Sarah Allen - The Girl Who Chased the Moon

Setting aside her incredulity for a moment, she knew exactly what they felt like.

She lowered her hand and slowly backed out of the room, then she ran back down the stairs. Vance was just now making his way into the kitchen from the yard.

“The wallpaper in my room,” she said breathlessly. “When did you change it?”

He smiled. “The first time is always the hardest. You’ll get used to it.”

“The wallpaper looks old. How did you get it to look like that? How did you get it up so fast? How do you get it to… move?”

“I didn’t do it. It just happens.” He waved his arms like a magician. “It started with my sister. No one knows why. It’s the only room in the house that does that, so you can move to any other bedroom, if you want.”

She shook her head. This was too much craziness for one day. “I’m not a child, Grandpa Vance. Wallpaper doesn’t change on its own.”

Instead of arguing, he asked, “What did it change to?”

As if he didn’t know. “Butterflies. Crazy butterflies!”

“Just think of that room as a universal truth,” Grandpa Vance said. “How we see the world changes all the time. It all depends on our mood.”

She took a deep breath and tried to be tactful. “I appreciate that you want it to be something magical, and I’m sure it took a lot of effort, but I don’t care for that pattern. Can I paint over it?”

“Won’t work,” he told her, shrugging. “Your mother tried. Paint doesn’t stick to that wallpaper. Won’t tear off, either.”

She paused. No one in this town would give an inch. Not with her mother. Not with this… wallpaper situation. “So what you’re saying is, I’m stuck with the mood room.”

“Unless you want to move.”

Emily leaned back against the red refrigerator, because standing on her own suddenly seemed too much of a task. Grandpa Vance watched her silently. She didn’t realize until that moment that he listed to one side, as if his left hip hurt him. “I’m still waiting for someone to tell me this is all just a trick being played on me,” she finally said.

“I know that feeling well,” he said quietly.

She met his eyes. “Does it get better?”

“Eventually.”

Not the answer she wanted. But she was going to have to live with it.

What choice did she have? She had nowhere else to go.

OVER SEVENTY years ago, during the full moon in February-people called it the Snow Moon-when Piney Woods Lake froze solid and the aquatic plants trapped in the ice looked like fossils as kids skated over them, the house beside the Coffey mansion on Main Street caught fire.

Flames were jetting out of the windows of the house by the time the fire engine arrived. The vehicle had to be pushed there by the six strongest men in town because it wouldn’t start in the cold. The town gathered in the park across the street to watch, huddled together under blankets, clouds of ice from their breath hovering above them. Vance was only four years old at the time, and his height was not yet a concern to anyone in his family. In fact, at the time, his father had actually been proud of what a strapping boy he had. Vance was wearing a red hat that night. It had a ball on top that his older sister, who was standing close behind him as they shared a single blanket, kept batting playfully back and forth.

Everyone watching the fire was riveted by the undulating yellow-golds and blue-oranges. It was like watching a memory of summer that the dark, relentless winter had almost made them forget. Some were so mesmerized, so ready for warmer weather and an end to aching joints, frozen commodes, and skin so dry it cracked and fell away like paper, that they walked dangerously close to the burning house and had to be hauled back by firemen, covered in soot.

First one person saw it, and then another, and soon the entire crowd was watching, not the fire, but the house next door-the Coffey mansion. All the servants were leaning out the windows on the side of the house facing the fire, and they were throwing whatever liquid substance they had on hand at the flames next door, trying to keep the fire away from the Coffey mansion. They threw water from flower vases, jars of peaches swimming in juice, a snow globe from one of the children’s rooms, a leftover cup of tea from breakfast.

The town watched in awe, and slowly began to realize that the Coffeys weren’t coming out and their loyal house staff was bravely trying to save them.

The fire was eventually extinguished and the Coffey mansion wasn’t affected, except for some burnt azalea bushes that the cold had killed anyway. The next morning, the story began to circulate that the Coffeys had huddled in their basement while the fire had raged next door, claiming they would rather die than come out at night.

People had always known about the Coffeys’ aversion to the dark hours, but no one had ever realized just how serious they were about it. It was the first time the citizens of Mullaby began to wonder, What if it wasn’t that they didn’t come out at night…

What if it was because they couldn’t .

Dulcie had loved that story when she was a little girl. Sometimes Vance had to tell her twice before she would go to bed. Dulcie had always been close to her mother, but she’d never wanted much to do with him. Maybe because he’d been so cautious around her when she was a baby. She’d been so unbelievably small compared to him. He’d been scared of accidentally stepping on her, or losing her in his broad hands when he picked her up. So when he’d found something, like stories of the Coffeys, that brought Dulcie closer to him, he’d been thrilled. He hadn’t known at the time that he’d been building the framework for disaster. By the time she was a teenager, she’d been obsessed with the Coffeys.

He didn’t want that for Emily.

After Emily had gone to bed that night, Vance moved a chair to the back porch and waited, a flashlight in one hand, a piece of clover for courage in his other. The full July Buck Moon was out-a time for the young and randy.

The Mullaby lights had been around a long time, and there were dozens of stories about them. But after the fire, the rumor started that the Mullaby lights were really the ghosts of Coffey family members who had passed on, running free at night in death as they were never able to in life. That rumor stuck, and to this day, it was still what the people of Mullaby told all outsiders who asked.

When the light appeared in the woods that night, he stood and turned on his flashlight.

“Go back to where you came from,” he called softly, knowing it could hear him. “I know what my daughter did to you. But you can’t have Emily.”

L ate Monday afternoon, Julia was walking home from the post office, a bundle of mail in her arms. She was reeling from the news she’d just received.

As she turned the corner to Shelby Road, she lifted the postcard from the top of the bundle again.

She still couldn’t believe it.

The postcard was from Nancy, one of her best friends in Baltimore. Because Julia couldn’t afford a phone in her apartment while living here, once a month or so Nancy would write with what was going on with Julia’s old group of friends-a rowdy group of young professionals who drank cocktails and talked a lot without saying very much. Julia had suspected that they’d been popular kids in high school, and she liked that they thought she was one of them. This particular postcard had thrown Julia for loop. On it, Nancy-whom Julia didn’t even know was seeing anyone-had written that she had suddenly gotten married. She’d also written that their friend Devon had moved to Maine and their friend Thomas was taking a job in Chicago. Nancy promised to give Julia all the details as soon as she got home from her honeymoon in Greece.