Authors: Elizabeth Hand
When she reached the altar she stopped. As Annie watched through a haze of smoke, Othiym’s fingers tightened around the lunula. She moved until she stood directly above the boy. She raised the lunula over her head. Before Annie could flinch, the glowing crescent fell to strike the boy beside her. Sudden warmth splashed onto her face.
Othiym, haïyo!
Annie screamed. When she blinked her eyelids felt sticky. A salt-scorched taste burned her mouth. Through the roaring in her ears she heard Othiym’s voice crying
Eisheth!
And Eisheth came.
It was no longer the black angel she had seen earlier. It was a vulture, so vast the shadow of its wings blotted out everything behind it. The stench of rotting flesh flowed from it, and she could see white grubs and blowflies rooting in the wattled flesh of its neck. It made a soft gurgling sound, like laughter, then pecked at the boy’s eyes.
Annie gagged. The acolytes darted to the altar, vying with each other to catch the boy’s blood in their rhytons. The vulture stared at them balefully, its black tongue clicking against its beak.
“Eisheth!”
A thunderous flapping as the vulture rose into the air. Annie tuned her head.
“Angelica,” she whispered. It was almost a relief to say it.
The woman smiled. She looked improbably youthful and lovely as ever, with her tawny skin and hair, her slanted eyes. But her breasts were stippled with blood, and blood ran from her nipples to streak her belly. In her strong peasant’s hands she held a rhyton shaped like a bull’s head. Steam threaded the air above the vessel’s opening as she lifted it, tilting it until a dark stream flowed from the bull’s open mouth and into her own.
“All I have loved is mine,”
she said. Her mouth and tongue and teeth were black with blood.
Annie broke into hysterical gabbling. Beneath her the cold stone altar disappeared. The smoke dispersed, and with it the vulture’s carrion stench. Once again she was crouching upon the wooden floor of the boathouse.
On the other side of the room people danced, oblivious. A few yards from Annie, Lyla and the others stood above a limp form. Annie’s voice became a sob. Virgie glanced at her, then back down at the dead boy.
His eyes were gone, and his tongue. His torso had been split, the twin arches of his rib cage pried apart and his organs removed. In the empty cavity there was only a black-and-crimson feather, like a blossom sprung from his heart.
Annie shook convulsively. A single maddening thought raced through her mind—there should be
more blood,
she had
seen
how he’d died, there should be blood everywhere …
Without warning they were upon her, clawing at her arms and face as they dragged her to her feet. Annie screamed, she kicked and fought and yelled but they were everywhere, a mindless hive tearing at her clothes, pinning her arms behind her back.
“Be careful, be careful!—
Annie saw Virgie looking at her with round black eyes.
“Agape,
Annie—you’re
so
lucky you’ve been chosen—”
Annie moaned, closed her eyes against the pain. When she opened them again she saw a crescent flashing in the darkness. A few inches from her face someone held a battered silver vessel. She smelled blood: that choking thick smell, its ferrous taste as they prised her jaws open and it scalded her gums, blinded her where it splashed into her eyes. She couldn’t scream, there was blood everywhere, filling her nostrils and ears and mouth. Through a film of red she saw the lunula, the Moon poised to rise and blot the sun from the sky …
“Let her go!”
A voice cried out. The hands upon her tightened; then the same voice cried again.
“Ne Othiym anahta, Ne Othiym—praetome!”
Annie blinked. The others turned, gazing at a screen door that had blown open behind them.
“Ne Othiym anahta, Ne Othiym—praetome!”
Her captors let go. Annie staggered across the floor.
“You fucking amateurs,” she spat, and started to cry.
A few feet away Othiym’s followers stared at the door, their faces angry and bewildered. Virgie let out a wail.
“Ohh—she’s ruined
everything
—”
Like insects they scattered, and disappeared among the crowd. Annie tried vainly to stop sobbing.
“You better call someone. I mean like 911—” she choked, wiping her eyes and staring repelled at her blood-streaked fingers. “
God,
I don’t fucking
believe
this—”
From the doorway came a muffled laugh.
“Funny?”
Annie whirled, hoarse with rage. “You think this
is funny
?”
For the first time Annie saw her savior: a striking long-haired woman in a purple dress.
