Hungry Moon (31 page)

^{The tilted moon hung in the cloudless sky. One upper window of the hotel looked full of its light, though none of the others did. Eustace went as straight across the square as he could, then round the curve to the deserted stretch of the High Street where the police station was. He reached for the handles of the porch doors and hesitated, hearing dogs growling somewhere. Hardly in the police station, he thought as he opened the doors and stepped into the dimness.}

^{FIFTY ONE}

^{At last the sounds of snarling and soft tearing gave way to silence. Nick resisted the urge to press closer to the bars of his cell, to try to make out what was happening in the room beyond the corridor. He was afraid that the dogs might leap out of the darkness, fasten their teeth in him before he had time to dodge back. Being unable to help the policeman as the dogs savaged him to death had left Nick feeling weak and vulnerable to all his fears, his helplessness. He was standing a foot or so inside the cell, peering through the bars that flickered and shook with his peering, when the dogs padded out of the dimness.}

^{They stopped at the end of the corridor and lay down. The moonlight through the window of the cell gleamed in their eyes. They were licking their lips, which were wet with a liquid that the light turned black. Apart from that, they were monumentally still.}

^{Nick glared about the cell for a weapon. Of course there was nothing; even the bed was bolted to the wall. In his pockets he found a comb and a pen. If he couldn't harm the dogs, at least they couldn't harm him. He stepped close to the bars and stared the dog at the centre of the trio in the eyes. 'If I had a gun I'd learn to use it just for you,' he whispered.}

^{The dog stared whitely back at him. Nick gripped the bars and stared at it until his eyes stung. Dogs couldn't outstare human beings. 'What's wrong with you?' he snarled. Whatever happened, he wouldn't be the first to look away. He was still staring, and beginning to feel as if he were being hypnotized or hypnotizing himself, when he realized that the celebration in the square was over. Reality jerked into place around him. How long had people been walking past the police station without his noticing? He began to shout for help.}

^{The voices in the street faltered momentarily, then they broke into a hymn. The louder Nick shouted, the harder they sang. He fell silent suddenly, not only because of his rage at them, which was making his head throb worse than his bruised shoulders. He'd realized that despite all the noise he was making, the dogs hadn't stirred.}

^{He lunged forward to make them move, shook his fist at them through the bars. Their stillness enraged and terrified him. He kicked the bars and roared at the dogs, until he became aware how grotesquely he was behaving. He felt at the mercy of his lack of sleep, couldn't recall how long it had been since he'd slept. He stumbled backward and sat on the hard bed.}

^{The street sounded deserted now. He was alone with the dogs. Their sides heaved slightly as they lay waiting. He didn't want to wonder what they might be waiting for. He was tempted to throw the comb or the pen at them, except for a dread that they might not move even then. He'd been gazing at them for so long that his exhaustion made them appear to be creeping toward him when, without warning, all three stood up.}

^{Nick shrank back inadvertently, but they weren't coming for him. They slunk away into the main room. At first he could distinguish them from the dimness, three shapes like mist drifting to different corners of the room, and then he lost sight of them. He pressed his face against the bars, and realized that the porch doors were opening.}

^{'Look out,' he shouted, 'dogs loose in here!' But the man had already stepped into the police station. He glanced about rather timidly, small mouth open under his broad nose, and took a step forward. 'Where are you? What did you say?' he called, and the dogs leaped.}

^{Their snarling had warned him. Nick saw him cross his arms over his face to protect it, and lurch toward a desk. 'Not that way,' Nick groaned, dragging helplessly at the bars, and almost shut his eyes. The man went down on all fours and squeezed under the desk just as the dogs reached him.}

^{Perhaps he'd dodged under there to confuse them, but the back of the desk was solid, no way out. He couldn't even turn around beneath it. Nick thumped the bars and yelled hoarsely at the dogs as they paced snarling toward their victim, and then he remembered the comb and the pen. He tore out the comb, which had snagged on the lining of his pocket, and flung it like a knife.}

^{Though the bars helped line up his aim, the dogs were at least twenty feet away. He'd missed, he thought numbly, just as the comb sailed past the desk and struck one dog in the eye. The animal backed off, yelping and snarling, shaking its head to try to shake off the pain. As if that were a signal, the desk under which the man was crouching heaved up, spilling papers and metal, and was driven blindly at the dogs.}

^{It caught one of them against the wall. The animal's frenzied yelping and the sound of snapped bone made the man falter, then he raised the desk and smashed it down with all his force. 'Go on,' Nick cried as the man stared about in search of a weapon, as the two remaining dogs converged on him, almost crawling on their bellies, their blackened lips stretched back over their gums, exposing dripping teeth. Then the man gave a shaky laugh and grabbed the handle on the desk against the wall.}

