Low Red Moon (42 page)

Narcissa leans over, reaching for the pistol tucked safely out of sight beneath her seat.

“You can finish it here,” Chance says. “Whatever the fuck it is, you can finish it here.”

There isn’t any difference,
another voice chimes in.
The start and the end, they’re not even two sides of the same coin anymore.

He’s only a child,
a mother’s voice cuts in as Narcissa flips off the safety, turns around in the seat, and aims the pistol at Chance’s head.
It’s not fair for you to expect him to understand something like that.

“You won’t kill me,” Chance says, her foggy eyes staring directly at Narcissa and the muzzle of the gun. “Not yet. You won’t kill me, because you might kill the baby.”

“Just when did you decide you have any idea what I will or won’t do?” Narcissa asks her, wishing the voices would shut up again so she could think clearly, so close to pulling the trigger and unable to remember how much longer she needs to keep Chance alive.

“That would ruin everything for you, wouldn’t it, if my baby dies?”

“Are you really that brave, crazy lady?” Narcissa whispers and raises the barrel of the 9mm before she squeezes the trigger. The gun roars, and the window above Chance explodes in a diamond-shard rain of safety glass. She screams, but Narcissa’s head is already too full of the dead voices and the sound of the gun to hear her. The bitter, hot smell of gunpowder is hanging in the shocked air and the sparkle of the glass scattered all over Chance and the backseat like confetti, the spent shell lying on her chest, and Narcissa lowers the barrel again.

“It isn’t a long walk,” she says, her own voice barely audible over the ringing in her ears. “I’ll help you.”

Chance screams again, louder than before, and then covers her face with both her hands; there’s a deep gouge near her left elbow, dark blood leaking steadily from the wound, and Narcissa wonders if there’s any point in bandaging it.

Did you hear that?
one of the dead children asks, frightened, and
What?
an old woman’s voice calls back.
Did we hear what?

The thunder. Did you hear the thunder coming?

Where’s it coming from?
the old woman inside Narcissa’s head asks, and another, younger voice giggles to itself and adds,
What’s it gonna want when it gets here?

“Tell them to shut up, Aldous,” Narcissa growls. “Tell them all to shut up right this minute.”

What makes you think I could do a thing like that?
the old man replies.
What makes you think that I would even try?

Listen,
the old woman mumbles,
I will tell thee what is done in the caverns of the grave,
mumbling because she has no teeth, and now Narcissa remembers killing her in Baltimore or some other city that starts with a B.

What does she mean?
one of the children asks.

Nothing,
someone reassures it.
She isn’t well. She’s old and isn’t well.

“I fucking mean it, Aldous. Make them stop.”

You’re wasting time, child, sitting here talking to yourself when there’s still so much left to do.

A noise outside the car, a sudden rustle from the tall grass growing at the edge of the road, and she looks away from Chance, looks up to see the old man standing in the fading daylight, watching her with the empty sockets where his eyes used to be. There are crows perched on both his shoulders, ebony birds with fiery red eyes and their beaks drip something thick and white. The ice pick is still embedded in Aldous’ chest, right there where she planted it almost fifteen years ago.

“It wasn’t my fault they wouldn’t have you, old man,” she says, uncertain if he’s listening to her, but she says it anyway.

He smiles, or snarls, his lips folding back to bare tarnished silver teeth and rotting black gums. With one hand, he points a finger towards the sky.

Does not the worm erect a pillar in the moldering churchyard?
the old woman’s voice asks from some wet and writhing crevice of Narcissa’s brain.
And a palace of eternity in the jaws of the hungry grave?

“We have to go now,” Narcissa says. “It won’t be so hard. I’ll help you walk.”

Chance has moved her hands and is staring at Narcissa, more blood on her face, blood seeping from a dozen tiny cuts. Her eyes so wide and afraid, drowning in her tears, and she nods her head very slowly.

“First, you have to promise me you’ll let me see it,” Chance sobs and then shuts her eyes as another contraction hits. “Just promise me that, and I’ll do whatever you want.”

“Aren’t you afraid that will only make it harder?”

“
Please,
Narcissa. Promise me.”

“How do you know I won’t lie to you, that I won’t say yes now and then do something else later on?”

Chance opens her eyes and takes a deep, gasping breath. “You told me you keep your promises,” she says. “And I don’t have any choice. Just promise me you’ll do it.”

Narcissa takes her finger off the trigger and glances back at Aldous and the crows, but they’ve gone.

“Sure,” she says. “I promise. Maybe I’ll even let you hold it, if you’ll stop giving me so much shit for—”

“Whatever you say. Whatever you want, I fucking swear.”

Narcissa stares out across the marshes towards Castle Hill and the sea. Inside her head, the voices have all fallen silent and now there’s only the sound of Chance sobbing and the distant, rowdy cry of a gull. She wishes she could see the beach from here, the cold waves throwing themselves against the shore, but tells herself it won’t be much longer and opens the door of the Lincoln.

“That’s not the right road,” Starling Jane says. “It’s another dead end.” But Deacon turns anyway, only to find his progress blocked by a sprawling pile of trash and limestone gravel.

“Shit,”
he hisses and shifts the car into reverse, his foot too heavy on the accelerator, spinning the tires, burning off more rubber.

“Keep that up, and we’ll have another blowout,” she says.

“You said you knew the fucking way.”

“I think you should go back to Ipswich. We should have turned south on High Street, not north.”

Deacon squeals out of the dead end, backing onto the main road, and then hits the brakes so hard that Jane is thrown back against her seat, then forward again, and she almost smacks her head against the dashboard. “What the fuck kind of sick joke is that supposed to be?” he asks her, pointing at a street sign.

