Ride the Moon: An Anthology (21 page)

This made all laugh even louder.

“Pay handsomely for the moon! Do you hear what he said? It's hilarious.” The Revenue agent shook his head pityingly. “You bumpkins aren't even blessed with the common sense the rest of us are born with. It's no more than a reflection, you clown. You can't snatch it from the water.”

“Sir? Are you sure, Sir?”

He jerked his thumb upwards. “It's up there in the sky. See. Miles above us.”

I frowned theatrically, careful not to overdo my performance. “Then what is that?” I enquired. “At the end of my rake. Surely, there cannot be two such dazzling orbs.”

He rolled his eyeballs, muttering: “God almighty, just how pig-shit stupid can these inbred peasants be?”

He came to a decision in seconds.

“C'mon men, we're wasting our time here,” he declared, his finger mockingly circling the side of his head to signal that I was clearly a lunatic. “They're obviously too brainless to be smugglers. Our quarry lies elsewhere. We need to get moving. We have a lot of ground to cover before daybreak. We'll leave our deluded rural friends here to their cretinous endeavours. Much good may it do them.”

I bowed with mock solemnity, as did my two now-smirking companions.

With a last disbelieving backwards glance, the Government man snorted and led the contingent away, back into the darkness from whence they'd come.

For a full, agonizing minute, I watched them go, my whole body trembling, my nerves screaming, wanting to yell with delight and shock that my outrageous dupe had worked.

“You did it, you bloody well pulled it off, Carrot-cruncher. You pulled the wool over their eyes,” Lafferty gasped, heaving with hilarity—this time at the gullibility of those who'd sought to trap us. “They swallowed your fairy tale like babes in arms.”

But there was no time for celebration or back-slapping. I had more pressing business to attend to. Frantically, I surged across to Daniels, hissing: “Let him up. Let Tom up. Take your hand off his head.”

He didn't reply. Didn't move.

“I said, let him up, you bastard. Let him breathe.”

Daniels' pained expression made me gasp, in icy realization. A cry formed in my throat as I saw that both his hands were in clear view—and had been for ages.

I fell to my knees, splashing, thrashing, grabbing through the water like a man possessed, as the single word “Tom!” screeched from my lips.

They say our exploits have become the stuff of legend, the talk of the taverns. Many chuckle, marvelling at our cunning and audacity, and predicting that Wiltshire men will be forever known as Moonrakers.

I care little.

All I know is that night I lost my son and my soul. And learned just what evil and depravity I am capable of...

Mary swore that none of it was my fault, I had no choice and should not blame myself for our darling Tom's death, but she hasn't been able to look me in the eye since, or comfort me as I weep.

Every night, I see my son's poor, bedraggled, frail, drowned body in my nightmares. He is light as I pluck him from the chilly wetness and cradle him to my bosom, squeezing tight... so tight.

I have a hazy recollection of what occurred next that accursed evening; mere glimpses, fragments seen through a crimson mist of violence and rage.

I recall grabbing Daniels with both hands, pushing his foul frame towards the water, intent that he too should drown. Struggling wildly, he cursed and thrashed, fighting to break my inhuman grip as I forced him face first far into the freezing darkness.

However, I was robbed of the satisfaction of watching the precious air leaving his lungs, for a sharp crack exploded near my ear and Daniels shuddered and went still.

The musket ball, meant for me, lay embedded in his broken back, ruby blood dripping copiously into the water.

Letting his dying bulk sink, I began slipping and sliding my way towards the bank, roaring, splashing chaotically. Lafferty, visage pale, nostrils flared, raced to reload. Despite my fury, I made slow progress and the cur must have thought he had time.

But I had Daniels' knife and years of experience throwing blades at the vermin in the barn.

It landed square between his incredulous eyes and he crumpled to his knees, mouth falling open lopsidedly. He wasn't dead... not then. That came dozens of frenzied stabs later, as I vented my crazed grief.

Many seasons have passed, the barrels of brandy long since gone, removed and sold, the proceeds the only thing that saved so many families from starvation during that cruellest of winters.

