Book Read Free

Waking the Moon

Page 16

by Elizabeth Hand


  “How do you know?” My voice was too loud. “I mean about the Benandanti. How do you know they stay here?”

  “My father.”

  “Your father.” I rolled my eyes. “Oh, sure.”

  Angelica didn’t seem to hear. She continued on down the hall, not even looking to see if I was following her.

  I wasn’t. I stood there, my hands clenched, and asked, “So who are the Benandanti?”

  Silence.

  “I said, who are the—”

  “Ssshh!” She stopped and glared. “I thought you were sick, Sweeney. Come on—”

  “I’m not your fucking sidekick! And I’d feel better if someone would tell me—”

  Suddenly she was there in front of me, her hand on my waist, the silver necklace glowing against her black lace bodice.

  “Sweeney,” she said softly. She touched one finger to my chin and tilted my head back, until all I could see were her eyes, huge and slanted and that impossible green. “It’s okay, Sweeney. Really, it’s okay—”

  She kissed me, not a schoolgirl’s peck on the cheek but a real kiss; and I let her, though I had never kissed another girl before or even really thought about it. Her hair spilled across my face and I felt lace like dry leaves crinkling beneath my fingertips; her breasts spilling into my hands like warm water, and the hard smooth weight of her thighs where they pressed against me. But all I could think was that it wasn’t that different really, there was nothing soft about her at all, not her hands or her skin or anything except her mouth, so small and so hot I gasped, then moaned as she pulled me closer.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered, and though she didn’t say it aloud I could hear what came next—

  You’re with me.

  I tried to kiss her again, but she only smiled, drawing away from me and twisting a lock of my hair around one finger. “Come on, kemosabe—let’s get you that aspirin.”

  I followed her in silence. I didn’t feel embarrassed or angry or even all that confused—just a little turned on, and very, very tired. She was so matter-of-fact, it was all so matter-of-fact that I was starting to think maybe this was what it was like for everyone on their first day of college. Angels at dawn, visions in the afternoon, succubæ at night. It was like a dream, like the best high you ever had; but I knew it was all a mistake.

  Angelica had stopped where the corridor ended, at the top of yet another flight of stairs. She looked at me and frowned.

  “Now what?”

  I peered down the stairwell. A freezing draft shot up from it, and an oily smell.

  “Maybe we just walked right past it,” I said weakly. “All those doors…”

  We turned back, but only took a few steps before I saw something we’d missed—a narrow passage extending out from the hall. At the end of it I could see a greyish blur that might have been a doorway left ajar. I grabbed Angelica and pulled her into the passage. “I bet this is it.”

  “Great.” Angelica stopped to fumble with her little beaded purse. “Okay. I know I’ve got some aspirin, I just—”

  She stopped and looked at me. From the main corridor came the hollow echo of voices and muffled footsteps. Before I knew what was happening, she yanked me further down the passage, until we stood in a small recessed alcove facing a door.

  Angelica rattled the knob. “Damn! It’s locked—”

  “Jeez, who cares? We’re just looking for a—”

  “Shhh!” Angelica crouched on the floor. “Get down.”

  “What?” This was ridiculous. The worst that could happen was that we’d be reprimanded for snooping around, maybe asked to leave. But then I remembered that cold, black stairwell. I shivered. The voices grew louder as Angelica pulled me down beside her.

  “I can’t—” I whispered.

  “Shut up.” Angelica moved her hand in a small tight gesture and leaned back, as though trying to fold herself into the wall. I crouched beside her in the darkness.

  Shadows blotted out the entrance to the tiny passageway. Men: two of them, I thought at first. But then the taller one moved, and I saw that they carried a third between them, a limp figure who kicked halfheartedly at the floor.

  I felt a warm rush of relief. Just a drunk being walked around by his friends. But still Angelica didn’t move or say anything. Her sweat had overwhelmed the musk of her perfume, its fragrance now rank and sour, like the smell inside a small room where a child has been locked and forgotten.

