Crave the Moon

by Lori Handeland

  The sky lit up like a carnival midway, and she stopped so fast she slid several inches in the mud, arms pinwheeling as she tried to avoid falling on her ass. She managed, just barely.

  She might not want to talk about what lay at the end of Lonely Deer Trail, but it appeared she was pretty intent on standing at the end of Lonely Deer Trail. She was nearly there.

  And the wind kept calling her name.

  “Giiii-naaa!”

  “Fuck you,” she muttered, but she kept moving.

  She didn’t feel any change beneath her feet as she approached. But then she wasn’t a horse.

  The night was so dark. Just as it had been back then. No rain that time, but the clouds had covered the moon.

  The complete darkness all around made her feel as if she were in space, where gravity was skewed and up could be down or the other way around. The startling flashes of light caused the barren, glistening landscape to resemble the surface of the moon.

  The sky flared again, and she started as Teo’s damn tree of life—her harbinger of death—sprang up in front of her. If she’d kept going—half-walking, half-jogging, was that wogging?—she’d have run smack into it.

  She slipped, and this time no amount of pinwheeling could prevent her from falling. The movement did, however, keep her from landing on her ass. Instead, she landed on her face. Or near enough.

  Despite her disorientation, she brought her arms up and broke her fall. She still smacked her head into the ground. But she turned her neck sharply, so instead of crunching her nose, she felt her temple connect with a dull, squishy thud.

  Then she lay there, letting her pulse return to normal. It didn’t matter that she wallowed in the mud or that water sluiced across the ground as if running desperately downhill, despite the flat nature of the plain, skirting her body like a dam in a creek. She was already soaked.

  But her pulse didn’t slow, even though her breathing did. She felt fine. She wasn’t hurt. Her heart shouldn’t be beating so fast and so loudly the very earth seemed to shake with its force.

  Gina rolled sideways, placing her palm against her chest.

  Bu-bump. Bu-bump. Normal rhythm.

  She laid her hand on the ground.

  Ba-bump-ba-bump-ba-bump.

  She snatched her hand away. The earth seemed to be shaking because it was shaking. Or at least beating to the tune of a very fast heart.

  No wonder the horses flipped whenever they walked here. The vibration made her teeth itch, and horses had a lot more teeth.

  Gina sat up, curling her legs into her chest and wrapping her arms around her knees; then she again touched the ground.

  With the exact same results. The heart of the earth beat against her palm with such force her skin crawled.

  She wiped her hand against her jeans, but the thud continued beneath, vibrating through her butt and up her spine. She felt as if her hair, despite being plastered to her scalp by the needle-like rain, was actually standing on end.

  “Giii-naaa,” whispered the wind, and she shivered, causing the hairs on her arms to dance.

  “Hey!”

  Her head lifted; her eyes scanned the darkness. Had she heard someone shout? Perhaps the whispers of Gina had actually been the word Gina coming from a human mouth instead of a—

  Well, who knew?

  “Teo?” She stood. The beat of the earth rumbled against her feet. She swayed, but she stayed upright, gaze straining, breath shallow, as she waited for the flash. She’d run away from him, but now all she wanted was to see him again.

  The world went bright white, and there he was, still a good hundred yards away. The air rushed from her lungs as relief swamped her, right before the whole world settled back to black.

  Teo had been calling her name. It hadn’t been the wind at all.

  Of course that didn’t explain the ba-bump beneath her heels. She wasn’t sure anything could.

  Unless there was a sorcerer down there.

  Gina began to walk in Teo’s direction, but as she did the ba-bump smoothed into one long, rolling rumble. She threw her arms out for balance; the sky lit up, and everything that had once been solid disappeared.

  * * *

  Every time the lightning flared, Matt lifted his head. The tree was always there—where was it going to go?—but Gina … Gina was another story.

  The first flash, he’d seen her, running hell-bent for that spooky old tree.

