The Moon-Girl

The Moon-Girl

  By Matthew Crockatt

  Published by Bubble Publishing

  Copyright Matthew Crockatt 2011

  The Moon-Girl

  “Des morts, des semences, et le pain poussait de la terre” Emile Zola

  Is a thought like a sentence? Does it have to feel complete? If so the first thing I thought when I woke up was I wish I were dead. There were scraps of thought before that, the inarticulate terrors of an animal, nothing that could be written down. I will try to describe what was going through my mind if you like but it won’t come close to the actual experience - I hope you never understand what it was like. Every morning when I go to sleep I live it again.

  It started with their boots on the stairs. I was sleeping, dreaming and then there was that thunder. I heard a cry and a crash, then my father’s outraged voice shouting followed by a single gunshot. There was the moment of perfect silence that always follows a loud noise, then screaming. Don’t hurt mama! I leapt up but the door exploded inwards, throwing me back onto the floor. The soldiers trampled over it and threw me on the bed. My face was pressed into the pillow. They were like a hot sun on asphalt, relentless, until something softened and I split apart. In my mind I saw the crack, jagged as blackened flapjack. Their sweat fell as foul rain, their breath a dessert wind. I was hallucinating by now. I found a cave in the rock wall and crawled in where it was cooler and I could breathe more easily. The animals prowled in the lighter darkness of the night. I curled myself into a ball and tried to disappear. Sometimes I could hear their teeth and claws scraping on the rock but I just hugged myself tighter until a tremendous roar shook the cave to bits around me.

  I woke up. I wish I were dead I thought. My face and hair were fastened to the pillow with sticky brown blood. I tried to get up but there was too much pain so I just lay there for a long while breathing as the sun burned up the sky. I wasn’t asleep but I didn’t feel awake either. I felt nothing and thought nothing, only moving my eyes, using them to explore the remains of my bedroom.

  Perhaps I am dead? I found this a consoling thought. It enabled me to peel my hair away from the gory pillow and roll onto the floor. I felt my head and found a soft pain where they tried to shoot me. I couldn’t walk so I dragged myself across the floor towards the doorway and its splintered frame. My father lay at the top of the stairs with his brains on the wall behind him. My mother was nowhere to be seen. I hauled this dead body over to my father and lay sobbing softly against his chest until it got dark.

  * * *

  Andrew wasn’t bothered by the stories at first. He did notice the way the workers went quiet as he approached then began their muttered conversations again as he moved away along the line of trees but it had been like that since school, he was always alone. Alexei came to him on Friday morning and said that half the team was preparing to leave, actually packing their bags.

  “They are afraid of the moon-girl” Alexei said, half smiling.

  “The moon-girl?” Andrew repeated, not understanding.

  Then it all came out, how at night this spectral girl could be seen among the cherry trees, picking. How those who heard her sing would be found the next morning, dew-soaked and comatose beneath the bird nets. They remembered nothing but her song. It had happened three times now.

  Andrew called all the workers together in the barn where he stored and seasoned logs. He asked them to wait and see if something could be done. He said he didn’t believe in spirits or ghosts but that he understood that they did. Andrew spoke of the aged caravans with their thin sides and flimsy windows. Strange noises carried a long way at night. The wind in the trees could sound like a person moaning or crying. There were owls. The torches and candles they used for light cast shadows that might dance in the corners of their eyes. His rational explanations failed to remove that look from their faces. They stood with their heads cocked to one side, hands on hips or just stared at the floor. A girl called Anya stepped forward.

  “When I’m little girl my grandmother tell story to me. The moon is woman, she wants to see what life here is like. She put on cloak to cover shining face and come down to see. Goblins take her arms. Dead thing climb out of ground. Trees make like hands, have claws to grab at her. Without light from moon at night they are not afraid. She is trapped. After long time one day good man set her free.”

  Andrew sighed and shook his head. He made a sign to Alexei who followed him outside.

  “We must set a trap. We can use the bird netting. She won’t see it in the dark and we can alarm it so we know when she’s caught.”

  “You think trap catch this kind of thing?” said Alexei.

  “Yes I do Alexei.”

  That night nothing happened. Nor the night after. The workers looked him in the eye and then walked by, sometimes spitting for emphasis. In his anger he cursed the Slavic race but in his heart he knew it was simply town versus country. He was new to farming and had a pile of city cash behind him to ensure success. They were the people of Zola’s novel La Terre. They grew from the earth strong and fully formed. You couldn’t change their minds or tell them anything. They were the same in any country, of any race.

