Waking the Moon (29 page)

An explosive sound ripped the night. The air shattered; shards of glass rained upon us, filling the night with a sound like bells. I screamed, drawing my hands to my face; but when the splinters struck me they were not glass at all but freezing water.

“—with her.”

At pool’s edge stood a tall slender figure. Angelica, shaking her head so that her hair spun out in long black tendrils and more icy rain scattered everywhere. She was laughing. Water streamed from her uplifted hands to spill upon her breasts and thighs, and when she moved atoms of light shot from her, like sparks from a glowing forge. Upon her breast the lunula still gleamed, but its glory seemed to have been swallowed by her eyes, treacherous fox fire eyes. She turned and all their fatal splendor focused upon me.

“Oh Beloved. It is time.”

Her voice, sweet as rainwater falling upon stone. I stepped toward her, my arms opening to her embrace: what else could I do? But then I saw that she was not looking at me; nor at Baby Joe or Hasel or Oliver.

She was not looking at any of us. She walked right past me, past the others, and never said a word. It was so still that I could hear Hasel swallow when she swept by him, the dead grasses rustling beneath her bare feet. After she had passed we all turned in her wake, peering through the darkness to see what drew her.

In the overgrown meadow crouched a hulking form. At first I thought it was an immense boulder, or maybe some abandoned farm equipment.

But as Angelica approached it, her arms flung open in greeting, I saw that it was not a machine. It was a cow—no, a bull, a huge dun-colored creature with arching horns and a ponderous dewlap that hung down between its legs. When it sighted Angelica it snorted and shook its head. Its dewlap shuddered. It pawed nervously at the ground and a cloud of vapor enveloped its nostrils. It seemed merely huge, until Angelica stopped only two or three paces from where it watched her with rolling black eyes. Then it became monstrous, unimaginably vast.

My breath was coming fast and shallow. I glanced over to see Hasel staring transfixed and Baby Joe wide-eyed and motionless, a dead cigarette caught between his fingers. Beside them, Oliver was a brooding shadow, silent and minatory. In the field Angelica and the bull stared at each other, their breath fogging the chilly air. And then, very slowly, they began to move.

She took a step; it took a step. She slid sideways, it raised its front legs and came down in a furious explosion of dust. Now and then the bull would lower its head and charge her, and Angelica would drop to the ground and roll away, darting to her feet again quick as thought. She was still naked; where the dirt and grass touched her, her skin was streaked black and grey, her long legs mottled with tiny seed heads. On one breast a smudge like a handprint showed as though she had been struck.

But the patina of dust and grime didn’t make her look less beautiful. In some perverse way it made her
more
so, made her more arousing, gave some earthy taint of straw pallet and byre to her unearthly beauty. She ducked and darted, reaching now to strike the bull’s flanks with the flat of her hand, now to tug at the heavy curtain of flesh dangling from its throat, then leaping away to flick at its ears; once even grabbing a long stick and making a sudden lunge between its legs, striking at its shadowy member and rolling away seconds before its hooves thundered back down. With each flashing motion the bull snorted and gamboled, tossing its head and rolling its eyes in a sort of ecstasy of fear and fury, its black hooves sending up a steady rain of stones and dirt.

And still she came at it, tireless, relentless, crying out in low sharp bursts, a wordless, teasing song that was the perfect music for that dance. And dance it was, not crude or stumbling but fluid as the mad rush of water raging down a ravine, beautiful and awful and horribly, infinitely perilous.

Suddenly she stopped. She was panting, I could hear her and see how her ribs rose and fell, see how her entire body was flushed and smell her sweat mingled with that of the bull and the pungent odor of the trodden grass. When she turned I caught a flash of light at her breast, a gleam like the sun on water.

In front of her the bull was still as well. Its nostrils flared and it shook its head, no longer furiously but slowly, as though exhausted. It pawed clumsily at the ground with one foot. Every now and then a shiver would run across its entire body and its skin would ripple with a long single tremor. Its ears lay flat against its huge skull. Two long strands of spittle dangled from its mouth. Darker patches stood out against its greyish hide. On its rear right fetlock there was a small gash that bled when it moved.