“Funny ha-ha or funny strange?” the woman asked.
Annie gasped. “B-but you—you were—”
The woman only smiled. Not with mockery or amusement, but with the purest joy and longing Annie had ever seen. Smiled and nodded, just once, whispering—
“Oh, Annie—I’ve missed you so—”
—before the wind sent sand like rain raiding against the floorboards, and without a sound she melted into the darkness.
I
DECIDED TO WALK
home. The Metro would have been quicker and cooler, but the mere thought of all those thousands of happy tourists exhausted me. I stopped at a bookstore to order a copy of
Waking the Moon,
then headed back out.
More than ever I felt like a failure. Compared to Angelica—beautiful, eternally youthful Angelica, with her gorgeous hair, her string of books and villa in Santorini and bewitching (if false) green eyes—I
was
a failure. Here I was, thirty-eight years old, never married, no kids, no serious love affairs, still renting a house because I didn’t make enough money to get a mortgage. The most interesting thing that had ever happened to me occurred half a lifetime ago, but even that didn’t really count because whom could I tell about it? Who would believe it?
Or—and this was worse—who, after all this time, would even
care?
The only
real
friend I had was Baby Joe, because he was the only person who remembered me the way I was at eighteen.
And that was the way I still liked to think of myself. Not as Katherine Cassidy, the loyal civil servant who’d paid her dues at the National Museum of Natural History and after thirteen sober years had an office with a view, a government pension, five weeks of annual vacation and the occasional professional junket to New York or Chicago; but
Sweeney,
who had dreamed of discovering buried pyramids and sacred tombs, who could drink and dance all night and all day and still find her way home in one piece; whose friends were beautiful and magical and who for some reason, however briefly, seemed to find Sweeney enchanting too. Sweeney, who read poetry and saw angels and had glimpsed the
Benandanti’s
wasteland behind a hidden door; Sweeney, who had known the answer to the magic question when it was asked of her, and who had tried to remain loyal, courageous, and true till the end. Sweeney, whose one great love had taken a swan dive from the loony ward at Providence Hospital.
But Sweeney was gone, as surely as Oliver was. And to the rest of the world, to everyone except for Baby Joe and maybe Angelica or Annie Harmon, she had never even existed at all.
Dr. Dvorkin’s house was on one of the myriad little cross streets that make up the residential blocks of Capitol Hill. From the street, the house looked much like its neighbors, a wide three-storied century-old brick town house, the walls painted a dark red that had faded nicely over the years and went well with the butter-yellow roses tumbling across the black wrought-iron fence.
The real wonder of Dr. Dvorkin’s house could not be seen from the street. Because, for all the loneliness and boredom I’d lived with since leaving the Divine, the
Benandanti
had granted me this: a secret garden, my own hidden cottage in the woods. The garden itself was so lovely I was surprised it had never been written up in
Washingtonian
Magazine or one of the national shelter rags. But then I learned that Dr. Dvorkin had, indeed, been besieged with requests to photograph the garden, and always gently refused them.
“It’s my secret place. And yours now, too, of course. And I would like to keep it that way.”
The garden was behind the town house. It was bound on all sides by high brick walls overgrown with Virginia creeper, climbing yellow roses and morning glory and wisteria. There were flagstone paths winding through hostas and astilbes and a low dark green mantle of pachysandra, and around its perimeter all kinds of gorgeously exotic lilies. At the back of the garden, pressed up against one of the crumbling walls, was the carriage house, a nearly perfect square with a flat roof interrupted by a small belfry. It was made of red brick that had weathered to a soft rose that was nearly white. Ivy covered it, and wisteria that twined above the flagstone path that linked it to the main house.
Inside, the carriage house was cool as the hidden recesses of my own heart. From the rafters hung bunches of herbs I had bought at Eastern Market—valerian, lemon balm, mint. I inhaled gratefully, kicked my shoes off, and let my bare feet slide across the cool slate floor. I was home.
Downstairs the carriage house consisted of only one largish room, with a tiny bathroom tucked beneath the stairs and a miniature kitchen like an afterthought added on to one side. The main room had slate floors and the original exposed oak beams and joists. One entire wall was filled with bookshelves, and there was a small harvest table that held a lamp and a few domestic artifacts: a shadow puppet, a vase of oriental lilies, the sea urchin lamp that Angelica had sent me for Christmas so many years before.
