Moon

by James Herbert

  As it was, he had watched Childes leave his cottage from the darkness of his patrol car, the teacher easily visible under the moonlight glare, observed him climb into the hired Renault and drive off into the deeply-shadowed lanes. After first radioing HQ to let them know their target was loose, the policeman had followed, keeping a safe but reasonable distance between himself and his quarry.

  The rabbit (or had it been a hare? They said hares had a special affinity with the full moon and would run senseless before it) had appeared near a bend in the road and Donnelly had braked only just in time - in fact swerving to the left a little to avoid the stupid animal, the patrol car brushing the hedge on that side.

  The rabbit (or hare - he could never quite remember the difference) had stayed crouching there on the road, directly in his path, stunned and shivery, one black and glistening eye watching with dumb blankness, and the agitated policeman had to leave his car and actually shoo the silly creature away.

  When PC Donnelly had finally resumed his journey and rounded the bend, the Renault's red tail-lights were nowhere to be seen.

  It was as if the car, driver and all, had been swallowed up by the moon-bleached landscape.

  50

  First the ringing doorbell disturbed Amy's sleep, then the sound of voices roused her into wakefulness. One of the voices was unmistakably her father's, and it was angry. She pulled back the bedclothes, wincing slightly at the effort, and went to the bedroom door, limping only slightly, opening it just enough to listen.

  The voices were still muffled, but her father was evidently complaining about the lateness of the hour. She thought she recognised both the other speakers. Amy joined her mother who was in her dressing gown on the landing, peering over the balustrade at the three men grouped in the downstairs hallway. One was Paul Sebire, fully clothed, obviously having been working late. The two other men were Inspector Robillard and Overoy. Amy wondered what Overoy was doing back on the island. She stood beside her mother and listened.

  'This is ridiculous, Robillard,' Paul Sebire was saying. 'Why on earth should we know where he is? Frankly, it would suit me fine if I never laid eyes on the man again.'

  It was Overoy who replied. 'We need to know if Miss Sebire has heard from him.'

  'I believe he may have telephoned my daughter occasionally over the last few days, but I'm sure Aimee would have no idea of his whereabouts tonight.'

  Amy and her mother exchanged glances.

  'Find your dressing gown and come down,' Vivienne quietly told her daughter, moving round to the head of the stairs.

  'Inspector,' Vivienne said, descending, 'Amy did receive a call from Jonathan earlier tonight.'

  Paul Sebire looked up at his wife in surprise and then annoyance.

  'Ah,' said Overoy and waited for her to reach the hallway. 'Would it be possible, then, to have a word with Miss Sebire? It is a matter of urgency.'

  'Look here,' interjected Paul Sebire, 'my daughter is sleeping and shouldn't be disturbed. She still hasn't recovered from her accident.'

  'It's all right,' came Amy's voice.

  Sebire turned to see that now his daughter was coming down the stairs. Amy hardly gave him a glance - indeed, she had hardly spoken to him since she had learned he had struck Childes at the hospital.

  Overoy frowned at Amy's bandaged eye and the plaster-cast from hand to elbow on her left arm. She walked with an awkward stiffness, limping a little. Healing cuts on her face and hands marred the smooth, light-tanned skin that he remembered so well from their previous meetings; he sincerely hoped none would leave permanent marks.

  'We're sorry to disturb you at this hour, Miss Sebire,' apologised Robillard, looking distinctly uncomfortable standing there in the hallway, the front door still open behind him, 'but as we've already explained to Mr Sebire, the matter is rather important.'

  'That's quite all right, Inspector,' Amy replied. 'If it concerns Jon, I'm only too willing to help. Is there something wrong?'

  'You should be resting, Amy,' Paul Sebire remarked rather than rebuked.

  'Nonsense. You know the doctor said I could be up and about tomorrow.'

  Overoy spoke up: 'I was sorry to hear of your accident. Jon told me about your injuries. Er, your eye…?'

