminded her. “Hiltrude is dead, and there’s no changing that.”

  “They should suffer for what they’ve done.”

  “They have suffered. And this one isn’t finished suffering yet, remember. Let him be an outlet for your grief, if it helps.”

  “It’s her I wanted,” Annora snapped. Her rasping voice grew low and brooding. “That saintly little whore got off too easily…”

  Maria tensed as the cave echoed with a high yelp. Jessup’s yelp.

  “Child, get away from that!” Talma demanded. “I won’t tell you again!”

  “He’s making funny noises,” the boy said.

  “He’ll make funnier noises yet…” Annora growled. “And soon, no noises at all…”

  Maria couldn’t wait any longer. She leaned steadily around the corner to see them, just a brief look to gather the scene. Only a portion of the main chamber was visible through the last stretch of the narrow passage, but it was enough. She saw their table against the wall, full of ingredients and various macabre artifacts. Here Annora stood, puffy and nude and slick with sweat as she peeled and plucked and picked from the spread of jars before her, adding them to a small firepot. Beyond her, the brown cloth separating the smaller alcove was hung again, though it was pulled aside now. Talma busied herself here. She sat on her makeshift bed of straw with a book in hand, which she scribbled in using a long, featherless quill and a small cup of ink on the rudimentary table beside her. At least Maria assumed it was ink…

  “What are we doing with him?” the boy asked.

  He skipped into view, naked as his caretakers, and Maria felt the breath sucked from her lungs. A small boy with dark features. His scraggly hair bounced against his shoulders as he came to stand beside Annora, where he rested his arms on the table beneath his chin and watched her work with muted interest. He couldn’t have been any older than Michael, Maria thought. Hardly younger, for that matter.

  “We’re harvesting him,” Annora said plainly.

  Maria looked toward the other side of the room, as much as the passage’s opening allowed her to see, and was just able to make out two feet resting on the floor. They shifted, the rest of his person out of sight. Jessup gave another hopeless moan.

  At least he still had his legs.

  She looked to the table again, where Annora was now crushing something up inside a small bowl, and her breath caught in her throat.

  The boy was looking directly at her.

  She ducked back into the shadows. Continuing to hold her breath, she reminded herself not to pull the trigger, her fingers tense around the gun. She gulped nervously and waited.

  “I think someone’s here,” the boy said curiously.

  Annora proceeded her crushing. “Hmm?”

  “Someone’s here,” he said again, more confident this time.

  There came the sound of small feet sliding over the rocky floor. Cautious steps. Curious steps.

  “No one’s here, boy.”

  Maria fell back a step. Then another. His feet were moving toward her quickly, quicker than she could move without making a ruckus of her own. She crouched low and the joints in her knees popped absurdly loud. She held the gun close, under her breasts, pointed it toward the corner where a small shadow was now slipping into view.

  “Help me with this,” Annora told the boy.

  But his shadow didn’t pause. It spilled farther across the passage, his feet padding sneakily closer until the shadow climbed the far wall. Another couple steps and—

  His silhouette appeared around the corner, small and gangly, a mask of black darkness over his face. He stood facing her, watching her, saying not a word. Did he truly see her as she saw him? Or was she hidden enough from the cave’s bouncing light, swallowed by shadow…

  “Who are you?” the boy asked.

  The moment stretched into eternity. The gun was squeezed so tightly in her hand, it felt on the verge of slipping cartoonishly out from her grasp from the pressure. She opened her mouth as if to answer.

  Annora’s c
rushing paused. The cave grew still and muffled in the subsequent silence.

  “What are you doing?” Annora asked. “Who are you talking to?”

  The boy turned to Annora, about to speak, and Maria’s gut impulse took hold of her. She rushed him, opened her knife-wielding arm to him. He flinched in her direction, a flourish of messy hair, and gasped as she scooped him into her arm, pulled him close against her body, and pressed the barrel of the gun to the side of his head. She jerked him aside so that they faced the passage’s opening. Annora was there, nearing the end of her table as she approached, and she halted at the sight of Maria. A genuine look of shock possessed her horrid face.

  “Don’t fight me,” Maria whispered in the boy’s ear. “Or I’ll pull the trigger on this gun and blow your head off.” She met Annora’s focused stare, the witch finally beginning to recognize Maria as the feral creature she was. It occurred to Maria now as well, that she’d entered this cave the same way she left it the first time. Using the child. “Stay where you are, or I’ll kill him.”

