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.

The open hatchway was a cauldron of steam and light; it looked like an artist’s rendition of the entrance to Hell.

“We had a terrible commute,” he said, unbuckling himself. “Your pilot flew like a Hun. Is he auditioning for a circus?”

“They’re scary, aren’t they?” The web-shrouded forest murmured quietly around them, dense ranks of trees gathering black air beneath their entangled arms. Bentley leaned closer, as if confiding a secret. “I’ve heard that sometimes patients escape into them.”

“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.”

Home, in the earliest days of lunar exploration, a group of prospectors and landbreakers were said to have discovered the lair of a Moon Spider—a massive creature supposedly possessed of psychic properties—buried deep in the moon’s rock.

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

“Some people say the moon is a skull,”

But the thought of turning back, of willingly delivering herself back into the care of the institution, was untenable. A dreadful epiphany: it would be better to die.