Shoot The Moon

Prologue

The scream could have woken the dead.  

As it was, it woke me from a dead-to-the-world sleep. Heart pounding, I jumped out of bed and stumbled toward my bedroom door as another hair-raising scream split the night.

I hurried out, knowing it was up to me to save my beloved children from whatever terrible monster lurked outside. In my haste, forgetting that Kodak, the black cat, was in the room with me, I inadvertently trampled my feline companion. The yowl he let out, a mixture of pain and outrage, almost ruptured my eardrums. 

“Sorry, sorry,” I muttered, fumbling to turn the door handle. 

Finally free, I raced down the hallway, intent on protecting my offspring from whatever danger was at our doorstep. Kodak bounded ahead of me.

I almost collided with my son, Henry, who’d stumbled into the hallway.

“Mom?” he murmured sleepily. “Did you hear something?”

He was now a college drop-out, but his tone reminded me of when I’d soothed away his night terrors when he was four.

A third blood-curdling scream jolted us both wide awake.

“It sounds like it’s coming from the back deck,” I whispered. 

“Should we call the police?” Henry asked.

I hesitated, unsure of how to answer.

My daughter, Paige, piped up from the shadows, “And say what? Somebody’s screaming in our backyard?” 

“I’ll figure out who it is,” Henry declared, moving toward the kitchen.

“You will not.” I grabbed his arm, dragging him backward with a strength born of being in protective mamma bear mode. “I’m the adult here. I’ll figure out what’s going on.”

“We’re all adults, Mom,” Paige pouted. “You keep forgetting that.”

“Not now,” I spat out through gritted teeth. “Henry, you stay with your sister. I’m going to investigate. If I don’t return, lock yourselves in your room and call the police.”

“If you don’t return?” he mocked. “It’s not like this is a slasher pic.”

“Have you forgotten the horror movie that is our lives, now?” his sister challenged bitterly.

“Just stay here,” I told them both. Then, I crept into the kitchen, pulled a carving knife from the rack on the counter and inched toward the door to peer outside.

Kodak meowed. I wasn’t sure if he was being supportive or trying to warn me that a creature from the night was about to burst through the panes of glass and rip my jugular open with one practiced swipe of its razor-sharp claws.

“Shhh,” I told the cat.

It was two nights before a full moon, which meant there was some dim light casting shadows across the backyard. 

I squinted into the night, searching for the source of the screaming. It took my eyes a moment to adjust, but when they did, I let out a worried gasp. A short, slightly round figure, brandishing an oversized spoon, was jogging across the grass toward my deck. 

I’d know that silhouette anywhere.

“Look out!” I called, wanting to warn my friend, Moon Park, that she was barreling straight into danger. But she couldn’t hear me through the door’s glass.

I’d seen enough horror pics to know that there’s strength in numbers; usually the psycho kills off one person at a time. Not wanting Moon to go into battle alone, I threw open the sliding door and charged, or at least tried to, onto the deck. I bounced off the screen door, having forgotten it was still closed.

I was pretty sure the mewling noise Kodak made was him laughing at my klutziness.

“Moon!” I shouted, struggling to clumsily open the door with one hand. “Look out!”

“I heard screaming,” she yelled back. “Is everything okay?”

Finally getting the screen door to budge, I pushed it aside and stepped outside.

Just in time for another horrible scream to fill the air.

This time, I was able to locate the source, though I had to blink a couple of times to make sure I was seeing what was in front of me. There was no masked bad guy, no pitchfork-wielding psycho, no scythe-swinging executioner. There was just a white goat, nibbling on what looked like the remains of my azalea bush.

Making eye contact with me, he threw back his head defiantly and let out another of those awful screams.

“Are you going to sacrifice it?” Moon asked, her gaze bouncing from the barnyard animal to the moonlight glinting off the carving knife I held.

“Is that you, Loki?” I asked.

“I’m Moon,” my friend said with exaggerated care, making it clear she thought I was having some sort of mental breakdown. “I mean you no harm.” She hid the wooden spoon she held behind her back. “I’m your friend, Kiki.”

“Hush,” I told her with exasperation. “I’m talking to the goat.” 

“Oh.” 

I don’t think my response made her feel any better. 

I moved slowly off the deck in the direction of the four-legged visitor. “It is you, isn’t it, Loki?”

He bleated softly, trotted forward, and butted my thigh with his head.

“You know this animal?” Moon asked in disbelief.

“I’m pretty sure that this is Loki, the goat who saved me when I’d been locked in the root cellar by Stan the Man and almost killed.” 

