CHAPTER 10

THE TOWER ROCHELLE HAD MENTIONED, WHICH WE WERE SUPPOSED to go up to for “observing,” was the silolike structure I’d seen when we first drove up to the house. A spiral staircase led up through it from the second floor. There weren’t any lights in the staircase; Julian had to go before us with a flashlight. The steps were high and narrow, and there were no landings. By the time we reached the top and stepped out onto a circular platform under the sky, I was completely out of breath.

Good thing there’s a railing, was my first thought as I looked about the moonlit platform. You could walk right off otherwise on a darkish night.

I was so disoriented, so distracted by my surroundings that it took me a few moments to realize the others had disappeared somewhere and I’d been left alone. I began to panic, to be afraid they’d locked some door behind me and I was trapped here in the moonlight. I was about to call out. But just then a light flashed from within a small domed hutlike structure at the center of the platform. From inside I heard laughter.

I started toward the doorway of the hut. I caught a glimpse, inside, of two bodies twisting against each other. I thought I heard clothes softly rubbing. There was another laugh. A gleaming white hand appeared, pressed against the back of a neck, amid short blondish hairs.

Julian stepped around the hut. Evidently he’d been outside too, on the other side of the hut from me. “Tom’s setting it up for you,” he said. “On the northwest quadrant.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. At that moment I could not have cared less. All I felt was my stomach clutching with grief and disappointment, at the knowledge that she was Tom’s after all.

Rochelle and Tom stepped out through the doorway. The entrance was low; Rochelle, but not Tom, had to stoop to come out. They held hands. Tom’s hair was mussed, and one strap of Rochelle’s evening gown had fallen off her shoulder. Tom gave a loud, harsh laugh and went back into the hut.

Rochelle replaced her strap and smiled at me.

“Isn’t it awful,” she said. “There’s only room in there for two people, one at the telescope and one at the table. Some nights you could just freeze, waiting out here.”

I looked up at the moon. I didn’t trust myself to say anything.

“All right, Danny,” said Julian. “You can go in now. Go in, and see what you can see.”

 

Tom sat at a wooden table, a large notebook in front of him. A kerosene lamp burned on the table. From the telescope came a loud ticking sound.

“See where the eyepiece is?” Tom said. “I’d adjusted it for myself. You may have to bend over a little.”

I put my right eye—or, more exactly, the right lens of my glasses—to the eyepiece of the telescope. I saw only a featureless lunar glare.

“Take your glasses off,” said Tom. “It’s better that way. Focus with the eyepiece. That’ll make up for your not having the glasses.”

I took off my glasses and tried again. I could feel my eyelashes brush against the eyepiece when I blinked.

“Try to relax your eyes,” said Tom. “You’ll see better. I can cover the lamp, if that’s disturbing you.”

I turned the eyepiece first counterclockwise, then clockwise. Craters and ridges seemed to emerge from the blur, then sink back into it. Finally I hit the right spot. The features stood out with almost uncanny clarity. I had no idea where on the moon I was.

“I think I’ve got it,” I said.

“Good,” said Tom. “What do you see?”

“There’s two big craters. The one on the left looks a lot deeper than the one on the right. There’s a lot of little pockmarks around them, particularly the one on the left.”

“Good. Anything else?”

“Something kind of like—like a W shape, I think. Underneath the crater on the right. If the whole thing were upside down, it might be kind of like a curved eyebrow. With the two craters as two eyes.”

“Good,” said Tom. “Damn good. That eyebrow, or W, is Schröter’s Valley. The crater it’s under is Herodotus. The one off to the left is Aristarchus. And actually the whole thing is upside down. Everything you see through a telescope is upside down, did you know that?”

“I didn’t.”

“See anything inside Aristarchus?”

“Something right in the middle of it, I think. Looks very bright.”

“That’s the mountain peak in the middle. Lots of craters have them. You’re a damn good observer, you know that?”

“Thank you,” I said, and felt myself blush with unwished-for pleasure at the compliment.

“Anything else there?”

“Some lines, or stripes, I think, running from the middle of the crater to the outside. And there’s—wait a minute.”

Something was happening in Aristarchus that even I could recognize as extraordinary. Just inside the crater’s rim, on the upper left, a pinpoint of bright red had suddenly appeared. As I watched, it blossomed into a shining red globe, very much like the drop of blood that had welled up from my fingertip earlier that evening. I waited for it to burst, to run, to wash the crater floor with blood. But nothing happened. The drop, or whatever it was, remained stable.

“I’ll be damned,” I said. “I’ll be damned.”

“What? What?”

“A shining red spot. Or maybe a sphere, I’m not sure. It just sprang up out of the side of the crater. Want to take a look?”

