Under the Wicked Moon: A Novel

by Abe Moss

  “You should be dead already,” she said through her grinding, lopsided smile. “But you’re succumbing to its power now, aren’t you?”

  Spreading outward from beneath Annora’s tight grasp, Maria’s veins suddenly filled with black, spiraling down her arm to her elbow. A piercing sensation—like pointed barbs sticking through her flesh from the inside out—followed the black toxin and she gave a loud cry.

  “There it is…” Annora said. “Just needed… a little… push…”

  Those black feelers under her skin crawled and twisted around the curve of her elbow and began to climb her bicep, the stinging, piercing sensation following them up. It was all she could do not to succumb to the weight of gravity then, legs trembling. And as she watched Annora’s single eye light up with glee, it was apparent her collapse was imminent.

  “Open your heart, pretty girl…” Annora whispered. “It’ll be over soon…”

  Maria’s arm cramped as those internal barbs bit into her again, and the knife tumbled out, fell to the ground. Annora, face twisted into a blistering scowl, shoved her away. She stumbled back. She turned as she fell and caught herself on her hands. Behind her, the metallic scrape of the knife being swiped off the floor.

  Ahead of her, against the wall within the small alcove, leaned a familiar axe.

  She stood just as Annora slashed the knife down her back. She pitched forward, gasping, hands outstretched, sneakers scuffing the ground as she fell against the wall. Annora’s feet slapped in pursuit. With only half a breath to steady herself, Maria grabbed the handle of the axe in both hands and, pivoting on her toes, swung it from the ground in an upward arc. The butt of the axe connected beneath the witch’s jaw with a deadening thump. Teeth cracked together. The knife spun from Annora’s hands across the floor as she crumpled to her knees.

  Annora sat hunched, head bobbing toward the ground as blood trickled from her mouth.

  “It’ll be over soon,” Maria said, panting for air.

  She heaved the axe up over her shoulder. With a violent grunt, she swung it on the back of the witch’s bowed head with a satisfying crunch, and she flattened on the ground, skull opened like a cantaloupe.

  —blood of the innocent—

  —blood of the sinner—

  Thinking of nothing else, Maria stepped over the witch’s corpse and made her way to Jessup, still lying on the ground with blood oozing from the side of his head. She crouched next to him, afraid to touch him.

  “Jessup. Jessup, look at me. Can you hear me?”

  “He’s alive,” Harvey told her, suddenly standing at the rear of the cave. Maria looked pleadingly to him, begging him to tell her it was over, that she’d saved them, but the look in the dead man’s eyes said nothing of the sort. He looked beyond her toward the other side of the cave. “Jessup will still be alive when you get back.”

  Maria followed his gaze, and discovered the space beneath the table was now vacant, the boy gone from it. And in the opening of the passage, so was Talma’s body missing.

  “They’re getting away,” Harvey warned.

  Maria sighed. She stood—she swore she heard a creaking in her joints—and went to Annora’s corpse, where she took the handle of the axe still lodged in the back of her head. With a twinge in her shoulder, she jerked the axe free. She carried it with her into the tunnel, wishing this never-ending night would finally do just that.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  She was too tired to run, but she followed the passage back at a steady pace, hurrying as quickly as her aching legs allowed. It was at a gradual incline this way as well, which only served to make it that much harder.

  She tried listening over the sounds of her haste—sounds of footsteps, of a little boy’s panting breath—but could only hear her own footsteps, her own breath. The thought that she could stop it, that she might survive this after all… it was just enough motivation to keep going.

  To let them get away with what they did to Michael, to Jessup, to Harvey…

  What they did to me.

  The voice inside her head which spoke these words sounded hardly like the voice she was used to. Sharp and loathing. Hot and bubbling with bitterness.

  Soon enough, she spotted light at the end of the tunnel. Dawn’s light. Soft blue, warming with the rising sun, slanting through the trapdoor above, open just as she’d left it. She approached the opening, stood beneath it, and listened. Quiet. Peaceful.

