Ride the Moon: An Anthology (5 page)

I got out of the jeep, my hiking boots crunching on gravel as I got my bearings. From my breast-pocket, I withdrew my crystal-and-chain and took a quick reading, getting my intuition dialed in. The dowsing pendulum I used was headed by a large purple quartz and had belonged to my grandfather. I've always thought that long family connection was part of the process, somehow. As though the energy of generations had set up a sympathetic resonance in that beautiful stone.

I wandered about the camp at random, letting the crystal guide me. My footsteps made the only perceptible sound in the place: all else was silence. There were signs of habitation—a half-empty thermos; newspapers open on field tables; a pair of extra boots outside one of the trailers—but no sign of life. And no sign of struggle.

I came at last to the lip of the dig, and winced at a sudden shock of pain spreading up from my neck and throbbing through the base of my skull. Pain was the sign: oil was here. Hydrocarbon feature confirmed.

I gasped at the awful majesty of it all.

The crater was some sixty metres deep, cyclopean cliffs sloping down to the limestone floor in graduated grey/yellow walls. A wide earthen-ramp had been engineered along the eastern side of the pit to allow easy access, and the entire site appeared to travel north for some distance, then veer to the east in an L shaped configuration.

I began my descent down the ramp, my temples pulsing.

Making the floor of the pit, I proceeded north, letting my pain draw me on. The silence in the pit was like a weight, like a physical presence. I felt the quiet pushing down on me, giving me the sense of having submerged into a pool of water, rather than having walked down into an open-pit mine.

I was struck suddenly by a thought I'd had on many previous occasions: oil had been the making of me, and in the making of me, I kept coming back to oil. More and more often, as exploration spread into the least accessible areas of the globe, it was the oil industry uncovering some of archaeology's most significant and bizarre finds. Oil industry endowments often financed the very departments with which I had been affiliated, and it was the oil industry that had proven to be the most open-minded towards the resultant—frequently unconventional—scholarship.

It was impossible not to reflect upon these interconnections as I approached the bend in the mine. I was there because of my talent, and my expertise, both of which were predicated upon oil.

I turned the corner to the east, and immediately doubled over, retching my eggs benedict into the dirt.

Pain lanced through my skull and spine: pain the likes of which I had never experienced on any previous dowse.

The extension to the pit was not extensive, running for perhaps only another hundred or so meters to the east, with the bowl of the crater extending up on all sides in a nearly perfect curve.

And in the center of the pit, emerging from the limestone to a height of some sixteen feet, rose an octagonal obelisk of what looked to be polished hematite.

I recognized it almost immediately, both from its shape and general dimensions, as well as by the presence of engraved pictographs which decorated the top half of the stone. I recognized it from writings in Kurtz, and in the dreamlike jail-house poetry of Artemis Jones, and had even seen a passage in Welton's Folkloric Origins concerning it, but more significantly than any of these, I had seen the edifice with my own eyes. Seen it, and photographed those designs, on a hilltop outside the town of Stoianacavar in Hungary!

I staggered forward, mind reeling with disbelief and agony. Pain so sharp as to make me gasp for breath bolted through my nerve endings as I fumbled for my phone. Addressing my pictures, I brought up the Stoianacavar obelisk, isolated on the pictographs, and expanded them. A moment's examination proved to my satisfaction that although both symbolic structures were of the same language, the symbols were not identical on both stones. Somehow, two culturally specific structures had been raised thousands of miles apart, and thousands of years ago, and in the case of the Athabasca deposit, how many untold eons must have passed since the pillar's construction? I stood sixty meters from the surface! And the obelisk had only been unearthed at all, because in some way, by some unknown process, it had presented as being geologically consistent with a hydrocarbon feature.

Almost as if it had known that only such a feature could motivate the Herculean task of digging the pit in the first place.

Almost as if the hydrocarbon sign had been a lure.

I swallowed, tasted the brackish backwash of my own vomit; spit, and wiped my mouth with my right shirtsleeve.

