Ebon Moon Read online

  “Do you still love me, Jess?” Blake asked, loading the single bullet into the .357 magnum pistol. He spun the chamber.

  “Please, don’t do this.” Jessica struggled against the duct tape trapping her in the chair. The black eye where he punched her had already swollen shut. With her good eye, she watched in terror as he stepped beside Megan sleeping peacefully on the couch. He placed the barrel of the gun against their daughter’s head.

  “What’s the answer, Jess?” His eyes burned with an insane glint. “Yes or no?”

  “Please, don’t,” Jessica pleaded while tears ran down her face. She spoke in a soft voice so as not to wake Megan. “Do me. Not our daughter. Please, Blake.”

  “Not so much fun, Jess.” He showed his evil smirk, signaling he was about to do something very bad. “Do you still love me, Jess?”

  “Yes.”

  “You lie.”

  Click.

  “Lovely day, isn’t it?” A voice asked causing Jessica to jump and turn.

  A large woman stood outside the front door to the Tastee-Freez. Dressed in a grease-spotted white apron with an equally stained work shirt, she lit a cigarette and smiled. Jessica looked around. The rest of the cars in the lot were gone except for her silver 1974 Camaro. The lunch rush had ended with her locked in memories so painful she didn’t notice.

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

  “I said it’s a beautiful day.”

  “Yes, it is,” Jessica replied.

  “It’s very warm for it being the last week of September.” The woman blew out a puff of smoke. “Indian summer is what they call it.”

  “Indian summer,” Megan muttered before putting the last of the cone in her mouth. She crunched down, causing white ice cream to squirt down her chin. “All gone, Mommy.”

  Jessica handed her daughter a napkin. “Wipe your face, baby.”

  The Tastee-Freez woman continued with an Oklahoma twang to her voice. “The weatherman says there’s a cold front coming, though. It should be here by the end of the week. You have a lovely daughter. Will you look at those big blue eyes? How old is she?”

  “Five.”

  Megan cleaned the ice cream from her chin and hid her bruised arm under the picnic table. Five years old and already knows to hide her abuse, Jessica realized.

  “Are you from around these parts?” The woman’s presence hovered just beyond the edge of the table. Jessica felt the paranoia return. Don’t get all spooked. It’s just a bored working woman wanting to make small talk after the lunch rush. Besides, she might be able to give me some information.

  “Just passing through.”

  “I’m Marjorie, by the way.”

  “Jessica, and this is my daughter, Megan.”

  “Hello,” Megan said with a smile.

  “Welcome to Hope Springs.” The woman smelled of cooking grease and fried burgers.

  “Thank you,” Jessica replied. “Perhaps you can help us. I’m thinking about settling in a small town like Hope Springs. We come from a larger city. Is this a place for a single mother to raise a daughter?”

  “Oh, honey, it’s a wonderful place. You couldn’t find one better. It’s a town of good church-loving people. Hope Springs is a very quiet community of softball games, weekend cookouts, and Sunday meetings. Just plain peaceful country folk around here.” Marjorie took the last pull on her cigarette. “There’s just one drawback.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a small town, dear. Everybody knows everybody.”

  “So everybody knows everybody’s business,” Jessica added.

  “That’s correct, and what they don’t know, they try to guess.” Marjorie chuckled. “Not many new people move into town. A pretty woman like you won’t be a stranger long.”

  “If I decide to live here, how would I go about finding a place?”

  “The Gazette only comes out on Monday,” Marjorie said, stepping on the cigarette butt. “If I was you, I’d try the post office. There’s a community bulletin board where people advertise houses for rent and things for sale.”

  “Thank you. I’ll do that.” Jessica stood and said to her daughter, “Let’s go, baby.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s nice meeting you,” Marjorie called out. “I hope you decide to stay. Lord knows we can use fresh faces about town. If you drop by and see me again, Megan, the next cone’s on me.”

  “Bye.” Megan waved back before climbing into the passenger side of the Camaro.