  Her heart sank with the realization she was too late. With the boy in her arms, Talma was already flying them across the desert landscape into deeper territories where she couldn’t follow, where they’d be hidden from all life if they so chose…

  She pushed the axe over the frame of the trapdoor onto the dirt outside, then grabbed hold with both hands and, with a breath taken deep into her center, hoisted herself up out of the hole.

  She grabbed the axe and climbed to her feet. As she stood, a wave of lightheadedness enveloped her, heavy enough she nearly tumbled backward into the trapdoor at her back. She saw stars, gold and spiraling in her vision. Dizzying. She steadied herself with the axe, leaned against it like a cane. She shut her eye, took a moment to find her senses. As the tilting of the earth began to subside, she heard something. A gentle, sad sound. Hoping the spinning was done, she opened her eye and the pale morning light seeped in.

  Ahead of her, on a clear spot of dirt between the weeds, a small figure was bent. Kneeling. She blinked. His back was to her—the little boy. The sound of his sobbing reached her fully, plainly, and similar to her sensation of lightheadedness, she was rocked with a greatly confusing emotion. Mindboggling. She shook her head, trying to be rid of it. Melancholy. Purely an instinctive reaction to such a sound, she thought.

  Because he sounded so much like Michael.

  Lifting the axe, she stepped toward him. He straightened, alerted by the sound of her approach. Another step. He spun quickly into a standing position, sprung up with the fear of death and death itself in his inky-black eyes. He cradled something in his arms. Large and furry and feeble.

  “Leave us alone!” he screamed.

  Maria stopped where she was, a few paces from him. He held it like a baby against himself—a cottontail rabbit. Its legs hung awkwardly over his arms. Long, skinny feet hovering. Its eyes were big and open and aware. Its soft belly fur was dark with blood.

  “Go away,” the boy said, sniffling. He looked morosely at the rabbit cradled to his chest. “You already killed her…”

  Maria turned the axe handle nervously in her grip. The rabbit gave a twitch in the boy’s arms and he held it closer. The axe was cumbersome—her shoulders ached—begging to be dropped violently onto something else. Maria breathed out slowly, measuredly, shedding whatever guilt or pity she thought she’d felt.

  “No. She’s still alive.”

  She moved toward them, and the instant she did, the boy fled through the bushes. She gave chase. Each footfall felt like that of a giant, her feet heavy as anvils. It was like wading through mud, running through the fog of her fatigue. The boy disappeared ahead, down a short slope. As she approached the crest, she heard his voice. A shout. Looking over the hill, the boy lay flat on his stomach on the dirt below. At the sight of her looming above him, he pushed the rabbit away with both hands.

  “Go!” he screamed. “Run!”

  Maria descended toward them. She watched as the rabbit hopped once, twice, its escape as labored as her pursuit. The boy pleaded for it to hurry, to get away.

  “Stop,” Maria said. “Let me put her out of her misery.”

  With a wild growl, the boy turned on her. He climbed toward her on all fours and for a moment, she froze. She pulled the axe against herself—a fleeting sense of confliction. The boy stood as he came near, and he threw himself toward her. She stepped to the side, shoved her hand against the side of his head and sent him tumbling onto the ground like he was nothing. She continued away from him, toward the bottom of the slope. The rabbit hopped again and again, sluggishly. De
sperately. Maria brought the axe up in anticipation.

  Behind her, the boy’s footsteps scraped and kicked the dirt.

  “No!” he hollered. “Get away from her!”

  She tensed as his feet left the ground. He collided against her, wrapped his arms around her shoulders from behind. The stab wound in the crook of her neck sang out as his mouth fell over it, warm and starving, and he sank his teeth into her flesh. She squealed.