  Footsteps. The figures passed us, silent except for a faint wheezing from the man supported in the middle. I could see the trouser cuffs of the closest figure, a tall lanky young man wearing tennis shoes and no socks; I could have reached out and grabbed his bare ankle. Next to him slumped his drunken friend, and behind them I could barely glimpse the third figure, so small he was like the shadow of the other two. They stopped in front of the doorway across from us. The figure in the middle suddenly jerked upright, head thrown back, and let out a short strangled cry.

  “No!”

  Beside me Angelica stiffened.

  “Let me go!”

  It was a woman’s voice. Not a drunken man, not some frat boy being carried around by his friends, but a woman. I stared in horror as she cried out.

  “Please.”

  The taller figure twisted her arms behind her so that she couldn’t move. He was holding her so tightly I could hear her bones creak.

  Oh, shit, I thought as the woman’s voice rang out again.

  “You can’t do this, Balthazar. It’s against the charter, to strike someone within the boundaries of the Divine—” Beside me I could feel Angelica shaking, “—you can’t, Balthazar, you know you can’t…”

  It was the woman who had spoken to Angelica at the reception. The one who’d given her the necklace: Magda Kurtz, the famous professor of European Archaeology. The man she spoke to, the smaller of the two others, shifted without loosening his hold on her. It was Professor Warnick, his face utterly impassive as he stared at her, not saying a word, just watching and listening. Her voice rose desperately.

  “Please, Balthazar.”

  Warnick took a step closer to her. “You broke the charter, Magda. A long, long time ago, it seems.”

  Even in the darkness I could see how his face was twisted, not with lust or hatred or anything else I had expected but with longing, the purest distillation of desire and sorrow I had ever seen. “You found it and never told us. You never told me.”

  “Only part of it,” Kurtz whispered. “It’s still incomplete, I only found part—”

  For the first time the other man spoke. “You stole it! How else could you have—”

  “Shut up, Francis!” Warnick’s voice cracked. Looking at Magda Kurtz he suddenly cried out, “I wish you’d left yesterday. Why didn’t you just leave?”

  At the sound of his anguished voice I trembled. Beside me Angelica was absolutely rigid, her eyes huge and horrified. Professor Warnick pulled away from Magda Kurtz, pushing her toward the other man. Warnick’s hand made a slashing motion as he turned and took two quick steps that brought him within inches of the door in the passageway.

  “You should have told me,” he whispered, and bowed his head.

  I had thought the door was ajar. In fact it was tightly shut. Whatever light it held leaked from its seams, grey-blue, dull as ashes—not sunlight or even moonlight but some other kind of glow, with no warmth and scarcely any color to it at all.

  “Balthazar.” Magda Kurtz’s voice died. Slowly she drew her hands to her throat.

  Warnick traced his fingers across the wood, murmuring. I couldn’t understand the words, they were in a strange language, not Latin, not anything I recognized. As he spoke I began to feel a dull buzzing in my ears. An overpowering drowsiness filled me. It was like the hottest longest afternoon of summer, like falling asleep on the screened porch while the cicadas droned outside. I could hear their persistent burr, soft at first but growing louder and louder. The sound filled my ears, filled me until my bones rang wit
h it and I could hear nothing else, not Professor Warnick’s voice, not Angelica’s breathing, not my own heart. The locusts’ cries rose to a mindless shrieking that wasn’t the sound of any insect or machine or human I could imagine. It wasn’t the sound of anything I had ever heard at all.

  And then came another noise—an echoing rattle and thump, the sound of countless large objects being thrown against the door. In front of us the wall shuddered. The door bulged outward as the shrieking grew to a howl, a clamor nearly drowned by furious scratching. I could hear wood creaking and splintering. The steely light grew brighter, but there was no warmth in it, nothing of sun or candle glow or embers. It was utterly cold, grey-blue and stark as bone. The three figures standing before it were like people trapped in a video screen. The tumult became a roar, the howl of metal grinding against stone.

  “Balthazar, no!”

  Professor Warnick stepped back. The door flew open. I started to scream, but Angelica’s hand closed over my mouth. She pulled me to her breast, trying to shield me so I wouldn’t see what was there. But I tore away from her, and I did see.