^{Was he hoping to find a weapon in the drawer? But the drawer was stuck. The man shoved one foot against the desk and tugged as the dogs closed in. The drawer came loose suddenly, strewing stationery over the floor, and the man was left holding an empty drawer. 'Christ, no,' Nick whispered, and was drawing a breath to shout to him to run when the man went berserk.}

^{The corner of the drawer caught one dog on the side of the head. The splintering impact was so loud that Nick thought it was the drawer that had broken until he saw the spray of blood the animal left in the air as its legs crumpled. The third dog was already backing away, baring its teeth until it seemed its lips would tear, as the man rushed at it, scything the drawer in front of him. The edge of the corridor blocked Nick's view, but he deduced that the man was driving the animal into a corner. He heard a dull blow and a yelp, and the dog staggered back into view, its head split open. The man followed it, and the drawer came down, again and again. From feeling appalled yet exhilarated Nick turned nauseated, and looked away until the butchery was over.}

^{The man dropped the drawer and came rather shakily toward the cell. 'I've never done anything like that before,' he muttered.}

^{Nick couldn't tell if he was boasting or justifying himself. 'You had to do it. Can you find the key and let me out?'}

^{The man halted at the end of the corridor. 'Depends what you're in for.'}

^{'Didn't you see me at the prayer meeting? I didn't understand what was going on, that's all.'}

^{'That makes two of us. Locking people up for not believing now, are they? I'm surprised I'm not in there with you. Just tell me where to look for the key.'}

^{Nick hoped the man could deal with it now that he was obviously shaken by his encounter with the dogs. 'I'm afraid it must be on the policeman. He's in there. The dogs got him.'}

^{'Oh, dear.' The man hung on to the edge of the corridor with one hand and wiped his forehead with the other, then he pushed himself away from the wall, into the main room. 'Oh, God,' he murmured, 'look at this . . . Oh, my God, that's his ... I can't, oh ...' Eventually Nick heard him run to a corner and vomit. At last he brought the key and fumbled it into the lock, and stared white-faced at Nick as together they opened the door. 'Where will you go now?' he asked plaintively.}

^{'I've got to find Diana Kramer. They may have locked her up somewhere too. She was arguing with an Irishwoman with red hair.'}

^{'Mrs Scragg from the school. She might have Miss Kramer at her house. I can take you there and anywhere else you need to find.' The man gave him a tentative smile that looked inappropriate to his round blood-spattered face, his hands smeared with blood. 'I'm a postman,' he declared.}

^{FIFTY TWO}

^{The painting on the Scraggs' wall filled with moonlight, and it was no longer a painting. The signature vanished as the light reached into the frame and beyond it; then a mist began to drift forward across the slopes of the gloomy moor ."But it was moving too quickly for mist; it was rushing over the slopes toward Diana, who felt herself rushing to meet it though her body was still sitting in the shaky armchair by the dead hearth. She couldn't help holding back, trying to cling to her sense of herself, not least because she knew that whatever was beyond the white mist, it was no longer the moor.}

^{'Don't you be criticizing my painting, miss. You save that for your pupils, if anyone anywhere is fool enough to let you teach.' Mrs Scragg's furious voice was falling away behind and below Diana, who felt insubstantial as mist now. She couldn't remember when she'd last eaten. No wonder she felt so light-headed. Or had she been fasting without planning to, preparing her -elf for this? The thought seemed to release her, or overcome the last of her resistance. The whiteness reached beyond the frame for her, blotting out Mrs Scragg's harsh voice. Diana was flying, plunging forward through the frame.}

^{It seemed as if her plunge would never end. There was no sense of up or down, only a feeling of indescribable vastness. She was glad she couldn't see beyond the mist; instinct told her that even a glimpse would be more than her mind could cope with. She felt utterly vulnerable, even so, rushing with the mist wherever it was going. She wasn't even sure it was mist. It seemed more like gas, the gas of an explosion spreading across vast emptiness. It felt like the birth of everything.}

^{If it was, why couldn't she have seen it begin? Was a consciousness directing it, or was the explosion only the imperative of the surrounding void? She couldn't hold on to her thoughts any more than she was able to control her headlong rush or her sense of herself. She felt both shapelessly vast and dwarfed by the distances she was travelling. The gulf of time she was crossing, and the awesomeness of her pace, shrank her life to less than a moment from birth to death. Her memories were left behind across an abyss of space and time. Only her awe and terror distinguished her from the churning gaseous matter she was part of, spreading across infinity.}

