Waking the Moon

by Elizabeth Hand

  Flagstaff Police Chief Robert Morales has voiced concern that whatever attacked Benson may also be responsible for a string of unsolved disappearances in the Southwest. Since last October, seventeen young men between the ages of 15 and 27 have been reported missing in Arizona alone. Several of the men were known to be prostitutes and runaways, and authorities are concerned that the numbers may actually be higher.

  “It’s a definite longshot that killer ants could be responsible for these disappearances, but we’re not ruling out any possibilities,” Chief Morales said.

  I stared at the paper, unsure whether to laugh or not. At first I thought it was another one of Baby Joe’s practical jokes—killer ants?

  Then I remembered the things I had glimpsed behind the door in Garvey Hall so long ago.

  I had spent the last nineteen years trying to forget what I had seen in my few months at the Divine; trying to forget Oliver. Because Oliver was dead, and Magda Kurtz, and now Hasel Bright…

  But I was alive, and so were Baby Joe and Annie and Angelica. Even if part of the unspoken deal I had made with Luciano di Rienzi and the Benandanti was to cut myself off from my friends, it had been almost enough, during all those years, to know my friends were out there still. To know that they were thriving, even if I was not. Even if my head and heart had remained under some kind of house arrest ever since.

  And there was always Baby Joe, who had stayed in touch with me in apparent defiance of the Benandanti. Who had struck out on his own into the tabloid jungle, rather than become the brujo the Benandanti wanted him to be.

  But now it seemed that all the unfinished business of my life that I had thought safely interred in the past was waking, moving slowly beneath the dry earth and starting to break through. I thought of the words of the poet of another city—

  Ideal and dearly beloved voices

  of those who are dead, or of those

  who are lost to us like the dead.

  Sometimes they speak to us in our dreams; sometimes in thought the mind hears them.

  And for a moment with their echo other echoes

  return from the first poetry of our lives—

  like music that extinguishes the far-off night.

  I stared at the pages Baby Joe had sent me.

  “But I think change is coming,” I read once more. “I think it is coming very, very soon. And I very much want to be a part of it.”

  I took the pages, folded them as neatly as I could, and put them in the top drawer of my desk. I made sure all the monitors and VD players were turned off, checked the latches on my windows, and left.

  CHAPTER 14

  Devil-Music

  HER ENCORE WAS ALWAYS the same. She walked offstage, got doused with Evian water by Patrick and Helen, tore off her sweat-soaked tuxedo shirt and replaced it with a sleeveless black Labrys T-shirt showing the double axe and her label’s motto. She gulped down a second bottle of Evian, smoothed her buzz cut with one hand and exchanged her acoustic Martin for a shocking pink electric Gibson.

  “Good house,” said Patrick. He was her manager. They’d known each other for thirteen years, since Annie first began singing in campus bars and rathskellers and then coffeehouses when the drinking age was raised to twenty-one.

  “Great fucking house,” retorted Annie. She reached over to get Helen’s head in a hammerlock, kissed her scalp, and turned to run back out onstage.

  “Provincetown, we love you!” she yelled, raising her fist.

  A wave of screaming applause from the audience. The band stepped from the shadows where they’d hidden all night, giving the occasional muted nuance to Annie’s acoustic work. Annie kicked away the chair where she’d sat with her acoustic guitar. A droning bass line roared out, a few tentative drumbeats; then the opening bars, transformed into something ominous and brooding. Annie stepped up to the mike, standing on tiptoe to readjust it. She grinned, tossing her head back. Her smoky voice rang out, twisting around the odd rhythms of desire and rage and nostalgia: her first real hit, Number 2 on the alternative charts: not bad at all for a thirty-seven-year-old lesbian folksinger from Nebraska.

  She is still a mystery to me…

  The audience shouted out the chorus, several hundred women and a few guys singing and swaying, raising their margaritas and Bellinis and Amstel Lights to the diminutive figure on the small raised stage. The music raged on, the chorus repeated again and again as the audience refused to let her leave. Annie grinned, dipping her head so the sweat flew off in tiny droplets and turned to mist in the heat of the spotlight.

