MOONBANE
by Al Sarrantonio
Crossroad Press Edition Published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital
Copyright 2010 by Al Sarrantonio
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Prologue
~ * ~
Man of shadows and cratered light:
Alabaster plains,
Seas of tranquil dust—
You know a secret.
What word would you tell
Had you a single cold breath above?
What word would it be?
Would it be Love?
~ * ~
I’ve never been happy with the last line of that poem. I wrote it after Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in the summer of 1969, when the scientists and newspapermen started saying the Moon had been conquered and was a dead place, not interesting anymore. I walked out late one night during that same summer, and looked up and saw the Man in the Moon, and I asked him if he really was dead and buried. He gazed down at me, silver-white, inscrutable, and I went in and wrote a poem that I called “The Secret.”
I thought it was a pretty good poem, but I had some trouble with the last lines—partly because, despite the effect that moonlight is supposed to have on lovers, I did not feel love emanating from it that night. I felt something else, something disquieting almost.
I wrestled with the last lines of my poem that night, the way poets are supposed to, but finally I gave up and left them like they were and went out and looked at the Man in the Moon again. He was high overhead, staring balefully down at me. Only now he didn’t look like a man at all, but like some other animal, one I had seen and could almost recognize—
I went out and looked at the Man in the Moon on many other nights after that, and always I had the same feeling of uneasiness, that he knew something we on Earth, with all our smug technology and Moon landers, didn’t.
And then it became December of 1989, twenty years after that first Apollo landing, and the Man in the Moon told his secret.
And now I wonder, as I write this in a place I never dreamed of being, on the way to a place that soon will no longer exist, if poetry has a place in a world in which most of the scientists and newspapermen are dead, in which I watched my dear wife die, in which my own son was transformed into something inhuman and monstrous, in which…
Let me tell you.
CHAPTER 1
The Far Field
“Look, Dad, another one!”
Not any December night will do. It must be, and always was, the night of December thirteenth when the comet trail swept through the blue Earth, when the tiny flashing specks of gold known as the Geminid meteor shower gave the pre-Christmas sky an early present.
It was bone cold, but neither Richie nor I cared. There were parkas on our backs; the night was as crisp as a McIntosh apple. If we got too cold the house was only thirty feet away, but neither myself nor my twelve-year-old son had made a move to go in. I knew Emily was watching television in there under a pile of quilts, and she knew we were out here freezing; but since we were both happy, who cared?
“There went another one,” I said as a dim flash caught the corner of my eye.
Fifty meteors an hour, the books said, and that was about what we’d seen. Not all of them came out of the constellation Gemini (the Twins—something Emily sometimes called Richie and me), but no matter where you saw a meteor trail in the sky, you could trace it back to the constellation that gave the shower its name. Only the Perseids in the summer were better.
“Whoa! Two!” Richie shouted, and I caught one of them right in front of my eyes. It was the biggest we’d seen yet—and the trail it made was white and wide, curving downward. I traced it back and found that it didn’t originate in the Gemini cluster of stars.
“That wasn’t a Geminid,” I said.
“A sporadic?”
“Had to be—”
I stopped talking as another fireball, the head a brightly lit bulb, the tail a long arcing stream of fire, arched overhead and down to the horizon behind us.
“Wow,” Richie said, and this time we both traced the path back and found that it didn’t come from Gemini either.
“That’s weird,” Richie said.
I nodded. “Guess we’re just lucky tonight.”
“Guess I’m just freezing,” Richie said. I noticed he was hugging himself.
A Geminid meteor fizzed overhead, dull and fleeting compared to the two fireballs we’d seen.
“Want to go in?” I said it so that it sounded like it didn’t matter if he left me or not, because he knew that I would stay out half the night.
“Little while,” he said, looking longingly at the front door to the farmhouse a mere ten yards away, outlined in the darkness. Vaguely silhouetted against the front picture window was the Christmas tree we’d put up that afternoon, surrounded by the boxes of ornaments we would hang on it tomorrow.
I was staring at the bowl of night over us, at the black fabric of sky shot with a billion pinpoints of soft starlight. The Milky Way snaked gauzily from east to west, the rim of our own galaxy spread like a gently whirling strip across the sky. The Moon, which before too long would ruin with its light the relatively fragile illumination of the Geminids, was just rising on the eastern horizon, fat and orange-yellow. I wanted to aim the white tube of our telescope at it when it came up; the news had briefly mentioned some strange activity in the Oceanus Procellarum region in the northwest quadrant, currently in shadow, which had the astronomers baffled. But the Moon was too low yet, and the sight of the whole, richly starred sky spread above me made me forget about the telescope as I scanned the sky from horizon to horizon.
“Dad—” Richie began, and I will remember the way his voice sounded at that moment because it was the last time his voice ever had that sound in it—“I want to do something but I don’t want to hurt your feelings”—that tone that told me he wanted to go in. But instead of finishing the sentence he turned his eyes upward and pointed with a gloved hand, forgetting how cold he was.
