With tonight’s lunar activity, I thought it might be fun to share an older horror story of mine that explores the power of the supermoon.
In 2018, Owl Hollow Press published my story “Luna’s Lure” in their anthology Under the Full Moon’s Light. I was still fairly new to writing horror and was thrilled to learn my story was the first in the table of the contents. “Luna’s Lure” appears again in Lucid Screams, my first short story collection which released in 2020.
At 3600 words, it’s a fairly quick read. So, check it out and then step outside tonight…but watch out for your neighbors while you’re looking up.
LUNA’S LURE
by Red Lagoe
OCHER-COLORED LIGHT absorbed into the floorboards of the front porch, bringing a warmth to David’s broken home, but not to his weary state. Something was off—in the colors of the sinking sun, in the taste of his cold beer. The orange-yellow light of day faded into a cool gray, bringing with it a warning. A pressure in his chest.
“Full moon tonight.” His neighbor Jeff pulled a sip from a chilled amber bottle. “Feels wrong being off duty.”
David stood up to break away from the threat within him—that admonishing voice inside whispering to him to get out. To run.
“Where’s your boy,” Jeff asked.
“Upstairs.” David leaned against the porch railing, unable to shake the apprehension. After all, it was the same feeling he had right before finding out his wife was screwing some other guy.
Jeff nodded with what David assumed was judgment and disappointment. Or maybe he had a lot on his mind. Four disappearances, once a month on the full moon, had all of upstate New York on edge. Being Jeff’s only confidante made David privy to information police wouldn’t even give to the reporters. The first man’s disappearance in Ontario County didn’t make big news until they found traces of blood and bone fragments behind his work shed. Then came missing cases in Seneca, Cayuga, and Tompkins Counties. Three men, one woman, all had wandered outside around sunset. The only remnants were pools of blood or bits of hair and bone—the rest of their bodies remained missing. Poor bastards. Jeff had said the police in those counties couldn’t seem to make any connections between the murders, other than they had all disappeared on a full moon. Then the FBI got involved and took the case from local authorities, leaving Jeff off-duty and sipping a beer with David on a Friday night.
“Still no clues on a suspect?” David asked.
“No clues,” Jeff said. “The last woman—there was so much blood. I got to see the photos. Assholes around town making werewolf jokes. They wouldn’t be laughing if they saw those photos.” He shuddered and set down his beer. “Really feels wrong not working tonight. If this guy is moving from county to county, then he’s gonna hit either Tioga or Cortland County next.”
A gravitational pull swelled inside David, the kind that made him want to stray from his home.
“Dave!” Jeff reeled him back in. “You there?”
“I’m listening.” He turned his attention from the neighborhood, back to his best friend.
“This guy could hit Cortland County tonight. Keep your eyes open.”
David scanned the neighborhood as that force yanked at his chest.
“Where the hell did she come from?” Jeff whispered, nodding toward a leggy brunette wearing a flowing skirt and a tight red top. The long, uncoordinated strides of her pale legs carried her up the driveway to the vacant house next door.
The force pulled harder, piercing David’s sternum and hooking into his ribs, directing him to her. David locked eyes with the stranger as she limped barefoot toward the steps. Feelings of warning drowned in his attraction to her.
Jeff brushed shoulders with him. “I hope she’s our new neighbor,” he said, letting out a slow, breathy whistle. “Dibs.”
“Dibs?” David’s trance broke. “What is this, junior high?”
Despite talking big game, Jeff was far too much of a gentleman to ever lay claim to a woman. In high school, he wouldn’t even approach his crush, who couldn’t have made it more clear that she wanted him to ask her out. Whereas David—by the age of 18—had mastered the art of making women drop their panties with nothing more than a smoldering stare. Over the years, Jeff worked on his confidence to approach women, but deep down, he was too much of a puppy. Especially for a woman like the one walking up the driveway next door.
Jeff smirked and then got serious. “Miss!” he called out.
The mysteriously charming woman climbed the steps without breaking David’s gaze—there was no doubt in his mind that she wanted him.
“You okay?” Jeff shouted. “You injured?” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Shoot, maybe I shouldn’t have said that. What if she has a physical condition or something?”
As she reached the front door, it drifted open, and the gorgeous woman disappeared inside.
“Or maybe she’s just rude.” Jeff chuckled and poured more beer down his throat.
David released his breath, fighting the silent summoning from behind her closed doors. Plenty of experience taught him to be cautious of beautiful women—they were nothing but trouble. He had been knocked on his ass one too many times. Even his wife, who was the epitome of beauty, kicked him in the nads and left him squirming for mercy. She got paranoid, without any serious proof, then hopped in the sack with the first guy that made her feel special. To top it all off, she walked out on her family, claiming the appetite of a flesh and blood woman—whatever that meant—and leaving David to care for their teenage son.