  The little boy started to squirm. She tightened her arm around him, wrestled him violently against herself. She pressed the gun so hard against the side of his face that he winced.

  “Don’t struggle,” Annora told him. “Be a good boy.”

  “I will kill you,” Maria whispered.

  He finally quit his fidgeting. Slowly, deliberately, Maria walked them into the opening of the passage, where the entirety of the cave was exposed to her. She looked immediately to Jessup. He was slumped against the far wall, hands chained behind his back just as they’d done to her. He was stripped of his clothes, naked and shivering. She studied him desperately, hopefully, praying he wasn’t in too much worse shape than when they’d taken him. As far as she could tell, he appeared intact.

  “You should be dead,” Annora snarled.

  “Quiet.” Maria nodded toward Jessup. “Take off his chains.” Annora didn’t make any attempt to move. Not at first. Behind her, Talma sat on her bed, her book dropped in her lap, watching with seething interest. “One of you do it, or I swear I’ll kill him.”

  “Do it, Annora,” Talma said. “You have the key.”

  And she did. The same pouch Maria remembered that Hiltrude wore was now around her sister’s neck. Never taking her eyes off Maria, Annora opened the pouch and dug around inside until she produced the shiny, golden key. She stood with it pinched in her fingers, eyes narrowed dubiously.

  “And what do you think will happen next?” Annora asked. “Will you leave us? Or do you plan to kill us anyway? Am I freeing him only to—”

  “Just do it, sister!” Talma urged.

  Annora’s hateful eyes flickered briefly in Talma’s direction.

  “Am I freeing him just so you can even the field?” Annora paused, waited. Maria said nothing. Annora grinned then, revealing the gruesome rows of teeth inside her ancient mouth. “He won’t be of much use to you. Not at the moment.”

  “Do it already,” Maria said. The boy whined as she jabbed the gun against his face.

  Annora gave the boy a final glance before she started toward Jessup. Maria thought she saw sympathy in the witch’s eyes. As the witch bent over Jessup and began to fiddle with the lock behind his back, the boy in Maria’s arms continued to whine, almost a low growl.

  With a click, the lock released and the chains pooled to the ground with a noisy rattle. Annora stepped back. She watched Jessup guardedly, as did Maria. His shoulders heaved in his effort to breathe. He groaned, shifted his weight. He lifted his face—that heartbreakingly boyish face—and his deadened eyes wandered until he saw Maria there. She imagined she wasn’t a pretty sight to behold, either. Regardless, the tiniest, most woeful smile touched his lips. He took a deep breath. He sat forward, put a hand beneath him to steady himself. There he paused. The muscles in his arms quivered.

  “See?” Annora said, a laugh rising in the back of her throat. “Can hardly stand…”

  “Come here, Jessup,” Maria instructed. “Get behind me…”

  Through all of this, the boy continued making a queer sound. A low rumbling from the pit of his belly. With the gun still pressed against him, Maria lowered her gaze to see the profile of his face. He glowered, his mouth pinched in a boiling scowl. His growl grew ever louder. Looking at him, with his face in the glow of the torchlight, Maria thought she noticed something unusual about him. His eyes, they were…

  “Calm down, child,” Annora said. “Everything’s going to be all right…”

  A sudden, jarring shout reverberated across the small cave and Maria cringed as Jessup leapt to his feet. He charged into Annora, tackled her against the wall of shelves at her back. She grunted as several jars and bottles shattered to the floor.

  Distracted by the commotion, Maria let her guard down. The boy’s savage growl let loose from his throat, animal-like in his screeching. She gasped as he squirmed and sank his teeth deep into her hand. Her fingers splayed, the pain of his bite like electricity through her body. The gun clanked dully on the floor. She fell back under his scrambling body, his face climbing toward hers, mouth open, blood oozing between his teeth. And his eyes—haunting and vicious in their hunger, their fervor—black as the devil’s own.

  With her free hand, she caught his face just in time, bloody palm smeared across his nose as his small mouth chomped ravenously like that of an attack dog.

  More noise in the background as Jessup fought with Annora. Breaking glass.

