Low Red Moon (33 page)

“Yeah, sure thing,” Deacon mutters, but he can see the relief pooling like thick glycerin tears in Downs’ eyes. “Whatever you say, Detective.”

“I swear to you, we’re doing everything we can.”

“You’re wasting your time,” Deacon says, and he glances at the apartment windows again, at the safe incandescent glow through the glass.

“We’ll find her,” Downs says. “You just gotta keep believing that. You just gotta let us do our job.”

“The girl you found out back, can I talk to her?”

“She isn’t even conscious, Deke. Do you know who she is?”

“Maybe,” he says, “and maybe no one does,” and then he lets one of the other policemen lead him away to a black-and-white parked in the street, catty-corner to the building. The cop asks if he’d like some hot coffee, and when Deacon says no, shuts the door, locking him in. Deacon leans back in the seat and stares up at the clearing sky through the rear windshield—the last purple-gray wisps of the storm clouds sailing by high above the rooftops, a handful of stars and the cold moon, almost full now. In a little while, he closes his eyes, waiting for Downs to come back for him, for whatever Narcissa Snow’s left upstairs, and Deacon Silvey prays for the first time since he was a child.

I
n the soft half-light behind her eyelids, Chance listens to the airplane-propeller hum of the tires on the road, the comforting, consoling thrum that has carried her from one weightless hour to the next. Morning sunshine warm on her face through the windows, bathing her like honey; no time here, and the fear is far away, unimportant, so long as she doesn’t think about it. So long as she keeps the whys and hows at arm’s length, where they belong.

“When I was seven,” the child says to her from the backseat. “Do you remember when I was seven, and I broke my arm?”

“Yes,” Chance replies, even though she doesn’t.

“You told me to be careful, climbing trees.”

“Did I?”

“Of course you did, Mother,” the child replies.

“You should rest now,” she says. “You’ll need your strength.”

“Is it very far, the place we’re going?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember if I know or not,” and the thing behind the steering wheel, the werewolf, the monster with the sun trapped inside its smoldering skull, tells her to shut up.

“Faster!” the child squeals excitedly. “Don’t try to talk!”

“I’m sick of listening to you babble,” the werewolf growls.

“Faster! Faster! I wonder if all the things out there move along with us?”

“I don’t know,” Chance says. “I can’t see them.”

“Well, you could, if you’d open your eyes,” but that’s the last thing she wants to do, better here in the warm honey-light with the constant, soothing thrum of the tires, better if she doesn’t have to see the face of the beast, the waxy mask it wears so other people don’t see the things it’s shown Chance.

“Let me sleep a while,” she says to the child, trying to sound firm, but also trying not to scold, and the werewolf growls again.

“Maybe I’m giving you too much,” it says. “Or maybe I’m not giving you enough. Maybe if I give you just a little more next time, you’ll shut the fuck up for a while.”

“I’m fine,” Chance tells it. “I’ll stop talking.”

She hears the click of the radio knob, static, white noise to get in the way of the wheel sounds, and then a man’s singing a gospel song.
That’s not so bad,
she thinks, curious to hear how the radio voice slips so easily in between the rays of light, through her skin, between the tires and the asphalt.

“…I once was lost, but now I’m found…” and then the crackle and pop of more static, and Chance almost asks the werewolf to put it back, that she wants to hear all the song, but then decides it’s better if she keeps quiet for a while.

But now I’m found,
and
No,
Chance thinks.
I’m not found at all, am I? I’m still very, very lost.

“You can be the White Queen’s Pawn,” the child says unhelpfully. “And you’re in the Second Square to begin with. When you get to the Eighth Square, you’ll be Queen—”

“You should be quiet for a little bit,” Chance says. “We’ll talk more later. Later on, I’ll tell you a story.”

“There’s that same old tree again,” the child says and laughs, a high wind-chime laugh that Chance is glad the werewolf can’t hear. “I think we’ve been under this tree the whole time, Mother.”

“Go to sleep,” she says. “I need to go to sleep.”

“You need to shut the hell up for five minutes,” the monster growls and snaps its jaws. Now there’s rock music blaring from the radio, nothing Chance recognizes or wants to recognize, and she tries to hear the tire hum through the writhing maze of electric guitars and drums.

