by S. T. Joshi
“Thank you for coming, David.”
David looked down from the mesmerizing spectacle at the cloaked figure in costume who was now standing next to Delia. The haunting apparition—someone dressed as a golem—took off their disturbing mask: It was Illya.
“Illya! What’s this all about?” David yelled over the roar of the pyrotechnics and the intoxicated celebrators. “Is Januuz here?”
Illya seemed troubled. He nodded, the black makeup around his eyes a strange contrast to his cropped, light-blond hair. Looking down to the ground, he motioned with a gesture of his arm, saying: “David, this is Januuz. I’ll leave you now. Shem!” With that, he vanished into the mob, grabbing Delia and dragging her with him as her screaming voice enfolded into the noise of the crowd.
“No! Delia! What’s happening!” Before David could follow them, Januuz appeared. He was a hulking figure dressed in black robes, and he blocked David’s way into the horde. Januuz’s mask was particularly gruesome: a twisted countenance with two faces, one fronting forward, though skewed, and the other offset to the rear. It was very convincing.
“We only come here once a year, David.” The voice coming from the mask was guttural, slow. The wide tongue licked the cracked lips on the forward mouth, leaving a silver slick. David stared at the man, his thoughts jumbled. At that moment, the second mouth screamed out: “It’s too late, David! We’ve changed our minds …”
For an instant David felt queasy, and everything appeared to slow down; there was a salty taste in his mouth. Coppery. It was then that he knew two things: first, that the thing in front of him was not wearing a mask, and second, that he was dying.
The second countenance was withered, its expression frantic—eyes rolling in their sockets, nose flaring—as it continued: “You cannot change the past. Every man carries the seeds of his own destruction within him, like a secret…. It is too late for you. Sacrifices and changes must be made.”
“You are guilty,” the first aspect muttered matter-of-factly, then grinned, showing rows of sharp teeth. It blinked its heavily lidded eyes as the fireworks flared overhead. “Look around us, David. All these people … They are all guilty of something, just like you. Some haven’t learned what yet, but they will, in due time, whether through their own realization or through our persuasion. When they do, we shall appear to them on our annual visit and lure them with their weaknesses, just as we did you.”
David could feel his sanity prying loose from his intellect. “What … are you? A demon? An alien? A hallucination or a dream?”
“Do we look to be a dream?” the faces replied in unison, then laughed. Unison again: “We are a god. The god of time, and transitions …”
In the distance, a mournful horn blared, adding a top note of sadness to the chaos on the Charles Bridge. In David’s overworked mind, the din of the crowd seemed to coalesce into a solemn requiem comprised of off-key chants, punctuated by dry drumbeats and the hollow clang of enormous, far-away bells. Crumbling to his knees, the great stone bridge was suddenly dark and barren except for Januuz and himself. Prague had become a vast land of nothingness.
As the New Year began, Januuz turned toward the Castle, and David followed, his past finally colliding with his future, and his time up at last.
Sealed by the Moon
GARY FRY
Gary Fry lives in Dracula’s Whitby, literally around the corner from where Bram Stoker was staying while thinking about that character. Gary has a Ph.D. in psychology, but his first love is literature. He was the first author in PS Publishing’s Showcase series, and Ramsey Campbell has referred to him as a “master.” He is the author of more than 15 books, and his latest are the Lovecraftian novel Conjure House (DarkFuse, 2013), the short story collection Shades of Nothingness (PS Publishing, 2013), the zombie novel Severed and novellas Menace, Savage, and Mutator (DarkFuse, 2014).
“WHAT’S SO IMPORTANT ABOUT THIS PLACE, ANYWAY?” asked Glenn, pulling his Vauxhall into the campsite’s car park.
Lily didn’t immediately reply, just sat in the passenger seat looking directly forwards, at a rocky landscape stretching to a hazy horizon. She’d grown up in this area, and Glenn hadn’t been too surprised when she’d asked to spend her twenty-first birthday here.
