Waking the Moon

argue with me. “Sweeney and Oliver and I are in the same class.”

Annie started to protest, then shrugged and looked away. “Whatever you say, Angel.”

And that was that. With a satisfied smile, Angelica turned to stare at the Shrine: the great Byzantine folly silhouetted against the darkening sky, a few stars salted across its dome. Suddenly, as though it had been strafed by an invisible enemy, the entire huge edifice burst into flame. I gasped, and Annie’s hand shot out to steady me.

“Hey! Relax, girl—it’s just a light show—”

It was, but like nothing I’d ever seen. There were spotlights, footlights, rays of gold and silver and blue streaming from hidden recesses. The bell tower tolled seven o’clock.

Bong. Bong. Bong…

I looked up with a growing sense of unease. I felt as though some strange game was being played out by everyone I met, and I hadn’t been cued in to the rules. But when I glanced at Annie, my own anxiety sharpened into a blade driving deep into me. Because she was staring at Angelica, and her eyes were bright with fear.

“Do you really have to go?” she whispered. “Do you, Angelica?”

Angelica seemed not’ to hear. “Do you?” Annie asked again.

Now I was getting freaked. “Hey, Annie—you okay?” But when I tried to touch her, she shook me off.

“I never heard that they had a guests policy,” she said coolly.

“Oh, come on!” Angelica gestured dramatically at the floodlit Shrine. “That’s for us! I mean for the reception—all of us, the alumnae and everybody. They do it at Homecoming too—”

“And when we win a field hockey game,” Annie snapped. “Keep it in perspective, Angel.” She spun on her heel. “Bring her home by midnight, will you, Sweeney? I don’t want her waking me up at dawn.”

“Ciao, Annie,” Angelica called.

“Chow chow chow,” echoed Annie, and headed for the library.

“They really do light it up for us,” Angelica said as we started away from the Shrine. The last echoes of the carillon hung in the sultry air. “It costs a thousand dollars a night. This reception is going to be great.”

I sighed. “I don’t know, Angelica. I’ve got all this work to do, and—” I gestured at my T-shirt and scuffed my boots in the grass. “I just don’t know if I really feel up to it.”

Angelica took my hand. She pulled me after her into a narrow drive that led up a tree-covered hill to where a single domed building gleamed in the darkness. The breeze brought me the sweet musky scent of her perfume, sandalwood and oranges. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Sweeney, come on. And don’t worry, you look fine, very gamine.

“Besides,” she added, giving one of her odd clear laughs. “No one will give you a hard time. You’re with me.”

Garvey Hall stood at the far end of the campus, atop the hill known as the Mound. The broken concrete drive wound through white oaks and tangles of sumac, with a row of ancient iron lampposts casting a bleary yellow glare through the leaves. We saw a few other people straggling up the path—middle-aged couples in evening dress; students in thrift shop finery, stained velvets and satins; a tall black woman wearing elaborate African tribal robes. One young man in a dusty tuxedo did a double take when he saw Angelica, turning to stare at her so that he ran into a tree. Angelica pretended not to notice, but when we rounded a curve in the path she burst out laughing.

“They really do think with their dicks, don’t they?”

“That one was walking with his.”

She giggled, tilted her head to regard me with pursed lips.

“May I?” she asked, and gently smoothed the hair from my temples. “You know, you should cut your hair, Sweeney.” Her touch gave me goose bumps. “Really. You have such beautiful eyes, they’d really stand out if your hair was shorter. I’ll do it for you if you’d like.”

I laughed uneasily. “Yeah, well, maybe. Maybe over the weekend. I’ll think about it.”

Angelica continued to stare at me, her gaze intense and yet somehow oblique. I glanced away, finally said lamely, “Look, about this party—I just feel a little under-dressed, that’s all.”

“I told you, you’re with me.” Her voice took on that same tone it had earlier with Annie: impatient, subtly threatening. “Look, Sweeney—do you want to go to this thing or not?”

She grabbed me, not roughly but with unmistakable insistence. “Do you?”

I swallowed but didn’t pull away. A few inches from mine her eyes were huge, their color washed to topaz in the sulfurous light. I tensed, resisting her. If she let go of me, I was certain I would fall.

“Do you?”

Her words lingered in the air. But then I heard another sound, a faint jangling echo as of a glass harmonium shattering, its brittle notes fading into Angelica’s voice.

“Do you?”

It was a real choice she was offering me: a deal of some sort. Like Oliver’s opening parry, this was a kind of acid test—but what the hell was I being tested for?

The jangling grew louder. In counterpoint to it rose another sound, the tremulous sigh of wind in dry reeds. Angelica’s grip on my arm tightened as she pulled me to her, until her body’s warmth enveloped my own. Her perfume was everywhere, musky and sweet. The sound of our breathing faded into the wind.

“Sweeney,” she whispered. “Will you come with me?”

I wanted to reply but I felt too sleepy to talk, too sleepy to do anything but lean into her arms. My head lolled back until I was staring at the sky, the afterlight of sunset gone now, given over to a glowing purple the color of hyacinths. The moon was there, just barely—a slender crescent with a silvery ridge of cloud banked against its curving tines, and a single pallid star beside it. The crimelights gave a weird sepia tinge to everything. Moon and falling leaves and even our own shadows seemed to be strewn across the faded dusty plane of an old photograph—everything except Angelica.

She was so much brighter and realer than everything else. I could feel her arms around me, feel her hair blown against my cheeks and smell her perfume mingling with the scent of decaying leaves and moist earth. The rattling of the wind in the trees grew louder, the scent of sandalwood and oranges filled my nostrils until it all blurred together: the moon sweeping across my vision, Angelica’s warm breath and the soft pressure of her hands upon mine, the beauty and strangeness of the Divine itself joining to claim me as the night grew deeper around us.

Will you come with me?

I closed my eyes. A faint earthy sweetness lay upon my tongue, and almost I imagined I could smell woodsmoke, the scent of burning leaves. I opened my eyes and smiled, half-turning my head to look up into Angelica’s face. I could feel her there, just as I could feel the chill wind.

But I did not see Angelica. What I did see made me gasp.

There was a woman in the moon. I could see her as distinctly as though she were my own reflection. Her face calm, with the ageless features of a Toltec image—heavy lips, long slanted eyes, high rounded cheekbones. Her eyes were half-shut, and the curve of her mouth mirrored the moon’s bow glittering upon her brow. Milky light washed across her, so that it was as though I gazed at a face in deep water, a shattered caryatid waiting to be pulled from the depths. It was a beautiful face, but what made it beautiful was its utter calm, the overwhelming sense that in aeons and aeons she alone had never bowed before the wrath and fury of time and lust and death. I could have stared upon her forever, I felt, and myself turn to stone and ash and never even care.

But then the woman began to change. Her hair first, its cloudy mass dispersing into darkness until only a few bright threads remained. Then the rounded contours of her face hardened. Her mouth grew thin and taut. A row of teeth protruded from beneath her upper lip—teeth white and glittering as ice, grotesquely long and needle-sharp. Very slowly her mouth parted in a smile. Behind the row of teeth loomed a darkness more complete than any I had ever seen: starless, formless, not even a mote of light glimmering within it.

And then the moon began to burn, not brightly but with dull red clouds swelling above it, as though it had been set upon a smoldering pyre. I watched in horror as those bloody clouds grew and finally burst into a poisonous black haze. The fragile arc of moon collapsed. Where it had shone moments before was—