Chuck Hogan - The Killing Moon - A Novel

A crack , a spray of flame, and he dropped onto his back on the side of the dirt road.

Nothing made sense at first. Not the trees overhead, nor the dark sky. The gasping that would not fill his lungs.

He heard hissing and felt a great pressure easing in the center of his chest, a sensation like deflating, like shrinking back into boyhood.

His fight-or-flight response failed him, blunted by years of false alarms. In the end, his brain was unable to differentiate between legitimate trauma and the fire drill of another cheap high.

The forest was fleeing him on all sides. Light came up in his face that he did not realize was a flashlight; a bright, beaming presence he thought might be divine.

Ten minutes earlier, he had been so fully alive. Pushing his way through the snagging branches of the Borderlands State Forest, jogging at times, giddy as he followed the full and smiling moon through the treetops. Intensely alive, every part of him, as he had not felt in weeks or even months.

He was two full days beyond sleep, yet his thoughts remained hyperfocused and particular, his mind blazing pure blue flame (no flickers of orange tonight, no air in the line). The thrill of risk, of danger, was his spark and his fuel.

He knew these haunted woods so well because it was he who had once haunted them.

Running the Borderlands had been, back in high school, a weekend dare for popular seniors with new driver’s licenses: speeding their parents’ cars along the ungated fire road that sliced through the state forest like a nasty scar. A midnight rite of passage, marquee entertainment in a town full of nothing-to-do, this tiny rural map-smudge in the northwest corner of Massachusetts, a fading and forsaken hamlet named Black Falls.

He had longed to participate, to be included as a passenger among a carload of screaming teenagers tearing through the forest. Stopping short on the access road, cutting the headlights, soaking in total blackness for an extra thrill. The stuff of roller coasters and horror movies.

But he was a strange young boy who had grown still stranger in adolescence. An outcast. One whom the others would never, repeat, never invite.

And indeed, he was different. More than any of them knew.

That was how he got the idea.

He still had loads of makeup left over from Halloween. He knew a thing or two about theatricality, about costumes, about the importance of performance. The mask and the reveal.

Word of the black-haired ghoul on the fire road blazed through school that week. Darting out of the trees with screaming eyes and a gaping black smile. The thrill seekers who returned the following weekend were disappointed by a no-show, until the creature’s notoriety exploded full force the weekend after that, with a dramatic reappearance said to have fouled the undergarments of a varsity running back.

The next week, no apparition, only the discovery of a blood-soaked shirt dripping from a low tree branch. Two more weeks passed, kids racing their fears with no payoff, until the demonic ghoul appeared yet again, this time hurling a severed human head (a hollowed-out cantaloupe larded with a mixture of Karo syrup and red food coloring) into a passing windshield, where it exploded with gore.

The legend of Hell Road had been born.

He camped there on weekend nights when the Thing in the Woods materialized, and even some nights when It didn’t: watching the headlights shoot through the Borderlands, his classmates alive to the danger, begging for some appalling shock to jolt them out of their tedious small-town existence. But they were merely flirting with death, whereas he was downright smitten.

Never once had he been afraid in these woods. He found only calm here. A haunted teenager sleeping in a haunted forest, he felt consoled.

That was how he navigated this night without flashlight or fear, following one of his old tree paths to the impending rendezvous on Hell Road. He had suffered all day in anticipation of this moment, opening himself to the forest now, to whatever this night would bring. The secret of the mystery man about to be exposed.

He had even worn his costume, updated through the years, including his hair. The night heat was oppressive, but he had no choice in the matter. It was not a disguise he wore, but a manifestation.

Not a mask, but a reveal.

Secrets were a thing he fed upon. A blood meal to him, a thing he craved. That sustained him.

But to Maddox he had made certain promises, some of which he might even keep. He was trying to be good. He actually was.

Illicit, not illegal, the midnight encounter of two like-minded souls of consensual age in the deep, dark forest. Adventurous, yes, and mysterious, and spectacularly dangerous — but perfectly legal.

He was hopeful, always. Of meeting a true soul mate. Of finding one person out there who understood him. His whims and eccentricities. He did believe, from their chats, that this mystery man in fact knew who he was, and evidently was okay with that. Which was a start. It would save him from getting beat up at least. Mystery Man even referred to their rendezvous point as “Hell Road,” so he had to be a local.

Regardless, it had given him something to dream about. Something to look forward to. A reason to go tripping through the forest yet again.

Night, bring me what you will.

That was what he had been thinking as he emerged onto the hard dirt pack of the moonlit fire road. And what he thought now as the light flooded his eyes, and he expelled a final, gusty sigh, settling deeply and comfortably into the ground as though it were a child’s soft mattress. He reverted to his best self, that innocent and unbroken young boy, exhausted at the end of another endless day of summer, surrendering to the moonlight and his secret dreams.

It was the blue lights that drew him.

Kane Ripsbaugh didn’t go around seeking out beauty in life.

He had no poetry in his heart, no language for pretty things. He owned a septic service company and ran the town highway department and was loyal to his difficult wife. But police blues pulsing against the dark night: he doubted there was ever a more beautiful sight than that.

Ripsbaugh stopped his truck and killed the engine. He left the headlights on and looked out at the road in a squinting way that had nothing to do with the strange scene his lamps revealed. This was the way he looked at the world.

The cop out there, the new hire, Maddox, had his revolver drawn. He glanced into the headlights, then backed off from the big deer dying in the road.

Ripsbaugh climbed out and down, his boots hitting the pavement. As the head of Black Falls’ highway department, a hurt deer blocking the road was as much his business as anyone else’s.

“You all right?” he asked Maddox, walking up on him slow.

“Yeah,” said Maddox, looking anything but. “Fine.”

Ripsbaugh watched the deer try to lift its head. Its hooves scraped at the pavement, blood glistening on its muzzle and ears. The stick casting a jagged shadow near its head was not a stick at all but a broken antler.

Some fifty yards down the road, Maddox’s patrol car was pulled over onto the shoulder. The driver’s side door was open.

Maddox started to talk. “I was driving past the falls. The spray washed over my car, so I hit the wipers. The road ahead was clear. All of a sudden, bam! Car jerks left — not a swerve like I was losing control, but like the car had been shoved. I realized I hadn’t hit anything. Something hit me.”