Waking the Moon

Elizabeth Hand WAKING THE MOON

For Oscar John Long,

friend and voyager

with all my love

Anyway those things would not have lasted long. The experience
of the years shows it to me.
But Destiny arrived
in some haste and stopped them.
The beautiful life was brief.
But how potent were the perfumes,
on how splendid a bed we lay,
to what sensual delight we gave our bodies.
An echo of the days of pleasure,
an echo of the days drew near me,
a little of the fire of the youth of both of us;
again I took in my hands a letter,
and I read and reread till the light was gone.
And melancholy, I came out on the balcony—
came out to change my thoughts at least by looking at
a little of the city that I loved,
a little movement on the street, and in the shops.

CR Cavafy, “In the Evening,” translated by Rae Dalven

If all those young men were like hares on the mountain
Then all those pretty maidens would get guns, go a-hunting.
If all those young men were like fish in the water
Then all those pretty maidens would soon follow after.
If all those young men were like rushes a-growing
Then all those pretty maidens would get scythes, go a-mowing.

—Maying Song

Contents

Prologue

PART ONE: DEPARTURE

1. The Sign

2. Raising the Naphaïm

3. Oliver and Angelica

4. The Lunula

5. The Sound of Bones and Flutes

6. The Reception

7. Night of the Electric Insects

8. Twilight at the Orphic Lodge

9. The Harrowing

PART TWO: ABSENCE

i. Pavana Lachrymæ

ii. Threnody: Storm King

iii. Lost Bells

iv. Saranbanda de la Muerta Oscura

PART THREE: RETURN

10. Ignoreland

11. Ancient Voices

12. The Priestess at Huitica

13. Other Echoes

14. Devil-Music

15. Ancient Voices (Echo)

16. Black Angels

17. Falling

18. A Meeting

19. Fire from the Middle Kingdom

20. Threnody and Breakdown

21. Waking the Moon

Coda

Author’s Notes

A Biography of Elizabeth Hand

Prologue

THEY NEVER FOUND HER. Nothing at alclass="underline" no clothes, no jewelry, no bones or teeth or locks of auburn hair. No lunula. Maybe that’s why I never truly mourned Angelica. Oh, I grieved, of course, with that hopeless misery one reserves for lost youth or broken chances or a phantom limb. That was how I wept for Angelica; not the way I’d raged when I lost Oliver. Not even the muted anguish I’d felt during all those lost years in Dr. Dvorkin’s carriage house.

This was a small grief, really: because how can I believe that Angelica is really gone, any more than a storm or hurricane is gone? The clouds pass over, the skies clear; but there are still the shattered homes and decapitated trees, the dunes given to the sea. And always there will be that clutch in the chest when you see a darkness on the horizon, a greening in the evening sky.

Like Oliver, she was beautiful; she was so beautiful. And she was kind and smart and funny, the sort of friend you dream of having. The kind of friend I dreamed of having, and somehow she found me, just as Oliver had. If she was a force of nature, she was still human; at least until the end. How can I believe she is gone?

But she is gone, and I have so little to remember her by. If only I had written more about my friends, or done something with my nearly empty college notebooks. If only I had taken pictures, or saved Oliver’s funny crabbed drawings, and the delicately calligraphic notes Angelica pinned to the door of my room in Rossetti Hall with their faint musky scents of sandalwood and oranges!

But I kept nothing of Oliver and Angelica, not a single real photograph or letter or drawing. Only a black-and-white Polaroid that Oliver gave me shortly after we met, showing his shoe—a rather worn black wing tip—and part of his bare ankle; that and the sea urchin lamp Angelica sent me our first Christmas.

That’s all. Though I have more of them within me now than they could ever know. Perhaps, that is almost enough.

PART ONE Departure

CHAPTER 1 The Sign

I MET THEM IN Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion. A fitting place, that magician’s grove within the enchanted forest that was the Divine, where Balthazar Warnick presided at his podium and wore a hand-painted paisley tie and three-piece Fergus Corméillean worsted suit to every session—even though there were only seven of us students, and the dyspeptic rathators hissed as though black winter gnawed at the stained glass windows, instead of the city’s sultry Indian summer.

I had taken a seat at the very back of the room. It was my first day of classes, my first official day at the Divine. I had arrived the previous Friday, meekly following the Strong Suggestion listed in the Introductory Handbook—a slender volume printed by the University on heavy cream-colored paper meant to invoke the physical and intellectual weight of vellum.

It is strongly suggested that underclassmen attending the university for the first time arrive during the week of September 1st, 1975, when Orientation and Introductory Sessions will be held for both students and those parents who wish to attend.

At the top of every page glowered the University’s coat of arms, a Gryphon rampant and Pelican gules, the latter tearing at her own breast to feed her young. Beneath them was a motto—

Vita, sine literis, mors est.

Life without learning is death.

—and the school’s name spelled out in glorious sweeps of gold and blue and crimson.

The University of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine.

The Divine, as I learned to call it within a few hours of my arrival. School, my mother called it, as when after the five-hour drive she stood with me in my dormitory room, surrounded by overstuffed boxes, and said, “Well, good luck at School, Katie.”

The drive had been long and hot and anxious, my mother and father veering between elation and depression at seeing the last of their six children plummet from the nest. My parents had married for love, high school sweethearts from Astoria, Queens. My mother still had the accent—muted to be sure, but jarring, when you took in that delicate face beneath fiery curls. My mother was an Irish beauty of the old school. Not so my father, who stood six-foot-four in his bare and uncommonly ugly feet and—notwithstanding the degrees from Saint Bonaventure and Fordham and the elevated position at IBM—looked more like Victor McLaglen than Jack Kennedy. My two sisters were the beauties, my three brothers rebels who, as adults, made good.

Me? I was the smart one, the loner, the hapless rebel and youngest by many years. Katherine Sweeney Cassidy, named for my maternal grandmother Katherine Sweeney; with my mother’s grey eyes and my father’s feet, Katie to the family but Sweeney now to the world. Sweeney to the Divine.