Black Light, page 26
“Did you?” He took me by the shoulders, his eyes desperate. “Lit, please, you don’t understand—”
“No.” I stared at him with all the hatred and disdain I could muster. “And you let go of me, or—”
Jamie let his breath out, gazed at his hands as though they didn’t belong to him; then sank back onto his own chair. “You didn’t,” he said in a low voice. “You swear you didn’t—”
“I didn’t sleep with Axel Kern. I never have.”
“Thank god.”
His tone was so earnest that I laughed despite my anger. “What, are you a Moonie or something? You hate sex?”
“No. Of course not. It’s just that—well, this is all a trap, Lit. All of it here at this party—”
He turned to peer over the top of his armchair, like a kid playing hide-and-seek; then curled around again. “It’s all for you. Axel Kern—I’m not sure exactly what he is, but he’s sure as shit not just a movie director. Somehow or other my father conned Kern into thinking that he could do some work for him, but my father’s not here to work. At least not that kind of work.”
His voice dropped. “Have you ever heard of a man named Balthazar Warnick?”
“Professor Warnick?”
“God, you do know him—”
“No! I never even heard of him until tonight!”
“Well, he’s here because of my father—and because of you. I don’t know why, exactly—”
He began scratching nervously at his arms. “But I do know this—I know my father wants to hurt both of them. Warnick and Axel Kern. I hear him talking some nights, my father—talking to himself, but what really creeps me out is that it makes sense. I mean it’s like he hears a voice, or voices, telling him things. And I can tell by his tone of voice that whatever it is he’s listening to, he’s hearing it for the first time. And once he does hear about it, well, all this weird stuff turns out to be true. Like this party—I heard him talking one night, we were still in the city—and he just sort of listened to whatever it is he listens to, and finally he said ‘Fine, Kamensic Village, we’ll go there.’”
“But Jamie—people do move here. It’s not like you need some magic voice telling you about it. Lots of people have heard of this place.”
“He hadn’t. Not before that night. I know, because he had to get a map to figure out where Kamensic Village is—he thought it was in Massachusetts, or Maine. He didn’t know it was just upstate. He’s here because of you, Lit—you and Kern and that guy Warnick…”
His voice grew softer, more despairing. “Look, I know it sounds crazy, but you have to admit this place isn’t exactly Walton’s fucking Mountain. And my father is definitely into some weird shit. I think he’s in way over his head. My mother did, too—she thought he was in some kind of cult, she was even trying to collect stuff for a book about it, maps and things, but then of course my mother also thinks she’s the seventeenth incarnation of Mary Magdalene. So”— he lay his hands on his knees beseechingly. —“can you please tell me what’s going on?”
“But I don’t know. You—you drew that face in the air back there, in the bathroom—how?”
“I told you—I watched my father, and memorized what he did. It doesn’t always work—I have to focus on what I want to see, and”— he opened his palms, clapped them together. —“pffft! Like that. If it works.”
“But Jamie, why did it look like Axel?” He looked puzzled and I wanted to shake him, I was that frustrated. “The face you made in the air—it looked just like him.”
“Kern?”
“Yes! Didn’t you know?”
He gestured helplessly, his arms red-streaked where he’d scratched them. “But I wasn’t thinking of Kern. I was thinking of those things you see here on the doors, those creepy masks…”
His eyes went dead, and somehow that was more frightening than the thought that he could draw faces in the air. All the color drained from them, the way a blue jay’s feather goes from blue to gray if you strip the quills, and he stared vacantly into the air between us.
“I don’t want to see them,” he finally said, his voice listless as his eyes. I knew he was seeing something else in the room’s shadows; whatever it was, my skin prickled to watch it mirrored in his face. “But they’re always there. That’s why I get bent—so I won’t see them…”
He turned and grabbed my hand. His was icy cold, the long fingers flaccid as rotting leaves. I recoiled but he drew me closer, until his breath was on my cheek, nicotine and a faint green scent, crushed petals, the bitter tang of resin. “Come with me, Lit. You hate this place, you want to leave—come with me to the city. We can live cheap, practically for free. We can get high, we can hang out. If we leave tonight we can be there by morning. I mean, trains do stop here, right?”