Her voice as strange as Glenn remembered it after she’d first started taking medication, she said, “There’s a place I want you to see.”
This was progress, he thought, drawing upon the many counselling textbooks he’d read as a student, which frequently talked about disclosure of secrets and how this engendered trust…. But he wasn’t in that role this weekend; despite having met during his NHS work, he and Lily were now lovers and should behave like that.
“I look forward to it,” he replied, choosing not to be inquisitive. Lily would tell him more in good time. She could be like that, elusive and often confrontational, and again Glenn drew on professional experience by not rising to issues emerging from her subconscious mind. “Shall we unpack and get the tent up?”
If she was disappointed he hadn’t asked about the place she’d mentioned, she didn’t show it. For a moment, before switching off the grumbling engine and opening his door, Glenn thought he saw a curl of anger ripple along her upper lip, but then this expression was gone, replaced by the passive solemnity he’d come to associate with her family.
An only child, Lily had lived with her parents only a few miles north of this location, in a small North Yorkshire town where everyone knew one another’s business. More recently, her mum and dad had moved to Leeds, where Glenn had been born and now worked. A few months after this relocation, following a botched suicide attempt, the eighteen-year-old girl had been referred to him for support and guidance. They’d fallen in love after only a few sessions, Glenn was vulnerable to the intimacy of a first client and Lily admired his cool strength, non-argumentative nature, and—she’d told him only recently—tremendous height.
Glenn was six-foot-four and had been only mildly surprised to learn, after meeting the man, that her father was a similar height. There was probably something Freudian at work here—an Elektra complex or some such—but Glenn had been trained as a general counsellor and not a dyed-in-the-wool psychoanalyst preaching according to Sigmund’s orthodoxy.
Lily’s mother had been a docile creature, given to apologies even in the absence of any perceptible misdemeanour. Whenever she’d served dinner, she’d say things like, “I hope the gravy isn’t too lumpy,” as if in anticipation of devastating disapproval. Glenn tried hard not to let his work dominate his private life, but he’d nonetheless found it strange how such a reserved man as the girl’s father could have such a timid, edgy wife, let alone a “loose cannon” of a daughter.
After carrying all their weekend gear across to a suitable spot for camping, Glenn watched his girlfriend roll one of the joints that she—in her own words—“simply couldn’t live without.” Since nearly OD-ing at a party in her late teens, she’d been prescribed by doctors an alchemist’s dream of potions and cocktails, yet none worked as well as her standard weed-and-nicotine combo. But Glenn didn’t mind, really. Sure, he was accountable in his career, but marijuana was hardly Class A stuff, was it? Besides, his private life had nothing to do with anyone else, and there were no rules against dating clients; it was merely frowned upon by colleagues, but they could all just bugger off.
Glenn enjoyed putting up the tent, using a heavy mallet to drive lethally pointed pegs into firm autumn earth. He wasn’t an aggressive man, which was perhaps the reason he was so suited to his career, the cut-and-thrust of psychological duels, that slippery process of transference. He and Lily had engaged in a number of intense sessions, during which he’d held her ostensibly sourceless anger, helping her to realise how non-destructive it was. This was extremely challenging, involving a firm identity and clear knowledge about where his boundaries lay. He guessed an over-possessive mother and distant father had offered him insight into these mechanisms, a nebulous knowledge of how people overlappe
d, their emotions grew entangled, and their actions were often mistaken for one another’s…. But again he was getting distracted by the minutiae of his working life. He as well as Lily was supposed to be relaxing this weekend, his first period of annual leave for months. And he was determined to do so.
“Let me have a smoke of that, will you?” he said, once the tent was fully erected and his girlfriend had lit up her second joint of the afternoon. It was a cool, crisp day, the September daylight almost colourless. Other than themselves, just a handful of other couples occupied the site, mostly older, respectable-looking folk who probably thought the scent of Lily’s smoke was a new perfume. Glenn reckoned most of them were a lot like his parents: polite, well-meaning, as green as all the grass here.