  Jessica slid behind the wheel and reached under the front seat to touch the loaded .357 magnum. The feel of the pistol gave her a small sense of security. She stole both the car and gun from Blake before escaping her home. If he found her now, he would do more than beat her.

  This time he would kill her.

  Jessica put the key in the ignition, and the Camaro’s large engine roared to life.

  “This is a pretty town, Mommy,” Megan said. “I like it. Are we going to stay here?”

  “If we can find a place,” she replied, backing the Camaro out onto the highway and angling the car toward the town.

  * * * *

  Like a Rockwell painting from the forties, Hope Springs was a little postcard-perfect community. The highway served as Main Street running through the center of town to the one traffic light. They drove past a church, dollar store, Laundromat, and courthouse before coming to the small post office.

  Jessica parked the Camaro. “I’m going in to see if there’s a house to rent. You wait here,” she said.

  “Okay, Mommy.”

  Jessica closed the driver door before remembering the pistol under the front seat. She decided against leaving Megan alone in the car.

  Opening the passenger door, she leaned in. “Why don’t you come inside with me, baby.”

  “Okay.” Megan slid out of the seat.

  Taking her daughter by the hand, Jessica entered the post office and removed her sunglasses to see better in the fluorescent light. On one wall in the lobby, she found the community bulletin board covered in tacked-up flyers and notices. Most were ads for used cars and trucks, auctions for farm machinery, garage sales, etc. Pinned to the board were three rental notices. She wrote down the phone number of each across her palm.

  “Who is that, Mommy?”

  Jessica glanced up. Megan pointed to a flyer showing a picture of a pretty brown-haired young woman in her early twenties. The heading at the top of the yellowed paper asked: Has anyone seen Michelle? Jessica leaned closer to read the text that stated Michelle Carlson had vanished over a year ago. Beneath her picture was a phone number for anyone with information on her whereabouts.

  “It’s a notice about a missing girl,” she answered.

  “She looks sad.”

  Beneath the missing person flyer, Jessica noticed a gold thumbtack that pinned a business card to the board. Printed across the face of the card were the words:

  Waitress Wanted

  $5 an hour plus tips

  Roxie’s Roadhouse

  Karaoke, Cold Beer, Good Times

  5 miles east on Highway 133

  Jessica stuffed the card in the pocket of her jeans.

  “Let’s go, sweetheart.” She took Megan by the hand and left the lobby for the sunshine outside.

  Once she locked the seat belt around her daughter in the passenger side of the Camaro, Megan asked, “Is she dead, Mommy?”

  “Who?”

  “The girl in the picture.”

  Jessica paused for a second. “She’s just missing. Maybe she ran away from home like we did.”

  Megan shook her head and looked down at the bruises on her arm. “I think she’s dead.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Opening the door to his workshop, Jasper Higgins kicked out the empty whiskey bottle. It rolled end-over-end before coming to rest against an old tire sitting in the weeds. He squinted up at the sunlight with bloodshot eyes and a hangover pounding in his head.

  He had spent the night with
Jack Daniel’s, the only companion he had left now.

  Together, they painted a new sign.

  Rubbing calloused hands across the gray stubble on his face, Jasper selected a hammer and nails from a workbench and dropped them into the pockets of his overalls. He bent down to grab the sheet of plywood, sending a deep pain shooting through his back. He used to carry the signs, but in the last year, his body had succumbed to painful arthritis. Now he could only drag them to their destinations.

  Grunting and cursing under his breath, he pulled the plywood across the overgrown grass toward the others he posted over the last two years. The handmade billboards stood in a line along the stretch of his farmland bordering Highway 133 and were intended for the drivers traveling between Hope Springs and the larger town of Morris, seven miles away. The words scrawled across the scabby pieces of wood told of the beast who murdered his wife one horrible night. The signs served as a warning to the unbelievers of their impending doom. God’s judgment was at hand, and the wolf was waiting at their door.

