Red Moon (8 page)

Her voice is rusty when she says, “Come out of there.”

As if in response the wind dies out, and in the silence that follows she can hear a faint clicking. She has no gun, only the ability to let the wolf turn over inside her, which feels impossible to someone in her condition, half-alive with grief and exhaustion.

A
scritching
now—she hears it—followed by the rustle of what could be cloth.

Enough. She hurries forward and raises her flashlight. The weak yellow light seeps into the bathroom but fails to penetrate a shadow darker than the rest. Its eyes flash red. A crow, she realizes, as it lets out a screech and leaps from its perch on the toilet. Its wings beat the air and its claws rake at her and she swings her arm and her flashlight goes whirling off and for a moment she is uncertain which way is up or down, left or right, with the crow screeching and flapping its wings and crashing off the walls, finally escaping through the open window.

She is huddled on the floor. She laughs and the laugh cracks into a sob.

She and her father used to count crows. For the times they spotted the birds roosting in a tree, wheeling in and out of low-hanging clouds, he taught her an old Irish rhyme. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a story that’s never been told. “Seven. That’s the one I want,” he used to say, squinting up at the sky. “I want that story.”

Anything but one. If they spotted a single crow, they would look around hurriedly, seeking another—as she does now, finding nothing but shadows all around her.

She packs what little she has and hikes her way out of town. A drop of rain strikes her cheek, and then another, and another still, and through the thickening downpour, she hurries to the nearest building, a Tesoro gas station, to wait out what she hopes is a passing storm.

She spins the card rack and chooses one at random. Its cover is cartooned with a baby in a sagging soiled diaper, a scab-kneed toddler picking her nose, a teenage boy clutching a sandwich and wearing sunglasses, a raggedy dog and spectacled grandparents, and, in the middle of them all, a bald middle-aged man in a white undershirt that can’t contain his potbelly. Inside, MOM—an acronym for Mother of Multiples—and a message from the sender, presumably a husband:
Thanks for taking such good care of us
.

Claire reads her way through all the cards, imagining whom she might send them to, and then wanders to the magazine rack and flips through a copy of
People
. Here is a shot of a starlet rising out of the ocean with her bikini dragged off her by a wave, a black censor bar covering her breasts.
Oops
is the caption. Claire wants to be interested—wants to read the articles as she would gobble candy—but part of her knows that her days of gossiping about celebrity nonsense are over.

Rain lashes the window. Out of the windswept murkiness comes a police cruiser, turning off the highway, into the parking lot, the tires splashing through puddles and throwing up fans of water.

Claire blindly sets the magazine on the rack and doesn’t pick it up when it flutters to the tile floor. Surely, she thinks, this is a sign, when a moment later the door chimes as the trooper pushes through it. He has the beginnings of both a mustache and a gut. His gun is holstered in his belt. He swings his arm wide around it, and in his hand dangles an oversize plastic mug with a bendable straw. He splashes it full of Cherry Pepsi and caps it and heads to the counter, whistling, the whistle cut short when Claire steps out from behind the greeting-card rack and says, “Excuse me?”

His feet drag to a stop. “What?” His mike squawks. His hand goes to it and he drops the volume as tinny voices chatter back and forth between blasts of static.

Then Claire tells him everything. But only in her head. In fact she only looks up at him, a man with handcuffs clipped to his belt, knowing that he could drop her, force a knee to her back, clip her wrists, pepper-spray her face in less than a minute. She finds it so strange that this is the situation she is in when about a month ago, around this same time of the day, she was sitting down to lunch with her parents—grilled ham and cheese, that was what they ate, along with small bowls of tomato soup—while NPR played from the faux-antique radio on the kitchen counter. The most ordinary thing in the world made suddenly extraordinary by the fact that she would never experience it again.

“What?” The trooper lifts the mug to his mouth and the straw becomes as dark as a vein when he sucks from it. “What do you want?”

She feels so naked under his gaze, under the fluorescent lights that hide nothing and make everyone appear as though they are dying. She imagines what she must look like to him: oversize coat, ratty hair, greasy skin, a faded bruise with an angry red gash running across her forehead. A runaway. That’s what he’ll think. And then he’ll make the connection—he’ll realize she is
the girl
—the one from the notice that could very well be circulating through every police station in the Upper Midwest.

She takes a step back and the rack rattles behind her and for a moment she can’t help but think of that card, the stupid one with the cartooned family on it. In her mind it flips open as her mouth opens and she says, “My friend says you can go seven miles over the speed limit and not get pulled over.” With every word she expects her voice to shake, but it doesn’t. “That you guys have, like, a seven-mile-per-hour cushion you give people. Is that true?”

“Don’t speed,” he says.

“Okay. I won’t. But do you?”

“I don’t speed.”

Inside the card.
MOM
.
Mother of Multiples
.
M
-
O
-
M
. An acronym. She is a few seconds behind the conversation when she says, “But do you pull people over if they’re only seven miles over?”

