Elizabeth Hand - Black Light

“Doesn’t matter. When has ignorance ever excused anyone? Gods need to be born, and they need avatars to assist them. That’s you.”

I kicked at him angrily, succeeded only in sending up a spray of twigs and moss. “Avatar? What the fuck’s an avatar? And if it’s so goddam important why don’t you do it? Why aren’t you it?”

For an instant I thought he’d strike back. His eyes narrowed, his mouth grew tight, but almost immediately his expression softened.

“Oh, Lit…I wish I were. More than anything—more than I have ever wanted anything on this earth, love or money or children, I’ve wished to be one of them. Any one of them—Benandanti or Malandanti, I never cared which!—but one doesn’t choose these things. One can only be born to it, or chosen.”

“Then what can you do?” Fear stoked my rage as easily as alcohol did. I began to feel buzzed, and stared challengingly at Ralph’s disconsolate face. “Why the fuck do they even bother with you?”

A tremor ran along one side of his mouth. “Oh, but they don’t bother with me, Lit,” he said, almost in a whisper. “That’s the whole problem. That’s what the problem has been for, oh, about twenty-two years now, ever since I went to college and made the mistake of trying to join a club that didn’t want me for a member. Have you ever had that happen to you, Lit? Has it?”

“N-no,” I said. “I mean, I don’t think so…”

“Of course not,” he murmured. “Of course not, how could you? Growing up there in Brigadoon—you’re one of them. Even if you’re not with Balthazar and his fucking Conclave, you’re still one of the Chosen Ones. How could you know anything about what it’s like, not to be chosen? To have this whole magical world open up to you for a little while, and then suddenly to have it all end—to have all the doors slam shut in your face? How could you know anything about that?”

How could I know anything about what you’re even talking about? I thought, biting my tongue.

Ralph didn’t notice. His hand remained on my arm, but I might have been a tree, for all the attention he paid me.

“I was hardly older than you are now when it happened. I wanted to be an architect. I’d been accepted at Yale and the University of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine—both great places to study. I chose the Divine, but instead of architecture I was seduced by archaeology. Literally seduced, by a doctoral student named Magda Kurtz. Because of her I changed my major to classical archaeology—I was eighteen, what did I know?—and that was when I met Balthazar.

“Have you ever fallen in love with a teacher, Lit? Because that’s what I did. Not physical love, of course, but this complete, all-consuming obssession. I couldn’t sleep, because I was so thrilled by him. By his ideas, his vision, his methods…This was in the fifties, remember, when you would go someplace to study law, or medicine, or physics, or English lit; and that was pretty much what you learned. Anything else, any kind of liberal arts education—well, that was just sort of going through the motions, pretending that any of these disciplines might have any bearing on each other.

“But that’s exactly what Balthazar Warnick taught. That everything was connected, that nothing ever happens by mistake. That there’s a—a sort of master plan for the world—”

I frowned. “It sounds like religion.”

“It is religion. Or, rather, all Western religions are it : part of the Benandanti and the system for control that they’ve developed over thousands of years. And the school itself is a religious school, administered by an ancient order—so, well, it comes with the territory, doesn’t it?”

He looked down at me, smiling. The color had rushed back to his cheeks; not even the strange wavering light could cloak how happy he looked, remembering. It seemed pathetic, and it depressed me; to think of somebody’s father feeling like that. I made a face but Ralph went on, oblivious.

“I began studying Cycladic cultures; the influence of ancient Anatolia on the Greek islands. Balthazar encouraged me. The bastard! He let me believe they would take me on, that if I worked hard enough, long enough, the Benandanti would accept me. But they never did.

“I finished my undergrad work at the Divine and went on to graduate school there. Magda helped me—she was the one who first told me about the Benandanti, and she showed me how I could recognize them. Because once you know they’re there, you see them everywhere—in government, in the Church, the military, universities— you name it. I went on several digs—Pamphilia in Turkey; the library at Herculaneum. I was still thinking like an architect. I explored the Roman mausoleums at Pamphilia, and was struck by how much they resembled the Ecclesiasterion at Prieme. Sacred spaces, theater and tomb, both defined by thresholds, by porticos and prosceniums—

“And by something else. I discovered that there were hidden passages that served as entries to secret chambers in the tombs and theaters. Not just tunnels, but words of power carved within the entablature. Magda knew of them, because she was a Benandante. She showed me how to find them myself. Which was forbidden, of course, but that was when I began to learn about the Benandanti’s portals—the doors they use to travel in time and space. That was how you got here”— He swept his arm out grandly, as though he had personally brought the taiga into being. —“and that’s how you got to see everything you’ve seen. Lit ,” he ended, and tousled my hair.

I pulled away. “What do you mean?”

“I mean all those things you saw—on the mountain, and by our house. The sacrifice, the horned god—”

“You put them there? You ?”

“No. I didn’t put them there. I opened the doors, that’s all. The portals. They’re everywhere, like the Benandanti are everywhere. You just have to know how to look for them. I spent six years, studying at the Divine—six years of learning how the Benandanti created the portals, and where, and why…”

He fell silent. I thought of the horned man moving through the trees by Jamie’s house, the standing stone atop Mount Muscanth and the crumbling doorway in Bolerium that had opened onto this wasteland. Cautiously I asked, “Well…what happened then?”

“Nothing.” Ralph’s tone was so light he might have been giving the punch line of a joke. But his expression was anguished. “Not a fucking thing. I was dismissed. My dissertation panel said my work was stolen, and they threw me out.”

“Stolen?”

“Plagiarized. They knew it wasn’t—it was an excuse, that’s all. I went home that afternoon and found my apartment had been ransacked. All my notes were gone, the copies I’d made of manuscripts and books in their libraries all over the world, the maps I’d drawn up—all gone. They took them— he took them. Balthazar Warnick. But —” Ralph tapped his forehead. “The one thing they couldn’t take was what was in here. ’Cause I’d memorized a lot of it. And I’d already been through some of their portals—in Herculaneum, and at their retreat house outside D.C., and again in Italy and—well, here, for chrissakes! Oh, yeah, quite a few places, you’d be surprised! Balthazar would be surprised,” he said maliciously. “It was too late to change that, and so they did the best they could to ruin my life. Blackballed me every time I’d try to enter another doctoral program, got me fired from jobs, turned my own goddam wife against me—

“But not this time. The buck stops here, now—’cause I’ve got you, Lit Moylan.”