Hungry Moon Read Free

to the edge of the bowl and held up one hand to stay the children. 'This is as far as we go.'
    Two hundred yards away, at the centre of the stony bowl, the cave gaped. Presumably someone had once thought it looked wide or deep enough to lose the moon in. It was really a pothole, fifty feet wide at the mouth and surrounded by a drystone wall. The first time she'd come here she had stepped over the wall, only to discover that even at high noon in summer you couldn't see bottom; walls that looked smooth and slippery as tallow plunged straight into darkness whose chill seemed to reach out of the bowl to where she stood now. Though she understood that eventually the shaft bent, as far as her emotions were concerned it might as well go straight down forever. Even though the children were safe beyond the edge of the bowl, she couldn't help wishing she hadn't brought them there. 'Never go any farther than this, okay?' she said, and waited until they all promised. —They-started shouting then, trying to make the cave echo. Some voices made a noise down there, not all–Diana assumed it had to do with pitch. She watched Ronnie wondering if he could get away with a shot from his catapult, and she was about to wag a finger at him when Sally's mother cried, 'Andrew!'
    Diana swung round, fearing the worst. But Andrew had only strayed back toward the path, and was stooping over something that had crawled away from the bowl. Children crowded round him. 'Yuck, it's a lizard,' Sally squeaked.
    Jane stepped back with a cry of disgust. 'It hasn't got any eyes.'
    As Diana hurried after the rest of her class to see, Andrew stepped forward and trod heavily on the creature, ground his heel into it and looked round as if he hoped the other children would be impressed, but they shuddered away from him. 'It must have come out of the cave,' Diana said, glancing at the mess of white skin and innards. 'A pity you trod on it, Andrew. It's very unusual for anything like that to come into the open. Never mind,' she said quickly, for the boy's mouth was trembling. 'While we're here you can tell us how you help to dress the cave.'
    His small, thin, pale face with its hint of eyebrows looked resentful. 'I make a bit of a picture with flowers,' he muttered as if he hoped nobody would hear.
    'You use petals, don't you? And then your piece and all the others fit together like a jigsaw.' Throughout the Peaks, towns decorated wells with pictures made of flowers and vegetation, a tradition that combined paganism and Christianity in thanksgiving for the water that had stayed fresh during the Plague and the Black Death. Watching the townsfolk carrying floral panels big as doors up from Moonwell to fit together at the cave last Midsummer Eve, Diana had felt as if she'd stepped back in time, into a calm that the world was losing. But Thomas was whispering 'Petals,' nudging his friends and
    sniggering, and Diana found that she didn't feel calm so close to the gaping cave. 'I think it's time we headed back,'she said.
    'Tents all round,' Andrew muttered, and pretended he hadn't spoken. He was right, Diana saw: the tents on the slopes above and below Moonwell made a ring around the cave and the town. Campers and walkers kept Moonwell going now that the lead mines were exhausted, concrete lids covering the abandoned shafts on the moor.
    The path led back to the edge of the moor, and suddenly there was the town between a chapel and a church, tiers of limestone terraces like one side of an amphitheatre, the murmur of small-town traffic. Diana led her class down the nearest zigzag path and along the High Street, past townsfolk gossiping on street corners, greeting her and the children. Her class fell silent as they reached the stony schoolyard with a few minutes to spare before the final bell.
    Mr Scragg was in his office, caning a boy taller than he was. Some of Diana's class tittered nervously at the sight of the headmaster standing on a chair. Sally's and Jane's mothers