Moon

by Herbert, James

  The old man feebly protesting against the saw edge cutting into his brow.

  Jeanette’s abject terror as she dangled over the stairway, hung there and choked by a knotted tie, to be saved but not spared the ordeal of near-death.

  The prostitute, whose torn innards Childes had sighted at the beginning, not knowing then it was the first in a stream of macabre visions, the return of an old nightmare.

  Kelly’s charred and withered hand.

  The school alight before the fire had been lit.

  The dead boy, defiled and torn, his putrefying organs spread over the grass around the graveside.

  Annabel. Poor little Annabel, mistaken for Gabby, her tiny dismembered fingers wrapped in a package.

  And he had witnessed for the first time Estelle Piprelly’s horrendous death, lying helpless on the floor, her neck broken, a trail of fire snaking towards her.

  Explain that macabre run-through to a pragmatic, not to say dogmatic, Officer of the Law. Explain how he knew where It would be waiting for him, that the vision of a huge moon-silvered lake had unfurled inside his head like a fast- running tide, and that it was here that everything would be resolved. Such matters could not be explained or logicized: they could only be sensed, or believed in faith. Not many had that kind of faith. Certainly, for most of his life, Childes hadn’t.

  By now he had crossed the rough-hewn parking area, a patch scoured of shrubbery and trees, set back from the narrow road which circumscribed the reservoir to descend into the valley below the dam. He mounted the slabs that were broad steps leading onto the dam, pausing there to study the long, narrow concrete walkway with its thick, waist-high parapets on either side. The middle section was raised, low arches out of sight beneath to allow for overspill should the reservoir become too glutted with rainfall; stout concrete posts reinforced the parapets at regular intervals and graffiti etched the walls where tourists had marked their visit; dark grass fringes sprang up through wide-spaced parallel joins in the walkway’s surface. Beyond the raised section loomed a water tower, octagonally shaped and set into the dam as part of its structure, where water was syphoned down to the pumping station at the base of the giant barrier.

  Childes started forward, a breeze ruffling his hair. He felt exposed out there on the dam and constantly scanned the path ahead, natural moonlight somehow soaking everything unnaturally, so that the effect was surreal and colourless. The lake could have been a gently rippled aluminium sheet so smoothly solid did it appear; yet the power of the massive volume of water beneath the light-reflecting skin was ominously present, concealed but nevertheless threatening. Falling would mean being sucked down into a pitch black netherworld to be crushed rather than drowned.

  He counted the narrow steps, seven in all, as he climbed to the bridge formation over the outlet arches. In the centre he waited, alone and afraid, yet determined.

  Childes could hear the sea from his high position, could even make out the thin whitish plume as wave after wave broke against the distant shoreline, so clear was the night. Keen air wafted against his face as he peered over the parapet on the unflooded side. The wall below sloped outwards, a concrete basin to contain overflow at the base, a conduit leading from that underground, taking surplus water beneath the valley to the sea. Not far from the basin was the white pumping station and behind that another shiny flat area, the processing plant’s sludge lagoon. Occasional lights shone further out in the valley, glowing from homes whose inhabitants kept late hours; he envied their unknowing snugness.

  A creature winged darkly across his vision, too swiftly erratic to be a disturbed bird; a bat, then, in accord with the night, abruptly disappearing into covering shadows. The soft beating of its wings had resembled the uneven fluttering of a frightened heart.

  As Childes lingered, his face a pale unlined mask under the moonlight’s glare, the visions plagued his mind once more, assailing him with fresh intensity; not for the first time he wondered at the malignancy governing their perpetrator. Childes’ last few days had been filled with outward mental probing, only a growing acceptance of his own unique powers giving strength to those endeavours. He no longer resisted what he had subconsciously known but rejected for so many years, that personal acknowledgement flushing his senses, lending vigour to his mysterious faculty.

  He had remembered other times, insights that he had dismissed as chance, as coincidence, suppressing that psychic seepage, even the memory of such incidents rebuffed until now.

