Black Light (11 page)

“Lit! Move your ass!”

All was as it had been. In the tall grass Ali hopped up and down and waved impatiently. Beside her Hillary made faces, moving his arms semaphore-wise, and Jamie Casson stood atop a pile of stones with his shoulders hunched against the chill. I stared at them, frowning. My eyes ached the way they did after I’d fallen asleep in the sun, and I wondered if I
had
somehow fallen asleep, or experienced some kind of acid flashback.

But whether I had or not, I knew I was stuck with it. Whatever I had glimpsed—a man with leaves in his eyes and the terrible slow gait of an avalanche destroying a hillside—was etched upon my mind’s eye as clearly as my father’s face, or my own.

“Lit!”

“Hold on, I’m coming—” I began to wade toward them, getting soaked by wet goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace. “Did you—did you—”

I paused, feeling sick to my stomach.
Did you see the world turn to water? Did you see a man with horns?

“You looked like you were trancing out there, Lit.” Hillary grabbed my shoulder. “You okay?”

“I—I think so. I guess I just sort of spaced or something.”

“Like, wow. Played Black Sabbath at 78 and saw God, right?” Ali leaned against Jamie, and he dropped his arm companionably around her. “Let’s go before you totally wig out…”

“I’m
fine.
”

Hillary continued to stare at me, finally shrugged. “If you say so.”

We walked across the field. Overhead the sky deepened from gray to violet. A few stars appeared. I forced myself to stare at them, and to count the seconds between a cricket’s song: anything to make the night seem mundane. I still felt shaky, and clung more closely to Hillary than usual. It felt weird to be here with his arm around me and the night wind biting into my neck; weirder still to look over and see Ali and Jamie the same way, as though they’d known each other for years instead of just an hour.

And it was strange to find myself this close to Bolerium again. I knew kids who used to come to the abandoned guest house, to get high or fuck in the empty bedrooms, but I hadn’t been here since I was seven or eight. Back then it was all neatly mown grass and stone walls, with hollyhocks and delphinium shading the cottage.

Now the guest house wasn’t abandoned anymore. At the edge of the overgrown field rose the stands of oak and hemlock and beech that comprised the old-growth forest covering Muscanth Mountain, one of the only virgin tracts left in the Northeast. Within their shadow stood the house, looking even smaller than I had remembered. Another one of Kamensic’s fey architectural artifacts, like the Mies van der Rohe mansion that had a tennis court on its roof, or the sixteenth century Austrian longhouse that had been reconstructed on Peter Nearing’s estate.

This was nowhere near as grand as either of those. It was someone’s idea of a French country cottage, built in the 1920s when the first wave of silent film stars settled in Kamensic. I remembered my parents talking about it during a visit to Bolerium. One of Axel Kern’s mistresses had lived here, before she had a nervous breakdown. It was an awful story—my parents absolutely refused to tell me what happened, but over the years I’d combed together most of the details. Drugs, and a murdered infant, or perhaps it was stillborn; the mistress found in the woods, a struggling fawn in her lap and her breasts bloody where the frenzied animal had bitten her. Her family hauled her off to Silvermire for electroshock and primal scream therapy. It was later rumored that she became a Jesus freak, before starting her own business selling real estate in Chappaqua.

The cottage had been unoccupied since then, and still looked it. Two gnarled lilac trees clawed at its walls, their branches shedding leaves like withered hearts. Layers of paint had been badly stripped from the front door, which was half-open so that you could hear opera blaring from inside. Beside the lilacs leaned a pair of rusted bicycles, and a huge and incredibly fake-looking sort of effigy.

“What the hell is
that
?”

I walked over and poked it—a gigantic green head, twice my height and made of molded plastic. Somehow it made the memory of the horned man less dreadful, more like the residue of a bad dream or bad drugs. It had round staring eyes and a grinning mouth filled with peg-like plastic teeth. Wormy green rubber spirals drooped from its head. A long red plastic tongue protruded from between its gaping mouth, flapping in the breeze like flypaper. On top there was an empty beer can and a wooden sign, with letters picked out in bottlecaps.

VILLA OF THE MYSTERIES

“That’s the gorgon,” Jamie replied, as though addressing an idiot. “Didn’t you see
Hercules in the Underworld
?”

“Uh, no.” I scrunched down to peer into its mouth. Water had pooled behind its grimace and become a trap for yellow jackets and daddy longlegs. “How disgusting. What’s it doing in front of your
house
?”

