Waking the Moon (44 page)

“Mellisœ agevahe! Oye Mellisæ!”

“Fuck you!” gasped Cloud. She leapt over a prickly pear and landed on the smooth surface of the drive.
And fuck Melissa, too!

She hurtled up the driveway. Ahead of her, she could just make out the tall posts with their sagging loops of electrified wire strung between, the crossties of the weathered gate that opened out onto Fire Road S3. Her heart was like a brick slung inside her chest, her shins ached from pounding the rough ground, but it was only a few more yards, she could feel where wild grass and sedge were poking up through the loose dirt beneath her feet and all she had to do was reach the gate and she could—

“Shit!”

Pain erupted from a spot above her knee. She slapped at her leg, felt another agonizing stab at her palm. Still running, she drew her hand up, saw a glistening red spot on the fleshy part of her thumb. Blood.

She shook her hand, trying to dislodge the shining droplet. But then the drop upon her thumb
moved,
coalesced into a gleaming bead of crimson with black legs and two bright black beads for eyes. Its jointed antennae twitched furiously, its swollen body thrust upward so for an instant she glimpsed what protruded from its abdomen, a black splinter like another thorn. Before she could slap it away another burst of pain lanced her shoulder, her leg, her breast; then another, and another. She glanced down and screamed.

She was covered with bees: a living shroud of bees, so many she could hear the pattering of their legs as they crawled over each other, trying to find purchase on her exposed skin. Thousands of them, each with its blaze of agony like a tiny blade drawn through her flesh. She shrieked and slapped at them, lurching across the stony ground, but it was like trying to outrun the rain. Her mouth opened and one darted inside; she gagged as she felt its legs, and then a horrible bolt of pain as it stung the back of her throat. She fell to the ground, clawing at her tongue.

Her throat was swollen shut; she couldn’t see for the bodies swarming across her eyes. They were crawling into her nostrils, she could feel them burrowing into her ears, their spent stingers a pelt of soft black hairs across her tongue and cheek and lips.

A few more minutes, and you could not tell that there had ever been a person there at all. The swarm covered a mound that could have been a large stone or dead animal, vaguely human-shaped. The bees crawled atop each other, coupling, feeding, moving their abdomens in vicious thrusts, squeezing their eggs from their bodies to lie beneath the girl’s skin, before it grew too stiff. When nearly an hour had passed, they departed. In long skeins like thread spun from a spindle, they lifted and sang off into the night, their humming growing fainter and fainter until it died.

From a few yards away a figure watched, silent, unmoving. Upon her breast glowed a swollen moon. It gave forth beams of splintered light as she raised her arms and chanted in a clear strong voice.

Oye Mellisæ! Haïyo Othiym, oye Thriæ …

I have crowned you, Bride of the thunder:

Your breath is on all that hath life, you who float in the air

Beelike, deathlike, a wonder …

And now that the bees had gone she summoned their sisters:

Oye myrmidon, oye!

—and the ants came, the voracious red driver ants named
eciton
that lay waste to vast areas of the rain forest, devouring anything in their path. They were like a shadow creeping down the hillside, like a ragged hem of darkness falling across that small still form. As quickly as the bees had found Cloud, the ants foamed across the barren desert and onto her corpse. Their feet made a whispering sound as they climbed upon her, her limbs and face bloated with venom. They darkened her skin like a bruise, crept beneath her loose clothing so that the fabric moved with a soft undercurrent of sound, a rustling that grew into a sort of tearing noise, like shears being drawn through thick canvas.

The noise continued for a long time. An acrid smell filled the air, released from glands near the ants’ mandibles. As they fed, other creatures crept up from the tiled veranda to watch: a pair of soft slow tarantulas and the elfin kit fox. But when they detected that bitter smell the tarantulas raised their front legs defensively and stalked back into the darkness. The kit fox’s ears flattened against its skull as it whined, then fled into the shadows. Only the bats whistled overhead, now and then sweeping down to carry off one of the winged sentries that hovered above the corpse.

When finally they had fed, the ants moved on. Like water poured onto the desert floor, the dark cloud spread; then disappeared into countless unseen cracks and crevices. Only their scent remained, a smell like bitter melons, and a glistening assemblage of bones and skull, a torn black shirt and khaki shorts like the flag of a fallen army sunk between loops of ivory.