  He had remembered the boyhood friend whom he knew would die beneath the wheels of a hit-and-run, the accident happening weeks later. A seldom-seen uncle whom he realized would be cut down by a diseased heart after their last meeting, that same uncle paralysed by coronary sclerosis months later. The death of his own mother, envisaged long before cancer had ravaged her body.

  His father had treated him cruelly for that weeping revelation, just as he had savagely beaten him afterwards when his mother’s spirit had come to him, the boy. Beaten him, Childes remembered, because his father had blamed the boy’s precognition for causing his mother’s death, for initiating her awful ending. Punishing him so badly that his nose and three ribs had been broken. And forcing him to agree through fear and even then, loyalty, when his father had told the ambulance men and subsequent doctors that the boy, distressed by the loss of his mother, had fallen down a flight of stairs in the home.

  Worst of all, in the feverish days that followed, the boy himself had come to believe his father’s reason for mercilessly beating him, had believed that his premonition really had caused his mother’s death as though it were some evil witch’s curse; and with the recognition had also come the belief that he was responsible for his friend’s car accident, that he had instigated the disease inside his uncle’s heart.

  His guilt far outweighed the agony of broken bones and bruised flesh and soon, when the fever that was the result of uncontrollable remorse more than injury, had broken, his mind had erected within itself a protective wall, acceptance of his psychic faculty expelled along with his own guilt, for they went hand in hand, had become part of the same.

  And the infant-murderer three years ago had somehow loosened the hold inside Childes’ mind, had set the precognitive process in motion once more.

  Now this new killer had broken through the mental wall, turned a leak into an unsteady stream.

  Childes’ subconscious had even sent him back to witness his own boyhood misery, a long-hidden part of him yearning for answers. And such was the power within the boy that he had observed his older self return. The mature Childes had been the presence watching from the corner of the boy’s room.

  The answers, of course, provoked other mysteries, but these were of the human psyche itself, secrets that might never be unravelled for they involved secrets of life and the mind itself.

  These thoughts coursed through him as he waited high on the dam, arousing a tantalizing yet wary exhilaration, as though he were on some kind of sensory threshold. As he gazed upwards, he saw that even the moon’s glacial radiance was extraordinarily puissant, dominating the night sky with a peculiar flooding vitality. Tension shook Childes’ body.

  He sensed he was no longer alone.

  He looked behind, in the direction he had come.

  Nothing there moved.

  He looked ahead, towards the other end of the dam where there were more dark trees and thick undergrowth, another path from the winding road.

  Something there did move.

  It had watched him from the cloaking darkness and had smiled an ungodly smile.

  So. At last he was here.

  That was good, for their time had come. Now, under the full moon. Which was appropriate.

  It moved from the trees towards the dam.

  If fear had bounds, then Childes considered he had reached the outer limits. He found he had to lean against a parapet to support himself, so weak did his legs suddenly become. His insides were full of wildly floating feathers, the rigid tightness in hi
s chest disallowing their escape; even his arms were useless, their muscles somehow wasted.

  It was on the dam, a black, lumbering shape in the moonlight, coming towards him, the wide, squat body rocking slightly from side to side, an awkward trundling motion that lacked any fluidity.

  And as the figure approached, Childes could hear the sniggering laughter in its mind. A mocking laughter that iced him, imprisoned him.

  Childes leaned more heavily into the parapet. Oh dear God, its mind is in mine, stronger than ever before!

  Soon he was able to perceive moon-cast outlines in its form, reflecting off immense sloping shoulders, jumbled in the texture of curled and matted hair. The shape of a nose, a chin. The planes of forehead and cheeks. The dark slash that was a wide, grinning mouth.

  It drew nearer, passing the water tower, much of its ungainly body becoming lost from view behind the steps of the raised section on which Childes stood. For a moment, only the head and shoulders could be seen.

  Its eyes were still shadowed, black pits that were as deep and as full of foreboding as the lake below.

