Hungry Moon by Ramsey Campbell Page A

nightmares?'
    'By telling her the devil will get her if she doesn't confess every silly little wrong she does. Why, they even wanted her to tell Miss Kramer she'd fallen asleep one night before saying her prayers. I admire Miss Kramer and I know she wouldn't want to hear that sort of thing. They've got Kirsty having nightmares about something walking down the moonlight and growing bigger and heaven knows what else. That's not what she comes to school to learn.'
    'If I could just explain,' one of Mann's followers said. 'We believe in helping one another. A sin confessed is a burden shared. Our children are only trying to help yours. Maybe you should ask yourself if God is sending your child nightmares to show where she's gone wrong.'
    'I'll tell you what, I know my child a damn sight better than your children do, and I don't think I'm the only one who feels that way.' He glanced quickly about the noncommittal faces. 'Isn't that so?'
    The murmurs of assent were muted and difficult to locate. Mrs Scragg smirked at him. 'You'll have to face up to it, not all children are as perfect as yours. I reckon I'm speaking for most of us here when I say that anything we can do to improve them is worth doing.'
    'Not much chance of improvement with the size of your classes now,' Jeremy Booth said. 'You can't expect children to do their best when they're sitting two to a desk.'
    'They cope well enough in my class and my husband's.' Mrs Scragg craned her neck, and found him. 'You aren't even a parent. What do you mean by pretending you are?'
    'He's here on behalf of Andrew's parents,' Diana said.
    Mrs Scragg didn't even glance at her. 'Let's be hearing from someone who's got the right to speak. Who's going to speak up for the school? Our new friends will be thinking they were wrong about us.'
    'You have to have rules,' Mr Clegg, the greengrocer, said shyly, 'even rules that don't make sense. When the children grow up they'll have to obey laws that may not make sense to them either.'
    Diana thought of some of the Scraggs' rules - no trousers for girls in the winter; no juice for the children to drink at lunchtime, only hot water. 'Aren't you talking about training people never to want to change anything? Too much of that and we'd be training them not to think.'
    'They aren't here to think, they're here to learn.' Mrs Scragg looked pleased with her turn of phrase. 'I want a show of hands now; you've all heard the arguments. You know people who aren't even brave enough to show their faces are doing things you never thought you'd see in our town, just because they don't want .to be told they're sinners like the rest of us. Now then, with all that going on, who wants to see less discipline here at the school?'
    'That wasn't what we were talking about,' Kirsty's father protested.
    'It may not be what you wanted to talk about, but there are other children besides yours to be considered. If she keeps on having nightmares you'd best get her to the doctor. Now then, does anybody want to make our
    new friends feel unwelcome because they act like Christians?' Mrs Scragg snorted when there was no response. 'So who isn't happy about the discipline?'
    Kirsty's father and Jeremy raised their hands at once; a few others went up tentatively. Parents were glancing surreptitiously about to see if there was enough of a response for their own not to be singled out and deciding against responding. 'Not many of you,' Mr Scragg said, slapping his small hands together. 'If anybody wants a word with me afterward, I'll be waiting.'
    But after the meeting, the rest of which was uneventful, several parents came into Diana's classroom to tell her how much they preferred her teaching to the rest of the school. Presumably they were too afraid for their children to have spoken up at the meeting. 'We were thinking of moving to Manchester anyway,' Kirsty's father told her, and suddenly that seemed a world away.
    She walked home feeling slow and dull. The moon was out of sight