Phantoms of the Moon

by Michael Ciardi

A spell of tranquility cast over Glen Dale’s frozen pastures on this evening. During the winter months, much of the location’s pristine woodlands remained lathered in a sheath of colorless frost, and tonight provided a frigidness customary to December’s dwindling days. A scent of pine suspended in the crisp atmosphere alongside Route 51. Since no relevant wind rustled the trees’ tangled branches, a fragrance of evergreen suspended over the length of the roadway.

  A sense of trepidation stirred in Evans’s thoughts, but it did not reflect in his eyes. He kept his purpose in prospective, and his resolve enabled him to push onward without the slightest inclination of preserving his own welfare. At this moment, anything short of bringing Ryan back from Glen Dale unharmed would have been deemed as a failure and branded the doctor’s very existence with a terminal scar.

  Upon reaching a section of the landscape where the evergreens aligned the road, Evans decelerated his vehicle to inspect the environs. Since he had just visited this site a short time ago, the terrain looked familiar to him. Victor, however, was not aware of the doctor’s earlier journey and therefore seemed confused by his decision to stop on what appeared to be an unpopulated stretch of pavement.

  “What have you stopped?” Victor questioned frantically. “Glen Dale is a few miles away yet.”

  “I know,” said Evans, still keeping a watchful gaze on the expanse of firs bordering both sides of the two-lane passage. Evans’s concentration gradually veered to the road’s right side, where he recognized a few of the posted signs. “We’re not driving into the town,” he clarified to Victor.

  “But Ryan said he was going there.”

  “Technically, he is, but in reality I don’t think he plans on venturing much farther than this spot of Route 51.” As Evans made this assessment, the headlights from his vehicle illuminated the back end of a red Mustang angled precariously on the roadway’s snowy fringes. Evans pulled his car behind the Mustang, confirming his fears to Victor with a single glance. Hailey’s vehicle was parked in almost the identical location where Wescott had recently brought Evans.

  Victor eyed the sports scar incredulously, but he now understood that Evans’s present knowledge of the predicament surpassed his own. “How’d you know that he’d be out here?”

  Evans intended on answering Victor, but he became distracted by the Mustang’s state of abandonment. A layer of frost already coated the car’s rear window, indicating that it had been left unattended for an extended period of time. The automobile’s lights were turned off, too, and its engine was not idling. “Listen,” Evans hushed Victor, while gesturing one finger to his own mouth and pressing it flat against his lips.

  “I don’t hear anything,” whispered Victor.

  “That’s my point,” said Evans. “They’re not in the car.”

  “Why would they leave it parked out here in the middle of nowhere?” Victor’s observation was partially tempered by knowing the purpose of Ryan’s journey. “I wouldn’t believe it unless I saw it for myself,” stated Victor, “but I think Ryan is trying to find the actual site where his family disappeared.”

  “It’s not difficult to believe that he’s found it,” Evans remarked. Without turning off his car’s engine, Evans threw open the driver’s side door. A pocketful of icy air immediately dashed into the vehicle’s compartment. Evans purposely kept the headlights shining on the Mustang as he exited his car. Victor remained shivering in the passenger seat, but this obvious sign of discomfort was borne from a source other than the bitter wind. At any rate, he did not aim to inspect the Mustang’s interior alongside Evans.

  Just as Evans had presumed, the Mustang was empty. Curiously, a purse and a cell phone remained situated visibly on the driver’s seat. Another peculiarity was the car’s key, which had not been removed from the ignition. When Evans placed his bare palm on the car’s hood, he sensed its coldness. He estimated that the engine had not been running for at least thirty minutes. When turning back towards his own vehicle, he heard a crunching noise under the weight of his footsteps. The snow had obviously frozen on the ground, creating visible tracks leading away from the Mustang. From his vantage point, he then distinguished two pairs of footprints angling down an embankment toward the pine trees.

