Waking the Moon

suddenly he was no longer afraid: not of the girls, not of anything, not even of those thin brown ropes, which he now saw were moving, sliding between the girls’ fingers and up along his legs. The sight should have terrified Baby Joe, but it did not. Instead he felt an odd exultation, a sense of imploding tension and release that was almost sexual. He knew he must be delirious.

Snakes, everywhere he looked there were snakes, slender brown vipers with triangular-shaped heads and tongues like split twigs dousing at the air. They slipped beneath the fabric of his trousers and flowed across his bare legs, and their touch was like the girls’, warm and dry. As though desert sand was being poured onto him, slowly and with exquisite care, as though he was himself a serpent, sloughing away an old lifeless skin and wriggling through the dust.

The girls were still there, he could see them through slitted eyes. Only they no longer looked like bull- leapers or legong dancers but like people he knew. Angelica was there, which did not surprise him, but he felt no rancor toward her, no rage that she had somehow caused Hasel’s death. Because Hasel was there, too, his ruddy face exploding into laughter when he saw Baby Joe—

Hey, man! What took you so long?!

—his embrace joyful as he reached for his friend. And there was someone else—Oliver, Baby Joe knew it must be Oliver though there was something different about him, he had changed somehow but it was all too much to take in, this mad exalted freedom, the sheer joy and unexpected delight of it all, nothing like what he had expected!

Hands were everywhere now, he could no longer see but he could feel them, pulling away his jacket and tearing open his T-shirt. Something bit at his left nipple; he shuddered and moaned at the sudden pain, and knew it must be one of the vipers. Its teeth piercing his flesh and then the slow surge of venom beneath the skin, like a wave building as it rushed through him. The pain came again at his left breast, but he was beyond that now. He was beyond them all, excepting only Hasel and the woman waiting behind him, her eyes laughing and her mouth forming his name as she took his hand and he knew at last what it was all about, there had been a mystery to it all along, serpents and bulls and a woman he had foolishly feared; but then he was lost in Her embrace, Her arms closing about him and his heart bursting with joy as She took him and he was Hers, Hers at last.

CHAPTER 19 Fire from the Middle Kingdom

ON THE PATIO AT Huitaca Angelica stood. It was evening of a day so hot that all the small things of the desert had retreated to their lairs: rattlesnakes and Gila monsters and scorpions coiled beneath the burning stones like hidden treasure, with their gleaming black carapaces and jeweled eyes. Above the Devil’s Clock lightning spiked the darkness. The bolts looked like cracks in the desert sky, but only Angelica knew what lay behind them.

She was alone now. Kendra and Martin had left earlier that week, Martin to return to California, Kendra to prepare for college in September. Kendra had never gotten over Cloud’s death. Her relationship with Martin soured, she grew teary and slept too much and refused Angelica’s offers to help her attend a grief workshop. Finally word came from Bennington that she would be able to start there as a freshman after all. The next day she told Angelica she was leaving, and the day after that she was gone. Martin split the following afternoon.

“You want me to, like, recommend someone to take my place?” He leaned across the hood of his Jeep, his white-blond hair falling into his eyes. “I mean, it’s probably not so cool for you to be out here all by yourself, Angelica. That cougar could still be around—”

Angelica smiled. “Sunday will be here.”

“Sunday!” Martin snorted. “Like Sunday’s gonna save you if something happens —”

“Nothing’s going to happen, Martin,” Angelica said soothingly. She tousled his hair and let her hand rest on his shoulder. He was so beautiful, beautiful things always made her yearn to possess them and it would be so easy, just a few moments alone and then…

Martin sighed. He took Angelica’s hand in his and squeezed it, then grabbed her in a bear hug. “Well, I better go. But I’m gonna miss you, Angelica.”

She laughed, her bronze hair falling across his. “Oh, you’ll see me again, Martin. Don’t worry.”

She hadn’t asked him to stay on. She knew he would refuse. The truth was that she no longer needed bodyguards. She no longer needed anyone. The house at Huitaca would be closed after tonight. Despite what Angelica had told Martin, Sunday would not go to Huitaca alone, so Angelica had given the housekeeper an envelope with a month’s wages and a false promise that she would call her when she returned in the fall.

And that was that. She had already turned off the water and notified the electric and telephone companies that she was canceling their services. The oriental lilies and freesia that had been slowly deteriorating in their Waterford vases were gone, tossed into a patch of ocotillo outside. Before leaving, Sunday swept the floors clean of sand and cactus needles, folded Angelica’s linen shifts and the embroidered camisoles of honey-colored silk, and set them inside drawers among little muslin bags of sandalwood and dried orange peel. Angelica had seen to the last bits of tidying up, putting back on the proper shelves the notebooks containing so much of her work. Translations of the Sybaris tablets that she had made at the National Museum in Naples, with their invocation of the Queen of the Underworld. The copy of the Dem?ric Hymn to Othiym from Keftiu, where night after night she had sat bowed over her desk, bathed in the light from a smoky clay lantern, its wick a calyx of false dittany floating in olive oil. One by one she had transcribed the cuneiform tablets, and returned them to their resting place in the tombs beneath the house. Hand-lettered sheets and Xeroxes of parchment pages, drawings she had copied from vases and rhytons and frescoes, from forgotten temples within the rain forest and subway platforms near the great necropolis in Paris: all of them would now be carefully interred at Huitaca, to be given over to whatever priestess next claimed them. For Angelica herself, they had no further use.

Looking over all her things for one last time, Angelica sighed. For nine days now she had been fasting, as the ritual commanded. She had grown so thin, and her skin had taken on an almost luminous translucence: as though her blood was already fleeing her, as though whatever strange raptures she had given herself to had purged her flesh of color and sinew and bone. When she gazed into the mirror her uncle had given her so long ago, the face that gazed back was no longer her own, but that of a caryatid or kouroi— beautiful, ageless, inhuman. For a long moment she stared at herself, touching the heavy mass of her bronze curls and seeking in vain for a grey hair. Letting her fingers brush against her cheeks, the skin smooth and cool as faience, unlined, unscarred. To look at her, one would never think that she was a grown woman with a grown son; but neither would one see anywhere within her the memory of the girl who once upon a time had astonished her friends with her explosive laugh.

“It was so long ago,” she whispered, and set the mirror back amongst the curling photographs and antique silver frames, the papery nautilus and cowries and rose-colored sea urchin. As she removed her hand something fell. She heard the chime of breaking glass, and with a low cry reached to pluck a photo from a sad heap of shivered crystal.

It was a picture of herself and Baby Joe and Oliver, Baby Joe smiling for perhaps the only time in front of the camera, Angelica in the middle and Oliver at her other side. His arm was draped across her shoulder, his eyes were so bright they might have been lit from within by candles, like a jack-o’-lantern.

“Oliver.” She bit her lip and blinked tears from her eyes. “Oh, Oliver…”

She thought of the poem that Sweeney Cassidy had liked to quote back at the

Divine, drunk on cheap beer and sentiment—
When suddenly at the midnight hour
an invisible troupe is heard passing
with exquisite music, with shouts—
do not mourn in vain your fortune failing you now,
your works that have failed, the plans of your life