The Moonlit Mind (Novella): A Tale of Suspense Page 9

  After waiting a few minutes, he cautiously leaves his room. The second-floor hallway is deserted. The stillness that has settled on the house reminds him of the ominous hush on that terrible night in July.

  The time is only 7:42. On that other night, the night of Saints Anne and Joachim, Theron Hall was not this quiet until nine-thirty. Maybe this feast will begin early.

  Certain that Nanny Sayo’s eagerness is shared by all the rest of them, that something bad might happen to Harley sooner than anticipated, Crispin makes no effort to be stealthy. He races along the hallway to the central stairs, which servants and children are never supposed to use.

  Between the second and the ground floors, two staircases sweep down the walls of a round foyer, forming a kind of harp when you look at them from below. He takes the nearest, descending two steps at a time, and dashes across the marble-floored entry to the front door.

  He intends to run into the street, flag down vehicles, bring traffic to a stop, look for a police cruiser. He’ll tell them that terrorists have broken into Theron Hall and taken everyone hostage, his parents and brother and the entire staff. Terrorists with guns, and they’ve taken everyone to the basement. Crispin will make so much commotion that the police will have to send in a SWAT team like they always do on TV, and when that starts to happen, nobody will dare do anything to Harley. They won’t dare.

  When he yanks open the front door, he discovers a uniformed policeman standing on the doorstep, not facing Crispin as if about to ring the bell, but facing the street as if guarding the house. He is a big man, and when he turns to the boy, he’s got a billy club in one hand. His face is broad and hard and, in the stoop light, red with anger.

  “You should be in bed, piglet.”

  Crispin lets go of the door, backs away as it swings shut. The policeman can be seen in silhouette through the beveled and lightly frosted glass in the top half of the door, but he does not attempt to come inside.

  Crispin’s heart is knocking hard against his breastbone, as if it wants to break out of him.

  He sprints through the house, into the deserted kitchen. This should be a busy place right now, because dinner is always served to Clarette and Giles promptly at eight o’clock. Nothing simmers on the stove, and the ovens are off.

  A cop stands also on the back doorstep. In fact, it seems to be the same officer or his twin, facing the door this time, billy club in his right hand, rapping it menacingly into the open palm of his left.

  “I have my assignment, piglet. You’ll find me at every door you open.”

  15

  Sunday, the fourth of December, on the evening of Crispin’s thirteenth birthday …

  Snow fell through the previous night and all morning, but in the afternoon the storm relented.

  They sit across from each other in the same booth in Eleanor’s, though this time Harley lies on Amity’s bench, his head in her lap. Dinner is done, and the dog is dozing.

  She sings the birthday song softly, sweetly. It’s corny, but he doesn’t stop her. Her singing voice is lovely.

  After the song, she says, “Tell me again about the cards.”

  “I told you the first time I was here. There’s not much to it, really.”

  “I want to understand better.”

  “There’s no understanding it.”

  “Try me.”

  Her face is lovely in the candlelight. There is nothing of Nanny Sayo in this girl and never could be. Nothing of Clarette, either, or of Proserpina.

  Crispin taps the deck, which lies on the table, in its box. “The shop sold magic tricks and games. The old man, the owner, said dogs were welcome.”

  “This was the night of the day you first met the dog.”

  “Yeah. I hadn’t named him yet. After I bought the cards, me and Harley sneaked down to the shop’s basement to stay the night.”

  “The owner didn’t know you were down there.”

  “Nope. He closed us in when he closed the shop.”

  “Why did you buy the cards?”

  “I don’t know. It just seemed …”

  “What?”

  “Something I needed to do. That was my second day on the run, so the feast of the archangels … that was still so fresh with me. Middle of the night, I woke up from a bad dream about my brother, woke up saying his name. That’s when I named the dog Harley. When and why.”

  The sleeping dog snores softly in Amity’s lap.

  “That’s when you opened the deck the first time,” she presses, for she knows this story well.