  Evans returned to his car casting a sullen expression into the reflection of his car’s headlights. Victor’s own features flared apprehensively as he waited a few seconds for the doctor to get back inside the car. Before Evans determined his next course of action, Victor asked, “What’s the matter? What did you see?”

  “They’ve gone into the clearing,” Evans noted as he pointed towards the surrounding spruces.

  “Well, they couldn’t have gone too far,” Victor deduced, anxiously hoping that Evans concluded the same. Victor’s eyes focused on where the doctor directed his attention. “It’s freezing out there,” he said. “You really think they went into those woods?”

  “There’s little doubt they haven’t,” Evans replied. “Besides, those woods aren’t as dense as you might think, Victor. That line of evergreens is only about fifty feet deep. Beyond that point, it’s nothing but open space for about two hundred yards.”

  “So what do you want to do now?”

  “I don’t see as though I have much of a choice,” Evans stated uncompromisingly. “I’m going to look for them.”

  “Maybe it’s a better idea to wait here,” Victor suggested. “We might never find them out there.”

  Evans already decided that he was not about to deliberately put another boy in jeopardy tonight. He had no intention of permitting Victor to join him in a search of the clearing, but he also debated on how safe it was for the boy to remain in the vicinity of the site.

  “Listen to me, Victor,” Evans advised, “I want you to stay here in my car in case they come back.” He then activated the vehicle’s flashers by pushing a button on the dashboard. “Don’t get out of the car for any reason. Do you understand?”

  “Okay,” Victor agreed, “but why do you sound so nervous?”

  “I’m just being careful.”

  “You don’t actually believe that stuff Ryan told you—right?”

  “As I said before,” Evans answered, “it’s not what I believe that matters. We have to view this situation as seriously as Ryan does if we’re ever going to understand what’s encouraging him to pursue it.”

  Victor recognized the doctor’s efforts to remain as evasive as possible. But Evans insistence on serving as the guardian to Ryan’s plight vexed Victor because he still blamed the doctor for tampering with his friend’s latent recollections. “I’m starting to think that you feel Ryan is in real danger,” said Victor. “But I shouldn’t have to remind you, Doctor, he didn’t go into those woods alone tonight. You’ll have to presume that Hailey is at risk as well.”

  Evans, of course, did not wish to make too many assumptions at this moment, but that idea already flickered through his thoughts. After grabbing a flashlight from between the seats, he reopened the car door and restated his earlier command to Victor.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Victor assured Evans. “I don’t plan on following you, but for my own peace of mind—what should I do if you don’t come back?”

  “If that should occur, Victor, I don’t think you’ll have a problem figuring out what to do.”

  As Victor watched Evans pace away from the car, he could not help but to feel a sense of terror overwhelming his thoughts. Oddly, in these seconds of isolation, his friend’s irrational fears did not seem so implausible anymore. And Evans’s treatment of the circumstances lent an eerie credibility to the unfolding events. Apart from the mixed emotions over the amount of attention Ryan had manufactured for himself—be it merited or not—Victor found it impossible to suppress his own feelings about the girl in his best friend’s company tonight.

  Though Victor never planned to undergo such a conversion of thought, he had continually dreamt of Hailey since the first time she visited him in the library. From that point forth, he sou
ght to be a good friend by pretending that Ryan’s stability mattered more than his own. In hindsight, Victor now realized that his own lack of confidence prevented him from expressing his true feelings toward Hailey on at least two different occasions. As it now stood, Victor’s reputation lived on with reference to his devotion toward his friend’s happiness. But such accolades lost their luster when Victor pondered the sacrifices he endured in the privacy of his mind.

