Low Red Moon (7 page)

“I need to tell you something important, Deacon, but you have to fucking
promise
me you won’t freak out or laugh at me or anything.”

Deacon rubbed at his chin, the dark stubble there like sandpaper, and “Darling,” he said. “I might not be the sort of person you want to start spilling all your deepest, darkest secrets to. Anyway, none of it matters to me.”

“Well, it matters to
me.
”

He nodded his head, and then reached beneath the seat for another beer. “Well,” he said. “Let’s see. Either you’re about to tell me you used to be a guy, or that you’re a dyke, or a Mormon or one of those—”

“Will you please just shut the hell up for a second?”

“Sure,” Deacon said, grinned, and opened the beer, which foamed and dripped all over his jeans and the Impala’s floorboard. “I just like to imagine all the worst-case scenarios up front. Kind of takes the sting out of whatever’s coming. And Mormons really do annoy the bejesus out of me.”

“I swear, if you fucking laugh at me, you’re gonna be walking home.”

Deacon sipped his beer and didn’t say a word, one way or another.

“I just wanted you to know you’re the…” and she trailed off and slumped forward, resting her forehead against the steering wheel.

“The cat’s meow? The bee’s knees?”

“No,” Chance said, beginning to get annoyed with him, and she took a deep breath and slowly let it out again. “You’re the first guy I’ve ever been out with. I’ve never been on a real date before tonight.”

And then both of them were silent for a long, uncomfortable moment. Chance with her forehead pressed against the steering wheel, Deacon sipping at his beer, another car stuffed with teenagers rolling past in a bass-heavy thundercloud of noise.

“I’m flattered,” Deacon said finally. “A little surprised, but flattered.”

“It just never seemed important enough,” Chance said, lifting her head and looking at him. “I always thought it would be a distraction. I was always so busy with school.”

“You know what they say. All work and no play—”

“You think I’m dull?”

“No, I don’t think you’re dull. If I thought you were dull, I wouldn’t be here. I hate dull even more than I hate rap.”

“Jesus,” Chance whispered. “Life is so goddamn weird.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Deacon said and finished his beer in a single, long gulp, crushed the can and stared at the wad of red and white aluminum in his hand.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. I don’t mean anything at all. I guess it’s safe to assume you’re a virgin?”

Chance reached across the seat and punched him in the arm, not hard enough to hurt, but he yelped anyway and tossed the crumpled beer can at her.

“You’re not shy, are you, Deacon Silvey?”

“No ma’am,” he said, reaching for the last can of beer. “Shy ain’t nothing but a waste of time. And life’s short.”

And then, quick, before she lost her nerve or he started talking again, she asked “Are you an alcoholic, Deke?”

He set the unopened beer can down on the dash and cracked the knuckles of his right hand, and already she wished she’d kept her mouth shut.

“No,” he said. “Alcoholics go to meetings and twelve-step support groups and therapists. I can’t afford that shit, so I’m just a drunk. Is that a problem?”

“Why? I mean, why are you a drunk?”

“Maybe someday I’ll tell you,” and he picked up the Bud and popped the pull tab. Loud beer hiss, but this one didn’t foam over. “If you stick around long enough.”

“I think I’d like to try. But it’s something that we’re going to have to talk about, sooner or later. It’s something I don’t understand.”

“Nothing mysterious about drunks, Chance. We just move a little slower than sober people, that’s all.”

“You didn’t move slow that night in the park.”

“Well, I have my moments.”

She smiled and changed the subject, talking about the movie instead, confessing that she’d sit through almost anything with Brad Pitt in it; Deacon admitted he didn’t go to too many movies, or watch much television, either. She talked about school, and he complained about the teenagers and their crappy music, and in a little while she drove them back to Southside.

Chance is standing with Alice and Irene in front of the huge coal forest scene, smiling even though she’s still pissed off about the banner. “It’s very nice,” she says. “I’m impressed.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Alice says and pats her gently on the back.

