Hungry Moon (43 page)

^{June was the first to move, but not far. She let out a sound of anguish beyond words and staggered toward him. then collapsed. The crowd turned on Diana then, as if she'd caused Andrew to lose his hold on the ridge. All the same, nobody seemed prepared to initiate the violence she could feel massing like a storm, and as she limped forward she thought they might even let her go to Andrew, be with him as he died, as Miss Ingham cradled his broken head. Then the children moved to block her way, moved as if they'd heard a voice nobody else could hear.}

^{What brought her to a shuddering halt was not their concerted movement but their faces. Perhaps the dead light exaggerated their appearance, but they looked old, shrunken, cruel old faces united by hatred. They looked as if Mrs Scragg's mean spirit had invaded them, as Diana had always feared it would while she was teaching at the school. But it wasn't Mrs Scragg who had put them in her path, it was the thing that had come to Moonwell. Why did it want to keep her away from Andrew until he died? What could she do that it was afraid of?}

^{She saw the curtains move at the glaring window, and Mann's face peered out. It was too bright for her to be able to distinguish his expression, never mind what the body to which the face was attached might look like now. It was watching to make sure she didn't do what she was capable of - but God in heaven, what was left to her to do?}

^{The children had surrounded Andrew and Miss Ingham. To reach the boy Diana would have to grapple with them, and some of them would be injured before she could get through. Someone grabbed her from behind to make sure she didn't try, twisted her arms again, drove a knee into her back, forced her to kneel. At that precise moment she realized that it didn't matter.}

^{The realization felt like the core of her vision, her sharing the birth of the stars, her whole self flowering. Perhaps that had prepared her for this. The awareness was so deep in her that she couldn't frame it, only follow wherever it led. It might set even Nick and the others against her, she knew that much, but that couldn't matter now. She raised her head to the glaring face in the window and spoke in a calm, clear voice as Andrew's small body shuddered out its last breath. 'You can't have him,' she said, and then she began to sing.}

^{SIXTY SEVEN}

^{There was a moment during which Diana realized that what she was about to do might be a beginning as well as an end - that she was choosing for the rest of her life without even knowing what the choice was. But she knew instinctively that it could rob the thing from the moon of Andrew, and so it was really no choice at all. More than that, unless she obeyed the instinct which that primal light had awakened in her, she wouldn't just be dooming Andrew to eternal horror, she would be betraying all that she recognized as life.}

^{She began to sing before she knew she meant to, and didn't know what she was singing. The instinct was older than words. She had never had much of a singing voice, even when she'd led singing in the classroom, and she could barely hear herself now. Perhaps that meant the crowd wouldn't notice she was singing, or at least wouldn't find it obtrusive enough to silence. If they suspected why she was doing it, they would tear her to pieces. She was petitioning that Andrew's death would be accepted as a sacrifice.}

^{She raised her eyes and looked past the moon. The sky seemed blacker than ever, except where it was blanched by the moon and by the glare of Moonwell. Surely it didn't matter how small her voice was; no human voice would be strong enough to reach across those distances -that kind of strength wasn't the point. All she wanted was a sign, a hint of a response to assuage the anguished yearning for the sunlight that her song had exposed in her, the yearning she'd repressed for days because there was no other way to cope with what had happened to Moonwell. Her song felt like a dying flame that was streaming up through her. Her whole body felt more and more like a wound, and the song was a cry for healing. She seemed hardly to have begun to sing before she was aware of nothing but the moon, standing unchallenged in the black sky, grinning like a mask that had been taken off and mounted on a blackness that shivered with the intensity of her yearning.}

^{Then Mrs Scragg's voice rasped in her ears. 'What's she yowling about? What kind of witch's song is that? She'd even sing her filth over that poor dead lamb. Shut her up, shut her up!'}

^{Diana looked away from the sky. Stinging whiteness filled her eyes, and then she saw Mrs Scragg stalking toward her, shaking her fists. The crowd was closing in, glad of a victim for their dismay at Andrew's death, their fears, their sense of helplessness. Even the children with their pinched, aged faces were advancing toward her, without a hint of regret in their eyes, not a trace of a memory of the relationship she'd once had with them. She must be threatening the moon thing, she told herself, or it wouldn't be so anxious to silence her. The ache of her body, of her whole being, sustained her chant, drove it out of her, and she tried to keep her voice low, to buy herself a few more seconds, telling herself again that the volume of sound couldn't matter. Then a piece of wood split her forehead open.}

