The Gleam of the Gilded Trap in Bushmantle
The air over Bushmantle was the color of old, oxidized gold, thick and humming. Elias, the town’s lone amateur astronomer and professional cynic, was the first to feel it. Not the gravitational pull on the ocean tides, but the pull on the mind.
The November Supermoon—closest, brightest, and most unnervingly golden of the year—had risen. It didn’t look silver-white; it looked like a monstrous, luminous coin hung low in the velvet blackness, shedding a sickly, buttery light that seemed to press down on the quaint, slightly crumbling homes of Bushmantle.
Elias had been trying to photograph the perigee from his roof, aiming his camera towards the peculiar glow over the old watermill. The moment he looked through the lens, the world warped. The golden light didn’t illuminate; it saturated. It didn’t reflect; it demanded.
The next morning, the town of Bushmantle was subtly, terrifyingly different.
The Beaver’s Blind Ambition
The ancient folklore held that the November moon was the Beaver Moon, the time when the industrious little creatures worked tirelessly to build their dams and stock their winter larders. But tonight, that focus had become a fever in Bushmantle.
The golden light didn’t just shine on the town; it seemed to leach out the very essence of human preparation, twisting it into a single, maddening obsession: Acquisition.
First, it was the beavers themselves, their usual dam-building activities becoming unnervingly frantic in the river that snaked through Bushmantle. Elias saw them, but they weren’t building with sticks and mud anymore. They were dragging stolen heirlooms, antique silverware, and anything that glittered under the unnatural light—into the colossal, impossible dam they were building near the old mill. They had an insane gleam in their tiny black eyes, their chattering a high, desperate frequency. The structure was a towering, grotesque monument of scavenged wealth and junk, rising obscenely from the water, all to block a river that didn’t need blocking.
The Town’s Twisted Treasure
The humans were worse.
Under the Supermoon’s hypnotic, golden glow, the need to collect became the need to possess. It started with hoarding. Old Mr. Henderson, the clockmaker, was found attempting to dismantle the town’s ancient clock tower, convinced he needed to “own all the time” before it ran out. He was muttering about the moon’s ‘golden promise’ of eternal moments. Mrs. Gable, the proprietor of the general store, had locked herself inside, frantically trying to count every single item, from rusty nails to dusty tins of sardines, claiming the moon demanded a full inventory of her domain.
The gold light had made the people of Bushmantle’s deepest, most primal fear—loss—into a terrible, manic engine of collection. They were gathering not just objects, but abstract concepts, desperate to hold onto anything that might slip away.
Elias realized the moon wasn’t just a light; it was a filter. It was amplifying a single, terrible thought in every mind: You don’t have enough. You must take more. You must never lose what is yours.
The scariest moment came when he saw his neighbor, kindly old Mrs. Peterson. She wasn’t carrying gold or books. She was carrying a large kitchen knife, its blade reflecting the eerie golden light, and stalking the cobblestone streets of Bushmantle with a terrifying, purposeful stride.
Elias asked her what she was looking for. Her eyes, usually gentle and blue, were now like polished amber in the golden light.
“My youth,” she hissed, her voice dry and brittle, echoing slightly in the quiet, unnaturally lit street. “The Moon promised me I must collect what I lost. The Moon promised it must be taken back from those who still possess it.”
She wasn’t looking for a treasure chest. She was looking for life, for time, for the potential of the young girls down the street. The Supermoon, hanging like a colossal, gilded trap above them, had driven the town of Bushmantle mad with the lust for what they had lost and could lose. They were gathering wealth, youth, time, and sanity with the panicked ferocity of beavers stockpiling for an eternal, uncoming winter.
Elias dropped his camera and ran, the suffocating, beautiful, golden light of the closest moon of the year following him like the glare of a jealous, all-possessing god, casting long, wavering shadows down the familiar, now terrifying, streets of Bushmantle.
The Crazymad Writer Writes Again 