  It mounted the steps, its body rising as if from a tomb, broad, wild-haired head grinning, eyes unseen, coming closer, moving nearer, its thoughts stretching forward, reaching for him. And there was something else that was disturbing about this almost shapeless mass which seemed to shuffle rather than walk, something that was slowly – ever so slowly – becoming evident as it advanced, drew closer and closer, to stop when it was no more than three yards away.

  It was only then, when he was able to look into that broad, moonlit face and see the gimlet eyes, small and black, that realization pounced, for when she spoke her voice betrayed nothing of her gender, the sound so low, so rasping.

  ‘I’ve . . . enjoyed . . . the . . . game,’ she said, each word slow and singular.

  Her low chuckling laughter was as unpleasant as her voice and punched into him like physical blows. He clutched at the parapet more tightly.

  The woman shuffled a yard closer and he noticed that her ankles, revealed beneath a long, voluminous skirt, were swollen, flowing over the laced shoes she wore as though her flesh were melting. An outsized anorak was spread over her upper body in untidy folds.

  Childes forced himself to stand erect. His head was buzzing with confused thoughts, nausea clogging his throat. He could smell this woman. He could scent her madness! He swallowed hard, desperate to regather his failing strength.

  All he could think of to say was: ‘Why?’

  The word was nothing more than a croaking sound, but she understood. He sensed, he felt, her shift of emotions: amusement had scuttled away.

  ‘For her,’ she said in that low, ungendered rasp, arching her neck so that her face was lifted towards the moon. ‘My Lady.’

  She gaped her mouth and he saw crooked, disfigured teeth. She drew in a deep scratchy breath as though inhaling the moonlight itself and when her head lowered, for one fleeting, unnerving moment, the moon reflected in those dark, cruel eyes, and it seemed as if the shine came from within, that the moon was inside filling her body, the eyes merely windows. The illusion was transient, but the vision lingered.

  ‘Tell me . . . tell me who you are,’ Childes uttered, uncertain of his own sanity.

  The grossly shaped woman regarded him for some time before speaking again, the brightness gone from her eyes, but replaced with a different kind of gleaming. ‘Don’t you know?’ she asked, her words slow, but less so than before. ‘Didn’t you learn anything from me? There was so much I got from you, my lovely.’

  He no longer leaned so dependently against the ledge. ‘I don’t understand,’ he managed to say, striving to keep a steady tone, willing his legs to stop their incessant trembling. She’s only a woman, he told himself, not an ‘It’. Just a woman! But a madwoman, a small, chuckling voice in his head whispered. An incredibly strong madwoman, it taunted. And she knows you’re terribly afraid, my lovely.

  ‘I stole the girl from you.’ The woman sniggered. Her mood had changed yet again, that shift sweeping through Childes himself, as though his senses were an integral part of hers.

  ‘Not your girl . . .’ she said slyly, ‘. . . unfortunately. The other little girl. How the little dear wriggled, how she squirmed.’

  The beginnings of anger flared inside him, a tiny flame struck in the darkness of his fear. The flame expanded, forcing back some of that darkness.

  ‘You . . . killed . . . Annabel,’ he said flatly.

  ‘And those others.’ Her voice was a low growl – a good-humoured growl. ‘Don’t forget all those others. Those girls were for my Lady too.’

  The breeze sweeping over the dam was stronger, colder, flicking at his upturned lapels. It carried the salt smell of the sea.

  ‘You murdered them,’ he said.

  ‘Fire murdered them, my lovely. And the woman who tried to stop me. Fire murdered the retards in the home, too. Oh how I enjoyed that place.’ Her massive bulk edged closer and she leaned her head forward in a conspiratorial manner, silvery light haloing the matted curls of her hair. Once more her eyes lay hidden in black pits. ‘Oh how I enjoyed that place,’ she repeated in a whisper. ‘My asylum. Nobody believed those lunatics, not their snivelling tittle-tattle. Who in their right mind would believe what I did to them when I got them alone? Who would credit the insane? Such fun it was, so very enjoyable. Such a pity it had to end, but you were coming closer, weren’t you, my lovely? And you would have given me away. That made my Lady very cross.’

