Low Red Moon (26 page)

“The thought never crossed my mind,” Deacon says very softly.

“Just put it
away,
Scarborough,” and Jane’s voice is still calm, but firmer this time. “You’re not going to shoot him, and we both know it.”

“Maybe what you know and what I know are two entirely different things,” he replies and starts to sit up, moans and slumps back into the gravel.

“Maybe
you
need to try a little harder to remember what we’re doing here,” the girl says sternly, and then she snatches the gun, moving so fast that Deacon almost misses it altogether—one second Scarborough’s holding the pistol and the next it’s in her hands.

“I didn’t come all the way from Providence to watch you get into a pissing match,” she says, and Scarborough curses them both and shuts his eyes, covers his bleeding nose with his left hand.

Deacon looks longingly at the front door of the bar, the burnt-out neon sign that’s always been hung upside down so that it reads
, the panes of red glass and the
GO AWAY—WE’RE OPEN
placard, hoping that maybe Sheryl called the cops anyway. But there’s no reason to think his luck should start changing now, no point in spoiling a perfect losing streak, so he kicks Scarborough in the ribs again.

“That’s for pointing a gun at me,” he says, and then, to the girl, “What do you say I just take my toys and go home?”

“You called us, Deacon.”

“Yeah, I know, but I think I’m over that now.”

Jane sighs and wipes a trickle of blood off Scarborough’s chin, then wipes her hand on her jeans.

“She’ll kill you before the night’s over. And then she’ll kill Chance. You’ve seen her. You know what she can do.”

“Narcissa,” Deacon says, and Starling Jane nods her head.

“She came here to kill you both and take your child. It’s the child that really matters to her.”

“Like Mary English.”

“We really shouldn’t talk out here in the open, Deacon. She—”

“—has spies. Yeah, I know. I heard you the first time around.”

“There is so much at stake here,” the girl says and wipes more blood from Scarborough’s face. “You cannot begin to imagine.”

“What if I took Chance and went somewhere else?”

“Then she’ll follow you, dickhead,” Scarborough mumbles. “She’ll follow you all the way to Hell and back, if that’s what it takes. You can’t run from this shit, any more than we can.”

“Can you walk?” Jane asks, and Scarborough grunts, either a yes or a no, but Deacon isn’t sure which.

“We have to go someplace where it’s safe to talk,” she says. “There’s not much time. Help me get him up, Deacon.”

Deacon looks down at his mangled left hand, a few shards of the shot glass still buried in his bleeding palm, no telling how many stitches he’s going to need, and he realizes that it’s beginning to hurt more than his head.
Well, at least that’s something,
he thinks, and offers Scarborough his good hand.

“I don’t need your help,” Scarborough tells him.

“Yes, you do,” Jane says. So Deacon takes him by the sleeve of his leather jacket and hauls him roughly to his feet.

“Do you two have a car or broomsticks or what?”

“That isn’t funny,” Jane replies. “We have a car, right over there,” and she points at the line of vehicles parked in the shadows and streetlight puddles along the road. Something sleek and white slips out from under the front bumper of an old Volkswagen Microbus and seems to glide over the asphalt, vanishing quickly beneath the wheels of a battered pickup truck, and Deacon tells himself it’s only a cat, or maybe a possum, nothing that shouldn’t be out on an October night, then looks back to Jane and Scarborough.

“I have to call Chance first,” he says.

Scarborough spits at the ground and licks his lips. “Five minutes and then we’re out of here, Mr. Silvey,” he says, “with you or
without
you.”

“Five minutes,” Deacon replies and heads for the door.

“Are you dying, Narcissa?” her grandfather whispers in her ear, and she opens her eyes, flinches at the pain, and lies staring up at the ceiling of the bedroom in the old house on Cullom Street. It’s finally dark outside, so it’s dark inside, too, and it takes her a moment to remember why she hurts.

“No,” she says. “I was only sleeping. I was dreaming about the night I burned the house.”

“She got away,” the old man taunts. “The pretty girl got away from you. No one’s
ever
gotten away from you before, Narcissa.”

“I was standing out in the dunes, in the snow, watching the flames.” And she starts to roll over onto her right side, but it hurts too much, so she lies still and watches the yellowy windowpane reflections on the white drywall overhead.

“You look like a big ol’ lobster someone left boiling in the pot too long,” her grandfather snickers. “And the pretty little girl got away from you, didn’t she?”

Narcissa shuts her eyes again, only wanting to go back to sleep, to slip away, back down to the numb place by the sea where the snow whipped through her hair and the fire was much too far away to ever reach her. She imagines the icy, howling wind off Ipswich Bay, so loud she can’t hear the breakers or the blazing demon picking the house apart. So loud there’s nothing else that matters, the memory alone almost enough to deaden her blistered face and hands, that frigid wind she thought would sweep the world away.

The first night that Aldous’ ghost came to her, charred and skulking across the snow-dappled sand, leaving no footprints but leading the way for the loping, yellow-eyed things that had come out of their holes to watch the house burn. Leading them to her.

“You might have changed their minds,” her grandfather murmurs behind her eyes, “but you weren’t much of a fuck, they said.”