“Well, yeah,” I said slowly. “Of course they do, the commuter trains come every day, but I don’t know about four A.M. on a Saturday…”
“Then we’ll hitch! There’s a place we can crash, a bunch of people I know are squatting there, it’ll be so cool—”
His hand tightened around mine and I nodded, not meaning Yes, not meaning anything; just trying to buy time to think.
“Why? I mean, why do you want me?” I said at last. I looked up, trying to will a spark back into those wounded eyes. “Why not Hillary, or Ali?”
“Because you’d know exactly what you were leaving. Hillary’s afraid to really go away—he just wants to hide at Yale for four years, and pretend this place doesn’t exist. But it does, and it’s not going to disappear—”
“But why not Ali?”
He shook his head. “Ali’s too much like me: she just wants to get high. Little rich white girls scoring nickel and dime bags…she’d never make it. She’s not tough, like you are. And she can’t sing.”
“Sing?”
“I’m getting another band together. I know these guys, they’ve been playing down on the Bowery for a few months now. We can get a regular gig there, and if we’re squatting we don’t have to make rent—”
“But I can’t sing! I’m horrible at all that stuff…”
I blinked back tears, my turn to feel desperate. Because suddenly it seemed as though there was a way out of Kamensic, and this was it. I shuddered, feeling the rush of chilly prescience that overcame me sometimes when I was drunk—the same dizzying sense of hopelessness and relief, the same sickening perception that this was the real world, teenage drunks and junkies nodding out in corners, midnight’s promise given over to crushed pill capsules and empty bottles and the same record playing over and over again on a neglected stereo.
And none of it, none of us, would ever mean anything. We would never be famous; we would never be rich. None of us would become what we were meant to be, beautiful and brilliant and enchanted, destiny’s tots taking bows onstage and receiving armfuls of roses, reading our reviews in the New York Times and Rolling Stone. Ali would go quietly mad like her mother, Hillary would teach Cymbeline to yawning high school students and one rainy night drive his car into the Muscanth Reservoir.
Yet in a terrible way it was a relief to know these things. To imagine that life could be ordinary and barren; to know that nothing I did would ever matter, that the visions of another world and another self were nothing more than bad dreams, the bitter aftertaste of bad acid and too much Ripple wine. Whatever secret that Kamensic and the Benandanti held was trumped by what Jamie was offering me—the chance to escape, to go to the city and lose myself. No one from Kamensic Village—or anyplace else, anytime else—would be able to find me. Not in New York City.
Not if I didn’t want to be found.
“Lit?”
I looked up to see Jamie staring at me. I opened my hands. “I can’t sing, Jamie. I can’t even act, and around here that’s like saying you can’t read, or drive. Actually,” I admitted, “I can’t drive, either. But Hillary can sing, and Duncan—”
“They’d never come with me—too chickenshit. Can you play guitar?”
“Hell no.” I bit my thumb, finally offered, “I guess I can dance. Sort of…”
“Well, you wanna write, right? We’ll just do covers at first but we’ll need songs, new stuff—”
“Songs? I can’t write songs—”
“Sure you can.” For the first time Jamie grinned. “Fuckin’ A, look at you”— he took in my filthy boots, the cast-off shirt rolled up around my elbows, my snarled hair and dirty fingernails. —“you’re a fucking mess! You’re perfect.”
“But—”
“Look, you’re pissed off, right? You’re mad as shit at the whole goddam world! You got a chip on your shoulder, I’ve got a monkey on my back—it’ll be fucking great! Come on, come on, come on,” he urged, rubbing my arm. “New York City really has it all…”
“But—”
I shut my eyes, dredged up the image of a horned man clawing his way through the trees; of a boy bound with ivy and Axel Kern in a rainswept chapel. I opened my eyes. Jamie was still there, his gaze no longer imploring but insistent. I sighed.
“But Jamie—if something really is happening here…if something is going on, and I’m part of it—how can I leave? How can I just go?”
“I’ll tell you how.” Jamie took his hands from me and slid from the chair. “Like this—you just put your legs together, and go.”
