Henry Halfmoon
A Fringe Mythology Story
Huck Warwicks
Nicholas Goss
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Henry Halfmoon
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About The Author
Books By This Author
Copyright © 2020 Nicholas Goss
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Paperback ISBN: 9798629171775
Ebook ASIN: B086FY5F47
Cover design by: TS95 Studios
Printed in the United States of America
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Henry Halfmoon
By
Huck Warwicks
Chapter 1
I have this strange feeling I’m being watched. But I keep moving my feet, never slowing my pace. Whatever has fixed its attention on me is behind me somewhere, matching my movements and closing distance.
I round a corner and bump shoulders with a guy on a cell phone. He’s your typical New York blowhard businessman, dressed to the nines and talking at a volume that forces you to listen. There’s no other volume for such people. It’s not that they’re oblivious to the world around them. It’s not even that they don’t bother to show some regard for other people they must share the world with. I’m guessing that they feel powerless; a single business soldier in a city of 8.6 million people, all pushing and shoving their way to and from their jobs, leaving no margin in their lives to stop and breathe. Forty or fifty years old, and running out of time. Realizing that they didn’t achieve the heights of wealth they dreamed of when they were fresh out of business management school. Now on the verge of a heart attack or stroke, they scramble to hoard all they can. Not just the money, but the attention; the sugar-substitute for power. It’s the one thing they can control, and it’s the only thing left that helps fill the void.
I know the truth, pal. There’s no one on the other end of the call. But congratulations. You’ve thumped your chest and made me look at you and your stupid briefcase. Wow. You must be important! It’s Armani! And whoa, look at that watch! You must be loaded! Your wild raging success in life is evident, and I am sooo impressed.
Too bad you don’t have a net worth that could afford you a cab ride. Instead, you must share the sidewalks with little ol’ me and the thing that’s following me.
Whatever the thing is, I hope it catches the scent of your knock-off cologne and vomits in its own mouth. Yeah. That would give me time to put some distance between us; not the thing following me. I’m used to that. It’s been happening daily for the past few weeks. No, I want to get away from people like you. I wish you the best, pal; you and all the other sheep, hurling yourselves off the cliff’s edge of corporate mediocrity.
“Sorry about that, sir,” the guy says politely, pulling the cell phone away from his face. “Take care.”
Dang it. I hate it when they’re nice. Okay. I need some coffee. I went a little overboard there. I can go dark on people sometimes, I guess.
“No problem. Take care,” I say with a half-smile. I need to relax, but I’m still twenty minutes from campus. I’m going to be late for class. I have a full day today, barely time to stop and eat. Round after round of lectures, labs, and tests. That’s my grind Monday through Friday. But my first class is my favorite. Of all the useless crap I must know, and can elect to know to get that meaningless piece of paper next summer, this class serves up the most interesting useless crap. Professor Shipley’s Survey of World Religions, Mythologies, and the Occult.
I’m not sure what future career lies waiting to magically fall into my lap when I graduate, but surely the history of religion and occult studies will serve me well, as will my philosophy degree. I’m sure there are plenty of philosopher jobs out there just waiting for me to get out of college with my bachelor’s degree pinned neatly to my poorly fitting J.C. Penny’s black suit coat.
Oh well. Shipley’s class may be useless, but I can’t get enough of it. And the professor! Wow. What a guy! He’s like the caricature… of a cartoon version… of the stereotypical university professor. The little round glasses, the tufts of white hair billowing from the sides of his bald head, and the tweed! He wears a tweed sport coat. I bet he goes home and sits in a room with musty-smelling books that cover his walls from floor to ceiling, smoking his Sherlock Holmes pipe, by his fireplace until he falls asleep from too much sherry. There’s probably an ascot involved when he’s alone, too.
Only ten more minutes. I just need to get across Washington Park, past the girls’ dorms, down Waverly and into the social sciences building. From there, I’ll go up three floors (taking the stairs) and barrel to the end of the hall.
I can make it!
My satchel bounces off my hip as I pick up my pace and begin my jog towards the best class on NYU’s menu of electives.
The thing somewhere behind me won’t follow me across the park. There aren’t enough places to hide behind, I’m guessing. It’ll go around and meet up with me in class. Usually, it slips in and lurks several rows behind me. I feel a sharp, icy anxiety on the back of my neck when it’s near. But I have a plan today. Today, I’m going to sit in the very back row and watch for it.
But I need to hurry; the back row of Shipley’s class always fills up first. It’s not well lit, and the many loafers who are just snagging the easy three credit hours like to catch some shuteye in the back row.
Shipley doesn’t care. His policy is basically, show up, get a passing grade. I’m guessing he’s been at this a long time to be so laissez-faire about class participation. When you think about it, having an expectation that anyone would find the subject of mythology, religion, and the occult particularly useful or interesting is a tall order.
