Black Light (33 page)

“But—” I hesitated. “Well, I know you hate it here— but why?”

“Because it gives me the creeps. Because it’s
sick.
But how would
you
know,” he went on bitterly. “You’re part of it, you and your creepy little town, all these fucking actors and Kern up here playing lord of the manor—”

“Me?”

“Yes, you!” He leaned forward and poked me, hard, in the shoulder. “Taking notes about everybody, pretending you’re gonna write a play about all of us—”

“Who told you that?” I demanded furiously, but I knew who’d told him.

“Hillary. And Ali. ‘Oh, don’t mess with Lit, she’s Axel Kern’s goddaughter, she can do—’”

“Shut up!”

“No.”
Jamie had moved so he was practically sitting in my lap. “Did you fuck him?
Did you fuck him
?”

“Who? Axel?”

“No—my father.”

I almost laughed; instead stared at him and said in a snide voice, “No, I didn’t fuck your stupid
father
—”

“What about Axel? Did you sleep with him? With Axel Kern?”

“What goddam business of yours is it who I—”

“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.