  She stumbled, fell to her knees, caught herself on her knuckles, fingers still wrapped around the axe’s handle, skinning them on the hard dirt. The boy gnashed his teeth along her shoulder, up the side of her neck. She let go of the axe, reached behind her with both hands. Her fingers moved through his greasy, shaggy hair, and she clenched a fistful of it. She yanked, felt strands of hair rip at their roots as she pulled him off her back and slung him onto the ground in front of her. He wheezed in a cloud of dust. Quickly, slippery as a witch, Maria swung herself on top of him, straddled him under her legs. He lifted his head toward hers, toward her face, teeth bared, and her hands found his throat. She forced him back down. Held him down. She pressed into him, her fingers around both sides of his neck, thumbs crossed over his windpipe. Those black eyes glimmered. They saw her, hated her, bore through her like a greedy void wishing to devour her whole, to suck the life out of her just as she wished to choke the life out of him.

  With her face pinched above his, she watched as tears appeared on his cheeks. Fat and sparkling with morning light. As she continued to throttle him, watching the silent scream on his face begin to soften, she blinked away her swimming vision and dripped a few more. His lips, pulled back like a dog’s, began to quiver and slide back down his teeth. His eyes, dark and deep as desert caverns, too began to close.

  “I’m sorry…” she managed to mumble over the swelling in her throat. She pressed her weakening hands more firmly against him, hard enough she expected she might crush his windpipe. “I’m sorry…”

  He had to go, she told herself. He shouldn’t exist. He couldn’t exist. Yet as his eyes fluttered shut, and he looked halfway normal, serene, she found it difficult to maintain the strength in her hands. He looked like something else then. Someone else. The strings on her heart pulled taut. She leaned into him, put the weight of her own body into the pressure of her hands. Her lips grazed the cool, dewy skin of his hairline, and she whispered to him.

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “Please… please…”

  She hoped he was dead. His pulse beneath her thumb was gone. She feared standing, seeing him, seeing what she’d done. What had to be done. She clung to him with her hands around his throat a minute longer, her body seizing with sobs.

  “He’s dead,” Harvey said beside her. “It’s done.”

  “No…”

  “Yes.”

  “Why can I still feel him?” she asked, and her voice was thick.

  “He’s dead, Maria…”

  She stood quickly from the boy’s corpse, paced a few steps away as she flipped her loose hands nervously at her sides, as though shaking death from her fingers. She breathed shallowly, gulped the leaden ball in her throat.

  “He hasn’t left me!” she cried.

  The morning was growing brighter. The pale blue sky was warm with a wide fan of orange sunlight on the horizon.

  “What are you talking about?” Harvey asked.

  “I couldn’t stop it!” She buried her face in her hands. “I couldn’t do anything…”

  Harvey’s voice traveled around her, in front of her.

  “That’s right. You couldn’t.” She turned from him, the desert a blur, and his voice followed relentlessly. “And he knows that.”

  Maria turned her wet face to the sky, where the moon was still suspended as a pale ghost, sinking into the light. She pressed the heel of her palm to her eye, clearing it of tears. Her other eye, the socket where one should have been, throbbed dully in the background.

  “If there was anything you could have done to save him, you would have. He knows.”

  Squeezing her fists, with knots in her jaw, she turned and snatched the axe up off the ground. She stepped beyond the dead boy, toward the desert brush. She rolled the axe’s handle in her tired hands. It couldn’t have gone far. Like her, it was weak. It was dying. It was…

  She came to a stop. Her jaw loosened. She lowered the axe.

  Talma lay naked and dead on the ground, on her stomach. Her eyes were open but empty. Dim.

  “It’s over,” Harvey said.

  Maria rested her callous gaze on the lifeless witch, waiting for any sign. A twitch of the finger, of the mouth. A ragged breath into the dirt.

  “Maybe for them it is,” she said. She lowered her stare to the ground between her feet, at the trail of blood which led to the witch’s body. “And maybe they’re the lucky ones…”

  With the axe in hand, doing her best not to pay the bloodshed more attention than she needed to, she returned to the cave entrance, to tend to Jessup and the rest.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “Jessup.” She knelt beside him on the hard stone. She put a hand on his bare shoulder and he convulsed with a shiver. “Jessup, it’s me.”

  He opened his eyes. He turned his head to see her. The blood on the side of his head seemed to have stopped flowing. His hair was sticky with it.

