She sank back to the couch as he gave his description. A cemetery, yes, laid in rows, but still only stone and dust.
Only she saw what was buried beneath it.
Gyorgi! she screamed—knowing he couldn’t hear her, not outside—watching her husband step from the L.M. the final time. Half-dreaming, half waking-in front of the monitor, she waited as the three astronauts, in blazing light now, walked through the ships’ graveyard, her own spacecraft having swung back around the Moon too late to do anything more than just watch them. She saw, with her vision, the L.M. itself, in the line of corpses. The crushing of Men’s dreams.
But Gyorgi could not see.
During the night, she’d recalled, in her mind’s eye, those last days before the launch. Her husband’s arguments with NASA that not only had she had cosmonaut experience—something of an exaggeration, at best—but also that, as a woman, with a woman’s patience and natural steadiness, her presence in orbit around the Moon would impart a steadfastness in those that were on its surface. But he had been wrong. She did not have patience. Not for the sort of waiting she did now, wanting to see, straining to see, what, even with the aid of their cameras, her husband could at best describe only dimly.
Except….
Except that she did see. The loneliness and stress produced visions in her mind. She’d looked to her instruments first, of course, the “Christmas tree” panel lights all still glowing green, just in case it might be some bad mix of air. She’d checked and re-checked again, thinking at one point she might call NASA to ask their opinion, but, no, she had best not—why cause needless worries? It was only the loneliness, after all, that and the fitfulness of her sleep habits, despite the schedule of sleep-times NASA had asked her to follow.
But how could she have slept otherwise, now that Gyorgi and the others were on the Moon’s surface?
And so, the visions came, these from the books she had hoarded that autumn. The dreams of a Heinlein, naive and hope-filled, mixed with the more cautious, Gallic optimism of Verne. And the darker, although still ambiguous, visions of Wells and Poe—Poe, with his bleakness, his soul-searing horror, still having his astronaut dream, too, of fields of Selenite poppies. Of lakes and forests.
But, then, Lovecraft’s colours. His dreams of far Yuggoth. Her own dreams, no less terrible for their having been lived once, of Hitler and Stalin, of KGB horrors. Poe, at his worst, still foresaw some brightness, some faint trace of Byelobog. While the other, his fellow American prophet of darkness….
She didn’t complete the thought. Something was happening. Lights played on rock spires—spaceships as she saw, but still looking stonelike to the others. And now behind them, as they climbed the talus of Tsiolkovsky’s mountain.
“Over here, quickly!” The voice was not Gyorgi’s. Rather, the Frenchman’s, also with an accent. She watched as the camera panned, saw his lights sparkle. And then…deeper darkness.
“I don’t know, Gyorgi.” The voices crackled. “What do you think, then?”
“A cavern of some sort.”
No, Gyorgi! she thought. But he could not hear her. Nor could she call down to the L.M. to warn them, because there was no one inside to receive the call, and their suit radios were designed only for communications between one another.
And so, she could only watch as they entered. Half-seeing, half-dreaming—was it a cave mouth? Some huge sort of airlock?
She still heard their voices, that much of her still tracking them on the monitor.
“Sloping down….”
“Smooth-floored. Almost circular in its cross-section….”
“Almost—what do you think?”
“Almost as if it were artificial…. “
She dreamed of Gyorgi, her vision widening, while, at the same time, she still stared at the TV. The sudden swirling beneath the men’s feet, as if their descent took them into a mist….
“Some kind of gas, maybe. Do you know what this means?”
“That the Moon has an atmosphere of sorts. But so thin, so tenuous that it exists only beneath the surface. Look, you go out—check the wire antenna. Make sure we’re still broadcasting up to the C.M. Then bring back a container of some sort for a sample.”
She dreamed of Gyorgi, her vision widening. She saw a huge comet, and yet, not a comet. A spaceship itself, crashing into the Moon.
Blasting a crater two hundred and more kilometers wide—the aftershock throwing up its central mountain. The occupant, wounded….
Byelobog shattered. Dead. Chernobog crawling out, once the Moon’s floor had cooled, finding a cleft in the newly formed mountain. A hole to bore into. To bide its time …hiding.
And on the TV screen, the mist coalescing. Shadowy, whirling.
Forming tendrils.
The vision of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. A hollow stone turning, revealing metal. Tentacles reaching out. Except….
Except, much vaster.
Edgar Allan Poe’s horrors most stern and most appalling, yet vaster and darker still.
What she saw now, her mind’s grasp expanding….
To bide its time from the time the Moon was young, over the eons, until it was stronger. And while it was waiting, to draw others to it.
The children, perhaps, of spores it had scattered on its mad journey—some, even, that came to Earth—to draw their strength back into its own body.
And, even it, perhaps the smallest of entities….
Coalescing. She saw. In her dream, she tried to send—somehow—some warning to Gyorgi.
That something stared back at her.
Knowing. Not knowing. The myths were metaphors. Human and nonhuman, all of the same spawn. Dazhbog and Myesyats. Byelobog. Chernobog. All of them part of the same dark evil….
Tasha woke, crying, to NASA’s frantic calls via the Space Station, demanding to know why she had stopped transmitting. Outside, she could see the Earth, bathed in full sunlight. Yet, cold and colourless.
On the TV, static. There was no picture.
She closed her eyes, straining. Trying to dream again. Trying to find some trace of her husband.
Then, slowly, she sat up and straightened her clothing and opened the C.M.’s own, separate transmission link, wondering, as she did, what exact words she could use to tell NASA.
There would be no springtime.
TRAJECTORY OF A CURSED SPIRIT
By Meddy Ligner
Meddy Ligner was born in 1974, in Bressuire, a small town in the western part of France. He spent his first 18 years there. He goes back frequently to see his family and to play baseball with the famous Garocheurs. He studied history. Afterward, he taught French abroad: in Finland, Russia and China. Since 2003, he has worked as a teacher of history and geography in Poitiers (France) where he is living with his wife, daughter and son. His website is: http://meddyligner.blogspot.com.
THEY WOULD FINALLY land. Expected and feared at the same time, the end of the voyage was very close. Surrounded by his companions in misfortune, who, like him, were backed to the metal wall, Maxim Brahms scratched at length his salt-and-pepper beard and reflected on the past.
He remembered the war that he had led in the course of these last few years. A war implacable, without mercy. A crusade against those who were called “the enemies of the people”. A devoted servant of the regime, he had fought the plotters, spies, saboteurs, and other counterrevolutionaries of every kind. In the course of this ferocious battle, Brahms had jailed them with a vengeance, separating whole families, deporting innocents, and obeying orders with zeal. For nothing. Or rather, to end up here, as one of the damned. He nearly retched.