Elizabeth Hand - Black Light

“This fucking life—this place, you’re just bored here but I feel like it’s killing me—”

Hillary reached across Ali’s snoring form and tried to take my hand, but I pulled away. “You know it’s true, Hillary. It’s not so bad for you—everyone loves you, everyone loves her —”

I poked at Ali, still oblivious, and Hillary sighed.

“I know,” he said. “But it’s not that long now. Probably you’ll miss it when you’re gone—”

“ Never. I will never miss it. If Kamensic fell into the goddam river I wouldn’t shed a single tear—”

“Oh, come on. You’d miss me. And you’d miss Livia, and Unk—”

“I’m sick of Unk. What Jamie Casson said last night was true—all these has-been actors—”

“DeVayne Smith just won the Oscar, Lit. And Mariel Gillian’s doing that new Beckett one-act—”

“But it doesn’t matter. What difference does it make, even if they were all Shakespeare? Which they’re not — my mother’s in a goddam soap opera and my father is Uncle Cosmo —”

“Give him a break, Lit! Unk played Toby Belch last year at Avalon—”

“It’s all bullshit.” I set my mouth and stared straight ahead. “ Bullshit. Eighteen million versions of Oedipus Rex, but it’s always the same goddam play, it’s been the same goddam play for two thousand years—”

For the first time Hillary looked pissed off. “So stop talking about it and write a goddam new play, Lit.”

“How can I possibly write anything here?”

“Maybe if you were sober once in a while…”

“Fuck you, Hillary. Just fuck you.”

“‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks—’”

I turned away. Outside railroad tracks appeared alongside the Muscanth River, so that I had a momentary vision of three parallel trajectories, road river rail, all arrowing into the heart of the village. A few minutes later, Kamensic itself came into view.

“That toddlin’ town,” Hillary sang to the tune of “Chicago.” In my lap Ali chimed in sleepily.

“Kamensic, Kamensic my home town—”

I stared resolutely out the window. And, despite myself, shivered at the sight of it—snowy church spires and courthouse bell tower, bare chestnut trees and white-gabled library all rising from the autumn haze like the memory of the drowned village that lay beneath the reservoir. Even after all these years, it still took my breath away.

Not because it was beautiful. Though it was, deceptively wholesome as a Currier and Ives print. Shops neatly tended, dogs sleeping peacefully on the sidewalk, a young boy leading a black horse alongside the railroad tracks. Healy’s Delicatessen, where lemons bobbed like turtles in a huge vat of iced tea; the library with its incongruous sphinxes standing guard beside the steps; and, hidden behind a bend in the road, the black depths of Lake Muscanth.

And everywhere the trees—four- and five-hundred-year-old oaks and ancient beeches, huge dark hemlocks and the pair of massive holly trees that fronted Mrs. Langford’s tiny cottage beside the courthouse. Like Bolerium they seemed to protect Kamensic, that phantom village, so lovely that even now I ached to see it.

Yet what haunted me was not its beauty, but the way it shut me out. For all that I had lived there my entire life, for all that every face that passed me on the sidewalk would greet me by name, remember my birthday—and not just my birth date, but the weather on the day I was born—still somewhere within the town there was a mystery.

And it was a secret kept from me. I was convinced of that, the way some children believe themselves to be adopted. What I had seen at Jamie Casson’s house proved it. A man with living trees in his eyes and horns sprouting from his skull; and for all I knew everyone in Kamensic had seen that creature, and had never bothered to tell me about it. So like any cast-out lover, I longed more than anything else on earth to hold Kamensic within my embrace. But the village only looked deep into the lake that mirrored it; and, dreaming, saw Bolerium’s decaying horns and turrets, and the shadows of the mountain.

A rattle as Hillary’s car bumped over the wooden bridge spanning the river, willow leaves like calligraphy upon its surface. Ali sprawled across the seat, her head bumping my knee.

“See?” she crowed. “My brain’s falling out, but Lit’s catching it!”

“Lucky for you,” said Hillary with a touch of bitterness. “I’m hungry. You guys want to eat?”

Ali was up like a shot. “Deer Park.”

“Okay with me. Lit?”

“No…” I shifted, trying to get comfortable. “Damn it, Ali, move over .”

“But aren’t you hungry?”

“No.” I couldn’t bear the thought of being in that car another minute; couldn’t bear the thought of sitting with Ali or Hillary or anyone else.

“Hey, suit yourself—”

The car scraped against gravel as we passed the courthouse museum. And suddenly I knew where I wanted to be.

“Listen—drop me off here, okay?”

Ali grimaced. “I’m not going to Healy’s—”

“Me neither. I’m going to see Mrs. Langford.”

“Mrs. Langford? Now ?” Ali looked at me as though I had just opted for a life of chastity, but Hillary silently angled the car in front of the courthouse.

“I just feel like dropping by. Plus I ate about five hundred pieces of French toast, so I’m not hungry. Here, keep this until I come over later—”

I shoved the shopping bag with my new dress into her lap. Ali made a face. “How’re you gonna get there?”

“I’ll hitch or something. See you—”

She waved as I bounced from the car, but Hillary said nothing; only pulled slowly back into the street. I waited to see if he’d look back. He didn’t, and I turned away.

The courthouse was older than anything in the village save Bolerium. When Bloodjack Warrenton burned the town, his men had inexplicably left it standing—Acherley Darnell in his Northern Sketches and Fireside Tales quoted a Leftenant Adams as saying it was “occupied by evil sprites.” Later, after Warrenton’s mysterious death, Polly Twomey was tried (and acquitted) there, and Darnell himself met his death in front of the small clapboard building. On the gallows he recited the First Pilgrim’s speech from The Duchess of Malfi, bringing tears to the eyes of those who convicted him as he cried, “Fortune makes this conclusion general, All things do help the unhappy man to fall,” and fell.

By the early 1900s, all cases were tried in county court fifty miles to the south. The Kamensic courthouse fell into disrepair, its cupola home to hundreds of little brown bats and its doleful bronze bell silent.

All that changed when Mrs. Langford arrived. Stage name Theda Austin, neé Hopiah Lee Magillicuddy, known as Hoppy to her friends—Mrs. Langford had been a celebrated stage actress, and the original Stella Dallas back in radio days. She and her husband, the actor Lawrence Langford, retired to Kamensic in 1931. Lawrence continued to work intermittently until his death in 1972 at the age of 101, but Hoppy took her retirement seriously. She devoted herself to reviving the courthouse, first getting its name on the Register of Historic Places, then raising the money to have it restored and turned into a museum. As such, it attracted perhaps a dozen visitors a year, who would push open the decaying screen door and be immediately absorbed by a zenlike torpor. I walked in now, the door wheezing shut behind me, and shaded my eyes against the steely light that spilled down from the clerestory windows.