  As Victor dwelled on his shortcomings, Evans planned to follow the tracks in the snow to a certain distance beneath the evergreens. After crossing under the trees’ limbs, he noticed that the snow and footprints he trailed had vanished in the clearing’s muddy terrain. Just as Evans had recalled on his previous visit, the ground was completely absent of snow and frost. No footprints remained on the soil in front of Evans. He only guessed on what direction Ryan and Hailey had ventured from this point. Though he rarely relied on instinct as a sole factor in making a decision, the timing seemed appropriate to take a chance. He estimated that his best view of the entire site existed at the clearing’s center. Without delay, Evans progressed to this location. He was only repelled briefly by a blast of wind rifling through the distant trees.

  Upon reaching this destination, Evans realized his flashlight had not enough power to illuminate more than three feet in front of his line of sight. Despite his limitations of visibility, Evans maintained his position and inspected the region as thoroughly as his resources permitted. He eventually detected numerous tracks in the mud surrounding his feet, but there was not any way of knowing if these footprints were from his previous visit.

  When his thus far silent pursuit proved to reveal nothing substantial, Evans resorted to a more primitive form of contact. He shouted Ryan’s name several times; each syllable echoed in the darkness and then faded into a vast arena of nothingness. In frustration, Evans tilted his head to the heavens, savoring the sky’s clarity, but perhaps at the same time wishing for divine inspiration.

  The doctor maintained his attentiveness toward the stellar world for several seconds before lowering his head. Had he continued to gaze upon the sky, he would have noticed an emergence of three disk-shaped objects descending between the moonbeams. But Evans had not traveled here tonight to survey the stars or any other of the firmament’s offerings. His eyes gradually refocused to the task set on the earth before him. To preserve his own sanity, Evans almost needed to displace the fact that he personally witnessed an unidentified sighting on this exact expanse of soil less than one week ago.

  While Evans barricaded his subconscious thoughts from events too strange for him to comprehend, Victor combated a nemesis churning within his mind as well. He sat in the car for ten minutes, secured from the night’s uncertainty, while the engine idled. During this time, Victor concluded that his promise to Evans was unreasonable. If Victor truly hoped to change his status as a mere messenger among his peers, he could not remain tucked away from this eve’s pending peril.

  A sobering thought almost reduced Victor to tears in these seconds. For nearly eighteen years he trudged through the avenues of his existence in a state of virtual invisibility. But in the vehicle’s stillness, while measuring the rhythm of his heartbeat, Victor realized that he needed to look no further than a reflection of his face against the windshield in order to unmask the culprit of his shame. He alone permitted his self-esteem to wither, and no one ever embraced a wilted spirit.

  Prior to her premature death, Victor’s mother once told him that before anyone bloomed in this world, he must first possess a thirst for the unknown. Up until now, Victor allowed his dreams to be quenched by monotonous endeavors. His promise to undertake adventure always seemed pledged in hindsight, but tonight afforded him with a chance at redemption—if only to satisfy the yearnings he buried alongside his mother so many years ago. By exiting the vehicle to confront whatever awaited him beyond the evergreens, Victor ensured himself with an opportunity to at finally partake in the nourishment for his parched soul.

  Once outside the car, Victor immediately distinguished an unnatural disturbance in the sky. After years of peering endlessly upon a tapestry of constellations, he at last witnessed a sighting that he could not readily explain. Three silver spheres hovered momentarily in the sky. They flashed a sequence of motley-colored lights—purple, green, and silver—that appeared like a coded signal. Victor instinctually reached for his cell phone in order to document this oddity with a series of crude photographs.

  Victor held his phone up to the sky and activated its built-in camera. After he managed to click six photographs, the spheres lowered beneath the trees’ camouflage. Before deciding to pursue the objects any further, he checked the images on his cell phone’s screen. Four of the six photographs were blurry and imprecise, but the last two vividly displayed the spheres silhouetted against a blackened sky. Victor now had all the evidence he required to continue his excursion into the pine grove.

