Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

Moon Madness by Tom Tolnay

© 2007 by Tom Tolnay

Tom Tolnay is the author of two suspense novels (Celluloid Gangs and The Big House, from Walker & Company), two collections of short stories, and dozens of stories in magazines ranging from The Saturday Evening Post to Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. His fifth book, The Forest Primeval, is a novel of psychological suspense, scheduled for summer 2007 release from Silk Label Books.

It began at precisely 1:09 A.M. Edgar Snipe knew this because a harsh voice on the street below had yanked him out from under layers of dreams, back into this world, and the lighted slot of his digital clock stared at him like the rectangular eye of a Cyclopean robot.

“I’m gonna kick your ass all the way to the moon, Irma!”

With a precinct house half-way down the block, Edgar figured that, before long, the drunk would be prodded away into another neighborhood at the end of a nightstick. Cops working the gallows shift, after all, needed their sleep, too. But no. The loudmouth continued to rant directly outside his tenement: “You hear me, Irma? From Ninth Street all the way to the freakin’ moon!”

At 1:22 Edgar heard the scuff of slippers on the wooden floor in the apartment above his. The window groaned open, and the booming voice of the matronly black woman who lived up there broke upon the moon-bleached streets. “Take that noise someplace else!” Then quieter: “We got kids sleeping up here.”

The drunk roared: “Mind your own business, fatso!”

“If you don’t shut your trap,” the woman bellowed, “I’m calling the cops.”

“Call the cops! Call the army! Call the President!”

The upstairs window slammed shut, and Edgar heard her feet, sounding heavier, thump across the floor. Silence took hold upstairs, making him think the mother of three might be dialing the police. He was glad. If that hollering kept up much longer, he might feel obliged to get out of bed and do something, and he was too tired to be arguing with a drunk at 1:26 A.M. He’d worked overtime that night and hadn’t gotten home until nearly eleven. In a few hours he’d have to crawl out of bed, slap a cheese sandwich together, fill his thermos with coffee, and catch the Second Avenue bus uptown.

A bony-armed, wispy-haired man of fifty-four, he had elevated the skill of avoiding involvement to a minor art form. Mostly his connection with others consisted of untangling the data that defined his customers’ lives, adding and subtracting and multiplying and dividing until a picture of the circumstances of the small shop owners began to emerge — all of this accomplished behind the frosted-glass door of a one-desk office in a building left over from the Industrial Revolution. After work each evening he would ride the bus back downtown, triple-lock his apartment door, shove a TV dinner into the microwave, and, before retiring for the night, light up a cigarette and read a few chapters of a science-fantasy novel. Next morning the routine would start all over again.

In the guts of the alley between the stained brick tenements, a slinky, elongated gray cat picked up the lament of the man on the sidewalk, and the two of them wailed mournfully in unison. Far off, possibly above Fourteenth Street, Edgar heard the charged swoon of a siren, followed by another and another — a three-alarm blaze had broken out somewhere downtown. More distantly there was a muffled boom — a gas-pipe explosion, he speculated, or maybe a husband had shot his wife in the act of sharing their bed with his best friend. Edgar sneered knowingly.

He turned onto his left side, facing away from the window. But the drunk had launched into a string of profanities that Edgar’s ears couldn’t escape, each four-, five-, six-letter word shouted without a pause in between. All the while the moon kept advancing, slicing the room with sharp bands of whiteness between the blinds.

Beyond sleep, Edgar climbed gravely out of bed and, wearing loose pajamas that made him look like an urban scarecrow, moved to the window and lifted one plastic slat in the blinds: A man with a blast of silvery hair, wearing a ribbed undershirt and dark work pants, was now hollering not at the tenement but at the moon, stopping only to take a swallow from the bottle he was clutching by its neck.

“Aw, shut up,” Edgar protested quietly.

He gazed at the cutout of icy light. Though he’d followed news accounts of the flights to the moon in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies, and had seen the fuzzy images of astronauts beamed back to Earth on television, he still found it difficult to accept wholeheartedly that human beings had set foot on its distant, reflective surface; that one of them had jabbed a pole bearing an American flag into its gray silt, kicking over stones that had lain undisturbed for millennia. To him space travel still seemed to have a closer connection to science fiction than to reality.

