Low Red Moon (18 page)

“Scarborough, can we please just get this over with,” the girl says. “I don’t really want to spend the rest of the night in this dump.”

“What do you want from me?” Deacon asks, and Scarborough lays the photograph down again.

“That cellar was Mary English’s own Land of Dreams, and you, Deacon, you were her nightmare.”

“She was a murderer. She killed fourteen children before we found her.”

“The police never proved that. There were no bodies found, no graves.”

Deacon reaches for his cigarettes, only one left in the pack and he fishes it out. “She had photographs of every one of the missing kids,” he says. “She had clippings of their hair and fingernails.”

“That proves she had contact with them, but it certainly doesn’t prove she killed a single one of them, does it?”

“Look, motherfucker,” Deacon growls. “I’ve had just about enough of this bullshit,” and all the men sitting at the bar glance up from their drinks and conversation, their cigars and salted peanuts, and turn towards the booth. The bartender reaches for something beneath the cash register.

“Maybe you’d better lower your voice,” the girl whispers, and then she smiles and waves to the men at the bar. “I think we’re beginning to wear out our welcome.”

Deacon looks at the unlit cigarette and then glares at Scarborough. “The bitch was a murderer,” he says again, lowering his voice. “What the fuck is it to you two, anyway?”

“Just
tell
him,” the girl says and stirs the ice in her glass with a green swizzle stick.

“Little birdie, one of these days real soon you’re gonna have to learn to keep your mouth shut.”

“Yeah, well, maybe one of these days you can try to teach me.”

Deacon pushes the glass of whiskey away, more of it sloshing over the rim onto the table, spotting some of the papers from the manila envelope. “Time’s up,” he says.

“No. Please wait,” and the girl reaches quickly across the table, taking his hand in hers and squeezing gently.

“These people that we work for, Mr. Silvey,” Scarborough says, “well, let’s just say that Mary English worked for them, too. And the woman who killed your friend, the woman you’ve seen in your visions, she’s become something of a problem to them.”

“He’s telling you the truth,” the girl says, but Deacon shakes his head and pries her fingers from around his wrist.

“Right now, I can’t begin to imagine what sort of sick game the two of you are playing—”

“Yes, Deacon,” the girl interrupts, “you’re right. It is a game. But not the sort you think. It’s a terrible game.”

“—or how you know what you know, but I’ll tell you this, both of you. If either one of you ever comes anywhere near my wife again, if you so much as
look
at her from across the fucking street, I
will
kill both of you. That’s a fucking promise.”

Scarborough rubs his forehead and laughs a gravelly, dry scrap of a laugh. “Sit back down,” he tells Deacon. “We’re not finished.”

“Fuck you, you psychotic son of a bitch,” and then the bartender’s talking, his voice booming like thunder, and when Deacon turns around the first thing he sees is the long, slick barrel of a shotgun aimed at his chest, its twin muzzles gaping like cannons. The fat man eases the hammers back, and they click loud over the noise from the jukebox.

“I think it’s about time you folks took your party somewheres else,” he says, “if you get my drift.”

“Yes sir,” Deacon says. “I was just leaving. But I’d be grateful if you’d keep an eye on these two here until I’m gone.”

“You got exactly two minutes,” and now the big man points the gun at Scarborough Pentecost, instead.

“Thanks,” Deacon says and walks quickly to the door and out into the chilly October night.

Not the last case Vincent Hammond brought Deacon, not the one that finally broke the camel’s back, and so what if Hammond had gotten him a shit job at an all-night coin-op and slipped him twenties and fifties now and then. Not the last, but definitely the worst, and if he’d had the sense God gave a rock, if he’d had the courage or self-confidence to tell the detective to fuck off, if he’d ever been sober for five minutes at a stretch, it would have been his last.

“What do you see, Deke?” Hammond asked.

Deacon looked up from the girl’s drawing, the crayon lines and angles, waxy blacks and greens and blues. “A fat cop,” he said. “Too lazy to do his own damn work.”

“You’re a goddamned comedian, bubba, that’s what you are. A goddamn Groucho fuckin’ Marx.”

“I do have my moments,” Deacon said and looked back down at the drawing in his hands. What might have been a face at a window, or something else entirely, those smudges that could have been eyes opening wider and wider, spilling a scalding kaleidoscope of broken sounds and images into him. The wild woman at the window, the witch who cries and whimpers and stares until you have to let her in, and then she drags you off to meet the goblins, off to the wild, dark places underground to become a Child of the Cuckoo.

O, what Land is the Land of Dreams?

What are its Mountains and what are its Streams?

The heady smell of dirt and pine straw, blood and rotting meat, shit and spiders, and two hours later, still clutching the drawing, he led them to the old shanty house in the woods somewhere west of the city. Down a long dirt road, narrow logging road crammed with five police cars and an ambulance, their sirens to drown the locust wail from the trees, but not the voice whispering furiously to Deacon from Jessica Hartwell’s crayon geometry. That voice growing louder and louder, swelling until he thought it would crack his skull in two and splatter his brains across the dashboard,
Does the Eagle know what is in the pit? Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?

O, what Land is the Land of Dreams?

“You wait right here, you hear me?” Hammond said as the car rolled to a stop in a cloud of orange dust, but Deacon was already out, already running across the weedy yard towards the front door of the house. Hammond shouted at him to stop, ordered him to come back to the car, but the sun had grown much too bright, the June heat and the voice squeezing itself between the cracks in his soul, and Deacon kept running. Three cinder-block steps up to the sagging front porch, and the door wasn’t even locked. As he turned the brass knob and stepped into cool shadows, the voice became a hurricane behind his eyes, raging, singing, swirling around the still and silent heart of his pain.