“Jesus Christ.”
I was going to tell him not to talk like that but then I saw what he meant, and I repeated his exclamation.
The sky was filled with meteors streaming overhead at a frightening rate, huge bolides like the two we had seen before. They seemed to rise up from the eastern horizon like fiery missiles. I thought I heard a faint whoosh as they passed overhead. In their background I saw a weak Geminid, and I tried to trace some of these monster fireballs, but they all came from the horizon and not from some recognizable star group. I thought for a fleeting second that they might indeed be some sort of aircraft, perhaps even (all those science fiction movies I’d seen in the 1950s produced this thought) some secret government project gone haywire. There had been times at sunset when I’d seen weather balloons pass overhead from Kramer Air Force Base, a good hundred and fifty miles to the west. But I just had a gut feeling that what we were witnessing had nothing to do with them.
There were hundreds of them now—then thousands. The sky was turned from night nearly today, and now I heard a distinct, air-splitting scream as one passed so low overhead that it looked more like a landing aircraft than a celestial object. There was still nothing visible but a huge glowing orange head followed by a long tail, but I swear I even felt its heat. It vanished in the west, but I saw a flash o
f light over the dip of the horizon and heard a vague, thumping explosion.
Richie and I looked at one another.
“What’s happening, Dad?”
I wished I could tell him; I wish at this moment, as I write this, that I’d known then and could have done something to prevent what happened afterward. But all I did was look at him and say, “I don’t know.”
Like good amateur astronomers, we tried to count the fireballs. But there were just too many. I saw six huge ones go over at once, with a backdrop of higher monsters, thirty, forty, eighty, a hundred. It looked as though there were layers of them. For a scary moment I thought of a World War II film with squadrons of B-29 bombers flying in formation to their targets, opening their bomb-bay doors, dropping their deadly cargo—
“Maybe we’d better go in,” I suggested.
“Are you kidding?”
“Richie,” I persisted, but I dropped my thoughts as something truly terrifying came at us.
For a moment I thought the sun had risen. It came from the direction of the rising Moon, a huge, waxing ball of light that grew and grew, brightening to almost painful intensity. I heard a rumble, like distant thunder rolling much too fast, and then a roar as the thing flashed straight at us. I shouted, pushing my son down, but it was a futile gesture—if the fireball was going to hit us, it would have by then. There was a crash behind us, a thudding boom, and then, mercifully, silence. I looked up from the ground and saw, off at the far end of our field, a thin plume of smoke and a glow like dying embers on the ground.
Richie pushed himself to his feet and stood staring at the crash site. “A meteorite!” he shouted. “Dad, we’ve got a meteorite!”
He made a move toward it, but I held his arm. “I think we’d better take it easy.”
“Why?” he said. And at that moment I had to ask myself the same question. What was bothering me? Something was trying to fight its way into my thoughts, some indistinct memory of standing out here on other nights and having the same unsettling feeling I had now. Wasn’t this just a freak meteor shower? What else could it be? For no rational reason I looked at the Moon, and as I did so a tiny voice, a voice that had perhaps been planted in the back of my mind a long time ago, said—
Run.
“Richie,” I said slowly, “let’s go in the house.”
He had already started to walk toward the far field. He stopped and looked at me, his face momentarily flushed by the light of a passing fireball. The lines of fire were still passing overhead, though by now there were not as many as there had been. I heard a high-pitched whistle and saw another one streak low overhead, landing somewhere beyond our property.
“I said let’s go in.”
He looked evenly at me, and I knew instantly that we had reached one of those bridges that all fathers and sons have to cross. William Faulkner wrote about it in The Bear, in which a father and son’s roughhousing abruptly became a battle for supremacy. It’s the Oedipus thing, of course, but since I don’t believe in Freudian psychology (one of my best friends in college, a psychology major, said that the only reason Freud invented psychoanalysis was because he needed it himself so badly), it must be something else. I prefer to call it growing up. Every father knows that sooner or later his son or daughter will stop thinking that he knows everything, and that maybe there are a few things they know better themselves.
“Dad, you’re not scared, are you?”
“Richie, I just have a feeling…”
He stood with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his parka, staring at me in the darkness.
“Son,” I began sternly.
And then I did the stupidest thing of my life.
“All right,” I said, “what the heck.”
We crossed the unplowed field together. Though this was a farm, I only rented the house, and nothing had been planted on the tired soil of the place for ten or fifteen years. We had to make our way carefully through old furrows hardened by many winters.
Richie looked up at me, and suddenly he smiled. Overhead, I noticed that the fireballs had become truly sporadic, one and then another streaking silently. Behind them, I once more saw a wan, unhearty trail of one of the Geminids.
I smiled back at my son, but it was a faint one.
“I think it fell over this way,” Richie said. He was pushing enthusiastically on. I saw a thinning plume of steam up ahead.