“Hey, you’ll need it where I plan to take you,” Lily replied, exhaling smoke with dragonish abandon. Her bohemian clothing—all wooden chains and garish amulets—rattled with her movement; her unmade-up face looked solemn and mysterious. “It might even help.”
He stepped across to her, dropping the heavy mallet, which hit the soil beside the tent with a vicious thump. Then he reached for the joint.
He liked a beer, of course—what normal guy didn’t?—but he’d never used such substances for anything other than mild relaxation, the pleasure of its taste. Pot was different, though; he enjoyed the dry, tender feeling it left in his throat, the sense of having more space around him it bequeathed. Hell, he’d spent most of his childhood in a small house in Leeds, and the great majority of his adulthood as a responsible trainee and then an even more responsible practitioner. But out here, where the hills climbed and fell, and rocks had stood for all time, it would be nice to open up a little, experiencing the world with all its edges exposed.
He took a deep drag on the roll-up, feeling smoke fill his mouth like dust. He sensed Lily watching him, a faint air of amusement animating her pretty face. Sometimes she looked so old at the same time as looking so young, and he wondered what that implied. He’d been treating her professionally for three years now and still felt as if he’d just scratched her surface.
Uncomfortable with feeling like the junior person here—he was twenty-four to her twenty-one—he met her green-eyed gaze and said, “So where is this place you plan on taking me to? And why the hell would you think I need help?”
Now she smiled properly, those lips curling north, like the sun arising during some primitive dawn. She’d been sitting on one of the collapsible stools they’d brought along with cooking gear and sleeping bags, but then quickly stood and snatched the joint back from him.
“Is the tent finished now?” she asked, between more hurried inhalations from the quixotic fire. “Can we just collapse in it when we return?”
“I’d just like to get all our stuff inside,” Glenn replied, sensing the drug already teasing the corners of his psyche, the way imps in ancient mythology were said to threaten fragile communities. “I mean, I know we’re in the middle of nowhere and with few ruffians around, but … well, it’s better to be safe than sorry, isn’t it?”
Before meeting Lily and agreeing to let her live in his smart city centre flat, he’d assumed such rules in life were commonsensical, just practical watchwords to uphold. But more recently, she’d overturned all that.
“Oh, so sensible,” she said, her voice certainly containing an element of disapproval if not outright frustration. Glenn wanted to blame the dope, but the dismaying truth was that she could be even more like this when clear-headed. “You’ll be putting padlocks on the zip next.”
Actually, he did have a few small locks that secured the tent, but this wasn’t the time to allude to them. Nevertheless, he wouldn’t lose his temper; his professional persona suggested that this was what Lily was after, what she was always after, and he refused to give her that satisfaction. If he was ever successful in transforming the girl into the happy, contented person her parents clearly wanted—well, her mother, anyway; her father had always been strangely uncommunicative on the matter—he’d have to resist her invasive mind-games.
“Okay, then, bugger the stuff,” he said, those imps breaking into the village of his mind and rapidly colonising it. “Let’s go.”
She looked curiously pleased, especially when he picked up the mallet again and flung it along with several other items inside the tent without securing any of it.
Then he was ready. And Lily willingly led the way.
* * *
The North Yorkshire countryside was rich and strange. Glenn loved this time of the year, its wet periods and chilly fronts. When winds gusted—and today played host to a circus performance of them—a scent of wild vegetation and moist grass swept across the landscape, filling his mind with fond recollections of childhood episodes involving happiness, health, and hope. Everywhere felt ancient out here, as if the primitive brain, with its seething limbic core, now had evidence for its irrepressible nature. Trees shook as they’d done since time immemorial; stone caves gaped, providing refuge from growling stalkers. Overhead, clouds scurried, great armies on the march, and the sinking sun kowtowed to a new kid in the area: the imperious moon appearing with all its mythological majesty.
