Elizabeth Hand - Black Light

“Let me try one—” Ali snatched the vine from him. An instant later she turned and spat out the window. “Ugh, that’s disgusting—”

The vine fell onto the floor, where I rescued it from between empty cans of Budweiser. The grapes were small but perfectly formed, and sticky with juice. I sniffed tentatively, inhaling their heavy, almost animal, musk; then bit into one.

“This one’s sweet.” Though the skin was slightly acrid—numbing, almost, like rubbing your lips with cocaine. I sucked it thoughtfully before swallowing it, tiny seeds and all.

“Here we are,” announced Hillary as the Dodge Dart humped over a fallen log. “Jesus, that road sucks. Can’t Kern pave it or something?”

“He’ll never pave it,” said Jamie disdainfully. “Mister Famous Director. He’s so cheap he squeaks.”

Ahead of us the corrugated drive gave way to meadow, a wide sloping expanse of knee-high grass. Patches of goldenrod nodded in the evening breeze, so bright a yellow it was as though the sun still shone in spots. Crickets buzzed softly. There was the intermittent drone of a power saw. We stepped out, blinking in the half-light, and Jamie peered into the distance.

“My father’s around somewhere,” he said as the power saw roared on again.

Ali yawned. “He mind if I smoke?”

“Hell no. My dad’s a really groovy kind of guy. A really groovy kind of asshole.”

Ali nodded. She pulled off her damp flannel shirt and tied it around her shoulders, smoothed the front of her leotard and looked around appraisingly. “Well, it’s a nice place.”

She grinned, a flash of white teeth with that odd little gap between them, and wandered away from the car. The boys started after her. Jamie said something to Hillary and Hillary laughed.

“Fuckin’ A, man…”

I hung back, shivering, and buttoned up Hillary’s old jacket. Underneath I wore a floppy white peasant blouse, intricately embroidered with long green tassels that dangled from the too-long cuffs. The blouse had seemed like a wonderful piece of exotica when I bought it at a head shop during the summer. Now it was nowhere near warm enough, and the thin cotton felt clammy against my breasts. I poked the tassels up into the sleeves, and hesitated before following the others.

Before me stretched the meadow. The scent of fallen leaves mingled with the fragrance of woodsmoke drifting overhead, and crickets chirped mournfully in the dusk. I glanced down, saw my boots coated with moisture pale and insubstantial as mildew. When I looked up again it was as though I were gazing, at the world through a fogged window. The outlines of everything were blurred. Ferns faded into a fallen rock wall, its stones indistinguishable from the trunks of trees. The trees themselves receded into a greater darkness. The wind rattled their bare branches and I stared, my heart thumping.

Because suddenly I wasn’t looking across a twilight field, but into a pool, black and depthless beneath a haze of mist. I no longer saw my friends moving in the distance, but only their reflections on the water’s surface, flattened images stirred by a cold wind that made the hair on my arms rise. Within the dark reaches other creatures moved, recognizable by their shadows: the flash of a tail beneath the surface, the flicker of something like a wing. The hum of insects faded into the ripple of water on stone. I took a deep breath and tried to focus on something familiar: Hillary’s jacket chafing at my neck, the way my boots pinched…

It was no good. Dizziness swept over me. The meadow’s autumn incense gave way to another smell, the dank odor of standing water, rotting wood. My mouth grew dry, my tongue hard and swollen. Something horrible seemed caught in the back of my throat, a viscous strand of water hyacinth or old-man’s beard. I coughed; the putrefying smell grew stronger, moist tendrils thrusting against my tongue as I struggled to cry for help. In front of me the air billowed, liquiscent.

I screamed then, but it was like screaming underwater. In the distance three bright shapes shivered and disappeared. I blinked. In front of me shone an unwavering sweep of pure blue, so beautiful that my eyes filled.

Because I recognized that color: it was the blue that shades the sky sometimes in your dreams, the blue you see when a kingfisher dives and for an instant everything before you coheres into one thing, bird lake sky self: and then is gone. That is the color I saw then, and somehow I knew that this was the sky, a truer sky than I had ever seen, and that I was gazing up into it from the bottom of the deep and troubled mere that was our world.

But before I could fully grasp this, or wake to find myself drowning, something moved above the surface of the water.

I thought it was a falling tree, its branches clawing at the sky. But it moved too slowly for a falling tree, and when it seemed almost to touch the water it halted. No leaves grew upon its tangled limbs, and I realized that they were not branches at all. They were monstrous antlers. What I had at first perceived as the tree’s grotesquely gnarled bole was a head—not a stag’s head, but a man’s. His staring eyes were huge, the irises strangely variegated. Tawny yellows, moss-greens, the murky brown of leaves at the bottom of a lake; the colors radiating from a pupil that was ovoid, like a cat’s. His mouth was parted so that I could see the moist red gleam of his inner lip and the tip of his tongue. As he gazed into the water I trembled, afraid that he would see me there.

But after a minute passed a deeper dread filled me—because he did not see me at all, and surely he should? Surely it was impossible that something so huge would not notice another creature scant feet in front of it?

Yet it did not, and as this realization grew in me, so did my terror. That I could be so insignificant, that it was possible for me to move through the world and have my presence as unremarked as that of a spider spinning its web in the tall grass. And like the spider I could be casually destroyed, my passing neither mourned nor noticed by this monstrous being. An arm’s-length away from me the horned man dipped his head closer toward the water’s surface, as though he would drink there. He did not, but hesitated an inch or so above it. The surface remained smooth, the glassy air untroubled. Only those daedal eyes moved very slightly within its great head, as though it gazed questioningly upon its own image.

I shuddered. Because there was something horrible in that gaze, a sort of mindless potency that made me think of water lilies choking a pond, infant voles squirming in their nest of cast-off hair. The odor of fetid water melted away. A sweetly aromatic smell filled my nostrils, oak mast and burning cedar, grapes warming in the sun. The immense figure swept its head from side to side, and I could hear its antlers slicing through the air. I was terrified it would catch my scent, but instead the creature turned. I saw it clearly against that elysian sky, its speckled eyes ravenous as an owl’s. Then it stepped away, moving in an odd, stilted manner. I caught a glimpse of its torso, arms smoothly solid, legs and chest and buttocks well-shaped as any man’s. Save only between its thighs, where its phallus mounted, grotesquely large and rigid as though hewn from wood. Once, Ali and I had found an image like this in one of Hillary’s books—an ithyphallic carving from ancient Greece, its face worn away to nothing save the faint indentations of eyes and lipless mouth; armless, legless, only its ludicrous member intact.

“Ooh, Daddy, buy me one of those !” Ali had squealed. But seeing this creature now I felt only horror, and panic lest it turn and catch sight of me.

It did not. Its long legs swung stiffly through the underbrush, its antlered head swung back and forth as slowly it receded from view. For one last instant I glimpsed its silhouette fading into the trees, and could almost have believed I imagined it: a strange manlike pattern formed by leaves and shadows and darting birds. But then I recalled its eyes, at once empty and devouring. I took a deep breath, as though struggling to wake from a dream, and stepped forward.