At least half the gallery space is occupied by the Pennsylvanian diorama, like an impossible snapshot of the tropical peat swamps that spread out north and south of Birmingham almost three hundred million years ago. Swamps along a vast delta created by an ancient river, wide as the Mississippi, as it flowed down from the newborn Appalachians across coastal lowlands to a shallow inland sea. The scene is dominated by a dense grove of bizarre vegetation as tall as tall trees: the lycopods
Lepidodendron
and
Lepidophloios,
both towering, cone-bearing plants with bark like the diamond scales of garpikes, along with the giant horsetail
Calamites
and the tree-sized gymnosperm
Cordaites
with its long, razor-strap leaves. Alien trunks expertly cast in plastic and airbrushed to life, rising up to meet the ceiling and the painted illusion of a rain-forest canopy spreading out a hundred and fifty feet overhead. An understory of ferns and pteridosperms among the gnarled roots, the most minute details of the fronds and seedpods so well sculpted that Chance can identify half a dozen familiar genera at a single glance. The forest seems to run on for miles and miles, as though the museum’s wall has simply dissolved in some warping of time and space. There’s a dragonfly as big as a crow, spiders and millipedes and giant cockroaches.

“I wish the soundtrack were finished,” Irene Mesmer says. “Then you could get the full effect. But we’re still trying to get the insect noises right.”

“Still working the bugs out,” Alice says, and Chance laughs.

A broad streambed winds between the trees, no water in it now but the collections manager says there will be later, just pebbles and dry sand for the moment, the pretend decay of fallen lycopods. And at the edge of the stream, a wide patch of fiberglass mud and Chance immediately recognizes the creature sprawling there, staring back at her, ink-black eyes the size of Ping-Pong balls set in that wide, flat skull, her own
Megalopseudosuchus
resurrected after three hundred thousand millennia. A dying lungfish dangles from its toothy jaws.

“That’s
him,
” Chance says. “My god, Alice, that’s really him.”

“Yeah. Ugly bastard, isn’t he?”

“Are you kidding? He’s absolutely gorgeous,” and she leans awkwardly over the railing, difficult because her belly’s in the way, and strokes the amphibian’s bumpy snout. “Hello there,” she says.

There’s another, much smaller amphibian nearby, peering cautiously out at the
Megalopseudosuchus
from behind a
Calamites
stalk. The temnospondyl
Walkerpeton,
another primitive tetrapod that Chance discovered in a Walker County strip mine her junior year. Eight webbed toes on its splayed front feet, and “I see you, too,” she says.

“I’m so glad that you like it,” Irene says. “The artists and technicians followed your notes and instructions whenever possible.”

“It’s almost like going back, isn’t it?” Chance asks no one in particular. “I can almost imagine the way it would smell.”

“Like a stinky old swamp, I expect,” Alice says.

“It’s
so
real,” Chance whispers, ignoring Alice, and then a dark trickle of blood leaks from the mouth of the
Megalopseudosuchus,
from the plastic lungfish trapped between its plastic jaws, and spatters on the fake mud.

Chance gasps and takes a sudden step backwards, bumping into Alice.

“Is something wrong, Dr. Silvey?” Irene asks anxiously, and Chance stares at her and then back at the diorama.

“I’m okay,” Chance replies, but she hears the quaver in her voice and knows she must sound anything but okay.

“Well, you’re white as a sheet,” Alice says. “You look like you just saw a ghost.” And then she puts a hand to Chance’s forehead like someone checking for a fever.

They don’t see it. They don’t see anything there at all.

“Do you feel ill?” the collections manager asks. “Do you need to sit down?”

“No,” Chance says, brushing Alice Sprinkle’s hand away from her face. “I’m fine,” but the fish is still bleeding, and she turns her back on the Pennsylvanian diorama. The rest of the gallery is cluttered with other related exhibits in varying stages of incompleteness—a wall devoted to the economic importance of coal, empty display cases to hold her fish and tetrapod fossils, a
Cordaites
stump for the kids to touch. The walls have been painted the color of moss.