  During the second, she no longer ran but stood still as a photograph, the sky gone white, both the massive tree and the tiny human etched in black.

  The third time the sky erupted in silver shards, what he saw made him stumble, nearly fall.

  She was gone.

  Which was impossible. This was a plain. The only thing sticking out of it were that tree and her. There was nowhere to go except—

  His breath caught and he shouted, Hey!” And: “Gina!” Then he listened. But between the wind and the rain and the thunder, all he could hear was the ever-increasing rhythm of his heart, the thud so loud it echoed in his feet. He feared an imminent heart attack. Nevertheless, he began to run.

  The next flash revealed Gina again. He didn’t realize he’d been holding his breath—no wonder his heart was pounding in his brain—until it exploded from his mouth at the sight of her.

  But his relief was short-lived, because suddenly the thunder of his heart was the thunder of the earth as it opened and swallowed Gina alive.

  * * *

  The ground gave way—first solid and then simply gone. Gina hit bottom, but instead of the dry dirt all around caving in, spilling onto her, some mud oozed down the walls, a bit plopping on her skin.

  “Gina!”

  Her gaze swiveled around the dark interior, trying to pinpoint the source of her name. Then another big clunk of mud fell from above, this time right on her head. She glanced up just in time for lightning to reveal Teo’s anxious face peering over the edge of the hole in the ground. “You okay?”

  Gina took stock. Odd, but she felt better physically than she had when she’d been tossed from the horse. Mentally was another thing entirely.

  Mentally, she was screaming. Her parents were down here.

  Her attention returned to the eternal blackness that surrounded her.

  Somewhere.

  And … What if her parents were the least of her worries?

  “Can you stand?” Teo’s voice drew her gaze upward. She needed to focus on him, not—

  “Yeah.” She stood. “I’m okay.”

  “Why did you run?” he asked, then lowered his voice. “Why did you run here?”

  She wasn’t going to admit to the wind calling her name. Teo would haul her out and deposit her in the nearest nuthouse. Not that she didn’t belong there, but if she was going, she was going on her own.

  “Gina?” he murmured again.

  “You asked about my parents.”

  “I did?”

  The surprise in his voice was comical. She could just make out his face against the suddenly lighter blue of the sky. The rain had slowed considerably; a few stars had begun to peek out.

  “You asked what happened here.”

  Understanding blossomed, quickly followed by regret. “The accident…,” he began, then paused. “If you don’t want to tell me, that’s all right.”

  Gina rubbed her wet hands against her wet jeans, sucking in a breath when her palms burned like fire. She’d scraped them—either when she’d fallen out there or when she’d fallen in here.

  “What’s wrong?” Teo’s voice, which had been so lovely and calm, took on an edge of panic.

  “Nothing,” she said quickly, then peered into the gaping teeth of darkness that lay behind her.

  Everything.

  “Maybe I should get a rope,” he said.

  “No!” The thought of being left alone down here made her swear she could hear those teeth snap at the air far too close to her heels.

  Teo would have to get a rope eventually, but if he did so n
ow, she just might cry. And if she started to cry, when would she stop?

  So, while she’d just run from him rather than share the past of this place, Gina took a deep breath and set that past free.

  “Isaac told us not to go here. He said at the end of Lonely Deer Trail was death. Everyone who’d ever come here had died.”

  “Everyone?” Teo sounded as skeptical as she’d once felt.

  “According to Isaac. Of course the warnings only made me want to see the place even more.”

  “Of course,” Teo echoed, in a voice that said, Who wouldn’t?

  She smiled against the darkness. “I bullied Jase into coming along.”

  “McCord doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d be bullied by anyone.”

  “Call him a wuss and a girl sometime and see what happens.”

  “A broken nose most likely,” Teo muttered.

  “For you, probably. For me…” Gina shrugged. “It took months, really almost a year, of constant badgering. The only reason Jase came at all was because I threatened to go alone.”

