Moonburn

by Alisa Sheckley

“Get a grip, Abra,” Malachy said to me. “It’s just lunch, and we have a lot to get done in a very limited amount of time.” Without looking away from me, Mal reached over to the plate Dana was still holding and stabbed a sausage with his fork. “Ah, pig meat,” he said, his eyes half closing with gustatory pleasure. He wiped the grease from his lips and I felt a wave of queasiness.

  “Malachy, that’s disgusting.”

  And then the two Grey sisters came back and smiled at me.

  “Well?” That was Penny, who apparently hadn’t managed to get her dentures back in.

  “What did you decide?” That was Dana, smiling broadly to reveal big, gleaming white teeth.

  Her sister’s big, gleaming white teeth.

  Clapping a hand over my suddenly roiling stomach, I bolted for the bathroom.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, I wished I had brought some makeup with me. My face and lips had drained of color, but there were dark circles under my eyes that I didn’t recall ever seeing before. My stomach felt better now that I’d thrown up, but my temples were pounding with the beginnings of a monster headache.

  I leaned against the sink, closing my eyes. I didn’t know how much of what I’d seen was real and how much was surreal, but I did know that I couldn’t just dismiss the sisters’ warning. I sighed. Trust my mother to give me a gift that hurt to use but was impossible to just leave in a box and ignore.

  There was a knock on the door. “Everything all right in there?” It was Enid’s voice.

  “Yes, I’ll be out in a moment.” Removing the elastic from my hair, I finger combed the sides and then redid my ponytail. On the wall was a framed photo of the three sisters in the late fifties, in front of the cafe. They looked exactly the same.

  When I opened the door, Enid was holding out a fizzing glass of something that smelled medicinal.

  “Here,” she said. “You’ll want to get this down you fast.”

  “Thanks,” I said, taking the glass and raising it to my lips. Then, hesitating, I asked, “Is this just some herbal infusion, or am I going to start seeing the walls breathe?”

  “It’s Alka-Seltzer,” said Enid, her white eyes turning in my direction and a small smile playing over her wrinkled seam of a mouth. “No need to go brewing willow bark or blinding newts these days, not when there’s a perfectly good pharmacy just across the road. Now, before you go wasting another question, remember that you only get three answers. Three per customer, that’s the rule. And that’s not per visit—folks always try leaving and coming back, but that’s not the way it works.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “What are you?” Because right now, little old lady didn’t seem to apply.

  Enid sighed. “You know, with the Internet and all the resources available to you, I would think that you could figure that one out on your own. But if you insist …”

  “No. Wait.” Because I had figured it out, thanks to the extensive education I’d received in ancient Greek mythology from my mother’s films. Although in Beware the Cat there had been a bit of confusion between the Grey sisters of Greek myth and Shakespeare’s witchy weird sisters. But then again, the most pagan thing about Hollywood is the way it borrows and blends the myths of different cultures, and then twists them around to suit its own ends.

  I didn’t believe in anything now, but when I was younger, I believed in Hollywood movies. So I was following the Beware the Cat script.

  “Are you trying to help me or harm me? That’s the question I want you to answer, and please interpret that in the narrowest possible way.”

  “In the narrowest possible way? Well, in that case, I want to help you, my dear. We are all three of us of the nurturing disposition.”

  Now that I thought about it, maybe I should have said she should interpret “help” in the broadest possible way. Someone needed to write an etiquette guide for dealing with the supernatural. Then I remembered that I had a guide of sorts, and reached under my sweater for my moonstone.

  Enid narrowed her eyes, as if she could see what I was doing. “What’s that you’ve got in there?”

  There was something about her voice that demanded obedience. Before I could think twice, I was lifting the pendant out of my sweater and showing it to her. Even through the insulating layer of my silk underwear, the silver was irritating my skin.

  “No, no, I can’t see it like that. Take it off. Look at me, what do you think I’m going to do, run off with it?”

  Warily, I removed the necklace and handed it to her.

