Read Meet Me in the Moon Room for Free Online Page A

before that, it had been Lewis and snake handling in Louisiana. Marilyn hadn’t spoken for a long time after that one, either.
    The reason the gang needed to make up a new tradition every year was that they had no traditions of their own. They were neither Christian nor Jewish, neither Muslim nor Hindu. The list of things they were not was very long. They were Americans of a certain class and education, in their forties, atheists or maybe closet agnostics. No children. They felt completely left out of things during the holidays, so they came together to seek out new rituals, new meanings. Over the years the search itself had become the tradition.
    This year Marilyn had gotten a head start on not speaking to Stuart. She was turning herself down, speaking less frequently, and with less volume when she did speak. She was as quiet as a mouse on the drive out to the silo, her head resting against the car window until her cheek got too cold and she sat up to stare out at the snow. She looked like a sickly child bundled up in too many winter clothes. She coughed, and her cough was an accusation.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “Are we there yet?”
    He hadn’t told her what he was up to. He knew that telling her would be like telling everyone. Elizabeth would have wheedled it out of her. He wanted it to be a big surprise—the vast plain of snow, the endless drive into nowhere, the headlights finally picking out the wire fence and the shack that must surely be too small to be their destination.
    “Yes,” he said at last, “we’re here.”
    He and Lewis busted open the frozen door on the shack covering the entrance, and they all climbed down into the silo. Stuart switched on the power and gave them the tour. Here was the control room, now a media center, and here the crew quarters, now cozy bedrooms. Way down there were the spooky storerooms, and all those corridors and huge heavy doors, and, maybe most disturbing, the hole where the intercontinental ballistic missile had been. It was half-filled with water—more than a hundred feet of water, Stuart said, and there were flooded passages, another underwater world down there. Echoes and a slimy green smell. Even with the flashlights it wasn’t easy to make out the surface of the water. None of them stayed long at the edge.
    He led them back to a room that had once been the crew’s mess. He let them bunch up at the door behind him, then stepped aside and switched on the light to reveal a lavishly appointed dinner table.
    The walls of the dining room had been papered white with a faint red rose pattern. A picture Stuart had first mistaken for a big photograph mimicked a window on one wall. When he looked a little closer he saw it was a painting. Not a very good painting. He doubted even a very good painting would have chased away the overwhelming sense of being underground. It had something to do with the way light and sound behaved, something about the earthy smell of the air.
    “Everyone sit down,” he said. “I’ll serve the soup.”
    Once into the soup course, Stuart warmed them up with his “alas, we middle-aged American atheists have no deep traditions” routine. It was the standard opening of their ritual.
    “The Catholic Mass or the twelve days of Christmas. Hanukkah or Ramadan. We’re excluded from all of that.”
    “Not excluded,” Elizabeth said. “We’ve opted out.”
    “Yes,” they all said together, like a chant. “Opted out.”
    “Well, tonight,” Stuart said, “we are going to do an exercise in creative belief.”
    He had their attention. This would be the point of the evening.
    His proposal was simple.
    Just believe something.
    He suggested they start with ghosts.
    “You’re suggesting that if there are no ghosts,” Bill said, “we must make our own?”
    “Exactly,” Stuart said.
    “We have met the supernatural,” Elizabeth said, “and the supernatural is us?”
    “Now you’re getting it,” Stuart said.
    “But why are we doing