Festival of the Harvest Moon

The dog knew before Diana did.

Murphy was an eleven-year-old yellow Lab, carried into Ward Veterinary Clinic wrapped in a blood-soaked fleece blanket—one of the ones they sold every October for the Harvest Moon Festival.

“He won’t let us near him,” Mrs. Heller said. “He almost bit Bill when we put him in the truck.”

“Murphy wouldn’t bite anybody.”

Diana crouched so he could see her. She’d known the dog most of his life. She had stitched his paw after he went through a storm window, removed a sock from his intestine, and once spent Thanksgiving morning making him throw up all the Easter candy he’d stolen off the Hellers’ kitchen counter.

“Hey, Murph. It’s me.”

The dog’s lips peeled back from his teeth.

Diana stopped. Pain could turn the sweetest dog dangerous, but this was different. Murphy was looking at her as though there were something about her he didn’t trust.

“He’s scared,” she said, mostly for the Hellers’ benefit.

She was sweating again. For almost two weeks she’d been running a low fever that never quite developed into anything. She promised herself she’d see somebody Monday.

She pulled on gloves and examined Murphy’s hindquarter. Four deep punctures, with tearing where whatever had bitten him had dragged its teeth through the flesh.

“Coyote?” Mr. Heller asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“What, then?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

The examination-room door opened.

“Good luck with that.”

Adam Acton stood in the doorway wearing his green conservation-officer jacket. At thirty he still had the crooked smile he’d had at fifteen, although nearly everything around it had changed.

“Whatever did that,” he said, nodding at Murphy, “he’s not the first. Two deer off Mine Road yesterday. Brenner lost three sheep Wednesday night.”

“And you’re just mentioning this now?”

“I didn’t realize the town veterinarian was part of the reporting chain.”

“You knew I’d want to know.”

“Now you know.”

There had been a time when Adam couldn’t stand to watch a fish die. Peter used to take the two of them to Lake Lenape, and Diana remembered Adam at fourteen slipping trout from the bucket when he thought Peter wasn’t looking. Peter always noticed. He just pretended not to.

That was before Adam’s father went away.

Adam looked down at Murphy. “If he were mine, I’d put him down.”

Mrs. Heller stared at him. “Excuse me?”

“Adam.”

“What? He’s eleven years old.”

“He’s treatable.”

“They can get another dog.”

Murphy growled.

Adam glanced down, but Murphy wasn’t looking at him.

He was looking at Diana.

Her phone rang.

ARGENT REGIONAL.

She was supposed to leave by noon for an interview with a surgical practice in Manhattan. Argent Hollow held a Harvest Moon Festival every October. Interviews like this did not come around nearly as often.

“Dr. Ward.”

“Diana? It’s Megan. We’ve got Tyler Acton in trauma.”

Diana looked toward Adam. “What happened?”

“Animal attack. He’s lost a lot of blood. We have B-negative coming from Morristown, but I don’t know if it’ll get here in time.” Megan hesitated. “You’re B-negative, aren’t you?”

Outside, orange leaves skittered beneath the banner stretched across Main Street:

WELCOME TO ARGENT HOLLOW’S 143RD FESTIVAL OF THE HARVEST MOON.

“When do you need me?”

“Now.”

Diana glanced at the clock.

“All right. I’m coming.”

***

The needle slipped while Diana was filling the sample tube and opened her thumb deeply enough that it probably needed a stitch. She wrapped it instead.

By the time she finished, her interview was gone. She sent an apology from the parking lot without bothering to manufacture an excuse. An emergency had come up.

Emergencies always came up.

The diner was on the way. Everybody called it Cain’s, after Lucas Cain, the physician turned silver prospector who founded Argent Hollow two centuries earlier. His name was everywhere: Cain Road, Cain Elementary, Cain Mine Trail.

Three old men in hunting orange occupied their usual stools at the counter.

Marlene put coffee in front of Diana. “You look terrible.”

“Thank you.”

“I mean sick.”

“That’s better.”

Eddie Kessler looked over from the counter. He had to be close to eighty, although Diana had thought he was close to eighty when she was ten.