Yet, our village pond still holds secrets.

And each month, I stand alone by its edge and softly say a prayer, staring downwards until I glimpse the bleached, white bones held in the greedy mud—bones that fluoresce and shine, gleaming starkly under the light of the accusing moon.

Midnight

This is not a fairy tale. No one will hang their bodies in the sky when they die.

The city slumbers under dark shadows cast from a wandering crescent moon. Oz, six stories up, presses his face against the smudged glass window. He feels as if he's just run a marathon with something squeezing his heart until he can't breathe.

He knows It is coming, the
thing
that will break down the door and destroy him even if he surrenders. Its endless hunger will leave him broken and battered like the girl in the bed behind him. She feasts upon an apple-flavored split end as she turns off the alarm clock.

The coffee mug he holds slips from his fingers, crashes to the floor. He stares at it for a minute, the blue liquid spreading, seeping into the rotting floorboards. Slowly he kneels, fingers wrapping around a shard of cool, broken ceramic. He holds it up to his face, examining the way the porcelain cracked in a straight line, jutting sharply into a pointed edge.

The white of the glaze looks like bone, and Oz wonders if this is what her skull looks like. Sharp angles, harsh fault lines, jagged edges.

Oz looks at the shards on the floor, knowing that the mug can never be put back together. There are too many pieces, like an unsolvable puzzle. The mug is no longer a mug, just broken glass.

Like her.

Oz loves her. He
loves
her, but he doesn't know if he can do this. He's afraid. Of himself, of what he'll do, what he's done. He's never been one to handle responsibility well. Oz is the one to lash out, to put up his defenses, to push others away.

Not her. Never
her
.

And still, he can do nothing to stop It from coming for her. For them both.

“Do you ever feel like...however hard you try, you can't get it right? No matter what you do?” he asks.

She is too far gone to answer.

One a.m.

Oz would never forget the way Tsuki Yomo looked, felt, tasted, smelled that night as they worked together on a Sudoku puzzle in his living room. He peered over her shoulder, the girl framing the numbers slowly as she tried to keep up, muttering sums under her breath. She was slow in everything she did—waxing, glowing silver-white, before fading into the waif again. But it didn't really matter when her body was a mass of warmth pressed against his chest as she shifted in his lap. He tongued the bubble gum from her mouth and tasted her upon the candy, all the time bending her closer to the floor.

The next morning, they found her mother hanging from the red maple in the backyard, like a monkey swinging on a vine.

Two a.m.

Oz's eyes grow heavy, but every time he thinks about dozing off, the choking uneven cough from the tangle of blankets on the ratty mattress startles him back to wakefulness. His head is foggy and his tongue clings to the roof of his mouth from not having enough water.

Determinism, he knows, is an idea that has been around for centuries, millennia. It came from Mayans who could speak the language of the moon. Everything is predetermined, they said. Free will doesn't exist. And thus if you recognize all the factors beforehand, you will know everything that will happen, how it will happen and when. Not the details, the minutiae, but the big moments, the important moments, the moments that count.

But if that were true, then Oz would have understood the meaning behind his inability to breathe the day he met Tsuki, would have expected the feeling of being punched in the stomach, been unsurprised by the world glowing brighter and more beautiful out of the abyss of nothingness whenever she was near.

If it was pre-written what he would say, what he thought, what he would do when the moment came, then couldn't that tiny rebellious part of him have argued, “I don't have to do what you say. I can break the mold. We can be free.”

But he didn't.

If there were any truth in the world, then he could have saved her from this.

The waiting makes his hands shake. Or perhaps that's the fear, the uncertainty he's lived with for twenty-eight days as the moon waned and waxed and waned again.

He can taste It, like fire and thistle.

Three a.m.

Every time Oz closed his eyes, he'd see Tsuki's grandfather—an old sea fox—sitting low in his chair, dragons of smoke wafting from his rice paper cigarettes, sipping sake from a snifter that reflected candlelight rainbows around the room.

