Elizabeth Hand - Black Light

He grinned and all the malice was gone. He looked like the same cheerful, slightly stoned hippie dad who’d first greeted us in Jamie’s kitchen. “A smart pretty girl like you—I told Jamie he’d make new friends here,” he said, and laughed. “ Lots of nice people, here in fucking Brigadoon…”

He took a quick step backward. At the same time he raised his hand, twisting it so that his fingers seemed to ripple, a magician performing a complicated card trick with no cards there. Then he cried out and his voice died into the crackle of flames. Around us there sprang a circle of blazing light, fire leaping until it arched above our heads like a gilded dome. But there was no heat, and while smoke thickened the air between us it had no scent. I tried to lunge past it but Ralph stopped me, shouting.

“No! It protects you—and me, while I’m with you—”

I shaded my eyes, struggling to see past the column of flame. I could just make out the slender figure of the girl, standing with arms outstretched beneath the tree, her mouth a gaping O of fear and dismay. In the branches above a dark form seemed to thrash, but then I saw that it was the corpse, its limbs beaten back and forth by flame. Fire raced along the branches, white bark crackling as the wood beneath blazed a searing blue. Behind her I could dimly see the line of horsemen, rising and falling in place like some infernal carousel, riders and mounts shifting from antlered masks to golden armor to white robes and red crosses, green and black and yellow uniforms streaked against a fiery field, and then back to those first horsemen again; and between them all like shadows on a cavern wall the images of animals, running, leaping, grazing animals. Bison and lionesses, reindeer with salmon splashing about their cloven feet, mammoths and bears and owls with the eyes of men.

Then it was gone. A flare of purplish light and the figures collapsed, disintegrating into falling ash. Only the girl remained, gazing at a tree where the skeletal remains of a human corpse could be seen, white bones tangled amidst white branches. She looked calm, unnaturally so, her eyes half-opened and her hands limp at her sides. The reindeer herdsmen had disappeared. Behind her stretched the taiga, the lichen-covered plain broken by stands of charred birch trees, and here and there a lone slab of granite thrusting up from the earth. Twilight had somehow eroded into dawn, with no real night between. The eastern edge of the world had begun to glow deep red, a shade so dark it had the blackish humor of a wound that will not heal.

“No…”

I could not bear to see whatever awful sun might rise there. I shut my eyes and buried my face against Ralph’s arm. He moved to embrace me, but then something impelled me to look up again.

I saw the redhaired girl moving as if in mockery of my own fear, into the arms of a tall form standing behind her. I wondered if this was some psychic projection of Ralph Casson, but no. The figure stirred, long braid falling to brush against the girl’s cheek, revealing a face smeared with ochre and wood-ash.

The man-woman. Gone was the creepy aura that had frightened me before; gone, too, any semblance to a real woman. He held the redhaired girl gently, big hands stroking her hair, his chin nestled against the top of her head. There was nothing remotely sensual about their posture, but at the same time it was so intensely intimate that I lowered my eyes. I was too conscious of Ralph there beside me, the way he was different from any boy I’d ever been with. Not just bigger but somehow more solid, more real ; even though I could feel that his arms were slack where Hillary’s were not, his hair thinner, his skin harder and more coarsely textured. It was like leaning against a tree and being able to feel it thrum with life. I was confused but also turned on; to hide it I pointed at the girl.

“What’s her power, then?”

“I told you: ‘Go not with young women over twenty, because they have no occult power.’”

“That’s bullshit.” I stared at the girl, still locked in embrace with her shaman consort, or brother, or whatever the hell he was. “Even if she does, I don’t.”

Ralph looked amused. “And why the hell do you think you would even know if you did, Lit Moylan?”

“I—well, I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m not some goddam sacrificial virgin, I’ll tell you that .”

“Oh, I know.” He took my face between his hands and held it firmly. It didn’t hurt, but when I tried to move he slid his thumbs until they sank into the flesh beneath my jaw. He pressed, hard, against my windpipe. “Believe me, Lit—neither Axel Kern nor Balthazar Warnick nor anyone else would have any interest in you at all, if you were a virgin.”

He shifted. One hand remained tight about my jaw; the other moved slowly down, tracing the ridge of muscle that marked my windpipe, then fanning out so that it covered my collarbone, the fingers slipping beneath the top of my dress. A flicker as I recalled sitting with him on the bench outside of Bolerium, feeling drowsy, nearly hypnotized as he pressed his palm against my breast—

But there was nothing of that now. I began to struggle, the knot in my stomach tightening as he pulled me to him. “You fucker,” I choked, and tried to kick him. His hand swept from my throat to my hair, yanking my head back as he shoved his leg between mine. I cried out; he pushed my face up to his, and kissed me.

“They owe me this,” he said. He stared at me, his blue eyes soft. “Oh, yeah—”

He kissed me again, teeth clicking against mine as I clenched my mouth shut. He made a low frustrated sound but before he could do more I angled my head sideways and bit him, hard, on the mouth.

“Ah—you bitch —!”

Blood spurted against my cheek and I spat at him, kicking viciously. His shout became an enraged growl,

“Don’t you dare, don’t you dare bite me—” I tried to break free but he held me, no pretense of gentleness this time. “You goddam bitch—”

“Let her go.”

Ralph looked up, his head snapping back. “Who the fuck are—”

“Let—her—go.”

It was the man in the long robe and woman’s braids; the man who had been embracing the redhaired girl. Only now he seemed taller—wild-eyed, his breath rank—and undeniably real, not some diorama figure from a fever-dream. Ralph stared but it was as though he didn’t really see him—Ralph’s eyes were unfocused, his mouth working as though he continued to shout at me. The other man loomed beside us; I could feel the nap of his deerskin robes, the soft tufts of colored wool that formed tassels along his sleeves as he raised his hand. I thought he would hit Ralph. Instead he let his arm fall, the leather fabric rippling down to hide me.

“This way!” the man hissed. He grabbed my arm and I stumbled after him, underbrush crackling underfoot. I looked back and saw Ralph staring at us in disbelief, and behind him the spectral silhouette of the girl who was my double, still motionless beneath the birch tree with all the taiga surrounding her, bathed in the crimson glow of sunrise.

Then the light shifted and grew more diffuse, as though a fogbank had crept across the plain. The girl’s clothing melted into shadow. Darkness poured from her like water and the birch tree, too, started to change. Its trunk grew wizened, its branches gnarled. The curved cage of bones propped on its limbs began to shake, as with a sound like ice shattering the skeleton reared into the air. Leaves leaped from the tree to cover it; strands of ivy shot up like spears to wrap around ribs, skull, fibula, sternum, until the entire form was clothed in greenery. Only the eyes remained free of leaves, such a deep black they seemed to glow. On the ground beneath the girl watched. Her stupor suddenly broke, and with a sharp cry she clapped her hands.