“Dad!” Travis called from upstairs.
Jeff laughed. “That’s him calling for attention.”
“Don’t start, man.”
“Just saying you might have to take him outside every once in a while.”
“I tried,” David said with his hand on the doorknob. “He has no outdoor skills.”
“Well maybe if you—”
“Lay off!” David snapped. “You don’t know. Travis has no interest in anyone other than himself. I’m done trying to help that kid.”
Travis’s telescope was perched in the window of his second story bedroom. Gifted to him by his mother before she left, the telescope sat in a box for weeks, right next to the baseball bat that David had bought him.
“Finally decided to try that thing out, huh?” David asked as he stalled in the doorway, eyeing the untouched bat. It burned a little to know the kid chose the telescope over sports. Not that he was surprised. David had tried to teach the kid to play a couple years back—he’d always had a hell of a powerful swing—but it only resulted in strikeouts and foul balls. Every week for months, David made an unsuccessful attempt to practice with Travis. Tireless eye-rolls and huffs of derision wore David down, and he gave up on the kid. Only a year until graduation, so all David had to do was try not to screw the kid up too much.
“You gotta see this,” Travis said.
David could not care less about looking through the eyepiece of the ex’s guilt gift. The $300 shiny black stargazing piece of bribery that she had probably hoped would win Travis back. One hand on a warming beer, and the other in his pocket, David pretended to care and entered Travis’s room.
“What are you looking at?” he asked, hovering over Travis’s shoulder. His corner bedroom allowed a direct view into the backyard next door. The gorgeous woman in the fitted crimson top stood below, stretching her arms to the sky.
“Supermoon,” Travis said. “It’s rising now.”
David lifted his eyes from the alluring brunette to see the full moon filling the gaps between the houses on the horizon. Of course. Travis was the only teenage boy he knew that would be looking at the moon instead of an insanely hot woman.
The woman’s presence in the yard below lured David’s attention away from the moon. Twilight turned the grass beneath her bare feet to a lifeless gray. Her flowing, knee-length skirt lifted in the breeze, allowing a flash of her bare thigh, and the gentle wind played in the strands of her hair.
Then, as if she knew exactly what David was thinking, she slid her shirt over her head.
David—needing to set an example for his kid—turned his back to her and dragged the telescope away from the window, fumbling like an idiot. “Whoa.”
Travis’s face, painted with confusion at first, turned stoic. “I wasn’t looking at her. Honest.”
David leaned the telescope against the wall. “What’s weird about that, is I believe you.”
He couldn’t help but look again. Topless, she turned her body toward him—eyes lingering on the window for a moment while he sank into the darkness of the room, hoping she didn’t catch him gawking.
“Okay, so the neighbor’s a nudist,” David joked.
“When did she move in?” Travis asked.
David shrugged.
Travis moved his telescope from the wall, fiddling with the parts, while David stole another glimpse of her. A flutter in his chest caught his breath. The rest of her clothing had been removed. With her bare backside facing him, she greeted the rising moon in the east.
David forced himself away from the window again. “What’s so super about a supermoon?”
“It’s a bit closer to earth than usual, and it can look bigger sometimes,” Travis said. “Especially when it rises.”
David tried to combat his need to look again. Maybe if he were able to control his lustful desires, his wife would not have strayed to the bed of another man. If he had just looked away instead of enticing every gorgeous woman to bed with him, he would still have the one woman that ever meant anything to him. Perhaps if he loved her, and only her, the way she deserved to be loved—if he could have satisfied her needs emotionally—he might still have her. And perhaps Travis would still have a mother living with him.
“Can I set up my scope again now?”
“Go take a shower or something, Travis.”
“But the moon’s rising now,” he argued.
“Now is clearly not a good time.” David gestured out the window.
“Why should I have to suffer because of her?”
“You’ll be asking yourself that about women for the rest of your life.”
The compulsion within him to go to that stranger next door ebbed and flowed, but David remained mindful of the warning in his heart. He grabbed a fresh beer downstairs, avoiding the peep show—he had some class after all. And he had some desire to save his marriage, if his wife would ever take him back.
He stepped onto his front porch where Jeff was standing guard, as if the serial killer at-large would stroll into his neighborhood at any moment.
“Feels wrong not working.”
“You said that already.”
“I should go talk to her,” Jeff said with a sly smile, “and let her know to keep her doors locked tonight. I gotta be a good neighbor and all.”
