Moon Eyes

by Poole, Josephine

  The bird had flown.

  Kate never knew how long she hung over the side of the cot, staring, not believing. Her heart had galloped: now, it seemed to stop. She turned slowly, looking into the corners of the room. But, of course, he was not there. She knew very well where he was. He was with Aunt Rhoda.

  And there was to be no fight after all. Rhoda Cantrip had walked back into the house, taking it over, with Thomas. Maybe she thought Kate was asleep, maybe she did not think about her at all. She stood in the middle of the moon-washed nursery with her arms hanging down uselessly; she felt utterly alone. She was beaten. Thomas had gone over to the enemy. It was worse than the wood: there at least she had been able to do something. Here, what could she do?

  Well, go and get him back.

  Out of the room, away from Aunt Rhoda and the dog? How could she win when those two were determined against her?

  But it was not true to say that Thomas had gone over. He had been asleep. Aunt Rhoda must have picked him out of his cot and taken him to her room. Perhaps he had not yet chosen. It was up to her to give him an alternative.

  She crept along the landing, and listened outside the spare-room door. There was no noise, and then she heard the window sash rattle. The dog had got into the room. Another moment of silence, when she thought the beating of her heart must alarm them; and then came Rhoda Cantrip's voice, fierce but low. “Speak to it! Bow your head, and say it is your master! Speak to it, this instant!”

  Kate opened the door. It was like looking into a boiler; at first she thought the room was on fire. The walls glowed, as though they were red hot, and it was full of a dense, sweet-smelling smoke. Ah, but the opposite wall was green no longer, it had become a fiery sky; and the stars scratched into it wheeled and turned, and threw sparks. She blinked and gasped, unable to see anything else at first, and then there was Aunt Rhoda with her back to the door, wearing her hair long and her velvet dress, and holding a lighted silver torch in one hand, that smoldered and puffed out the scented smoke. Evidently she was not aware that the door was open: but Thomas saw, he was standing in front of her in his pajamas with ruffled hair, staring up at her with an expression Kate knew well. He was afraid: but still he was obstinate, he was determined to make up his own mind. And the great black dog padded up and down, up and down, along the flaming wall. Until it fixed Kate with its eyes, and glided past her down the stairs.

  “Speak, Thomas, I order you, say it is your master!” But he did not say anything, he only glanced for a second at Kate.

  And suddenly there was hope.

  Aunt Rhoda trembled with anger; she could not bear to be thwarted, and had difficulty in controlling herself. The powder in the torch glowed and puffed when the hand that held it shook. Kate suddenly thought that she would hit Thomas with it. She ran into the room -- ah! in here the floor must be on fire, it seemed to scorch the soles of her bare feet as she caught her brother by the arm and half pulled, half carried him out again. Aunt Rhoda was taken completely by surprise; next moment she recovered herself, and gave a great shout, an exulting triumphant shout: “Moon Eyes!”

  But her dog had gone.

  They hurried downstairs, almost tumbling in the dark: there was no time to fumble about for the light. The front door was locked; Kate remembered doing it herself, it was well and truly barred. She could not turn the great key and push back the bolts, and still keep hold of Thomas. She let him go and struggled, sweating; she could hear Aunt Rhoda upstairs throwing open the windows and calling over the common for the dog. Why had she locked up so thoroughly? What she would have shut out came in quite easily through the bolted doors and windows.

  Then she heard the dog growl, and realized that it was in the drawing room. One more bolt and the door was open: she had got it, she pulled it back. Was it usually so heavy? Or did her strength fail? And she put down her hand for Thomas, and he was not there. The dog growled again.

  Thomas was standing in the moonlit drawing room, and it faced him, crouching, with bared teeth and eyes glaring. It was about to spring; she was terrified; she did not dare even to go in and pull him away lest that set it off. And there he stood in his pajamas, as defenseless as a baby and apparently not afraid in the least in fact, he took a step towards it. She pressed her hands to her mouth. The dog reared up, snarling, its muzzle wrinkled back from its gums and the fur upright along its spine. Then it dropped down on its four feet and turned, and slunk behind the sofa.

  Now was her chance. She darted into the room, and grabbed his arm. But he shook himself tree. “Come on,” she hissed, “the front door's open,” and then she saw that already it was too late. The dog was creeping out.

  Now the carpet was not big enough for the room, so the edges of the floor showed polished wood. The dog's feet should have made a noise on the parquet, but they did not: it moved quite silently, turning its head always to face Thomas, fixing him with its white eyes, while its upper lip trembled back from long teeth. “It's half my height” thought Kate, watching fascinated. “It's nearly as tall as Thomas.” The sweat ran down her face, in the heat; and yet the whole scene had an unreal quality, perhaps because the dog moved without noise, as if a bit of a nightmare stalked in their room. Aunt Rhoda's desperate voice, and the slamming of windows upstairs, seemed to belong to another world.

  “Let it get out of the room,” whispered Kate, suddenly inspired, and immediately Thomas went to the open doorway and stood there with his arms out. “Thomas, get out of the way, you little fool!” she screamed at him without thinking; and the dog, thwarted, pulled back as if to spring, growling and snarling with a hideous noise. “If he moves it'll go for him for sure,” she thought, “and if he doesn't...”

  “Get out” said Thomas clearly. “Get out of this house, Moon Eyes.”

  And his voice made the house shake.

  So the beast did spring, but not at him. It went through the window, through a great pane of glass that smashed in pieces on the path outside as silently as leaves fall. And a draft of cool night air entered the room.

