Waking the Moon

“It won’t be okay. Something terrible is happening, something horrible and now I’m in it but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna drag you into it with me—”

She closed her eyes to keep from crying, but that was when the visions came: those shadowy figures looming around the boy’s ravaged corpse, darkness behind them and overhead the ghostly blurred face of the moon…

Annie moaned, and stumbled to her feet. Overhead the sun broke over the mountain. “I can’t stay here. It’s Angelica, Helen, if you only knew what she was like!”

“Try me.”

“She’s just so used to getting her own way—I mean everything she wants! Men, women, boys, girls—”

“Beauty,” Helen suggested. “Eternal youth.”

“It’s not funny!”

Helen finished her coffee and reached for a croissant. “So, does she bathe in the blood of virgins, or what?”

“Helen. They killed that kid last night. And now—now she wants me. I don’t know why—I mean, after all this time—but she wants me—”

Helen forced a laugh. “Don’t flatter yourself, sweetheart.”

From the bedroom came the sudden hoarse shout of a telephone: an old-fashioned rotary phone to go with the inn’s 1930s decor. Two short rings and then a longer one. Annie stiffened and looked at Helen.

“Don’t answer it.”

“Don’t be silly. I have to answer it; it’s probably just Vicki or Ed checking to see if we want the room for another night.” Helen got to her feet.

Briiing briiing.

“Helen. Don’t.”

Briiing.

“Don’t! Nobody knows we’re here, nobody should be calling, Helen, PLEASE!—”

“And do we want the room?” Helen glanced back as she picked up the heavy black Bakelite handset. “Hello?”

From the porch Annie watched her. Helen’s sweet round face, the edges of her braids fuzzed from sleeping on them and her kimono falling open around her wide hips, that dark cleft and Annie’s heart aching because they hadn’t fucked, they’d fought, and now it was too late.

This is the last time I’ll ever see her, she thought with a sort of greedy desperation. This is it, make the best of it, Annie-girl, because—

“Annie?” In the bedroom Helen’s expression folded into fear, as quickly and neatly as a deck chair collapsing. She sank onto the bed, holding the phone out to Annie with wide eyes. Her voice faded to a whisper as she said, “It’s Fiona. From Labrys. She says…”

…because…

“Fiona? It’s only three A.M. out there, how the hell did she find—”

…because…

Helen stared at her in a daze, shaking her head. “I—I don’t understand. She says she just got off the phone with Angelica Furiano and she wanted you to know right away—the bad publicity, for some reason Angelica called and threatened them with a lawsuit, something about that boy, and you being there, and—well, they’re canceling the tour—”

Annie yanked the phone from her lover.

—because this is where things fall apart.

Angelica stood before her bedroom window, watching the moon disappear behind the black rim of the world. It had been a long night. After talking to Elspeth she had called Fiona from Labrys Music, dragged her out of bed and would not let her go until she’d promised to call Annie Harmon immediately. Let Annie wonder how she’d tracked her down; let her twist in the wind for a few weeks. By then it would be too late, and no one would be talking about the police, or anything else for that matter; not unless Othiym wanted them too. Her hand rested upon the lunula at her throat, felt its warmth seeping into her fingers.

You are the secret mouth of the world
You are the word not uttered
Othiym Lunarsa, haiyo!

Already first light was striking the Devil’s Clock. Her fingers slipped from the lunula to pluck at the sleeve of her kimono, wipe a drop of sweat from her wrist.

Dylan had never called. She knew better than to worry about that—did eighteen-year-old boys ever call their mothers? Still, it was enough to spark a small frisson of fear and unease; enough to keep her from going to bed.

Though in truth she did not really sleep anymore. As the power of the lunula waxed, as Othiym Herself grew stronger and Angelica waned, she found that she had little need of sleep. Instead of dreaming, her waking mind burned with random images. Annie in the shower, her face raw from crying. The black angel Eisheth rising into the darkness above the Atlantic Ocean, huge and ravenous, its mouth a flaming hole, its fiery wings billowing until they were swallowed by the clouds. A Circle in a Kansas wheatfield, adolescent girls and boys with knives raised above the cowering figure of a young boy scarcely more than a child; another Circle in the old growth forest of the Pacific Northwest. Older women here, the last ragged edge of the failed separatist movement, their prey older as well, and the sound of invisible wings beating fiercely at the air. Angelica saw all these things and more; they chased sleep from her mind as though it were a gnat.

But of Dylan she saw nothing, and that was strange. And try as she might, she could not find Sweeney Cassidy.

From the room behind her static crackled softly. Angelica turned. She had forgotten about the radio. Whatever station it had been tuned to had gone off the air hours ago. The hissing of white noise had become part of the ambient fabric of the night. She crossed the room slowly, to the neat array of stereo equipment stacked atop an antique secretary. Her finger was poised above the OFF switch, when abruptly the static cleared.

“Now what?” she murmured, frowning. There was a moment of silence. Then the radio picked up some distant signal. Music caught in mid-song, a sonic blur of feedback and echoing synthesizers; then a voice. An unfamiliar voice, repeating unfamiliar words in a near-monotone.

But there was a thread of melody there as well—a familiar melody, it nagged at her, tugged at the carefully woven tapestry of memories she had cloaked herself in.

From the long harrows of Wilshire to the Pyramids
From the stone circles that challenged the scientists
And the Neolithics that tread the ancient avenues
Your children that died forevermore exist

“Enough,” whispered Angelica. She stabbed at the OFF button. There was a gentle click, an electronic sigh; but the music did not stop.

I have always been here before…