Valley of the Moon by Melanie Gideon Read Free Book Online

from
Charlotte’s Web
.”
    I nodded impatiently. “Will you step into the fog for a moment? With the pig?”
    “Why do you want me to do that?”
    “I need to test a hypothesis.”
    “What hypothesis?”
    I’d have to tell her the truth—a partial truth anyway. “The fog makes us sick. But it didn’t make you sick.”
    “Why does the fog make you sick?”
    I couldn’t think of a lie quickly enough. “I have no idea,” I said.
    Her face softened. “Oh. Okay. So you’re wondering if something’s changed. That’s why you’re all looking at me this way. Because I came through and I’m fine and now you’re wondering if you’ll be fine, too?”
    “Exactly.”
    “You want me to test it out for you. With the pig?”
    “If you wouldn’t mind.”
    Everybody had left the dining hall now and was standing just a few feet behind us, listening carefully to our conversation.
    “Please,” said Fancy.
    “All right. But then I really have to go,” she said.
    I pulled out my pocket watch. “Sixty seconds. I’ll let you know when it’s time to come out.”
    “You’re not worried I’ll run away with your prized pig?” she joked.
    That was the least of my worries.
    She entered the fog. A minute later I called to her and she stepped back into the sun. The pig lay still in her arms.
    “You—it’s dead,” she stammered. She glared at me. “It’s your fault. You did this. You made me kill it. Why did you do that?” she cried.
    “I’m sorry. Listen, it’s only a pig,” I said, thinking at least it wasn’t one of us.
    She shook her head, angry. “I have to leave right now. I’ve got to go home.” Clearly rattled by the pig’s death, she blathered on. “It’s almost time for my son to start school. I haven’t even bought his school supplies.”
    “But it’s only August,” I said.
    As I said it, I was struck by a foreboding which I realized I’d been trying to fend off from the moment she arrived. But now it overtook me, filling me with trepidation.
    “Mid-August,” she said, “practically late August. The sixteenth. Nineteen seventy-five—in case you’ve forgotten,” she added, looking me up and down. My trousers and suspenders. My boots and linen shirt.
    I could sense everybody behind me stunned into silence, holding their breath. I finally said, “Well.”
    Well
was a workhorse of a word that could mean so many things.
Well, nice to have met you. Well, this certainly has been an illuminating conversation. Well, a madwoman had found her way through the fog to Greengage.
    “I don’t feel so good,” said Lux.
    “What’s wrong?” asked Martha. She was using her clinical voice, firm and calming. It made you want to tell her everything.
    “I’m dizzy,” said Lux. “I think I’m going to puke.”
    She swayed and slid to the ground, the pig falling out of her arms. Then she went very still. Martha sank to her knees and pressed her fingers to the side of her neck, seeking out her pulse.
    Dear God! Had I done this by forcing her back into the fog? Had I killed her?
    “She just fainted,” said Martha, sitting back on her heels. “She’ll be fine. No thanks to you, Joseph. Asking her all those questions. Scaring her half to death. What were you thinking?”
    Fancy, dumbstruck, said, “Nineteen seventy-five?”
    Fancy’s comment triggered the crowd and everybody started speaking at once.
    Martha ignored the hysterics.
    “Let’s get her home,” she said to me.
    I bent and lifted her into my arms. Lux. This stranger.
    Her name meant
light
.
    —
    We were halfway to the house when Martha said, “It was a full moon yesterday, wasn’t it?”
    During the four months we’d been trapped, it seemed that full moon days passed differently than all the rest of the days of the month. Just after midnight on the day of the full moon, time began to race by. Like a record on a gramophone played at ten times the normal speed, we sped up, too. Hours seemed to go by in minutes. The sensation lasted