Elizabeth Hand - Black Light

“How come? He seems okay to me.”

“I don’t know.” I followed him to his front door. Hillary stood there for a minute, staring at the terra-cotta mask hung on the knocker. The porch light spilled too brightly onto its blank face, two small holes for eyes, its mouth a black slit. “It is weird,” he said, almost to himself. “We never think about it, but Jamie said you never see stuff like this in the city. Or anywhere else, probably.”

Suddenly he gave the mask a tug, yanking the hempen cord from the door. “What the hell does it mean, Lit?” he asked in a low voice, and held up the ugly grinning face. “What does it mean ?”

I shrugged. “I don’t think it means anything,” I said, but that wasn’t true. As I stared at the tiny mask between Hillary’s fingers I felt revulsion and something very close to fear. Again I saw that terrible figure moving slowly through the trees, and heard the rustle of its antlers as they tugged at the leaves. “Hillary…”

Hillary’s eyes remained fixed on the mask. His expression grew dark. Before I could say anything more, he tossed the mask into the drift of leaves beside the porch.

“I just want to get out of here,” he said softly. “I just want to get to New Haven and never see this town again.”

He opened the door and slipped inside. For a moment he hesitated and I saw him framed in shadow, the porch light igniting his face so that he resembled the mask, his mouth a livid gash and his eyes blackly staring. He dipped his head in farewell.

“’ Night, Lit. See you.”

“Yeah…”

He shut the door. I waited, half-expecting him to come back, to ask me in, to act like Hillary again. But he didn’t. After a minute or so I turned and started back to my own house, glancing at the pile of leaves where the mask had landed. There was no sign of it, and even when I kicked through the heap, sending a spray of gold and brown and scarlet up into the night, the mask remained hidden.

When I got home my parents were already in bed. I called Ali; her phone was busy, and after three tries I stopped. I went into the darkened living room and sat in the wing chair by the window, staring out at the silhouette of Muscanth Mountain. Lights still burned from the promontory where Bolerium stood, but whether these were indeed bonfires, or just light glowing from the mansion’s windows, I couldn’t tell. After a while I stood, yawning, and crossed to the fireplace mantel, where my mother’s awards and the photo of my father and Axel Kern leaned against the brick.

But the photo was gone. I frowned, glancing around to see if my mother had moved it to one of the end tables cluttered with old scripts and issues of Italian Vogue. It wasn’t there, either, and when I checked to see if it had somehow fallen on the mantel I found nothing. Finally I gave up. I went to my own room, a small haven under the eaves with a map of Middle Earth on the wall and George Booth cartoons torn from The New Yorker, the ceiling covered by a collage I had made of magazine and newspaper pictures.

“That’s your whole problem right there,” Hillary had said once, pointing to a photo of Lou Reed thumbtacked onto a publicity still of the Moody Blues. “You can’t make up your mind whether you want to be a freak or just totally uncool.”

He was right. I was tainted by the same impulse that made my parents adhere to their Oriental rugs rather than shag carpeting, oak harvest tables rather than glass-and-chrome bookshelves. I stared up at the ceiling, then hopped onto the bed and peeled away the Moody Blues, in their place stuck a page torn from Creem, showing a silver-haired Iggy Pop in a recording studio. Then I collapsed back onto the unmade bed, kicking its flimsy India-print spread onto the floor, and turned on the radio.

Alison Steele’s dusky voice filled the room. She read a poem and an excerpt from The Prophet, segueing into trancey music. Tonto’s Expanding Head Band, Lothar and the Hand People, a band I’d never heard before singing about the Autobahn.

“Fahn, fahn, fahn …”

I reached for a broken-spined paperback on the floor: Greek Plays for the Drama. I was weeks behind in my reading. With a sigh I thumbed through it until I reached the selection from Euripides I was supposed to have memorized for class on Monday.

Behind me the radio pumped out its strange music, muted voices chanting over a synthesized drone. It made my head ache, that and the last vestiges of Ralph Casson’s pot. After a few minutes I turned off the light. I felt edgy and frightened, the way I felt anticipating a test I hadn’t studied for. But I fought the urge to sneak over to Hillary’s house for comfort—he’d just lecture me again on my drinking. So I pushed Euripides onto the floor, switched off the radio, and crawled under the covers with my clothes on. My window was cracked open; chill air threaded into the room, bringing with it the acrid smell of damp birch bark and fallen leaves, the creak of insects. At last I fell asleep.

In the middle of the night I woke. The crickets had fallen silent, and the night was given over to the wind. Just a front blowing in, but hard enough that the windows rattled and I could hear tree limbs rapping at the walls.

Hhhhhhhuuuhhh…

I pulled the paisley spread tight around my shoulders and held my breath, listening.

Hhhuuuu…

Dread seized me then—dread but also a sort of exultation, an unbearable longing. The realization that something was going to happen, was happening now.

This is a weird place…you hear all kinds of stuff at night…

I remembered how Jamie had looked sitting on the jukebox with light welling up around him like a wave; and the shiver of recognition when I realized I had never seen anything so beautiful, so solid, in my life.

Outside the wind rose louder still. With it there came another sound, the wail of a train making its way southward past the far shore of Lake Muscanth. I lay on my back and focused on the beating of my heart, the rhythm of my breathing: anything so as not to hear the wind.

The next thing I knew I was wide awake. Something had disturbed me, a sound like the nervous tapping of a foot. It came from within my room, and even in those first hesitant moments of wakefulness I knew absolutely what it was not —not the sound of water dripping, not a mouse moving within the walls, not one of my parents padding to the bathroom. This sound was at once more subdued and more insistent. There was a manic quality to it, like a restless child rapping for attention, but a child who has forgotten why she wanted your attention in the first place. I sat and listened, sleep falling from me, and waited for the sound to fade away.

It did not. Neither did it grow louder, but as the moments passed the rhythm of the tapping quickened. I could see nothing, not even the pale outline of my window. My breath came harder; I began to suck air through my mouth as loudly as I could, trying to drown out that sound. But I could not.

Nor could I look away. And very slowly I began to see something take shape within the corner of the room. The relentless tapping continued, but now I could see that the noise was connected to blots of darkness jumping within the gray, and tiny silvery sparks. The flickering interplay formed a pattern, and I had the terrible feeling that I should recognize it, that it should somehow make sense.