Literature / Moon (1985)

A 1985 novel by James Herbert.

Three years after horrific visions helped him lead the police to a child-molesting Serial Killer, thirty-four-year-old divorced computer technician Jonathan Childes, in shelter from the public’s morbid curiosity, holds, on one of the Channel Islands, several peripatetic teaching jobs.

On an ocean swim with French teacher Amy Sebire, Childes is suddenly overwhelmed by a distant vision of a corpse’s evisceration. During a dinner party with Amy’s family, a vision of the exhumation of a small boy’s corpse causes Childes to collapse. While Amy’s father Paul Sebire is suspicious of Childes’s past police involvement, Amy protests that Childes helped solve the murders. While she urges Childes to seek some kind of help, he’s petrified that this may somehow advantage whatever depraved mind has reached his own.

A vision of an elderly psychiatric patient's cranial mutilation persuades Childes to call Detective Inspector Overoy, aided three years ago by Childes's visions. Investigation of the subsequently burnt psychiatric hospital; a small boy’s exhumed corpse, and an eviscerated prostitute indicates a killer who removes organs; partially eats them, and leaves, in each corpse, a moonstone.

What’s more, the killer has psychically sensed Childes’s distant observation. A sudden overwhelming fear for seven-year-old daughter Gabby’s safety heralds the killer’s aim to have, with Childes, some sadistic fun…

This novel provides examples of:

• Always with You: In dream, Childes recalls, from childhood, a suppressed memory of seeing, in his bedroom, the discarnate figure of his week-dead mother, who reassured him that love transcends the grave.
• Amicably Divorced: Childes and ex-wife Fran.
• Ass Shove: By psychic simulation, the killer, in attempt to burn Childes's internal organs, psychically projects into him the effects of a hand which turns to fire.
• Aura Vision: On the school Open Day, Childes sees the similarly psychic Miss Piprelly radiate something like "a gentle many-hued flame."
• Awesome Underwater World: Beneath the sea, Childes's examination of a feeding starfish is followed by a remote vision of bodily desecration.
• Ax-Crazy: To feed Moon Goddess Hecate, or even just to torment Childes, Heckatty targets indiscriminately and sadistically.
• Barred from the Afterlife: In offering to moon goddess Hecate, and to prevent their souls from reclaiming their bodies, Hecatty steals some of their organs. Joint with that of Childes, her mind allows her victims’ ghosts to tangibly manifest. On Heckatty’s death, seven-year-old victim Annabel's severed fingers are restored.
• Battleaxe Nurse: From the police list of staff and patients at the burnt down psychiatric hospital, Overoy finds one of the nurses, a hugely strong woman who went by the name of Heckatty, to have helped restrain more violent patients; used, for murder, a bag of surgical instruments, and to have been obsessed with the moon goddess Hecate.
• Beat Them at Their Own Game:
  • In search of the psychically acquainted killer, Childes gazes into the corpse-concealed moonstone. By prolonged concentration, he establishes contact; with his strength, surprises the killer, and, in exchange for an end to the murder and torment, a direct confrontation.
  • On the dam’s walkway, having received from Heckatty psychically induced pain, he finds himself able to retaliate - although to minimal effect.
• Beware the Mind Reader: On Childes's psychic witness of Heckatty's desecration of a small boy's corpse, she senses Childes's observation.
• Black Eyes of Evil: Eventual moonlit confrontation on the reservoir dam’s walkway Heckatty's eyes are ominously shaded.
• Boarding School: La Roche Ladies’ College.
• Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl: Amy and traumatised Childes.
• The Brute: As well as a mass-murdering sadist, Heckatty is very physically powerful.
• Calling Card: In each newly found corpse is an oval, transparent, blue-tinged moonstone.
• The Call Knows Where You Live: The mass-murdering psychic sadist has access to a phone book - with intent to kidnap and murder Childes’s daughter Gabby. Heckatty instead abducts and murders young neighbour Annabel.
• Came Back Wrong:
  • Heckatty's slain victims, seemingly drawn to the potent psychic union of her and Childes’s minds; form, from an ethereal mist, into the bodily states in which Heckatty left them. They seem less disturbed by their variable states of mutilation than aggrieved at the Organ Theft entailed thereby. Albeit playfully, the spectral mutilated small boy makes a grab for his stolen heart - and rips out one of his murderer’s eyes.