  “Why so obsessed?”

  “Good question.” One Gina didn’t have an answer to. All she knew was that this place had been the only one forbidden her and she’d been unable to keep herself from seeing it.

  “What happened?” Teo repeated.

  “We came over the ridge and…” She paused as her breath caught in her throat now as it had then. The vista that had spread out before them had been so irresistible she’d scrambled like a kid with a broken piñata for her camera. “I took that damn picture as the sun set.”

  And even though Jase had wanted to turn back then—they’d found the end of the trail; now they could go—she’d been captivated by a tree that had appeared to be on fire.

  “By the time we got close, the sun was gone; the moon was coming up.” She’d planned to return to the exact same place where she’d taken the sunset photo and take another of the moonscape, but by then her camera had been crap.

  She lifted her face and received a few final plops of rain on her cheeks. “The horses threw us at about the same place ours did today. But those didn’t stop where Spike and Lady Belle did. They kept going. Jase and I walked around, trying to figure out what was so bad about the area. How could people die? It was flat. Nothing dangerous that we could see. Unless someone climbed the tree and fell on his or her head.”

  Gina remained silent for a few seconds, bracing herself to share the recurring nightmare that had begun right here. “The ground gave way, and the dirt just kept pouring in, the walls collapsing.” She swallowed, remembering how the dust had filled her throat, forced her to close her eyes.

  “How did you survive?”

  “Must have been an air pocket.”

  “Unusual.”

  “I don’t have any other explanation.” She didn’t have an explanation for a lot of things.

  “The air wouldn’t last forever.”

  “No.” Gina remembered the panic, the darkness, that sense that something “other” was there and that it was so very, very glad they’d come. “But every time one of us moved, the dirt would shift, and we were afraid we were only making it worse. We tried to talk, but that uses oxygen.” And caused dirt to cascade into their mouths.

  “What did you do?”

  Held hands and waited to die.

  “The horses ran home,” she blurted.

  “Awful long way.”

  “We’d already been missed. My parents were almost here when they blew past.”

  Teo sucked in a loud, sharp breath. He knew what she was going to say. She said it anyway.

  “They tried to come in from the side so they wouldn’t dislodge more earth. Instead—” The words stuck in her throat just like all that dirt had.

  “The earth dislodged on them,” Teo finished.

  “It was like…” She paused, uncertain how to say it and not sound crazy. So she said the first part and kept the second to herself: “In pouring onto them, it poured off of us.”

  As if the earth, or something else, had chosen who would live and who would die.

  Duck. Duck.

  Goose.

  “I guess that could happen.” Teo sounded skeptical.

  “It did,” Gina said flatly. “We dug, but couldn’t find them. By the time Isaac arrived, it was too late.”

  “What do you mean, you couldn’t find them?”

  “Dug here, dug there, no bodies.”

  “That’s…” His voice faded. Obviously it wasn’t impossible or there’d be bodies. “Weird,” he continued. “Didn’t you bring in earthmoving equipment? Professionals?”

  “Things just kept collapsing. Some geologist figured there were underground catacombs. Every shift of the soil only caused the bodies to break through another layer, falling deeper and deeper. Therefore, the more we dug, the farther away they fell.”

  She’d had nightmares for years about reaching for her mother, only to have the earth give way beneath Betsy’s feet an instant before Gina touched her, the echo of her scream fading as she fell and fell and fell.

  “Not long after they got us out Isaac had the hole filled in.”

  “But if there are catacombs,” Teo said, “it would eventually cave in again.”

  “Really?” Gina muttered. “Ya think?”

  Silence descended. The sky had cleared, the moon just visible over the lip of the hole.

  “I understand now why you didn’t want me here,” he murmured. “But I still have to look.”

  She almost told him everything—what she’d heard, what she’d felt—except she was trying to convince him not to dig farther. If she told him that, she’d only intrigue him more.

  “It’s dangerous,” she said instead.