Is that what happened?
she wonders.
Is that what
really
happened, or was it something else entirely?
Did she only sit in the sand, shivering and smelling the sea, while the flames licked at the cloudy underbelly of the sky? Time and the pain have muddied her recollection, the pain and Aldous’ whining, simpering voice, and she can’t be sure. Perhaps the ghouls didn’t come for her until sometime later, the long nights she lived alone in the dunes with only the noisy gulls and Aldous’ ghost for company.

“The girl doesn’t matter to me, old man,” Narcissa says. “She never mattered. The girl was only a very small thing, a garnish.”

“Liar,” her grandfather purls. “She
saw
you, Narcissa. She knows your face. They’ll never, ever have you now.”

Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?

“They won’t have any choice, Aldous. Not when they see what I’ve done for them, not when they see my gift.”

“They’ll piss on you
and
your idiotic gift. They’ll pick their teeth with its bones.”

Would not, could not, would not, could not, could not join the dance.

“If they
wanted
that child, Narcissa, they’d damn well come and take it for themselves.”

Narcissa can hear the old man pacing restlessly back and forth across the floor now, his bare and bony feet loud on the varnished wood, but she doesn’t open her eyes. Lies completely still in her fevery cocoon, the faint maple-candy stink of Neosporin ointment, her hands swaddled in layers of gauze, a big Band-Aid where her left eyebrow used to be. He
wants
her to look, wants her to see what she’s made of him, so she keeps her eyes shut and only watches the distant, burning house, the flames mirrored in the black waters of the bay.

“I bet you didn’t think twice about spreading your legs, when they finally came sniffing around, did you, child?”

You were there,
she thinks.
Weren’t you?
and maybe she’s dreaming again, because the girl named Sadie Jasper slips over the windowsill, the handcuffs pulling tight, almost tearing the radiator pipe loose. And the tiny kitchen fills up with blue-white fire. If she hadn’t smelled the gas, if she hadn’t guessed and stepped back from the doorway, and she tries not to notice the way all the vampires in Miss Josephine’s parlor are staring at her.

“You should forget us,” Madam Terpsichore says, “while there’s still time to live the life you have.”

“I don’t want the life I have,” Narcissa tells her. “There’s no place for me out there. There will never be any place for me but here, with you.”

“No, she isn’t dying,” one of the other voices whispers, a runaway she met on the road to Baltimore months and months ago. “She’ll heal. More’s the pity.”

“You don’t
know
that, you little fag,” Aldous growls. “You don’t know she won’t die.”

“Hell won’t have her,” the dead boy says, “and Heaven’s full.”

“You don’t know that either, so why don’t you just shut the fuck up. How could Heaven ever be full?”

The fire spreading so quickly there was no time for the pain, less time to wonder if the girl would escape, and Narcissa jumped from a bedroom window as the apartment filled up with smoke and the hungry roar of the inferno poured itself free of the kitchen. In the dunes, the gale carried the billowing smoke away towards Cape Ann and the wide, indifferent Atlantic. She didn’t have to smell it at all, just the clean snow and salt smells, the winter’s night to keep her safe from the heat and soot and ash. She watched the gabled roof sag and collapse as the house shuddered and fell in upon itself, and an eight-year-old girl imagined entire cities at the mercy of such a perfect, merciless beast.

“Ask me, she smells like any chunk of human meat,” the ghoul named Barnaby said to Madam Terpsichore and sneered at Narcissa. “Soft and pink, but maybe when she’s dead, maybe when she’s aged a bit, there might yet be something of interest come of it.”

And then Madam Terpsichore reminded Barnaby that no one had asked him anything, and he went back to work, dividing skin and silk-white fascia from red muscle. Upstairs, the vampires must have begun the evening’s waltz, the way the floorboards have begun to creak and dust sifts down into the darkness, into the snowy night, sifting down from the ceiling of the old house on Cullom Street to settle on Narcissa’s burned skin. Motes like scalding embers as she turns a page of her mother’s journal, the smell of the paper to ease her soul, and “The universe,” she wrote, “is only strings and knots. Most of the knots were tied ages ago, but we tie a few ourselves, and then spend the rest of our lives trying to untie them again.”

“Did you see that, Grandfather?” Narcissa asked, and Aldous shook his head, squinting out to sea.

“It hurts,” one of her dead voices mumbles in her ear.

“Not so bad,” she replies too quickly, too eager to prove the ghost a liar. “I’ve been through worse.”

The wind off the sea flutters the pages of the journal, and Narcissa reads by the light of the burning house:

“Well, it looks like it hurts,” the voice says, and Narcissa tries to remember which one this is, which death, which sin, but her head is too full and the names rush past like snowflakes.

“You learn your place in the scheme of things,” Madam Terpsichore says, “or someone has to teach it to you. I recommend the former.” And then the ghoul glances up at the basement rafters, the rhythmic stomp and shuffle of shoes in time to antique music from Miss Josephine’s Victrola. Narcissa hears, or only imagines that she hears, the swish of crinolines and petticoats from upstairs. Madam Terpsichore looks back down at the corpse on the dissection table, and her long fingers move swift and sure, claws so sharp she has no need of scalpels.

“We all dance,” she says. “But only a damned fool dances to someone else’s fiddler.”