Hungry Moon (30 page)

^{'Go on then, if you want to do it all yourself. Just go slowly. You don't care whether or not
I
feel safe.'}

^{He needed to feel in control of the situation as much as he could, needed to believe he was leading them out of the hotel with the urgency Vera couldn't know was required. She let her hand lie stiffly in his as he rested his free hand on the staircase wall and took the first step down.}

^{Ten steps and the staircase turned a corner. Seven more led the.stairs across the width of the lift shaft, and then it turned again, toward the next floor down. The darkness thickened as it grew more confined, and Craig could no longer hear the uproar in the square, heard only his own laboured breathing that the darkness seemed to hold against his face. Then Vera halted, a few stairs short of the second floor. 'What is it?' he gasped, panic almost choking him.}

^{'I thought we were the only people left in the hotel.'}

^{'I'm sure we are,' he stammered, suppressing the thought of the opening door, the dreadful brightness. 'They'll all be out there praying. Come on, let's find Hazel.'}

^{But she stood where she was. 'I heard something, a door, I think. Maybe someone's in here thinking he's all by himself in the dark.'}

^{She was going to call out. Craig's hand jerked up. Only if he tried to cover her mouth she would struggle, and they would be lost, the thing with Mann's face would know they were there. Then she giggled. 'Of course, it's}

^{him, isn't it,' she said, sounding close to recklessness. 'Godsgift Mann. Maybe we ought to ask him to show us the way, since he thinks he can do that for everyone.'}

^{'We can do without him.' Craig glanced up wildly, but the darkness was still total. 'We'll show him,' he said as convincingly as he could manage.}

^{'You're right, we don't need him. You and I are enough for each other if that's the way they want it,' she said with a fierceness he wasn't prepared for, and stepped down with him.}

^{He stumbled when his foot touched the floor of the corridor. His fingers groped around the corner, over the chilly doors of the lift shaft. Only two floors to go, the mocking thought came. He was one floor distant from Mann's room, he told himself, and it was just a hotel, however dark, a hotel that smelled of metal polish and carpet cleaner and unemptied ashtrays. Surely he was imagining that underneath these was a reptilian smell. His shaky fingers led him across the metal doors to the stairs.}

^{Stairs creaked under Vera's tread but not under his, presumably because he was closer to the wall. He sensed that she wanted to speak, and he squeezed her hand in the hope that would forestall her. His ears throbbed with straining to hear if there was movement anywhere in the hotel. He stepped down faster, holding on to the corners that boxed in the lift shaft, taking the last flight as quickly as he could without causing Vera to protest aloud. He faltered at the landing, but now there were just three more flights of stairs between them and the lobby, less than that to seeing the end of the dark. He groped quickly for the metal doors, and his arm plunged through the opening where the doors should be, into empty dark.}

^{His panic made him do the worst thing he could do: he let go of Vera. He was tottering on the edge of the open shaft, flailing his arms wildly, when he felt Vera stumble against him, grabbing at him, pushing him over the edge.}

^{Then the knuckles of his right hand knocked painfully against the edge of the open door, and he shoved his fist against the wall there, flinging himself and Vera back.}

^{'We're all right,' he muttered, panting with the pain of his bruised hand and his heart. 'It's the lift, the doors are open. Keep well back.' The shaft must go down at least thirty feet to the basement, but it wasn't the mine, he wasn't back in the nightmare of falling. He could hear it was the lift shaft, hear the faint creaking of the cable. He was standing there to give his heart and his breath time to calm down when he wondered what was making the cable creak.}

^{That was the sound he'd heard on the way down, not the stairs under Vera's feet. Perhaps the door she'd heard had been the doors onto the lift shaft. He had the sudden thought, so dreadful that he almost stumbled forward without realizing, that something had been opening doors so as to lie in wait for him and Vera, something that had climbed spiderlike down the cable and was waiting now for them to step blindly into its long arms, its hands. A reptilian smell drifted toward him out of the dark, and he felt as if the blackness had frozen around him, holding him fast, unable to move or speak. Then Vera spoke, so loudly he was terrified for her. 'Don't let's stand here, it could be dangerous.'}

^{A thought paralyzed him - the thought of her being dragged into the dark without ever knowing what had seized her, or worse, finding out in hideous detail - and then it sent him lurching toward the stairs. He stepped into gaping emptiness. It was the staircase, he realized as he found the wall. He hurried blindly down, colliding with the corners around the lift shaft, almost falling.}