  Although impatient to learn of the reason for their visit, Amy managed the flicker of a smile. 'Apparently there is no serious damage, my sight won't be impaired. The bandage is really only there to prevent infection and to force me to rest the eye. Now you must tell me what this is all about. Please.'

  Vivienne moved close to her daughter and slipped an arm around her waist, drawing her close.

  'Mr Childes disappeared from his home earlier tonight,' Inspector Robillard said. Over his shoulder and through the door, Amy could see that more than one police car was parked in the drive. She felt a tightness in the back of her throat. 'One of our patrolmen,' the inspector went on, 'who was, uh, on watch, lost his car in the lanes, I'm afraid.'

  She gave a small shake of her head, not understanding.

  'We wondered if Jonathan might have phoned to let you know where he was going,' said Overoy, a nicotine-stained finger scratching his temple.

  Amy looked from one policeman to the other. 'Yes. Yes, he did call, but he didn't mention anything about going out. If anything, he sounded tired. But why do you want to know? Surely he's not under suspicion?'

  'He never has been as far as I'm concerned, Miss Sebire,' replied Overoy, eyeing his colleague with mild but apparent disdain. 'No, I caught the last flight over here tonight because I wanted to talk to him. I also hope to help the Island Police make an arrest.'

  He paused to take in a breath, looking at each of them. 'You see, we've discovered the identity of the person responsible for this madness. Someone we've checked on and know is still here on the island. Someone who might get to Jonathan Childes before we do.'

  51

  Childes sat in the Renault for a while, suddenly terribly afraid.

  had drawn him here to this place, inducing an image of a large moonlit-smooth lake. Yet no lake of that immensity existed on the island. But there was one such vast area of water, a valley that had been flooded a long time before, covering trees and the deserted houses alike to form a reservoir, a great concrete dam built across that valley to prevent its rivers from reaching the sea.

  A voice - no, less than that: a thought - had enticed, had lured,. him there with a promise.

  The thought's instigator had no shape, no substance. When Childes concentrated, his own consciousness drew its periphery inwards to almost a defined line of thought, only a soft-brimmed radiancy formed at a point behind his eyes, a moon-shape that shimmered hugely on the wall of his mind and excluded all other images and all other rationality.

  wanted him here, and Childes had not resisted.

  The promise? The incentive?

  An end to the killings. An end to the torment. An answer, perhaps, to Childes' own mystery.

  The notion made him push open the car door, just as it had impelled him to drive through the empty lanes to reach this point. He had felt sure he was being followed when he had left the cottage - presumably by a police patrol car, for he assumed he was now under observation night and day - but the lights of the vehicle behind had soon disappeared, the other driver having turned off somewhere along the way. Maybe he, Childes, had finally become paranoid; and who could blame him?

  The night was chilly despite the season, cool air breezing in off the sea to soothe the land after the heat of the day. Sweater and cord jeans could not prevent that chill from causing a back-juddering shiver; he pulled up the collar of his jacket, closing the lapels around his throat. The full moon was still unsullied by clouds and bathed the countryside in a stark luminescence, rendering it peculiarly flat, while shadows were deep and uncompromisingly black. So brightened was the sky by its round hanging lamp that stars, untold millions of them, were visible only beyond the far-reaching canescence. As Childes walked towards the dam, it seemed that the
landscape was frozen beneath the eerie gleam.

  His senses were alert and acutely clear, his eyes ceaselessly searching the area around him, well aware that any inert creature would easily blend in with the surroundings, so dark were they in places, so oddly-shaped in others. Here, a lone bush might be a crouching animal; there, a tree stump with thick roots stretched outwards could be a sitting man; a clump of trees to his left might easily hide a lurking figure, while a spread of undergrowth ahead could provide a concealing canopy for some waiting predator.

