Elizabeth Hand - Black Light

After that I never asked her about the dead bell. If she started telling stories about Axel Kern, or the Village, or any of its odd history, I listened but said nothing. Somehow Hillary had made me feel that we had to protect Ali, and so I did. Much of the time I did so reluctantly, because Ali could be a bully; but I knew Hillary was right. We had to protect her, as the town protected us. It would be a few more years before Axel Kern returned to Kamensic and our world shivered apart, like a crystal vase vibrating to that dimly heard note. By then it was too late to protect anyone.

IN ANOTHER HOUSE NEARLY a thousand miles from Kamensic, atop a mountain far more isolated than Mount Muscanth (though no less strange), a man sat looking down upon the dying sun as it dipped beneath the trees. He was a very slight man, small-boned but strong-featured, his black hair curling almost to his shoulders and tinged with gray. The ruddy light spun a fine web across his sun-taut skin, but otherwise it was impossible to guess his age—his full cheeks were rosy as a child’s, his eyes a penetrating sea-blue beneath bristling black eyebrows. His first year undergraduate students always thought him quite ancient, forty at least; but those who went on to more advanced and esoteric studies at the University of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine were nonplused to find that as years and even decades passed, their Professor changed very little; and only the very wisest of his protégés gradually realized that, in fact, Balthazar Warnick never aged at all.

He sat now within an enormous bay window overlooking the Agastronga River far below. A hawk drifted lazily past, its wings tilting as it caught the air currents and finally plummeted out of sight. In the distance stretched the Blue Ridge mountains, their peaks a sunset archipelago thrusting upward from the October mist, light like molten copper trickling down their slopes. Balthazar Warnick leaned forward, tracing the hawk’s path. On the window ledge a note was perched, expensive stationery covered with the fine spidery handwriting of the Orphic Lodge’s formidable housekeeper—

Professor Warnick,

I am to remind you that we have passed three weeks since October 1, and you have not yet performed the pharmakos…

Balthazar sighed. Three weeks was far too long, of course, even for such a monotonous (and unpleasant) task as the pharmakos. But still he lingered at the window, putting off his duty for one more minute as he stared into the autumn haze.

His knee bumped against something, and he looked down to see the Benandanti’s orrery leaning sideways on the faded velvet window seat. A jeweled model of the solar system, sun and planets and little moons all formed of semiprecious stones. But one of the gold wires had become twisted, the lapis lazuli Venus perilously close to being thrown from its delicate orbit. Balthazar had set it here months ago, meaning to set about the careful task of repairing it with more gold filament.

But then the busy weeks of the University’s spring term had begun, with their round of oral and written dissertations, the painstaking process of winnowing Molyneux scholars and the painful one of dismissing those who had failed to live up to their promise, or otherwise crossed the Benandanti. And so the months had passed, until finally today Balthazar had returned to the Orphic Lodge, to find the Benandanti’s mountain stronghold isolate and calm as ever, and the little orrery yet unhealed.

With a sigh he picked it up and set it idly upon one knee, toying with the lapis representation of Venus—marble-sized, its surface etched with faint golden striations that felt like fine hairs beneath his fingertips. He rolled the glowing bead back and forth, back and forth, until heat began to rise from it, and tiny gray fronds like steam. He drew his hand back, smiling a little as the blue orb danced upon its filament; then whistled softly as his thumb caught upon the jagged bit of protruding gold filament. The orrery bounced upon the velvet cushion and came to rest against the window. Balthazar swore beneath his breath and drew his hand to his mouth, sucking another crimson bead from his thumb. On its abbreviated transit, gold-veined Venus spun and strained at its wire lead like a june beetle on a thread, and made a noise like a woman humming.

“‘ In coelo quies, ’” he murmured. There is rest in Heaven.

Somewhere within the vast reaches of the Orphic Lodge a clock struck the hour, six sweet clear chimes that rang out like water cascading into a well. The notes hung in the air a moment and Balthazar listened, waiting for the echoes to fade.

But instead of dying away the sound grew almost imperceptibly louder, as though someone ran a moist finger around the lip of a crystal glass. Balthazar frowned. He looked toward the door, but of course there was no one there.

He shivered. Still the sound went on, maddeningly faint, and as it did so the hairs on his arms prickled.

Because there seemed to be another sound behind that eerie note. A noise like scratching, or static, that as the moments passed resolved into a cluttering whisper he could just barely hear: as though a radio droned in some far-off part of the house. Balthazar shook his head. With stony calm he turned, straining to hear.

And now the sound grew—not louder, but more distinct. He held his breath, listening. There was a crackle of static. Myriad voices chattered and whistled, with now and then an unsettling whoop like an angry gibbon. Balthazar listened, every hair on end; then grew rigid as the room fell silent.

A moment when he could hear only his own breathing. Then suddenly a voice began to speak in mid-sentence, a voice so thin and faint it was like the clicking of ants within the walls.

A voice he had last heard almost four hundred years ago.

“ Giulietta, ” he whispered. “Giulietta…”

… do not understand why I have been summoned here…

A young woman’s voice, speaking in the dialect of the Italian village of Moruzzo, her tone calm but Balthazar knew, ah! he remembered: she had not been calm at all.

— Do you know of anyone in this village who is a witch, or a Malandante?

A second voice now, a man’s, with the airy accent of Vincenza. His tone neither threatening nor pleading but almost playful, rehearsing a well-known part with an actor who had perhaps forgotten her lines.

Of witches I do not know any, nor even of Benandanti. The girl laughed throatily; but a moment later went on, her voice rising. Father, no. I really do not know. I am not a Benandante, that is not my calling. And certainly I am not Malandante. I do not know whether any child in our village has been bewitched.

At the word Malandante Balthazar shuddered as though a sentence had been pronounced. The voice of the inquisitor rang out, more sternly this time.

— -Yet you saw the son of Pietro Ruota.

I went to see the sick child… The girl hesitated, then went on. The father asked for my help, but I could do nothing. I told him I did not know anything about it. I — I have not invited anyone to the games to which the Benandanti go. She laughed again, a sound like rope fraying.

— Why did you laugh? the man demanded; and Balthazar’s throat burned as he felt the same words welling inside him: O Giulietta, why did you laugh? He saw her again, a tall girl with bold eyes, uncanny ice-blue eyes that had already stained her with the epithet strega; that and the fact that she rinsed her hair with Egyptian herbs to give it color and strength, and lay with men but had never borne a child.

— Why did you laugh? repeated the inquisitor.