  There was a world beyond the door. It was the world that went with that howling, mindless noise, with that blinding leaden glow. An endless expanse of dead plain, colorless, treeless, a horrible lifeless steppe pocked with shadowy hollows and spurs of jagged stone. Overhead stretched the sky, purplish black and starless. On the horizon monstrous shadows rose and ebbed like clouds, and smaller blackened objects fell like hail or a rain of stone. It was a landscape bereft as the moon: no stars to light it, no aqueous Earth casting its blue glow upon the horizon. Only bare ground and stones and freezing air, and a faint foul smell like gasoline. Above it all the deafening roar continued, relentless, as those bulbous black shapes dropped from the sky onto the ravaged plain.

  I moaned. In front of us the three others stood, their faces bluish white, their shadows stretching across the floorboards. Angelica’s hand tightened over mine, and as it did the horrifying clamor seemed to die. A sudden vast silence engulfed us, and a darkness more profound than any I have known.

  “Angelica,” I wanted to whisper. But the name would not come.

  Then out of nowhere I heard a thin monotonous voice; a voice chanting inside my head from a million years before.

  Shape without, form, shade without color…

  Scratched and faint: an old man’s voice that struggled with the words even as I struggled to recall where I had heard them.

  Remember us—if at all—not as lost

  Violent souls, but only

  as…

  And I remembered. I was slumped in a chair in a darkened auditorium, a dim spotlight fixed on the stage where a horrible grey-faced rector chanted.

  There are no eyes here

  In this valley of dying stars

  In this hollow valley

  This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

  —or no, I was crouched before a leaping flame, fighting to keep my eyes open as a small figure clad in furs and leather tapped out a monotonous rhythm on a skin tabor.

  Here we go round the prickly pear

  Prickly pear prickly pear

  Here we go round the prickly pear

  At five o’clock in the morning….

  Abruptly the voice rose to a scream and faded into a chittering wail. Once again I heard that buzzing roar, softer now though more distinct, a sound punctuated by thumps, the hollow impact of empty pods on gravel. And I almost laughed—would have laughed, deliriously, if Angelica hadn’t caught me and held me close.

  Because when I first saw that charred landscape I thought that there could be nothing more horrible than that utterly barren place where nothing had ever grown or died, not scarab nor vulture nor thorn tree nor worm. But now I knew there was something infinitely worse.

  Because in all that colorless formless desert, something was alive. Many things. What I had at first perceived as monstrous shadows, as clouds or mountains or fog, were not shadows at all. They were the monstrous things themselves. Huge, at least twice man-high and skeletally thin, with the outlines of ribs and thorax and skull gleaming in the silvery light.

  But they were not skeletons, or cadavers. They were not even remotely human. They were immense arthropods, like praying mantids or walkingsticks or leaf insects. Many-jointed, silvery grey as the scar they danced across, their long, jointed legs trailing behind them like matches spilling from a box. They had huge round eyes, smooth and curved as glass, with a tiny black spot marking the pupil. Some of them had wings that retracted when they struck the ground. They filled the black sky of the world beyond the door, a vast horde growing nearer and nearer. I saw a blurred flutter as one fell to earth and then exploded into the air again, wings beating furiously as it propelled itself toward us. Above its twitching mandibles its eyes glittered like steel bearings.

  “Balthazar! Balthazar, no—”

  Magda Kurtz’s scream was silenced as, with a single thrust, her captors pushed her through the door. I struggled in Angelica’s arms, then pulled free.

  For a final instant I glimpsed Magda Kurtz. She was on the other side of the door now, and she staggered as though blinded, arms flailing, before falling to the ground. Grey dust puffed up around her knees. I heard pebbles rattling against the wooden portal, wind buffeting the wall behind us. The air pouring from the doorway was so cold my teeth chattered. The smell of gasoline choked me. I could no longer feel Angelica’s hands clasping mine. I could no longer see anything, except what lay beyond the door.

