The longer Her hour is postponed, and therefore the more exhausted by man’s irreligious improvidence the natural resources of the soil and sea become, the less merciful will Her five-fold mask be, and the narrower the scope of action that She grants to whichever demigod She chooses to take as Her temporary consort in godhead. Let us placate Her in advance by assuming the cannibalistic worst…
Dr. Furiano’s hand remained poised in the air. Beyond it the moon rose slowly above the hillsides.
“But I think change is coming,” she said softly. “I think it is coming very, very soon. And I very much want to be a part of it.”
I put the fax paper down on my desk, smoothed it with my hand.
Othiym. Waking the Moon.
It was all crazy, of course, but exactly what I would have expected from Angelica. The part about saving the world made it sound like maybe she’d tripped off the line somewhere, but the rest seemed pretty much in character with the girl I’d known nineteen years before. And at least she’d given credit to June Harrington and Marija Gimbutas and…
At the thought of Magda Kurtz I shivered, reached instinctively for the cardigan I kept hanging on the back of my chair all winter. But it was July now. The sweater was stuffed in a drawer at home, and I doubt if it would have offered much comfort anyhow.
“Katherine?”
I started, turned, and saw Laurie Driscoll, our department secretary “Another fax for you.” She handed me a piece of paper. “And Alice said to tell you that your intern will be here tomorrow morning—I guess a whole batch of them arrived this morning, they’ve got orientation and then some kind of lunch at the Castle. So finally we’ll have some help getting that new stuff organized.”
“About time.” I took the fax, glanced down, and recognized Baby Joe’s signature. After she left, I read Baby Joe’s addendum.
Sweeney—
This just in, I thought you should see it. Also, I talked to Annie Harmon and she said she’d call you.
I’ll be in touch.
It was a copy of a brief article from that morning’s New York Times.
FLAGSTAFF, AZ July 2 Police stated that yesterday morning the skeletal remains of Cloud Benson, professional bodyguard to noted feminist archaeologist and author Angelica Furiano, were discovered on the grounds of Furiano’s home in Sedona.
In what appears to have been a grisly freak accident, Benson’s corpse was completely devoured by wild animals—probably some type of fire ant, says County Medical Examiner Warren Schaner—so that only her skeleton and remnants of clothing remained. Benson, 19, had been a member of Dr. Furiano’s entourage since the fall of 1993. She was last seen alive the previous evening, when her colleagues Kendra Wilson and Martin Eisling left her in the cottage they shared on Furiano’s 200-acre ranch. Furiano speculates that Benson, who liked to run every evening along the ridge that marks her property line, may have tripped and injured herself, and so fallen prey to some kind of predator. Sunday Jimenez, Furiano’s housekeeper, reported seeing a puma on the property some months earlier.
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—
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.