I advanced to the pillar, squinting with the effort of detecting what I thought to be a slight vibration coming from the surface of the stone. As I closed, I felt the vibration more certainly, resonating in the crystal in my breastpocket—could feel the sympathetic harmony against my chest.

I reached a trembling hand to the surface of the stone—so impossibly silver and smooth—contrasted against the muted yellows and greys of the surrounding ground.

My fingertips met with the stone, and confirmed the vibration. I felt it in my feet then, on the top of my head, in my clenched teeth. I felt the stone singing, for I sensed it as a song, and all the world fell away in a sudden directionless acceleration into the infinite.

I saw, I felt, I heard...

A war amongst the heavens; a God-like son slaying his leviathan mother, removing her heart, throwing her head into the sky. Coyolxauhqu she came to be named, her head becoming the moon; her life's blood flowing thick and black into the bowels of the earth. Blood boiling with viscous energy, waiting for discovery; the moon guiding searchers through the millennia via unseen forces and dreams, pulling at psyches even as it pulled on the seas...

An ancient Byzantine galleon spewing Greek fire from a bronze nozzle carved in the likeness of a dragon, the vulnerable wooden decks protected by eldritch sorcery. The original petro-magic, binding petroleum and war...

A young Winston Churchill seated in the library-office of the First Sea Lord, coming to the realization that the British navy must convert to oil-driven dreadnoughts in order to maintain supremacy. It's the decisive step, the hydrocarbon rubicon, the first domino to fall...

Standard Oil rising and combining its various tentacles in trust, seething with life and power, its agents scouring the planet in search of precious reserves. I see them then, the new petro-sorcerers, the inheritors of Byzantium, hidden from history and dreaming of Coyolxauhqu, placing the planet irrevocably upon the hydrocarbon path, gradually invoking the goddess of the moon...

Standard slain by her offspring: Exxon, Chevron, Conoco, Sunoco, Mobil, Amoco even as Coyolxauhqu had given birth to the gods who would vanquish her. Her unseen hand behind everything now; her mind the engine, her blood the fuel...

War. I feel the explosions, hear the roar of the Merlin engine, the Daimler-Benz engine, smell the gasoline and diesel of the tanks and planes, feel the grease amidst the pistons. It is the joy and laughter of Coyolxauhqu; blitzkrieg another of her children...

Black, billowing, pluming smoke: to breathe it is to die...

The fire, and the horror.

I awoke to a strange piping sound, a sound that soon resolved itself into a singing voice.

I lay on my back, at the base of the silver stone where I had fallen. I felt no pain. Day had passed, and through the rim of the crater I observed the whirling immensity of the cosmos, the scattered stars cold and vivid in their indifference.

The singing came closer, and I saw her then—a beautiful, pale-skinned girl with hair as black as crude, whose naked body seemed to glow in the moonlight though I could see no moon above. Her eyes were dark, and long lashed, and her thin, yet sensual lips formed a secret smile as she hummed her sibilant tune.

She knelt beside me, singing softly, and adjusting her notes as though trying to recombine the sounds. In a few moments, the music resolved itself into English, and she spoke: “Thank you, Jack.”

I turned my head towards her. I felt no pain, but I was weak, and my limbs tingled, the nerves deadened, and sluggish.

“Who...?” I croaked, my throat thick and dry with sleep.

“You know who,” she said. She was right.

With an effort, I struggled to sit up. The girl helped me upright with a small, cool hand at my back. She smiled, and I knew I'd seen that smile before.

“Diana,” I mumbled.

“A projection,” she purred.

“If I call her on her cell?”

“There will be no answer. I needed to bring you here. I sent a figment of my mind to get you.”

I swallowed again, wincing at the constriction in my throat.

“I don't understand.”

“Yes you do,” she said, going to her haunches, placing her hands in her lap. She looked as earnest as any pupil I'd ever had, her staring, black eyes more intent than menacing. “I've been singing to you your whole life. Calling to you to come find me. You and only you—the others are but shadows compared to your light. I knew that you would find me, and bring me through.”

