Low Red Moon (20 page)

Sadie sits down at one of the tables to wait for the books, takes Deacon’s drawing out of her notebook and stares at it, trying hard to imagine the design as he must have seen it the first time, not graphite on a rumpled sheet of typing paper, but traced in drying blood on a wall above Soda’s bed, the dark line beneath the circle drawn in charcoal. The same thing, but something entirely different, something awful. Deacon said there was writing all around the circumference, and she wishes she knew what it was, wishes she had the photographs the forensics people must have taken.

“Here you go,” the librarian says and sets the cardboard box down in front of Sadie. “Lot Two of the Akeley Collection.”

“Thank you,” and Sadie opens her notebook to a blank page.

“No ink, remember. Just pencils.”

“I remember,” Sadie says. “Thanks.”

The librarian lingers, wringing his hands and gazing down at her with his wide Mr. Magoo eyes.

“I hope you’re not offended,” he says. “I honestly wasn’t trying to be offensive.”

“I’m not offended,” she says, which is mostly true, since she’s only annoyed.

“You’re absolutely sure?”

“Yes, I’m absolutely sure,” she says. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Well, you let me know if you need anything else. Oh, and I’m afraid the Xerox machine’s broken down again,” he says and goes back to his desk.

Several years now since Sadie discovered the meager remains of Charles Akeley’s library, these two boxes willed to the archives upon his death, but she knows there must once have been a hundred times this many books, the bulk of them sold off by his heirs. Akeley was the wealthy grandson of a Birmingham steel baron who never married and spent most of his time traveling in Europe and Asia, chasing ghosts and collecting odd books on the occult. He even wrote one of his own, late in life, and published it himself—
The Mound Builders and the Stars: An Archaeo-Astrological Investigation
—though Sadie’s never actually seen a copy of the volume for herself. In the 1950s, he briefly served on the library’s board of trustees, but abruptly resigned in disgrace following rumors of homosexuality and strange goings-on in his great-grandfather’s mansion over the mountain. Finally, he committed suicide in 1963, only a few hours after the Kennedy assassination. From time to time, Sadie’s entertained the idea of writing his biography, but has never gotten any further than a few pages of typed notes.

She takes a couple of books from the box marked
LOT
2 in red Magic Marker, copies of Magnien’s
Les Mystères d’Eleusis
and Benoist’s
Histoire des Albigeois et des Vaudois,
sets them both aside because she hasn’t had French since high school, and they’re not what she’s looking for, besides. There are volumes on the Grail and alchemy, witchcraft and Masonry and the Knights Templar, a battered copy of Erich Neuman’s
The Great Mother
and
The Idea of the Holy
by Rudolf Otto. The pleasant, nostalgic mustiness of the old paper, but she’s more than halfway to the bottom of the box and Sadie’s beginning to think this might be the wrong lot after all, is already dreading another encounter with the librarian when she finds what she’s looking for hidden beneath a first edition of Charles Fort’s
Lo!
Nothing stamped on the fraying cloth cover, but Sadie knows this one by sight, has read most of it at one time or another. She places it carefully on the table and opens the book to the title page,
Werewolvery in Europe and Rituals of Corporeal Transformation
by Arminius Vambery, London 1897.

“
There
you are,” she whispers to the book, and gently turns its brittle yellow-brown pages, past medieval maps and woodcuts, a man with a wolf’s head gnawing a bone. Searching for a passage she remembers or only thinks that she remembers, and Sadie pauses to read Vambery’s narrative of the Beast of Gévaudan,
la Béte Anthropophage du Gévaudan
; contemporary accounts quoted from the
Paris Gazette
and
Saint James’ Chronicle
of something huge and wolflike that roamed the French countryside from 1764 to 1767, something murderous that was said to stand on its hind legs to gaze into the windows of peasants. Stories of slain women and moonlight sightings, strange tracks and the frustrations of the Chevalier de Flamarens, King Louis XV’s Grand Louvetier. Vambery finishes with Gévaudan and goes on to describe other attacks in other places, other years, a creature that stalked Cumbria in 1810 and another in Orel Oblast, Russia, in July 1893. When Sadie glances at the clock, an hour has passed, and she still hasn’t found the passage. She looks at the sheet of typing paper and Deacon’s drawing and turns another page.

