The Moonlit Mind (Novella): A Tale of Suspense (4 page)

Crispin, Harley, and Mirabell are sitting at a reading table in the library. Mr. Mordred strides back and forth in front of a row of bookshelves, holding forth on some subject, delighting them with his stories. In the dream, Mr. Mordred doesn’t have a horsefly birthmark on his left temple. His entire head is that of a giant horsefly.

Dream leads to dream, to dream, until he is awakened by a sound. A swishing-scraping noise.

The clock reads 12:01
A.M
.

So weary that he can’t fully sit up, Crispin lifts his head from the pillow just far enough to survey the room for the source of the noise.

The bed tray stands on the cart, where he last put it. On the tray, the thermos of chicken soup wobbles around and around on its base, as if something inside is turning, spinning, impatient for Crispin to unscrew the cap and pour it out.

He must be delirious again.

Lowering his head to the pillow, closing his eyes, he thinks of her slender hand upon his chest, and soon he sleeps.

In the morning when he wakes, the cart is gone and the tray with it. He hopes that a maid removed it and that Nanny Sayo will not have to know that he failed to eat her soup.

He never wants to disappoint her.

Crispin loves his nanny.

In two days, he regains his health.

When he is well again, after showering, he stands naked in the bathroom, studying himself in a full-length mirror, searching for the detailed silhouette of a horsefly. He can’t find one.

For reasons he is unable to put into words, he believes that he has narrowly escaped something worse than a birthmark.

His embarrassment and worry do not last. Soon he lapses back into the relaxed and carefree rhythms of Theron Hall.

Crispin, Harley, and Mirabell eat only what they like. Chef Faunus and Cook Merripen cater to their every desire.

They go to bed only when they wish.

Each rises to his or her own clock.

Mr. Mordred entertains. Nanny Sayo attends the children’s needs.

The world beyond the great house has been fading from Crispin’s mind. Sometimes, passing a window, he is surprised to see the city, the Pendleton looming across the street.

Shortly before midnight on July 25, having been in bed less than two hours, Crispin swims up from a troubled sleep. Half awake, he sees two shadowy figures in his room, the place brightened only by the hallway light that seeps in through the door, which is ajar no more than two inches.

The visitors are talking softly to each other. One voice is that of Giles, whom the children now call Father. The other belongs to Jardena, Giles’s mother.

Jardena looks old enough to be her son’s great-grandmother. She keeps almost entirely to her suite of rooms on the third floor. She is withered, her face as drawn as a sun-dried apple, but her eyes as lustrous and purple as wet grapes. She’s seldom seen, almost always at a distance, at the farther junction of hallways, floating by in one of her long dark dresses.

Crispin hears little of what they say, though it seems that tomorrow is some kind of memorial or feast day. Before he slides away into sleep once more, the boy hears the names Saint Anne and Saint Joachim.

When he wakes in the morning, Crispin is not sure that the visitors to his room were real. More likely, they were part of his otherwise unremembered dream.

In the coming night, something happens to Mirabell.

Halloween, three years and three months later …

The leash jerks from the boy’s hand, and he falls.

The previously gentle dog, never having growled, does not growl now, but bites. He nips at the ankle of the male marionette in the white suit, who cries out and lets go of Crispin’s jacket.

The boy sprints after the dog, away from the nightclub called Narcissus. They plunge into the street, dodging cars as brakes shriek and horns blare.

From the comparative safety of the next sidewalk, Crispin looks back across the street and sees the man on one knee, examining his bitten ankle. The woman in white is talking on a cell phone.

Crispin snatches up the dropped leash, and the dog sets off with purpose. He and Harley weave between the pedestrians, half of whom are costumed for Halloween, half not.

When the hunters are hot on the scent, some places are safer than others. Certain churches, not all, seem to foil these particular pursuers. Sanctuary can be found in that kind of church—whether Baptist or otherwise—in which, on Sundays, rollicking gospel songs are sung with gusto and booming piano. Churches in which Latin is sometimes spoken, candles are lit for the intention of the dead, incense is sometimes burned, and fonts of holy water stand at the entrances—those are also secure. Synagogues are good refuges, too.

