Waking the Moon

“Sweeney! Come here!”

“What?” I walked into the kitchen, to find him perched in a chair staring at the tiny Sony on the counter. “Is that news?” I asked darkly. “You know I hate news—”

“Just listen!”

He turned up the volume, so I could hear a correspondent in L.A. talking about how a previously unknown fungus had apparently been released from somewhere within the ground during the previous spring’s earthquake. People all over southern California were getting sick, their symptoms alarmingly similar to those caused by biological warfare in Southeast Asia in the sixties.

“Isn’t this great? First rats, now fungus!” Dylan shook his head and reached for an opened bag of tortilla chips. “My mother is right—we are going to hell in a clutch purse! Here—” He pushed the bag at me. “I got some salsa.”

I grimaced. A list of symptoms was scrolling across the postcard-sized screen, along with information numbers for the Center for Disease Control and NIH. “Thanks, Dylan. Maybe later.”

“Wait—don’t go, there’s supposed to be something about that man who boiled his kids in Trenton—”

“Dylan!”

I had started for the living room, when the screen switched from the L.A. correspondent to a woman standing in front of a huge sand-colored building.

“Hey,” I said. “I know that—”

“This morning, officials at the University of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine in Washington, D.C., confirmed that they had reached an agreement to transfer a collection of over three hundred ancient artifacts to the radical feminist group Potnia.”

“That’s the Divine!” I grabbed Dylan’s shoulder. “That’s where—”

“Shh—I can’t hear!”

“—as ongoing investigations continue at several museums in this country and abroad, amid rumors of a secret society from which women are barred, and even stranger allegations made by Potnia. We spoke to Professor Balthazar Warnick, Professor Emeritus at the University’s Thaddeus College.”

“Holy cow,” I breathed. “I don’t believe this—”

The screen showed a slight man in a three-piece suit, standing in a cavernous space. He was so thin as to appear almost wasted, but his hair was still dark, and his eyes were the same piercing eyes I had last seen years before at the Orphic Lodge.

“There has been absolutely no wrongdoing on the part of the University or any individuals associated with the institution,” he said. At the sound of his voice—silken as ever it had been, with that same ironic undertone of menace and laughter—I hugged myself; as though someone had opened a window onto winter. “We have held these items—and numerous others of greater value, I should add—for many, many years. Centuries, some of them.” He swept his hand upward to indicate the vaulted recesses of a ceiling high overhead, and I realized he was being taped somewhere in the recesses of the Shrine.

“No one, absolutely no one, at the University has ever gained any sort of financial benefit from these objects,” he went on. For an instant I saw a glint of fire in his eyes. “I should also say that, considering the political climate in many of the countries where these artifacts have their origin, the University has done an excellent job of safekeeping—”

Abruptly the camera cut to an elegantly dressed young woman sitting behind an important-looking desk. She was even more diminutive than Professor Warnick, with straight jet black hair and white skin and black eyes. Her almost childlike beauty was belied by her suit, which probably cost what I made in a month, and the delicately drawn tattoo on her cheek.

The newscaster intoned, “Rosanne Minerva, attorney and spokeswoman for Potnia, disagrees.”

“Some of these figurines, including the so-called ‘Tahor Venus,’ are literally tens of thousands of years old,” Rosanne Minerva said. Her tone was utterly self-assured. “For centuries this relatively small group of men—primarily American and European businessmen and scholars—has been hiding these treasures—these priceless religious artifacts that belong to women, and men, everywhere!”

When she said the word men it was with the sort of pity usually reserved for speaking of the terminally ill. The camera drew in for a close-up of her poised, aquiline face, and I got a better look at her tattoo. Without meaning to I gasped.

“What?” demanded Dylan.

The little cusp drawn so carefully upon her cheek was a perfect half-moon, incised with tiny swirled lines and meanders. The same lunar crescent that Angelica had worn: a lunula.

“What these men have done is nothing short of profanation,” Rosanne Minerva said. Her hand rested lightly upon a stack of papers, but I could see how her fingers tensed. “It is a sin, and a crime, and it will be—it has been—stopped.”

I continued to stare in disbelief even after the screen cut back to the newsroom.

“She’s just a lawyer,” Dylan said, reaching for another handful of chips. “I know who she is.”

“You do?”

“Sure. Potnia—they’re with my mother.” He turned to look at me, a curtain of dark hair flopping over his eyes. “Haven’t you ever heard of them?”

“Well, sort of. I read something about them. What—”

At that moment the door buzzer rang. Dylan stopped eating in mid-bite. I froze with one hand on the wall. Nobody rang that buzzer, except for UPS men and Seventh-Day Adventists.

“My mother!” whispered Dylan. He glanced nervously down at his shirt, then at me. “Uh-oh.”

“You stay here,” I commanded.

“Why?”

“I don’t know!” I said, flustered. “It’s my place, that’s why, I’ll open the door —”

“I live here too!” Dylan called after me plaintively, but he stayed in the kitchen.

I walked to the door in my bare feet, running a hand through my hair and cursing myself for not putting on makeup. Give it to Angelica to pull off something like this. After all these years, here she was coasting in with a little fanfare of related media coverage and not even a phone call to warn me. I could just make out a figure through the window, someone nearly hidden by wisteria. I stopped in front of the door, took a deep breath, and opened it. “Surprise,” someone rasped. It was Annie Harmon.

I was so stunned I could only gape. She had the same dun-colored hair, trimmed to a messy crew cut; the same recalcitrant cowlick, dusted now with grey; the same brown violet-tinged eyes and wanton voice. She was thinner than she had been, and it showed mostly in her face—puckish Annie had cheekbones now, and a small cleft in her chin, that obviously hadn’t just been put there for her music video. She had lines too, around her eyes and mouth; her arms were thin and muscled, her hands worn and raw-looking. Her tiny feet were shoved into red tennis shoes—expensive red tennis shoes. She wore torn fatigues, a blue flannel shirt with the sleeves ripped out, a gold wedding band on her right hand. She looked absolutely beautiful.

“Annie.” I fell back as she pushed past me into the room. “Uh—jeez, it’s uh—it’s great to see you.”

“I’m underwhelmed,” she said, and grabbed me in a hug. “Remember me? The girl least likely to succeed in a long-term heterosexual relationship?”

I laughed. “I dunno, Annie. I think I was in the running there for a while.”

She dropped her knapsack to the floor. “So: you happy to see me, or is that a roll of pennies in your pocket?” She grinned, but her voice sounded strained. As though she was putting on an act for me, as though if she gave me the chance to think, I’d change my mind and push her right back out the door.

“Of course! Here—sit, sit,” I urged, pointing her to the couch. “You want something to drink? No kidding, Annie, it really is great to see you. I mean it.”

I hesitated, went on in a rush, “This is so weird. There was just something on the