  Evans may not have uncovered any more footprints leading him closer to Ryan and Hailey, but what emerged in the sky seconds ago provided him with a restored inquisitiveness in the unexplained. The spheres had returned to the site, only now there was no question in Evans’s mind regarding their existence. As Evans fumbled with his flashlight, the objects scintillated with a strange luster. In his haste, he dropped his flashlight into the mud surrounding his feet, but this mishap presented little inconvenience in the ensuing moments. The spheres lit up the clearing as though night had changed to day, so bright in fact that the full Moon no longer remained the brightest force in the sky tonight.

  Evans counted three spheres initially, and as they uniformly descended to ground level, he estimated that each orb was no larger in size than his balled fist. But as seconds slipped away with an incomparable level of confusion surging within his mind, Evans noticed the spheres beginning to multiple in numbers. Although a limited range of knowledge hindered Evans’s ability to offer a precise identification of these objects, he concluded that they were each entirely too compact to be spacecrafts. Of course this held no bearing on their legitimacy as unexplained objects, or the petrifying affects on the doctor’s sense of perception.

  By the time Evans realized that the clearing’s midpoint was not the best spot for him to be standing if he wished to preserve his anonymity, the spheres had completely encircled him. A concentration of generated light spilled across the barren landscape, exposing Evans in full view for anyone—or anything—that might have studied him as keenly as he observed the spheres. As it was with anyone who served witness to such a phenomenon, Evans’s immediate reaction was to run. But fleeing in any single direction did not seem to offer a refuge for him now. He ultimately decided to hold his position steadfastly, hoping that the objects abandoned their curiosity. But it was too late for false hope.

  The spheres circulated at eye-level now. Evans stood before the objects as if mesmerized by their seepage of energy. The cascading light projecting across the soil was almost too blinding to gaze upon, but Evans maintained his willpower to see what exactly unfolded before his eyes. He cupped his hands over his face, but continued to peer at the silvery glow pouring forth from each of the orbs. If he sought to elude this scope of unworldly power, he made no such effort to do so. In fact, his refusal to dodge the throbbing bands of light proved to be most curious. By neglecting to avert his eyes, he almost welcomed its presence. And when kneeling to the earth, Evans appeared to be in the midst of a rapturous prayer. His eyes appeared vacant and as dense as the black holes of outer space. Seconds later, a pewter-colored radiance enshrouded his entire body, and when the orbs’ energized beams finally recessed to darkness, the doctor no longer remained on the land he formally crouched upon.

  Victor observed a portion of this spectacle from the roadside, but none of it frightened him now. Contrarily, the chance of embracing something unknowable in consequence only served to invigorate him with a sense of discovery. He bounded in heedless strides toward the evergreens, hurdling mounds of snow
in his advancement into the clearing. No one who observed him now could have rightly denied the danger he ushered into his life with each succeeding footstep. Yet, he was utterly unfazed by the notion of finally confronting an entity that he could not comprehend.

  When Victor arrived at the center of the clearing, he realized that Evans was no longer physically there. No trace of the doctor’s whereabouts remained anywhere in proximity to this location. But Evans was not the only thing that vanished from the scene. The spheres that had driven Victor to this spot had disappeared as well. All that was left to consider was the frigid air and a flashlight Evans had dropped upon the soil. Victor hollered the doctor’s name several times, and then concluded that the man had suffered the same fate as those who traversed this region before him.

  A terrifying thought triggered Victor’s emotions. The frozen environs or even the premise of an alien abduction did not disorientate him now. But there was a much darker feeling unbalancing his soul in these seconds. It was one of isolation.

  “Take me!” Victor exclaimed, shaking his fists wildly at the star-clustered sky. “Take me!”

  To whom or what Victor directed these cries remained uncertain. His voice rebounded off the encircling trees and then dissipated into silence. Just as Evans had advised him before they departed for Glen Dale, there would not be any heroes borne on this evening. For now, Victor faced his gravest foe, and it was a force he failed to conquer for his entire lifetime. Perhaps this boy knew better than anyone that loneliness depleted even the bravest of heart, and nothing in this world or beyond could have ever altered its insidious devastation upon the human spirit.