  “We had a light down there in the storeroom. The cards were something to do, to take my mind off … whatever. It was a brand-new pack. I know it had to be new because I broke the seal, stripped off the cellophane.”

  He opens the box now, removes the cards, but leaves them stacked facedown.

  “I shuffled them,” he remembers, “I don’t know … maybe five or six times. I was nine, the only card game I could play was five-hundred rummy, but I couldn’t even do that because I didn’t have anyone to play with but the dog.”

  “So you just dealt two hands faceup, so you could play against yourself.”

  “Stupid kid idea, playing against yourself. Anyway, the first four cards I deal are the sixes.”

  The memory still disturbs him, and he pauses.

  She can read him better than anyone has. She gives him time, but then nudges with three words: “Four moldy sixes.”

  “A brand-new deck, but the sixes are dirty, creased, and moldy.”

  “Like the sixes on the warehouse floor.”

  “Exactly like. There were other cards scattered on the warehouse floor when the dog led me in there to the dead junkie and his money, but the sixes were all together, faceup.”

  “All together when you went in.”

  “Yeah. But when we came out, only one six was on the floor. All the other cards seemed to be scattered where they had been, but three of the sixes were missing.”

  “Someone took them.”

  “No one was there. And who would want some moldy old cards?”

  In the basement storeroom of the magic-and-game shop, he had sat staring at the filthy cards for a long time, afraid to touch them.

  “What I finally did was go through the rest of the deck to make sure there wasn’t a completely different set of sixes, clean ones, but there wasn’t.”

  “And none of the other cards were dirty or creased, or moldy.”

  “None,” he confirms. “I just didn’t want to touch those four, like there was a curse on them or something. But Harley kept sniffing them and looking at me. So I decided if they didn’t scare him, they shouldn’t scare me.”

  Harley sighs and shudders, still asleep but evidently dreaming of something that pleases him.

  “I put the moldy sixes on top of the deck and reached for the box to stow them away. But Harley slaps one paw down hard on the box before I can pick it up.”

  “Good old Harley.”

  “He gives me this stare that seems to say, What are you doing, boy? You’re not done with this yet.”

  “The hairs were up on the back of your neck.”

  “They were,” Crispin agrees, “but in a kind of good way. I don’t know what the dog wants me to do, so I shuffle several times and deal out four cards again.”

  “The four sixes, but not the moldy ones.”

  “You might as well tell it, since you know it so well.”

  “I’d love to tell it if I knew anyone to trust with the story. But I like to hear you tell it.”

  “With your editorial assistance.”

  “No charge,” she says, and grins.

  Her smile reminds him of Mirabell’s, and he loves her like a sister.

  “I shuffle, deal, and right away turn up four sixes, but not moldy now. As crisp and clean as all the other cards. I go through the deck, looking for the damaged sixes, but there aren’t any.”

  “Harley still has one paw on the card box.”

  “H
e does. And for maybe an hour I keep shuffling and dealing, trying to turn up four moldy sixes again, or even four clean new ones, all in a row.”

  “But it doesn’t happen.”

  “It doesn’t,” Crispin agrees. “And then I hear myself say what I never thought to say. I mean, it all comes out of me like someone’s speaking through me. ‘Harley,’ I say, ‘when those four ugly ones come up again in a row, if they ever do, it’ll be time for us to go back to Theron Hall.’ ”

  “So then he takes his paw off the box.”

  “He does.”

  “And you put the cards away.”

  “I do.”

  Amity leans back in the booth and crosses her arms over her chest, hugging herself. “Now comes the part I like best.”

  Harley snorts, wakes, yawns, and sits up on the bench beside the Phantom of Broderick’s.

  16

  Nine-year-old Crispin on the night of archangels …

  Whether the policeman on the two doorsteps is one man, twins, or something else altogether, Crispin is not going to be able to get help from outside the house.