He sips again from his soda and then sets it in front of the register for the clerk to ring up. “Everybody is different. Maybe it will be your day to get pulled over and maybe it won’t. Maybe I’m feeling nice or maybe I’m feeling mean.” He digs in his pocket and rattles out some change. Behind him a wall of cigarettes and lighters and energy pills. “The next time you think about doing something foolish, think of me mean.”

“I will,” she says, but he is already out the door and she has already forgotten him. Her backpack drops to the floor and she digs through it for a pen and paper. Her eyes are blinking rapid-fire and her jaw is clamped so tightly it clicks. Her mind cycles through the constellations. “Grus. Octans,” she says. “Taurus. Orion. Mensa. Indus. Reticulum.” She continues to speak to the empty store, her voice solemn, as if performing some ancient rite. “Indus. Aries. Musca.”

M
IRIAM IS TIRED
of waiting. For two weeks she has remained in the cabin, pacing the hardwood floors, waiting for the power to flicker out, the water to gurgle to a stop in the faucet. Her neck aches from sleeping in the bathtub. Her teeth ache from grinding. Her eyes ache from peering constantly out the slots sawed into the plywood sheets hammered to the windows.

Sometimes she thinks she hears laughter in the forest. Sometimes the motion detectors go off and bring a ghostly pallor to the night. One morning she woke to a
thunk
against the front door and thought dreamily to herself, it’s the paper, only to later discover a rabbit bleeding out on the welcome mat. Otherwise, two weeks of nothing.

She has never gone this long without transforming. She doesn’t trust that part of herself these days, like an alcoholic eyeing a whiskey bottle, knowing the promise of one sip will lead to a gurgling swallow and the night will end with broken dishes, bruised flesh, sirens. She will either tear apart the cabin or claw her way outside.

She tries to keep herself occupied. She jumps rope until her legs ache. She does push-ups and crunches on the oval rug in the middle of the living room. She plays chess, spinning the board with every turn, pretending herself the enemy. She reads her way through the paperbacks on the bookcase, among them a Dover edition of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
. The bottom shelf is crowded with children’s stories and on more than one occasion she opens them as if to make sure their words and drawings haven’t vanished. Her eyes flit to her husband’s book—a self-published manifesto the size of a brick called
The Revolution
—its cover bearing the image of a man casting a wolf’s shadow, but this is a book she won’t read, no matter how bored she gets.

She crunches her way through a bag of tortilla chips and then licks her finger to pilfer the crumbs and salt. She eats peanuts, Oreos, Nutri-Grain bars. She cracks six eggs and grates cheese and chops peppers and stirs up a steaming omelet. She always has a coffee in hand, the mug clacking against her teeth. She is so hungry.

Tonight is especially bad. The moon is nearly full, and it pulls at her blood. Her mouth drowns in saliva. Her muscles feel like tightly coiled springs that no amount of stretching can loosen. She gnashes her teeth and breathes as though back from a run. Every noise draws her to the window, gun in hand. Every shadow makes her eyes narrow. She walks from room to room, a clockwise rotation of the windows of the house, peering out into the clearing walled by woods.

She keeps the cabin dark so as not to ruin her night vision, and the slots in the windows glow like slanted blue eyes. In the living room she drops to the floor and hurries out a set of twenty-five push-ups. After the last rep she pauses with her chest and cheek against the rug. She does not breathe. Something has changed. She can sense it like an open door, a shift in sound and pressure.

She rises slowly from the floor and approaches the front window and releases the safety. The slot is the size of a ruler and she must press her eyes against the wood to get any sort of view. Splinters chafe her nose and forehead. A good minute passes before she sees, at the edge of the woods, a shadow come alive and separate itself from the rest, moving into the clearing, seeming very much a part of the forest, with its antlers forking upward like a cluster of branches and the band of white beneath its muzzle as bright as the moon rising over the tree line. A buck.

She closes her eyes, and when they snap open the rest of the world has fallen away, except for the deer, as if spotlighted. It lowers its head now to taste some grass, and she too opens her mouth and runs her tongue along her teeth. Through her body she feels a rush of blood that finds its focus in her chest, a throbbing pressure. She imagines her rib cage as a cell that cannot contain much longer the black fingers gripping it, shaking it.

If she does not hurry, the deer will step into the range of the motion detector and the explosion of light will startle it away. The door is braced by three two-by-fours. She sets down the gun and picks up the drill and hesitates, knowing the deer will hear the sound. She rattles around in a junk drawer for a screwdriver instead. She hardly notices the cramps in her hand when she twists out the eight screws the length of her finger.