“Nothing moving this morning,” he said.

“No deer?”

“Nothing.”

The hunter beside him shook his head. “No squirrels. No birds either.”

Marlene looked toward the window. “My feeders were empty.”

“Maybe they heard you three coming.”

“Animals know things,” Eddie said.

“Usually that men carrying rifles are bad news.”

That got a laugh, but Diana noticed Marlene was still looking outside.

Children carried paper moons toward Founder's Field while volunteers stacked the bonfire.

The hospital courier came through the door, and Diana handed him the insulated package.

“Kid’s lucky you were around.”

“He’ll be lucky if it gets there in time. Go.”

Diana reached for her coffee. The bandage around her thumb had loosened.

She pulled it back.

The cut had closed. A thin pink seam remained where less than an hour earlier the skin had been split open.

“You okay?” Marlene asked.

“Fine.”

“You look like Peter did.”

Diana looked up. “What?”

Marlene immediately regretted saying it. “Your father came in a few days before he died. Sweating like you are. Wouldn’t eat anything.”

“When?”

Marlene’s expression answered her.

Three days before Peter Ward died.

For twelve years Diana had heard explanations. Peter had been depressed, confused, suffering some kind of breakdown. None explained why he had left his twenty-year-old daughter a note containing only three words.

Stay away tonight.

“I have to go.”

Outside, a shepherd mix tied beside the hardware store saw her approaching and scrambled backward until its leash snapped tight.

Diana stopped.

The dog began to whine.

***

By three o’clock Diana could smell rain somewhere beyond the ridge. She could smell fryer grease from the festival vendors two blocks away, wood smoke from Founder's Field and something sweet rotting in a garbage can across Main Street.

She could smell blood too.

A woman passed her with a Band-Aid wrapped around one knuckle. Diana smelled it before she noticed the bandage.

She crossed the street and entered the Argent Hollow Historical Society.

A passing car threw headlights across the vestibule, and for an instant her reflection stared back at her with red eyes.

Diana spun around.

Nothing.

Mrs. Bell was upstairs arranging old photographs of the Harvest Moon Festival.

“I need something on Lucas Cain.”

“You and everybody else today.”

“Not the festival stuff. His medical work.”

Mrs. Bell frowned. “His medical work?”

“He was a physician before he came here.”

Twenty minutes later Diana sat beneath a portrait of Argent Hollow’s founder with a leather folio open before her.

Observations Upon Periodic Disorders of the Blood. L. Cain, Physician. 1796.

The first pages described fever, sleeplessness and changes in appetite. Then Diana found a table.

Twenty-eight days. Twenty-nine. Thirty. Twenty-nine.

She read it twice.

Cain called the episodes paroxysms. Increased body temperature. Acute smell. Extreme hunger. Rapid healing. Changes in hair and nails. Some patients became violent.

The next notation stopped her.

Dogs and horses perceive the afflicted before Man does and cannot readily be compelled into his presence.

Diana touched her thumb.

Cain had experimented with silver salts. His colleagues considered the treatment dangerous and the underlying theory absurd. He had been ridiculed, censured, and then disappeared from medicine.

In 1802 he purchased thousands of acres of worthless mountain land in New Jersey after traces of silver were found there.

Every child in Argent Hollow knew what came next. The physician became a prospector. The prospector opened a mine. The mine became a settlement, and the settlement became Argent Hollow.

Except they had the story backward.

Cain hadn’t become interested in silver because he became a miner.

He became a miner because he was interested in silver.

Diana turned the page.

Someone had underlined a sentence in pencil.

Argent arrests the manifestation. It does not cleanse the blood.

Beside it, in handwriting Diana knew:

CONTROL, NOT CURE.

Her father had written in every book he owned.

“Mrs. Bell. Did my father read this?”

“Oh, constantly.”

Diana looked up. “What do you mean?”

“Toward the end? Peter practically lived up here.”

Diana looked back at the manuscript.

Several pages later she found another heading.

The Second Affliction.

The first sentence had also been marked by Peter.

