Meet Me in the Moon Room (5 page)

Julie.

Why do little girls get lost in the woods?

“Sammy!”

She rolled over and pulled her knees in under herself. Her butt rose into the air, but the weight of her tree pinned her face to the mud and wet leaves and pine needles. Her voice was muffled as she struggled and called to him for help.

Sam backed away from her. Somewhere under that mass of muscle and sticks and leaves, Julie sobbed. What had he done? Sam took another step back. He should go to her now. Take it all back. Make it all better.

He turned to run.

Julie roared.

Sam’s foot tangled in a deadfall, and he tripped. He snatched at the air and felt something squish between his fingers like the mud of Mad Dog creek. He saw Julie’s broad green leaves sweep up and away into the sky as he plunged toward the hard ground of the town square. He heard the townsfolk gasp.

One of her pale hands darted through the air and snagged his ankle. Julie lowered him to hang upside down by one leg in front of her awful face. Her other arm snaked out, and she grabbed his other ankle and scissored his legs open and shut, open and shut. Her lips and teeth were smeared with Big Betty’s blood. She closed one eye in a terrible wink, then opened it again. A rumbling came from somewhere deep inside of her.

“Julie,” Sam said and let himself go limp. She would crush him like a pig in those huge jaws. It was no more than he deserved.

Julie released one of his legs and took him under the arms and turned him upright. Easily, like a kitten. She shook him a little and pulled him in close. With an effort that twisted her face and pushed her tree higher into the air, she puckered her purple lips. When she kissed him, her kiss covered him from head to toe. Then she put him on his feet and let him go.

Sam stepped away from her. A trembling overtook her, and she shook from the top of her tree down to her feet. Her huge head suddenly moved up the trunk of her tree like an elevator. When it reached the top, her leaves became a thatched roof, and her eyes went blank and became windows and her mouth became a door. Her feet went yellow, grew talons, and her trunk split into two giant chicken legs.

The witch’s hut ran out of town, kicking up dust and scattering the crowd, and as it left, Sam thought he saw her in the window, the sudden white flash of her smile, the black shadow of her hair. She would be waiting in the woods.

Pretending

T
he missile silo was Stuart’s idea. It was his turn to make up a holiday tradition. The silo belonged to a man named Johnson who had moved his family back to Cheyenne. Johnson and his wife had spent a lot of money fixing the place up, and they’d given it their best shot, but it hadn’t taken long to discover that a missile silo was an awful place to raise a family. Now he rented it out to people like Stuart.

The party this year was Stuart and Marilyn, Bill and Elizabeth, and Lewis. Bill was a lawyer and Elizabeth taught math at the same college where Stuart was in Psychology and Marilyn, when she wasn’t on sick leave, was a research biologist. Lewis was a computer programmer. Sally was missing this year. She’d left Lewis and gone back to New York in the spring.

Last year it had been Elizabeth’s turn to come up with a candidate tradition. She’d taken them to the Mojave where they had jumped out of an airplane. Since none of them had done it before, they jumped in tandem with instructors snugged onto their backs. Lewis had made a lot of bad jokes about being ridden to earth by the sky patrol. The instructors were all getting good xmas eve overtime but none of them seemed happy about it. On the way down, Marilyn had wet her pants and hadn’t spoken to any of the others for weeks afterwards.

The year before that, it had been Lewis and snake handling in Louisiana. Marilyn hadn’t spoken for a long time after that one, either.

The reason the gang needed to make up a new tradition every year was that they had no traditions of their own. They were neither Christian nor Jewish, neither Muslim nor Hindu. The list of things they were not was very long. They were Americans of a certain class and education, in their forties, atheists or maybe closet agnostics. No children. They felt completely left out of things during the holidays, so they came together to seek out new rituals, new meanings. Over the years the search itself had become the tradition.