Like the carriage house itself, most of its furnishings were borrowed from Dr. Dvorkin. He had more money than I did, I liked his taste, and so for all these years I’d just lived with his things. Against the back wall was a sagging Castro Convertible sofa bed, draped with a heavy kilim rug. Shaker chairs hung from hooks in the beams, and there was an abandoned hornet’s nest perched on a rafter in the corner. The tiny bedroom upstairs held a beautifully carved wooden bed from Sweden, a heavy armoire from Java, another kilim on the floor. Outside there were a couple of deck chairs and an old wicker table I’d salvaged from the curb.
Right now it was too hot to sit outside. I changed into an old T-shirt and turned on the radio. “All Things Considered” was starting, but I felt like I’d had enough news for one day. I fiddled with the dial until I found something more soothing—some nice madrigals, very dull, very pretty—then checked my answering machine for messages. There was only one, from Dr. Dvorkin, saying that he’d forgotten to tell me someone was staying in the main house, so I shouldn’t worry if I saw lights there later in the evening. I reset the machine and went into the kitchen and poured myself some wine, then flopped onto the couch.
“Well, here’s to Angelica,” I said. I finished one glass and poured another, then another. I didn’t usually make such a dent in a bottle of wine, especially on a work night, but this seemed like a special occasion, an evening for elegies and repining. The sad strains of the madrigals filled the little room, the slate floors cooled beneath my bare feet as the sun died and violet shadows crept across the deck and into the carriage house. From Ninth Street came the occasional hushed sound of a passing car, and I heard soft laughter from one of the neighboring houses. One or two stars glimmered in the darkness, and fireflies moved in a drowsy waltz above the hostas outside. I watched for lights to go on in the main house, trying to guess who Dr. Dvorkin’s newest guest might be—someone connected with the Aditi, probably, a visiting curator or diplomat. Maybe even one of Jack Rogers’s fire-eaters.
“Ah, well,” I sighed. I leaned forward to refill my glass one last time, stood a little shakily, and put the bottle on a side table beside the vase of oriental lilies. A little water slopped out of the vase and I wiped it up with the hem of my T-shirt.
“Messy, messy,” I said thickly.
By now it was full dark. I switched on the sea urchin lamp, the tiny bulb inside casting a rosy glow through the curved shell. A pink haze hung above the table, a lovely soft globe like a fairy lantern floating in the darkened room. I returned to the couch and lay back with my head resting against the kilim’s rough wool, the wineglass held between my hands, the sweet clear voices of the madrigal singers rising and falling in the room about me like the wind. Like the sea, like waves rushing and receding while I rested there, dreaming and untroubled in the sultry tropic night, while in the garden a single mockingbird sang.
Much later I awoke. The madrigal singers had been replaced by a man speaking in a very soft urgent voice about the need for a more efficient Capitol police force. I sat up, blinking, and put my empty glass on the floor. My watch said ten-thirty. Time for bed.
I hadn’t eaten dinner, but I wasn’t hungry, or even thirsty. The wine had left me with a feeling of drowsy well-being, as though I’d eaten that fairy fruit that eases all hunger and thirst and slows the passage of time. I yawned and started to get up, wondering if to was too late to call Baby Joe.
But at the edge of the couch I stopped.
The room was on fire. Shadows leapt across the walls, black and red and white, the air was thick with smoke, and I heard a persistent frantic sound like flames crackling. I stumbled to my feet and sent my wineglass spinning across the slate floor. I looked around, flushed with fear and wine: but there was no smoke, only the thick steamy mist that often appeared on the hottest summer nights. In the background the man’s voice droned on and the wind rustled in the leaves, a sound like rushing water. Weirdly colored shadows moved upon the walls, rose red, velvety black, amber. Tentatively I crossed the room, until I stood beside the harvest table.
Something was trapped inside the sea urchin lamp. Its shadow darted across the room’s walls as it beat frantically against the curved interior of its prison. The sound I had thought to be flames was its wings banging against the bulb. There was an unpleasant smell, as of scorched cloth.