It was Martin who found her early the next morning, out on his dawn run. He recognized her clothes, and also the three tiny gold rings he found caught in the curve of a finger bone, alongside the shivering crystal wedge of an insect’s wing.

“Oh, my god,” he whispered, and raced back to the house.

“What is it?” demanded Angelica, as she met him at the door.

“Stay inside, just stay in here,” commanded Martin, and he dialed 911 with shaking hands.

A short while later the police and ambulance arrived, but of course there was nothing they could do. The dogs they brought, sturdy cheerful German shepherds trained in tracking lost children and hikers, sniffed at the sad array of bones and then bellied miserably onto the ground, pawing at their muzzles and whining.

“The coroner’s on his way, and Dr. Sorrell from up at Flagstaff,” the chief of police told Angelica. He was pale as he scratched a few notes onto his clipboard. By the pool Martin was comforting the hysterical Kendra, who had, despite orders from Angelica, run to the top of the ridge and seen what was there. Sunday was talking excitedly to a reporter, telling him about the puma she’d seen months before. “He says fire ants have killed folks in South Texas but that was more of an allergic reaction. This just seems like some kinda crazy freakish thing—”

“I can’t believe it, I just can’t believe it,” murmured Angelica. She shook her head and stared out the open front door. Three police cars and the coroner’s car and an ambulance were in the drive, along with the pickup trucks of two local reporters, all parked every which way, some with their doors still hanging open. As she stared a plume of yellowish dust rose from between the jaws of the wooden gate at the top of the hill. A moment later a Jeep came bouncing down the drive.

“Who’s this?” asked the chief of police.

“My son,” Angelica said softly. “He’s been driving back from college—”

The Jeep slammed to a stop. Its door flew open and a tall figure jumped out. He paused and stared at Martin and Kendra on the patio, turned to gaze in disbelief at the policemen and ambulance and the howling brace of dogs caged in a police car.

“Mom?” he yelled, running up the sidewalk. He ducked through the front door, glancing around frantically until he saw her. “Mom!”

“Dylan,” she said, and opened her arms to embrace him. “Dylan—”

“What happened, Mom, what’s—”

“Shhh,” she said, raising her hand to stroke the long hair from his eyes. “Shhh, don’t worry, it’s okay—

“Just something bad, that’s all. Something bad that happened to Cloud.”

W
HEN I CALLED THE
Beacon
I got Baby Joe’s voice mail, his soft sleepy voice followed by a few bars of the Bernard Herrmann score for
Jason and the Argonauts.
I left a message, then went to clear my head.

Outside on the Mall, the Aditi was in full swing. Raga music, wailing flutes, fire-eaters and magicians and puppet masters, all obscured by the duck smoke of frying
samosas
and the dust raised by thousands of passing feet. Already the grass had been trampled into a dirty greenish mat pleached with cigarette butts and trampled hot dogs and broken balloons. You could see the heat shimmering from the sidewalks and the flow of traffic on Constitution Avenue. In front of the National Gallery of Art, water arced from a line of sprinklers and children ran shrieking in and out of the rainbow spray. A woman in a stained sundress rummaged through a trash bin.

It was the second of July. Tens of thousands of tourists had descended on the city, and they all seemed to be
right here,
mingling with the dancers and fakirs and weavers imported from India at the expense of Winesap, Inc. I watched a family in full American tourist drag staring at a Bengali mother in tissue-silk sari and gold bracelets and her children, as
they
watched two young men angle a pair of fighter kites across the sky. In the background the Capitol glowed like a huge white cloud, its perimeter ringed with flags and the concrete bulwarks set up over the last few years to guard against terrorist attacks. The kites swooped and dipped, delta chips of green and yellow. Their strings had been coated with broken glass, so that when one suddenly dived at the other, the tail of the second kite was severed. It went into a stall and crashed. The victor reeled in his kite, smiling; then the two warriors gathered their reels and arm in arm walked to a Good Humor wagon.