And now, oh so slowly, Angelica began to walk toward it. She would take one step and halt, wait and then take another. When the bull shuddered and lowered its head, eyes madly rolling, she would become motionless and remain so for a minute, two minutes, three. Then she would step forward again. Overhead the moonless sky stretched black and boundless. The stars threw down a pale bitter light that cast no shadows, illuminated nothing but the things themselves: a beautiful girl and a bull.

Finally she stopped. The bull’s head was inches from hers, its horns reaching to embrace her. Above her breasts the lunula glowed, its raised prongs deadly as the bull’s horns, its gleaming curve radiant beneath Angelica’s face. So slowly that she scarcely seemed to move at all, she lowered herself to the ground, never taking her eyes from the bull’s; until she sat cross-legged at its feet, her head thrown back. Its dewlap hung above her upturned face. It shook its head, tail flicking at the air as though to drive away an insect. Slowly it raised its head, its huge eyes fixed upon the frozen stars, and lowed: a chilling desperate cry.

As it did, Angelica brought her hands to her throat and then snatched them upward, so quickly that all I saw was a flash of white. I gasped. In her hands she held the lunula, grasping it so that it formed a curved blade like a scythe. Without a word she lunged, slashing at the bull’s throat. She drew back and lunged again, and this time when the animal bellowed the sound was a screaming roar, so loud I covered my ears.

But I couldn’t look away. She struck at it again, and again, and it kept on roaring, its legs buckling as it sank and kicked out at Angelica, frantic with rage and pain. Once it nearly struck her but she pulled away just in time. It staggered toward her, moaning, its head lowered so that its horns formed a dull moon to her glittering crescent. All the while its blood poured from its throat in a dark torrent.

The bull stood weaving slightly as it stared at her, its black eyes no longer bright but shrouded with blood and grit. With a coughing roar it fell onto its side. Its flanks heaved as, with a last strangled bellow, it struggled to lift its head. Finally it was still.

In front of it Angelica was frozen in a half crouch. When it was clear that the animal was dead she stood, her arms held stiffly in front of her. Slowly she turned to face us.

She was all but unrecognizable. Her long hair was clotted with blood, her face and hands and breast covered with it, a black syrup I could smell even from here. A stench that I had never known before but which was somehow, impossibly, familiar. Bile and heat and shit, the faint green fragrance of crushed grass and spring rain. But also the cloying sweetness of spoiled meat, and that unmistakable musky odor that was Angelica, sandalwood and oranges and something else, the salt smells of sweat and the sea. I stared at her in horror, as terrified and repelled as when we had watched Magda Kurtz given to the hollow land. But Angelica only smiled, her teeth red-streaked, and raised the lunula above her head.

She held it by its slender spars, so that it formed a silver arc above her. As I watched it began to glow, until it was not just a piece of glowing metal but something else, something
real,
its edge still black with blood, but so dazzling, so
pure
that I couldn’t bear to look upon it; I tried to tear away my gaze but could not. Angelica’s lips were moving although I could hear nothing, only my own breathing and the faint desperate knocking of my heart. From the small curved opening in the pendant flames danced, higher and higher, until they wreathed the entire crescent, until Angelica herself was ablaze.

And then I saw what it was, saw what
She
was—

The Moon: the
real
Moon, not the dead stone that whirls blindly in Earth’s shadow but Hecate, Selene, Artemis: the pure and terrible One. She hung above us like a dream, like a doom waiting to fall and crush us—myself, Oliver, Hasel, Baby Joe—all of us frozen. All of us waiting to be chosen. Waiting to be destroyed.

But not me.

I started to run. Someone grabbed my arm—Hasel, though he held me without looking at me, his eyes still riveted on what was before us.

And then, what was before us spoke.
“Come to me.”

It was only a whisper, but the night shivered with it, each dried blade of grass trembling as though a hot wind roared down from the sky.

“Come to me,”
she said again, and every bone inside me strained toward her. But it was not to me she called.

As though he were walking through deep water, Hasel turned and stepped toward her. She opened her arms to him and he walked straight into them, heedless of the filth and gore that clung to her, the clots of blood thick and black as flies. Behind her the bull lay upon the earth like some fallen monument: black, its horns the color of bone.

