Her words lingered in the air. But then I heard another sound, a faint jangling echo as of a glass harmonium shattering, its brittle notes fading into Angelica’s voice.
“Do you?”
It was a real choice she was offering me: a deal of some sort. Like Oliver’s opening parry, this was a kind of acid test—but what the hell was I being tested for?
The jangling grew louder. In counterpoint to it rose another sound, the tremulous sigh of wind in dry reeds. Angelica’s grip on my arm tightened as she pulled me to her, until her body’s warmth enveloped my own. Her perfume was everywhere, musky and sweet. The sound of our breathing faded into the wind.
“Sweeney,” she whispered. “Will you come with me?”
I wanted to reply but I felt too sleepy to talk, too sleepy to do anything but lean into her arms. My head lolled back until I was staring at the sky, the afterlight of sunset gone now, given over to a glowing purple the color of hyacinths. The moon was there, just barely—a slender crescent with a silvery ridge of cloud banked against its curving tines, and a single pallid star beside it. The crimelights gave a weird sepia tinge to everything. Moon and falling leaves and even our own shadows seemed to be strewn across the faded dusty plane of an old photograph—everything except Angelica.
She was so much brighter and realer than everything else. I could feel her arms around me, feel her hair blown against my cheeks and smell her perfume mingling with the scent of decaying leaves and moist earth. The rattling of the wind in the trees grew louder, the scent of sandalwood and oranges filled my nostrils until it all blurred together: the moon sweeping across my vision, Angelica’s warm breath and the soft pressure of her hands upon mine, the beauty and strangeness of the Divine itself joining to claim me as the night grew deeper around us.
Will you come with me?
I closed my eyes. A faint earthy sweetness lay upon my tongue, and almost I imagined I could smell woodsmoke, the scent of burning leaves. I opened my eyes and smiled, half-turning my head to look up into Angelica’s face. I could feel her there, just as I could feel the chill wind.
But I did not see Angelica. What I did see made me gasp.
There was a woman in the moon. I could see her as distinctly as though she were my own reflection. Her face calm, with the ageless features of a Toltec image—heavy lips, long slanted eyes, high rounded cheekbones. Her eyes were half-shut, and the curve of her mouth mirrored the moon’s bow glittering upon her brow. Milky light washed across her, so that it was as though I gazed at a face in deep water, a shattered caryatid waiting to be pulled from the depths. It was a beautiful face, but what made it beautiful was its utter calm, the overwhelming sense that in aeons and aeons she alone had never bowed before the wrath and fury of time and lust and death. I could have stared upon her forever, I felt, and myself turn to stone and ash and never even care.
But then the woman began to change. Her hair first, its cloudy mass dispersing into darkness until only a few bright threads remained. Then the rounded contours of her face hardened. Her mouth grew thin and taut. A row of teeth protruded from beneath her upper lip—teeth white and glittering as ice, grotesquely long and needle-sharp. Very slowly her mouth parted in a smile. Behind the row of teeth loomed a darkness more complete than any I had ever seen: starless, formless, not even a mote of light glimmering within it.
And then the moon began to burn, not brightly but with dull red clouds swelling above it, as though it had been set upon a smoldering pyre. I watched in horror as those bloody clouds grew and finally burst into a poisonous black haze. The fragile arc of moon collapsed. Where it had shone moments before was—nothing—only that immense face with its shuttered eyes, and the sighing wind.
I was shivering uncontrollably. I could feel the hammering pulse of blood in my temples, feel Angelica’s arms around me, cold and unyielding as iron, and hear her breathing. But my vision was filled with the dreadful visage that took up the entire sky: eyes like charred holes, her mouth a howling void. I was filled with a terror so intense, so sharp and pure and cold, that it was almost like joy. For a long moment everything was so still I thought we might stay this way forever, frozen beneath that implacable sleeping face. And then its eyes began to open.
I screamed; at least I tried to. But Angelica gripped me so hard the sound was choked out of me. Above us floated that gorgon’s face, vast and ravenous and patient. Once more the moon burned upon her brow with a hard silver gleam. Her hair flowed across the sky, her mouth gaped wider and wider until I thought it would swallow us. But what was most terrible was her eyes.
Because they were not a gorgon’s eyes. Instead, when the heavy lids lifted, there in that dreadful white face shone eyes warm and blue and brilliant as the heart of summer. Looking at them my knees buckled. Even Angelica gasped. She let go of me and I dropped to the ground, weeping.
Because I could have borne the gorgon’s stare, shuddered and kicked and fought some nightmarish vision of Hecate or Kali or Circe. But not this. Never this.
Because this was my mother. Her summer eyes staring down at me as she woke me in the morning, met me after school, waved a sad farewell in front of Rossetti Hall. But at the same time it was also Angelica I saw there. Angelica as I had first glimpsed her, poised in the doorway of a stifling classroom, Angelica staring at the Shrine as it burst into flame. I wept, overwhelmed by the most primal surge of yearning that I have ever felt.
And the Woman in the Moon gazed back down upon me. Her eyes, too, welled with tears, her lashes drooped even as her mouth yawned wider and I felt myself falling into Her. All around me was heat and flames, the stench of charred wood and cloth and cinders. My hair burned, my clothes turned to ashes and my hands to sizzling bone as I reached for Her, crying aloud. Because She was my mother, She was whispering my name, the only name my mother ever called me, even as She devoured me—
“Katie—Katie—Katie—”
—and in Her burning embrace my tears hissed upon my cheeks, my hair and skin were nothing but smoke—
“—Sweeney! Sweeney—please!”
I opened my eyes and blinked painfully. “What…?”
“Sweeney! Are you all right? Sweeney?”
In front of me crouched Angelica. Her face looked greenish in the crimelights. I coughed, waved unseen smoke from my bleary eyes. “Yeah, I’m okay. But Angelica—did you—did you see—?”
Her eyes widened as she shook her head. “I thought you were having a seizure,” she said. “You’re not—well, epileptic or something?”
I stared at her in disbelief. “No, I’m not epileptic. Didn’t you—I mean, Angelica, what the fuck was that?”
Angelica said nothing. Above us the night was clear; at least it was clear once you got above the scrim of heat and exhaust that hung above us like the ghost of some other, older place.
“What was what?” Angelica asked softly. “I mean—you just seemed—well, a little out of it.”
I glanced at her sideways: her pale face, the way she looked away from me and then back again, her gaze skipping from mine like a stone over cold water.
A little out of it.
She was lying. Something had happened, but who knew what? Not me; but then maybe not Angelica, either. I took a deep breath and forced myself to stare into the sky again, looking for the face I had seen there before, the moon like a bright reflection of my own deepest fears and longing.