“I wouldn’t strike up a conversation now,” David said. “She’s naked in the backyard.”
Jeff’s eyes bulged. “You’re full of shit.”
“Nope,” David said, and took another swig of beer. “But it’s weird. She was staring at me through the window. Like she knew I was there and she didn’t care.”
“In the nude?” Jeff asked, brows furrowed.
“Yep.”
“That’s an invitation if I’ve ever heard of one,” Jeff laughed.
David held his breath, considering the idea. “No. I’m off women for a while.”
“That’s no woman,” Jeff smiled. “That’s a goddess. You don’t turn that down. If a woman like that is eye-screwing you, you offer her a drink.”
David leaned on the post and sipped from his beer, withholding his lecherous thirst for the woman next door, along with the contrasting yearning for his wife’s love. The warm summer breeze skimmed his arm hair as the force of her calling pulled at him again.
Jeff straightened up his stance, took a swig from his bottle, and tucked in his shirt. “If you’re not going to talk to her, then I will.”
“She’s naked, man.”
“I know that.” Jeff cringed. “I’m not some perv. I’m gonna knock on her door, let her put some dang clothes on, and then introduce myself. Let her know she’s safe in this neighborhood. Maybe I should put my uniform on. Women love that.” He paused for a moment and shook his head. “No time for that. I gotta do this now while the mood is right.”
Jeff strolled next door with his hands in the pockets of his cargo shorts, climbed the steps, and knocked.
After a few seconds, the door opened to the tall, enchanting woman—no longer naked, but draped in a red satin robe. The sight of her welcoming smile captivated David all the way from his porch. She turned away from Jeff and faced David’s house, imprisoning his gaze again.
Then the unexpected—she turned back to Jeff and allowed him inside. The front door shut behind them. David kicked himself for not calling dibs on her first, but found comfort in knowing he did what seemed like the right thing.
As he headed upstairs, the intense sensation to go to her ceased. Released from her grasp, David stalled by Travis’s room where the hiss of his shower grew louder. The moon crept higher against the darkening sky, spilling light through his window. Despite the trepidation within discouraging him from going to the window, David edged closer anyway, taking in the glow from the supermoon.
Travis’s shower cut off.
David peered into the darkening yard below as Jeff and the woman stepped outside. With her back to David, she stood before Jeff’s silhouetted frame in the moonlight and opened her robe to him. David leaned closer to the window, stunned. “What the hell?”
Jeff stood still—what a dumbass. A gorgeous woman in front of him, and he freezes. David would have known how to play her.
Jeff’s arms dangled by his sides as she drifted closer. Pale hands slithered across his chest. David leaned against the frame of the window, drawn to her. She pushed Jeff to the ground with a violent jolt, and David jumped, ready to help his friend. But Jeff wasn’t exactly fighting her off. He lay on the grass as she crawled over him.
That’s when David should have turned away, but his eyes were trapped. The high contrast between her pale skin and dark shadows created an illusion of some inhuman form crawling with the awkward mechanics of an insect.
David squinted through the darkness trying to make sense of the contorted shape of her limbs.
Her robed body writhed and rocked over Jeff. David pulled his eyes away, toward the light beneath Travis’s bathroom door to be sure his son wasn’t coming. Despite his conscience insisting he look the other way, he was drawn back to the window.
Her back hunched over Jeff.
A darkness grew beneath them. A black shadow crept outward from under their bodies, so dark—like a void in the earth could swallow them whole.
The air shifted in the bedroom as Travis opened the bathroom door, stealing David’s attention for only a moment.
The woman crouched over the growing black shadow. And Jeff was gone.
Her shoulders jerked in a violent, seizure-like episode. Still hovered over the black void, with her back to David, her head twisted in pulses as if being cranked by a wrench. The woman’s eyes locked on him through the window. Impossible for her to see him through the darkened room, but her lips stretched into a sinuous smile inviting him to come to her.
Stumbling over Travis’s books, David scrambled away from the window, unsure if his eyes were betraying him. All the possible explanations rushed through his mind. Weird lighting and shadows. Alcohol. An elaborate prank—knowing Jeff, it was the most likely of the scenarios.
“What happened?” Travis asked.
“Stay here,” David urged. “Keep away from that window!”
The side yard, deep in the shadow of the house, provided cover while David went looking for Jeff. His heart hammered against his breastbone, bruising him from the inside, while he called for him.
“Jeff,” he whispered as he stepped around the back of the house. Trying to remain calm and sensible, he walked into the moonlight, expecting Jeff to pop out of some hiding spot, laughing about how he “got him good.”