Right now, he and Harley are a few dangerous blocks from any such a safe haven.

Reverend Eddie Nordlaw, who founded the Crusade for Happiness and who appears Sundays on his TV show,
The Wide Eye of the Needle
,
preaches that God wants everyone to be rich. He operates from his megachurch, the Rapture Temple, on Joss Street, which is not far from here.

But Crispin has learned the hard way that the Rapture Temple offers no more protection against these enemies than does a shopping mall. Or a police station.

On the day of his mother’s wedding, when he watched from a high window, one of the honored guests whom he saw arriving was the chief of police.

Pedestrians admonish and curse Crispin as he pounds pell-mell after the bolting dog, holding fast to the leash and trying not to be jerked off his feet.

Water in motion can also screen Crispin from Giles Gregorio and everyone like him. A rushing stream, if it is wide enough, thwarts them. Even if the boy stands on the farther bank from them, in plain sight, they seem unable to see him and eventually give up the search.

In Statler Park, a man-made waterfall tumbles into a fake-rock pond. A narrow pathway allows you to walk behind the falls, where there is a grotto. In that sequestered hollow, you can look out toward the park, through the cascades. The hunters must know of that retreat; but Crispin has several times been safe there while they stalked him through the rest of the grounds.

Rushing torrents seem not only to deny them his scent but also to confuse their senses, as though the swish and burble of the water is not merely sound but also a language, as if Nature is speaking a dispensation to spare him from their homicidal fury.

He and the dog are at this moment far from Statler Park and no nearer any rushing stream. Their best hope is Memorial Plaza, two acres of granite cobblestones, raised planters full of flowers, and benches on which people sit to read the morning paper, to have a bite of lunch, to feed the pigeons, and even to contemplate the sacrifices made by soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines who have died to keep them free.

Harley knows the city as well as Crispin does. Soon cobblestones are underfoot. At this hour, the lamplit plaza is deserted because, for everyone except Crispin and his dog, such places are dangerous after dark in this part of town.

At the center of Memorial Plaza, on a granite plinth twelve feet in diameter, stand three larger-than-lifesize bronze figures: marines in battle gear, one of them wounded and leaning on another, the third carrying Old Glory as if defiantly announcing their location to an adversary they do not fear.

These days, the city is operating with such an enormous budget deficit that the plaza lamps and the spotlights on the statuary are extinguished at nine o’clock to save electricity. All is dark but for the lunar lamp.

The sounds of celebrations ring in from surrounding streets.

Harley springs onto the plinth, and Crispin scrambles after him. The slab of granite is carved to represent a stony outcrop, as if the bronze marines stand atop a battle-blasted hill. Among those sculpted rocks is a place where a boy and a dog can nestle.

They are less than half concealed. Even without the spotlights that used to wash the statues, the boy and the dog should be visible to anyone passing by, for the moon is full.

Yet Crispin is confident that they are safe. They are safe in the company of these bronze heroes.

The woman in white, black strings dangling, rushes into the plaza. Moonglow powders her marionette face, and her blood-red lips look black.

While the woman surveys her surroundings, the boy half believes that he can hear her doll eyes click-click-clicking as she blinks, as if she is in fact an animated puppet.

Her gaze passes over him from right to left, then slowly left to right.…

She doesn’t hesitate or come closer. She turns and moves away toward another part of the plaza.

Proximity to certain symbols and images can make boy and dog invisible to this woman’s kind, as surely as does swift-moving water. Statues honoring acts of courage and valor. Certain religious figures carved or cast life-size or larger. The immense mural of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the front wall of the Russian-American Community Center. The huge cast medallion of America’s sixteenth president embedded above the main entrance of Lincoln Bank on Main Street.

A cross or a serviceman’s medal worn around the neck will not provide invisibility. The symbol needs to be of substantial size to be effective, as if the noble efforts and the determination of those who created and erected it are as important as the symbol or image itself.