  “Ah,” said Enid, appreciatively as she lifted the moonstone to the light coming in from the window. I wondered if she could see, or if she was relying on some other sense to examine my necklace, but I didn’t want to waste another question. As Enid turned the pendant, I saw a small rainbow arc through the air between us. “Lovely. Just lovely. Las Lagrimas de la Luna. A good-quality stone, and what a gorgeous setting.”

  There was no accounting for taste, I supposed. “My mother said it belonged to my father’s mother.”

  Enid looked at me shrewdly, and now I saw that like the moonstone, her opaque eyes had flashes of bright color beneath the surface, iridescent traces of blue and green and purple. “Makes it all the more valuable, doesn’t it? But it’s not doing you any good wearing it over silk. The stone has to be worn against the skin.” As Enid closed her gnarled hand over the stone, I felt a stab of panic. “I’ll pay you handsomely for it.”

  “It’s not for sale.” I didn’t know why I felt so strongly about it, but I held out my own hand, palm up. “And I’d like it back now, please.”

  “Just a moment, dear, you haven’t heard what I’m offering. If it’s true vision you want, I can adorn those lovely spectacles of yours with crystals that will help you see things as they truly are, and without the itch and discomfort of silver.”

  “No, thanks.” The true vision part sounded good, but even if I’d wanted rhinestones on my chic new glasses, there was something about Enid that made me doubt I’d get the best of this deal.

  “Or how about something to help you conceive? I have a potion guaranteed to make even your great-grandmother as fertile as a fifteen-year-old.”

  I put my hand on my stomach, which was as flat as ever—flatter, actually, thanks to my days of living wolfishly. “I’m afraid that I have some pretty specific problems in that area.”

  Enid reached into the pocket of her apron and produced a small, old-fashioned bottle.

  “Dear God, Enid, what is that?” The bottle appeared to contain a shriveled homunculus suspended in a pale green fluid, its pitiful mouth open in its otherwise featureless face.

  “This, my girl, is mandrake root, the real kind, grown from a drop of hanged man’s seed. Whatever your problem, one drink from this bottle and I guarantee conception and, yes, a full-term birth.” Enid stuck the bottle closer, so that I could see that it did, indeed, contain a root, and not a tiny, malformed body. “What do you say, my dear? Do we have a deal?”

  I stared at the old woman in horrified disbelief. “Enid, first of all, mandrake is part of the nightshade family, and it’s poisonous. Second of all, I have no idea what kind of baby you get when you ingest something grown from a hanged man’s semen, but I’m guessing not the kind of kid who grows up to be president. So no thank you, but I’ll keep my moonstone.” I held out my hand, and Enid looked at it for a moment with a touch of sadness.

  “You’re quite right, of course. A gift given from a grandmother … yes, of course you don’t want to sell it. But it’s just not going to do anything sitting on your shirt like that.”

  “I have an allergy to silver,” I said stiffly.

  “I see. Well, may I put it on for you?”

  I turned around, thinking even as I did so that this was a bad idea. But I didn’t want to hurt Enid’s feelings, and saying “No, just put it in my hand” felt like a direct insult. I felt the old woman’s dry, cool hands against the back of my neck.

  “I see no
w that you really do need this necklace,” Enid was saying as she fiddled with the clasp. “That’s half the trick, you know, finding out what it is that people need. Some need a dress, just to get them the interview, say, and some need a skill, like software programming or spinning straw into gold. You need to be able to use your instincts, even when you’re not running around on all fours. Now, then.” Enid stepped away and I faced her. “Now you’ll be able to face what’s coming with your eyes open.”

  “It feels a bit tight.” I put my hand to the necklace and discovered that she had fastened it around my neck like a choker, so that the silver was touching my naked flesh. “Enid, what did you do? I told you, I’m allergic to silver!” Looking into those unspeakably ancient eyes, I wondered how I could have put my faith in her, even for an instant. Trying to remove the necklace, I found the catch impossible to open. “How can I get this off again?”

  “By removing your head, of course. Oh, dear, and that was your last question, too.”

