Part I - Isabeal
I sat in the garden late at night the first time I felt it. I didn’t know what it was, but I was certain it was there, watching me, and I couldn’t say why I knew. It wasn’t unpleasant. Actually, it was quite comforting, and I felt drawn towards the darkness. It was mid-September and the weather was mild, and when Mother called me and told me that I would get a cold if I stayed out any longer, I hesitated to go to my room. She had to call twice and come out herself before I reluctantly left the chair on the terrace and went to bed.
I only stayed in bed long enough for Mother to go to bed herself, before I snuck out. I didn’t dare to go downstairs, but my bedroom had a sloping wall, in which there was a large window that I could open and climb through onto the roof. I picked a blanket from my bed, draped it around my shoulders for warmth and sat on the roof for most of the night. It must have been near dawn when I climbed back into bed. It was my luck that it was a Saturday evening, for even though I didn’t have a cold (I rarely get those) I was so tired, that I couldn’t stay awake to get through a full day at school. And more importantly: I didn’t get punished for napping in church.
I smile at the memory. I was eleven years old then, no more than a child. I sip the hot tea in the bottle and adjust the blanket around my shoulders. For almost six years, I have been sitting on the roof whenever I felt it. At first, I didn’t know when or why it came, but when the spring came, and the weather became warmer and the sky less cloudy, I suddenly knew what drew me in. The large white globe in the sky that comes every month or so, the same large white globe that I am watching now. And whilst I have been watching the full moon, the moon has been watching me. I must have been a bit odd to watch. A skinny girl with spots on her face, no curves and dirty-blond hair that would never behave properly, who sat on the roof of a terraced house staring up at it. And then watching her transformation into a young woman, who was still slender, but no longer skinny, with her thick brown curls in a braid that fell over her shoulder and bosom, and she was still sitting and watching the moon, though from another rooftop, with a blanket around her shoulders and sipping tea from a bottle.
Sometimes I feel a bit odd, sneaking out of my window to sit on the roof in the middle of the night, but I never feel so while I am sitting here. I can tell the moon anything, even my secrets, and I know she will keep them. And I will tell her everything that has happened to me in the last month. I never speak though. I never make a sound. At first, I was afraid to wake Mother, later I found it embarrassing, but now I know that the reason for my silence is that I don’t need to make a sound for the moon to hear me. I speak to her in my mind, and she herself never answers me. But she gives me peace. And I succeed in finding peace in her company, every time I come here.
Tonight, I am having a hard time finding peace though. I missed the last moon, as I was admitted to the hospital, and the episode that put me there has left me with scars.
Well, one physical scar… the rest is in my mind, though I don’t remember it. All I remember is the pain in my left shoulder, where a wolf had bit me in my trapezius muscle close to my neck. And now, I carry the round mark of his teeth on my skin.
The episode in the woods five weeks ago has managed to remind me of what happened to Mother. She died when I was thirteen. Alec was eighteen then, and he has taken care of me since. Less than a week after Mother died, we left the house I grew up in.
First, we went to live in the woods. We did so for four months, before we came here. To the Pack House.
It is the roof of the Pack House that I am sitting on now. I asked for a room close to the roof, and the housekeeper gave me the largest room on the second floor of the East wing. My window is no longer sloping, but the building is half-timbered, and by climbing on the timber I can easily reach the roof. And here I sit.
Tonight, Moon, I have to tell you everything, from the very beginning.
I sit up on the roof all night, thinking and talking to the moon, and when dawn comes, I climb down and throw the empty bottle inside, so it lands in a pile of clothes on the floor, then I climb in myself, closing the window after me. Today is September 2nd. The next full moon will be on October 1st. Tomorrow, it'll be September 3rd, and I’ll be 17 years old. I have aged, and I have changed a lot. The moon has not. Yet I am still fascinated by her, and whatever it is, it is still there.