  She is still a mystery to me…

  Then, Annie heard it. The now-familiar chant rising from a half dozen people at a table in the very front, their voices at first keeping time with the music but gradually growing stronger and louder, running counterpoint to her own husky voice and guitar—

  Othiym Lunarsa, Othiym, Anat, Innana, Othiym evohe! Othiym haïyo!

  Annie’s smile froze. She glanced up and saw her bassist Linga staring at her in concern.

  She is still a mystery to me…

  Still those other words rang out, loud enough now to drown her own.

  Hail Artemis, Britomartis, Ishtar, Astarte, Ashtorath, Athena, Potnia, Bellona, More, Kali, Durga, Khon-Ma, Kore. Othiym Lunarsa. Othiym haïyo!

  Annie glared down into the front row of tables with their flailing figures, trying to turn the tiny space into a mosh pit. She shouted the last lines of her song, heard the crash of echoing feedback from the band behind her. She bowed, trying to look as exhilarated as the women screaming a few yards away from her on the club floor. Then she walked offstage. The band followed her into the tiny dressing room, grinning and raising their fists.

  Patrick met her there with more bottled water, a paperback book, and a huge sheaf of flowers.

  “An admirer,” he said, handing her the book: Journal of a Solitude. “And I don’t know who these are from—”

  He waved the flowers at her, but Annie turned away.

  “Boy, they’re really noisy tonight,” said Helen. “Must be a full moon.”

  “Fucking amateurs,” snarled Annie Harmony. She gulped her Evian water and tossed the book onto a table. “Dark of the moon.”

  “What?” Helen stepped behind her partner.

  “Dark of the moon, they come out at the dark of the moon. Black angels,” she added ominously. “Fucking cultists.”

  Patrick raised an eyebrow, gazing at her over the fragrant cloud of blossoms he still held. “I would have thought you’d be into all that stuff, Annie,” he said in surprise. “You know, women’s spirituality, awakening the goddess within, that kind of thing.”

  Annie scowled. She grabbed a towel from Helen and mopped her face.

  “Annie went to college with Angelica Furiano,” Helen explained. “They were roommates.”

  “No lie?” Patrick’s eyes widened. “Was this in Italy or something?”

  “D.C.,” said Annie brusquely. “It was only a semester. I haven’t seen her since.”

  She crossed the cramped room to gather her bag and a plastic quart bottle of Diet Pepsi, looked back at Helen. “I’ve got to go to the hotel; I forgot my filofax and I’d like to take a shower. Martha’s supposed to meet us at the inn at eleven-thirty. Please don’t make us late again.”

  Patrick and Helen watched as she swept out of the dressing room, the little swaggering figure shoving open the fire door and disappearing into a small crowd of fans waiting in the street.

  “She doesn’t like to talk about Angelica,” Helen explained.

  “Duh,” said Patrick. He rubbed his earcuff gingerly. “So they were really roommates?”

  Helen nodded. She was slender and dark, her hair braided into elaborate patterns spliced with red and yellow beads and brighdy colored strands of kente cloth. “Yeah. Supposedly even back then, Angelica was really something.”

  “She and Annie have a thing?”

  Helen shrugged. “Who knows? It’s ancient history now. I know Angel
ica was involved with some friend of theirs, this guy who killed himself after she dumped him. I guess Annie must have taken it pretty hard. She doesn’t like to talk about her at all.”

  Patrick regarded the flowers thoughtfully. “Well, I guess I can relate to that. You want to take these back to the hotel?”

  Helen grabbed the bouquet, sniffed it tentatively. “Nice. Hey, these are pretty exotic. What are they?”

  Patrick touched one delicately crumpled scarlet blossom. “Well, that looks like some kind of poppy, and these—”

  He breathed on a handful of soft pale blue petals, “—these are anemones.”

  “And that’s a jonquil.” Helen’s pinkie brushed a tiny pale orange flute surrounded by flaring white petals. “We used to grow them in Vermont.”

  “Narcissus, I think little ones like that are called narcissus, and this looks like some kind of hybrid hyacinth.”

