Elizabeth Hand - Black Light

I stared at the accompanying photo, shot a surreptitious glance at the girl beside me. It was the same person, though in the picture her hair was silver and not black, her face immaculately made up, and her slim form clad in a white dress that glowed like a fluorescent tube. I read the caption.

“That’s the joke, get it?” Kissy Hardwick nudged me. She licked her lips again. “He’s not bigger than God. He is God.”

I didn’t say anything. I was only twelve years old, but at this point even I knew that this girl was nuts. Worse than nuts, she was on drugs—I’d seen her swallow that little black pill, and god only knew what else had already made its way from her magic bag of tricks into her mouth. I looked at the floor, trying to think of how I could leave, wondering if I could just bolt, when she grabbed my wrist.

“Tonight.” Beneath the thin fabric of her dress her breasts moved, and one pink nipple poked out through a hole. She was breathing too fast, her head nodding crazily. “Tonight tonight tonight. December 21. The winter solstice. Get it, do you get it? And I’m ready, I’m all ready for it to happen…”

I tried to pull away, but her grasp only tightened.

“Ow—”

“Right here,” she said, ignoring me. With her free hand she slapped at the junk on the floor. Matchbooks and earrings went flying, pills skidded away as her fingers closed around something. “’Cause I’m ready, I told them I was ready—”

She looked up, still holding my wrist; grinned that horribly incongruous doll’s smile and showed me what was in her other hand.

“See, Charlotte?”

It was a knife. Maybe six or seven inches long, blade and handle both carved from the same slender piece of bone. The handle end was narrow and russet-brown; the curved blade creamy ivory. As she turned it back and forth I could see tiny incisions in the handle, a series of lines intersected by smaller Xs. But the blade was broken—the end had been sheared off, leaving a jagged edge. When she ran her finger along it I could see that it was dull, no sharper than a piece of plastic cutlery.

“Huh. I’ll have to sharpen it I guess. But I’ll do it, that’s the key thing! I’m not afraid and—”

She stumbled to her feet, dragging me as well. Although she seemed to have almost forgotten me; I might have been another piece of awkward jewelry tied to her wrist. With a soft moan she began flailing back and forth. I thought she was having a seizure, but then she started to laugh, spinning in a clumsy pirouette with me staggering alongside, and I realized she was dancing.

“I’ll—do—it—!” she sang breathlessly. Something crunched beneath her bare feet. I looked down and saw that the floor was littered with seedpods, brown and as big as my thumb. “I’ll—”

At that moment the candle went out. I yelped, Kissy laughed; and the door at the end of the room flew open.

“Lit? Charlotte Moylan, are you—”

“Daddy!”

For a fraction of a second I could feel Kissy’s hand tighten about mine. Then there was a warmth at my ear, and a voice whispering, “Don’t forget!” With a giggle she let go, falling back against the wall.

“Lit! What the hell are you doing in here? Where’s the light? What’s that smell ?”

My father stomped inside. “Jesus Q. Murphy, we’ve been ready to leave for an hour, where the hell have you—”

Light flooded the room from an unshaded bulb overhead. There was a soft crack, and the saucer that had held the votive candle shattered beneath my father’s foot. “Charlotte!” he said, hugging me to him. “Damn it, where have you been ?”

He let his breath out in an explosive gasp and ran his hand through my hair. I leaned against his chest, smelling wine and the warm tobacco scent of his tweed jacket. “What, did you come in here and fall asleep?” he went on, rocking back and forth. “Your mother’s ready to call the cops—”

“No—no, I just got lost, I was looking for you , and then I came in here and we were talking—”

I gestured at the wall behind me, looked up to see my father frowning.

“‘We’? Who’s ‘we’?” He sighed, exasperated, and pulled me with him as he started for the door. “Come on, then, let’s go, we’re going to be ticketed as it is and it’s starting to snow—”

I slipped from his arm and whirled around. “Wait—”

Kissy Hardwick was gone. So was the rock painting. Only the walls were as I had first seen them, shimmering green, and the shattered husks of seedpods sown across the floor.

And, faint as a breath against my cheek, I could hear the rustle of wind in the leaves.

“Lit.”

I nodded obediently, without a word returned to my father. He draped his arm around me and we went down the hall, past other rooms that were all empty now; past the derelict Christmas tree and the shabby foyer where a boy was throwing up out the window, and where my mother awaited us by the elevator.

Neither of my parents ever said anything to me about the party; never even mentioned how strange it was that it had been Christmas, and Axel Kern was my godfather and I had not seen him, or even gotten a present. On New Year’s Eve we stayed at home and celebrated quietly by ourselves, watching TV, Guy Lombardo and Fred Astaire in Top Hat. The next morning, January 1st, 1970, I read in the Daily News about the death by drug overdose of nineteen-year-old celebutante Caresse Hardwick. Her body was found on the bathroom floor of her Chelsea Hotel apartment. Medical examiners estimated that she had been dead for at least a week, perhaps two. Her involvement with Axel Kern and his films was duly noted, as were the shocked reactions of family and friends. Nowhere was there any mention of a bone knife.

The truth was that, despite their friendship with Axel Kern, the world of the Nursery wasn’t my parents’ world at all. My mother was far too professional for such self-indulgence.

“Amateur night,” she’d always sniff when told of opening night parties where principal actors got smashed on champagne or gin. Still, in those days my father was a prodigious drinker. It showed on his face, and helped chart the odd peregrination his life would soon take as Uncle Cosmo on Tales from the Bar Sinister. His stories about my godfather were dark, though very funny as my father told them in his professionally Irish brogue.

Actually, all the stories I ever heard about Axel Kern were dark—the disturbing tales of his involvements with underage girls, the bizarre circumstances surrounding the death of his first wife and the madness of his mistresses; rumors that he slept with a loaded gun in his mouth, and especially those grotesque charges of drug use and cannibalism lodged against him by several bit players from Saragossa. These last of course were dismissed, but not before several weeks’ worth of scandalous publicity. The actors were disgruntled over their scenes ending up on the cutting-room floor, and in those days Kern’s extravagant reputation made him an easy target for lawsuits.

This was in the year following the holiday party at the Nursery. Only a month after Caresse Hardwick’s death, a woman actually had tried to murder Axel, though with a gun rather than a Paleolithic knife. She was arrested and subsequently imprisoned; still, public sympathies seemed to lie with her and not Axel Kern. The Manson Family killings were recent history. In their wake, ritual cannibalism practiced by a leading film director didn’t seem quite so far-fetched. The Nursery and Kern’s Laurel Canyon home were searched. Small quantities of peyote and psilocybin mushrooms were confiscated from the latter, along with esoterically obscene sculptures from the Mediterranean and Near East. Kern himself was hauled off to jail. My father helped him make bail (while he never went over budget on any of his films, Kern was famously insolvent), and stood by him while further accounts of Kern’s escapades—strange ceremonies involving Newport socialites and some livestock, a bas-relief missing from the Museo delle Therme in Rome—filled the papers and evening news.