Governments, if not scientists, had largely lost interest in the study of lunar terrain in the decades after the last Apollo flight. But Edgar had read in the Sunday papers that this was changing. Not only the United States but several other nations were developing plans to launch lunar flights. According to the article, an unmanned Japanese flight would soon be hurling missile-like instruments onto the moon to penetrate deep inside its surface to study the composition of the moon’s innermost interior.

The novel he’d been reading that evening seemed to echo these developments. A team of multinational scientists had launched a manned rocket to the moon and the astronauts proceeded to drill far below its gray surface. Presenting their discoveries to an international quorum of astrophysicists in Stockholm, Sweden, the team leader made an astonishing claim: “Following extensive analysis of samples taken, we’ve found that the moon’s core is composed of living tissue, containing cells that resemble neurons.”

That was where Edgar had put the book down — hours ago, though he had a pretty good idea of where the plot was going. The scientists would claim that through telepathy, or perhaps through its rays of reflected light, the moon was projecting thoughts into the minds of the inhabitants of Earth, affecting how human beings behaved.

Such fictional imaginings were too far removed from reality to interest Edgar in any very meaningful way; they simply helped pass the lengthy evening hours of an accountant who had lived alone with his numbers for many years. But tonight those hours had been stretched almost beyond endurance by the noisy intruder on the street.

The drunk wailed: “I’m gonna boot your mother’s ass off the planet, too, Irma — just like a football.” Appreciating his own simile, he repeated it again and again, finally breaking into a burst of grating laughter. Whenever the drunk paused in his shouting, Edgar knew it was only to take a swallow from his bottle.

Next-door, through the wall, Edgar heard something heavy drop onto the floor, and suddenly his next-door neighbors, a young couple to whom he’d nodded once or twice, began arguing, though he couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. The couple had always seemed to get along well, but Edgar understood the strange things that being awakened abruptly in the middle of the night could do to people.

He considered opening his window and telling the drunk to get lost, but he knew that would only encourage him to continue barking at the moon. His bare feet chilled, he returned to his bed and wriggled his bony body onto the limp mattress. Immediately he drew the blanket over his head, but it didn’t help.

“Hey, Mr. Moon — I’m sendin’ you a coupla earthlings to bury in your craters!”

Now Edgar remembered the dream he’d been immersed in when the drunk had jolted him out of sleep: The moon had grown angry over the intrusion of astronauts probing beneath its surface, with the likelihood of more to come now that China, India, Japan, and Europe had announced plans for lunar explorations. And so, with its powerful icy rays, it had frozen all feelings of love in every human heart on Earth. The accountant smiled coldly at the thought that maybe the moon had frozen his own heart already, many years ago.

Finally, at 1:53 A.M., Edgar heard another voice outside, and it sounded authoritative. “It’s about time,” Edgar said gratefully, getting up and scuffling across to the window.

Raising two slats of the blind, he saw a tall, square-shouldered policeman, arms crossed, standing over the much shorter drunk. The bottle, lying in the gutter, glistened in the moonlight. “You’ve had a little too much to drink, old-timer, and the neighborhood’s had a little too much of you. Why don’t you and I take a walk.”

“I’m stayin’ right where I am,” the old man declared. “Not one inch am I gonna move!”

“Where do you live?” said the cop in a tolerant yet insistent tone.

“Nowhere — as of tonight, I don’t live nowhere.”

“In that case you’d better come along with me to the station and sleep it off.”

“You can’t make me leave — this sidewalk’s public property.”

In the apartment above Edgar’s, the mother yanked open the window and screamed, “Throw the bum in jail!”

From a window below his apartment came a chesty voice: “He’s keeping the whole damn neighborhood awake, Officer. Get him outta here. I gotta work in the morning.”

“Gonna chop all of you up into pieces like chunks o’ cheese!” the drunk roared at the building. Enjoying his latest simile, he repeated it a couple of times. “Like chunks o’ cheese!”

