Low Red Moon (21 page)

“Lycanthropy is often associated with menstruation, and menstruation is often associated with the moon. She kills people and then draws the moon in their blood.”

“Hell, Detective Downs should have come straight to you in the first damn place,” Deacon says and blows on his steaming coffee.

“But you do see that it makes sense, don’t you? That’s what she meant about the moon coming—”

“Sadie, I think maybe it’s best if you forget all about this mess, let the cops deal with it. The truth is, I never should have come to your place last night.”

Sadie glances quickly back down at her coffee, just in time to see the mound of Sweet’N Low collapse and sink into her cup like doomed Atlantis swallowed by the ocean. She picks up her spoon and stirs at the hot black liquid for a moment, counterclockwise swirl, a tiny whirlpool to drag down her thoughts, and when she releases the spoon, the momentum carries it three or four more times around the inner rim of the cup.

“Mrs. Silvey wasn’t too thrilled when she answered the phone and it was me, was she?”

“That’s not what I mean,” Deacon says. “This doesn’t have anything to do with Chance.”

“Sure. Whatever you say, Deke. But I think I have less trouble believing in those sheep-killing fairies.”

Deacon sighs and takes a drink of his coffee, stares out the window at the street.

“Hey, look, don’t worry about it,” Sadie says and reaches into her purse, digs around until she finds three crumpled one-dollar bills, and lays them on the table.

“You’re not listening to me,” he says impatiently. “This thing’s a lot more complicated than I thought, and I shouldn’t have ever gotten you involved. It’s dangerous—”

“Great. So next time you feel the need to fucking unburden yourself, try telling your spook stories to Chance. Tell
her
about your bad dreams.”

“For shit’s sake, I don’t need this right now, Sadie.”

“Well, you know what? Neither do I,” and she gathers her things, the notebook, her cigarettes and purse, and slides out of the booth. “I gotta run, anyway. Sheryl got me a few hours at the bar this afternoon, and I need the money.”

“I’ll call you later.”

“No you won’t, Deacon. But that’s okay, all right? It was fun pretending we were friends again,” and she walks quickly past the woman at the cash register and back out into the breezy October afternoon.

Seven long hours at The Plaza tending bar for minimum wage and tips, two o’clock until nine to supplement the checks her parents send once or twice a month, seven hours before Bunky shows up and she can finally go home. Bunky Tolbert on time for once in his whole lazy life, and Sadie leaves the smoke-filled, clattery bar and steps out into the night. A chill in the air and her breath fogs, but there’s no point wishing she had a car, because she wouldn’t be able to afford the insurance, or even gas, for that matter; she walks along Highland Avenue, her quick, determined steps, arms folded and her hands tucked into her armpits to keep her fingers warm. Her streetlight-to-streetlight march, one halogen pool to the next, and Sadie tries not to think about Deacon Silvey or her empty apartment. She keeps her eyes on the sidewalk, step on a crack and maybe her mother has it coming.

The wind makes lonely, snake-rattling sounds in the trees, and she doesn’t look at the windows of the apartments and condos she passes, other people’s comfort not meant for her. When she reaches the scruffy little hollow of Caldwell Park, Sadie stands there shivering, staring across the patch of grass already going brown from an early frost, a few scattered water oaks and pines, a swing set and picnic tables. A shortcut home she’s taken a hundred times after dark, but tonight there’s something in the air or under her skin, and she pauses and looks back the way she’s come. There are only the cars parked along the sidewalk and a few fallen leaves scuttling like giant insects along the road, and she steps off the concrete and descends sandstone and redbrick stairs leading down into the park. At the bottom, she stops again and looks back up towards the sidewalk.

“What the fuck’s gotten into you?” she asks herself, wondering if it was the things Deacon told her the night before, or the stories she read that morning in Arminius Vambery’s old book. Either or both or something else altogether, and she listens to the random interplay of the sighing wind and dry branches, the human sounds of the traffic along Highland and a radio playing rap music somewhere.