It was all a little too weird for me. I went to a booth with a yellow-and-white awning and bought a lemonade. I crossed the Mall to the Freer, always an oasis of calm amidst the summer storm of tourists and children. I sat on a bench and sipped my lemonade and mused on what I had seen on TV.

Angelica a cult figure.

I shook my head and took another sip, getting a grainy mouthful of sour sugar. Although, really, it wasn’t totally unexpected. If I really thought about it, I would have been surprised if Angelica
hadn’t
turned out to be somehow extraordinary. If instead of an Italian count, she’d married a chemical engineer from Houston and settled there to raise their children. I wondered if she
had
children, dismissed the notion as ridiculous, maybe even a little grotesque. I could imagine Angelica hiring someone else to bear a daughter for her, and then engaging an army of nannies and tutors and linguists to raise her, a serenely beautiful child playing by herself in a Florentine garden.

But Angelica pregnant, Angelica in labor; Angelica changing diapers and making Play-Doh and watching
The Brave Little Toaster?
Not in a thousand years.

I finished my lemonade, dropped the empty cup atop a trash can already filled to overflowing. I walked slowly back across the Mall. A murky breeze carried the greasy smells of hot dogs and egg rolls from the lines of roach coaches parked in front of the museums. A bunch of marines in summer whites posed on the museum steps with a cardboard cutout of the president and his wife. Two museum guards watched, laughing, and saluted.

Too weird. I let the heavy revolving doors bear me inside, breathing gratefully the cool recycled air, the heady scents of tourism and scholarship, and returned to my office.

A little while later Baby Joe called. “What’s shaking,
hija
?”

“Baby Joe!” I was unexpectedly relieved to hear his voice. “You okay?” Silence. It had been only a week since Hasel’s death. “Yeah, I guess. Why?”

“Well—I just saw the weirdest thing on TV. On Opal Purlstein—”

“You watch Opal Purlstein?”

“Angelica
was on! I saw her, she was promoting some new book—”

“Oh, yeah.
Waking the Moon.
It’s supposed to hit the best-seller list this Sunday.”

I was flabbergasted. “I have a friend at the
Times Book Review,”
said Baby Joe tentatively, “he says—”

“You
knew?”
I exploded. “You
knew
about Angelica and didn’t
tell
me?”

“Hey, Sweeney, it’s not like it’s some kind of state secret—”

“I know that! But all that stuff about Hasel, and you never even
mentioned
—”

“I didn’t even
know
until a few months ago. I mean about her,” he said, aggrieved. “And—well, with Hasel and everything, I kind of forgot—”

“How could
you forget
?”

“Cut me some slack, Sweeney! My best friend fucking died!”

“But
Angelica
—Hasel said he saw—”

I could hear a soft intake of breath as he dragged on his cigarette. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about Hasel right now,” he said finally.

“Fine,” I snapped. “Can we talk about Angelica?”

Another long silence, followed by a sigh. “Yeah. But listen, Sweeney—there’s something weird going on. I mean with Angelica—”

“So that’s news?”

“Back off, huh? Okay, this is what I know: someone here interviewed Angelica for the Leisure section a little while ago. She’s got some kind of cult following out on the West Coast, feminist grad students, something like that …”

“You could have
told
me, Baby Joe. Jeez, I almost had a heart attack when I saw her—”

“How’d she look?”

“Fantastic. I mean, she doesn’t look different at all, she looks just like—”

I thought of how she had looked the last time I’d seen her: crouched over Oliver, as though she were a wolf and he her prey. I felt a clutching in my chest, the same awful disjointed feeling I’d had when Baby Joe told me Hasel died.

“—she looked just like always,” I ended lamely.

“Yeah.” Baby Joe sighed again. “Okay, I guess I should have told you when I first found out. But I kept thinking of Oliver, and—well, you and Angie had all that weird history—”

“We did?”

“Hey,
hija,
you tell me. But Oliver, you know, I thought it would just make you feel bad …”

His voice drifted off. I imagined him sitting at his computer, hazed with blue smoke and a dusting of ash. My anger melted—because seeing Angelica
did
make me think of Oliver, and that
did
make me feel bad.

“It was a long time ago,” I said at last.

“A long time ago, in a university far, far away,” Baby Joe giggled softly. “Hey, you didn’t videotape her or anything, did you?”