Hungry Moon (39 page)

^{She and Nick and Eustace tiptoed as fast as they could through the side streets to her cottage. Up at the hotel she heard hymns and confused sounds, not all of them joyful. As she came in sight of her car, she became afraid that the searchers would have wrecked the engine, to trap her. When Nick and Eustace had clambered in, still speechless from the encounter at the church, the car started on her second turn of the key. She crept it through the streets and then, with a wordless prayer she couldn't even frame to herself, she sped the car onto the moor.}

^{SIXTY TWO}

^{Andrew had been left at the hotel with Miss Ingham. Once his mother had gone off to look for whoever she blamed for the policeman being killed, he closed his eyes again and joined in the praying. Praying was easier than thinking; there were too many things he didn't want to think about. Those of his prayers that weren't for his father were about him, asking God not to let his parents meet out there in the dark while his father wasn't his father. The thanks for what they'd received through the miracle Mr Mann had performed came to an end, but he stayed on his knees, swaying to keep himself balanced. 'Are you asleep, Andrew?' Miss Ingham said, and he opened his eyes guiltily.}

^{The crowded lobby was still dim. The glow that filtered into it seemed almost to be seeping out of the walls. Miss Ingham's looming face looked anxious, less so when he struggled to his feet and managed not to fall over. 'Are you sure you're all right? You didn't have much to eat,' she said. When he mumbled that he was, her smile filled out. 'Play with your friends if you like.'}

^{His mother had told him to stay close to Miss Ingham. Besides, he didn't feel like playing, especially not when he looked at the other children, at their well-fed, glimmering faces. The dimness made them pale as the shapes he'd seen crawling up the devil's cave. Some of the older children who'd come to Moonwell were organizing games, round games where a prayer got longer as it went around the circle, Bible quizzes where you had to do a penance if you answered wrong. He felt sinful for not wanting to join in, but he was worried about too many things that made him feel more shrunken every time he thought about them. One of them got past his lips. 'Who's my mummy gone to get, Miss Ingham? What'll happen to them?'}

^{'I wouldn't like to say who it might be, Andrew. There will always be people who don't want to listen to what God has to tell us, and that means they'll hear the devil and do his talking for him.' She patted his head and went on, 'But as for doing anything to them, I expect they'll just be brought to Godwin.'}

^{Then they would be in the way when Andrew tried to sneak up to see him. Andrew had to get there first, while his mother wasn't here to stop him. T think I'll play a bit now like you said,' he told her, and she gave him a smile that made him feel even guiltier.}

^{'Oh, it's Andrew,' Robert said when he found a game near the stairs. 'Happen this'll be too hard for you.' But Andrew managed to keep the growing prayer straight in his head twice round the circle before he remembered that the longer he played, the less time he would have to reach Mr Mann. 'See, I told you,' Robert said smugly when Andrew missed a phrase the third time round.}

^{Andrew stumbled out of the circle, his face burning with self-consciousness and guilt and the fear of being noticed as he inched toward the stairs. He was sidling toward the stairs with his back to the wall as if he wasn't going anywhere really, and then he realized that was exactly how to get himself noticed. He swung round, the inside of his head turning faster than he was, and staggered forward, grabbing the end of the banister. Without warning, Miss Ingham was in his way. 'Where are you going, Andrew? Your mother said you were to stay where I can see you.'}

^{Hopelessness spread through him, unstringing his limbs. 'I'm tired. I want to rest,' he whined.}

^{An old woman sitting nearby in a chair and poring over a Bible while she pressed her spectacles against her eyes with one hand looked up, switching off her pencil flashlight. 'If the boy wants to sleep, my bed's doing nothing. Shall I take him up? It's only on the first floor.'}