The first is an inheritance of blood and carries neither virtue nor guilt.

Cain described an afflicted man who had killed another. There had been contact with the victim’s blood. Afterward the normal remission failed. Reason deteriorated. Hunger increased. Violence became indiscriminate.

Beneath the account Cain had written:

One inheritance is received in blood. The other is purchased with it.

Peter had circled the sentence.

Beside it was a date.

October 17.

Twelve years ago.

The night he died.

Diana read on.

The condition may pass where blood passes.

For several seconds the words meant nothing.

Then she saw the courier leaving Cain’s, her blood beneath his arm.

Tyler.

Diana was moving before the chair hit the floor.

***

Sheriff Tom Garrison clocked her at seventy-two on Old Mine Road.

She saw the lights and kept going another quarter mile before pulling over.

Tom was out of his cruiser before she had her window down.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“I need to get to Regional.”

“You need to get out of the car.”

“Tom, I don’t have time.”

“Diana, look at yourself.”

She got out.

His expression changed. “Jesus. Are you sick?”

“I’m fine. Who found Tyler?”

“What?”

“Tyler. This morning.”

“Adam.”

Diana felt something settle into place.

“The Hellers’ dog. Adam brought him in.”

“Yeah.”

“The Brenners’ sheep?”

Tom frowned. “First one there.”

“And the deer?”

“He called those in. Why?”

Three scenes.

Adam at all three.

“Where is he?”

“Founder's Field. Somebody reported a big animal in the woods behind the festival. Adam went over to check it out.”

Diana’s phone rang.

ARGENT REGIONAL.

The hospital was south.

Founder's Field was north.

For most of her life Diana had believed that when someone needed help, the decision was already made. You went. You did whatever you could. You found a way to fix it.

Now two people needed her in opposite directions.

She got back into the car.

“Keep everyone out of the woods.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Especially the kids. Just do it.”

“Diana—”

But she was already turning north.

***

The bonfire made everyone beautiful.

Children chased sparks across Founder's Field while teenagers drank cider behind the bandstand and old couples sat beneath strings of orange lights. Fiddle music drifted over the crowd with the smell of oak smoke, caramel apples and fallen leaves.

For a moment Argent Hollow looked like the kind of place people moved away from and spent their lives trying to find again.

Then Diana saw Adam.

He stood across the bonfire watching her.

Firelight caught his eyes.

Red.

His familiar crooked smile appeared, then vanished.

He had seen her eyes too.

Adam turned toward the woods.

Diana followed.

Within a hundred yards the music faded. She could hear Adam’s footsteps ahead of her and the beating of her own heart.

Then she realized she could hear his.

She heard mice moving beneath the leaves, wings shifting in branches, children laughing back at the festival. She could hear blood moving inside living things.

Pain dropped her to her knees.

Something moved beneath her skin.

Diana had spent her adult life studying anatomy. She knew what bones were supposed to do, how joints articulated, where tendons attached. Everything inside her was wrong.

Her body was becoming something else.

Not because moonlight had touched her. Whatever was happening had begun long before she entered the woods. The fever, the hunger, the smells, the healing. She had been moving toward this all day.

Maybe all her life.

Her hand closed around Peter’s silver dollar in her pocket.

She had carried it for twelve years.

The metal burned her palm, but the pain steadied her. The panic receded enough for her to find herself inside it.

Control, not cure.

A howl came from above.

Diana raised her head.

She had spent years explaining that wolves did not howl at the moon. Wolves howled to communicate, beneath full moons and new moons, clear skies and clouds. People remembered wolves beneath moonlight because that was when they could see them.

Adam stood on the abandoned quarry ledge with the moon behind him.

And he was howling at it.

Then he came for her.

He hit her hard enough to throw her against the rock face. For the next several seconds there was nothing human about either of them. Diana remembered pieces—the weight of him, claws against stone, the smell of blood, her own teeth closing into flesh.

Adam recoiled.

His blood was in her mouth.

Something inside her answered to the blood.

Cain’s findings made sense now. The first affliction was carried in the blood. The second began when blood was taken.