“Go home, Sadie,” she says, prompting, just something to get her moving again, and she imagines how good a hot bath will feel, Mr. Bubble and her vanilla- and lilac-scented candles, how much better bed will feel afterwards. She turns back to the park and takes a few more steps towards the other side, no streetlights down here, and so she walks faster than before.
If Deacon were here,
she thinks and then pushes the thought away, angry at him and more angry that she’s getting freaked out over nothing, scared of the dark and jumping at her own shadow like a five-year-old.

“If Deacon
were
here,” she says out loud, talking to herself and the shadows gathered beneath the trees, “I could kick him in the nuts.” She laughs, but it isn’t really very funny and doesn’t make her feel any better, so she starts walking again. Sadie’s halfway across the park when she hears a noise from the trees on her right, a heavy footstep in pine straw or the creak of rusty chains from the swings, some perfectly ordinary park sound, so there’s no reason whatsoever for the way her heart has started racing or the tinfoil and ephedrine thrum of adrenaline in her veins. But a stray line remembered from Vambery’s book, “When twigs crack, don’t whistle,” warning from mothers to their children during the terror in Gévaudan, and “Fuck off!” she shouts at the dark places the noise might have come from. “I have pepper spray!”

There’s no way to pretend the laughter that floats back to her is anything else, a woman’s soft, almost musical laugh, and Sadie reaches into her purse, hunting the tiny can of cayenne-pepper spray she keeps on her key chain.

“I’m not joking with you, asshole,” she says, even though she can’t find her keys hidden somewhere in all the other purse crap.

The woman laughs again, as Sadie’s hand closes at last around the cold and spiky bundle of keys. She drops her purse getting them out and spills everything in a pile onto the grass at her feet.

“Oh my,” the woman says, her voice like ice cream and rose thorns. “What big, big eyes you have, Sadie.”

Sadie aims the pepper spray at the darkness, at the useless streetlights shining dimly from the far side of the trees, but her hands are starting to shake.

“What will it be, Little Red Cap? Which road will you choose?”

Sadie doesn’t turn her back on the voice, but she does take another step nearer the edge of the park, another step towards home.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“This fork in the road, child,” the woman replies. “Which path will you choose? That of the needles, or the road of pins?”

“I’m not afraid of you,” Sadie lies, and there’s a rustle high in the trees, the flutter of frantic, startled wings, skitter of small, sharp claws. And she squints into the night for a glimpse of the face behind the voice, but there’s only black and a hundred thousand shifting shades of gray.

“I’m not afraid of you, bitch. Come out where I can see you.”

“Oh, child,” the woman says, and now she sounds almost kind, almost sorry for whatever’s coming next. “Run. Run away fast.”

And that sudden shift in tone enough to make Sadie drop the badass act once and for all, any pretense that she isn’t scared all the way shitless and back again, and she
does
run. Never mind her spilled purse, never mind anything but the safety of lights and cars and people. She runs, and with her ears or only in her mind she can hear the thing following her fast across the grass and patches of dry, sandy earth, the thing that doesn’t need a face because it has that voice and the whole damn night for a mask.

Sadie reaches the sidewalk and keeps running, out into the street and the deafening blare of a car horn, the squeal of brakes and tires hot against asphalt, the headlights like the dazzling eyes of God. The car misses her, but close enough that she can feel it rushing past, the gentle shove of air displaced, and then she trips on the curb and lands sprawling among the gnarled roots of an old poplar tree. She rolls over onto her back, the pepper spray still gripped tight in her right hand, and
Please, just let it be over fast, let it be quick,
but there’s only the empty park back there, only the mute darkness holding its ground beyond the garish streetlights and the road.

