A Moonlit Task

by Tom Hansen

  She decided to lie down on her bed until the room stopped spinning then she would get back up.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Nancy Moon.”

  The echoing voice that had haunted her dreams for the last four years was back. Like the countless times before, the voice was that of a distant woman calling to her from another room, muffled by the plaster and lathe of aged walls.

  “Nancy Moon.”

  She was in her house, but not. The bedroom wall color was no longer a pleasant beige; it was a checkerboard wallpaper from the fifties or sixties. The furniture was the same, but something else didn’t feel right about the room. Was she a little bit taller?

  She walked up to the ornate hand-carved mirror perched atop her dresser.

  A much younger version of Nancy stared back. Her nightgown was stark white cotton, with all but the top three buttons secure. The long sleeves that came down to her wrists and were topped with lace looked good on her.

  Her face, free of the trappings of time, looked sweet and innocent. Her eyes were a brilliant green, almost luminescent in the early morning sunlight.

  She smiled at her herself. She was twenty-four again, a blushing bride if ever there was one.

  “Nancy Moon.”

  She followed the voice out into the hallway, her delicate feet padding on the cold wooden planks. She would carpet them someday, but it would be years from now.

  She breezed down the steps without counting. When had she started counting them? That memory seemed lost in time.

  The house had always had an aged quality to it, but it was decidedly more dingy now than after she had become the mistress and caretaker of their residence. The place had needed a woman’s touch.

  “Nancy Moon.”

  The voice came from around the corner, so she followed it, barely feeling the creak of the unkempt floorboards beneath her. She stopped in the hallway. Where had it come from?

  She looked at the wall where the entrance to the basement lay hidden behind the wallpaper, its secret foreign to twenty-four-year-old Nancy, the only woman in the new town whose husband insisted she keep her maiden name. He’d said he liked it better than his own.

  She frowned, she knew that there should be a door here, but there wasn’t. Schrödinger's door, unable to be opened until it’s first observed. She instead turned to the left and walked into the library.

  “Hello, Nancy. So good to see you.”

  Linda was much younger now, nearly matching in age of the young woman in the mirror.

  Nancy sat down on the chair close to the fireplace, picking up the steaming cup of tea waiting for her on a small side table.

  Linda looked good, her high cheekbones and pert nose a symbol of youth and beauty. She was excruciatingly thin, even for a young Japanese girl.

  “Would you like some tea?” Nancy asked, indicating the steaming china in front of her.

  Linda shook her head. “You have not done what I asked, Nancy.”

  “But I found Peter, I told him he was forgiven.” Nancy dared a glance at the hidden nook right next to where Linda sat. She didn’t want to admit she hadn’t given him the figurine, but somehow she felt that Linda already knew. Shame welled up, catching in her throat.

  “Things are in motion, Nancy, things you cannot stop. The spark is within you if you would only embrace it. It is time to become who you were always meant to be. Peter still needs your help, but you are too busy with your own thoughts to open your eyes.” Young Linda crossed her legs, the sheen of the long maroon dress she wore bounced light from the sunlight outside. Only it wasn’t sunlight. There was a blackness, a void to the brightness.

  “There is someone here to see you, someone who wants you to understand. I know this is difficult. You have so many questions, but Peter still needs your help.”

  Another Asian woman walked into the room, facing the wall. Nancy could only see one side of her as she crossed the room. Her face was different from Linda’s, more round, with smaller, piercing eyes. She was taller and thicker, but still lithe. Chinese perhaps? Her eye had a haunted look to it as it stared at the wall in front of her.

  She stopped just past Linda and without turning her head to Nancy said, “He needs to know I love him.”

  Her accent was different, more tonal, smaller perhaps, if that was possible. Terrifying in its resonance.

  She took another step forward and sat down on the other chair beside Linda, turning her full body so Nancy could see.

  The other half of her face was shredded, like that of Linda’s in the alleyway. Mauled by a vicious beast. Strips of skin swung loosely, exposing the bloody flesh beneath.