  Helen breathed in deeply. “God, they really do smell wonderful, don’t they? All these fragrant things. But what a bizarre arrangement—I’ve never even seen some of these before. Who’d you say brought them?”

  Patrick shrugged. “I don’t know. Some woman. She had on this cowled dress, très mystérieuse. She just kind of blew in and out before I could say anything. But wait—you know what, there was a card with them, let me look—”

  He shuffled through the crumpled newspapers and plastic containers from the take-out Thai place next door, triumphantly held up a piece of paper.

  “Ta da!”

  “Let me see.” Helen took it, a small white rectangle, expensive cotton rag paper with tiny letters written on it in black ink. A cryptic but very careful hand—the script looked as though it had been typed. Patrick stood behind her to read over her shoulder.

  Utcunque placurit Dea vents

  For Annie, with much love

  Helen shook her head. “How bizarre. Dea, that means goddess, I bet. Well, that makes sense, there were a bunch of those girls out there tonight. But the rest’s in Latin. You were an altar boy, what’s it mean?”

  Patrick took the note and puzzled over it. “‘Utcunque placurit.’ I think that’s something like, As it pleases you or May it please you. And verus, that means truth. So this would mean, As it pleases the true Goddess. Weird with a beard.”

  “Weird with a merkin.” Helen dropped the card onto the table and handed the flowers back to Patrick. “Here, go find some nice young man and give these to him.”

  “You don’t think Annie wants them?”

  “I think Annie would be a little freaked, Patrick. Those girls give her the creeps. Me too. Look, I gotta fly; if I’m late again, she’ll have a fit.”

  “Yup. See you later. I’ll clean up—”

  He poured the rest of the Evian water into a jar and set the flowers in it, then went to meet the club manager to discuss the evening’s take.

  They met Martha in the bar at the Tides Inn, a small, pleasantly dim room cooled by several softly whirring ceiling fans. Air-conditioning would have been more useful—it was seventy-nine degrees outside, at midnight—but Annie had to admit the fans looked nice, big old brass-bladed things slicing through the darkness and making a gentle whick-whick sound. For once Helen hadn’t been late. But Martha was, and so Annie and her lover sat alone at a small table by the window, silently holding hands. There was no one else in the place. The owner served them, a taciturn man with long white hair in a braid down his back. Helen got a Hurricane, Annie a club soda with lime. Through an open window wafted the brisk salt smell of the ocean, the reek of patchouli and joss sticks from the crystal emporium next door. They sipped their drinks and stared outside, watching the twinkling lights of boats bobbing in the water, the steady parade of sunburned couples on Commercial Street—men and men, women and women, women and men—laughing and talking, relishing the night.

  Annie stared at them enviously. Everyone looked so bouncy and cheerful, as though they’d all just come out of the same Frank Capra movie. She always felt slightly dazed and suspicious when she visited P-town, just as she did in Key West and Palm Springs and the Berkshires, any place where gay couples could act just like everybody else. Any place, really, where people made being happy look so easy.

  Face it: you’d feel like this in Disneyland, she thought. Too many years in Nebraska, too many years singing and starving; too much time spent being afraid, remembering Lisa and Oliver and Angelica and now Hasel—

  She stiffened, and her fingers tightened around Helen’s.

  “Those girls tonight?” asked Helen softly. Annie looked up at her, shaking her head as though awakening from a dream.

  “How’d you know?”

  Helen smiled. “I have magical powers and the gift of sarcasm.”

  “That’s my line, girlfriend. But yeah, I was thinking about them.”

  “It’s not such a terrible thing.” Helen twisted one of her braids around a finger, playing with the rows of striped trade beads. “How bad can it be, for women to learn how to stick up for themselves, to be assertive and all that stuff? I think your friend Angelica is onto something—I mean, there really is this dark aspect to goddess-worship that everyone has ignored for all these centuries. It’s like being a Christian and refusing to acknowledge the Inquisition.”

  “She’s not my friend.”

  Helen smiled wryly. “Boy, you must have had it bad, to still get so worked up over her.”