He crossed to the fireplace, squatted there and stared into the ashes. After a minute he turned back to me. “Look, I don’t care if you come or not. Or, no, I do care, I guess, but I’m going whether or not you come with me. Or anyone else. But if you stay here, it’s just like Hillary going to Yale, and Ali going to Radcliffe or whatever fancy place you all get shoved away in. It’s a cop-out; it’s a way of making sure you just keep coming back home again and doing what your parents did—
“Just like they always do, Lit. It’s their fight and they drag us into it. Always, always the same fucking thing. But you know what?”
He stood. He didn’t look wasted anymore, or tired. “This time I’m not buying into it. Whatever my father is involved in, whatever it is he thinks he’s breaking into, I’m breaking out. I’m breaking the cycle. And I think you should too.”
I groaned. “Oh, God, Jamie, I dunno…”
Jamie said nothing. He just stood there, then began to sing in a sweet boyish tenor. “I remember how the darkness doubled…”
I leaned forward and cradled my head in my hands. When I looked up a moment later, he was gone.
“Shit—Jamie, no, wait—”
I raced into the corridor. It was empty. Thin cyanic light filtered out from a few half-open doors, along with laughter, the tireless whir of a Super 8 camera. I turned and began walking toward the main hall. I felt wired, almost frantic, and my eyes burned. When I rubbed them I looked at my hands, to make sure they weren’t black with ash. Instead my knuckles were red, not with blood but something powdery, the color of brick-dust.
Ochre.
I touched my cheek and drew away fingers stained vermilion, then rubbed my face with my sleeve. The white cotton was streaked with rust. When I saw the arched entrance to the main hall in front of me, I began to run.
Music thudded from the monolithic speakers. Heavy bass, slivers of guitar noise; buried vocals that sounded like weeping. Beneath my boots the floor was awash in the party’s spoilage—spilled wine, auroras of glitter and sequins, roaches and cigarette butts.
But there was a more ominous residuum, too. Crushed acorns, their meat like grubs nosing amidst scattered piles of oak leaves; pinecones and opium pods, papery petals frail as moth’s wings. When I kicked through the detritus daddy longlegs raced underfoot, and spiders as long as my finger crept over broken syringes.
“Damn…”
I stepped inside. I expected to be blinded by the same carnival glare that had greeted me hours earlier, and shaded my eyes.
There was no need. The columns of ultraviolet light still marked the perimeter of the room, but all their otherworldly fire had been extinguished. There was only a faint flicker inside the tubes, like trapped lightning. The bulbs made a threatening sound, buzzing as though locusts hid within them. I walked past warily, making a circuit of the room and looking for someone I knew.
I saw no one. The dancers had all gone home. The hall seemed to be full of white-shrouded figures, frozen in the dying light. Something warm grazed my wrist; I looked up to see the candelabrums still hanging from the ceiling. Long streams of wax had spilled from them to the floor, hardening into veils and cataracts and tusks. It was these that I had taken to be cloaked figures; it had been a droplet of hot wax that spattered my wrist.
“It’s okay,” I whispered. “It’s okay…”
My breath was enough to send a shiver through the waxen shrouds. I walked on, tiny stalagmites crunching beneath my feet, and as I crossed the room the music changed. The droning bass was chopped off by the crackle and fizz of dust on the needle. As though it were water leaking in, the great hall filled with the sound of a chiming guitar and a tambourine’s funereal jangle. But I could still see no one, and I could no longer tell where the music was coming from.
I shivered. My eyes ached from trying to focus on anything within the colonnade of ruined candles and black light. The music thrummed and droned, the tambourine became a tocsin. As I walked things clung to me, cobwebs or dripping wax, I thought. But when I glanced at my arm I saw long tendrils of pale green sprouting from the cleft of my elbow.
“Ugh!”
I slashed at them and the tendrils fell away. Immediately three long red furrows rose along the inside of my arm, oozing dark liquid that spun in long droplets to the floor. I gazed down, stunned, but before I could move there was a rush of wind that swept away everything, music, light, dead leaves and cigarette ash. Something touched my cheek and I recoiled.