  “Please save my son,” the disfigured woman pled.

  “But I have.”

  She snapped back, vitriol coating her heavy Chinese accent. “No, you haven’t. You failed in the most basic task of saving a child.” The woman put her hands to her face and cried. “I just want to cradle him again, one more time. Hold him to my breast and splash tears on him. Let him feel my heartbeat once again.”

  She looked up, her eyes flashing gold, her voice suddenly violently dissonant. “Find him, tell him he’s not a monster. Bring me to him so I may protect him.”

  The woman leapt off the Queen Anne chair on all fours and bounded out of the library like some loping animal.

  Terrified, Nancy looked to Linda, but she was lying dead, her chest torn open as blood dripped onto the lush carpet of Nancy’s library.

  Nancy dropped the tea she had been holding in her hand; the hot liquid felt like penance for her sins.

  Nancy bolted up in bed. Sweat dripped from her forehead and dampened the sheets. She huffed, breathing in, feeling the bite of air in her lungs. She felt alive again. Real. Present. Older.

  She looked down at the nightgown she wore; it was old, yellowed, and threadbare. The same one she had worn in the dream, only drastically aged from many decades of wear.

  “I need a new nightgown,” she gasped to herself in between pulls of air.

  She looked around the room. Everything was back to normal. The tacky 1950s wallpaper was replaced with a pleasant beige color. The furniture, handed down for generations through her husband’s family, carved untold decades before, remained, looking slightly more worn in the last forty years than it had in the dream.

  It had felt so real, though, so vibrant.

  She lay back down and closed her eyes, hoping the headache from too many bottles of wine would dissipate, when she smelled something dark and bold coming up from the kitchen downstairs.

  She followed the scent, drawn by the allure of a percolating cup of coffee, her mind swimming in the miasma of lingering sleepiness and the confusion brought on by terrifying visions.

  What did it all mean? Who was the woman with the shredded face? Was she Peter’s mother? Peter had said that his mother had died when he was too young to remember. That was the only thing Nancy knew about her. Why would her mind torment herself with images of a woman she never knew? She shuddered, a chill crawling down her spine.

  “Good morning!” Edna was far too chipper for a morning like today and had Nancy sitting and supplied with a steaming cup of black coffee in no time. “Well, you look like something the cat drug in.”

  Nancy couldn’t help the involuntary glance at the backdoor, wondering where the small feline was. It had disappeared a couple days ago, after chasing the bird out the back door. Hopefully it would show up soon.

  The dream present in her mind, Nancy wanted to talk to Edna, to tell her what was going on and fill her in on all the small things she hadn’t mentioned to this point. It tore at her that she was keeping things from her best friend.

  What had that woman said to her? That Peter wasn’t safe? How could she know? How would Nancy know, since they were a product of her dreams? Had he left some kind of clue to his whereabouts?

  Her heart sank when she looked up and saw that the note Peter had left her was still sitting on the counter, not two feet from the coffee pot
.

  She glanced to Edna. Even through the haze of drinking, she remembered the look on Edna’s face the night before. It was rare for Edna to bring up all the lost men in her life and Nancy had been too pre-occupied with getting more wine to engage.

  “I’m sorry,” was all Nancy could say.

  Edna Maddox had woken up that morning with a wicked hangover. As much as she’d wanted to stay lying in the bed of Nancy’s guest room, she need to piss something fierce.

  By the time she tromped down to the hallway bathroom and taken care of Mother Nature’s urgings, it was too late to go back to bed.

  “That woman is going to be the death of me.” She tried to fix her hair as much as she could, but without her brushes she wouldn’t have much of a go of it. Nancy only kept a small plastic comb down here and Edna had forgotten to bring her travel bag the night before.

  Hair somewhat under control, she padded out to the early morning light and made her way into Nancy’s kitchen. “I swear that woman doesn’t belong in this century.”