“You can sleep when you’re dead, girl,” the child says, just like Deacon, and it surprises her so much that Chance opens her eyes partway and squints painfully at the brilliant day, the sun and the hills rolling past outside the car.

“I need to pee,” she says, trying not to mumble or slur the words. “I’m thirsty, and I need to pee.”

“There’s no place to stop here,” the werewolf tells her. “You’ll just have to wait. You shouldn’t drink so damn much.”

“I’m pregnant,” Chance replies impatiently. “Pregnant women drink a lot of water, and then they pee a lot. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that?”

“You drew a trilobite on my cast,” the child chimes in from the backseat. “And a red
Tyrannosaurus.
”

“No one ever told me they talk so goddamn much,” the werewolf growls and turns up the radio. “I ought to cut out your goddamn tongue. It’s not like you’re going to need it.”

“It’s not me talking. It’s the needles,” Chance says, though she meant to say “It’s the shit
in
the needles,” but part of it got lost in all the racket coming from the radio. “I really do have to pee,” she whispers, and the child with Deacon’s strange eyes laughs, but she doesn’t turn around to see why. She stares out the window, much too much trouble to close her eyelids again, now that they’re open, watching the steep wooded hills, autumn-colored hardwoods and grass that’s still mostly green, wondering where they are, how far they’ve driven, how many nights and days since the werewolf came slinking out of the storm to take her away.

“Where are we?” she asks, and “We’re under the tree,” the child answers. “I fell and we’re waiting for Daddy.”

“No, I mean where are we
at,
not where are we
when.
”

“What difference does it make?” the werewolf growls.

“Maybe it’s someplace I’ve never been before. Maybe I’d just like to know.”

The car passes between gray-white limestone walls, a small slice of the world taken away long ago to let the road come through. “See, I think those rocks are Mississippian,” Chance tells the werewolf. “But they might be Ordovician. If I knew where we were, I could tell you which.”

“Why the hell do you think I care?”

“I care,” Chance says. “The Ordovician’s not so interesting, but the Mississippian—”

“We’re in Virginia. We’ve been in fucking Virginia forever. Now will you zip it?”

“Virginia,” Chance says, repeating the word because it takes her a second to remember exactly what it means. “Then they probably are Mississippian, after all.”

“I’ve got a scalpel and clamps in my bag in the trunk—”

“But I might bleed to death,” Chance whispers, sly whisper that makes the child in the backseat laugh out loud again. “We can’t have that, can we?”

“I’m a real whiz with a needle and thread,” the werewolf barks back. “Trust me, you wouldn’t bleed to death.”

“Anyway,” Chance says. “I’m going to pee on your seat and the floorboard, and then I guess you’ll have to steal
another
car.”

“She does that later, after the fire,” the child says.

“Oh,” Chance replies, and the car passes through another road cut, higher walls than the last one, and for a moment the sun is eclipsed by the exposed rocks. A moment of chill air, and Chance shivers and starts talking again so she doesn’t have to think about cold, dark places.

“Are we in the Valley and Ridge Province?” she asks, but doesn’t wait for the werewolf to answer before she continues. “If we are, then it probably is only Ordovician. Shallow water carbonate deposition predominated, up until the Taconic Orogeny began, anyway. There’s the Conococheague Formation. Isn’t that a wonderful name? And the whole Beekmantown Group—”

“What’s an orogeny?” the child asks.

“When mountains get made,” Chance replies, and then they’re out in the sun again, and she’d already forgotten how good it felt on her face.

“I see,” the child says thoughtfully. “Are there dinosaurs in those rocks?”

“No. There won’t be dinosaurs for a long time yet, not for hundreds of millions of years. But there were lots of trilobites and brachiopods, and bryozoans. Remember me telling you about bryo—?”

“Jesus fucking
Christ!
” the werewolf snarls, and it cuts the steering wheel like it’s decided it’s a better idea to try driving straight through the pastures and trees. The car bounces off the blacktop and onto the narrow shoulder, slinging gravel, plowing up red mud and tall brown stalks of ragweed and yellow goldenrod. It rolls to a stop beside a listing wooden billboard that reads repent siners for the end is near; sun-faded crimson paint on peeling white, letters taller than Chance.

“That’s not how you spell ‘sinners,’” Chance says, pointing at the sign. “I don’t think that’s even a real word.”

