The Moth for the Star by James Reich

Author:James Reich [Reich, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror, gothic, murder, New York, mystery, noir, occult
Publisher: 7.13 Books
Published: 2023-06-16T01:39:23+00:00

chapter fourteen

The night was cold as they crossed Central Park West and drifted solemnly under the lambent trees at the perimeter toward the meadow. Campbell reached her black-gloved hand for his, and they gripped one another with the fingers of people drowning in a bitter tide. Charles Varnas realized that he was still holding his empty martini glass and felt a small guilt for stealing it from Konigsberg. He rested the glass upon a park bench for someone else to discover. Certainly, he thought, the actor could afford to lose one. For a time, they walked without speaking. The sheep had retreated to the north-east of the receding pasture, but could yet be seen, white and silver in the press of darkness, huddled and motionless as a photograph of smoke, or a mural of clouds, he thought. He wondered if the painful association they had set in him previously was used up. He seemed to be able to see them without memories that night. Perhaps this was an effect of Hallowe’en, a kind of suspension of pain. Campbell paused, pointing toward a row of plywood shacks. There were about a dozen small shanties, collaged from whatever discarded material and waste that could be found and nailed or lashed together, cardboard, painted planks of splintered signage, corrugated metal, tarpaulin shreds, and dirty bedsheets. They moved toward the row of makeshift shelters. There were obscure objects scattered in the mud that had spread about the small buildings.

“Welcome to Melanesia,” Varnas said, ironically. “They call these Hoovervilles.”

“I feel like I’m in the proper dress.” Campbell knocked her wooden beak against his. “Look, Charles, there’s a light in that one.”

In another abysmal shack a child was weeping quietly, and someone was trying to comfort it. Varnas pulled Campbell on toward the glassless window and the guttering candle she had pointed to. As they approached, it seemed that another candle was being lit inside. It was the last shelter on the row.

Time out of joint, the two figures—leather coats dragging over the rippled mud and embedded trash, wide hats eclipsing the distant streetlamps, their grotesque conical faces and glass eyeholes— moved through the acrid smoke of a dead bonfire.

“They got killed of the sheep,” Varnas said. The tortured, partly stripped skull of a white ewe stared from one jellied eye socket in a dune of ash. The soft flesh of its cheek had been peeled crudely from the bone with something blunt. Half of the tongue protruded from the side of its smashed jaw.

Campbell whispered, “Oh, God, how horrible.”

“Let’s go on.”

“Someone’s awake in there,” Campbell said. Again, she hesitated.

“Of course,” he said, casually.

At the smoldering fireside, they were almost directly outside the shack when the flap of corrugated metal that served as its door shifted. It seemed to Campbell that the occupant struggled with it as if it were stuck in the dirt. Then it fell outwards. The displaced air sent white ash and red sparks into the night. A figure staggered out.

“Feh!” The man was tall and dressed in a suit that appeared in the moonlight to be rusted with filth.

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