And then it was ice cold.
Everything went dark.
I turned around and started to run back down the hall but the hallway seemed to curve and swerve in the darkness and I smacked into the wall. My forehead ached and I couldn’t get a bearing on which way was which. A cold sweat broke out on my body and my heart raced. I stumbled ahead not knowing if I was heading back towards the mural room or straight at that cloud.
And then in the darkness I saw a thin, pale face and the white collar of a priest’s vestment under it floating towards me.
“Daniel?” I whispered.
It said nothing and as it came closer.
I let out a weeping chuckle as the pain and sadness of everyone who’d come here before me smothered my body and soul. My chest squeezed tight and I struggled to breathe.
A hand grabbed my forearm like an iron vise and pulled me away. “I told you not to come down here, Father!” Michael’s voice snapped. He dragged me through the blackness and seconds later we were back in the dimly lit mural room. Michael pulled me to the stairs and I ran up them and into the church hallway. I collapsed onto the floor. Breathing hard, Michael started dragging me by my arm down the hallway. “It won’t come upstairs but we shouldn’t stay this close.” After about twenty feet he let go and I slumped to the floor; Michael sat down next to me with his back against the wall.
“So did you get your answers?” he asked.
My head had stopped spinning and my chest had relaxed. “Almost,” I said. I looked over at the thin man. “Who are you, Michael?”
Michael rubbed his hands together and looked at the floor. “In the book about the church’s history you read about the dark priest, correct?”
I pushed myself to my elbows.
“Well, what the book doesn’t tell you is that just before he’d been hung, this dark priest set a curse on the church. And that after his death, anyone who went into the basement and viewed his mural would be haunted by its ghosts.” Michael looked at me. “This way, under a stream of caretakers that Martin could trust, the mural could be continued.”
I bit down on my lower lip and then let it go. “Caretakers who Martin could trust—caretakers who shared his bloodline,” I pieced together.
Michael stared hard at me. “That’s right. I am Michael Walker Halligan. And it’s been very nice to meet you, Father.”
I lay back down, stared at the ceiling, and chuckled.
The moon’s gray rock floor sprawled into the black horizon. I tapped the hallway-length window with my fingers and sighed. Six months I’d been up here on Alpha Base 6. Why they’d tacked the 6 on the end I had no idea; there was only one base on this cold rock, just like there was only one person—me.
But it’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting into.
My friends had said I was out of my mind to take a two-year stint up here and they might have been right. The guy before me had been killed performing observational experiments on some crater about six miles from the base and I’d be lucky not to suffer at least some level of radiation poisoning by the time I got off of here.
But a half-million bucks for the gig was worth it.
I cracked my knuckles and walked down the steel hallway into my quarters. A junior-sized bed, small desk, and a nice view of the north side of the moon was about all it had going for it. Yawning, I walked over to the bed. I’d been working since 0600 and needed a quick nap or I was liable to wander outside without my helmet on. I lay down, closed my eyes, and a cold breeze suddenly flowed over my face.
My eyes popped back open.
A thin white blur hovered in the center of the room. I shut my eyes and opened them again. It was gone.
“This damn place,” I said as I turned over and went to sleep.
Three hours later I was up and back at work. The roaming satellite had spotted a nice patch of golden ore just a couple of miles away and I wanted to mark the location and send it to the company to get the OK to dig. I began to take down the coordinates when another cold breeze hit my back.
I turned around and my heart froze.
A pair of blurry white hands gripped the inside of the doorway like they were struggling to keep an unseen body from flying away. The hands let go and I got out of my chair and went into the hallway.
Nothing.
I rubbed my temples and then checked my pulse. Jesus, I was barely a quarter of a way through this job and I was already seeing things.
I headed to the communications center to transfer the data about the ore and get the go-ahead to extract it. When I got there I punched the coordinates into the computer and hit send. It would be a few minutes until I got a response and I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes. When I opened them up a few seconds later the computer screen was white static. I stood up and looked around the room; the three other computer screens were also all static. It could have been a solar block, but that was unlikely. Putting my hands on my hips, I bit my lower lip and stared at the floor for a second.
Was five hundred grand worth it?
I shook my head and looked back up. The screens were back to normal.
A message came through and I was cleared to get the ore. As soon as I stepped back into the hallway, a noise like a wrench banging against a metal pipe rang through the station and the back of my neck got tight. It sounded like it’d come from the