“Jeff?” he called again.
While distracted by the nearly blinding light of the massive rising moon, he slipped. His foot slid in the grass, throwing off his balance, but he caught himself from falling.
“What the—”
Beneath his feet laid the black shadow where Jeff had been.
He knelt down and placed his fingertips in the dark, slick substance, then raised his hand to the moonlight. A red viscous fluid encased the tips of his fingers—blood.
His pulse sped faster than his icy blood could pump through his veins. David backed out of the carpet of bloody grass. Shaking hands pulled his phone out to call for help.
The woman in the red robe came out of her house with a grin. Moon glow reflected off her skin as she jerked toward him in convulsions that defied physics. The satin robe, open and draping from her breasts, exposed a long, rugged scar from her clavicle to pubis. A scar indicative of some horrible surgery, or some traumatic event that ripped her open from the base of her neck all the way down her body.
David’s hands betrayed him as his finger dialed the last digit. The phone fell to the ground.
“911 dispatcher…” the woman’s voice faded.
His throat swelled from the inside. He couldn’t speak. Gravity pulled at his feet with so much force it felt like the earth would suck him in. Standing petrified, David’s body was unresponsive to his desire to flee.
Her pale gray eyes, cratered with dark splotches, captivated him. Mesmerized and paralyzed, he allowed her closer. One delicate hand rested against his chest, radiating an energy that permeated his skin. It surged through his veins, swelling and receding.
“Luna,” she said with a voice that hissed and rolled like ocean waves. “She’s close tonight. So strong.”
With a gentle nudge, she sent him falling backward. Joints fused stiff, David could not break his own fall as he crashed into the grass. Flat on his back, with his arms to his sides, lying only feet from the blanket of Jeff’s blood, David struggled to escape his paralysis.
The woman opened her robe, exposing her body. The long, vertical strip of white scar tissue widened, splitting along the length of her torso.
“She must feed again.” A gravely breath of pain and pleasure seeped from her parted lips.
The flesh at the scar’s seam stretched and separated.
Long, white strands of fleshy tissue thickened and formed into spindly teeth. Unclasping from an interlocked position over her organs.
Ribs fractured. The newly formed monstrous fangs opened, exposing a cavernous abyss within her body.
Terror-ridden and charmed, David remained flat on the ground as she dropped to her hands and feet and scrambled over him.
Her eyes eclipsed to darkness.
The spiky teeth of her abdomen dripped saliva onto his belly, and a snarling moan rose from the beast within her gut. The fanged pit widened like the unhinging of a snake jaw, prepared to devour him.
Unable to close his eyes, he was forced to watch as it lunged upon him, delivering a fate he probably deserved.
A flash of Travis smiling. A glimpse of his wife dancing. The memory of his young son laughing hysterically after an epic swing of a wiffle-ball bat that busted the plastic ball in half. As the moments of his life filled his heart, David snapped back to reality as the beast screeched and jerked to the side.
Travis towered over him with the baseball bat on his shoulder.
It squirmed in the grass, squealing from the blow.
Travis heaved, trembling, panting. David—shocked by his son’s bravery—shifted an arm beneath him. As his vision pulsed with his heartbeat, he tried to break from his petrified state to help Travis.
The woman’s arms and legs buckled and snapped. She unfolded herself into an upright position.
David manipulated his numb legs and stood, but he could barely lift them to take a step.
Her blackened eyes revealed a glowing crescent as they came out of their eclipse. She moved toward Travis.
The atrocity in her belly hissed and drooled as it closed in on the boy.
“Travis!” David shouted, lunging his torpid body between them, knees weak, crumbling beneath the weight of his body.
The scream of a thousand voices howled from the creature, and police sirens joined in from down the street.
“You’ll be all right,” David said to his son as something caught his breath.
A pressure in his chest.
Travis’s eyes widened with panic. A fleshy, bony tentacle exited David’s sternum. The creature pierced him from behind and wrapped the segmented extension around his waist.
Travis struck at her abdomen again, cracking one of its teeth, as red and blue emergency lights flashed across the fencing.
“Over here!” Travis screamed for help.
The pale beast on all fours backed against the fence with David in tow. His son’s image shrank as David was pulled into the shadows of the yard.
“Dad!” Travis called, but his voice was distant—safe.
Tingling numbness sparked through his circuits as David allowed the monster to take him far away. His body tore through the woods, dragged by the demon to be consumed later. Relief blanketed him, knowing that Travis was safe from the beast’s appetite for flesh and blood.
Recent Comments