  Aunt Rhoda appeared behind Thomas, a black shadow person. She glared at the hole in the window. Kate watched with the strange feeling that she was simply a spectator, and that the real struggle, all along, had been between Aunt Rhoda, Thomas and the dog. Sometimes they had used her, and sometimes she had foiled them, but the battle had never been hers to win or lose. Now she saw the lines of Aunt Rhoda's face alter from rage to a dreadful grief, such as she had seen only once before, on that same face, one afternoon in the garden. Aunt Rhoda wrung her hands, and then she had gone; but they heard her hurrying down the garden path.

  The air was filled then with a peculiar noise that Kate had heard before, a hollow humming. Their house seemed to echo in the bowl of a singing wineglass.

  “What's that?” she said, stupidly, her voice sounding tiny and flat in the giant circles of sound.

  “Aunt Rhoda's crying,” said Thomas, and Kate was shocked; but as they stood listening, words entered her brain so that without hearing or seeing she knew why Aunt Rhoda wept.

  Oh, I have longed, I long

  To serve faithfully.

  And you have wronged, are wrong

  In turning from me.

  How have I tried, l try

  To work your pleasure,

  Yet you pass by, and by

  Passes my treasure,

  All that I do, is done

  After my master,

  Yet when I come, you run

  Always the faster.

  Now having lost, I lose,

  I am bereft.

  Be not crossed by one without use,

  Take what is left.

  “Come on,” said Thomas, pulling her sleeve. They went through the dark frame of the open front door into the scented silver garden, and crept across the path and through the archway, into the old rose bower. They peered over the beech hedge. There was Rhoda Cantrip, pacing the width of the road; turning and pacing back and forth, as the dog had done along the
opened wall in her bedroom. And still the mighty reverberations made a hollow spiral of the summer night.

  “She's waiting,” whispered Thomas.

  He did not seem to be at all afraid, but her hands shook; she felt that she rustled, like a leaf; she was sure Aunt Rhoda must hear.

  “Come away, Thomas,” but he shook his head, his eyes shining with excitement.

  “No, no, see what happens next. Waiting, whistling, now for the dancing!”

  And suddenly it came.

  From where they stood they could see the road as far as the wood, patched shiny and gray in the moonlight under a tunnel of trees. Thomas twitched Kate's sleeve. “Look, look, look!” She did, and there in the deepest, blackest part she thought she saw a light wink, like water at the bottom of a well. Yes, there was a light no, two lights, now she could see them distinctly quite small, but bright. She glanced again at Rhoda pacing across the road; and then she looked back towards the wood and the lights were surprisingly bigger and brighter. They're coming nearer, she realized, and soon they had grown into white blazing lamps, and must be at the gate of the woods but were not stopped. There was no sound of the gate opening, no noise on the moonlit road. Only the humming changed, as though it was disintegrated by a great wind, a storm seemed to be upon them although the air remained still.

  “Aunt Rhoda! Aunt Rhoda, get out of the way!', Kate suddenly screamed she could not help it, any more than she could help watching; as she used to make herself hang over a low bridge while a train burst out beneath her. Those lamps were eyes: the white glaring eyes of a huge dog, as big as a pony, that seemed to glide along the road, swift and silent. “Aunt Rhoda!', Kate cried once more and had an instant to see her pause, and turn, and then with her arms out, run towards the creature that came for her. And her face, in the moonlight, was silver and strange and joyful.

  It was all over. There was nothing left to hurry along the road between the waiting hedges; the last echo had been sucked from the sky that did not quiver, but pinned under a safe canopy the sleeping valley. The only white eyes were those of the stars, twinkling and kind, and shutting up one by one. The humped black outline of the trees did not menace, in the rough shape of waves caught at midleap.

  People are often born at this time, Kate thought, or -- they often die. She felt her face wet, and on her mouth tasted the salt of her own tears.

  Suddenly a cock screamed fiercely that it was dawn, and so did another, and another, until the valley was ringed with the crowing of cocks. Light gripped the rim of the world with steely fingers, and rolled the dark cloth back across the sky.

  The horizon was gradually drawn into detail by the first pink breath of the sun. In a little while Mr. Pawley's bald head would also be touched up. He had thumbed a lift on a lorry, thereby combining speed with economy; and now hastened panting, hat in hand, up the last hill that separated him from Hurst Camber.

  The children were as cold as stones, and they moved stiffly across the soaking lawn and down the steps to the pool. Here it was half dark, only the water was patched crimson where the sun struck between the tree trunks. It would be easy to imagine a dog now, on the further side; but Kate was not an imaginative person.

  But the writing had gone. The stone was leprous with pale lichen, as though it had never been. All at once she leaned forward, screwing up her eyes.

  The little boy's hands had been empty for as long as she could remember, but surely now he was holding something. She tried to see what it was, peering first at the statue, then at its reflection. He was holding a bird -- yes, a small stone bird whose wings were roughly carved so that in the half light, as she strained her eyes, they seemed to flutter. And now the child's body glowed in the rosy sunrise, his cheeks were quite pink. She knew when she looked at the statue that it was a statue, but when she looked at the reflection -- at his underwater brother -- for a moment she was not so sure.

  About the author

  Josephine Poole was born in London. Her first children's book, A Dream in the House was published by Hutchinson in 1961, after the birth of her second child, and she has continued to published highly acclaimed children's book ever since. She lives in Somerset with her husband.

  About the illustrator

  Trina Schart Hyman (April 8, 1939 – November 19, 2004) was an American illustrator of children's books. She illustrated over 150 books, including fairy tales and Arthurian legends. She won the 1985 Caldecott Medal for U.S. picture book illustration, recognizing Saint George and the Dragon, retold by Margaret Hodges.

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  Liberation Edition: Sue Dunham

  OCR version 1.0