  Nancy’s coffee maker was so old that Enda jokingly called it World War II surplus equipment. She knew it wasn’t quite that old, but it was still probably from the eighties.

  She fired off the old machine and wandered into the parlor while it spurted and sputtered behind her.

  Despite the overabundance of alcohol consumed the night before, they had made pretty amazing headway on the pile and would most likely need just an hour or so to finish it up this morning.

  Edna casually picked up an old, worn paperback of Great Expectations before sneering her nose at it and dropping it into the donate pile.

  “Save her from herself.”

  She glanced out the front window, noting an old Ford pickup in the driveway of the house across the street. “Huh, Nancy been holding out on me?” She hadn’t seen the truck before and Nancy hadn’t mentioned anything about someone moving in.

  She smirked. Pickups usually meant men, particularly the rugged outdoorsy types. She waited a little longer to see if she could see any movement but eventually gave up to go pour herself a cuppa.

  She was about halfway through with her first cup when she noticed a red paper on the counter. Curious, she picked it up. It looked like a Chinese takeout menu, but on the back was scrawled a letter from Peter.

  She finished the letter and rubbed at the twitchy eye she got when something was bothering her. Nancy was a dear, but she had clearly been holding out on her.

  She knew what Nancy needed, really needed, was not her. It was someone far wiser and more astute at these things. A vague memory from the haze of last night wormed its way into her head. Oh yes. YES! Nancy had made the call. She had scheduled an appointment. Life was about to get way more interesting.

  She didn’t have to wait long for Nancy to wake up, come down the stairs, and stumble into the kitchen haggard and half-asleep.

  “I’m sorry,” Nancy finally said.

  “What’s that?” Edna looked up from her newspaper and gave Nancy a half-hearted glance before going back to her reading.

  “Edna.” Nancy paused, fingering the lip of her coffee mug like she did when she was trying to figure out what to say.

  Edna met her gaze and turned sideways to glance at the paper on the counter. “That? I already read it.”

  Nancy sighed. “I know I …”

  “I know what you need,” Edna stated, folding the newspaper in her hands.

  “What’s that?”

  “I think you need to see Ushageeta.”

  “Usha what?”

  “Ushageeta? Remember, my life coach?”

  Nancy’s eyes narrowed. “She’s your life coach now? I thought last time we talked about her she was a guru or sherpa-something helping you on your spiritual journey.”

  Edna dismissed her question with a wave of her hand, tossing the folded paper onto the middle of the island. She couldn’t remember how many times she had tried to get her friend to see someone, anyone, about talking things out, but getting Nancy to consider paying someone to talk was like pulling teeth. Ushageeta was fantastic, and if what Edna suspected was going on with Nancy was even half true, then Ushageeta would be the best and possibly only person Nancy should see.

  Edna knew a shaman in Canada, but Ushageeta was it for miles.

  “Hon, something is going on with you. It’s plain as day, and I don’t want to pry, but you seem to have something you need to get off your chest. If you’re not going to talk to me, your best friend, about it, will you at least talk to a trusted advisor?”

  “Now she’s an advisor?” Nancy looked frustrated.

  “Sweetie, I know you have a lot on your mind lately. I just want you to be okay, but something big is going on and you won’t talk to me.”

  Nancy slumped, nearly spilling her coffee with the sudden motion. “Is it that obvious?”

  Edna cleared her throat. “First, you’ve been dodgy and subversive since you found Linda in the alleyway. I’ve already said you should talk to a counselor about it.”

  “But I …”

  “Can I continue?” Edna voice was heated. Her volume tended to rise with her mood and how excited she was about a certain topic. She knew Nancy would forgive her for her boisterous attitude.

  Nancy smiled apologetically. “Of course, I’m sorry.”

  “Second, I’ve never seen you agree so fast to going to visit supposed drug dealers in the middle of the night. That alone should send you to the psychiatrist for an evaluation. But above that was what you wouldn’t stop talking about last night.”