^{Vera's protests at his haste subsided as the last flight of stairs came in view. A carpet of moonlight was laid out from the glass doors of the wide lobby to the foot of the stairs. Vera must think they were safe now, but Craig felt vulnerable as china, even once he was past the closed lift doors that gave onto the lobby. He was struggling to convince himself that his eyes must have tricked him as he'd peered through the keyhole, serve him right for doing so, but he felt as if the shock of that sight hadn't caught up with him. Out in the square the crowd sang and waved their hands and cheered, and what appalled Craig as much as anything he'd witnessed was the expression he saw everywhere. Hundreds of moonlit faces were turned worshipfully upward, willing Mann to give them another glimpse of himself.}

^FIFTY

^{'This ought to bring out the loonies, Mr Gloom.'}

^{'It's what they all asked for, Mr Despondency.'}

^{'All except the ones who think there's nothing to believe in.'}

^{‘They're in for a surprise that'll make their eyes pop, then.'}

^{'Especially him in there who doesn't even know whether to believe in us.' 'Happen we're him throwing his voice, he thinks.'}

^{'Bloody cheek. I'm Useless Eustace, and I'm out here with you.'}

^{'More useful than he is, all the same.'}

^{‘The only joke he's got left is himself, and nobody wants it.'}

^{'Happen he thinks if he stays in there long enough the world will go away.'}

^{'He may not recognize it, right enough.'}

^{'If he ever dares look out at it, you mean.'}

^{‘He's afraid to look out.'}

^{'Afraid to go out.'}

^{'Afraid to come out and see us.'}

^{They were chanting, and now they began to dance. From the way their moonlit shadows bobbed on the curtains, Eustace thought they'd linked arms. At least that meant he didn't have to see how long their arms were - long enough, he thought, to reach into the corner where he was crouching in an armchair, as far from the window as he could manage. He mustn't fear that: they only wanted to taunt him - they kept virtually saying so, if he was really hearing their voices. If he just stared at the shadows and let his mind go blank as it wanted to, he could believe he was seeing the shadows of bushes.}

^{Except that there were no bushes in his garden. He could only maintain that the shadows were natural so long as he stopped remembering. First all the lights had gone out. The dark had seemed almost welcome, an excuse for inaction, an enemy too vast to struggle with. He'd felt peaceful, no longer compelled to make up stories about everything that befell him. The cries of panic in the streets had nothing to do with him. He'd been sitting calmly in the dark when the moonlight had come poking in, and when he'd gone to pull the curtains and shut out as much of it as he could, he'd seen three figures climbing head first down the side of the moor.}

^{'I saw three shapes come crawling down,' he sang to himself to blur the memory. They must have been crawling on their backs, for he'd seen their faces, white and featureless as snails' bellies except for their grinning mouths. They must have wanted him to see that, to appall him or perhaps to bewilder him, for how could they sound as they seemed to if they looked like that? He mustn't wonder about that, it would let them reach him, break through his calm. If he couldn't both think and be calm, he was happy to give up thinking.}

^{'Afraid to look out, afraid to go out, afraid to come out and see us.' They were waving their arms like gospellers now, and he had to shut his eyes; he couldn't cope with the sight of even the shadows of the arms that could reach across the room for him. The voices already seemed more distant, excluded by his own dark. Maybe they thought he didn't want the world to go away, but for him that wasn't a taunt, it was a promise.}

^{Then a thought stirred in his head, although he tried to lull it back to sleep. Suppose he was giving them what they wanted, withdrawing into himself so that he would truly be of no more use? He already was, he tried to tell himself: useless to everyone, especially Phoebe Wain-wright. But he might be the only person in Moonwell who suspected that she needed help.}

^{Perhaps nothing more was wrong with her than with him: a lack of nourishment now that he'd finished the little food he'd kept in the house and the shops would hardly favour him even if they hadn't run out too; a sense of meaninglessness now that he and Phoebe no longer had jobs, nothing to help them pretend that life was going on as normal. But the difference between her and himself, he thought suddenly, was that she was worth saving - and maybe that was why his tormentors were trying to lure him into forgetting her along with everything else.}