  He wondered now if he wasn't disappointed that he had not been followed by a patrol car. Perhaps he should have rung Robillard before he left the cottage. But then, how would he have explained to the police inspector, who was sceptical to say the least, that earlier that evening his mind had finally fused with another's? The difference this time was that the fusion had been whole, with Childes on the offensive, seeking out and delving, surprising the other with his strength at first, then becoming absorbed by it.

  By It!

  Explain the silent, torturous mental battle that had followed as the creature taunted him with horrors that had come to pass, revealing the deaths to him again like some edited movie rough-cuts, with each frame containing feelings, smells, the pain and fear of the real event, a new stupendous dimension in cinematography. 4D. All in random order: The old man feebly protesting against the saw edge cutting into his brow.

  Jeanette's abject terror as she dangled over the stairway, hung there and choked by a knotted tie, to be saved but not spared the ordeal of near-death.

  The prostitute, whose torn innards Childes had sighted at the beginning, not knowing then it was the first in a stream of macabre visions, the return of an old nightmare.

  Kelly's charred and withered hand.

  The school alight before the fire had been lit.

  The dead boy, defiled and torn, his putrefying organs spread over the grass around the graveside.

  Annabel. Poor little Annabel, mistaken for Gabby, her tiny dismembered fingers wrapped in a package.

  And he had witnessed for the first time Estelle Piprelly's horrendous death, lying helpless on the floor, her neck broken, a trail of fire snaking towards her.

  Explain that macabre run-through to a pragmatic, not to say dogmatic, Officer of the Law. Explain how he knew where It would be waiting for him, that the vision of a huge moon-silvered lake had unfurled inside his head like a fast-running tide, and that it was here that everything would be resolved. Such matters could not be explained or logicised: they could only be sensed, or believed in faith. Not many had that kind of faith. Certainly, for most of his life, Childes hadn't.

  By now he had crossed the rough-hewn parking area, a patch scoured of shrubbery and trees, set back from the narrow road which circumscribed the reservoir to descend into the valley below the dam. He mounted the slabs that were broad steps leading onto the dam, pausing there to study the long, narrow concrete walkway with its thick, waist-high parapets on either side. The middle section was raised, low arches out of sight beneath to allow for overspill should the reservoir become too glutted with rainfall; stout concrete posts reinforced the parapets at regular intervals and graffiti etched the walls where tourists had marked their visit; dark grass fringes sprang up through wide-spaced parallel joins in the walkway's surface. Beyond the raised section loomed a water tower, octagonally shaped and set into the dam as part of its structure, where water was syphoned down to the pumping station at the base of the giant barrier.

  Childes started forward, a breeze ruffling his hair. He felt exposed out there on the dam and constantly scanned the path ahead, natural moonlight somehow soaking everything unnaturally, so that the effect was surreal and colourless. The lake could have been a gently rippled aluminum sheet so smoothly solid did it appear; yet the power of the massive volume of water beneath the light-reflecting skin was ominously present, concealed but nevertheless threatening. Falling would mean being sucked down into a pitch black netherworld to be crushed rather than drowned.

  He counted the narrow steps, seven in all, as he climbed to the bridge formation over the outlet arches. In the centre he waited, alone and afraid, yet determined.

  Childes could hear the sea from his high position, could even make out the thin whitish plume as wave after wave broke against the distant shoreline, so clear was the night. Keen air wafted against his face as he peered over the parapet on the unflooded side. The wall below sloped outwards, a concrete basin to contain overflow at the base, a conduit leading from that underground, taking surplus water beneath the valley to the sea. Not far from the basin was the white pumping station and behind that another shiny flat area, the processing plant's sludge lagoon. Occasional lights shone further out in the valley, glowing from homes whose inhabitants kept late hours; he envied their unknowing snugness.

  A creature winged darkly across his vision, too swiftly erratic to be a disturbed bird; a bat, then, in accord with the night, abruptly disappearing into covering shadows. The soft beating of its wings had resembled the uneven fluttering of a frightened heart.