Glenn was always enamoured by this kind of environment, despite having grown up in a city. He could well imagine what Lily’s early life had been like, the alfresco freedom of unquenchable youth. But what had come between her and later success? Why had she developed a phobic reaction to maturity and mainstream life, as if a nuclear moment in her teens had torn a hole in her existence?
This was all Glenn knew about his girlfriend’s suicide attempt: one moment she’d been dancing with so many other up-and-coming peers, and the next she’d been lying in a hospital bed with machines buzzing and bleeping all around her. As long as Glenn had known her, she’d refused to discuss this dramatic event, but had always been happy to refer to her childhood, the days preceding this inexplicable attempt at oblivion, living with her parents in a village up north.
With the campsite way behind them and the makeshift pathway ahead deserted, Glenn considered this a good moment to question Lily, who, for all her cocky confidence, tended to open up only in absolute privacy.
“So,” he said, puffing a little as they ascended a slope leading to a sequence of rocky hillsides, “where are we headed?”
He wanted to feel that this whole event—her birthday, the amazing location, just the two of them together—bore some kind of symbolic resonance, a journey into revelations, deep and true. But that surely required complicity, and he couldn’t be certain whether his moody lover was willing to share his predilection for bone-shaking facts.
In the event, marching on ahead with a lingering smile of expectation, she said, “We’re going to Mooncap Cave.”
She left it at that, presumably attempting to pique his curiosity. And on this occasion, now alone in the brooding hills, he saw little harm in humouring her. “What’s … Mooncap Cave?” he asked, feeling both fretful about the spooky name and intrigued by what attracted her to this place.
Lily had now stopped smoking, but the substance she’d already imbibed must be pressing against her mind, because when she eventually replied, her voice grew laboured, as if all the space out here was lending it a resonant quality, the way acoustics in a concert hall offered richness to sound.
“We used to come here when I was a child, me and Mum and …”—a pause as she quickly drew breath—“and my dad.”
Glenn was sharp and had observed months ago how his girlfriend referred to her parents differently. His docile mother, with her reticent nature, was addressed as “Mum,” the pronoun’s capital letter almost audible. But her father—the taciturn, disengaged man who stood as tall as Glenn at well over six feet—was always called “my dad.” And the use of the single modifier “my” told Glenn a great deal about Lily’s relationships with her parents; this was a subtle thing, but straight out of a textbook. But now he must drill down into experience, get her talking in a way she rarely had in the past. M
aybe this was a perfect opportunity.
“Go on, then,” he said, observing all the dark gathering overhead. Having reached the crest of a slope, they found themselves among a vast range of rocky land. He wouldn’t want to be stranded out here in as little as a few hours; neither he nor his girlfriend had brought torches. “Tell me more about Mooncap Cave.”
Glenn thought she’d hesitate again, weighing the relative risks and rewards of opening up to him. But then she began talking, making him believe that the drug in her blood had brought dark treasure to the surface.
“It’s an old story around these parts—older than the hills.”
She giggled like a schoolgirl, as if her opening comment had greatly amused her. Glenn suspected that both of her parents had once used this line, back in the days to which Lily now alluded.
“There’s a cave up ahead, and it has a hole in its ceiling that you can see straight through. The hole is circular, the same size as … the same size as the moon.”
As Lily paused again, Glenn noticed many glitters appearing in the dimming sky, an extraordinary display of stars. There was no cloud this evening, which exposed the world to whatever aspects of the cosmos saw fit to damage it. And yes, here came the satellite to which his girlfriend had just referred: bloated, bloodless, and bonelike—the intense moon.
“So what?” Glenn replied, now feeling slightly uncomfortable. It wasn’t just because his girlfriend’s voice had grown less reticent; it was also that, at twenty-one years old today, she’d requested to spend the time here, in such a barren part of the ancient world. That wasn’t normal, was it? But of course nothing about Lily had ever been normal.