^{Time had no meaning for her now, and so she couldn't tell how long it was before the rush began perceptibly to slow. She didn't realize that the incandescent mass had begun to coagulate until she saw the void beyond it, unobscured by the gas. The sense of the enormous dark through which other clouds of gas were racing, vaster than galaxies yet so distant they were hardly visible, shrank her further, threatened to blot out her awareness. She was profoundly grateful when her awareness turned to nearer things, still vast but, by contrast, almost comfortingly awesome. The mass in whose centre she was hovering had begun to form into stars.}

^{Again she had a piercing sense that time was meaningless. She was experiencing a process that had taken millions of years. The massive violence of the process, dust and gas being sucked into cores of incandescence whose heat she flinched from imagining, touched her on some level deeper than consciousness, her whole self opening flowerlike toward that fiery power. She became aware that the galaxy was spinning majestically in the void, stretching out its spiralling arms beyond the reach of her senses - one hundred million light-years beyond, she thought, a last echo of learning from the life she'd left behind. The awareness drew her outward, toward a young star.}

^{Though it seemed to be nowhere in particular, she could tell that it was closer to the centre than the edge. A nebula spun around it, lumps of matter colliding and growing, drawing more matter to themselves as they grew, creating raw worlds. She settled through the void toward the third planet and its satellite, and time quickened again. Earth and moon convulsed as the sun brightened; both globes broke out in volcanoes, flaring wounds. Clouds closed over the planet then, and Diana thought she saw glints of water on the moon, perhaps even the shimmer of an atmosphere. For the first time she.tried to control the vision she was experiencing, tried not to be drawn toward the moon. Perhaps it was the way it appeared to seethe, to stir wakefully under the bombardment of chunks of the nebula, matter left over now that the worlds were formed, but there was something about the satellite she didn't like.}

^{Was her apprehension carrying her toward the moon? The earth had more gravity, she told herself desperately; it ought to be able to capture her, to pull her away from the moon. But that didn't work for whatever she was, nor did trying to shift her awareness to the nebula around her, the galaxy, anything that could hold her back from the moon. The moon was beneath her now, and she was tethered to it by forces as invisible and insubstantial as she was.}

^{The moon was already dead, she saw. Water and atmosphere had evaporated, and the globe seemed dry and hollow as a husk in a spider's web. Meteors still dug into the surface, causing it to erupt in huge volcanic craters. The bursting of the surface made her think of corruption, life growing in decay, hatching. But that wasn't what terrified her, made her struggle to draw back from the moon while there was still time. She sensed that however dead the globe was, it harboured awareness. The earth was being watched.}

^{She could only pray that the watcher wasn't aware of her. Surely she was too insignificant to be noticed. She was intensely relieved when her perceptions turned toward the earth, which was changing more rapidly now, though each change lasted millions of years. Meteors still rained down, but caught fire in the atmosphere. Huge continents were splitting, drifting apart as storms picked at the world. Mountains reared up, seas flooded into gaps that were beginning to outline continents she could almost recognize. There might soon be life as she knew it - and then she realized what she had known instinctively. Life on earth was what the watcher on the moon was waiting hungrily for.}

^{Her terror turned her to face the moon, the dead surface that was nonetheless violently alive, lava exploding from raw craters, falling back more slowly than it could on earth. All her being cried out for the bombardment of meteors to stop, to leave alone whatever was lurking in the dead globe, but her will was powerless against the mindless forces of the universe. The movements of the crust were only geological, she tried to reassure herself. Perhaps at least there would be nothing worse to see. She tried to forget how life must be crawling out of the seas of earth by now, evolving on the land into creatures large enough to attract notice. How soon would dinosaurs appear? She felt as if her dread were rushing time forward toward what she feared, and terror overwhelmed her as she saw the change that was creeping over the moon.}

^{At first she took it for an eclipse, the shadow of the earth turning the satellite black. But the blackness wasn't advancing like an eclipse, it was crawling over the entire rim of the moon. She had a vertiginous impression that the moon was shrinking. If it was, then something was eating it away - something that was rising into sight from the dark side of the moon.}

^{She was suddenly afraid that the moon would turn black, leave her in the dark with whatever was approaching. Even that might have been preferable to seeing. As she watched helplessly, long pale tendrils, eight or more of them, reached over the rim of the moon. One stretched to the edge of the immense dead crater above which she was hovering. It was only when it gripped the edge of the crater that she realized it was more solid than the fissures she'd thought the tendrils were. The dark at the rim of the moon was the shadow the globe cast on whatever was behind it - whatever had climbed out of the dark side and was clinging there spiderlike with legs that stretched around the globe.}

^{As Diana's consciousness struggled to recoil, she grasped that dreadful as it was, the sight was nothing but a censored image of the reality, an image that was all her mind would let in. Perhaps even that was too much for her to cope with, the sight of the bloated body, white as only something that had passed all its hideous life in darkness could be, that heaved itself over the rim of the moon.}