“My father designed it. He also did the monster bees in
Empire of the Anguished.
Also Sirena the Ageless in
Blood Surf
and the talking rocks in
Satan’s Hammer.
Ever see those?”

“No. Sorry.”

“No one did.” Jamie looked tragic. “That’s how come we’re living in this dump.”

He edged past me, shoving the half-opened screen door so that we could follow him inside. “Watch your step,” he said and stooped to pick up an electric drill. Ali and Hillary wandered past him, kicking aside a newspaper. “This place is a fucking bear-trap—”

“You’re not kidding,” said Hillary.

Inside smelled of mildew and marijuana smoke, the hot reek of carpenter’s glue and solder. The low ceiling was traversed by heavy beams hung with bundles of rope, a hacksaw, wire mesh. There was hardly any furniture—an old horsehair sofa and two unsprung armchairs. Sheets of plywood leaned against one wall; two-by-fours were stacked alongside another, and there were mason jars everywhere, filled with nails, screws, nuts and bolts, metal hinges. India-print bedspreads were pinned over some of the windows; in others you could clearly see the great webs made by golden orb weavers, and the spiders themselves poised in the center, like flaws in the glass. A big old wooden hi-fi console stood beside a crumbling fireplace, opera blasting from its torn speaker.

“Welcome to Hodge Podge Lodge,” said Jamie.

“I thought it was the Villa of The Mysteries,” said Ali.

“Uh-uh.
That
was from
Medusa Enslaved
.” Jamie crossed to the stereo, scowling. He turned off the opera and began flipping through a stack of records, finally found something and put it on. There was the crackle of dust on the needle, and then music, the same few notes picked out on a piano. “You guys hungry?”

We drifted into the kitchen, a dim room with rough-hewn cabinets and a few battered chairs. Hillary flopped down at a trestle table strewn with the remains of breakfast—a jar of imported marmalade, half-eaten toast, tin mugs of cold tea.

“Yeah, as long as I won’t catch something,” said Ali.

I plonked down beside Hillary, moaning. The beer and whiskey had burned off, and I could feel the beginnings of an early hangover. “I would
kill
for some coffee.”

“How about some ants?” He held up a piece of toast filigreed with tiny insects. “Mmm mmm good. Can you imagine Flo and Moe here?”

“No. I can hardly imagine
me
here.”

At the sink Ali clattered and smoked. Jamie filled a teakettle and put it on to boil, and I rested my head on the table. From the living room music echoed, and Hillary sang along in his reedy baritone—

“If you had just a minute to live, and they granted you one final wish,

Would you ask for something like another chance?”

And then I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew I was jolted awake by the teakettle’s piercing whistle, and a man’s voice booming.

“Why aren’t you kids in school?”

I sat bolt upright. Ali dropped her cigarette in the sink and looked around furtively, but Jamie only took the kettle and began to pour boiling water into a brown ceramic pot.

“Hello, Dad,” he said. “How’s it goin’?”

It was like a fast-forward glimpse of how Jamie would look in twenty years. Into the kitchen strode a wiry man in faded coveralls and carpenter’s belt heavy with tools, his shoulder-length blonde hair going to gray and receding from a high sunburned forehead, so that you could see the taut lines of face and skull. The same haunted eyes, mocking as Jamie’s; the same wry mouth. He walked over to his son and jabbed him with the blunt end of a screwdriver. As he passed me I caught the distinct smell of marijuana smoke.

“You young scalawag, you,” he said, peeking into the teapot. “Wait’ll the truant officer gets here.”

“It’s night, Dad.” Jamie gestured at the window. “See? Dark: night. No school.”

The man turned to survey the rest of us. “Well, well. Our nation’s youth in revolt. I’m Jamie’s Dad. Ralph Casson.” He nodded and shook my hand, then Ali’s, then Hillary’s, repeating his name solemnly each time. “Ralph Casson. Ralph Casson. Ralph Casson.”

I glanced at Hillary, but he just grinned. “Hi, Ralph. We met this morning.”

“Of course we did.” Ralph Casson slid the screwdriver back into his toolbelt and grabbed one of the enameled mugs. He sipped, made a face, and handed it to me. “So. Which ones are you? Debutante daughters of Miss Broadway 1957? Antonioni extras in town for the fall foliage tours?”

