Waking the Moon

“Oliver and I are just friends,” I said loftily.

“Hey, don’t think I’m, like, jealous. I don’t like icky boys. Although I personally think your friend Oliver may be a member of the He-Man Women-Haters Club. Uno amigo de Dorothy, if you take my meaning.”

She dropped her voice. “I tell you, Sweeney, you oughta be selling time-shares in that boy. I mean if you’re not sleeping with him. ‘Cause I know that Angelica—”

I turned to her, furious, but Annie backed off. “Ex-cu-use me!”

We sat in silence as the car inched through rush hour traffic. Outside, all the sultry glamour of the city had vanished. The Washington Monument looked smudged and worn against the dirty white sky, the distant shape of the Jefferson Memorial like a great cracked egg hidden among dusty trees. Above Haines Point an endless line of aircraft roared into National Airport. Between the noise and exhaust fumes, the Lysol stench of Brother John’s car deodorizer and all the beer I’d drunk, I felt distinctly queasy.

“You know where we’re going, don’t you?”

Annie nudged me, but I refused to look at her. “You know what this is, right?” she persisted. “This Orphic Lodge?”

I waited a long moment before shaking my head. “No.”

“It’s their headquarters. Summer camp for your boy Balthazar and all the rest of them. Home base. Ground Zero. Your retreat business is a trap, Sweeney—”

Her words were like a window slamming shut behind me.

“—a fucking trap, and we’ve walked right into it.”

If the retreat house was a trap, it was a very nice one.

It took us nearly three hours to get there. I dozed, an achy hung-over nap that brought little in the way of real repose and gave me uneasy dreams of pursuit and flight. When I woke it was just past nightfall. Outside all was dim and softly moving, painted in shades of green and black and violet. The little car wheezed and bucked as it made one hairpin turn after another, climbing higher and higher. Suddenly we made a sharp turn, veering onto an even narrower road. The car jounced over stones and fallen branches, abruptly came out into a wide space where the trees fell back and the sky opened above us, black and studded with stars.

“Well, we’re here,” said Brother John, and we piled out.

The Orphic Lodge was the sort of place where you spend one enchanted August as a child, and devote all of your adult life to finding again. A sprawling Craftsman-style mansion, its pillared verandas and balconies and gabled windows thrusting out in bewildering profusion. When we stepped onto the front porch the wooden flooring boomed and creaked beneath our feet, as though we were walking on ice. Upside-down Adirondack chairs and wicker sofas were pushed against the walls. There was an air of genteel desolation about it all—the grey limbs of an espaliered pear tree; drifts of dead leaves everywhere; the echoing of ghostly voices from upstairs rooms where windows had been flung open to the chill night air.

But inside, the Lodge looked more like the first day of vacation. Students running up and down steps, back and forth between cars and the kitchen, carrying duffel bags and knapsacks and boom boxes, cartons and bags of food, paper towels, beer, wine. A fat, friendly-looking grey cat sat on a windowsill and regarded us all with mild yellow eyes. On a wider windowsill in the main foyer Balthazar Warnick did the same, though with a more feral gaze. Beside him stood a tall stern-featured woman, with black hair and very black straight eyebrows, wearing a paisley dress and old-fashioned chef’s apron.

“…said thirteen and I have made dinner for thirteen. Gravadlaks and salat, and the gravadlaks, the salmon, will not keep well. And those boys are spilling something on the stairs.”

“Thirty, Kirsten, I said there would be thirty. Mr. Bright, would you please assist Mr. Malabar with the cooler?” Balthazar looked distractedly at the tall woman. “We brought spaghetti for dinner tonight, Kirsten. We always have spaghetti the first night of retreat. You know, lots of water boiling, many eager hands at work. A sort of icebreaker.”

The housekeeper gazed suspiciously at the many eager hands now reaching for the cooler Hasel Bright had opened in the middle of the floor.

“Good night, Professor Warnick, they deserve their spaghetti,” she announced. “I am going to bed.”

“Our housekeeper does not approve of undergraduates drinking in the lodge.” Professor Warnick frowned at Hasel, who sheepishly replaced his bottle and closed the cooler. “Let’s get unpacked and get dinner going before she changes her mind and comes back to supervise the kitchen, eh Mr. Bright?”

Warnick turned to where Annie and I were standing, somewhat at a loss, by the front door. He regarded me measuredly before saying, “The girls’ rooms are in the east wing on the second floor. To the right.”

We straggled upstairs, yelling greetings back to the others, who’d already unpacked or were still arriving below.

“Where do you think Angelica is?” I panted. “She’s got to be here; they were in the lead car with Warnick.”

Annie shrugged, pausing red-faced to swing her guitar and one of Angelica’s bags to the other arm. “Who knows? She and Oliver are probably settled in the honeymoon suite already.”

The rooms in the east wing all seemed pretty much the same. A few simple camp-style beds lined up against the pine walls, unmatched curtains at the windows, maybe a worn rag rug on the floor. Annie stopped wearily in front of an open door.

“The view from this room is really terrific, Sweeney, I read about it in the promotional literature downstairs; this is like the best room in the whole place, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, and then Angelica appeared in the dim hallway.

“Sweeney! Annie! I got a room for us—down here, the third door on the left.”

“Hooray,” said Annie. She dumped Angelica’s stuff on the floor and took off down the hall with her guitar.

Angelica picked up her bags and smiled. “Thanks for bringing my bags, Sweeney.”

“Sure.” I rubbed my shoulder. “Where’s Oliver?”

“Oh, he’s around.” She smiled, a secretive delighted smile, and started after Annie. “I helped him get settled upstairs. I think he went down to help with dinner. Okay, this is it—isn’t it great?”

It actually didn’t look much different from any of the other rooms—bigger, maybe, with four beds extending from the far wall, and it did have its own bathroom with shower stall and ancient rust-stained pedestal sink where Annie was already noisily washing up. But the long far wall was filled with windows, and even in the darkness I could make out the shadowed hump of the mountains and the velvety star-filled sky.

“Yeah. Yeah, really, it’s nice.” I dropped my knapsack on one of the beds and flopped onto it. “Yow. Nice mattresses, too.”

“Mine is stuffed with corncobs,” announced Annie from the bathroom. “I sure do hope Oliver’s not sleeping in that other bed, Angelica.”

Angelica shook her head. “No, he’s not. Cornhusks, Annie; I don’t think anyone ever stuffed a mattress with corncobs. Come on, Sweeney, I told Oliver we’d help them out downstairs. We’ll see you later, Annie.”

Annie watched us go, nonplussed. In the hall Angelica took my hand. “God, this is so great here! Isn’t this great?”

I shrugged and tried to smile. We still hadn’t talked about what happened that night after the Molyneux reception, but obviously Angelica wasn’t the type to discuss such things. And I was burning to hear about Oliver, and to find out what room he was staying in.

But Angelica only laughed, pausing to pull her hair back into its loose ponytail. “Oliver says from his room you can lie in bed and watch Orion progress across the western horizon.”

I smiled ruefully “Progress, huh? How does he know? He hasn’t been here before—”

“No.” Angelica started down the corridor. “He’s never been here, but his brothers have. I guess they told him which room was the best one…” Her voice trailed off.

“So—I guess you guys are really like, involved, huh?”