  • Averted with seven-year-old Annabel, murdered in place of her friend Gabby - seemingly because, save for her severed fingers, Heckatty seems to have neglected to steal any body parts.
  • Downplayed with the fire-slain La Roche girls; Miss Piprelly and Matron Bates , who, while badly burnt, don’t seem that bothered by it - the spectral students even point and giggle at their murderer.
• The Cavalry: With Heckatty about to push Childes over the reservoir dam’s walkway, their extrasensory minds, sharpened by brief psychic union, hear the ghosts of Heckatty's victims.
• Cheerful Child: Gabby.
• Children Are Innocent: On the phone, Gabby, totally oblivious to Childes’s pang of sorrow, asks if he’ll visit soon.
• Commitment Issues: Downplayed. On sudden realisation of the depth of their mutual feelings, Childes and Amy are both startled and excited.
• Cool Teacher: Childes considers himself neither teacher nor disciplinarian. Patient and easy-going, he's well-liked.
• Cop Killer: In his car, a policeman keeps nightwatch over La Roche Ladies’ College. Childes finds him dead with his throat slashed.
• Dating What Daddy Hates: Paul Sebire, who would prefer a son-in-law in his own line of work, makes little attempt to hide his aversion to Childes.
• Death of a Child:
  • After an unnamed small boy’s funeral, Heckatty dissects the corpse.
  • Aiming to provoke Childes via kidnapping daughter Gabby, Heckatty mistakenly takes, and murders Gabby’s friend Annabel.
• Desecrating the Dead: As involuntarily psychically observed by Childes, Heckatty removes victims’ internal organs.
• Determinator: While terrified by a fire raging through La Roche Ladies’ college, Childes is desperate to find survivors.
• Dreaming of Things to Come: On the way back from a school trip, during a seaside stop, Childes briefly sees young Kelly’s ice cream-stained hand to be incongruously badly burnt. She, and several others, later die in a fire.
• Emerging from the Shadows: Telepathically summoned to the reservoir dam’s walkway, Childes finally sees, lumbering into view, the killer.
• Friend on the Force: Detective Inspector Ken Overoy, during the rampage of a child-molesting serial killer, learned to take Childes’s insights seriously. Plagued by new horrific visions, Childes gets back in touch.
• French Jerk: Averted with Paul Sebire’s young business associate Edouard Vigiers, who, at the Sebire’s dinner party, endorses Childes profession, and politely dissuades Sebire’s attempt to pressure Amy into showing Eduoard around the island.
• Elder Abuse: From a distant psychiatric hospital, Childes, from perpetrator Heckatty’s perspective, the top of an elderly man’s head sawn into.
• Evil Old Folks: In the moonlight, Childes sees Heckatty’s hair to be curly, matted and silver.
• Fantasy-Forbidding Father: Childes’s father hated anything to do with mysticism or the supernatural; forbade mention of dead wife and young Jonathan Childes from her visiting grave, and blamed the boys prediction thereof for her death.
• Fat Bastard:
  • Averted with overweight young Isabel.
  • Downplayed with Heckatty; vast in bone structure as well as flesh.
• Finger in the Mail: Shortly after Gabby’s friend Annabel is kidnapped, Childes, with a moonstone, is mailed five tiny fingers and a thumb. Mercifully, the pathologist determines them to have been severed after the child’s death.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Through his bedroom window, when Childes sees the distant school’s white walls to have caught the setting sun, he briefly thinks it’s caught fire. Heckatty later sets the school on fire.
  • After Childes collapses at dinner, Paul Sebire frets to daughter Amy that riding in a car with Childes during such an episode could be dangerous. Through a telepathically stimulated throttling, Heckatty forces Childes into a car crash, from which Amy, in the passenger's seat, sustains facial cuts.
• Friend to All Children: Following Gabby’s troubled birth, her dependency roused in Childes a renewed tenderness for all life.
• Fundraiser Carnival: As summer nears, La Roche Ladies’ College hosts Open Day, which sees beverage stalls, prize giving, and general merriment.
• Groin Attack: Played for Horror - in their eventual confrontation, the killer psychically stimulates crushing Childes’s testicles.
• God of the Moon: A moonstone left victims’ corpses rouses suspicion of a murderous cult. Detective Inspector Overoy reads of Hecate, overseer of the dead and patron of sorceresses. Like the moon itself, her character is said to vary. Heckatty's the moonstone, with its inner blue shimmer, to be Hecate’s earthly embodiment; and to her, offers murder victims’ souls.