  “I’ve done this before; the people I’ll have helping me have done this before. The machinery and tools we’ll be using are made for this situation. It’ll all work out. You’ll see. We might even find—” He broke off, but Gina knew what he’d been about to say.

  He thought they might find her parents. Was that what she wanted?

  Gina glanced around the hollow where she’d fallen, no longer pitch-black but beginning to gray with the glint of a rising moon.

  She’d never understood the need to bury a body. Her parents’ funeral hadn’t been any less final without twin coffins at the front of the church. The headstones Isaac had insisted they place in the cemetery weren’t any more upsetting because they marked empty plots.

  So, no, Gina didn’t care if they found her parents. In fact, she’d much prefer they did not.

  But what she wanted didn’t matter. Teo would dig, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it beyond watch.

  “I’ll get a rope, some light, the hors…” He paused. “Well, at least the rope and a light.”

  “Crap,” Gina muttered. It wasn’t as easy as it appeared on TV to haul a person out of a hole. If there was a horse available to help, you used the damn horse.

  Unless the creature planned to behave like the wildest bronc at the rodeo as soon as it came anywhere near.

  “I’ll be right back,” Teo said, and then he was gone.

  Gina wrapped her arms around herself and kept her gaze on the sky so she wouldn’t be tempted to let it wander around the cavern.

  However, creaks and crinkles, whistles, and was that a whimper? tempted her. She cast quick glances—first forward, then up, then to the left, the right, back up, and finally to the rear, where she could have sworn she saw something move.

  She began to hum, uncertain at first of the song, until another loud reech forced the words right out.

  “In a castle, on a mountain,

  Near the dark and murky Rhine,

  Dwelt a doctor, the concocter

  Of the monster Frankenstein.”

  Gina laughed, though the sound gurgled weak and watery. Of all of Mel’s songs to remember right now, it had to be that one.

  She hoped singing would make the swirling shadows b
ack off. Instead, the sound of her own voice echoing out of one helluva big empty hole only made them seem to swirl closer, brushing against her skin, cool as fog. So she sang louder.

  “In a graveyard, near the castle,

  Where the sun refused to shine,

  He found noses and some toeses,

  For his monster Frankenstein.”

  Gina’s gaze flickered downward again. If there were any spare noses or toeses, she figured she’d find them right over …

  There.

  She yanked her gaze back to the shimmering, silent moon.

  Really, really, bad song choice, Gina.

  However, now that she’d started, she couldn’t make herself stop. Probably because when she stopped, she kept hearing the damn song anyway. The words were set to the tune of “Darling Clementine” and that was a rhythm that just wouldn’t go away.

  “So he took them and he built him,

  From the pieces he did find.

  And with lightning he animated

  The scary monster Frankenstein.”

  Bizarrely, lightning blazed in the distance, thunder rumbling in from the east.

  Once the flash of silver cleared, a ray of gold appeared against the sky, bobbing closer and closer, as if the biggest firefly in the world flitted near.

  “Scared the townsfolk, scared the po-lice,

  Scared the kids, did Frankenstein,”

  she sang softly, gaze on that flickering light that spread and spread like the sun across a field at dawn.

  “Till with torches they did chase him,

  To the castle by the Rhine.”

  “Did someone ask for a torch?” Teo’s head appeared haloed in the golden glow of the tent light in his hand.

  She was so glad to see both him and the lamp, she laughed. Why did he have to be who he was? Why did she? Whenever they forgot themselves, they almost had fun. She had so little fun in her life; she cherished it. Even if it was with Dr. Moldy.

  Who wasn’t very moldy at all.

  “Aren’t you going to finish?” he asked.

  “You weren’t supposed to hear that.”

  “Gina,” he said. “Everyone within thirty miles heard that.”

  She winced. “Oops.”

  “You have a nice voice. I, on the other hand—” He straightened and began to sing the chorus at the top of his lungs.