This year Marilyn had gotten a head start on not speaking to Stuart. She was turning herself down, speaking less frequently, and with less volume when she did speak. She was as quiet as a mouse on the drive out to the silo, her head resting against the car window until her cheek got too cold and she sat up to stare out at the snow. She looked like a sickly child bundled up in too many winter clothes. She coughed, and her cough was an accusation.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Are we there yet?”

He hadn’t told her what he was up to. He knew that telling her would be like telling everyone. Elizabeth would have wheedled it out of her. He wanted it to be a big surprise—the vast plain of snow, the endless drive into nowhere, the headlights finally picking out the wire fence and the shack that must surely be too small to be their destination.

“Yes,” he said at last, “we’re here.”

He and Lewis busted open the frozen door on the shack covering the entrance, and they all climbed down into the silo. Stuart switched on the power and gave them the tour. Here was the control room, now a media center, and here the crew quarters, now cozy bedrooms. Way down there were the spooky storerooms, and all those corridors and huge heavy doors, and, maybe most disturbing, the hole where the intercontinental ballistic missile had been. It was half-filled with water—more than a hundred feet of water, Stuart said, and there were flooded passages, another underwater world down there. Echoes and a slimy green smell. Even with the flashlights it wasn’t easy to make out the surface of the water. None of them stayed long at the edge.

He led them back to a room that had once been the crew’s mess. He let them bunch up at the door behind him, then stepped aside and switched on the light to reveal a lavishly appointed dinner table.

The walls of the dining room had been papered white with a faint red rose pattern. A picture Stuart had first mistaken for a big photograph mimicked a window on one wall. When he looked a little closer he saw it was a painting. Not a very good painting. He doubted even a very good painting would have chased away the overwhelming sense of being underground. It had something to do with the way light and sound behaved, something about the earthy smell of the air.

“Everyone sit down,” he said. “I’ll serve the soup.”

Once into the soup course, Stuart warmed them up with his “alas, we middle-aged American atheists have no deep traditions” routine. It was the standard opening of their ritual.

“The Catholic Mass or the twelve days of Christmas. Hanukkah or Ramadan. We’re excluded from all of that.”

“Not excluded,” Elizabeth said. “We’ve opted out.”

“Yes,” they all said together, like a chant. “Opted out.”

“Well, tonight,” Stuart said, “we are going to do an exercise in creative belief.”

He had their attention. This would be the point of the evening.

His proposal was simple.

Just believe something.

He suggested they start with ghosts.

“You’re suggesting that if there are no ghosts,” Bill said, “we must make our own?”

“Exactly,” Stuart said.

“We have met the supernatural,” Elizabeth said, “and the supernatural is us?”

“Now you’re getting it,” Stuart said.

“But why are we doing this?” Lewis asked. “What exactly do we hope to accomplish?”

“I want us to experience what most of the rest of the world claims to experience all the time,” Stuart said. “Before the evening is over, I want each of us to know what it is like to believe the unbelievable.”

“No matter how hard we try,” Marilyn said, “I don’t think we’ll get ghosts just because we want to.” She didn’t look up when she spoke.

“You’re right,” Stuart said. “We are all unapologetic materialists. We’ll need a little help.” He would say no more until after dinner. No one complained. The delay was part of the ritual, too.

After dinner, they regrouped in the parlor. There was a fake fireplace with an electric fire. There was a round table in the middle of the room. On the table was a single black candle. To one side was a bar. Lewis spotted it at once and poured himself a drink.

“What?” he said when he caught them all looking at him.

“I have picked ghosts for us to believe in,” Stuart said, “because I think we can use a mental aid that will make it easier.”

Bill joined Lewis at the bar and mixed a drink for himself. He raised an eyebrow at Elizabeth but she shook her head no.

“We’ll have to make our own ghost,” Stuart said. “You can think of it as a game. The game for tonight. The main event. One of us will become a ghost. The degree to which that person becomes a ghost will depend on how strongly the rest of us believe that person is a ghost.”

“You’re talking about me,” Lewis said.