“There,” Richie said. I lost him for a moment, behind a clump of tall bush, but then I came around and he was there, standing before a hissing pile of what looked at first like charcoal briquettes. When I got closer I saw what really was there: a circular pit four feet wide, a foot deep. A single glowing piece of rock sat in the center. I smelled ozone, and something else—a faint, familiar smell that at first I couldn’t identify.
“Don’t touch it,” I said, as Richie reached out a hand. “It might be hot.”
He pulled his hand back. “Maybe I should get a stick,” he said and immediately went searching for one.
This left me alone with the thing. That feeling deep down inside began to act up again. But having rationalized it away once, it was easier this time to suppress it. Here was my twelve-year-old son, my boy, looking for a stick so he could poke at a rock from space, and his father, a former teacher, a published poet, a respected man, wanted to cower like a child and hide.
If only that’s what I’d done; if only I’d dragged Richie into the house, dragged my wife from bed and locked the three of us in the cellar, bolting and barricading the door behind us…
Richie returned with a long straight bough, the victim of a summer lightning strike on one of the oaks that bordered the field. He stood over the meteor for a moment, and then edged the stick toward it. “I wonder how heavy it is,” he said, to himself as well as to me. The stick bent when it touched the roughly pyramidal mass, but the meteorite moved a bit.
Richie stepped in closer, one booted foot slipping down into the crater. He had both hands on the stick, pushing the rock toward the other side of the hole, trying to flip it over.
Suddenly I took him by the shoulder and yanked him back.
The same odd look of defiance he had shown before crossing his face. But then he saw what I meant, and his expression changed.
“Oh,” he said, stepping out of the hole and next to me.
The meteorite was moving on its own. Or, rather, the pointed end of the pyramid was. Tiny fissures had formed on the cooling stone, a network of cracks that resembled the pattern on the surface of a hatching egg.
That grip of prescience took hold of me again. Once more—fatefully this time—the look of wonder on my son’s face shamed me into doing nothing about it.
“What is it, Dad?”
“I don’t know.” One side of the pyramid had flaked away, a portion perhaps six or eight inches long. Now something that couldn’t quite get out was pushing at the neighboring face of the rock, working it till it, too, began to drop away. That smell I had detected earlier, which I still couldn’t place, was stronger.
Overhead, a last large meteor passed by, disappearing like a flare in the west. The sky was empty, except for the Moon, which had risen full and stood balanced over the eastern horizon, and the scattering of bright stars it wasn’t able to drown. The Geminid meteors were completely engulfed by the gray-white light of Luna.
I didn’t rebuke him, because again I repeated the same exclamation. A tiny limb, a paw it looked like, had pushed out from the fractured rock in the crater. It was quickly followed by the rest of the body, which fell to the ground and formed into a tight, nearly fetal shape. As we watched, a membrane, thin and yellowing, nearly transparent, melted away from the stretching body of the thing, and it was left panting feebly in the ditch its falling carrier had formed.
That smell again—that smell…
“It’s a puppy!” Richie exclaimed, and at that exact moment I realized what that smell was. “Richie!” I shouted, but he had impulsively stepped into the crater and reached down
his gloved hand to the stirring dog shape that lay there, waving its paws with growing vigor, its tiny snout sniffing at the unfamiliar air, its eyes like gold coins, the light in them growing. It had a thin, emaciated body and a long slim tail, nearly hairless.
“Richie!” I screamed, reaching for him, but it was too late, and the next image was one that has come to me in my many nightmares every night since.
The tiny dog struggled on its side, moving its hind legs beneath; then abruptly, forcefully, it sprang and took hold of Richie by the hand with its teeth. I saw the bright flash of them as its small mouth opened: two sharp half circles, upper and lower, like blue-white razors. Even as Richie tried to pull back, the thing’s mouth closed on his glove, holding tight like a sprung trap.
Richie’s scream was an unearthly thing. Even more terrifying was the sound the creature made as it dropped the glove, a strong, piercing howl that echoed around the field like a triumphant bray.
The beast, with Richie’s glove still in its writhing mouth, fell back into the hole. Richie fell into my arms, and I began to pull him backward. For a moment I could still see clearly down into the crater, and my blood froze at the sight of the little monster in there, biting through the leather glove like a sharply honed machine, then spitting it aside. Already, it had grown. Its front paws were still unsteady, or I’m sure it would have leaped from the ditch at me. It did look up at me, though, with its huge, almond-shaped yellow eyes, and I swear it grinned, with a smile that Lucifer himself would have envied.
Then it turned its head, looked at the Moon rising majestically above the Earth, and let out a blood-curdling howl.
I backpedaled away from the hole, lifting my moaning son up into my arms. He lay limply.
“Richie,” I said, but his eyes were glazed, showing only pain. I turned and ran for the house.
As I reached the porch, fumbling with the front door, screaming for Emily to help, I looked back toward the far edge of the field. The thing had not yet followed me. But I saw its now-grown head rearing up out of the hole, turning to look at me—
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