Harvest Moon

by James A. Moore

  HARVEST MOON

  James A. Moore

  CEMETERY DANCE PUBLICATIONS

  2009

  Harvest Moon Copyright © 2006 by James A. Moore

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  FIRST EBOOK EDITION

  Cemetery Dance Publications

  132-B Industry Lane

  Unit 7

  Forest Hill, MD 21050

  Email: info@cemeterydance.com

  www.cemeterydance.com

  Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays. As a kid my family moved constantly and there were only a few things I could trust to always be there as a form of stability:

  My family, Christmas, and Halloween.

  Thanks to Kelly Perry, who edited this little tale for me and made sure I didn’t go off track too often. You are a saint, dear lady. Thanks to Bonnie Moore, my wife, for accepting me no matter how strange I get, and to her brothers, Ralph and John, and my sister Ro, for joining us every year in the Halloween madness around the house.

  Thanks to Alan Clark for the perfect cover art, and for being one of the best talents out there.

  However, there are a few other thank yous to throw out there. Thanks to Rich Chizmar for asking me if I ever felt like writing a Halloween novel. Rich, you’re one of the few people I know who loves All Hallow’s Eve as much as I do, never change my friend. Thanks to everyone at CD for being simply delightful to work with.

  One of my earliest Halloween traditions was to read THE HALLOWEEN TREE by Ray Bradbury every year. It was my guaranteed method of getting into the right frame of mind. For that reason, HARVEST MOON is dedicated to Ray Bradbury with a hearty thanks for the memories!

  Happy Halloween, one and all.

  Prologue

  I

  She slept in her bed and dreamt that she was in the woods. She hadn’t been in the forest for almost a year, but in her dream she was lost and cold and confused. The last time she’d been near the Witch’s Hollow in the waking world the others had teased and tormented her. Not all of them, true, but enough to leave her wondering exactly why they had chosen her. She couldn’t think of a single thing she’d done to any of them to cause the grief she received.

  It was the other girls, naturally. Ever since her breasts had started developing the boys were always more than glad for her company, as if the mounds of flesh on her torso somehow made a difference in who she was.

  She slept and in her dreams she was not the same woman, but another, just as scared but also very angry. All she’d wanted was to be left alone with her family and all she got was the hatred and fear that seemed the only currency her neighbors understood. She’d come to the New World for the same reason as the others: freedom from the religious rules of the other places in the Old Country.

  She did not practice the same religion as the other pilgrims, true, but she failed to see how that should make it all right for them to torment her. Naturally enough, she tormented them back. She had every right, and if that made the other people who lived on the small settlement uncomfortable, then all the better.

  And if killing their children and eating their plump little bodies was a sin, well, she had been sinning for a long, long time. That thought comforted her on the cold winter nights, when her arthritic hands were too swollen and painful for her to do more than burn a few pieces of kindling or warm herself near the oil lamp she kept for lighting her way.

  That had all changed with the birth of her sons, and she was pleased to know that her lads were as strong and special as any children have ever been. In the dream there were a few brilliant moments of joy and an almost endless series of darker times.

  Her mind focused on the darkness, and reveled in it, wallowing like a swine in the filth of violence, lust, and carnage.

  And in her bedroom, the girl moaned, her body moving sinuously across the bed, her covers tossed to the floor on the cold October night. Her sleeping mind reeled in the darkness of a life long gone, and her body moved to a tempo of its own, her hands sliding slowly down between her legs and touching where she’d never seriously considered touching while she was awake.

  The villagers came in the night, trying to sneak up on her and her children. She let them close in; let them burn her house to the ground, before she retaliated from the safety of the trees near the pond where she drew water. They thought her withered form an indication of her power and in that they were sadly mistaken. The first five did not die, but merely wished they could. She left them suffering as few have ever suffered before. But even then she knew that she could not win the fight. There were simply too many of them and she was not prepared.

  She called to her children, and they came to her, roaring their defiance to the fools who would dare harm their mother. Patrick killed four men before they struck him down, burning him in the blazing remains of the only home he had ever known. Robert killed an even dozen, and left most of the others screaming in fear, cowering before his power. His pale white hands were crimson long before they managed to stop him.

  Or until he allowed them to think he had been stopped.

  Jack did nothing save watch from the woods, as his mother requested; though she knew it wounded him deeply to obey her wishes. Of all her children, it was Jack who could have hurt them the most, but she had other plans for him, just as she had other plans for all of her sons and for herself as well.

  In the end, she let herself be captured. Oh, to be sure, she put up a fight and a good enough one to convince them that she had lost. In the end, she was dragged down, just as she knew she would be.

  Her death was not kind, and she howled her defiance into the air, cursing the men who hacked their blades into her body as well as those who took the skittish horses and forced her arms and legs in different directions and tied each to the reigns of a different steed.