  Nancy stared in silence for a moment, her face looking like she was either constipated or trying to puzzle something out. She glanced to the counter where the four empties from last night sat.

  “What did I say?”

  Edna smiled. “You kept saying you wanted to go see Ushageeta.”

  Nancy laughed dismissivly. “I what?”

  “Oh yeah, you leaned in at least three times to me and said, ‘Psst, I have a secret, and I need to talk to Usha about it.’ I tried to get you to tell me, but you kept saying not to tell Edna but then refused to tell me. I believe at some point you called me Christine?”

  Nancy blushed. “To tell you the truth, I have been thinking about it.”

  “Well, you did more than think about it. You called her around one in the morning and set up an appointment.”

  “Oh my God. I did what?” Nancy stood off her stool in stark surprise. “Please tell me I didn’t.”

  Edna turned around, stretching from where she sat to grab the note from Peter off the counter and hold it out for Nancy to take.

  Nancy held the paper in her hand, reading her neat handwriting scrawled across the menu. Ushageeta 4pm.

  “Why is this here?”

  Nancy held out the paper, pointing at a spot where Peter’s name was written half a dozen times, once with a heart traced around it.

  Edna felt her face flush with heat. “Oh, that one may have been me,” she admitted. “He was pretty cute, you have to admit.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “This is her house?”

  Nancy hopped out of the car and took a couple steps up the walkway while she waited on Edna to catch up. Edna took the lead up to the house.

  From the street, the house looked run down. Typical midforties stucco-covered ranch house with a single vacant carport. Getting closer though, the house appeared to change. What seemed like a pile of trash from the distance in the waning sunlight of the afternoon now was a small clump of garden gnomes all working to dig a hole in the ground.

  Nancy chuckled to herself as she looked at the chubby little guys with their floppy hats. She’d never seen them cast in such a way as to be in the middle of working. Usually they just stood there holding on to a shovel with a dopey grin on their face.

  Flowers and rocks dotted the small front yard. It looked like a pleasant meadow, once she observed closer.

  Despite the age of the house, it seemed to be in good rep
air. The stucco was largely free of cracks, and the mustard-yellow paint that looked atrocious from the street was much better close up.

  The front door was a dark, small-grained wood with an odd sigil carved into it spanning nearly the entire door. The circle contained smaller circles inside of it, forming a triangle. It reminded Nancy of the Spirograph drawings she used to make as a teenager. She wanted to touch it but pulled her finger back as a shadow passed across the front window before the door opened.

  A young Indian woman, hardly more than a girl, looked out from the doorway. She eyed Nancy up and down for a moment before setting her gaze on Edna. “Miss Edna, welcome. Come in.” She had a petite melodic Indian accent that matched her small nose, and large, inquisitive brown eyes. Her long brown hair hung to the small of her back and seemed to sparkle in the afternoon light.

  Edna smiled and nodded, then slipped her shoes off before stepping into the house.

  Nancy breathed a sigh of relief that her sneakers were a little on the loose side, and she slipped them off without untying anything. The girl held open the door for her with a curt smile as Nancy pulled off her shoes.

  Stepping inside felt like traveling to a completely new world separated by space and time from the one she knew. The strange feeling, the sensation of a slight tug on her skin as she crossed the threshold, mirrored her experience in Anca’s apartment days before.

  Harsh opposing neon pinks and forest greens dominated the palate and gave Nancy a sense of apprehension. Just like Anca’s home, the smell was overpowering. Unlike Anca’s apartment, however, this home was far more organized. No piles of books and papers covering the neatly arranged furniture. While filled with numerous curios and books, the shelves were organized, with a sense that this home was lived in, rather than a dumping ground for the days detritus.

  “The Mother will be with you shortly,” the younger girl stated in a flat dull tone.

  “Namaste.” Edna put her hands together and bowed slightly. The girl gave a curt little nod of recognition before turning. Nancy noticed the start of an eye roll as the girl turned away from Edna.