Adam backed toward the quarry edge. Another few feet and there was nothing behind him but space and a hundred-foot drop into the abandoned silver workings.

Diana could end it. All the animals. All the dogs and sheep. They’d be safe. And his pain would be over.

There’d be no next child. But what would it do to her? Could she take that poor boy?

Adam shuddered. His teeth shone.

For a moment she thought the moonlight was playing tricks on her. His face came back first.

Adam. Thirty years old and bleeding.

Then Diana saw the boy beneath him—the fourteen-year-old slipping Peter’s trout back into Lake Lenape.

“Di.”

Diana loosened her grip on the silver dollar.

There was still a boy in that prison.

Maybe Cain had been wrong. Maybe Peter had been wrong too. There could be some treatment Cain never found. Medicine advanced. People learned things. Diseases that once killed everyone could now be cured with a pill.

There was always another thing to try.

A child’s voice came from the trail below.

“Mr. Acton?”

Diana turned.

Two children were climbing toward the quarry carrying paper moons.

“Sheriff Garrison said everybody has to come back.”

Adam inhaled. A snarl issued from his lips as he circled.

When she looked back, his face had changed. A grotesque mask covered every inch.

The change was not just physical. There was intent behind it. And rage. Compressed and ready to be released.

Whatever part of Adam had said her name was gone.

He looked toward the children.

And Diana finally understood her father.

There wasn’t always another thing to try.

Sometimes waiting for one only meant another life sacrificed to wishful thinking.

Adam moved.

Diana hit him from the side with everything she had.

For one long moment he hung beyond the quarry edge, his hand reaching for something that wasn’t there.

Then he fell.

Branches snapped below.

Then silence.

Diana stood at the edge listening.

No howl came back.

***

By the time Diana reached Founder's Field, she looked human again.

Mostly.

The silver dollar had burned a black circle into her palm. Around her, the festival continued as though nothing had happened. The fiddle player had started another song. Children drank cider. Marlene was laughing near the firehouse tent. The Hellers stood beside the bonfire.

Life had continued while Diana was in the woods committing murder.

Her phone rang.

ARGENT REGIONAL.

“Diana? It’s Megan. Tyler made it.”

She closed her eyes.

“The blood got here in time. His pressure came up almost immediately.”

“Good.”

“But there’s something strange. His wounds are already granulating. The trauma surgeon says it doesn’t make any sense.”

Diana looked at her thumb.

The cut was gone.

“Diana?”

“I have to call you back.”

A little girl stood near the fire roasting a marshmallow. Beside her was a yellow Lab Diana didn’t recognize.

The girl smiled at Diana.

The dog turned its head.

It backed against the girl’s legs and growled.

Across Founder's Field, firelight touched the bronze statue of Lucas Cain. Beyond it rose the mountain where Peter Ward had died twelve years earlier.

Diana had spent twelve years angry with him.

Sometimes months passed before she found one of his old books or heard somebody mention his name and the questions came back.

Why didn’t you let me help you? Why did you have to leave?

She had built a life around those questions. A profession around them, maybe. Animals couldn’t tell you what hurt. They couldn’t explain what had happened. You had to figure it out for them.

And if you worked hard enough, knew enough, cared enough, sometimes you could.

Diana opened her hand. Peter’s profile from the silver dollar was burned into her palm.

She thought of Adam saying her name. The children coming up the trail. Tyler in a hospital bed, alive because she had given him something neither of them understood.

Maybe, for Peter, saving her had come at the cost of his own life. Maybe there was no way around it – if she was to be safe. These were things she’d know better in time. After all, she had no idea what it was like living under a double curse.

Around the bonfire stood people she had known all her life. Marlene. Tom Garrison. The Hellers. Children waving paper moons while their parents laughed beneath the October sky.

People who were alive.

Diana moved closer to the fire.

Her shadow stretched behind her across Founder's Field, long and black, until it reached the edge of the woods.

She looked at it for a moment.

Then she looked back at the fire.

Somewhere south of Argent Hollow, a boy who should have died was healing.

And somewhere inside him, another clock had begun to tick.