  Her death was a symphony of pain that stopped with her body being torn apart. The fathers of her sons cheered as she died, celebrating her demise, unaware that they had done exactly what she wanted them to do. She had not plotted the encounter, but she made advantage of it once it had begun.

  She planted her seeds with each drop of blood that fell from her ruined body. She fertilized the land about her with the ashes of her own remains. She died on Halloween night long before the land where she dwelled broke away from the powerful nation that spawned the majority of the early settlers. The flames that conquered her were pale beneath the full, harvest moon that seemed to look down on the bloody devastation.

  And in her sleep, the girl moaned, her body edging into a deep, resonant orgasm, unaware that she was being watched by a man who should have known better. Though he never touched her, he too achieved an orgasm.

  II

  He walked along the winding road that would take him into Beldam Woods, moving at a leisurely pace that still seemed to devour the distance. Though he had been walking for hours, he was not winded in the least. He had long since become accustomed to walking everywhere.

  His hair was a little longish for a young man, and worse on a man of his advanced age, but he carried it well. The wind was cold, whispering the threat of winter’s caress, just a few weeks away. His skin was pale and made paler still by the hint of frost that blew along the same path he’d chosen. Perhaps a lot of people would have been shivering in the frozen breeze, but he was not like other people. He never had been.

  The sky was changing from dark blue to light in the sky to the east, and the moon, not quite as full yet, was on
the western horizon and fading away at a rapid pace. The late night was working towards dawn when he crested the last hill and laid eyes on his goal in the distance. Beldam Woods was a small town, nestled in the geography of upstate New York. Not far from Utica, but not in any way a part of that community. In comparison, Utica was positively urban.

  “Norman Rockwell, eat your heart out.”

  The sun crested the hills to the east, and cast the first rays of light into the town. He watched as the warming beams of molten gold touched the steeples on the two churches, turning the cross on the Lutheran Church into a golden beacon and defining the wrought iron crucifix on the Protestant house of worship. One of the two had been there when he’d last been in the town, but he was damned if he could remember which. The thought brought a thin smile to his bony face. He was, after all, damned either way.

  From where he stood he could see the town square, which had changed only in the shapes of the buildings, most of them replaced with brick and modern supplies, instead of the wooden structures he remembered from his youth. There was a modern school down there, big enough to seat a few hundred children, and not too terribly far from that one he could see the campus of the private academy he had read up on. Watersford Academy for Advanced Children, which from what he’d seen in the brochures, specialized in catering to the obscenely wealthy. Between the two was a long stretch of land that was perfectly groomed and well fenced. Even from outside of the town proper he could see the horses munching contentedly on the lawns. The only livestock raised at most of the farms these days were thoroughbred championship equines. Of course, the region was well known for its fresh vegetables as well; at least according to his brother, Patrick, who had never bothered to leave the area.

  His hometown had changed a great deal since he’d been near it last.

  There were numerous signs in the area, all advertising specials for Halloween. Apparently there was a Haunted Hayride, sponsored by the Watersford Academy. There was going to be a party in the very center of the town for all of the children on Halloween night, and, of course, strangers were welcome. Anyone who wanted to act now could pull off the interstate, enter the town proper and get a prize-winning pumpkin at the “Punkin Patch,” where a gathering of local farmers sold the gourds for bloated prices.

  His tight smile broadened a bit as he contemplated that last sign. He’d been hoping for the right sort of place to set up his necessities in town, and that could well be the location he was looking for. The gnarled fingers of his right hand sought the trinkets he’d brought with him on his long journey from the west. Deep in his coat’s pocket he found the packet of pumpkinseeds—fresh, not salted and roasted—and he nodded. That would be a visit worth making, he suspected.

  The sun glared into his pale yellowed eyes, making him squint just a bit. He had been away from home for far too long, and it was time to pay his family a visit.

  Chapter One

  I

  There is a time of year when the world seems, for however brief a moment, to stand perfectly still. The birds settle down and stop singing, the wind falls to little more than a sigh and the oceans calm themselves from their normal, frantic pace. Most people think that moment is set by a calendar, but humans are alone in this particular ignorance. The date hardly matters. You could no more tell the exact instant than you could know the moment of your first kiss, your first caress, or your last desperate gasp for air. To be sure, it happens every year and normally around the same time of year, but the date? The day, hour, or minute? No. They are merely points of reference and really, far less significant than the first time your lips are brushed by the lips of someone who is not obligated to kiss you by bonds of blood and family.

  It’s the end of a season; summer dies again and is replaced by autumn. That is the time we shall speak about here. It’s just possible that every person recognizes that moment in their own way. For some it’s the first time they allow themselves to dwell on the past: on chances taken and those avoided; on friends known and almost forgotten until a sound, a scent, or even a shiver down the spine reminds them to be melancholy. Others might notice when they suddenly realize the sun is setting earlier than it should, and the shadows that normally huddle close to their bodies are stretching out and trying to race ahead or hide behind them. For a few it’s that first whiff of wood smoke caught on a breeze that was warmer the last time they thought about the temperature. It’s a time of mourning and regret for some and a time of change for others.