“Are you sure?” Alice asks.

“I’m
fine,
” Chance says again. “Really. It’s silly. I just got a little too excited, that’s all.”

They don’t see it, because there’s nothing there to see.

“Let me get you a glass of water,” Irene says and is already hurrying out of the gallery before Chance can stop her. When she’s gone, Alice sighs and “Well, at least we’re rid of her for a few minutes,” she says quietly. “Maybe it’s time we got you back home.”

“Yeah, maybe so,” Chance whispers and glances back over her shoulder at the coal forest, bracing herself, expecting more of the crimson splotches like the stigmata of some inexplicable Catholic effigy.

But if the blood were ever there, it’s gone now.

N
arcissa Snow parks the black Oldsmobile at the dead end of Cullom Street and sits watching the house a moment before she gets out of the car. Only the second time that she’s seen it, the first just yesterday, but the real estate agent wouldn’t shut up, so she couldn’t
really
see it. The fat, smiling woman chattering on and on and on about things that would never matter to Narcissa—new kitchen appliances, work on the roof, the fresh coats of white paint.

“It was a terrible mess a few years back,” the woman said. “Just falling apart. A bunch of hippie kids used to live up here, and they’d let it go. A shame. It’s a good old house, really.”

“I’m sure,” Narcissa said.

“Did you live in Savannah long? I have an aunt—”

“It’s exactly what I’m looking for,” and Narcissa smiled and thought that the woman’s expression might have changed, then, a flickering, almost imperceptible shift, there and gone again, fear or something finer, and “Very good,” the woman said. “We can take care of the paperwork back at the office.”

The house was built more than a hundred years ago, the real estate agent said, raised at the other end of that late, bloodred century so recently deceased; war and murder, deaths and shattered minds, broken spirits, the shit and piss that men have dragged themselves through in their hunger for an end.

“I see you,” Narcissa says, aloud though she knows this house could hear her perfectly well without words, without her voice, that a house like this hears everything. The house it is
because
of everything it’s heard and seen and felt playing out inside its walls, beneath its ceilings. Mad house, sour place, once upon a time ago good place driven insane by happenstance, driven sick by the minds that have lived and dreamed inside its rooms. Not evil, no, Narcissa knows evil houses well enough to be sure—not evil, only mad. Left at last to rot in this lonely patch of trees and strangling kudzu vines on the side of this mountain, and Narcissa imagines how much the house would have welcomed that decay.
I will die, finally,
it must have thought.
I will forget everything, forever,
but then the hateful carpenters and painters and plumbers, their busy hammers and brushes and PVC transplants, to patch it back together again and haul the house on Cullom Street back from the precious edge of oblivion.

“Maybe, when I am done,” Narcissa tells the house, “maybe then I will burn you to the ground. I can be merciful.” But it can see inside her, and the house knows she’s a liar.

Narcissa takes the slender leather satchel from the passenger seat and gets out of the Olds, the car she stole in Charleston almost a month ago. “Just a few more bad dreams, that’s all,” she says, and the house cringes, floorboards drawing back the smallest fraction of an inch, the stiff flinch of tar-paper shingles and goose bumps down cloudy windowpanes.

“You don’t have to be afraid of me,” she says. “You’re a far, far more terrible thing than me, after all. Think about it,” but she can tell that the house has no intention of believing anything she says. The doubtful shadows crouched apprehensive on the wide front porch, a stubborn darkness clinging there despite the noonday sunshine and the blue October sky sprawled above the trees.

“Well, then. Have it your way,” Narcissa whispers. “We could have been friends, though. And I don’t think you’ve ever had many friends. We could have told each other stories.” She glances back towards the rear of the Oldsmobile, thinks about her heavy suitcases in the trunk, a cardboard box with her books, another, larger satchel with her knives and scalpels, her tools, but all those things can wait until later. There will be plenty of time to unpack later, and she walks slowly across the weedy, leaf-littered front yard to the door.

