Iridescent Moon

From the hilltop above Kinclaid, the two boys had set up their telescope. The sun had begun to dip below the horizon, the stars and planets had begun to reveal themselves, the veil of light concealing them gently pulled back. The two boys, like hunters, moved their instruments gently as if any sudden movement might scare their prey back into hiding. Beneath them, in the valley, the lights of Kinclaid began to flicker on, a constellation of stars mirroring the ones above. The weather was optimal. Low winds, the gentle warmth you only get from a late summer’s evening, and what clouds dotted the sky were thin and wispy. Andrew and John peered through their telescope, Andrew would say some figures or measures or any observations, and John would record them. Then they would swap. The process continued, sweeping the night sky for anything of interest.

Quarter past twelve they opened their backpacks and took out their thermoses. Mom had packed them soup. By one they had finished their soup and returned to the hunt. Andrew peered through the lens at the moon. The lens was smeared with some sort of oily sheen. Gently, he cleaned it., When he looked again, the sheen was still there, a ballet of colour dancing and swirling around the moon. Andrew called John over, and John checked the lens. Nothing there. He looked again, the glimmering iridescent sheen still covering the moon.

“It’s like an aurora borealis or something, yeah?” Andrew asked.

“I think, but I don’t think that’s possible” John responded as he rummaged through the astronomy book they had borrowed from the library. He squinted at the moon. Now that he was really looking there was a distinct colourful pattern to the moon’s glow. “And it’s not the telescope, look!” he exclaimed. His finger pointing at the moon.

The boys both squinted now.

“Okay, write all this down” John handed their journal to his brother while he moved to reposition the telescope. Each new look at the moon resulted in new colours and new patterns, constantly shifting. It was beautiful. John watched, entranced; he had never seen anything like this, he doubted anyone had. John couldn’t focus on any part of the moon for too long before he began to feel nauseous and sick, so his eyes — and his mind — dashed about. But the colours, the patterns, were the most gorgeous thing John had ever seen. They burnt themselves into the folds of his mind.

“John!” Andrew yelled, hitting his brother in the back with the flat of his hand. “Are you listening to me?”

John came to a start, spinning around wildly and knocking the telescope over. “Look what you made me do!” hHe said angrily, picking up the telescope.

“Its three A.M. John, let’s go home. We can talk to one of the teachers at school about this on Monday,” Andrew said, worry creeping in his voice.

John was pale, his pupils were massive, his lips fading into a slight bluish tinge. When Andrew put his hand on John’s forehead. John flinched away from the touch, but even the moment of contact showed John was having some sort of fever.

“Let’s get you home, man.”

Months had passed, and despite their best efforts, they had not spotted the iridescent moon again. Their science teacher had proposed that it was simply a trick of the light or a spot on the telescope lens, and when they insisted it wasn’t he gently told them to bother someone else with this.

The colourful moon had consumed John’s every waking moment. He couldn’t focus in school or at home; every moment he had free he spent thinking about the event. Every night, even school nights, he marched up to the top of the hill to watch the moon, until their mother locked up the telescope. Andrew was curious too, but his brother’s obsession worried him. After a long period of begging their mother drove them to the city for a meeting with the head of the astronomy department at St. Dominic University.

The professor, an aged man with decades of experience, sat quietly as the boys explained what they had seen, showed him their journal, and asked for an explanation.

With a deep sigh, the professor cleaned his glasses. “I admire your passion for amateur astronomy, I really do, but what you’re describing is both impossible and easily explainable by a myriad of other factors. I’m sorry boys, I know this must be disappointing.”

Andrew stood up, thanked the professor for his time, and asked him to call or send them a letter if he heard anything else about this strange phenomenon. The professor, for what it was worth, said he would.

John sat, hunched in his chair. When the professor went to shake his hand John shot up and slammed his hand on the old oak table.

“No!” he yelled. “That’s not good enough! I know what I saw! I know what I saw, you weren’t there! It wasn’t a mistake, it was there!” John’s voice had mounted into terror by the time his tirade came to an end.

The professor’s patience was up, and after a few choice words about respect and a call to the front desk, the boys were escorted off the campus to their mother sitting in her car angrily. The drive home was quiet.

Andrew tried to move on, but John couldn’t. He snuck out at night, he neglected school and friends and family, he pored over astronomy textbooks and anything he could find. He spent his birthday money in secret on a new telescope until that one, too, was confiscated and returned to the store. John had begun to lose weight, his appearance became unkept and his presence was announced by a distinct odour. Therapy didn’t work, the medication didn’t work; John was a man possessed.

Then, one night while Andrew was trying to sleep, John burst into his room. His eyes were large, pupils dilated, beads of sweat dripping from his forehead. “I saw it! I saw it!” he yelled at his groggy brother as he ripped open the curtains.

“Go to bed, John,” Andrew groaned.

John grew angry, and he shook his brother violently “Look, it’s there1 I’m not– we’re not crazy!” His grin was like a knife wound from ear to ear.

Andrew turned over and squinted at the moon. Nothing. “I don’t see anything, John,” he mumbled, his mind already drifting back to sleep.

John looked back at the moon “No! No, it was there! I saw it. You believe me right? I saw it! It was so pretty. You believe me right?” He asked with a pathetic whimper.

“Yeah, John, I believe you,” Andrew muttered into his pillow.

John snarled, his face contorted. Suddenly his face went lax. He let out an exasperated sigh and then retreated to his room.

The next morning Andrew awoke to a scream. His mother’s scream. He jumped out of bed and ran to see his mother sobbing. John’s body hung in his room. Andrew couldn’t help but sob too. He watched as his brother’s body was moved by a gurney, his mother grasping and clawing at it while a neighbour and family friend held her back. He watched himself walk into John’s room, he watched his own hands as they opened the note John had left. In large shaky letters, John had written only the words It was gorgeous.

Years passed. Andrew studied astronomy at the state university. At first, he spent his time reading textbooks, attending classes, and utilizing every resource his education could give him; he was a prodigious student. But there were no answers to be found. He grew more and more frustrated, and he read more and more esoteric texts. At first, just obscure papers published by nobodies, then he started digging back further. He tried to find something, anything that could explain what they had seen, what his brother had seen, but nothing. There was nothing.

So Andrew kept looking, scanning the night skies; he hoped beyond hope that he would see the iridescent moon again, and feared beyond anything that he would.