• Gutted Like a Fish: Childes suffers an extremely graphic remote insight into the removal of a corpse’s internal organs - and then learns a prostitute to have been thusly desecrated.
• Hanging Around: During Open Day, Heckatty, stalks the not-quite-empty dormitories, and with a school tie, hangs Jeannette over the stairs.
• Human Sacrifice: Having eaten from victims’ organs, Heckatty, to bar the slain from reclaiming their souls, steals some of their organs - an offering to the Moon Goddess Hecate.
• Haunted Technology: During a computer class, each monitor screen’s sudden display of the word "MOON" perplexes the students and horrifies Childes.
• Heroic Fire Rescue: Having seen from his cottage window La Roche Ladies’ college to be on fire, Childes drives over to find the building intact - until fire promptly erupts. While staff and students evacuate, Childes learns of a possibility of people trapped several floors up. While Kelly, Patricia, Adele, Caroline, Isobel, Sarah-Jane and Matron Bates perish, Childes leads to safety ten-year-old Sandy and Rachel.
• Honest Corporate Executive: Paul Sebire, chief executive of Jacarte International; while a bit pushy and overprotective, is an honest, if ruthless, businessman.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: Heckatty's mind, when merged with Childes's, does indeed enhance each others' extrasensory sensitivity - which summons the ghosts of Heckatty's victims. And they'd like their stolen organs back, please.
• Hot Teacher:
  • Young Jeannette takes a shine to Childes.
  • French teacher Amy, in an attempt to look schoolmarmish, keeps her hair in a tight bun. Childes just finds it sexy.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Having found himself suddenly attuned to the mind of a child-molesting serial killer, the public’s interest in Childes's publicised assistance of the police drove him to the seclusion of the Channel Islands. Attunement to the mind of another serial killer has him wracked with dread.
• Innocent Bystander: Headmistress Miss Piprelly, with police stationed at the Serial Killer-targeted school, hears a nightly intrusion. Heckatty overpowers her, snaps her neck, soaks her in petrol and fatally sets her on fire.
• Intangible Time Travel: On recollection of a childhood encounter with his dead mother, Childes recalls glimpsing a second, unknown figure - and realises it to have been his own mentally projected self.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Having telepathically sensed the unknown killer’s depraved thoughts and monstrous actions, he can’t think of them as human.
• Jacob Marley Apparel: On the dam’s walkway, in school uniform as opposed to nightwear, appear the fire-slain La Roche girls.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Downplayed - rather than an outright git, Paul Sebire is inordinately protective and possessive - although his fear for Amy’s safety when riding in a car with the psychically vulnerable Childes proves well-founded when Heckatty psychically forces Childes and Amy into a car crash.
• Just in Time: On Open Day, Childes, from the school field, sees, in a school window, a face. He hurries up to the dormitories; finds, with a uniform tie, Jeannette hung by her neck over the stairs, and, just in time, gets her down.
• Killing in Self-Defense: When Heckatty dangles over the dam’s walkway, Childes psychically senses, in her calm plea for assistance, an insatiable desire for more sadism. Spectral finger-severed victim Annabel with a look, entreats Childes not to let Hecatty live. From the walkway’s wall, he starts to prise free Heckatty’s fingers.
• Let Me at Him!: After Paul Sebire punches Childes, Inspector Geoff Robillard holds him back.
• Life-Saving Encouragement: As fire rages through the school, Childes gently encourages, and leads down the fire escape, two terrified ten-year-olds. When Childes briefly succumbs to exhaustion and despair, Sandy briefly takes the role of encouragement-supplier.
• Literal Cliffhanger:
  • During their eventual confrontation on the reservoir dam’s walkway, Heckatty forces Childes over its edge.
  • Although Childes doesn’t quite register what happens, Heckatty, seemingly driven by her advancing ghostly victims, ends up in a similar position.
• Lonely Among People: On Open Day, Jeannette, away from the heightened loneliness for her own parents threatened by her peers’ united families, sneaks back to her dormitory.
• Lunacy: Overoy notes the police in general to acknowledge, during full moon, generally increased crime rate. He ponders the moon’s effect on the tide - and perhaps the semi-liquid human brain.
• Magnetic Medium: Shortly after her death, Childes’s mother was drawn to his extrasensory insights. On young Annabel's death, her friend Gabby receives a similar visit.