But I’m interested. And I don’t know why. It’s just how I’m wired. I’m one of those unevolved Neanderthals that still believes that there’s more to the world than what we can see. I also believe that we understand the world (especially the unseen world) less and less the more our modern culture progresses. My peers smugly attest that humanity is evolving, and a realm that science can’t quantify is pure fantasy. But I disagree.
We are devolving.
And that’s why I dig Shipley’s class so much. It makes me feel connected to the ideas and beliefs of cultures that were better informed about the true nature of the universe and our role to play in it.
My phone vibrates. I accidentally snag my satchel’s strap on the door of the social sciences building, trying to p
ull the device from my pocket.
It’s my mom: Praying for you today, Henry! God has great things for your life! Love you!
Thanks for the interruption, Mom. I almost ruined my only book bag trying to read your text.
I was afraid it was an emergency. Dad hasn’t been doing well lately. The doctors told him ‘stage three’ was treatable, but there’s this strange, I don’t know, feeling or smell I notice when I’m home for a visit. Maybe it’s just my imagination. Hopefully. It could just be my undaunted pessimism. Henry, your fly is open, and your oversized negativity is showing.
It must be hard for Mom to be his full-time caretaker, and that all alone. My mood softens when I consider that, and I shoot her a quick text in reply as I scramble up three flights of stairs
Thanx, Mom. Luv you too.
Take that, Wordsworth! Pure literary genius. Yeah, I’m the world’s greatest son, I know. Now, please let me get back to my life. I know that finding my purpose in life is important to my parents, but the warming energy of the city, the constant movement, the social fabric, and unique vivacious character of all that is ‘‘New York,’’ is an epic soothing distraction.
My purpose can wait.
I burst through the door, and I’m right on time. Shipley is pulling recently graded test papers from his briefcase and shuffling them on his desk as I and my peers find our seats.
I slink up the shallow steps to the very back row and sit dead center, with a commanding view of the whiteboards, along with the world’s greatest history nerd and the credit hour snatchers.
Shipley stands at the edge of the dais with the bundle of test papers in his wrinkly old hands and pretends to examine them. He has his classically grumpy look beaming, mostly from his furrowing white eyebrows. He says nothing; he just stands there pretending to examine the stack of papers as he silently waits for students to quiet themselves and give him their attention.
When the room finally settles to an acceptable level of ‘quiet’ so Shipley can address the students without raising his thin, wavering voice, he raises his face to the class and peers at them with his sharp, beady eyes.
“I have finished grading last week’s test. You’ve all passed.”
The room barely responds. With many of the other professors at the university, such news would send the class into a celebratory frenzy. Shreds of ticker tape would fall from the ceiling, and plans for the afterparty would immediately get underway. Students would at least respond with cheers. But Shipley doesn’t expect that to happen in his class, where showing up, and putting any answer down on a test would ensure that the students passed. It’s almost as if he’s just trying to get the students happily through the semester, sifting through the mass of naive care-nothings, looking for maybe just one student with a spark of interest, but resigned to the reality that the world is abandoning the wisdom of the past.
“Some of you,” he says, arching a bushy white brow and doing his best to seem authoritative, “just barely passed. Frankly, I don’t know how some of you manage to tie your own shoelaces, and speak in a coherent sentence.” He raises the stack of papers above his head in one hand. “The rubbish answers that some of you have bothered to scribble onto these tests make me happy I never had children to subject to the same woefully lacking public school education you received.”
Some idiot on the left side of the class, barely visible from the poor lighting, calls out, “Your tax dollars at work, Professor!”
There’s some laughter at the remark, punctuated by a chuckle from Shipley himself.
Shipley steps down from the dais to the one student brave enough to sit in the front row. Ugh. The teacher’s pet. Shipley hands him the stack of papers and asks him to hand them out to the rest of the class.
Behind him on the left side of the platform is motion. No one seems to notice the three dry-erase markers and the eraser slide along the bottom of the whiteboard and onto the floor. But there’s nobody on the platform or anywhere near the whiteboards. It happens so quickly and subtly, nobody seems to notice, not even Shipley, who slowly steps back onto the dais and behind his lectern.
But I notice. The thing is here. The last time it happened, I was sitting in the middle row, drowning in Shipley’s exposition on the occult in America. It was a fascinating lecture, but it was interrupted by a door slamming shut in the back of the lecture hall, specifically a utility room door that’s left securely locked during the day. Shipley stopped mid-lecture and glared in the direction of the door at something for a few seconds, then continued speaking. Moments later, I felt it behind me—that achy cold that makes my neck hairs stand on end. And that feeling like I’ve had the wind knocked out of me. I didn’t turn around to look. I never do. I can’t. I’m afraid of what I’ll see.
But this time, I’ve come to class ready to spy on the thing from the back row.