The dog-bitten man in the white suit appears, limping. Soon there are five of them, though the others are not costumed, prowling the plaza and its immediate surroundings.

Although it is ancient, the silver moon looks newly minted.

On a nearby street, a drunken reveler howls like a werewolf.

The moon is without menace. It neither favors evil nor calls to those who do.

This is what Crispin believes at the age of twelve: By the light of the moon, truth can be seen as easily as by any other light. Year by year, he will refine that perception into a greater wisdom that will sustain him.

To see the truth, however, you must have an honest eye.

Across the plaza, the marionettes and their allies, who love lies, search for the boy and his dog, unaware that they are incapable of seeing that for which they seek.

July 26, three years and three months earlier …

Having been healed by the power of his nanny’s kiss or having been healed in spite of it, nine-year-old Crispin falls again into the cozy rhythms of Theron Hall. The world outside seems less real than the kingdom within these walls.

For some reason, Mirabell is excused from the day’s lessons. The three-year age difference between Crispin and his sister ensures that he is less interested in what she’s engaged upon than he would be if she were only a year younger or were his twin.

Besides, girls are girls, and boys are most like boys when girls aren’t around. Therefore, Mr. Mordred is even more interesting and entertaining when he is able to focus his attention on Crispin and Harley, with no need to tailor part of his lesson to a girl so small that her brothers sometimes call her Pip, short for pipsqueak.

Lessons begin at nine and are finished by noon. After lunch, Crispin and Harley intend to play together, but somehow they go their separate ways.

Most likely, Brother Harley is on a cat hunt. Recently, he has claimed to have seen three white cats slinking along hallways, across rooms, ascending or descending one staircase or another.

Nanny Sayo says there are no cats. Both the chief butler, Minos, and the head housekeeper, the formidable Mrs. Frigg, agree that no felines live in Theron Hall.

No cats are fed here and in this immaculate residence, no mice exist on which the cats might feed themselves. No disagreeable evidence of toileting cats has been found.

The more the staff dismisses the very idea of cats, the more that Harley is determined to prove they exist. He has become quite like a cat, creeping stealthily through the immense mansion, trying to sniff them out.

He claims to have nearly captured one on a couple of occasions. These elusive specimens are even faster than the average cat.

He says their coats are as pure-white as snow. Their eyes are purple but glow silver in the shadows.

Considering that Theron Hall offers over forty-four thousand square feet in its three floors and basement, Crispin figures that his brother might be engaged in a search for the phantom cats that will last weeks if not months before he tires of his fantasy.

At four o’clock on the afternoon of July 26, Crispin is in the miniature room. This magical chamber is on the third floor, across the main hallway from the suite in which the matriarch, Jardena, withers in reclusion.

The space measures fifty feet in length, thirty-five feet in width. Clearance from floor to ceiling is twenty-six feet.

In the center of this room stands a one-quarter scale model of Theron Hall. The word
miniature
seems inadequately descriptive, because each linear foot of the great house is reduced only to three inches in this representation. Whereas Theron Hall is 140 feet from end to end, the miniature is thirty-five feet. The real house is eighty feet wide, and the reduced version is twenty. The fifteen-foot-high likeness stands on a four-foot-high presentation table with solid sides rather than legs.

The model is such a painstakingly accurate rendering of the mansion that it’s endlessly fascinating to Crispin. The walls are made of small blocks of limestone, cut thin to minimize the weight, but seemingly thick. The carved ornamentation in the window pediments and in the door surrounds match perfectly to the real thing. The balconies, the richly designed cornice, the balustrade that serves as a parapet, the nearly flat ceramic-tile roof, the chimney stacks with bronze caps have all been re-created with obsessive attention to detail. The window frames are bronze, with genuine glass for the panes.

Through the windows, he can study rooms precisely as they are in the true house. The miniaturized library features shelves and paneling of select walnut, exactly as does the life-size inspiration. Even the furnishings and the artwork have been reproduced by a team of modelers who must have worked thousands upon thousands of hours to complete this magnificent reproduction.