  I tried yanking at the chain, then growled and grabbed Enid by the spindly arms. “Old lady, if you don’t show me how to get this off …”

  Enid was unruffled. “You want me to remove your head? Don’t be a dolt, girl, can’t you see I’ve done you a favor?”

  I was about to shake her when there was a crash from the other room.

  “My word,” said Enid. “I do believe your friend might be in trouble.” With a frustrated grunt, I released Enid and ran into the other room to find Malachy lying on the floor, unconscious. Grigore, Dana, and Penny were crouched beside him, Grigore holding down his hands, the two sisters each pinning an ankle to the floor.

  “What’s going on?” I reached for his wrist, and Grigore shook his head.

  “He’s having a seizure.”

  As Grigore said the words, Malachy began to vibrate as though some giant hand was shaking him. His eyes rolled back in his head, and I had a moment to grab a pencil from Penny’s apron pocket and cram it into Malachy’s mouth before his jaw snapped shut.

  “Malachy. Mal. Can you hear me?” Kneeling beside my boss, I pulled back his eyelids and examined his pupils. For a moment, they remained fixed on some distant horizon, and I thought: He’s gone. I felt a sudden hollowing in my stomach. Whatever had been unexplored and unresolved between us would now always remain so.

  But then Malachy’s pupils dilated and he was looking at me. “What happened?”

  “You collapsed, and started to shake,” said Grigore.

  “Did I?” Mal looked befuddled, and so unlike himself that I found myself wrapping my arms around him.

  “Are you all right?”

  Malachy opened his mouth and another seizure took him. I replaced the pencil and held on to him, waiting it out, wondering what this was doing to his brilliant, singular mind, hoping it wasn’t irreversible. And then Malachy went limp, and I stroked his sweat-dampened hair back from his high forehead. “Mal, can you hear me?”

  Malachy stirred and opened his eyes. He began to flail, as if fighting. I removed the pencil and said, “Easy, easy. You’re okay.”

  For one unguarded moment, I saw a flicker of uncertainty in Malachy’s green eyes, and then his lids lowered, shuttering his gaze. “Well,” he said, “I do hope you’re not going to start fussing over me.” He glanced at his watch. “We need to get back to the laboratory and finish compounding the medicine. I believe we have less time than I had first estimated.”

  Gee, I thought, no kidding. “Can I help you up?”

  “I’m perfectly capable of standing up without assistance, thank you very much.”

  Ignoring this, I put my arm around Malachy’s waist to help him up, ignoring the burn of the silver moonstone around my neck and the dull throb in my left arm, along the scar Red had given me in our mating ceremony.

  I knew better than to touch it, though. I figured love, magic, and poison ivy had one thing in common: The more you scratched the itch, the more you were affected.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Along the way back to the veterinary office, Malachy and I saw signs that Northside’s dogs were not the only creatures behaving strangely. A young moose, seldom seen this far south, ambled down Church Street, its head down as if it refused to even acknowledge our presence, before veering off into the wooded thicket behind the funeral parlor. The new moon was invisible in the afternoon sky, and after the days of seeing it full in the sky all day as well as night, I found myself missing it like an absent lover. Red. I flipped open my cell phone and tried him again, but the phone indicated he was out of range.

  There was a mocking sound, almost like laughter, and I turned to see five crows flap heavily down to the ground, where they hopped around like paparazzi, waiting to catch some big name in a moment of weakness. A massive red-tailed hawk gave a low screech and sailed over the telephone wire, and a turkey vulture landed on a split rail fence opposite.

  I nudged Malachy with my elbow. “Are you thinking The Birds? Because that looks very Hitchcock to me.”

  “I am wondering what fresh kill they anticipate,” Mal responded. “And hoping it is not us.”

  A moment later, as we turned the corner onto Main Street, a group of ten-to-twelve-year-old boys swarmed past us, whooping and hollering. This would not have been remarkable, except for the fact that it was the end of January and the boys were naked from the waist up and using jump ropes to drag a grown man in a suit and tie behind them.

