Woman Who Loved the Moon (15 page)

What was the dream telling her?

Silver—her memory jumped to the lab, and Mitra holding up a test tube filled with silver liquid. “Promising,” she had commented tersely. “Needs more tests.” Janna stalked naked to the com-screen and punched out a number.

“Mitra? What were you playing around with this morning? A test substance for the paint? It was silver.”

The screen said two short sibilant words, and then said something rude, and was silent.

Janna reached for clothes. The lab will be empty, she thought, seeing deserted City corridors, passengerless lifts, herself alone, private, unobserved in the vacant lab—doing what? I will know, when I get there, what needs doing. Detachedly she saw herself open the door, leave her room, walk quickly down the hall—I am a dream of the City, she thought. The City is dreaming me.

* * *

Illis woke when the light went bright.

His mother was bending over him.

His mouth filled with questions. She had not come to visit him for ten days. “Hello,” she said. Her voice was muffled in the fabric of the mask. He saw it stretch over her smile. “Hello, baby. You don’t have to talk to me. Just lie back and watch.”

He lay curious, feasting his eyes on her graceful movements, as she carried in a box through the door, and then knelt down by the other door of the Lock, hands busy, head bent secretively. She had made the room heavy again. Painfully he pulled himself up in the bed to watch her. She saw him, and came to sit on the chair beside the bed.

“Look!” she commanded, and she pushed up the sleeve on her left arm with her right hand. “Look at my arm.”

The skin along her left forearm was thickened and scaly, and it
glittered.

“What—” Where it touched the dark of her own skin, it thinned away. He reached with his left arm, the good one, and touched the silver. It was warm and dry.

“It’s skin,” she said.

“Is it real?”

“It’s growing there.”

“What’s it made of?” He stroked it.

She chuckled, and watched his yearning face. “Fish scales. Mitra made it, in Research. It looks like paint, and it’s made of protein, protein very like the components of your skin.” She touched his left cheek with her gloved hand. “It’s for you.”

There was a loud click, and Lazlo’s voice came into the room. “What’s going on in there?”

Janna called out cheerfully, “I’m visiting my son!”

“At four in the morning?”

“Yes. And yes, I did jam the door. You aren’t going to be able to get in here without screwing Illis’s protective isolation all to hell.” She walked over to the com-screen unit and did something to it. Then she came back to the bed. “That’ll keep ‘em busy,” she said. “Hold still now. I want to look at you.” She turned the light up, and pulled the netting away. The grafts looked better then they had ten days back—but there were still too few of them. Illis’s bones poked up through the devastated body as if they were trying to climb out.

“I’m pretty ugly,” Illis said.

“You’re going to be pretty flashy soon,” Janna answered. “I’m going to color you silver.”

“Now?” Illis whispered.

“Now.” She stepped to the box, and took from it an ordinary glass jar, filled with a thick silver liquid, and a prosaic brush. “I’m going to do one whole side of you,” she said. “It’ll be cold, at first, and then it will sink in. Which side shall I do?”

“My right one,” Illis said.

Janna set her teeth, and began to slowly paint the iridescent fibrous material over the raw wounds on her son’s body. He whimpered, but held still, as she dabbed his throat, chest, abdomen, and right side. She put down the brush and wiped her sweating forehead, and then continued, working down his groin and his right leg. “That’s all,” she said, as she brushed the paint over his heel, and she capped the jar with shaking hands.

“It is cold,” he reported.

“It will pass.”

“The cold is going away.”

“Good.” At last she was able to look at him. He looked like a starved harlequin. “It will itch,” she warned him. “You’d better not scratch. Not even in your sleep!”

It took her a long time to unjam the door.

Lazlo was waiting on the other side. He grabbed her. “What did you do?”

“Go and look.”

Careless of isolation procedure, he strode inside the room. Illis waved at him from the net bed. “What—what is it?”

She laughed, sagging against the wall, and held up her glittering arm. “It’s the protein paint,” she said. “I had a dream—and the dream told me something, Laz. I stole some. And then I burned myself, a third degree bum. I poured the paint on. It healed—like this, Lazlo. With no grafting, just like this!” She was crying. He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. One or two tears splashed his face.

From the bed, Illis watched with undiminished curiosity.

“You did this because of a
dream
! Blast you, Janna. How could you take such a risk!”

“For Illis,” she said. And grinned. “Now I can stay with him.”

“Ah, Christ!”

* * *

The whole City heard the news, and waited. Lazlo became an unwilling daily reporter. The paint remained unchanged on the emaciated boy for two weeks. Three weeks. After twenty-two days, it began to grow along the right arm, up the collarbone, to meet the healthy skin growing down the neck. They installed a mirror at the foot of Illis’s bed, so that he could watch. “It’s growing,” he said with wonder, flexing the elbow of his right arm, touching his shoulder with his finger.

“Yes,” said Lazlo.
“
Don’t scratch
.”

With novel luxury, Illis wriggled in bed.

They patch-painted him all over. The new skin grew in faster each day. “Hey—will I be able to go home soon?” he asked his mother.

“Soon.”

And Illis ate for three, watched the mirror, and wept when his new skin itched.

* * *

When she came to get him, to take him home, Illis was standing at the window, looking up at the sky. She went to stand beside him. So close, one could see their kinship in the shape of noses and ears, the way their mouths were set, their amber eyes—only Janna’s skin was a warm, dark brown, and Illis’s shone bright, scaly, hairless, and delicately mottled, like the integument of an eel.

“What are you doing?” she asked him.

“Dreaming.” He turned to her, intrigue in his eyes, looking like a quicksilver monkey. “I’m going to go there, someday,” he said.