  Theron Hall seems deserted, and that means they are all in the basement. And his brother is down there with them. The feast, the celebration—whatever it is besides plain murder—will soon begin or has begun.

  In his mind’s eye clearly appears one of the paintings from the book titled A Year of Saints. The three archangels. Gabriel carries a lily, and Raphael leads a young man named Tobias on some journey. Michael is the most formidable of them, clad in armor and carrying a sword.

  From a rack of knives near the cooktop, Crispin selects the longest and sharpest blade.

  Off the kitchen are two small offices, one belonging to the head housekeeper, the other used by the two butlers, Minos, who is now in France, and Ned. The butlers keep a wall-mounted metal box in which hang an array of spare keys, all labeled.

  Crispin isn’t sure when he learned of this key collection, if he ever did, but now he takes a key labeled BASEMENT from one of the pegs. On second thought, he takes also a key labeled HOUSE. The keys and the knife, the wisdom and the sword.

  On the desk lies a ledger in which Ned is balancing the petty-cash account. Beside the ledger is an envelope that contains sixty-one dollars in cash. Crispin takes only eleven dollars. He stuffs the two fives and the single in a pocket of his jeans. This isn’t stealing, this is desperate necessity. If it were theft, he would take all sixty-one bucks. And even if it might be to some degree stealing, it is also something much worse than theft, which he will in time understand.

  He races down the south stairs to the basement door, glances back, but is not stalked this time by Cook Merripen. The key turns the lock, the bolt retracts, and the door opens into the lowest hall in the house.

  As he crosses the threshold, he hears the chanting, which he’d been unable to hear on the farther side of the door because his heart is raising a rhythmic thunder in his ears.

  The great steel slab stands open, and the light of many candles dances through the doorway into the otherwise shadowy corridor. He smells incense, too, a cloying fragrance utterly different from but somehow reminiscent of the aroma of the hideous stuff that Merripen poured into Crispin’s open mouth from the thermos.

  He’s drawn forward by love for his brother, but he is at the same time hesitant, fearing not only for his own life but also for some other loss at the moment nameless but terrifying to consider. He’s never been so conflicted before, determined to spare Harley no matter how many of the enemy he must slash his way past … yet at the same time struggling with a desire to drop the knife and fall to his knees and do whatever they want of him now, right now, not five days from now on the feast of Saint Francis.

  When he comes to the doorway, he discovers a chamber brightened mostly by candles standing on tiered tables around three sides of the room, a thousand candles if there’s one. The yellow-orange flames seem to quiver in time with the chanting, which is in a foreign language, maybe Latin.

  Knife held out before him, Crispin crosses the threshold, past which the concrete floor leads to what seem to be numerous mattresses laid side by side and covered with black sheets. He halts when he realizes that they are all here and then some—the entire staff and perhaps a dozen strangers, Clarette and Giles, Nanny Sayo—and that they are all naked.

  Crispin has never before seen anyone naked except himself and his brother. The sight of these bare bodies embarrasses him, shames him that he should be staring at them as he does, but also sends a not unpleasant shiver up his spine.

  Perhaps half the assembled are standing and chanting, and the others are either on their hands and knees or lying in strange postures, moving together in urgent rhythms, writhing. He needs a moment to understand that they are doing the man-woman thing, of which he has only the vaguest understanding, the man-woman thing, but the couples are not always a man and a woman, and they are not always only couples.

  None of them appear to notice him. Not yet. He is a small boy still outside the main crescent of candlelight, largely shadowed but for the knife blade that glimmers as if it’s gold.