  “Maria?”

  “It’s over,” she told him. “They’re dead.”

  He glanced sideways, then jolted upright as his memories flooded back. He looked around the chamber, at the horrific things on the walls. He found Annora’s gruesome body on the ground not far from where he lay. Gingerly, he touched the deep gashes above his ear and winced.

  “Jesus…”

  “You’re okay,” Maria said.

  He looked at her, and the transformation on his face as he studied her appearance, her wounds, nearly crushed her.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I’m okay. I know how I look…” She stood. She gave him her hand. “Are you ready?”

  “Give me a minute,” he said, and sat up straighter, hunched over his legs, breathing.

  “Maria.”

  She turned around to see Harvey standing just inside the chamber, between the passage and the witches’ table. Once he had her attention, he craned his neck and peered up toward the shelves above the table there, full of those brightly colored, glowing jars.

  “Take your time,” Maria told Jessup. “There’s something else I need to do…”

  “Where are you going?” Jessup asked worriedly.

  “It’s fine. I’ll be here.”

  She crossed the cave to stand with Harvey.

  “Which one’s you?” she asked.

  He frowned. “You should free them all.”

  She looked over each of them, the two shelves fully lined, and saw there must have been close to thirty jars in all. She wondered how many others there had been, or how many times these jars had been recycled for new souls. How many victims had been trapped and used up until there was nothing left…

  “How?”

  They looked at each other, a fondness underneath their shared misery. Harvey smiled grimly.

  “Shatter them.”

  She reached for the first jar on the bottom shelf. A bright, pale red light inside. Harvey stopped her.

  “Save that for last,” he said. “I’d like to stick around long enough to watch the others, if that’s okay.”

  Maria nodded. She set his jar on the table and reached for another off the shelf. The next one was green, deep like ivy. She stared into its swirling, glowing center, its light cast on her forearm as she held it. Then, with a pang of anxiety, she tossed it at the ground. It broke loudly, and Maria glimpsed Jessup startle across the room. Pieces of glass—she’d have to remember not to walk through the mess when she was done—poured across the stone floor. The green light expanded for an instant as it broke, swelled into the room like a flashing bulb, and in its misty aura Maria saw a figure. A young wo
man stood, invisible below the knees where her apparition hovered. She turned in a circle, stunned, and just as she met Maria’s face, saw the amazement there, her shock eased into something comfortable. Then she dimmed until she was vanished.

  “Who was that?” Jessup asked.

  “The truly unlucky ones,” Maria said.

  She reached for another. Soft gold, almost white. She broke it in the same place. The cave flashed with its release like the one before. In this light stood another young woman, about the same age as the last, and Maria got the strange impression she’d be seeing many others like them in this collection. Young and beautiful and wasted. She broke several more, one after another, giving each their moment of clarity and departure before reaching for the next. Most were young women, but there were others, too. Young men, like Harvey. Like Jessup. Young boys, like Michael. And young girls, too…

  She was nearly halfway through the second shelf when she took a soft rose-colored jar. Light and sweet. Even as she held it, she felt a weird air of familiarity to its touch. An expectation, a premonition, she wasn’t sure.

  She broke it in the pile of others. The cave lit up with a rosy fog. Standing in the wake of shattered glass, a little girl floated. She looked immediately to Maria. Her face filled with hope at the sight of her, and she opened her mouth as though to ask her for something, an urgency in her eyes. It was like she’d been frozen in time all these years, frightened and alone, and only now did she get her chance to call for help. A hollow pit of recognition opened up in Maria’s chest. As the others had done, the little girl seemed to realize quickly what was happening. Perhaps she saw something Maria could not. Perhaps all of them did. Whatever it was, it must have told them the truth. A hard truth, but a welcome one. The little girl closed her mouth without saying anything at all, and a moment later she was gone, evaporated into whatever lay ahead.

  “What was that?” Harvey asked. “You knew her.”

  “I didn’t know her,” Maria said. “But I recognized her.”