  The child wriggled violently on top of her, and his hands clawed at the sensitive scar-tissue around her throat. For a brief moment, Maria forgot the knife in her other hand. She stuck him with it, piercing him in the side. He shrieked. He pulled away, his black-void eyes bulging wildly with pain and confusion. He writhed away from her, quick as a monkey, and scooted himself under the wooden table.

  Maria sat forward with a groan. She blinked sweat from her eye, hot and stinging. Ahead of her, Talma was on her feet. The witch moved toward her with purpose, her body jiggling in her haste. Jessup gave a yelp from the floor where he and Annora wrestled. As Maria glanced toward them, only for a second, and then brought her attention back, only then did she notice the black dagger protruding from Talma’s fist, poised to slash.

  “You dirty wretch!” Talma bellowed, lifting the dagger.

  Maria clambered forward and swiped the gun off the ground as Talma let out a witchy howl. She lunged toward her, the knife catching firelight along its gnarled edges in its downward swipe. Maria pulled the trigger three times in quick succession. The first bullet pinged off the cave wall, its modest blast deafening in the tight space of the cave. The second disappeared into the flesh between the witch’s flopping breasts. The third pull of the trigger gave an audible click.

  Even with a bullet somewhere inside her, Talma’s expression of absolute hatred and desire to tear Maria to pieces didn’t falter. Maria pushed herself back as the witch fell upon her. Sharp, jagged metal sank into the crook of her neck and shoulder. The witch’s weight immediately followed, and she crushed Maria flat against the ground with a beastly groan. Maria lay for a moment, the air squashed out of her. She noticed a definite stillness in the witch’s body, the fight gone out of it. Then she heard Jessup again, his struggling breathlessness, and Annora’s with it.

  Drained nearly of all her energy, she shoved Talma off herself. The witch rolled over lifelessly. She tried to pick herself up and grimaced as searing hot pain radiated through her shoulder, her collar. She grabbed the handle of the dagger wobbling out of her flesh there. She gritted her teeth and—

  —across the room, Jessup’s and Annora’s heaving bodies struck and clawed and kicked at the other, turning endlessly over and over on the floor—

  —pulled the dagger from her shoulder with a choking wheeze. For the brief instant it was sliding out, her neck and shoulder ignited in a crippling pulse of fiery pain. The dagger fell from her blood-slicked fingers to the floor with a dull clang. She looked wearily across the
cave, hardly ready to continue the fight…

  As Jessup straddled her with his hands around her thick throat, Annora reached a spindly hand toward the fallen and broken jars on the floor beside them. She grabbed a handful of something—soggy and weedy and red—and pushed it into Jessup’s open mouth. He reared back. He made a face—hurt or disgust, it was difficult to tell. He spat. Annora reached for something else, and as her hand patted and her fingers tapped, she found one of the broken jars themselves. Sharp, pointed glass edges…

  “Hey!” Maria shouted—an attempt to warn him.

  The glass smashed against the side of Jessup’s head and he fell sideways onto the floor.

  Maria made to stand, but her body protested. Head to toe, her muscles quivered uselessly. Never in her life had she ever felt so spent. Perhaps it was the venom in her blood, hard at work against her…

  “Maria…”

  She glanced up to see a hand offered to her. With her kitchen knife still held firmly, she took Harvey’s ethereal hand and clenched her jaw as he pulled her to her feet. Standing, she tottered side to side. She tilted, falling, and caught herself against the side of the narrow passage entrance. Harvey was gone already, vanished as quickly as he’d appeared.

  The little boy remained shrunken under the table, meanwhile, nursing the wound in his side, watching the scene with feverish paranoia.

  Jessup lay dazed on the ground. The side of his head was a sopping mess of blood. Annora sat up, the broken glass squeezed in her own bleeding fingers. Gripping the knife, Maria dragged her feet toward them as quickly and steadily as she could without falling over. It was a frustrating sensation—to be pumped so full of adrenaline and at the same time on the brink of collapse.

  Annora inched toward Jessup. She raised her chunk of broken glass to strike a second time. Maria lunged toward her, knife plunging through the muggy cave air. Sensing her whispering feet, the witch’s yellow eye widened. She leaned back, caught Maria’s wrist in both her hands—her cold, slender fingers wrapped tightly. Struggling against one another, Maria grabbed Annora by the arm, pressed into her, the blade shaking between them. Annora grinned, glimpsing the snakebites along Maria’s arm, and a grating giggle escaped her. Her skeletal fingers clamped harder around Maria’s wrist.