  Now only one of Childes’ hands rested against the concrete ledge. ‘I still don’t understand. What lady?’

  She leered at him – at least he imagined it was some form of grotesque leer. ‘Don’t you know? Haven’t you felt her divine force inside you? The power of the moon goddess that waxes and wanes with the moon’s cycle. Can’t you feel her strength in our minds? You have the gift too, my lovely, don’t you see?’

  ‘The sightings . . .?’

  She became impatient, her irritation rumbling through his own senses. ‘Whatever you care to call it – none of that matters. When we share that gift, when our minds are together – like now! – its strength is so powerful . . . so beautifully . . . powerful.’ The thought had made her breathless. Her body swayed from side to side, her face upwards again.

  Her smell of insanity was rancid.

  She became motionless and her head lowered. ‘Don’t you remember what we did with your machines? Our little game?’

  ‘The computers?’ He shook his head in bewilderment. ‘You made the word “MOON” appear on the screens.’

  She laughed, and the sound was threatening. ‘You made the word appear in their minds! Not on the machines, my lovely fool! We did it together, you and me, we made your precious girls see what we wanted them to see! And you saw what I wanted you to!’

  Illusion. Everything was illusion; and perhaps it made more sense that way, knowing none of it was real.

  ‘But why,’ he pleaded, ‘for God’s sake why did they have to die?’

  ‘Not for God’s, but for our goddess’. Sacrificial lambs, lovely. And for their spiritual energy, feeble though it was in most. Interestingly strong in the woman, though, the one whose neck I broke inside the school.’

  ‘Miss Piprelly?’

  A shrug of those immense sloping shoulders. ‘If that’s who she was. You understand the energy I mean, don’t you? I think you’d call it psychic force or some such fancy name. That energy tucked up inside here.’

  A stubby finger tapped her temple and Childes shuddered inwardly when he saw how large her hands were. Powerful hands, swollen, like her body.

  ‘But the woman’s was nothing like yours, my lovely. Oh no, yours is special. I’ve searched inside you, I’ve touched your spirit. Such force, and held back for so long! It belongs to me now, though.’

  She grinned and shuffled closer.

  ‘All those others,’ Childes said quickly, needing time for his anger to surge through him, to lend
its vigour. ‘Why did you mutilate them?’

  ‘I tasted their souls through their inner flesh. That was the way, d’you see, my lovely? I emptied them and filled them again, but not with their own organs – oh no, their organs couldn’t be returned, or they would have tried to reclaim their souls. And their souls belonged to our goddess. But I left them the stone, her physical presence here on earth. You’ve witnessed her earthly spirit inside the moonstone, haven’t you, that tiny blue-glowing spark that’s her essence? My gift to those unfortunates who had to die for her.’

  Mad. She was totally mad. And she had moved very close now.

  Dread, icy and clutching, held him there as she stretched one of those big hands towards him. The fingers slowly uncurled, the palm upwards, so that moonlight struck the fleshy surface.

  ‘I’ve got one for you,’ she whispered, smiling at all that her offer implied.

  A tiny round stone lay in the outstretched palm and it might only have been the madwoman’s disrupted and disruptive mind working on his, implanting the thought, the illusion – for she did have the ability; despite her madness, she did possess unbelievable psychic power – but there was an effulgence inside the gem, a bluish phosphorescence heightened by moonshine. In that glimmer he saw all the deaths.

  With a gasping cry of both fear and rage, Childes slapped at the hand so that the moonstone flew into the air, a minute shooting star snuffed out almost immediately as it arced down into the void that was the dam’s valley.

  The demented woman, who held within her an uncanny force, stood silently before him, her hand still outstretched, her face, with its shadowed eyes, inscrutable. Childes, too, was transfixed, the air between them somehow dangerously charged, an insidiously creeping current thrumming around his body so that each hair stiffened on its own little island.