“Indeed,” Vambery writes, “many of these accounts may be divided from fatal attacks upon persons by mere carnivorous animals, in the singular and grisly commonality that so few of the bodies are ever entirely devoured. Instead, the beasts frequently remove only the meanest portion from the corpse, often a vital organ such as the heart or liver, or have only drained the victim of his blood. No doubt, these selective, indeed almost surgical, habits must be related to rituals which remain unknown to us.”

“How’s it going?” the librarian asks, and Sadie jumps, drops her pencil, and it rolls away under the table.

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“No,” she says, “that’s okay,” ducking beneath the table to retrieve her pencil, but it’s nowhere to be seen. “I didn’t know you were standing behind me, that’s all.”

“I thought you might need something else.”

“No, I’m fine. I found the book I was looking for,” and she gives up on the pencil, sits up again, and the librarian is reading Vambery over her shoulder.

“Not for someone with a weak stomach, is it?” he asks and smiles his uncertain smile.

“No,” Sadie replies, “I don’t guess it is,” wishing he’d go back to his desk, wondering if she has another pencil or if she’ll have to borrow one from him.

“I was born in New Orleans,” he says. “My grandmother used to tell us stories about the
Loup Garou
. She used to say there’d once been a house in the Quarter where they all met when the moon was full.”

Sadie finds another pencil in her purse, but it isn’t very sharp and doesn’t have much of an eraser left.

“The house caught fire when she was just a little girl, on a night with a full moon, and her mother told her that it was God’s judgment on the werewolves for having killed a parish priest. She said the firemen heard animals howling inside the burning house, but all the bodies they ever found were human.”

Sadie turns around so she’s facing the librarian, scooting her chair across the linoleum floor. “That’s a really creepy story,” she says. “You should write it down sometime.”

“Oh, well, my grandmother, she knew a lot of creepy stories. Are you sure you have everything you need?”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” Sadie says. “But thanks, though,” and then the librarian returns to his desk and leaves her alone again with Lot Two. She turns back to Arminius Vambery and Deacon’s drawing, his rising or setting sun, sun or moon, if she’s right. Sadie finishes reading the account of the attacks in Orel Oblast, turns the page, and at last there’s the one she’s been looking for. She reaches for her notebook and prints
ATTACKS BEGINNING
8
JANUARY
1874 on the top line of a blank piece of paper.

A string of unexplained killings in Ireland, mostly attacks on sheep and other livestock, and Vambery quotes at length from an article titled “An unwelcome visitor” from the
Cavan Weekly News,
April 17, 1874. “A wolf or something like it” the reporter says, slaughtering sheep near Limerick, as many as thirty in a single night, and several people bitten by the animal were admitted to the Ennis Insane Asylum, “labouring under strange symptoms of insanity.” Another article from
Land and Water
dated March 28, describing footprints not unlike a dog’s, but long and narrow, with marks made by strong claws. The throats of the sheep had been neatly cut and most of the animals drained of their blood, but the bodies left uneaten.

More newspaper accounts, the
Clare Journal
and London
Daily Mail,
a monotonous inventory of dogs shot and sheep mutilated, and then Vambery returns to the subject of the Ennis Asylum. One of the women from Limerick, Margaret Tierney, mauled by an animal she could only describe as a “great black beastie,” and “Following the incident, the inmate has been gripped with some peculiar specie of obsessive mania,” Vambery writes. “When given ink and pen to write her step-sister in Dublin, Margaret Tierney instead decorated the walls of her cell with the same symbol or design again and again. The symbol was described by the physician in attendance as a carefully executed ring or circular shape, underlined in each and every instance. It may be of interest to the reader and any future investigators that there still exists a tradition among the people of Co. Limerick of ‘raths’ or ‘hollow hills’ leading down into the subterranean realm of the Gaelic
Daoine Sidhe
. It is said the entrances to these ‘hollow hills’ are sometimes marked by ancient standing stones bearing graven emblems not entirely dissimilar from that drawn repeatedly by mad Margaret Tierney.”