• Mind Rape:
  • Having sensed Childes's involuntarily psychic observation, Heckatty deliberately probes his mind with visions of her crimes. Childes telepathically feels Heckatty’s “obscene glory,” and is terrified that he may be the crimes’ amnesiac perpetrator. He most certainly is not.
  • During their moonlit confrontation on the dam’s walkway, Heckatty forcibly imparts severely exacerbated images of Amy’s car crash wounds; a fatal and brutal version of Jeannette’s attempted hanging, and a vision of Gabby with open torso and exposed, animate organs.
• Mirror Scare: Driving his car, Childes, in the rear-view mirror, suddenly sees Heckatty's eyes.
• Mood Whiplash: At the Sebire’s dinner party, during George Duxbury’s risque story, Childes succumbs to a distant vision of the exhumation of a small boy’s corpse.
• My Significance Sense Is Tingling: Played for Horror. Over breakfast with Amy, Childes is suddenly devastated by a definite persuasion of seven-year-old Gabby’s endangerment. A telephone call to Fran reveals Gabby’s friend Annabel to have vanished. He later irresistibly realises Annabel to have died quickly.
• Mysterious Mist: With Heckatty about to push Childes over the reservoir dam’s walkway, mutually heard telepathic voices precede a pale mist, which refines into distinct human shapes.
• Organ Theft: A small boy’s desecrated heart is seen to have bite marks - Heckatty, to absorb their vitality and to bar the slain from reclaiming their souls, Heckatty eats of their organs.
• Panicky Expectant Father: Played for Drama - during daughter Gabby’s birth, her endangerment by a mucus blockage nearly made Childes collapse with fear.
• Parental Abandonment: With her parents stationed in South Africa by her father’s engineering job, fourteen-year-old Jeannette misses them.
• Parents in Distress: While Childes confronts Heckatty, seven-year-old daughter Gabby, hysterical over a dream in which her father, over a huge body of water, is attacked by a "monster lady". With Gabby having already shown signs of having inherited her father’s gift, Overroy hastens to the island’s reservoir.
• Police Are Useless: Averted. Detective Inspector Ken Overoy, having, in search of a child molesting serial killer, learned to respect Childes’s extrasensory insights, eventually manages to identify the new killer.
• Police Psychic: Childes.
• Properly Paranoid: Alone in her quarters, a suddenly unnerved Miss Pipprelly, aware of her own psychic faculties, resolves to investigate. And smells petrol…
• Psychic Children: Gabby starts to show signs of having inherited her father’s gift.
• Psychic Link: Having suppressed his extrasensory insight for much of his life, Childes, three years ago, found it involuntarily attuned to that of a child-molesting serial killer.
  Childes: Psychics say our minds are like radio receivers, tuning into other wavelengths all the time, picking up different frequencies: well, maybe he was transmitting on a particular frequency that only I could receive, the excitement he felt at the kill boosting the output, making it powerful enough to reach me.
• Psychic Powers:
  • As a boy, Jonathan Childes, pending others’ mishap, had occasional precognitive realisations - including his mother’s untimely death. Blamed by his father for somehow causing it, Childes guiltily suppressed his extrasensory insight - which, in adulthood, awoke in response to a succession of murders. Three years since helping the police find the killer, Childes is once more disturbed by brutal visions.
  • Headmistress Estelle Piprelly, also prone to precognitive insights, wonders about Childes.
  • A psychiatric hospital nurse, known only as Heckatty, on sensing Childes’s reaching mind, taunts him with horrific visions and, eventually, telepathically induced pain.
• Psychic Strangle: In Childes, Heckatty eventually manages to telepathically induce the physical effects of bodily assault - including strangulation, by which she forces him to crash his car.
• Psychometry: On touching a moonstone found in a murdered corpse, Childes sees, within the stone, a blue flash. To Detective Inspector Overoy's alarm, a sudden tingling causes Childes's hair to ripple. He feels a distant, barbarously warped mind.
• Rage Breaking Point: Downplayed. After Childes and Amy’s car crash, Paul Sebire’s paranoid bluster climaxes in an accusation of Childes to have been behind the attempted hanging of young Jeannette. While sorely galled, Childes calmly dismisses Sebire’s raving. Played Straight when Sebire then punches him.
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • Detective Inspector Overoy, having been helped by Childes on a previous murder case, works hard to spare him any more intrusive publicity.