^{'I'll come with you so I can see where it is.' The two women helped Andrew upstairs between them, and he realized he wouldn't have been able to climb by himself. The old woman trailed the miniature flashlight beam along the first-floor corridor, over the room numbers that gleamed like coal, and stopped at 109. When she opened the door, the room looked like a faint ghost of itself, filled with glimmering shapes that seemed about to fade into the blackness. Andrew couldn't have cared if they did, he was all at once so exhausted. He hardly felt the old woman taking off his shoes as he crawled, eyes shut, toward the pillow. Someone kissed him lightly on the forehead, someone pulled the covers over him, and then he was asleep.}

^{He was too exhausted to dream. When he opened his eyes, hours later, the room was brighter; the moon was up behind the clouds. He was alone in the room, perhaps on the whole floor. When he felt awake enough to push back the covers and venture into the corridor, all the voices he could hear were downstairs. He tiptoed to the stairs. Someone was sobbing wildly below him, and for a moment he was sure it was his mother. Could she have met his father out there in the dark? He mustn't go to her, not until he'd asked Mr Mann to help them. He felt able to climb now that he'd slept. 'Please,' he said to anyone who might be listening, and began to climb toward the top floor of the hotel.}

^{SIXTY THREE}

^{It was close to moonrise when Craig began to wonder why he felt so calm. Despite the cold - if it was still cold -he was no longer shivering. Even the dark seemed almost comforting: at least he didn't have to drive through it or find his way on foot; all it required of him was to sit on the gentle grassy slope beside the road and doze as if at the end of a picnic. Vera was nestling against him, her breaths a warm breeze against his neck. For the first time in as long as he could remember, neither of them had anything to do but sit: there was no point in even trying to plan ahead. It felt like the end, he thought dreamily, and if this was how it came, it wouldn't be so bad. Then he wondered if he was calm because he knew they'd reached the end, knew that they would never leave the dark.}

^{Perhaps exposure would finish them off; perhaps it already had. That might be why he no longer felt the cold - not because he and Vera were keeping each other warm, but because the sensations of his body were deserting him. His growing sense of imminence was as close as he'd ever come to a psychic intuition, and perhaps it was the only one he'd ever needed. He wondered if everyone experienced it, at least everyone who was about to die a natural death.}

^{There had been times when he'd thought he was dying, times when he'd wakened gasping in the middle of the night, when every painful beat of his racing heart had felt like the last. He'd been afraid then - afraid because he wasn't ready. But he felt ready now. Suppose they tried to make their way across the moor once the moon rose, what would happen then? The last place on earth he would go was Moonwell, but he didn't believe they had time to reach anywhere else. And even supposing they found someone's house, say, what would they have to look forward to? He would rather die peacefully here with Vera than spend years turning back into an incontinent, slobbering infant - God forbid that Vera or anyone else should have to cope with him in that state. Better to accept the comfortable dark.}

^{He found he was hoping they wouldn't see moonrise, which would only make it harder for them to slip away. He closed his eyes, perhaps to share Vera's slumber. If there was anything beyond death, he thought it must be that your last thoughts went on forever, or seemed to -you wouldn't know if they came to an end because you wouldn't exist. He'd want nothing more than this sense of peace and wordless closeness to Vera. Then she raised her head. 'Craig?' she murmured.}

^{'Yes, love,' he said, willing her to go back to sleep while they could.}

^{'Did they get through safely, do you think?'}

^{'Hazel and her husband?' He wondered if she'd forgotten what Benedict had been following, the luminous bird, the shape of Benedict's faith. 'They seemed to know where they were going.'}

^{'They had to make their choice, we couldn't make it for them. They're young,' she said as if that assured their success. 'And I don't think Benedict will find it quite so easy to have his own way in future.'}

^{He thought she was drifting back to sleep when she laid her head against his shoulder. Then she murmured, 'I've been remembering.'}

^{'Have you, love?' he said, and realized that unless they shared memories now, perhaps they never would again. 'What?'}

^{'I was thinking about her first day at school. Remember how she marched through the gates and never looked back at us? And that night she told us she knew that if she looked back she wouldn't want to leave us, and she didn't want us upset.'}