^{They'd started throwing things at her, then. They were pelting her like a witch. Blood trickled down the side of her face and soaked her collar. She wondered dully who'd thrown the piece of wood - not one of the children, she hoped, though it had come from that direction. She wondered why Mrs Scragg looked daunted, when presumably this was what she felt Diana deserved, what she'd encouraged to happen - and then Diana realized that the woman was staring up at the hotel, at where the piece of wood had come from.}

^{It hadn't been thrown deliberately, after all. It was a piece of the sash of Mann's window. Mann's face was pressed against the glass, flattened against it so violently that the glass was bulging outward, as if the owner of the face had no time to raise the sash or had forgotten how to do so. The next moment the window burst asunder, spraying wood and broken glass across the square and into the crowd, and the occupant of Mann's room squeezed out through the gap where the window had been.}

^{The head and hands came first. The head looked more like a growth or a whitish mass of innards than a head, almost shapeless except for the parody of Mann's face that it thrust gargoyle-like at the crowd. The hands with their disproportionately long fingers were more than twice the size of the head. They gripped the edges of the jagged hole left by the window, and then two more distorted appendages slithered into view, grasping the still. They heaved the bloated glowing body forward, the body that hung behind them like a spider's - the gap in the wall was only just large enough for it to squeeze bonelessly through - and it came scuttling on its scrawny unequal limbs straight down the front of the hotel.}

^{The crowd screamed and fled to the edges of the square, cowering against the walls. Parents ran forward to drag away their children, who looked suddenly bewildered, lost, more like themselves. The man who was holding Diana tried to pull her out of the thing's path, but when he realized that she was determined not to move, he let go of her and stumbled away from the hotel.}

^{As the shadowless thing reached the foot of the wall, it seemed to lose its shape momentarily, then to gather itself together more misshapenly than ever, none of its limbs the same length now. It turned and made for Andrew, the swollen bulb of its body lurching from side to side. It poked its head snakelike at the boy's corpse, Mann's stiffly smiling face askew on the leprous head.}

^{It couldn't quite touch Andrew, Diana saw. She had achieved that much. She raised her voice, her song lonely and desperate as the first human voice might have been on the first night of humanity. Then the bloated shape lurched around and scuttled at her.}

^{It could tear her apart, she knew. It could wrench her head off her body. Nick and Eustace were suddenly on either side of her, but all they were doing, she thought with a distant sadness, was inviting the same fate. She looked away from the tiny eyes that glared at her out of the gaping sockets in Mann's face, she looked up at the sky to voice a last plea. Then she gasped and let the song stream out of her on the same breath, her singing more impassioned now. There was the faintest tinge of orange light on the slates of the roof.}

^{The thing hadn't scuttled down just to claim Andrew if it could. It had been fleeing the threat of sunlight, which seemed to tinge all the unbroken windows of the top floor, or was she only seeing what she yearned to see? In any case, the sight roused her body from its resigned stupor. All at once she was dancing, oblivious to the thing that was thrusting its parody of a face toward hers. She was dancing without moving her feet, her body swaying like a flame that seemed actually to grow toward the sky, to soar with yearning. She was cupping her hands in a gesture like prayer, and for an instant she thought she felt life flutter mothlike between them. Then she opened them toward the sky, offering whatever she held, and sang passionately, no longer conscious of herself or where she was. There was nothing but the black sky. She was no longer even aware of the moon.}

^{And then the black sky burst into flames.}

^{It was the sun, but it was like no dawn she'd ever seen. The orange light seemed to tear the blackness apart, to flood the sky like flames on oil, turning whiter as it claimed the sky, putting out the moon. So much she saw in the few instants before her eyes began to burn. 'Don't}

^{look, protect your eyes,' she cried as loudly as she could, and put both hands over her own. Even then the sunlight glowed through her flesh, and her skin tightened with the sudden heat. She made herself peer through her fingers and her slitted eyelids as soon as her eyes could take it, to see what the thing in the square was doing.}

^{Daylight filled the square, and even the shadows it cast were welcome. The sun hung above the moors, a disc like blinding glass. The bloated thing was crouching low, the head with Mann's face searching the square for a refuge, the maggoty neck stretching. Diana realized where it could hide from the direct sunlight a moment before it did, and she dodged around it, ran to the steps of the hotel. 'No way,' she said, as it dragged itself around to face her.}

^{The sunlight must be weakening it, and perhaps she had a touch of the power of the sun. All the same, she knew that if it tried to get past her, there wouldn't be much left of her by the time it succeeded. She could only hope the crowd would turn on it, not on her. But those of the crowd who had their eyes open seemed unable to look away from the sun. Most of the people were praying raggedly; someone was trying to start up a hymn. Only Nick ran to her, dabbing at his eyes.}