^{Her glimpse must have lasted only an instant, though it felt like an age. The sight would have destroyed her, left her insane in the void, if she had had to bear it any longer - if she had glimpsed its face. Then the body that was bigger than the moon seemed to pour itself into its tendrils, which were already merging with the moonlight. Diana saw the light stream down to the earth, saw it touch the ground and take shape.}

^{She felt as if she'd passed beyond horror. She watched the shape stalk the new lands, the steaming forests. As the moonlight strengthened, it grew. The towering famished trunk reminded her of a maggot, the way the skin moved ceaselessly. The head was too large for the body, and she managed not to make out its face, except as a mask like the markings of the moon. When it opened its mouth wide and reached its arms as long as trees into the lairs of its prey, pulled its prey out struggling and shrieking in its long hands, she managed almost to blot out what it looked like. Already its prey was far larger than a human being, but she sensed that it wasn't satisfied. It was hungry for more than food.}

^{Days, months, years, centuries flickered across the earth. The time of her vision might have been speeding to assuage the hunger. Seas opened, continents collided, mountain ranges heaved up jaggedly, almost as if the planet were troubled by the parasite that ranged over it whenever the moonlight was strongest. Then time began to slow, and she knew the hunger was close to being satisfied. She was trapped in the vision, drawn down toward a speck of red light in the midst of a jungle. It might have been a signal to the thing that climbed the moonlight, though it could never have been intended that way.}

^{It was a fire in a clearing. Around it crowded creatures that walked on two legs. Diana felt pity rather than recognition; they didn't look much like human beings. It wasn't their smallness she pitied so much as the way they still seemed so animal, so vulnerable. But when they raised their eyes and saw what was lowering itself hungrily toward them, surrounding them with all its legs, their terror was far too human.}

^{She watched it feed, since she couldn't turn away. She learned what it was hungry for: whatever distinguished the human from the animal. She suffered helplessly through the centuries of its triumph, as the race became more human. She watched it stalk though the last ice age, its swollen body lighting up the icy wastes. That must be where the tales of giants originated, in the sight of the spidery legs that reached into the sky, growing taller as it strode away from feeding. Perhaps it was where religion was born too, the first priests supplicating the sun to return, to save their people from the hunger of the moon, a plea which flared through her like a reminiscence of the power that had touched her as the stars were born. But the moon had its conciliators, prototypes of the druids, men articulate enough to call the stalker into human form, the form of a man so brightly white they couldn't look directly at him. They promised it their cannibal sacrifices, promised to hold the moon sacred, and it lent them the powers to change and grow stronger to hunt when the moon was full, so that it could take what it wanted from their feeding. Diana wanted to cry out to the conciliators not to bargain on behalf of humanity, but the bargain was already past; already the dreadful purpose of the rites was being forgotten, glossed over as the centuries advanced. Only the hunger the rites assuaged and the inhuman power they fed would never change.}

^{Humanity advanced. Civilizations grew up. The worship of the moon was tamed, civilized. People who ran with the full moon were outcast or treated as mad or put to death. The old religion survived in the least accessible places, where the moon thing fed, driven out by the brightness of cities. Glimpses of it gave rise to legends of ogres, of monsters that stalked the empty ocean. Then the druids had called it to Moonwell, and the Romans had tried to destroy it while it was trapped in the druid priest's body. All they had done was to enrage it, provoke it to plan a revenge that had festered over the centuries, a revenge on the human race.}

^{The utter dark of the cave hadn't quelled it. On the contrary, it had gained power over the dark. Before the druid's body had finished decaying, it had called up blind creatures from the deepest caves to heap the pieces of the corpse together with the body of the Roman soldier who had sacrificed himself, never realizing he was to feed the very thing he'd meant to destroy. It had slowed the decay, transforming it into a kind of life that brooded through the centuries of darkness, a makeshift body it could inhabit while it waited. Over the centuries its eyeless servants had become more like itself. In the upper world the moon was still worshipped, the worship giving power to what waited in the cave. Sometimes it reached up and grasped minds in which racial memories of the old worship were buried, and then they went mad or changed with the moon. If they hunted, it shared their feeding, fed on the spirit as they fed on the flesh.}

^{It still lacked the strength to climb back to the moonlight. Once its eyeless servants had borne it toward the upper shaft, but the makeshift body had fallen apart before they had crawled more than a few yards. Besides, it wanted a human being to be its bearer, the first of its triumphs. Perhaps the time it waited in the blind dark was nothing to a being that couldn't die, but to Diana the years felt like the centuries they were. All the same, she couldn't help wishing for them to continue when, far along the cave, she saw a light descending the upper shaft. God help her and everyone, the waiting was over. Mann was coming.}