I frowned at that expression, felt the blood drain from my face. All my talents, and all my studies...how much had been my decision, how much her design? Lunaco...had the company been formed knowing that I would find the oil? The Lunaco stock options had financed all my subsequent endeavours; made me what I was to become.

Had I ever truly found oil, or had it always found me?

“Yes,” she said, reading the comprehension dawning in my expression.

“What about...what about the men, the miners? Where did they...” I stopped speaking as I looked into her eyes, and sensed her smile in the darkness. She was so close, I could hear her breathing softly through her nose; smell the scent of a tropical rain forest upon her skin. Her eyes were pitiless, unblinking: the eyes of a mamba.

“I'll need some clothes,” she said at last. “I want to drive with you to my city.”

Calgary, Alberta, she meant. It all made sense then, the changes I'd seen there over the decades.

Coyolxauhqu was alive at last, the moon made flesh, and she was coming to reclaim her throne.

I've written this out of guilt, I suppose.

Shame for my part in things, my ignorance. I've consulted Kurtz; emailed an associate in Britain who owns original leather bound tomes from the Inquisition which might have held some answers, but the fact of the matter is, it's simply too late. The coming of Coyolxauhqu was a century in the making. The time to stop her was in the late nineteenth century, not in the mid twenty first. We are all of us bound to her through our economies, our behaviours, our cars, our jobs, our mortgages. She spent thousands of years learning to correct her past mistakes, and when she came at us, she used our own minds to prepare the ground. We've been taking her sacrament too long. We'd be lost without her now.

She wanted to drive to Calgary so she could feel the wind on her face. She put her feet out through the side window and tuned the radio to classic pop, singing along to Katy Perry and Britney. When we got to town, it was dark, and she made me drive to Riley Park—just up tenth street from The Batucada. She held my hand as we lay on our backs in the middle of the central field and looked up into stars dimmed by the city lights. None of the junkies in the shadows even thought about accosting us. I imagine their drug-induced dreams were more hideous than ever before, on that night.

Lying with her then, our backs chilled by night-dewed grass, I could sense her immensity. The great cosmic dragon crystallized in the shape of a girl; the shape I had given her.

I've wanted for nothing from that moment on. I am the consort of Coyolxauhqu—her unwitting high-priest. The form-bringer. The finder. I rattle around in our mansions, unable to concentrate, unable to sleep.

When she dematerializes into the city, I sometimes hear her in the wind, that piping sound, an ululation you can hear whistling between the buildings downtown during a Chinook. You can catch a whiff of sulphur at the most unexpected times, and wonder if there's been a gas-main break. There'll be an odd light in the sky sometimes, and you'll wonder if there's been another tornado warning. You'll see the full moon shining a shade of blood red, and you'll click your tongue at the air pollution.

She appears in the hallways of our companies; places calls from a hundred head offices; announces directorships and partnerships, and I'll hear her words coming from the mouths of our leaders on the television.

We drift towards war with clockwork inevitability, yet nobody seems too concerned. The talk in the coffee shops and after-work lounges is all of showing strength, of being hard, from people who never used to say such things aloud.

Sometimes she'll call to me, and I will summon her body, and we'll go to The Batucada where she can dance, and snort coke, and drink throughout the night.

And on those nights, I cringe in terror when an unsuspecting girl is pulled out of the audience by men made up to look like Aztec priests. For the sacrifices are no longer staged: the hearts pump, and the blood flows viscous and real, and my Coyolxauhqu exults in the roaring of her chosen people.

Ever since she was a little girl, Julia Threswald loved the moon. She used to say she was born during the full moon but that was a bit of a fib. Julia's mother gave birth to her on a late Friday afternoon and although the full moon rose that night, Julia had already made her appearance by that time.

But Julia never let that get in the way of her story, and her fascination with the moon began.

As Julia's father worked as a chemist at drug company, Julia grew up with an appreciation of science (if not much appreciation for drug companies that laid her father off when he was two years shy of retiring). She studied physics and chemistry, anything she thought might get her closer to her dream because as she grew it no longer became just about seeing the moon, she dreamed of visiting it. She imagined herself dressed in a white space suit, taking her first tentative steps on the surface of an alien world.