  “I’m not worked up over her, this has nothing to do with my feelings for—”

  “Hi, guys! Sorry I’m late, I had to go home and feed the dogs. I brought a couple of friends—I hope you don’t mind, Annie—”

  They looked up to see Martha, resplendent in an African-print dress, her hennaed hair looped in extravagant braids and her ears hung with gold circlets. Around her throat she wore a thin gold chain heavy with little charms: a lambda, a dolphin, a crescent moon, a tiny silver image of the faience Cretan snake-goddess, serpents like two lightning bolts dangling from her raised arms. “This is Lyla, and this is Virgie—they were just at your show, Annie, I turned them on to you years ago and promised I’d introduce you to them someday—” Martha sank into a chair and reached for Helen’s drink, took a sip. “Oooh, that’s good. I’ll try one of those.”

  At the sight of the two strangers Annie stiffened.

  Moon-girls. She recognized them from the club earlier, shouting their goddamn mantra while she was trying to sing. Young, in their early twenties—so many of Angelica’s girls were young, it must have something to do with having missed that whole first wave of feminism and liberation, of growing up under the conservative cloud of the eighties, of being desperate and cynical and incredibly naive all at the same time. Virgie was coffee-skinned, with long thick black hair and tilted black eyes and a Hothead Paisan T-shirt. She wore crescent-shaped earrings and a crescent-shaped pendant around her neck, a bad copy of Angelica’s necklace made of cheap Mexican silver. Her companion was slight and short, wiry as a young girl, with auburn hair clipped close to her skull and a small tattoo of a crescent moon on her left cheek. When she extended her hand in greeting, Annie saw that she had another tattoo on the ball of her thumb, the tiny perfectly rendered image of a honeybee.

  “That must have hurt,” said Helen. She pulled two extra chairs from another table and scooted over to make room.

  “Not really,” said Lyla. She slid into a chair, her grey eyes never leaving Annie. “You let yourself flow into the pain. It’s over pretty quick.”

  “I always thought body mutilation was the sin against the Holy Ghost,” said Annie.

  “What?” asked Virgie.

  “Nothing. Obsolete cultural reference.” Annie reached for her club soda and sipped, staring warily at the newcomers. “Enjoying your vacation?”

  “Your show was fantastic, as always,” said Martha. She inclined her head toward her two friends. “It was the first time they’ve seen you—”

  “First time we’ve seen you live. Your video is great,” broke in Lyla. />
  “Your music is so fantastic,” gushed Virgie. “It cuts so close to the bone, I mean it’s really amazing how you get so much out of your own pain and sense of loss, how you’ve managed to heal yourself and turn it all into those intense songs—”

  “It’s a living.” Annie crunched an ice cube. She leaned back in her chair, staring at Virgie’s throat with narrowed eyes. “Nice necklace.”

  “Thanks! I got it at one of Angelica Furiano’s Waking the Moon workshops. Have you ever been—”

  “No.”

  “Oh, but you must! I mean, she is so incredible, you can just feel the power emanating from her, I mean it was just the most incredibly intense experience of my life—”

  “Wow,” said Annie dryly.

  “It was pretty intense,” said Lyla. “We live in Northampton and we’ve started a group there, there’s a lot of us who took the workshops and were awakened. We get together every week and the energy level is just amazing, and—well, you just wouldn’t believe it, that’s all. You really should check it out.”

  “Annie’s pretty busy touring these days,” Helen said. “We don’t have a lot of free time—”

  “Angelica really is rather remarkable,” said Martha. She gave Annie an apologetic look. “I know you think it’s all kind of dumb—”

  “I don’t think it’s dumb. I’m not a separatist, that’s all.”

  “Oh, but all kinds of people are into Angelica!” Virgie leaned across the table to stare earnestly at Annie. “I’ve even met guys there. I mean, most of the women at our workshop were straight, and it was so amazing to see how they blossomed! Most of us—”

  She fluttered her hands, indicating the women at the table, the crowds outside. “We’re used to feeling outside the mainstream, but for them it was like the first time they ever truly realized just how marginalized women are, how totally dependent on this archaic obsolete patriarchal system that enslaves us—”