^{He didn't want to open his eyes and leave his comfortable dark. If he starved to death, that didn't seem to matter. But letting it happen to Phoebe did, if indeed that was all that was happening to her. He shifted in his chair, suppressing an urge to scream at the dancing, chanting shadows to leave him alone, and then he smelled himself. He stank of days of not washing, and at some point he seemed to have wet himself. He shoved himself out of his chair, his whole body itching with self-disgust, and ran upstairs to the bathroom.}

^{Moonlight filled the bath, shining it whiter. The water spluttering out of the taps looked like milk. He stripped naked and prepared to step in, forgetting that there was no electricity to heat the water. He grabbed the soap and managed to work up an icy lather, and was rubbing it}

^{over himself when he heard a noise at the bathroom window.}

^{He didn't look. He knew what the soft thumping was: the hands reaching up from the garden, beating time to the chant. He joined in the chant, suppressing the wild laughter that threatened to shake his voice out of control. He was singing so loudly he couldn't tell when they stopped. Their fingers slid down the window with a squeal like wet rubber on glass. Maybe that was all, he thought, and tried to ignore the fact that he was hoping it was.}

^{He stood over the bath and splashed water on himself, gasping; then he towelled himself vigorously and raced to his bedroom to dress. In the dressing-table mirror he caught sight of his silhouette, spiky with uncombed hair. He stooped to pick up his comb just as something thumped the window.}

^{'Run out of ideas, have you?' he muttered. 'Old joke, not funny any more, go away, we'll let you know.' He tugged at his hair with the steel comb, scratching his scalp; it took him minutes even to drag the comb through. He tidied his hair as best he could, cursing monotonously at the reflection of the window and the shape he glimpsed there. It wasn't a hand this time, it was too rounded. He thrust the comb into his pocket and swung round, and then he began to scream.}

^{Most of the nose was missing, and one eye. The hand that was displaying it to him had poked a finger in the socket, like a long white worm. The hair resembled wet grass, trailing over the patchy forehead. All the same, he could see it was Father O'Connell's face.}

^{Eustace's scream of rage and horror scraped his throat raw. He lunged toward the window, then veered out of the room, almost falling downstairs, almost blind with the storm of his emotions. He struggled with the latch and wrenched the front door open, lurched onto the path.}

^{The garden was deserted. He glanced wildly about the street, cottages like cardboard in the moonlight, and caught sight of three pale, thin figures under the moor, one of them brandishing an object like a ball. Outrage drove him toward them, but as he trod on the pavement he faltered. Were they trying to lure him away?}

^{Though he was shaking with hatred and dismay, he forced himself to turn his back on them. He'd never catch them, and perhaps they would do worse than taunt him if he chased them onto the moor. Let them follow him if they dared, then the people who were returning home from the town square would see them. He had to find out how Phoebe was.}

^{Shock caught up with him as he turned toward the main street. His legs began to tremble, and he had to lean over his garden wall and wait to be sick. When he managed to swallow instead, he stumbled along the terrace and into the High Street, into the crowd. People glanced at him, pityingly rather than with hostility; others were too wide-eyed to notice. He hurried shakily past the shops, which were being unlocked, and dodged into Roman Row.}

^{Phoebe's front door was wide open. He saw that before he reached the gate. Moonlight lay like a welcome mat in the hall. Perhaps she'd just stepped out. Eustace turned under the trellis of rotting vines up the squeaky gravel path.}

^{He knocked twice at the door, but there was no reply, no sound at all from the house. Eventually he took a breath that made his head swim, and went in. The front room was deserted; moonlight crept over the fossils embedded in the fireplace, made them appear to stir; in the dead light, the floral figure that had stood guard over the cave last year looked withered. He stared at the photograph, wondering why that made him even un-easier, and then he searched the house.}

^{It was empty. It smelled cold and stale, except for a hint of her wild perfume in the bedroom. Her weight had left a dent in the mattress of the double bed. Eustace avoided the gaze of her late husband's photograph and went to the window, hoping to catch sight of her. Then he flinched back, afraid to be seen in her house, appalled at how habitual his reactions were even after everything that had befallen Moonwell.}

^{He had to find her, or have her found. The cottage felt as if she'd been gone for too long. He hurried back to the High Street, where the townsfolk were queuing outside the shops, complaining about the rationing of food, too much like bloody wartime. 'The farmers are having a meeting now to see what they can do,' the butcher announced from his doorway as Eustace ran into the square.}