“No. By the time I get the eyepiece adjusted it may have changed, and you need to see it. Just be damn sure you remember what you see.”

“It’s starting to fade now.”

“OK, OK.” I heard his ballpoint pen scribbling in the notebook. “Goddamn it, I forgot to write down when you first saw it. How long have you been looking at it now?”

“I’m not sure. Not much more than a minute, I don’t think.”

“And it’s fading, you say?”

“It’s practically gone now.”

“Show’s probably over then.”

I stood up from the eyepiece and stretched. “There’s a chair over by the wall,” said Tom, “if you want to sit down.”

I slumped into the chair. I felt drained, as if I’d just seen something the watching of which demanded all my strength. Bathed in moonlight, Rochelle stood in the doorway. “Danny had a sighting?” she said.

“A real doozy,” said Tom.

“What was it?” I said to her.

I don’t know why I expected her to know.

She shrugged. “ ‘The earth hath bubbles,’ ” she said, “ ‘as the water has. And these are of them.’ ”

“What?”

“Macbeth. Act One, Scene Three. We studied it in English class last month.”

“And the moon has them too?”

She didn’t answer. She looked off into the distance.

“Why don’t we take a walk?” she said to me. “In the moonlight.”

 

She walked toward the railing. I began to follow her. Then I stopped.

“Come on,” she said. “What are you afraid of? That I’ll push you over the edge?”

The thought had crossed my mind. I plucked up my courage and walked to the railing. She was leaning on the railing, and I leaned there too, beside her. I imagined we were standing together on the deck of a ship sailing through a midnight sea, only this was the middle of the air. I didn’t dare look down toward the ground.

“What did you mean,” she said, “at the dinner table when you talked about going down to the caves of the dero?”

“Oh . . . I don’t know. I think it was just a joke. It just came out of me. I don’t know why I said it.”

“It’s not a joke. You know that.”

Everything inside me turned cold. I clenched both my hands around the railing, for safety.

“The dero caves are not a joke,” Rochelle said. “Richard Shaver’s welding gun—or whatever was talking to him—was telling him the truth. Mostly the truth anyway.”

“The dero are real. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Them. Or something like them. I wouldn’t want to swear to the name. Shaver sometimes calls them the abandondero, you know. The abandoned ones.”

Richard Sharpe Shaver. The Pennsylvania metalworker, his name so comical, his messages from the subsurface world so relentlessly horrid. The world of those left behind when the Elder Races—

“Left for the stars,” said Rochelle. Without realizing it, I must have spoken my thoughts aloud. “They knew they were being poisoned by radiation from the aging sun. They were withering; they were dying—”

“ ‘They seemed to age quickly,’” I said. Like a certain woman I knew: prematurely aged, withered, though I seldom noticed unless I looked at old photos. “ ‘Girls of twenty soon appeared to be old women.’ ”

Rochelle nodded. “Oh, yes,” she said. “You know more than you let on, don’t you? You know the Shaver literature; you can quote it by heart. So you know that’s why the Elder Gods left earth in their spaceships. They left the dero behind them here to absorb the radiation poison. That’s how the dero got so weird. But you knew all that already.”

I thought: I didn’t know it was true.

“I won’t swear to the details,” said Rochelle. “Or exactly what kinds of things these . . . things . . . are. There’s a continuum. We still don’t know the—what’s the word?—taxonomy of what lies along it. We get only glimpses here and there. I doubt if Shaver really understands it. I’m sure he doesn’t, actually. He’s not a great thinker. I know; I’ve met him.”

Where? How? But these people seemed to go everywhere, know everybody. “And the things they do?” I said. “To the ones they kidnap—into their caves—”

“Yes. It’s true. The thirst, the burnings, the impalements—all of that’s true. But don’t ask for details. Please. You really don’t want . . .”

Her voice trailed off. Her features twisted in pain and sorrow. I thought I saw her trying to frame the word No! with her mouth. But no sound came out. Her face wrinkled and withered and fell away, like an old woman’s, so that at last only her eyes, huge and unblinking, remained her own, staring at me through a layer of unshed tears.

Shaver was wrong, I thought. It isn’t the sun that poisons us. It’s the moonlight.

 

“We’re going back down,” Tom called out. “Anybody who wants to come is welcome.”

The light in the hut was off. Julian, carrying the flashlight, had already disappeared down the spiral staircase. Tom followed.

“We’d better go,” said Rochelle. I looked back at her and was relieved to see once more the beautiful girl who’d sat beside the chessboard.

“They’ll leave us here,” she said. “That’s just the way they are. And I don’t have a light.”