And it’s here now. I’ve caught it in action, and I can’t believe what I just witnessed. Shipley rarely uses the whiteboard and doesn’t seem to notice the fallen items; he jumps into his talk. If he only knew that the thing that’s been following me is on the platform nearby! But I can’t see its form, and it has no shadow.
Finally, the remaining stack of test papers makes it to the back row. Mine is on the very bottom, of course. I neglect to notice the grade at the top of the first page; I can’t stop looking for the thing somewhere in the room. But the whiteboard incident has been the only activity in the past fifteen minutes, and the feeling in my stomach is waning.
Shipley rambles on and on about Enki being the ancient Chaldean equivalent of Christianity’s Lucifer. Normally, I’m soaking up every word, but I’m distracted by the thing, scouring the lecture hall’s every detail for any sign of its next manifestation.
My eyes burn with fatigue and finally, both my anxiety and my will to search, fizzle out together. I resign myself to ‘run out the clock’ and glean what I can from the rest of the professor’s talk. I casually glance down at the test, still in my hand and creased from the anxiety-induced death grip I’ve unwittingly had on it for the past twenty minutes.
D minus.
“What the heck!” I blurt out, waking one of the snoozing credit snatchers next to me.
“Sorry, bro. Go back to sleep,” I whisper. Next to my grade, which by the way is circled in red marker (adding insult to injury), there’s a deduction of points… Apparently, sixty percent is enough to pass. But I was sure I aced this one. It was a test on the Greek pantheon, and even though I’m well versed in it already, I still poured over my notes from the lectures and scoured the text that Professor Nerd had recommended.
This can’t be right. I scour the pages for check marks, x’s, or any comments next to my wrong answers. But Shipley didn’t make any notations indicating what questions I answered incorrectly.
All the pages are completely void of Shipley’s red pen, except for the very last page. The professor wrote a brief note and circled it with his bold red marker.
Washington Park Arch. Tomorrow night at nine p.m. I know what’s been following you, Mr. Halfmoon.
Chapter 2
The rest of my Wednesday is a complete wash. The day grinds by at a snail’s pace, each class and lab a grueling labor of distracted confinement. I must be visibly distracted because Mr. Sneed, the organic chemistry lab teacher, intervenes several times, preventing me from mixing some volatile compounds that are not very… simpatico.
“Are you okay, Mr. Halfmoon? You seem… uh… a bit detached from what we’re trying to do here.”
I need to get off campus and clear my head. “Yeah. Sorry, Mr. Sneed. I’m not feeling so well…” I lie.
“Why don’t you go see a nurse, or the campus clinic. I don’t need you spreading your funk in my class if you’ve caught something.”
I make sure to cough in an extra-juicy kind of way and grunt a little bit as I pack my satchel and sling it over my right shoulder.
“Yeah. I’ll be sure to do that,” I lie again. “See you Friday.” The
lies just keep coming.
I decide to skip the rest of my classes today. I’ll get marks off for attendance, no doubt, but I’ll just take the hit. I need to know what’s going on with me and the thing.
Maltino’s Cafe is two blocks north of the Washington Park Arch. I can’t help but stop at the structure and gaze at the strange symbols and friezes. I loaf for a while and find myself counting the stars stamped into the underneath surface of the arch. Seventy-two. I’m sure it’s significant. Maybe it’s the number of slaves our first president owned. Or perhaps seventy-two is something less scandalous, like how old he was when he finally croaked.
I get bored with the monument, and the stiff chill in the wind convinces me to move on. I slip into Maltino’s a few minutes later, unseen by the baristas and most of the customers. My wallet is currently lean, so I just work my way to a tiny table in the back and plop down into the cheap metal chair, facing the entrance. Always. I don’t like having my back to the thing. I pull out my phone and make like I’m checking texts, putting on the act that I’m waiting for someone. This keeps the staff from asking me to either order something or move on.
Tomorrow will be seminal. I need to plan if I’m going to avoid the thing all day. I’m dang sure that I’ll be skipping classes but an entire day of avoiding whatever has been stalking me, and waiting to get some answers isn’t a prospect that excites me.
Suddenly, a cold breeze wafts across my ears. The smudgy glass door at the front of the cafe is open and in walks one of the local homeless crazies. This guy is short, covered by faded, filthy clothes that don’t fit. Pants being held up by a length of used garbage bag twisted into a belt, the bottoms ripped and spilling over sneakers the color of subway concrete, mottled with muck and soles barely hanging on, exposing his holey socks and toes that haven’t seen bath water or toenail clippers in months. Maybe years. His hoodie is a torn, stretched net of city odor. On his head is a beanie that some charitable soul recently bought off a street vendor and donated out of sheer pity, along with the knit gloves on his grimy hands, with fingertips cut away, exposing this smut under his overgrown black fingernails.
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