“I thought that Deputy Siffen saved you,” Moon replied carefully, still not convinced I hadn’t suffered some sort of psychotic break.

I rolled my eyes at the mention of Jacob Siffen. He had, in fact, helped to save my life, but he was also the man who’d stolen my phone and seemed intent on making my new job as the Pride Falls crime scene photographer a miserable experience.

“Is everything okay, Mom?” Henry called from inside the house.

“Everything’s great,” I yelled back, absentmindedly rubbing Loki’s neck. “It’s not a deranged serial killer on the loose, just a goat.”

Henry and Paige both stepped out onto the deck to get a better look at our visitor.

“A goat!” my daughter harrumphed, before spinning on her heel and stalking back inside.

Her brother walked over to me and crouched down so that he was eye level with Loki. “She’s cute.”

“Pretty sure it’s a he, and his name is Loki,” I informed him.

“Can we keep him?” Henry asked hopefully.

I blinked, taken aback by the question. When Karl had been here, no pets were allowed. Now, my adult son was asking if we could home a goat.  

Noticing Moon, who was now tapping on her knee with the wooden spoon, he waved and said, “Hey, Moon.”

She grunted something unintelligible back. 

I realized then that she was wearing red pajamas dotted with a turtle pattern and an oversized scowl. “It’s not my fault,” I said defensively. “He just showed up and started screaming.”

My friend raised her eyebrows like she didn’t believe me.

“We’ve got to be up in less than an hour,” Henry declared. “I’m going to make coffee. And since there’s time, pancakes. Who wants pancakes?”

The goat bleated.

Chuckling, my son patted the barnyard animal on the head, stood up and headed into the kitchen.

“You should tie it up,” Moon announced.

“What?”

“The lamb you—”

“It’s a goat,” I corrected.

“Lamb. Goat. You can eat both,” Moon muttered. 

Wincing, I covered Loki’s ears.

“You should tie it up before it wanders somewhere else and wreaks havoc,” Moon declared. “Do you have any rope?”

I nodded slowly. “I’m sure there’s some in Karl’s supplies.”

Moon let out a heavy sigh. “You need to get rid of it.”

“You just said we should tie him up,” I argued.

“Tie up the goat. Get rid of Karl’s crap.” 

Lashed by the bitterness in her tone, I took a step back. She’d never gotten along with my husband, but ever since he’d disappeared in a hot air balloon “accident”, she’d made no effort to hide her dislike.

“It’s been a year, Kiki,” she said firmly. “He’s not coming back.”

“It’ll be a year in two days,” I told her, clenching my fists as I tried to keep my tone even. “I know he’s not coming back, but every time I move his stuff, Paige freaks out.”

“So dump it after she goes back to school. He was controlling when he was here. She’s controlling now that he’s gone. It’s your house. Your life. You’ve got to—”

I held up a hand to silence her. “Can I at least get a cup or two of coffee in me before you launch into a full-blown lecture?”

“Rope,” she replied.

“Be right back,” I told the goat before heading into the house. 

As I rushed through the kitchen, Henry said softly, “She’s right, you know.”

I stopped to look at my son who was stirring pancake batter. “Excuse me?”

“Moon’s right,” he said firmly. “You need to get rid of Dad’s junk. Maybe not the stuff that’s of sentimental value that Paige might want some day, but all his odds and ends, especially the ballooning gear. It has to go.”

“I need rope to tie up Loki.” I hurried toward the garage, swallowing a painful lump that had lodged in my throat. “I hate you, Karl,” I muttered under my breath as I rummaged through his ballooning equipment in the garage, searching for something that could be used to restrain the wayward goat.

I hated that he’d left us. I hated that he’d embezzled funds from Pride Falls. I hated that he’d created a son who cursed his name and a daughter who was still wishing he’d return. Most of all, I hated that his disappearance had turned our orderly life into chaos. I was doing my best to move forward, forge a new path, but since there was no proof he’d died, I was stuck in the miserable limbo of making a life of my own while bearing Karl as the albatross around my neck.

I blinked hard, willing myself not to shed the tears of frustration that burned my eyes. Finally, I found a length of rope, almost eight feet long. I rushed back through the house, holding it aloft like it was the Stanley Cup or something.

I passed Henry flipping pancakes at the stove, Moon buddied up to the breakfast counter, slurping coffee, and Kodak curled in a ball near the door, pretending to sleep. I made a beeline toward Loki. I might not have known what to do about Karl, but one thing was for sure, I was going to keep the mischievous goat who’d saved my life out of trouble.

If only I could have done the same for myself…