“Pipe down, Pop,” the policeman said, his voice growing agitated.

Deep in the alley, the cat made a trio out of this duet of distress, releasing that nerve-shriveling meowwwwwww again. A block or two away the huge tire of a delivery truck blew out, and an auto-theft alarm went off somewhere. On the ground floor in Edgar’s tenement an infant began wailing, coughing, choking to catch its breath. On a nearby street, a dog barked hoarsely, triggering a howl from another backyard dog.

The turmoil caused Edgar to recall something he’d read about mental patients ascending to the heights of their madness under the gravitational pull and marble glare of a full moon.

As the voice of the drunk began to fade down the street, followed by the policeman’s voice goading him along, Edgar heard the young couple moving around, bumping and thumping, in the next apartment. Aroused from their sleep by the unrest of the night, he figured, they’d begun to take it out on each other, and their voices quickly grew loud and bitter.

“You didn’t seem to mind Greg putting his hands all over you.”

“Look who’s talking! Don’t think for one second I didn’t see you hanging on to Dahlia all night.”

Suddenly they broke loose, screaming wildly at each other — one of them throwing something made of glass, maybe a lamp, against the wall with a great crash.

“You’re nothing but a slut!” roared the young man.

“I hate your guts!”

Edgar Snipe gave up on sleep. Staring at the scratches of moonlight clawing their way across the tangled sheets on his bed, he began piecing together the events of the night, passages from the novel he’d been reading, details of that news item, and fragments of his dream — and in the wooziness of a thick fatigue began to wonder whether some sort of vengeful force might truly be at work in the moonlight.

At 2:16, lying in bed against the wall that separated their apartments, Edgar heard the slap of what sounded like a fist meeting a wad of flesh. The young woman began shrieking hysterically. Edgar stiffened.

“If you ever touch me again,” she sobbed, “I’ll cut off your fingers,” her voice fading as she escaped into another room.

After a few moments of silence, Edgar heard the young man yell, “Put that down, Susan — have you gone nuts?”

“What’s the matter, Jack? Not such a big man anymore?”

Good Lord! thought Edgar, sitting up, wondering if he should do something. Now he heard them struggling, apparently falling onto the floor with a clatter, as if they’d knocked over a night table on the way down. Edgar kneeled on his mattress and pressed his ear against the wall. The young woman sounded very much like that cat in the alley, letting out a piercing screech.

“Give it back — it’s mine, give it back!”

“Who’s afraid now?” he demanded. “Come on, tell me — who’s afraid of the big bad knife now?”

Alarmed, Edgar jumped out of bed and dashed to the window, opened it wide, and leaned out: He could not see the policeman or the drunk anywhere on the street. And he heard someone running across the floor next-door. Without a notion of what he ought to do, he felt himself moving toward his front door, his pajamas striped by horizontal slices of moonlight.

The doors of the two apartments opened at the same moment: The young woman, dark-haired, wild-eyed, wearing a pink nightshirt that didn’t quite reach her knees, sprang against Edgar, startling him as well as herself. In the dull light the young man, a head taller than both, suddenly loomed over them, his taut body covered only by a black T-shirt and white undershorts.

Though Edgar saw the descent of the steel blade all the way — as if it were approaching in slow motion — he was powerless to stop it from plunging into his shoulder. Backwards into his apartment he staggered, the pain seeming to come on slowly, and then making him dizzy. He collapsed, his limbs sprawling awkwardly across the floor. He could taste a salty thickness, hear the rasp of shrill voices, sense the suddenness of movement around him. But when he tried to see what was going on, he was too weak to raise his head.

With his mind lolling near the craters of unconsciousness, he focused on the only image that came to him, clinging to it as if it would help prevent him from falling off the edge of the Earth: A figure in a silvery, puffy, one-piece suit, with a transparent globe for a head, was jabbing the sharp point of an aluminum flagpole into a spongy gray surface.

Stripes of sheer whiteness continued to spread over the linoleum in his apartment, until they touched Edgar’s nicotine-stained fingertips, and the sound of the ambulance grew louder.