The room was alive with whirling petals, a vortex of red and pink and scarlet, as though the mansion itself were bleeding. They erupted from the casements like broken glass and drifted from the candelabrums, and where they touched my skin it grew numb. My feet were mired in blossoms; when I tried to shout my jaw didn’t move. The sound of wind in the trees grew deafening. It no longer came from outside but somewhere within the room. There was a smoky reek like hashish, the fruity odor of new wine. And still the papery blossoms swirled around me, sticking to the gashes on my arm and covering my face like snow.
As though unseen hands had slammed the windows shut, the gale stopped. The petals froze in midair; then, like iron filings circling a magnet, they made a shape—the ragged outline of a tree, limbs bare save where petals settled in the crux of trunk and branches. Something moved within those branches, just visible behind the scrim of blossoms; a shadow like a crouching figure readying itself to spring.
No…
I tried to summon the strength to move; but abruptly as it had appeared the phantom tree was gone. So were the falling blossoms. The music rang out again, thin and shrill. I blinked and drew an unsteady hand across my face. There were no flowers there; but on the floor faded petals mingled with broken wineglasses and oak leaves. I turned and started to walk across the room.
The sickly glow from the dying UV lights had faded. I could just make out a series of closed doors along the far wall, each a lozenge of deepest black with no hint of a lock or knob or window set within. I remembered seeing them earlier, almost hidden by a throng of partygoers. Now they seemed ominous as the doors to Bluebeard’s castle in a Hammer horror film or one of Ali’s ghost stories.
“Oh, Christ. Ali.” I whispered, anguished, and opened my hand. A single crimson petal lay pressed against the palm. “Ali…”
I knew then that it was as Jamie had said. Bolerium was a trap, a labyrinth; and I was ensnared. The only way I could truly escape would be to do as Jamie planned—leave right now, taking nothing, saying no farewells, with no money in my pocket and no idea of what I was really doing, except running away.
But that would mean leaving Ali nodded out in an empty room upstairs. That would mean leaving my parents, and Hillary; leaving Duncan and all the rest of them—Mrs. Langford and Moe and Flo and Ali’s father with his crapped-out car. It would mean leaving Kamensic itself.
And suddenly I didn’t know if I could do that. I wasn’t even sure if it was possible.
Because Kamensic wasn’t just a town. It was something that had seeped into my veins like a drug, something that had filled all the hollow places in my bones and heart and head, until even if I died the shadow of the town would be there, taking my shape, using my voice—and how would anyone even know I was dead?
How would I know?
I shuddered. The smell of spilled wine grew stronger as Axel Kern’s voice crooned in my ears, and Ralph Casson’s—
Nothing happens only once…
She is their pathfinder: She travels between this world and the realm of the dead…
I thought of Ali’s stories of the drowned village, of suicidal children given as tithe to a dark man in the back of an unconsecrated church. I thought of Hillary smashing a terra-cotta mask in a drift of autumn leaves, and Ali dancing drunk across her room, crooning gimme shelter as she waved a burning joint at me. I thought of all these things; and of my parents, and a silver-framed photograph of Axel Kern with me beside him, my hair crowned with a wreath of red flowers.
No, I had said when Ralph Casson held out the small swollen globe of a poppy husk to me, No, I don’t want it.
With every ounce of fury and despair I had, I beat my fists at the air and shouted—shouted until I drowned out the droning music and the entire hall became an echo chamber with only my voice roaring inside. The streams of candle wax snapped and shattered. From the long outer wall came a muted thump, and then another, as one by one the tall tubes of UV light flared like Roman candles and went black. My voice died into a rasp. I let my hands fall to my side and listened for the music.
There was none. A flood of frozen wax covered the floor, shards of white glass and metal threads. The French doors banged open and closed as the wind sent a spume of dead leaves into the hall. I watched them, but only for a moment. Then I turned away, terrified but resolute, and walked through the wreckage until I reached the row of closed doors. Some were veined with ivy, others covered with thumbtacked messages, bits of paper and strips of sequined fabric clinging to the wood like vines.