Just as the ancient mariner sat every night since the day his only child took her life, now more ghost than man.

“You're the only one left now,” he told Tsuki. “The old traveler, spinning tales. He took your mother; he'll take you, too.”

Oz tried to soothe her, Tsuki with her dark eyes and perfume that smelt like her grandfather's garden where the old fox spent hours on end, sifting through soil, giving birth through his fingertips, now sleeping beneath his prized Japanese maple, buried under the light of the full blood moon.

That night a grieving girl found relief in a boy, a needle, and a vial of Dark Side of the Moon.

Oz never knew if she mourned the old man, or what his death meant. He was too afraid to ask.

Four a.m.

Staring at the dim lights of the alarm clock, Oz wonders what a.m. and p.m. actually stand for.

And why he bothers to care.

He feels It coming.

His skin peels away from his bones and tries to crawl away through cracks in the floorboards, but eventually snaps back into place. He takes his pulse to remind himself that he's still living.

Alive...alive...alive.

A mantra in his mind. Something to startle himself from sleep because he can feel his eyes drifting, drooping, closing, slamming open, like a lullaby he can't stop humming.

The blankets shift and Tsuki's hair settles like moon rocks on a polished mirror.

Five a.m.

Oz knew all about falling.

He had watched Tsuki's little sister tumble down the stairs at the age of five; saw the way her blood stained the rug while Tsuki screamed. Saw her mother's shaking hands, the wildness in her eyes as she stumbled before finally hitting bottom at the end of a hangman's noose two weeks later, the half-moon her only witness.

And so Death claimed the first, the monkey.

Her grandfather followed a fortnight later—he, the witness, the watcher, the patient one, the keeper of the tale. The old man fell on a bullet from a .45 Remington, straight through his heart.

This time, Death took with him the fox.

And then there was Oz...taking the plunge that night when Tsuki, desperate to escape the past of future's present, pressed herself against his cold, chapped mouth and slipped Solid Courage through a newly exposed vein. If it wasn't so messy and clumsy and perfect, it would have been laughable, but nothing amused him much these days.

Oh yes, he could write a whole book on falling. Which was why, when the sliver sliced the sky once more and he knew the old traveler would come to complete his collection, Oz didn't give Tsuki the chance to say Yes.

Six a.m.

Her breath rattles to a stop; her face, swollen and edged with purple, is relaxed, jaw slightly open, only the slightest crease between her eyebrows. The bed beneath her grows cold.

Oz kneels next to her, takes her in his arms, never wants to let her go.

The silence of the apartment is crushing. It wraps around his throat and seeps into his pores, completely overwhelming him. His breathing grows ragged as his thoughts fracture into nothing. Or maybe he's thinking about everything. Oz can't even tell anymore.

Without her, everything feels off-balance. There is no counter weight to hold Oz up. Nothing will be able to stop his fall now that she is gone.

Then, he hears It.

A knock at the door, but Oz won't answer it. He's wrapped up, stifled, consumed. He lurches to his feet, panic racing in his veins. He looks around, desperate to escape.

But there's nowhere left to run. Nowhere to go. No one is left.

The door creaks open and footsteps pad into the room, then pause. The old traveler stands there, muddy duster dripping on the floor, peaked judge's cap brushing the doorframe. Marks line his face, one for each of the roads he's traveled.

There are many marks.

“I thirst,” he says. “Will you not offer an old man a drink?”

All Oz has to give is the bottle of cyanide he'd given to Tsuki, cruel in his kindness to save her. It was the only way.

“No? Then please, give me something to eat.”

Unless the traveler wishes to gorge himself on ecstasy and cocaine, Oz has nothing to proffer.

“Let me rest my weary bones, good sir?”

The only furniture in the decrepit apartment is the rotting mattress where the corpse of his girlfriend now lays.

The first rays of the new day rise in the east. A thin silver sliver of moon peers over the horizon, fading as the light bleeds into the apartment through the broken gray windows.