  After a moment, I recognized the school’s principal, Mr. Glynn. “Boys,” he kept pleading, “boys, please. Don’t you realize that this will go on your permanent record?”

  Clearly, this was not quite the deterrent Mr. Glynn intended, because the boys merely laughed and jeered at him in response.

  I wanted to run after them and help, but Malachy put his hand on my arm, stopping me. “We need to figure this out, first. Look up.”

  Obediently, I looked up at the blue sky. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”

  “Look at the clouds, Abra,” said Malachy, sounding impatient. “Look to the east.”

  “It’s getting dark,” I said.

  “A storm is coming. But not a winter storm. That sky, those clouds—I’m not an expert, but does that look like a January sky to you?”

  I shook my head, and realized that the quality of the air had changed. There was something subtle in the angle of light, in the smell on the breeze, that felt more like March than January. But the heavy, dark clouds that were gathering in the east were from another season entirely: July, perhaps. The season of wild shifts in weather, when clear skies could abruptly turn to thunderstorms, or hurricanes and twisters.

  “And look there,” said Malachy. “The birds are coming back.”

  I turned to see a dark swarm of shapes flying toward us: Canada geese in their deep V formation, swallows and robins, and many others I didn’t recognize. It was a mass migration to our unnatural spring.

  “I’m guessing this isn’t just global warming at work,” I said, taking off my coat.

  “I suspect this is a bit more localized.” Malachy held his coat over his shoulder and took my elbow, as if we were out for a stroll. I tried my cell phone again. “Still no reception,” I said.

  “Is that usual?”

  I shook my head. Northside had an unusual number of dead zones, but Main Street wasn’t normally one of them. I punched in Red’s number again, and this time there was a faint signal. “He’s not picking up,” I said.

  Mal nodded, quickening his steps. Now that the seizure had passed, he seemed energized. Maybe the misfiring of his neurons had worked as a kind of autonomic electrotherapy. Hurrying now, Mal said, “We’ll try again back at the office.”

  I nodded and lengthened my stride to keep up with him. I felt a slight cramp in my side and began to slow down again.

  As clearly as if she were standing there beside me, I heard my mother’s voice in my head, saying: Abra, this is no time to baby yourself.

  Hearing voices. That couldn’t be good
. On the bright side, however, Malachy had been reporting that he saw the same things I did, which meant moonstone wasn’t a hallucinogen. I didn’t know why it had given me that strange vision of the three sisters, Malachy, and Grigore, but maybe the longer the stone touched me, the more I got used to it. I tried not to think about what the silver was doing to my skin. When I thought about it, I began to itch.

  “Stop scratching yourself,” Malachy said, and I put my hand down.

  As we passed old man Miller on his porch, the town’s former mayor suddenly stood up and leaned on his cane, his long white beard trembling as he began to prophesy in a quavering voice. “Heed me well, O Children of iniquity, the whole nation shall be punished for thy sins.”

  “I thought he was an atheist,” I said, looking back. “And when did he grow that beard?”

  “About the same time Jackie turned professional.” I turned in astonishment to see that Jackie was sitting in the gazebo in the little village square where Santa greeted the village children at Christmas. Like Santa, Jackie had a long line of people waiting to meet her, but unlike Santa, her bright-eyed devotees were all men. The men were wearing long-sleeved shirts, and some of them were carrying chickens, and one or two were holding a rope tied to a goat or a pig.

  Up on the gazebo, Jackie was wearing a silky purple nightgown. And reclining on a huge pile of furs and blankets, her wolfdogs arranged in a semicircle around her.

  “Hey,” said a local farmer as I cut through the line, but I ignored him.

  “Jackie,” I said, “what on earth are you doing?”

  Jackie didn’t get up from the improvised bed. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  There was no polite word for it. “Are you feeling all right? Why don’t you get up from there and come with Malachy and me.” Inspired, I added, “We’ll call Red for you.”

  Jackie smiled, and it was her old, familiar, wry smile. “Honey, Red will find his way to me. Today I am high priestess here, and the goddess inhabits me. All the men must worship me. Even yours.”