Some are Born to sweet delight, Some are Born to sweet delight, Some are Born to Endless Night.

Through cramped and shabby rooms, down a hallway whose walls seemed to pulse and throb like living, membranous things, and at the end of it the arch of bone and vines was waiting for him, guarding the cellar door.

“Deacon! Where the fuck are you?” Vincent Hammond roared from somewhere nearby and still very far away, somewhere inconsequential, and the three skulls leered down at Deacon from their hollow, eyeless sockets. “Here!” he shouted back. “I’m over here,” but the air around him turning thick and sour as clotted milk to muffle his words, to slip down his throat and slither up his nostrils. And when Deacon reached for the cellar door, the knob felt soft and warm.

“Land of Dreams,” he whispered. “Land of Dreams,” reading the words painted on the door aloud; the voice in his head flinched and shuddered, and the air around him was only air again.

She saw the couches of the dead, and where the fibrous roots of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists…

The doorknob, cold and hard as any doorknob, turned oil-smooth in his hand, and Deacon stared down the crooked wooden stairs at the darkness below. The musty stink of dust and mildew and tiny white mushrooms flowed from the open doorway, and he reached for the light cord, pulled it, and a single bulb flickered and burned dimly from its socket on the cellar wall. He could hardly hear Hammond and the others anymore, their voices and footsteps faded like a passing train, and Deacon stepped through the arch.

A land of sorrow and of tears…

“Jessica?” he called out, but nobody answered, no one and nothing but the lunatic ranting in his brain. The stairs creaked beneath his feet, and Deacon wondered if they would take his weight, if maybe it weren’t only a trap after all, and in a moment he would be lying broken and bleeding in the dark, broken and maybe dead. The whole damned thing too easy, too
urgent,
his mad dash from the car, the unlocked doors, and he retreated a step backwards into the hallway.

Past the weak glare of the bulb, an insectile
snick-snick-snick,
metal against metal, steel drawn repeatedly across steel or a whetstone, and “Jessica!” he yelled, louder than before. Around him, the house seemed to mutter to itself, smug, satisfied, triumphant, and the hurricane voice in his head paused for an instant, the meanest instant of silence, and then
O, what Land is the Land of Dreams?
it asked him again.

Deacon descended the cellar stairs as quickly as he dared. He kept his right hand pressed against the wall, fingertips to brush mold and cobwebs, to tell him when the pine boards changed to bare earth, and the stairs led him down and down and down, much deeper than he would have imagined the cellar to have been dug. The soft earth changing, finally, to rough-hewn stone, bedrock, and the light at the top of the stairs had grown as faint and distant as a star. There was no sign of Hammond or anyone else back there, and he began to wonder if they’d ever been there at all, if his entire life had not been spent on these stairs.

Art thou a Worm? image of weakness, art thou but a Worm?

There was surprise when he found the bottom, surprise but not relief, and more surprise when he realized that it wasn’t dark anymore. The woman holding the kerosene lantern stared back at him with dewy eyes the color of moss. She wasn’t old, but the lines in her face and the streaks of gray in her tangled black hair there to say that she’d seen and heard enough in her time that she might as well be a hundred. Her tattered yellow dress draped slackly over skin and bones, her bare feet, and she gripped a straight razor in her other hand.

“Is this a Worm?” she asked, and the voice in his head was only her voice now, had never been anything more or less. “I see thee lay helpless and naked, weeping, and none to answer.”

“Where is she?” Deacon demanded, and the woman smiled softly for him and held the razor up so it glinted in the lantern light.

“And none to answer,” she replied. “None to cherish thee with mother’s smiles.”

“I’m not alone. There are police coming.”

“Yes,” she said and looked at the razor, her smile melting away to something like regret. “There are.”

“Give me the girl, and I promise no one will hurt you.”

“You can’t make promises for other men,” she whispered.

Deacon glanced quickly from the razor in her hand to the gloom behind her and back again. “Is she here?”

“You have no idea, Deacon Silvey. You can’t begin to imagine,” and she pointed at him with the straight razor. “I’m only a conductor here, and this is only a transit station. That God would love a Worm, I knew—”

“Her name is Jessica,” Deacon said and looked again into the shadows crouched behind the woman. There was something back there, something that seemed to hang suspended from the floor of the house a thousand feet overhead.

“But they won’t let her keep that. No, Deacon, but they will let her choose a new name one day, when she’s older and—”

“You need to show me where she is,” Deacon said, and the woman took a couple of steps back from him then and smiled again, this time a haughty, secretive smirk, and she shook her head.

“She’s a Child of the Cuckoo now. Her name has already been written in the book, and you can’t ever have her back.”

“They’re coming to
take
her back.”

At that the woman hissed and swiped at the air with her razor, cut a long slash in nothing only a few inches from Deacon’s chest. Her thin lips curled back to show rotten teeth and black spaces where teeth should be.

“You better run, boy,” she snarled, “while you still got two good legs under you. You better run straight back up into the light and tell the rest of them folks they better start running, too. That child ain’t theirs no more, not—”

And then Deacon punched the woman in the face, hit her hard and fast, and she dropped the razor, stumbled backwards and almost fell. He snatched the razor from the floor and folded it closed.

“Where is she?” he asked again, but then he could see for himself, the cage and the chain leading up into the darkness, rusted iron bars and the girl lying on her side at the bottom, curled fetal in a filthy bed of hay, her back to him so he couldn’t see if she was alive or dead.

“You don’t know what you’ve done,” the woman said, tears in her eyes and running down her cheeks, blood oozing steadily from her nose, getting into her mouth, and she spat on the ground at Deacon’s feet. “What wailing wight calls the watchman of the night? You don’t know what you’ve done, Deacon Silvey.”