Waking the Moon

no longer warm but icy cold. As she drew it over her head she felt the bite of metal, a tugging pain as it raked her temple.

Then it was free. Between her fingers she held the shining reflection of the new moon that burned high overhead. The face of Cybele, Brimo Hagne, Terrible Pure One. The sleeping moon, the fasting goddess: Othiym. She could feel eyes upon her, could see them now in the dark. But not Peter’s eyes.

No: Her eyes, cold and bright and full of yearning. She was there, standing before Magda on the mountaintop, the moon upon Her brow like an arc of flame, Her mouth curved into a smile. Magda could see Her white teeth and Her hands outstretched as though to gather Magda to Her breast; but Her breasts were withered and shrunken as an ape’s, Her hands knotted into clumps of bone. From Her mouth flowed a blackness so immense that Magda swooned; but before she could lose consciousness something grabbed her, she felt stony fingers pulling at her arms and that cold foul breath filling her nostrils like fetid water. Magda opened her eyes and She was still there, more immense and terrifying than anything Magda had ever seen.

“No!” Magda cried; but as she sought to wrench away she could feel herself bowing, even as her mind cried Worship! Worship!

And then She was gone. Magda gasped, blinked and raised her hands protectively, expecting to see that monstrous face. Instead she saw the boy, one arm flung across his face so that his eyes were hidden. His throat was pale, smooth, showing only the smallest bulge of Adam’s apple beneath his childish face. His breathing was soft. Across his mouth spilled a slender bow of moonlight. He stirred, murmuring, then lay still again. Without a word she raised the lunula, grasping its spurs so that the curved glittering blade faced outward, and fell upon him.

Long after she woke. She lay upon the pallet, the lunula still in her hand. The room was dark. From the sliver of bluish light that crept from beneath the door she guessed that it was morning. A foul smell hung in the air, excrement and bile and blood. There was blood on the sharpened edge of the lunula, still damp, and blood on the first three fingers of her right hand. On her knees was the crumpled mass of the shirt he’d given her. When she bunched the cloth between her fingers it crinkled, as though it had been starched. A tangle of something soft tugged at her fingers and she looked down to see a long matted plait of blond hair, at one end stuck with a felted blackish mass. Flies lifted from it in a lazy droning spiral, like the lingering ghost of the boy’s stoned chatter, and disappeared.

She drew her head up slowly. A few inches from where she sat, Peter’s corpse sprawled on the mattress. His head sagged backward; it had been nearly severed from his neck. He was so white he looked as though he had been frozen. She had never seen a body so purely albescent, like a figure carved of quartz or crystal. His hands were curled into rigid talons. His hair had fallen across his face, so that all she could really see was his mouth; his lips had drawn back in a snarl. One of his front teeth was missing.

“Aaahhhhh…”

With a moan she backed away from the corpse. When she bumped into the door she shrieked softly, covered her mouth with her hand. She stood there for a long time, staring. Finally she gazed down at the lunula dangling from her fingers.

In the dim light it looked almost black. The spots where the blood had dried were like jagged bites in the soft metal. As she stared, the blood staining the silver began to glow. The metal grew hot, so hot she cried aloud, but just as she moved to fling it away, the crescent cooled, as rapidly as a hot poker stuck in the snow. She saw where lines began to stand out on the smooth silver, the full curves and swells of its moons so brilliant they looked molten. Magda thought it would begin to drip, spattering liquescent metal upon the floor.

But then the lines faded, red to black to grey. The lunula’s surface gleamed as before, pure and smooth as though it had been cast anew.

She waited more than an hour before leaving his room. When she did, she saw no one. Not then; not when she bolted into the filthy bathroom at the end of the hall to wash. Not when she left the next day, her duffel bag stuffed with books and clothes, a small newspaper-wrapped bundle beneath her arm. She had paid for her room in advance; there was no one who cared when she departed, as long as it was before Friday. She had spent the intervening hours curled in a ball on her mattress, feverish, nearly delirious, waiting for the sound of footsteps that never came. When she finally left the pensione she walked quickly. She crossed several streets until she came to an empty alley. Without stopping, without even hesitating, she dropped the bundle containing Peter’s bloodstained shirt into the gutter.

Her flight left Athens as scheduled. While the customs officials spent twenty minutes going through her bag, and confiscated a model of a water clock that she had purchased in a shop near the old Agora, they took no notice of the crescent moon that hung pale and lucent as a tear against her throat.

“Excuse me—oh!”

Someone bumped into her and Magda winced. She ducked her head and let the lunula slip behind the silken folds of her dress.

“Well, well! Professor Kurtz! We’re sorry to be losing you again, Magda.”

It was Harold Mosreich, he who had attained such success with his work in the Yucatan and was now a fully tenured professor of Central American Archaeology at the Divine. He smiled at her, genuinely forlorn: whether because he had bumped her or because she was leaving, she had no idea. Magda smiled and leaned over to kiss his cheek, catching a whiff of talc and Lilac Vegetal.

“Oh, Harold. You’re the only one.”

He shook his head. “Not at all. Only yesterday I heard Balthazar Warnick say how sorry he was you were leaving us so soon.”

“So soon?”

At mention of Balthazar’s name she grew cold. She thought of the naphaim in her room; of the faces she had glimpsed in the silver basin, the boy and girl she had come in search of tonight. She stammered, “I was actually supposed to leave earlier, but I stayed on a few extra days. Bind up a couple of loose ends. You know…”

Her voice trailed off. She wished she’d gotten another drink, or a canape, something to use as a prop and distract Harold, keep him from looking at her face. She felt the lunula like a brand burning at her throat. How could she have been so stupid as to wear it here?

“Oh. Well, maybe he was sorry you hadn’t left sooner, then.”

She glanced at him sharply, but Harold’s expression was without irony. He was gazing across the room at a drift of white-clad nuns blocking one of the service doors.

“You don’t suppose they’re all going to the bathroom together, do you?” he asked. When Magda raised her eyebrows he went on, “It’s just that Balthazar particularly asked that we don’t have a lot of traffic upstairs tonight—they were supposed to cordon off that end, but then the loo by the kitchen backed up, and—well, you don’t want to hear all this, do you?”

He took her hand and shook it affectionately. “Good luck, Magda. Have a safe flight back.”

“Thank you, Harold.”

She smiled as she watched him make his way through the crowd, his bald head gleaming beneath the gently swaying chandeliers. Before Harold reached the doors leading upstairs, she turned to snare more champagne from a passing waiter.

And so she didn’t see Balthazar Warnick step from behind the cluster of nuns to greet Harold Mosreich, with Francis Xavier Connelly looming behind him. By then Magda Kurtz was much too far away to hear Harold’s words to her former mentor, or to see how the tenured professor of Central American Archaeology sketched a half circle in the air, his melancholy eyes even sadder than they had been a few minutes earlier. She did not see how Balthazar Warnick nodded as she took her champagne flute, or how he marked the tenebrous halo about her like a cloud’s passing, the glint of silver at her breast.

CHAPTER 7 Night of the Electric Insects