She drew Hasel to her and he grabbed her furiously, moaning as her hands moved across his body. He was like a candle flame, small and pale, shining more brightly in the moment before it is extinguished. I could see the lunula, dangling from her right hand. Her fingers tightened and drew the bright crescent across his shoulder. Hasel cried out, his voice torn between longing and pain, and pulled away.

For an instant they stood apart. Hasel reached to touch his shirt, parted the slit-ted cloth and probed there. His eyes widened when he saw his fingers slick with blood.

“Hey,” he said.
“Hey …”

Angelica cupped a hand beneath Hasel’s chin. Her lips parted as though to kiss him, but her free hand moved toward his breast, her fingers taut around a blade of light—

“No!”

Oliver darted between them, pushing Hasel aside. With a moan Hasel staggered away from Angelica, clutching his chest. The front of his shirt had been ripped from shoulder to hem, and where the cloth flapped open blood oozed from a long shallow gash across his sternum.

“Oh—
God!
—Sweet Jesus, I’m fucking
bleeding
—”

I moved to help him, but fell back as another voice rent the air.

“You said it was me!”

In front of Angelica, Oliver stood with hands clenched at his sides. His eyes were wide and maddened, his face contorted with rage.

“You wanted me!” he shouted.
“You said it had to be me!”

Angelica stared at him, the lunula dangling loosely from her fingers. For the first time she seemed uneasy, and her gaze darted from Oliver to Hasel. Suddenly she nodded.

“Yes,” she said in a low voice. Quickly she draped the lunula back around her neck, awkwardly brushed a matted strand of hair from her eyes. Before she could move, Oliver grabbed her, his hands stark white against her bloodied arms. For a moment I thought she would pull away from him, but he pushed her roughly to the ground. She did not cry out or try to flee. Instead she stared up at him, her mouth a hard line curving slowly into defiance and a sort of grim joy. Oliver stared down at her, his hands fumbling at his belt. His trousers slid down his legs. Like a clumsy schoolboy he fell onto her, pulling her beneath him as her arms closed around his back.

“No.”

I covered my eyes but still I could hear them, their bodies thrashing against the dead stalks and Angelica’s low moaning whimper, Oliver making a deep grunting
ah! ah! ah!
as though he were being struck over and over again. In a way it was more horrible than all that had gone before, if only because it was so banal and so joyless, like listening to some machine echo the most precious remembered words of a lover long dead. But there was also something maddening about it: truly maddening. I was seized by a dreadful terror that if I stayed there I would lose my mind, as Angelica and Oliver seemed to have lost theirs.

So I turned to run—and froze.

On the rise behind me stood Balthazar Warnick and Francis Connelly. They might have been two stones set there as sentinels to guard the scene below. In the cold starlight they looked grey and stern: Francis’s mouth curled in disgust, Professor Warnick grim-eyed as he gazed down upon Oliver and Angelica moving in the dust.

As I stared, other things began to appear in the darkness to either side of them. Shapes tall and thin and white as birch trees, and others huge as menhirs, with great upswept wings; and still others the forms of ordinary men and women, seeming frail as porcelain beside those monstrous shadows. From horizon to horizon they stretched in an unbroken line, demons and angels and human men and women. Though they were mostly men. Men old and young and middle-aged, men of every race imaginable, their faces drawn and silent as Balthazar Warnick’s.

I began to shiver uncontrollably. There was no mistaking who they were. They were the
Benandanti
: Those Who Do Well, The Good Walkers. The chosen ones who for millennia had watched over mankind, benevolent sentries but also jailers, who meted out punishment and torment and death with as much care as they preserved a way of life. As the Furies were known as the Eumenides, The Kindly Ones, so the
Benandanti
saw themselves as benevolent; but to me they were dreadful even in their stillness.

I turned to look back down upon Oliver and Angelica; and now it seemed that they were not a man and a woman rutting in the dirt but two grasping dwarfish figures, struggling as they fought, the dead bull behind them. And then again they were not two
people
at all but mere shapes; and then not even that but formless things grappling beneath another, greater darkness. One white, the other black. Not the black that soothes and brings sleep but a chthonic darkness, a vast supplanting emptiness that was both maw and womb, whirling maelstorm and the storm’s calm fixed eye.