  As Childes lingered, his face a pale unlined mask under the moonlight's glare, the visions plagued his mind once more, assailing him with fresh intensity; not for the first time he wondered at the malignancy governing their perpetrator. Childes' last few days had been filled with outward mental probing, only a growing acceptance of his own unique powers giving strength to those endeavours. He no longer resisted what he had subconsciously known but rejected for so many years, that personal acknowledgement flushing his senses, lending vigour to his mysterious faculty.

  He had remembered other times, insights that he had dismissed as chance, as coincidence, suppressing that psychic seepage, even the memory of such incidents rebuffed until now.

  He had remembered the boyhood friend whom he knew would die beneath the wheels of a hit-and-run, the accident happening weeks later. A seldom-seen uncle whom he realised would be cut down by a diseased heart after their last meeting, that same uncle paralysed by coronary sclerosis months later. The death of his own mother, envisaged long before cancer had ravaged her body.

  His father had treated him cruelly for that weeping revelation, just as he had savagely beaten him afterwards when his mother's spirit had come to him, the boy. Beaten him, Childes remembered, because his father had blamed the boy's precognition for causing his mother's death, for initiating her awful ending. Punishing him so badly that his nose and three ribs had been broken. And forcing him to agree through fear and, even then, loyalty, when his father had told the ambulance men and subsequent doctors that the boy, distressed by the loss of his mother, had fallen down a flight of stairs in the home.

  Worst of all, in the feverish days that followed, the boy himself had come to believe his father's reason for mercilessly beating him, had believed that his premonition really had caused his mother's death as though it were some evil witch's curse; and with the recognition had also come the belief that he was responsible for his friend's car accident, that he had instigated the disease inside his uncle's heart.

  His guilt far outweighed the agony of broken bones and bruised flesh and soon, when the fever that was the result of uncontrollable remorse more than injury, had broken, his mind had erected within itself a protective wall, acceptance of his psychic faculty expelled along with his own guilt, for they went hand in hand, had become part of the same.

  And the infant-murderer three years ago had somehow loosened the hold inside Childes' mind, had set the precognitive process in motion once more.

  Now this new killer had broken through the mental wall, turned a leak into an unsteady stream.

  Childes' subconscious had even sent him back to witness his own boyhood misery, a long-hidden part of him yearning for answers. And such was the power within the boy that he had observed his older self return. The mature Childes had been the presence watching from the corner of the boy's room.

  The answers, of course, provoked other mysteries, b
ut these were of the human psyche, secrets that might never be unravelled for they involved secrets of life and the mind itself.

  These thoughts coursed through him as he waited high on the dam, arousing a tantalising yet wary exhilaration, as though he were on some kind of sensory threshold. As he gazed upwards, he saw that even the moon's glacial radiance was extraordinarily puissant, dominating the night sky with a peculiar flooding vitality. Tension shook Childes' body.

  He sensed he was no longer alone.

  He looked behind, in the direction he had come.

  Nothing there moved.

  He looked ahead, towards the other end of the dam where there were more dark trees and thick undergrowth, another path from the winding road.

  Something there did move.

  52

  It had watched him from the cloaking darkness and had smiled an ungodly smile.

  So. At last he was here.

  That was good, for their time had come. Now, under the full moon. Which was appropriate.

  It moved from the trees towards the dam.

  53

  If fear had bounds, then Childes considered he had reached the outer limits. He found he had to lean against a parapet to support himself, so weak did his legs suddenly become. His insides were full of wildly floating feathers, the rigid tightness in his chest disallowing their escape; even his arms were useless, their muscles somehow wasted.

  It was on the dam, a black, lumbering shape in the moonlight, coming towards him, the wide, squat body rocking slightly from side to side, an awkward trundling motion that lacked any fluidity.

  And as the figure approached, Childes could hear the sniggering laughter in its mind. A mocking laughter that iced him, imprisoned him.