  Above Magda Kurtz hovered an immense black shape. Its dangling limbs moved slowly up and down, its huge witless eyes were fixed on what lay beneath it. For perhaps a minute it hung there, wings beating in silent rhythm. Then without warning it dropped to the ground. A cloud of glittering dust rose as it extended one long, jointed leg like the metal shank of a tripod.

  In its shadow crouched Magda Kurtz. She looked impossibly small, a doll-woman or the spindly figure from a cave painting. She drew her arm up to shield her face and turned to look back at the doorway. But I could tell by her blank expression and gaping mouth, by the way her head weaved back and forth, that she could no longer see the door or what lay beyond it, that our world had closed upon her forever. The last thing I heard was her scream, a rising wail sliced off as the door slammed shut.

  “Jesus Fucking Christ!”

  Before Angelica could grab me I was gone, stumbling out into the main passage. From behind me came shouts; then Angelica’s desperate voice.

  “Sweeney, no!—the stairs—!”

  She pointed and I sprinted down the hall to where that horrible back stairway yawned. Behind me footsteps clattered like hooves; I heard Professor Warnick’s deceptively calm voice echoing through the darkness.

  “Kids, it’s some students, that’s all—”

  Then Angelica’s scream.

  “No!—let go of me—Swee-nee!—”

  I whirled. Francis Connelly had her by the wrist. He twisted it as he pulled her toward him and Balthazar watched impassively.

  “Let go, you bastard, let me go—”

  I could hear Angelica panting, could see the dark welts where he gripped her cruelly. An arm’s length from them, Professor Warnick crouched against the wall like a goblin fearing sunlight. And then Francis began to drag Angelica toward the alcove where they had taken Magda Kurtz.

  “NO!” Angelica shouted, scratching at his face.

  “God damn it, you stupid—”

  Francis’s voice broke off as I darted toward him. I grabbed Angelica, then, with all my strength, kicked him in the shin. A satisfying instant when I felt my boot’s worn metal toe smash into bone. With an anguished howl Francis collapsed onto the rug.

  “Oh dear,” murmured Balthazar Warnick.

  “Come on!” I gasped, and pulled the half-sobbing Angelica after me.

  Around us all was a blur of scarlet and black and gold. I thought I heard voices, the muted sound of vast wings. Then we were at the end
of the corridor. Below us the staircase unfurled. From behind us came the rattle of bone, a shrieking wind rank with the smell of gasoline and burning leaves. I couldn’t think, couldn’t move…

  “Sweeney, go!”

  Angelica shoved me. I grabbed the railing and lunged down, two and three and five steps at a time. When I saw the floor only a few feet below I clambered over the banister and jumped. Then I bolted, toward a screen door gaping open onto the night. Beyond it lay the comforting yellow glow of the campus crimelights, a few half-shadowed figures gathered atop the Mound. When I reached the door I slammed my fists against the screen and, gasping, looked around for my friend.

  “Angelica?”

  She stood at the foot of the stairs, her hair wild, her breast heaving as she steadied herself against the rail. Her dress was torn, so that I could see her skin dead white against black lace and satin. In one hand she brandished a high-heeled shoe like a club. She was staring up to where the others gazed down: Francis, white-faced with rage; Professor Warnick, tight-lipped, his gaze steady as he stared back at her disheveled hair and blazing green eyes. She looked like a wolf brought to bay, like a maenad unrepentant on the mountaintop. No longer frightened but nearly incandescent with rage: if you held a match to her she would burst into flame.

  “Angelica,” I whispered.

  Around her neck the silver crescent was glowing. Not with any reflected light but with a hard cold brilliance, brighter than any star I had ever seen, so bright that I had to shield my eyes. As I stared Angelica’s hand crept to her throat, until it touched the edge of the pendant. Light streamed around her fingers in spectral rays, blue and white and silver. Her expression changed from fury to wonder as Professor Warnick’s voice rang out, clear and bitter as gin.

  “She has the lunula.”

  “The lunula?” shouted Francis. “How did she—”

  With a cry Angelica turned and fled. An instant later she flung herself at me and together we stumbled outside. Professor Warnick’s soft voice drifted down behind us.

 

‹ Prev