Ali found a windowsill wide enough to perch on and settled there. “I’m Alison. This is Lit—”

“‘Lit’? What the hell kind of name is that?”

“It’s for Charlotte,” I said, and felt myself reddening. “But nobody calls me that.”

I stared at my clunky boots. My hair cascaded into my face but I let it stay there, until I felt a hand brush it away.

“Charlotte. You’re right, I don’t think you’re a Charlotte.” I looked up into Ralph Casson’s frank, slightly manic gaze. He pulled his fingers gently through my tangled curls, let the hair fall back into my eyes as he drew away. “How about Thalia?”

“How about Bigfoot?” suggested Ali. Hillary and Jamie laughed, but Ralph shook his head.

“‘ A lovely being,’” he said, “‘scarce formed or moulded, a rose with all its sweetest leaves yet unfolded.’”

“Oh, bra-
vo,
Dad.” Jamie’s sarcastic voice drowned out Ali’s hoot. Ralph Casson winked at me, then crossed to the sink and began washing his hands.

“Watch your step, Jame,” he remarked over his shoulder. “You don’t want to get into bad company in
this
place.”

“
Who’s
bad company?” said Ali. Ralph turned and shook his hands, sending water over all of us.

“You.” He tilted his head at Ali, then me. “Her.”

Hillary pretended to be affronted. “What about me?”

“You?” Ralph regarded him disdainfully, then said in an arch, Glinda-the-Good-Witch voice, “You have no power here!”

“And they do?”

“Oh, Christ,
please
don’t get him started—” begged Jamie.

“Don’t you know the
Mahamudratilaka
?” Ralph raised one hand as though delivering a benediction.
“‘ Go not with young women over twenty, because they have no occult power.’”
He sighed. “Kids these days. What
do
they teach you?”

“You sound like my old man,” said Ali.

“Does
he
know the
Mahamudratilaka
?”

“Probably,” said Hillary. He sniffed at a glass of milk left over from breakfast, then poured it into his tea. “So what are you doing here? Fixing up this place for Kern or something?”

“Or something.” Ralph began rummaging among canisters and mason jars on the counter, finally settled on a large Earl Grey tin. He pried off the top and fished out a plastic baggie full of marijuana, opened it to remove a packet of ZigZag papers, and began rolling a joint. I quickly turned my attention to a jar of marmalade, trying not to look shocked. I knew adults in Kamensic who smoked (there were certainly enough who
drank
), and probably did other things as well, but I had never actually witnessed somebody’s father crumble a bud into a rolling paper. Ralph finished rolling the joint, lit it, and inhaled deeply.

“Hillary?” Smoke leaked from his nostrils as he leaned over to pass the joint to Hillary. Hillary waved it on. So did Jamie—he seemed wary around his father, not afraid exactly but tense.

But Ali took the joint and sucked it eagerly. I did the same. I actually hated getting high. It made me cough, and I worried so much about saying something stupid that I would just sit in paranoid silence until it was time to go home. But I was too self-conscious to refuse, certainly in front of Jamie’s father.

“Thanks,” said Ali.

“No prob.” Ralph leaned against the counter and ran a hand through his thinning hair. “So. Axel’s coming back this weekend. I gather you guys know him?”

Hillary cocked a thumb at me. “He’s her godfather.”

“Oh yeah? That’s cool. So you heard about the party, right?”

“No.” I took a spoonful of marmalade and sucked it. “What party?”

“There’s a big bash this weekend. Halloween party. I gather there’s gonna be a lot of the usual suspects around. Rock musicians. Pulitzer Prize winners. Norman Mailer, local riffraff. You see Axel much?”

I shrugged. “Not for a long time. He’s hardly ever here. I think my folks saw him, I dunno—maybe two years ago? He doesn’t stay in Kamensic much.”

“Why would he want to?” Jamie turned to Ali. “How come he’s not
your
godfather?”

“I wasn’t born with a caul.”

“What’s a caul?”

“It’s a joke,” I explained. “He and my father’ve been friends for a while, that’s all. I didn’t even know he was back in town.”

“He’s not, yet,” said Ralph Casson. “He’s getting the money together for
Ariadne.
”

Ali frowned. “Ari Who?”

“Ariadne auf Naxos.
The sublime music that was playing when you arrived, before Jamie put on whatever the hell
this
crap is. It’s an opera. You guys know what an opera is?”

I laughed, but Hillary cleared his throat and warbled in his best falsetto—