  He sees Nanny Sayo doing something disgusting. She disgusts but also tantalizes him, and he takes two steps toward her before he realizes what he is doing and halts. A fresh terror, different from any he has known before, shears through him, because he realizes that if she sees him and turns those eyes on him, those pretty black eyes, the least terrible thing that might happen to him is that they will kill him. The sinuous candlelight, the rich incense that is one moment an exquisite perfume and the next moment a suffocating smog, the chanting, the supple movements of the writhing bodies, and now, from somewhere, reedy music: All of it does nothing so innocent as sweep over Crispin, a tide of experience, but instead envelops him, seems to take him as his nanny has sometimes taken him in her arms, surrounds him and lifts him, welcomes him. If Nanny Sayo catches sight of him now, if she meets his eyes, he knows in his heart that he might wake up years and years from now, not sure how he has gotten wherever he might be at that time, not sure who he is, sure of only one thing, that he is owned by someone, that he is a slave to her.

  This sensory stimulation has so overwhelmed him that only now does he raise his eyes from the crowd to what lies elevated beyond them. On a long white marble table lies Harley, dressed in a white gown like a choirboy, a wreath upon his head. He is chained to steel rings in the pale stone. His jaws stretch painfully to accommodate a green apple in his mouth, and the apple is held in place by a strap that goes around his head. Crispin looks higher yet and sees Jardena and Mr. Mordred, both in black robes. Masks are tilted off their faces, onto their heads, but now they pull them back in place, masks so realistic that suddenly Mr. Mordred seems to have the head of a leering goat, Jardena the head of a snarling pig.

  Another time, these masks might strike him as funny, Halloween dress-up, silly play-acting, but this is different because the faces under the masks are their masks, and the elaborate masks of goat and pig are their true faces. If people can be so different from what they appear to be, maybe nothing in the world is what—or only what—it seems to be.

  Behind and above Jardena and Mr. Mordred, on the back wall, hangs an object of which Crispin cannot immediately make sense. After a moment, he realizes that it is a crucifix hung upside down.

  Over the chanting and the music, Crispin hears a more intimate noise, a buzzing. A few feet above his head, a serpentine stream of fat horseflies winds out across the celebrants. These must be their marks, birthmarks, tattoos, whatever, once just silhouettes on their skin but now become real for the duration of the ceremony, swarming. He suspects that if one of the flies chooses to settle upon him, he will be lost.

  As the chanting of the standing members of the congregation reaches a higher pitch, Crispin looks back toward Harley in chains. The raised dagger in Jardena’s hand has a serpentine blade across which candlelight flows like a liquid.

  Crispin is just a boy, a small boy w
ith weaknesses of character, which have been encouraged since he came to live in Theron Hall. He is a boy whose formation is incomplete, whose heart is still a work in progress. He is a boy without the substance to be a warrior, and he is too late. The dagger plunges, and Crispin flees, runs from the horseflies and from the magnetic eyes of Nanny Sayo before she can turn them on him, runs from all responsibility for his brother, but also—as he will realize only years later—he runs from what calls to him seductively, from what he might have been if his weaknesses had run deeper or been worse.

  Breathing hard and raggedly, he finds himself in the foyer, without the knife but with the book, A Year of Saints, on the cover of which is a different portrait of Saint Michael, not in the company of Gabriel and Raphael this time, as in the interior illustration, but alone and fierce.

  Crispin pulls open the door and is confronted by the policeman who can be everywhere at once. “Useless little coward,” the hulking cop declares, and he swings the billy club, which shatters when it strikes the image of Saint Michael on the cover of the book.

  The boy dodges as the policeman reaches for him, and he races away from the house. He sprints across the sidewalk, springs off the curb and into traffic.

  On the farther side of Shadow Street stands the Pendleton, bigger even than Theron Hall, once a mansion for a single family, now an apartment building. He knows no one in the Pendleton. The place does not look welcoming, looks in fact like another kind of terror waiting to entrap him.

  Brakes shriek and car horns trumpet like prehistoric beasts, vehicles swerve around him with only inches to spare, but Crispin doesn’t care what happens to him anymore. He runs the center of the avenue, down Shadow Hill, taillights to one side and headlights to the other, and the sea of lights that is the city seems to rise like an incoming tide to meet him.