“Labor in Vain Road,” she says, reading it aloud. “We really should go back to Ipswich, Deacon, while there’s still time. We should have turned—”

“Just admit you’re lost, Jane. Please just fucking admit you have no idea where we are.”

Jane looks away from the sign, stares silently at her empty hands.

“Yeah, well, fuck me,” Deacon says, shifting into drive again. “What time is it?”

“You just asked—”

“Well, I’m just asking again. What time is it?”

“Three forty-three,” she tells him, glancing reluctantly at her wristwatch.

“And moonrise is at four forty-five.”

“We still have time. It’s not that far from here, I swear. But we need to get back on the right road.”

“She’s going to die,” Deacon whispers and slaps the steering wheel hard with the open palm of his good hand. “You fucking lied to me, Jane, and now Chance is going to fucking die because you fucking lied to me.”

“No,” she says very quietly, and then doesn’t say anything else. He wants to hit her, wants to hit her more than he’s ever wanted to hit anyone in his life. Instead, Deacon looks up through the bug-spattered windshield at the sky, the too-broad Massachusetts sky stretched out like a second-rate Maxfield Parrish painting, and starts driving again. Almost twenty-four hours now since they left Birmingham, slipping out of the city in the battered old piece-of-shit Camaro Jane pulled out of her ass with two calls from a pay phone, the car and two guns delivered to them like a pizza. No way they would have made it very far in the Impala, not once Downs and the FBI discovered they were gone. The phony fire alarm worked like a charm, and Deacon still has no idea what the girl did to the cop standing guard outside her hospital door, but he was way too busy counting and recounting her deck of playing cards to even notice when Deacon wheeled her out of the room and down the hall to the elevator. Too much panic and confusion for anyone to notice them, Jane in her sunglasses and wrapped in a torn and bloodstained raincoat that he’d found in her closet, Deacon keeping his head down and his eyes straight ahead.

“We’ll be fine,” she said. “Just act like you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing and nobody’s going to look at us twice.”

And nobody did, magic or luck or both, and he hasn’t bothered to ask her which, no time for anything but the drive, the destination, an image of Chance burned into his mind like a dream of the Grail. His headache faded after a few hours, about the same time they reached Virginia and the Camaro started overheating.

“We’re not going to make it,” Deacon says, not turning back towards Ipswich, following Labor in Vain Road east.

“Yes, we will,” Jane whispers. “Maybe this connects with Argilla somewhere up ahead. There just aren’t that many roads out here. Unless maybe it loops back around towards town. It might do that, you know?” and she looks back over her shoulder.

“Yeah, Jane, let’s just keep thinking those happy fucking thoughts, why don’t we? Why the hell are you whispering?”

“I’m not,” she says, speaking so softly he could never consider it anything but a whisper. “But I think there’s something following us.”

Deacon glances at the rearview mirror, and there’s only the deserted blacktop behind them, a few trees and some scrubby underbrush, weeds and the litter scattered along the edges of the road. “I don’t see anyone,” he says.

“Just keep driving,” Jane whispers. “Don’t look at it. I think they know I’m coming.”

“There’s nothing fucking back there,” he says, too scared and exhausted to humor her anymore, not after the way she’s been freaking out on him every forty or fifty miles since they crossed into Connecticut, every time they passed a flock of blackbirds perched on a power line or a stray dog wandering along the highway.

“They probably wouldn’t use anything you’d be able to see. Not this close to the warrens. By now, I expect they know you’re with me.”

The road begins to turn towards the southeast, winding past a small and shimmering lake on their left, a brief glimpse of a long-legged water bird with gray-black feathers standing in the reeds near the shore before the trees obscure the view. Jane looks over her shoulder again and then mutters something to herself, drawing some complex sign in the air with her hand, the sign of a cross with more than four points, and Deacon checks the rearview.

“I still don’t see anything,” he says.

“Don’t look at it. Watch the road.”

“Jane, there’s nothing back there
to
look at. Except the fucking sunset.”

“It’s only three fifty-eight,” she says quietly, calmly, staring straight ahead as the car rounds another bend, and now the Camaro is traveling south.

“I didn’t ask,” Deacon says and starts to tell her this can’t possibly be right, because now they’re heading away from the sea, but Starling Jane opens the glove compartment and takes out her gun.

“I need you to promise me something,” she says. “If you should make it through this, and I don’t—”

“Hold on. You think I owe you a favor?”

“No, but I’m asking you anyway, because there’s nobody else left for me to ask. And I did bring you—”

“All you’ve done so far is get us lost,” Deacon says and glances down at the speedometer, sees that he’s only doing fifty and puts a little more pressure on the gas.

“We’re not lost. We’re getting close. You’ll see.”

“We’re not even going in the right goddamn direction.”

“The things Narcissa stole,” Jane says, speaking so softly now that he can hardly hear her. “I think she’ll still have it all with her. It’s papers mostly, old books, journals, maps, that sort of thing. I think they’ll be hidden somewhere in her car, the trunk probably.”

“What the fuck do I care?”

“If I don’t make it and you do, then I need you to take it all back to Providence for me. Don’t even think about reading any of it. As long as you don’t know exactly what it is, they won’t hurt you.”

“You’re out of your mind,” he says. “No way.”

“Please listen to me, Deacon. There’s a big yellow house on Benefit Street, just past the Athenaeum—”

“No,”
he says again, more forcefully than before. “If we get through this shit, and I don’t kill you for what you and that asshole Pentecost have done to Chance, you’ll be the luckiest little creep on the face of the earth. So don’t start getting greedy.”