Moonbane

I had survived. That fact alone I found remarkable—that I had made it through a second night trapped in my own cellar. I had even slept a little, toward morning. Most of the night had been filled with the howling and wild thrashings of my son as he sought to break free and obey the command of the Moon above. At one point, he had almost succeeded, but I had managed to tighten his bonds. I looked over at him now; he was rolled into a fetal position. I could hear his shallow breathing. The scattered food that I had left for him had not been touched; milk still pooled along the wall where he had thrown it.

Sunlight streamed through the windows.

I went upstairs. The television was blind now. “Dennis the Menace” had been replaced by static and meaningless lines. Two of the three radio stations were dead; only the soft rock station continued to reel off Melissa Manchester records and Pepsi commercials. I went to the spot where I had thought I heard something the day before, but there was only the sound of Marconian silence.

I left the radio on and went to the kitchen to eat. I filled a bowl with cereal. I was pouring the last of the souring milk onto it when the empty loud static of the radio was replaced by a sudden startling voice.

“Stand by,” the voice said.

I froze with the first spoon of breakfast halfway to my mouth.

The sound of that voice, after two days of silence, galvanized me. But the tone of the voice—it sounded like a professionally calm voice, the kind that state troopers have, but driven to the edge—kept me frozen to the spot. I was afraid that perhaps the following announcement wouldn’t come, that the request to “stand by” was all there would be.

I forgot the cereal and went back to the living room. I stared at the radio as if it was a god. By the clock, five minutes went by. I was beginning to convince myself I had heard the voice in my head when the tone of the static changed, and the voice came back.

“Baines and Proctor,” the voice said, “Baines and Proctor. Apply at once for work.”

The radio went back to static. I stood staring at it, waiting for more. There was nothing.

I had heard from the outside world, and there had been nothing there for me. A voice fighting calm, two names. And then nothing.

I waited, but the radio stayed silent. I finished my breakfast, then wandered around the house. I heard the thing in the cellar grunting against its bonds.

I went into my study, which, I discovered, the beast had passed by. It seemed like another world, one I no longer recognized. Dark green walls, the way I had painted them four years ago when we moved in. Emily had said that that was the way a man’s study should look. Dark colors did that. There was a word processor on a table. There were books in all four corners, on the floor, bulging out of the bookshelves. I had built the bookshelves myself—white pine stained dark mahogany. Thin poetry volumes, four of them mine, occupied a special place above the desk. Theodore Roethke. Robert Frost. My first volume, Solitude. Shelley, Keats, the monolith Milton. Poetry seemed like it was from another world. From the Moon. I knew I had a poem I had been working on in a notebook that occupied center stage on my desk, but at that moment I couldn’t even remember the title. It had, as I recalled, something to do with spring (the opposite of the winter season we were just entering; I often dwelled on that which was not before me, relishing it in memory), something about “the death of roses bloomed.” I could remember nothing more of it.

I believe that art is something pursued in tranquility. A hunted or starving man will have little thought of composition; give the same man a full stomach and safe haven (even if it be Tolstoy’s prison cell) and he will, if so inclined, turn to art. Thoughts of survival have a way of pushing all others aside.

I wondered if I would ever write again.

I left my study, sadly, and found myself at the door to my son’s room.

As I entered Richie’s bedroom, a pang of hurt and loss overcame me. His models, which had been displayed neatly along one side of his desk—two race cars, a spaceship—were smashed to the floor now. Only a Frankenstein monster, as if in mockery, had been left intact. His schoolbooks, which had been stacked, closed tight against Christmas vacation, were scattered around the room. The covers had been pulled from his bed; normally, they would have been turned down, something Emily did every night…

I heard a sound in the hallway.

Startled, I turned to see my son staring at me.

He was crouched slightly, his front paws turned in front of him like a dog standing on its hind legs. His body looked lean and powerful, despite its lack of food. The eyes burned with yellow intensity. There was a near grin on his long, wide mouth.

“Richie?” I said, tentatively.

The lean, bony body tensed, and then he leapt at me. I was standing by my son’s desk chair, and I swung it around in front to block his way. He batted the chair aside.

I moved toward the doorway. He stood breathing shallowly by his desk.

“Richie, please,” I said.

He attacked again.

I swept the contents from the table next to the door in his path and ran. He howled in frustration, leaping from the room and loping after me.

I went to the kitchen, moving behind the kitchen table. He stopped on the other side, panting, regarding me with nothing short of hatred.

“Richie, can’t you hear me?” I pleaded. “My God, there must be part of you left in there.”

He growled like a rabid dog and pushed the kitchen table into me, pinning me against the wall behind.

He threw his head back and howled, then gave a sudden jump and was on the kitchen table on all fours, moving toward me, his jaws opening and closing like a vise.

He jumped and I threw myself under the table, crawling desperately to the far side. The cellar door was open, and I threw myself onto the steps. I tried to push the door closed but he was right behind me and yanked it open. I jumped down the steps, grabbing at one of the pieces I had used to bar the door. At the bottom of the stairs I ran to my workshop and slammed the door shut behind me.

He hit the door with his body, forcing it partway open, but I was able to keep him out.

In a growing rage, he threw himself at the door again and again, but I was able to hold him off.

I refuted all of my earlier complaints about the door, thanking God that this sturdy one was here instead of at the top of the stairs.

He tried for five minutes to get in at me, but I felt his growing weakness, and, finally, he retreated.

I took the opportunity to bang the two-by-four I had brought down with me across the door, and to pull my heavy workbench up against it, and then I settled down to wait.

CHAPTER 7

The Flight

Night fell. The sky outside the windows purpled, then blackened to starlight.

And then the Moon rose.

The thing that had been my son let out a heart-stopping howl as the edge of the Moon lifted up over the lip of Earth.

I watched its pale, evil light fill the world outside my tiny, wire-covered window. It was a horrifyingly beautiful sight. There is beauty in horrible things, in their evil perfection.

Outside the window, I heard other screaming cries, a chorus of prayer to the white-cratered god pulling into Earth’s sky. I thanked the resourcefulness of whoever had built this workshop, providing me with the miniature fortress I now inhabited.

My gratitude proved short-lived. There came a wild howling cry from the other side of the door, and my son threw himself against it, splitting the upper half of the wood. I cried out, “No!” and put my back into the workbench, holding it across the entrance. The thing on the other side clawed and beat at the door, reducing it to splinters.

He stood in the doorway, and I saw what the Moon had done to him. His body had swelled; the muscles in his arms had thickened and hardened; the skin around his eyes had shrunk back to reveal the ferocious, almond