The voice that scolds her, that begs restraint, that tells her to stay put, is a mere whimper, easily ignored. She sheds her clothes like a skin no longer needed. When she pulls open the door, ripping off the two-by-fours, and takes in her first shuddering breath of fresh air in two weeks—when she steps across the threshold, from the shadowy pocket of the cabin to the moonlit expanse of the night—she is already changing, the process as simple and liquid for her as diving into a pond.

The deer raises its head to study her. Its eyes black. Its ears twitching. It lifts one of its hooves, ready to move—and then, when she starts off the porch at a dead sprint, it twists away from her, bounding toward the cover of the trees. The motion detector flashes—instant daylight—and throws her shadow before her, a long black seam she pursues.

The wind shushes her ears, trembles her hair, making her feel as though she rides its currents, weaving past trees and cutting through bushes and curling over logs, the deer always within sight. It is faster than her but compromised by its size. Its body thuds off tree trunks; its antlers clack against low-hanging branches, finally tangling in one, dragging the deer to a stop.

It shakes its head furiously, trying to tear away from the tree. Wood cracks but does not give. Needles rain down. The weight of her body knocks the deer free, the two of them a mess of flailing limbs, and then it is too late, her claws dragging across its throat. Its bones are pearly. Its blood is warm and steams like a ghost released. For a long time she is lost to hunger.

Then her muscles tighten, knot up. For the first time she feels the air’s chill. She is aware of herself as a wolf and a woman, the woman only faintly realized, like a burr in a sock, an abrasion that makes her lift her head from the carcass and recognize the danger of the night.

A cloud spills over the moon and momentarily dims the forest. She feels a pang of dread and rises from her crouch. Her sense of smell is compromised by the blood that sleeves her arms, masks her face, clots the hair that has risen from her skin. A scudding sound makes her flip around. The moon breaks from the clouds and splashes its light across what at first appears to be a boulder furred over with moss.

Its eyes sparkle like bits of quartz and its teeth glimmer when it rises into the massive figure of Morris Magog. She can see his breath trailing upward and imagines it as hot as the breath of an oven.

She does not whimper. She is not paralyzed by the terrible sight of him. A gust of wind is the only prompting she needs. She runs on all fours, letting the wolf lead her. Branches claw at her. The deer’s blood dries against her in a tacky patina. The thrill of the earlier chase is gone, replaced by a cold, emotionless need to escape. Fear can come later.

She never glances over her shoulder, but she can hear his passage close behind—wood snapping, a deep-throated growling that sounds like shifting stone—and she can picture him clearly enough, appearing more bear than wolf, a surging mass of hair and muscle with a mouth of darkest black.

There it is. The woods open into a clearing with a driveway snaking through it. The shed. The Ramcharger. The squat shape of the cabin. She feels more vulnerable in the open space and wonders for the first time if Magog is alone. An explosion of light blinds her. The motion detector. Through the yellow haze she finds the steps and clambers up them—the open door waits for her, a rectangular black slash that she dives through. She does not allow herself the time to look, to see how close he is behind her, but slams the deadbolt home and backs away from the door, certain it will explode inward at any moment.

Already she is retreating into her human form, and as always she feels small and bewildered and achy, like someone rising from a dreamscape to find herself gripped by a hangover. Without looking, she crabs her hand across the coffee table and finds the Glock.

She knows she should retrieve the shotgun, the machete, the extra clips of ammo. But right now her body only wants to curl up in the corner, the wood of the wall digging into her naked back. She hears the porch boards rasp. And then, a moment later, a faint scratching at the door, a nail teased across its exterior. The knob turns slowly—catches against the lock—then rattles back into place.

A minute passes. The motion detector clicks off. The harsh white light is replaced by a watery blue glow seeping through the window slots. One of them goes suddenly dark. She breathes through her nose with a high-pitched whistle. She wills her body to recede into the wall, to appear as another piece of furniture in the room. She aims the Glock. Her finger tightens on the trigger. A half pound of pressure is all it takes.

The darkness retreats and the space glows blue again—and then, a moment later, white, the motion detector activated.

She does not feel relieved. She feels like she has a noose around her neck and it is only a matter of time before the trapdoor gives out beneath her. She waits for one of the longest silences of her life, barely breathing in an effort to listen more closely. Then the cabin shakes as something lights upon the roof. She does not cry out but brings a hand to her mouth and bites down on it.

The pitched ceiling is made of tongue-and-groove fitted pine planks. When the footsteps come, slow and thudding, fifty years of dust rains down. She blinks away the grit in her eyes and squeezes the pistol so tightly that the grip bites her palm. She concentrates on the impact of each footstep, the complaint of the wood, until she feels she could sketch a circle on the ceiling that targets Magog.

He is fucking with her. She is done being fucked with. She raises the Glock and fires.

She squeezes off five rounds, and the spent hulls litter her lap and burn her but she hardly notices. The cabin quakes as though struck by a car. She has hit her mark. The fallen body rolls, thundering its way down the roof. There comes a brief silence punctuated by a heavy
whump
.