The story of the “Black Beast of Limerick” went on for several more pages, and Sadie made a few notes with the dull pencil, dates and names, Margaret Tierney’s insanity, the removed organs and surgical precision of the wounds. On April 27, an infant went missing from its cradle, and tracks found in the soft earth beneath an open window matched those discovered at the scene of many of the beast’s attacks. The mother was the last “victim” admitted to the Ennis Asylum during the incident, where she continued to insist that what had slipped out the bedroom window with her child wasn’t a wolf at all. After the disappearance of the baby, the attacks ceased as abruptly as they’d begun. “In early June,” Vambery continues, “a farmer in neighbouring Croom is said to have shot and killed a mongrel, which many believed to be the fiend. However, there are no records to tell us if the dog’s spoor compared favorably with the queer tracks seen two months previous in Limerick.”

And then he goes on to recount other horrors, and Sadie closes the volume and sets it aside with the others. She copies Deacon’s drawing into her notebook, and writes “Not sun, but moon” and underlines “moon” three times. When she looks at the clock on the wall she’s surprised to see that it’s almost twelve, so two whole hours now since the librarian brought her the cardboard box labeled
LOT
2, and my how time flies when you’re giving yourself the willies, she thinks. Sadie returns all the books to the box and then carries it back to the librarian’s desk.

“Oh, you didn’t have to do that,” he says. “You should have asked. I’d have gotten it for you. That’s what they pay me for.”

“That’s okay, I’m a big girl,” and she thanks him again for his help and goes back to the table for her notebook, her purse and the stubby pencil.

“There’s a pay phone upstairs, right?” she asks, and the librarian points at the ceiling. “First floor,” he tells her. “Right there across from the big portrait of Washington,” and then he disappears into the stacks with the box of Charles Akeley’s books.

The coffee and sandwich shop is only a block from the library, hurried lunch-hour crowd of businessmen and their secretaries, the murmur of indecipherable conversations, and when Sadie’s finished talking, she hands her notebook across the table for Deacon to see. As if there could be something there to back up the wild things she’s said, as if words on paper might be more convincing, but it doesn’t matter, because he doesn’t even bother to look at it.

“Werewolves and fairies,” he says again in the same doubtful tone and pushes the notebook back across the table to Sadie. She closes it and shrugs, looks down at the cover instead of looking at him.

“You said see what I could find. That’s what I found.”

“I’m looking for a murderer, Sadie, not a monster.”

Deacon pours milk into his coffee from the little cow-shaped pitcher that the waitress brought, stirs at it with his spoon until it’s faded the color of roasted almonds.

“What you told me you saw,” Sadie says, “it sounded pretty goddamned monstrous to me.”

“Yeah, well, you know how that works. I know I’ve explained it all to you before. What I see isn’t always gospel, Sadie. Sometimes I only see people the way they see themselves.”

“So what about the design, then?” Sadie asks and reaches for a pink packet of Sweet’N Low for her own coffee. “You don’t really think that’s just a coincidence?”

“No, but I do think it’s possible this woman’s been reading some of the same books you have.”

Sadie shakes the packet of saccharin three times and tears a corner of the paper, dumps the white powder into her cup, and most of it floats on the surface of the coffee like a tiny island.

“‘The moon came down and scraped itself raw against the horizon,’” Sadie says, quoting lines from Deacon’s dream back to him. “‘When I was a girl, the moon bled for me.’ That’s what you told me she said to you.”

“Something like that.”