Crypt of the Moon Spider (Lunar Gothic Trilogy, #1)

by Nathan Ballingrud

Veronica recalled a local myth, which held that the moon was the inhabited skull of a long-dead god who once trod the dark pathways of space like a king through his star-curtained palace.

pleasant face that seemed somehow false, like a coat of yellow paint on a haunted house.

“I tried to kill myself.” The casual way he said it horrified her. It sounded a note inside her, like the tolling bell of a secret annihilating church buried in her heart.

“I didn’t used to be this way. I was happy when I was a child. I had such grand ideas about how life would be. What happened to me? What happened to us?” “We grew up.”

“Has it occurred to you that your aversion to treatment is a symptom of your illness?”

The thought crawled out of the wet black loam of her brain like some horrid new insect. It scrabbled unchecked through her mind, eating everything clean and good in her, laying clutches of wet, mucousy eggs in its stead.

I just didn’t want to live. You can’t make somebody want to live.”

When successful, though, the webbing filled the brain’s missing places with minimal side effects. And so the remainder of Charlie’s brain combined with the rags of an older intelligence, and for the rest of his life Charlie’s dreams were seasoned with memories of a dead colossus: the ice seas of Europa, the storm-cities of Neptune, the mausoleum ships drifting beyond the solar system’s edge.

“How could I ever become a burden to them? That doesn’t make any sense.” “When what you need outweighs what you offer. Make no mistake, child. Your life does not belong to you.”

What an unmusical thing, to be a human being. She had a nagging memory of something grander, buried in the human meat of her brain. It rolled over, struggling to be recalled.

She peered down through the long gulf until she found the little girl staring back up at her, a flag of life in the blowing wheat.