All Narcissa’s life like someone else’s fever dreams locked up inside her head and wanting out, or something scribbled down by a crazy woman for her to have to live through, red-brown words stolen from her mother’s diary; all her days chasing delirium’s legacy, measuring the ever-narrowing space between nightmares and visions, and she cannot even remember a time before this was the way she saw her life. No guiltless beginning, no damning moment when childhood’s hollow innocence melted into disillusionment and all the casual atrocities of her twenty-six years.

Her birth on the last freezing night at the end of a long year of horrors—earthquakes in Burma, volcanic eruptions in Hawaii, a subway wreck in London that killed forty-one people, the fiery crash of a Vietnamese cargo jet carrying two hundred and forty-three orphans. And all of these things written down in her mother’s diary, all of these and a thousand more, a pregnant woman’s book of splintered days, and then her mother died in childbirth, before she saw Narcissa’s face, before she even heard her child draw its first breath and cry. One life lost, one life gained, tit for tat, and the only daughter of Caroline Snow was raised by her grandfather, Aldous, in his tall and crumbling house by the sea. He read to her from his strange books, reading by beeswax candles and oil lamps because the electricity had been shut off long ago, and she walked with him along the rocky Massachusetts beach below the house.

“The sea is the mother of the world,” he told her. “The sea is Mother Hydra, and one day soon she’ll rise again and swallow her ungrateful children.”

“Will she swallow me, too?” Narcissa asked, and the old man nodded his bald head.

“She will, child. She’ll have us all.”

The ocean black and green, always-wheeling gulls, the ragged granite and salt-marsh wastes at the mouth of the Manuxet River, and Narcissa did not go to school or play with other children. Nothing for her beyond the house and its jealous secrets, the seashore and the Atlantic horizon running on forever. Everything she needed to know old Aldous taught her—how to read and write, astrology, the rhythms of the tides, history, the cruelty of this life and the ones to come, the red, wet mysteries beneath concealing skins.

When she was six years old, Narcissa killed a stray dog with a piece of driftwood, beat it slowly to death and then dragged the sandy, flea-seething carcass back up the hill to her grandfather’s house. She cut it open with a kitchen knife, and the old man watched, neither approving nor disapproving. A wooden mallet and cold chisel to break its sternum, her small, bare hands to pry open the bone and cartilage cradle of its rib cage. Then she spread the dog out around her, like the pictures in his books, naming organs for the old man as she cut them free and laid them on the porch. “This is the heart,” she said, naming valves and ventricles, and “This is a kidney. Here’s the other one.” She ate an eye because it looked like the hard candy he sometimes brought her from his rare trips into Ipswich. After that, she killed gulls and wild geese, rats, a fat raccoon, whatever she found that couldn’t get away.

When Narcissa was eight she discovered her mother’s diary, hidden in a small hole in the wall behind the headboard of the bed where she’d been born and Caroline Snow had died, and it became her bible. She kept it secret from Aldous, though she’d never kept anything from him before; something told her
this
book, the yellowing pages in her mother’s perfect cursive hand, was hers and hers alone. The book was bound in red leather, with a strip of fine gold cloth to mark the pages. It was only half filled, the last entry made three days before Narcissa’s birth. The first page dated April 29, and “I will put it all down, whatever seems important, everything I can remember,” Caroline had written in ink the color of dried blood.

Narcissa kept the diary in the hole behind the headboard. It was safe there, she reasoned, because her grandfather wouldn’t come into this room. Some nights he even poured a double line of salt in front of the threshold, if he didn’t like the look of the moon and stars, and he’d written things that Narcissa couldn’t read on the door. Charms to keep something he feared in or out, but nothing to stop her.

When Narcissa was nine a shower of blood fell on the house for two hours straight, thick red rain against the gambrel roof like bacon frying in a skillet, and her grandfather watched the storm from his seat by the parlor window.