It was the City’s dream—the return. “Sure you are,” she said gently.

He danced a little, phoenix-brilliant in the summer sunlight, Her heart clenched.

“Have you been there?”

“No.”

“Why not?” he demanded.

“The radiation level’s too high. The only people who can go are those who’ve had their children, or who are sterile.”

“Is it green yet?”

“No.” It was still too early for renaissance. Throughout the City, desire fleshed a vision of plowable soil, drinkable water, rivers brimming with fish instead of chemical death. But the City scavengers would find rocks and steel, lichens, moss, and insects. The insects had re-inherited the earth.

“I
will
go.” Illis said. “I will swim there.” He grinned. “I am a fish, now.”

“You are an imp.”

He looked up again. “I dream about them,” he said. “In the sky, with the sun shining on their wings. Next time, Mama—make me feathers. I want to be a bird.”

The Island

Shirley Jackson was one of the finest horror writers to ever pick up a pen. No one has surpassed her chilling, literate prose: she is the mistress of quiet horror. This story was written in tribute to her work. It does not imitate her style—that would be both rude and impossible—but it does, I think, I
hope,
catch something of her mood.

* * *

Cape Cod girls they have no combs

Heave away, haul away,

Comb their hair with codfish bones

We are bound for Australia.

Heave away my bully bully boys

Heave away, haul away,

Heave away and don’t you make a noise

We are bound for Australia....

traditional sea chanty

* * *

The island sat in a ring of stone and a nest of fog.

It was a flat and sandy land, treeless, silent, smooth and white. Its toothy wet escarpment looked like a good place to lay lobster pots, but the fishermen never did. The way to it was treacherous. Once there had been a bell-buoy marking where the secret rocks began their rise, but something had happened to it. Fog lingered round it. Its name on the sea charts was variously rendered as Seal Island or Silk Island. On some charts it was not named at all.

Douglas Murdoch saw it from the bedroom window.

He leaned out the window feeling the foggy wind on his cheeks, cool with the promise of winter. The Labor Day crowds were gone. The Turrets had hosted a few tourists, but most people didn’t want to have to climb the paths from the ancient cupola’d guest house to the beach and the shops. Mrs. Alverson was negative about cars. There was no driveway up to The Turrets, just the rutted tracks laid down by Sally Ives’ jeep. He heard from the kitchen below the sound of his seven-year-old daughter singing. It had been a good idea to stay here, he decided. They had almost stayed in a slick hotel in the village. But the peace and isolation felt good to him, and Janna seemed happy. They were going sailing today, the second time. He gazed north at the boulder-strewn coast.

And saw the island for the first time as it floated in the morning fog.

He went, slowly, down the steep old stairs.

Janna said, “Mrs. Alverson had to leave and she said for you to get your own breakfast. I had eggs.”

He opened the capacious refrigerator. Eggs, bacon, milk, butter. Salt, pepper, garlic. Onions. He took the smallest cast-iron skillet from the wall.

“Did you fold the quilts?” she asked him.

“I forgot.”

“I’ll do it.” She slid off her chair. He could not get it through her head that Mrs. Alverson would do that, or else she did not want to relinquish the habit that her mother had taught her... Laura. He pushed the weight and pain of memory away—the eggs. Look at the eggs, stir the eggs. They’ll burn. I hate burned eggs.

In his head the voice was Laura’s.

No, This would not be one of those days. Would
not
be. Would NOT.

Janna came down the stairs. “Da, where are we going today?”

“Sailing.”

“
Where
sailing?”

Janna was important. Think of Janna. “I thought maybe north today.”

“I want to see the windmill again.”

On the first excursion they had gone south and seen an old battered mill, vanes still turning, though three of them were splintered stubs. A relic. God that’s an ugly word. That was Laura now, a relic.

The windmill, think about the windmill. He had asked Sally Ives about it.

(“The old Bigelow mill. It’s been empty for years. It never worked well, the vanes kept breaking. The wind’s too strong.”)

“Wouldn’t you like to see a new thing?” he asked Janna.

“
What
new thing?”

“Um. I don’t know... I saw a little island out in the fog, a little baby island, just right for two people to picnic on. We could go there.” That was good, that was better. Janna nodded so hard that her black braids flew. He levered the eggs out of the pan and sat at the long wood kitchen table to eat. She brought him a napkin. “Thank you, lovey.”

She leaned into him shyly. It hurt him that she was still so shy of him. You lay four months in a hospital ward bandaged like a mummy, and she got to see you twice a day for five minutes; how could she be anything but shy of you? “Let’s go to the island,” she whispered.

* * *

They climbed down the steep cliffside path to the village. Janna ran ahead. Douglas took his time. The accident had left him with shattered legs. The doctors had rebuilt them, but the left was an inch shorter than the right, and both were full of metal bits and pins that ached when it rained, like shrapnel. He had spent a month learning how to walk at the rehabilitation hospital in Boston. He had only been out three weeks.

He caught up with Janna. She was sitting on a rock singing with great energy: “Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest, Yo- ho-ho and a bottle of rum!”

Sally grinned at them when they came into the store. “Where you goin’ today?” she asked Janna. She was an immense woman, six feet tall, 180 pounds and none of it fat. She ran the Emporium, the grocery and goods store in the village of Kennequit. She was forty, unmarried; she lived with her seventy-year-old parents in a small old house on a cliff. Mrs. Alverson had told Douglas that, and more, when she had told him that Sally Ives could rent him a boat. (“She owns two of them. She’ll rent them to you—
if
you can sail.”)