All the way home from the park, past more apartment buildings, walking twice as fast through the long shadow cast by a freeway overpass, finally past The Nick and its rowdy parking-lot crowd, and every second Sadie listening for anything out of place, any incongruence, the most infinitesimal creak or shuffle or whisper that ought not be there. One knee and both her elbows bleeding badly from the fall, skin scraped raw and aching, and when someone calls her name from the crowd outside The Nick, she smiles and waves, but keeps walking. All she has to do is get inside and call Deacon, and he’ll come because he
has
to come, because somehow this is all his fault.

“Yo, Sadie!” someone shouts. “Is something wrong? You look like shit,” but she doesn’t stop and try to explain, nothing she could say that would make sense, anyway, nothing that wouldn’t sound hysterical.

Through the front entrance of the building and up the stairs to the second-floor landing, her keys all that she has left now, but all she needs, too, and it takes her a moment to find the one that fits her door. The pepper spray and the key to her parents’ house in Mobile, the key to a blue Volkswagen bug she had years and years ago, four or five keys to nothing at all, just bits of shaped and polished metal she carries around because they make her feel less disconnected from the world. Her hands still shaking badly enough to make even such a simple undertaking a chore, but when she finds the right one, the brass key slides smoothly into the lock and it clicks softly and the knob turns easily in her hand.

“Hello, Little Red Cap,” the woman from the park says, and Sadie looks up to see her standing all the way at the other end of the hall. She smiles a wide white smile and reaches into her slick leather blazer the color of old motor oil. “I’ve been waiting here so long I thought maybe you weren’t coming.”

“I’ll scream,” Sadie says and opens the apartment door.

“And who do you think’s going to hear you, child? Who do you think’s going to care?”

Sadie steps quickly over the threshold into the dark apartment and slams the door behind her, turns the dead bolt and slides the safety chain into place. Only a little light from the street getting in through the curtains, but the telephone isn’t far away, sitting in its cradle on a stack of books beside the television, and she grabs the receiver and dials 911.

“They can’t help you,” the woman says, her voice coming from right outside the door now, bleeding through the wood. “By the time the police get here, it’ll all be over.”

“Leave me
alone!
” Sadie screams, and then the operator comes on the line and starts asking questions, easy questions, but Sadie can’t remember any of the answers.

“They can’t help you, Little Red Cap,” the woman says again. “I wouldn’t lie to you. I have no reason to lie to you.”

“There’s someone at my door,” Sadie tells the operator, words rushing out of her in a frantic, breathless flood. She knows that she’s crying now, because she can feel the wet, warm paths of the tears down her cheeks. “Please, there’s someone trying to fucking kill me,” and the operator tells her to stay calm, slow down and speak clearly, asks for her address in a perfectly reasonable, dispassionate tone, and then the doorknob begins to turn.

“This isn’t my style, Sadie. Let me in, or I’ll have to let myself in.”

“Please,” Sadie says. “Hurry,” and the door explodes with a crack loud as thunder, the old hinges giving way before the dead bolt, the doorframe pulling loose from the wall in a shower of splinters and plaster, and Sadie drops the phone and runs. She makes it as far as the beaded curtain dividing the kitchen from the living room before strong fingers tangle themselves in her cherry hair and pull her back. Sadie grabs at strings of amber beads and they go down with her.

“What are you running from, Little Red Cap? Didn’t you
want
to find me? Didn’t you go looking for me in a book today?”

The woman crouching over her, one hand locked tight around the back of Sadie’s neck, sharp nails digging into her skin and forcing her face towards the hardwood floor, the yellow-orange scatter of plastic beads, and “The police are coming,” Sadie sobs. “They’re already on their way.”

The woman laughs and slams Sadie’s forehead against the floor. There’s an instant of faultless nothingness before the pain and a fairy swarm of lights about her face, but she doesn’t black out.

“And then what, Little Red Cap? Will they chop off my head? Will they cut open my belly to let you out?”

Sadie closes her eyes and opens them again, blinking back the pain, but the fairy lights are still there, and a chocolate-dark smear of her blood against the wood.