^{The thing with Mann's face floundered at her, and she backed up the steps until she stood against the doors of the hotel, gripping the handles. The thing gathered itself, losing shape again and rearing up, a giant with spindly limbs, a loafhesomely small head on a long unstable neck, Mann's face smiling still. Then it crumpled to all fours and swung round, its body smearing the hot tarmac, and scuttled unevenly out of the square.}

^{She had to see where it was going. When she followed, Nick ran with her. As they went toward the Booths, Geraldine seemed to come back to herself: she glanced about, blinking, and tugged at Jeremy's arm. 'The children,' she said. 'They'll hurt their eyes.'}

^{The children were hiding their faces against their parents, who were still backed against the walls of the square. Nevertheless Jeremy seemed to agree with her. 'Don't look at the sun, whatever you do,' he shouted. 'Let's get the children into the hotel to give their eyes time to adjust.'}

^{Diana hesitated, anxious for him. Could he really expect the crowd to do his bidding so soon after he'd been one of their scapegoats? But they seemed scarcely to know who he was, and they were clearly desperate to be given some direction after all that had happened. Those who could see made gratefully for the hotel, while Geraldine and Jeremy set about helping those who were stumbling blindly. Mrs Scragg was leaning on her husband and wailing, 'Sweet Jesus, give me back my sight, there are people here who need me.' As two men supported June toward the hotel while Eustace lifted Andrew's body gently, Diana and Nick ran out of the square.}

^{The streets, the buildings, the sky looked recreated by the sun, each of them a separate miracle. The misshapen thing was no longer in sight, but Diana knew where to go. As she and Nick dodged into the nearest lane that led to the moorland path, they saw the thing crawling straight up the steep side of the moor. Its legs were withering in the sunlight, its body was shrivelling as if its immense age were catching up with it. It was still able to scrabble over the rock, and by the time Nick and Diana reached the top of the path in the dazzling sunlight, it was halfway to the cave.}

^{Nick stopped to catch his breath, and grabbed Diana's arm. 'Can we kill it?' he panted.}

^{'The sunlight will if anything can, Nick.' All the same, he'd made her wish she'd brought a weapon. As she ran across the charred moor, following the trail the shrivelling body was leaving, she glanced about: a heavy branch might do - but the nearest tree was far too distant. The fleshless legs dragged the wobbling body over the rim of the stone bowl that surrounded the cave, and she ran faster.}

^{She almost fell over the rock beside the path, a rock nearly the size of her torso. Nick realized as she did that it might be what they needed. They struggled to raise it, heaved it up, their arms aching with the effort, their hands already bruised and numb. Then they had it between them, and stumbled quickly up the slope to the stone bowl, the weight of the rock as much as the urgency of their task carrying them forward. Diana was praying that the moon thing hadn't yet crawled back to its lair, that it would still be within reach. She didn't realize that it had turned to wait for them until Mann's face with its shrunken eyes rose over the edge on its maggoty neck and the huge unequal hands reached for them both.}

^{The weight of the rock carried them helplessly forward between the hands, and then she felt the rock slipping out of her and Nick's grasp. They'd failed, she thought miserably. After all that effort, they were going to be the last sacrifices to the moon thing, the souls it would carry back to its lair. Then the rock fell on the upturned face, which was still smiling hideously, and smashed the head.}

^{Nick flung her aside and stumbled out of the way himself as the huge deformed hands began to flail in agony. The hands snatched at where Nick and Diana had been, reached blindly for them, then heaved and plucked at the rock. The thing was enfeebled now, but still it raised its body convulsively, trying to fling itself backward. Diana had the horrid notion that it might tear off its head under the rock, that the headless body would scuttle after them over the moor. Then it gave a last heave with all its limbs and wrenched its flattened leaking head out from beneath the rock.}

^{There wasn't much left of its face, and nothing remotely human. The way it looked, it shouldn't be moving at all. But it tottered away down the stone bowl, waving what was left of its blinded head at them. Nick lunged at the rock for a second try, and Diana followed him, though she could see little point to it. As they grabbed the rock, the thing backed over the edge of the cave, its withered whitish body swarming with bruises. It held onto the edge with one splayed, shrivelling hand; then it let go.}

^{They shouldn't have let it reach the cave. They should have trapped it in the sunlight, but it was no use saying so now. Diana scrambled to the edge. She could see no movement down there, and there was no sound - but as she crouched at the edge and peered into the dark, something rose from the cave.}