Elizabeth Hand - Black Light

“Great. Oh, I’m just great.”

Ali watched me, still smiling; then reached to curl a tendril of my hair around one finger. The album ended. In the brief silence before the next record dropped I could hear the staccato chirp of crickets somewhere in the room. There was a sudden gust of sound from the party below, laughter and the thump of a bass; then the album fell and music started once more.

“Look at you, Lit.” Ali reached for a cigarette, struck a match against the floor. “Do you eat men with your new red hair?” She reached forward to link her hands around my waist. Between us rose a thin plume of smoke. “Beware, beware.”

Ali flopped back onto the mattress. Hillary stood watching us, and I couldn’t tell if he was still enraged, or just depressed. Beneath the black light bulb Jamie swayed and stared at his hands.

“Show her Camille. That’s Jamie’s sun scorpion,” Ali explained. “Axel gave it to him.”

“I thought it was a spider,” said Hillary.

“It is.” Jamie stumbled to the wall, bent and picked up a glass globe the size of a soccer ball. He turned and held it out to me. “Sun spider, sun scorpion they sometimes call it. He brought it back from Oaxaca.”

I peered inside. Upon a bed of sand and small stones rested a creature the length of my hand, chocolate brown and covered with short stiff hairs, with long front legs that ended in pincers. It had myriad black eyes, clustered like currants upon its head. Suddenly it leaped in my direction, bashing itself against the side of the globe.

“Jesus!”

“Calm down. It’s not poisonous—” Jamie pointed at the spider, now tensed into a brown hairy fist. “She hunts things and crushes ’em with her jaws. See? No poison.”

I made a face. “Next time get a pony.”

“Wait! Come here—”

He moved until he stood directly beneath the overhead bulb, angling the globe so that it was bathed in ultraviolet. “Check this out.”

I looked cautiously. The sun spider had hunkered down with pincers raised. Beneath it the stones were nearly invisible in the black light. But like magic, as Jamie tilted its prison the ghostly image of a purple death’s head appeared on the spider’s carapaced back. I whistled.

“Whoa! That’s amazing—”

Jamie grinned. “Cool, huh? Axel showed it to me. It only appears under UV light. Like certain kinds of rocks and stuff.”

“Like all of this.” Ali rolled onto her stomach and gestured at the dingy room. “Like this whole place. Kamensic. Everything…it only comes out at night. You know. It moves when you’re not looking. It’s like a fucking ghost town. Wanna know what I think?”

“No,” Hillary blurted. “You’re too fucked up to think anything—”

“Yes,” said Jamie. “Tell me.”

“I think the real town is down there under the lake,” Ali said. “I think everyone is there. When they moved the houses and dammed the river and made the reservoir…I think all the real people went under there. I think all the real people were drowned.”

Hillary rolled his eyes and I snorted. Only Jamie nodded, walking with precise stoned steps to where Ali lay. He placed the globe on the floor and knelt beside her. “Yeah?” he said. “Then who are we?”

“Ghosts. We’re all ghosts. Of course.”

“Don’t be a jerk, Ali.” Hillary looked so furious I was afraid he might hit her. The black light made him look like some weird statue, Avenging Spirit or The Spurned Lover or something even worse. “Why are you even saying that?”

But Ali and Jamie were out of it. Jamie was stroking her back, not with anything like desire but absently, the way you stroke a cat. And Ali was utterly heedless of him; her eyes were dark bruises in a face the color of twilight, her black hair bleeding into the shadows. Wasted as she was, I knew by her expression that she was on a roll: the Ali of all those slumber parties where I would be too scared to fall asleep, the Ali who knew stories about girls named Topaz and Juniper and Sweet Lavender: girls who all disappeared before dawn, stories that all ended with a scream.

“This is the story of Giulietta,” she said, raising herself so that she stared straight out at the closed door, her eyes wide and black. “She was a girl a long time ago in Italy, in a small town in the mountains. After the Black Plague, during the Insurrection—”

“The Inquisition,” hissed Hillary. I put my hand on his arm to silence him.

“—during the witch trials. She was not the most beautiful girl in the village, but she had many lovers, though she did not become pregnant, or marry any of them. And because of this the villagers said she was una strega: a witch. And they talked about her, and made accusations, until finally the priests came from the cities, the investigators—the inquisitors—and they questioned her.

“She was not a witch, of course. There were no witches. There were only the people who worshipped the old gods, and the priests hated them and killed them, and they called their gods devils. If they found out you were one of them, you would be brought to trial, and if you did not renounce your gods then the priests would burn you. But Giulietta would not renounce the gods, because she was a chosen one. She had her mortal lovers, but she was also the beloved of the god of the mountain. And she was also the lover of a priest—”

“A priest ?” interrupted Jamie.

Ali nodded. “Sure. Back then priests all had lovers. Some of them had wives. He was a man from the village who had gone to Rome to study, and remained there as a librarian. He was not an inquisitor but a scholar; but when the complaints reached the Holy Office and they sent their interrogators to the village, this man was asked to accompany them and to aid them in their work, since he knew the villagers and the surrounding countryside.

“He had not seen Giulietta for several months, and while they were in the village preparing for their task he visited her and tried to warn her. He went to her at night, and begged her to recant.

“‘But I have done nothing wrong,’ she said.

“‘I know that,’ said her lover. Though he did not quite believe her: he was a priest, after all—and even though he loved her, he couldn’t stop believing that she was wrong—but still he wanted to save her.

“‘Recant and marry me,’ he begged her.

“‘Will you give up your god?’ she asked.

“He said no. But he loved her—she knew that—and she loved him. So she stayed with him that night, and the next morning after he left the inquisitors came, and took her. They questioned her but she would not admit to having done wrong: she had done no wrong. But she would marry no one and none of her lovers would stand up for her.

“‘Where is your god now?’ asked the priests; but Giulietta said nothing except ‘He will come. He will come.’

“And all the while her lover was there in the same room with her, writing it all down…

“They found her guilty. They told her she would only be imprisoned, they told her lover the same thing. But they lied. The next day they took her to a field outside the village and they burned her alive. Her lover went mad: the other priests struck him on the head with stones, to make him unconscious, and so that he wouldn’t bring shame on them by killing himself.”

“What about the god?” I broke in. I had crept forward until I was sitting on the floor beside the mattress. My heart was pounding, just as it always had during one of Ali’s stories—but there was something worse about this one, something about it that made me feel nauseous and dizzy and revolted.

I wasn’t going to tell Ali any of that, though; so I only repeated my question.