“Is this your doing, child?” he asked Narcissa without taking his eyes off the window.

“No sir,” she said and crossed the room to stand beside him.

“Are you sure?”

“Maybe it’s Mother Hydra,” Narcissa said, and she wasn’t surprised by the fear in his eyes or the small tingle of satisfaction it made her feel, deep inside. “Maybe she’s coming back.”

“You still remember that damn story?” he asked, and his dry voice trembled.

“I remember everything you tell me, Grandfather.”

“Well, that was just a tale I made up to keep you away from the sea. It’s greedy, and little girls who aren’t afraid of it might wind up drowned.”

“I think you were telling me the truth,” she said.

“You believe whatever you want. I don’t give a damn no more.”

And he sat in his chair, and she stood at his side until the blood stopped falling from the sky.

On her tenth birthday, Narcissa’s grandfather gave her one of his books, one of the antique volumes that he kept locked inside the walnut barrister cases in his study and the keys always hidden somewhere she was never able to find. He wrapped it in an old newspaper, tied it up neat with twine, and made a bow from a scrap of china-blue silk they’d found on the beach the week before. He left the package lying outside her mother’s bedroom door, where Narcissa had started sleeping months and months before, and she unwrapped the gift sitting on the edge of the dead woman’s bed. The title and author were stamped in gold letters across the brittle black cover—
Cultes des Goules
by François Honore-Balfour, Comte d’Erlette. There were pictures, terrible, wondrous pictures that she stared at for hours on end, and the book became her most prized possession, even if she couldn’t read the French. She thought the bow was pretty and kept it in the hole in the wall with her mother’s diary.

She kept other things in the hole: coins and seashells she’d found among the dunes, a shark’s tooth, a black and shriveled mermaid’s purse, pretty shards of blue and green beach glass. An arrowhead. A string of purple plastic beads.

“Have you read the book yet?” her grandfather asked one day when they were walking along the beach together. She’d just found half a sand dollar and was busy wiping it clean on the hem of her dress.

“You know very well that I haven’t,” she replied. “You know I can’t read French.”

He stared at her silently for a moment, as if that had never occurred to him, and then Aldous Snow glanced longingly back towards his tall house, grown small in the distance.

“We should start back,” he said and rubbed at his chin. “The tide will be coming in soon.”

“Do you
want
me to read it?” Narcissa asked him.

“You’re stronger than your mother ever was. I never would have given her a book like that.”

“Do you want me to
read
it, Grandfather?”

“It’s your book now. Read it if you want. I should have burned that goddamned thing years ago and dumped the ashes into the sea.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

But he didn’t answer her, turned around instead and started walking back up the beach towards the house alone. Narcissa stood watching him, listening to the cold wind, the waves, and in a little while she slipped the broken sand dollar into her coat pocket and followed him home.

The shiny, new silver key the real estate agent gave Narcissa opens the front door, and she eases it shut again before reaching for the light switch on the wall. The foyer’s much darker than it should be, plenty of sunlight from the big living room to her left, but it seems diffused, stretched thin, drained of the simple strength to keep the shadows at bay. The electric light doesn’t work much better, and Narcissa turns the new dead bolt on the door, the dead bolt and the safety chain. Not that such flimsy things would ever keep anyone out, not anyone who really wanted in, but they might buy her time. Locks have bought her time before.

The air in the old house smells sweet and sickly, fresh paint and a fainter undercurrent of mildew, a smell of age and neglect that the workmen couldn’t scrub away or cover over. There’s a closed door leading off the foyer, and Narcissa reaches for the brass knob, cold metal in her hand, and opens the door to the bedroom where a young woman once hanged herself, where that same young woman’s mother died of cancer years before. These aren’t things that the real estate agent would ever have told her, things she would probably have denied had Narcissa asked, but she knows how to find what she’s looking for on her own. Bruised places, houses with enough misfortune in their past that she can trust them to keep her secrets.