  Reaching the pole he erected the day before, Jasper stopped to catch his breath. The sun beat warm upon his brow, and he wiped sweat away with the sleeve of his grimy work shirt. He took a moment to look back over the farm he worked for the last fifty years. The clouds broke the sunlight to cast shifting shadows over the rusting tractor, the overgrown fields, and the peeling paint of the house and barn. When Emma was alive, golden wheat fields surrounded the property. The farm died when Satan murdered his beloved wife. Its only crop now was the signs he made.

  Jasper located the aluminum stepladder against the fence running along the front of his property. Just a few yards beyond, cars and trucks raced down the two-lane blacktop of Highway 133. None slowed to read his scrawled words of innocence and doom. A few passing drivers honked, but he did not wave to them. To most of the locals, he was a crazy Bible-spouting drunk who murdered his wife.

  He unfolded the ladder, grabbed the painted plywood, and hefted it up the pole. Once in place, he pounded nails through the sign. Every hammer blow became more intense as he recalled why he hung the words in the first place. No one believed what he saw the night of Emma’s death. Not the sheriff. Not the papers. They tried to pin the murder on him, but there wasn’t enough evidence. After a thorough search of his farm, they never found Emma’s body.

  He became their number-one suspect.

  Jasper had no doubt who committed the vicious crime. The Beast of Revelations murdered his wife. He remembered waking that night to see something looming over their bed, a hideous hunched shadow against the glow of the moonlight from the open window. The creature’s red eyes burned like fire. Before he could cry out, the demon grabbed Emma with black claws and fled leaping through the window. Her horrible screams faded away as the thing carried her off into the darkness beneath a full moon.

  He pounded in the last nail as tears moistened his eyes. Tucking the hammer in the loop of his greasy overalls, he descended the ladder and stared up at his latest handiwork. The sun shone across the words he had spent all night painting on the plywood. He read them one more time:

  I did not commit any crime.

  Satan in all of his wickedness

  took my wife from me.

  I’ve seen the Beast of Revelations

  It comes like a thief in the night.

  The descent to Hell is easy.

  Find God and the love of Jesus.

  For the end-times are here.

  “I love you, Emma,” Jasper whispered with a tear in his eye.

  Tires squealed from behind. He turned to the sound. A late-model gray pickup had parked on the shoulder of the road. Two teenage boys exited the vehicle and walked toward him. One of them he recognized: Terry Newman, a young man who had been a member of his youth ministry group at the Southern Baptist Church of Christ in Hope Springs before Emma’s death. Since that time, the boy had put on a few extra pounds around the belly. The other was a skinny teen whose face was covered in pimples. He walked next to Terry holding the last three cans of a six-pack of beer wrapped in plastic rings. Neither of them was of legal drinking age.

  The two stopped just on the other side of the fence.

  “What are you doing, Mr. Higgins?” Terry asked. “Putting up another sign?”

  “Yep.” He nodded. “It’s nice to see you again, Terry. You’ve grown so much I nearly didn’t recognize you.”

  With apprehension, he studied the other youth with the pimples and the beer. The boy looked like trouble. Jasper once loved spreading God’s word to the young men in the area, but since Emma’s death, he didn’t trust teenagers. When he went into town, they would honk and call him cruel names while racing by in their fancy cars or trucks. He also suspected a group of teenage boys were responsible for shooting holes through his signs in the middle of the night.

  “I don’t think I’ve met your friend, Terry.” Jasper started folding the aluminum ladder and placing it on the ground.

  “Oh, this is Sid Granger.”

  “You want a beer, old man?” Sid asked, pulling a can from the plastic ring of the six-pack.

  “I don’t drink with minors.”

  “Really?” Sid chuckled. “You’re already shitfaced. I can smell it on your breath. Your ass is drunker than both of us combined.” He chuckled handing the beer to Terry.

  “Don’t be a prick, Sid.” Terry popped the top. “Mr. Higgins used to be my Sunday school teacher.”

  “Is that right? I hear he’s a crazy bastard that murdered his wife and says the devil did it. He’s a fucking psycho, but that’s cool.”