“Why you?” Stuart asked.

“Odd man out.”

“Actually,” Stuart said, “I was thinking we’d draw straws. Look, I’ve already set it up. Short straw is the ghost.” He took the straws he had prepared earlier from his jacket pocket.

“Here, you go first, Marilyn.” He pushed the straws in front of her face. “Go on, pick one.”

She sighed and took a straw. He saw that she had gotten the short one. He hadn’t exactly planned it that way. In fact, he had been holding back. He knew how to force a card or, in this case, a straw. He had learned that trick in a psych course taught by a magician when he was a grad student, but he didn’t think he’d used it on Marilyn. No one else knew the rest of the straws were redundant, so he went through the entire exercise letting each of them pick one. There was one left in the end for him. He held his up and everyone did the same. It was easy to see that Marilyn would be the ghost.

“Our ghost person, let’s call her Marilyn.” He smiled at her. “She is merely a focus of attention. After all, what is a ghost but the point of concentrated desire?”

“Fear?” Lewis asked. “Concentrated fear?”

“In the unlikely event that this works,” Bill said, “I mean, if I can convince myself that Marilyn really is a ghost, then she’ll disappear.”

“Why disappear?” Elizabeth asked.

“Because I don’t believe in ghosts,” Bill said.

“You mean, if you believe Marilyn is a ghost, you won’t be able to see her, because you don’t believe in ghosts?”

“You got it,” Bill said. “It’s a Zen of Physics kind of thing.”

They were talking about Marilyn as if she weren’t there, Stuart thought. It was working already. He hated to break the momentum but he needed to get her moving. She wouldn’t be much fun as a ghost if she just sat there looking ill and pathetic. “Let’s get this show on the road,” he said. “Marilyn?”

“What do you want me to do?” Her voice wasn’t much more than a whisper.

“Be a ghost,” Stuart said. “You’ve got this ideal spooky place to haunt, so go haunt. Pass on to the other side. We’ll light the candle and sit around the table and hold hands and call you back with pure belief.”

Marilyn pushed herself up out of her chair and walked to the heavy metal door. Her shoulders slumped as if she were thinking she’d never be able to get it open, but then she must have remembered the doors were perfectly balanced because she grabbed the wheel and pulled. The door swung aside smoothly and she moved into the corridor.

“Okay,” Stuart said. “Let’s take our places at the table.”

“What is this?” Bill sounded irked, but Stuart had known him long enough to know that he was intrigued.

“Mood,” Stuart said. He lighted the candle and switched off the electric light. “Believing the unbelievable is all about mood. Come on, sit down.”

Bill and Elizabeth took chairs at the round table. Lewis filled his glass again and sat down next to Elizabeth.

Stuart sat down. “Okay, hold hands.”

“Oh, boy,” Elizabeth said. She took Bill’s hand. Lewis was staring down at his drink and didn’t respond to her outstretched hand.

“Come on, Lewis,” Stuart said.

“Okay, okay,” Lewis said. “Let’s blast off.” He took Elizabeth’s hand.

“Everyone close your eyes,” Stuart said.

“Studies show that listening to Mozart strengthens your mind,” Bill said.

“Personally, I go for Ginkgo Biloba,” Elizabeth said.

“All you need is love,” Lewis said, maybe a little bitterly.

“Close your eyes, and she will come,” Stuart said.

One by one they closed their eyes. Stuart closed his last. He waited. Bill’s hand was dry. Lewis’ was cold from the ice in the drink he’d been holding. Stuart’s chair was hard.

“Do you think we should say her name in spooky voices?” Elizabeth asked.

“No,” Stuart said. “Maybe. I don’t know. Let’s try concentration first.”

He concentrated.

Several minutes later, he peeked out at the others and looked right into the wide-open eyes of Elizabeth. She gave him a crooked grin and a wink. He frowned at her, and she sighed and closed her eyes. He waited a moment more to make sure everyone was cooperating before closing his eyes again.