  On the third night the moon was full and the clear sky was pricked with stars. The cherry trees shone silver-green, their fruit hanging in purple-black clusters. At around 3am the alarm went off. He rushed outside with Alexei, a powerful torch in his hand, and ran to check the trap. There was a girl in amongst the netting, hopelessly tangled. Her skin was pale and almost transparent in the torchlight. Alexei hung back so Andrew went towards her, holding his palms out, speaking softly as he would to a nervous horse. He was almost close enough to touch her when he heard a piercing scream and a great blow caught him on the back of the head.

  Gradually Andrew’s vision returned. A white disc hung in the sky. As his focus grew more defined he saw it was a face, a face without expression. The moon-girl pressed him gently back. She passed a cool, damp cloth across his brow. He raised his head a little. Something sticky had fixed his hair to the pillow. When he reached carefully to touch the place that hurt his fingers came back stained red-brown.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  Her blank stare sapped his strength. He closed his eyes and slept once more. When he woke up she was still there, watching him with her pale, heart shaped, face and those dead eyes. They were in one of the caravans. His head pounded as he sat up. He noticed it was dark outside and that the window didn’t quite shut. Rainwater had stained the wall and lifted the lino on the floor. He looked around at the rest of the caravan. It was cramped and filthy. There were no sheets on the bed he lay on. Had he really charged people money, deducted it from their meager wages, to live like this?

  “Well if you won’t speak I will. Thank you for taking care of me. I will have to assume you can understand what I am saying...”

  The girl gave a slight nod. Andrew smiled.

  “So you do speak English?”

  Again, the slightest movement.

  “But you don’t speak? Are you dumb or just afraid?”

  She stood up and opened the caravan door. The disturbed air brought him the scent of straw and vegetation. She looked over her shoulder at him; moonlight flashed in her eyes and made her black hair flicker with shifting blue flames.

  Andrew followed the girl through the cherry orchard and down to the river. The way this weird light soaked the scene he felt he might be in a black and white film. He had a sense that anything was possible in this new, metallic version of his farm. He saw the moon-girl make for a large oak tree and then vanish. As he walked around the ancient trunk he ran his hand over deep creases in the bark. The moon picked out silvery cobwebs and the mica trail of a slug or snail. The river slid by between verdant banks, chuckling throu
gh rapids, sifting sand and gravel with its endless motion. On the far side of the tree, hidden from the field, he found an opening. He bent low and stepped inside.

  The girl sat against one side of the trunk, her knees drawn up against her chest. The oak was hollow and high enough inside for Andrew to stand. He sat cross-legged in the middle of the straw-covered floor and smiled at her. She had woven baskets in which she seemed to collect and store various edible plants. He saw a bark bowl full of dark cherries that must have come from his farm. After a minute or two the moon-girl took a shoebox and threw it at his feet. He looked inside and saw it was crammed with letters. He began to read, holding the paper towards the light that streamed through the crack in the trunk. He read in silence for a long while. She appeared to write a letter to her parents every day. The English was excellent and he soon learned that her father was a teacher, that he loved the English language and felt it was vital for his daughter to become not just fluent but an expert. Some of the letters were rather strange. All of them were full of superstition. She wrote about Devils, Goblins, Daemons and imagined awful deaths for those she described as the enemies.

  “My workers thought you were a spirit you know?” said Andrew.

  The girl looked at him. When she spoke she seemed amazed at the sound of her voice.

  “You don’t believe in Devils but they are real.”

  She spoke for a while and gradually he began to understand.

  “This is how I live now; in moonlight and amongst shadows.”

  Andrew nodded. Her monologue was over.

  “Let’s go outside.,” he said.

  They walked in silence across the field listening to the swish of grasses against their shins and the gentle sighing of the summer night. Spider-webs blinked with diamond droplets or outlined the breeze with trailing gossamer threads. The farmhouse stood black against the depths of the star-filled sky. Cherry trees marched in lines towards them, twisted arms held aloft, leafy hands full of fruit. The moon-girl began to sing, softly at first then with greater confidence as ancestral voices joined her. Andrew felt himself drift across a line of some kind. He saw the music form a shining path ahead of them and took her hand. The field of swaying grass, the bountiful fruit trees, the river and the broad oak; all these things were in the song that lifted them gently, through all reflections, into the purest kind of loving light.

  If you enjoyed this story then you can find more here:

  https://www.bookselector.co.uk/