  “If he said the devil murdered her, I believe him,” Terry replied and said to Jasper, “You didn’t do it, did you, Mr. Higgins?”

  “I’m innocent.” He couldn’t count how many times he had said those words to anyone who would listen.

  “There. Mr. Higgins is innocent. Enough said,” Terry replied, looking at the row of signs running along the fence. “You sure put a lot of work into your signs, Mr. Higgins. I bet there are over thirty of them.”

  Sid squinted up at his latest message in the sunlight. “Hey, what does that mean, you’ve seen the Beast of Revelations? So this beast is the one who broke into your house and killed your wife, right?”

  Jasper nodded but said nothing.

  “That’s awesome, man. So what the fuck did it look like?”

  He described the horror to them: the black hunched shape, the claws and fangs, and the eyes that burned with hellfire. Even in the hot sun, the recollection brought a chill down his spine.

  “Sounds like a werewolf to me,” Sid commented after taking a long drink of beer. “I don’t think you got the right monster, old man. It’s not the Beast of Revelations; it’s a fucking werewolf.”

  “A werewolf? Are you saying it was some kind of wolf?”

  “You mean you don’t know what a werewolf is?” Surprise showed on Sid’s face.

  Jasper thought to himself. It seemed one of the arresting detectives used the term, but he wasn’t sure. Not after a night of hard drinking. “I guess not.”

  “Didn’t you ever see the movie The Howling?” Sid asked.

  “I don’t own a television. Emma always said it was a tool of the devil. We just listen to a Christian station on the radio.”

  “Fucking boring.” Sid tossed away an empty can into the ditch.

  Terry spoke up. “Well, a werewolf is a man who changes into an animal form when there is a full moon. It’ll run around killing people and change back to human after the night of the full moon is over. It’s only a myth, though. No one’s ever seen one for real.”

  “There was a full moon the night of Emma’s murder. Maybe it was a werewolf I saw in my house that night.”

  “You know how you kill one of those fuckers?” Sid popped the top of the last beer.

  Again, Jasper shook his head no.

  “You got to shoot him with silver bullets. The only way you can kill one.”

  “Silver bullets?” />
  “Yeah, silver does a fucking number on them. It kills them deader than shit. Any other wound they can heal, but not one from a silver bullet. You shoot one and he turns back to a naked man lying on the ground and all fucked up.”

  Terry laughed and said, “You got to have silver bullets, Mr. Higgins. That’ll kill any werewolves coming around your house.”

  “Thank you. I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “No problem, Mr. Higgins.” Terry finished his beer and crumpled the can.

  For a moment, Jasper remembered the boy he knew three years ago. Terry had been an eager participant in the Bible classes he taught to the young men before the murder accusations. Afterward, many of the parents pulled their kids out of the youth ministry because he had become an embarrassment to the little church. Looking at him now, Jasper fought back a deep sadness.

  “Terry, when was the last time you went to church?” he asked.

  The boy’s eyes looked down to the ground. “I haven’t gone back since you stopped teaching the youth classes. I hang out with Sid now.”

  “Don’t turn away from God, son. Don’t let what happened to me keep you from church and the love of Jesus.”

  “I guess I just don’t believe like I used to,” Terry said in a barely audible voice.

  “Don’t stop because of me. You were saved, son. I was the one who was your witness before God.”

  “I know.” Terry nodded.

  Sid shoved the boy against the shoulder. “You’re going to take preaching from a whacked-out old drunk? The fucker killed his wife, dumbass.

  Jasper ignored him and continued, “Remember the things we talked about in Bible class? How Jesus died for our sins and only through him can one reach salvation?”

  Sid began walking back to the truck. “It’s all bullshit. Don’t pay any attention to the old fucker. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Please go back to church, Terry. Don’t turn your back on the love of Jesus. Do it for me.”

  “Here’s what I think about your Jesus, fuckhead!” Sid spun around pitching the half-empty can of beer. It struck the new sign splattering all over the words in a spray of foam. “Now, what do you have to say, preacher man?”