  It is a frozen moment, a suspended span of time where the world, the universe itself, seems to hold its breath.

  And sooner or later, that breath is released, and the world is changed again.

  In Beldam Woods the change came first to the trees. The leaves that had been green caught fire, blazing in a hundred different shades of yellow, orange, and red. Oaks, elms, and maples all shifted as the air became chilled and the days died a little bit earlier, giving way to the nights with their dry air and the hissed whispers of autumn’s first kiss. The summer had been a harsh one—more humid than usual and hotter, too—and there were few people in Beldam Woods who were unhappy to see it pass, though, of course, many were sad for other reasons.

  Beldam Woods was never meant to be a big city, or even a small one for that matter. Nestled as it was between granite deposits and foothills, the land simply would not permit outrageous growth. But it was comfortable and the people who lived there rather liked the way it sat. The rugged terrain might have made setting up dozens of shopping malls difficult, but the fertile soils still allowed for farming. While few in the town made their living as farmers these days, many still had a plot or two dedicated to orchards or melon patches.

  There wasn’t much to Beldam Woods, as far as towns go, but it was enough to leave most everyone who lived there content. Oh, to be sure, there were exceptions; like Herb Doretevsky, for instance. By most people’s estimations Herb had been in a piss-poor mood for the last thirty-seven years of his life. But there are almost always a few who aren’t happy with their lot. The wiser people understand that perfect happiness can’t really exist for long without boredom creeping in. The casual philosopher might think the disenfranchised exist solely to keep that very boredom from becoming a reality. Quite naturally, they’d be wrong, but that’s not really the point. Beldam Woods was a town like so many small towns. It was different only in that it wasn’t really designed to grow bigger. It was safe from the worst of the changes brought by that demon known to one and all across the United States of America as “progress.”

  The town had not stagnated over the years, because there was always at least a little new blood to keep things from growing too calm, but that was all right for the most part, too. There was crime in Beldam Woods, though not anywhere near the level of some of the neighboring towns, thanks just the same. Now and then one of the Everett Brothers would get into a solid brawl with somebody over some trivial slight, and it was hardly uncommon to find that a few of the easily distracted and overly energetic teens had done a little harmless vandalism. Now and again some boy with too much testosterone and not nearly enough common sense tried to get into the panties of a girl who was unwilling, and unfortunately, now and then one of them succeeded. On those occasions, the situation was handled as discreetly as possible and the damned fool boy in question learned the hard way that rape was not exactly a minor offense. The lucky ones had the situation handled by the local police instead of by irate family members. Of course, not every case was reported, but most were.

  Beldam Woods was a town like so many others, but still a unique entity. Every town might have certain staples as it were; locations or people who could almost be stereotyped into them. Why? Because stereotypes exist for a reason. It’s not uncommon for at least a few teens to be ostracized by their peers and called names. It would hardly be unfair to say that most towns have at least a handful of young ladies who confuse the amorous advances from a handsome young lad for love and willingly offer their bodies as a s
how of affection. Town drunks? Oh yes. Town drunks, city drunks, country drunks; they exist, much as we might wish otherwise. Inevitably there are a few who just can’t figure out how to say no to an offered drink and can’t seem to keep control well enough to stay sober. So yes, there were town drunks and sober people and an occasional police officer to stop the former from becoming a threat to the latter. These sorts of people fill any town of any size, as surely as corpses fill graveyards. That hardly makes them carbon copies. Each has a different reason for the behavior, and even if they seem, at first, to mirror the folks seen in other towns, they are unique.

  Every town is different, too. Most of the small ones have a main strip, and more often than not that little area has a few municipal buildings, a church or two, at least a few shops and a park somewhere nearby. That’s hardly a sign that each is identical. They might seem so at first, but the difference is in the details, not in the appearance.

  Beldam Woods had been in the same place for longer than there had been a United States of America and some of the families could—and would with very little provocation—brag about the fact that they were descended from the original settlers of the country. Others had been there less than a generation and couldn’t have given a damn about the pedigree of their neighbors. There were poor families who managed to live on remarkably little, and there were families with more wealth than common sense. Some lived in the town proper and others lived on the small farms that dotted the hills and peaks around the perimeter. The farms were not, as a rule, really notorious for the stock they bred or their yield of vegetables. They were better known these days for the wealth of the families living there. Some had been in the area for damned near forever, but a good number of them had settled in the last twenty years when, almost as if by whim, several families decided the slight rolling hills and the deep forest around the area were just about postcard perfect. A few of the newly imported families spoke with tongue firmly planted in cheek about changing the name of the town to “New Hampton,” but not with any serious notions.