“Just get out of the damn car,” the werewolf growls at her and snaps its ivory teeth at the sizzling Naugahyde air. “Get out and take your fucking piss, and then shut the fuck up.”

“But someone might drive by and see me.”

“Then go behind the sign,” and Chance looks up at the billboard again, stares at it a second or two, trying to remember if she’s right about the proper spelling of “sinners,” and then she nods her head.

“Okay. Sure. That’ll do. But I need toilet paper.”

The werewolf curses and grabs a wad of paper napkins from the dash, leftovers from someplace they stopped for hamburgers last night, and she shoves them into Chance’s hand.

“Don’t try to run, Mother,” the child says from the backseat. “You won’t get far. She’s fast.”

“Don’t worry,” Chance replies, smiling and looking over her shoulder, but she can’t see the child so maybe it’s hiding in the floorboard. She’d hide, if she could fit. “I’m just gonna pee. I’ll be right back,” and then, to the monster in the driver’s seat, “Don’t try to leave me here. I don’t even know where we are.”

“Just get out of the fucking car,” it snarls back at her, and Chance unlatches her seat belt and opens the door. She leaves it standing open, so it’ll be more trouble than it’s worth for the werewolf to drive off and leave her stranded. Dizzy when she stands up, and she almost falls, has to lean against the car until her head stops spinning. “Just the morphine,” she says, because it scared her until she remembered the needles, the white powder, and she turns her back on the car and starts pushing her way through the tall weeds. Small brown grasshoppers leap out of her way, hundreds of grasshoppers, it seems, and a bumblebee buzzes loudly past her head.

“Deacon’s coming,” she whispers to the insects, quiet so the werewolf won’t hear her. “He’s coming with the starlings to take me back home. So all I have to do is stay alive until he finds me.”

The sign looms above her, declaring doom and damnation and hope like a hostage, and Chance tries to focus on where she’s putting her feet, watching out for poison oak and copperheads.
Now, wouldn’t that be ironic?
she thinks and wonders if the werewolf has anything in its bag of tricks to treat snakebite. Another dizzy spell, and so she leans against one of the signposts this time until it passes. “Deacon’s coming,” she says again.

The hills above the sign are very steep, the forest like a fortress wall on the other side, and maybe if she ran she
could
get away, if she could only make it up the hill; the sky so wide and blue above her, and there must be a hundred thousand places to hide in there. To make herself very small and burrow deep down into the fallen leaves and detritus, pull the soil up over her head and wait for Deacon to come and take her home. Down with the worms and grubs, and the werewolf would never, ever think to look that far down.

“Yes, she would,” Chance says with the child’s androgynous voice. “That’s the very first place she would look. Monsters are always looking down.”

Chance steps behind the sign and unbuttons the denim straps of her overalls, lets them fall down around her ankles. Just her oversized T-shirt and violet panties to deal with now, and she pushes the panties down and squats with her back pressed firmly against the signpost, so she doesn’t lose her balance and go rolling head over heels out into the road.

“Try not to pee on yourself this time,” she says, knowing she probably will anyway. Too awkward, too clumsy, and the weeds are poking at her and starting to make her itch. The sudden sound of the warm urine rushing from her aching, distended bladder reminds Chance that she’s thirsty, has been thirsty forever it seems, and she wishes she had a Coke or a cold bottle of water. And then she sees the dead thing, half hidden in the tall grass only a few feet away from her, sees it and smells it in the same instant, and covers her mouth and nose.

It’s hard to tell what it used to be, before, to start with; a big possum or a raccoon, once upon a time, a small dog maybe, or a fox, but now there are only a few matted tufts of gray-black fur clinging stubbornly to the bones and rot, a noisy, iridescent cloud of greenbottle flies hovering in the air above the corpse. Sharp white teeth still set in its slender jaws, and Chance thinks if only
she
had teeth like that, maybe she could have fought off the werewolf and wouldn’t be pissing behind an end-of-the-world sign in the mountains of Virginia right now. And her child would be safe, and Deacon would be safe, if she had teeth like that.

“They didn’t save
him,
” the child says unhappily, speaking with her tongue, her lips, and Chance starts crying, and the last few trickles of piss splash against her overalls and left shoe. She leans back against the signpost and stares up at the sky, wishing she believed in anything at all, anything watching down on her.