  • In the hospital following Childes and Amy’s car crash, Dr Poulain tries to calm the raging Paul Sebire.
• Resigned to the Call: While Childes dreads some terrible consequence of pursuing his psychic insight, enforced remote exposure to Heckatty's sawing off the top of an elderly mental patient’s head pressures Childes to get back in touch with the police.
• Robbing the Dead: To bar the Hecate-sacrificed victims from reclaiming their souls, Hecatty steals certain body parts.
• Rooftop Confrontation: Having made psychic contact with the killer, Childes is summoned, high above the island’s reservoir, to the adjacent dam’s walkway, to finally meet the killer.
• Scars Are Forever: Downplayed - from Childes’s psychokinetically enforced car crash, Amy retains small but permanent scars, repairable by minor plastic surgery.
• Scenery Gorn: Heckatty’s incineration of La Roche Ladies' College is brutally believable.
• Seeing Through Another's Eyes: Through Heckatty’s perspective, Childes senses her crimes.
• Secret Relationship: At work, Childes and Amy keep things strictly formal - although their gossip-happy charges remain suspicious.
• Shattering the Illusion: When Heckatty psychically simulates in Childes a burning of his internal organs, the pain distracts from fear, which breaks the spell.
• Shrinking Violet: Fourteen-year-old Jeannette has a timidity Childes finds both disarming and faintly exasperating.
• Shout-Out: Gabby’s letters to Childes come in envelopes engraved with the cartoon figure of Snoopy.
• The Sneaky Guy: Paul Sebire, vaguely familiar with Childes’s name, has Island Police Committee member Victor Platneur discreetly check to see if Childes has been involved with police - and learns him to have been under suspicion for murder. While Amy protests that Childes helped solve the crimes, Sebire remains wary.
• Starting a New Life: From the public’s morbid interest in his psychic assistance of the police, Childes fled to an unnamed one of the Channel Islands. Three years on, he rents a detached cottage, and works as a peripatetic computer science teacher.
• Stern Teacher: Headmistress Estelle Piprelly, to staff as well as students.
• Sympathetic Adulterer: With neighbouring young Annabel murdered in place of their targeted daughter, Childes spends the night at Fran’s. That night, a traumatised Fran seeks, from Childes, intimate comfort.
• Touch Telepathy: Via telephone - when Childes, with the killer, makes direct psychic contact, a car crash-recovering Amy, through the phone lines, feels Childes’s contained fury. Childes’s urge for Amy to get some sleep then makes her feel irresistibly tired.
• Traumatic Superpower Awakening:
  • In childhood, before their guilt-induced suppression, Childes’s psychic insights were rudimentary. In adulthood, involuntary attunement to a murderous child molestor awakened them.
  • When young Annabel goes missing, Gabby, late that night, is disturbed by a waking vision of her friend, looking sad. The encounter rekindles Childes’s own encounter, aged seven, with his week-dead mother.
• True Craftsman: Childes’s digital flair is sometimes considered intuitive.
• Unhappy Medium: Downplayed. Childes’s psychic insight causes him a lot of stress, but this is mainly because of its revival from dormancy by involuntary attuning to two deeply depraved minds.
• Vampiric Draining: Heckatty, to “taste their souls,” eats from victims’ organs.
• Vengeful Ghost: Seemingly drawn to Childes’s and Heckatty’s psychic union, the mutilated slain, from an ethereal mist, around their killer, increasingly solidify. The murdered small boy, in pursuit of his stolen heart, rips out one of his murderer’s eyes.
• Villains Want Mercy: Downplayed. Dangling over the dam’s walkway, Heckatty asks Childes for help - but her plea lacks entreaty. Furthermore, still psychically attuned to Childes, Heckatty, whilst hanging onto the walkway for dear life, with one eye missing, continues to telepathically torment Childes with horrifying images - the plea for help is made in mockery.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: At twenty-three, Amy is said to have a “quiet maturity.”
• You Are Too Late: With fire raging through La Roche Ladies’ College, Childes finds, trapped on a stairwell, Kelly, Patricia, Adele, Caroline, Isobel, Sarah-Jane and Matron Kathryn Bates. Getting some bedding from a dormitory, he rescues ten-year-old Sandy and Rachel. When he gets back, the stairwell has collapsed into the inferno.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: In Childes, Heckatty psychically stimulates bodily pain. While its effects are tangibly manifest, it may, by recognition of its arbitrary imposition, be denied.