^{'And that school speech day when she got the prize for being first in her class. Remember how solemn she was, saying it was all thanks to her teachers and us. And she gave us that look as if she was almost apologizing for having done so well in Religious Knowledge.'}

^{'Remember the day she brought a boyfriend home for the first time . . .'}

^{'Yes.' What had the young man's name been? He couldn't recall; perhaps the inessentials were slipping away more swiftly now. Craig had liked him - a pity she'd chosen Benedict instead. Maybe that first boyfriend had been too much like her father, which was certainly not true of Benedict; Craig hoped not, anyway. His thoughts were beginning to prod him out of his waiting calm, and he tried to sink again into the dark he was sharing with Vera. 'And the first holiday we had by ourselves when she was old enough to go away with her friends,' he said. 'We couldn't get used to not having to say good night to her, could we? And after she got married, I kept nearly going into her room to speak to her for weeks.'}

^{'We never did go to Greece.'}

^{'No, we didn't,' Craig agreed, wondering why she had suddenly grown tense. When he understood, he couldn't help opening his eyes in the dark that perhaps wasn't quite dark. He'd been trying to conceal his sense that they were near the end, for fear that it might distress her, and all the time she'd been keeping the same insight to herself - hiding it, he thought, in case the idea of losing her in nothingness dismayed him. Suddenly it did, and his eyes filled with tears. 'I want to be wherever you are,' he said, shocked by the aging of his voice.}

^{'You will be. I'll make sure.' She hugged him fiercely. 'If there's a God, I can't believe he would separate us just because he never gave you the ability to believe in him. He couldn't be so cruel.'}

^{That might be comforting so long as he didn't examine it too closely, but he wished he hadn't opened his eyes. He couldn't recapture the warmth and peace he'd been sharing with her - he was wondering where their death would come from. Hours ago he'd told himself that nothing could happen to them if they sat still, and now he couldn't quite shake off a yearning for that certainty. The sky was beginning to pale: he could see the edge of the slope above them on the far side of the road. Soon the moonlight would come creeping down that slope. He'd wanted them just to merge softly with the dark, but it was too late for that. He wished he could close his eyes and Vera's. but he was too apprehensive now to be able to take advantage of that dark, for something pale and huge was stirring restlessly above the slope.}

^{'Just clouds,' he muttered as Vera snuggled close to him. They
were
clouds, he realized, but he didn't like the way they were shifting, almost as if the light behind them were thrusting them aside like fat, heavy curtains. It must simply be a gap in the clouds that were oozing over the slope, he told himself. Now there was a patch of clear sky above the edge, sky that flared whitely. Almost at once, far quicker than he would have liked, light spilled down the slope, fossilizing the heather, and then the forehead of an enormous skull rose over the edge.}

^{'The moon,' Craig said. Of course it was, however eagerly it seemed to be rising. It wasn't quite full, he saw. It only had one eye, which made the dead face look as if it were winking, a conspiratorial wink suggesting that it had a secret which it was about to share. The moonlight flooded down the slope toward a large rock across the road from Craig and Vera, and Craig strained his eyes to see the clouds that must be drifting across the moon, casting shadows that made the slope appear to tremble and shift alarmingly. But there were no clouds over the moon. The landscape seemed to heave like sheets on a bed from which the waking moon was rising. Then the moon rose clear of the edge of the slope and leaned down at him out of the sky, grinning its crumbling grin.}

^{Craig never knew if he recoiled or *he slope beneath him moved and threw him backward, or both. He fell into the shadow that the rock on the far side of the road was casting. At first he didn't fully understand why Vera was hugging him as if nothing on earth would make her let go, and then he realized, with a shock that seemed almost to burst his heart out of his chest, that they were falling. They couldn't be, he cried out mutely: there had been solid ground behind them in the dark. But now, in the moonlight, there was only emptiness.}