Elizabeth Hand - Black Light

Eventually most of the charges were dropped, save only those for drug possession. But an Icelandic shaman and two Lakota medicine men testified that the peyote and mushrooms were for religious use, and by the time the whole ridiculous episode had been supplanted in the headlines by the Pentagon Papers, Kern had paid several hundred dollars in fines and tens of thousands in legal fees. My best friend Hillary and I used to fight over the morning’s Daily News, giggling at the front-page photos of the gaunt hawk-faced man, his long dark hair pulled into a ponytail and his eerily intent eyes unshuttered by sunglasses. A year later he recreated it all on film for Granada Television, in the prize-winning documentary Suddenly, Last Summer. Throughout, his lawyer hinted darkly at a mass conspiracy that, if revealed, would shake not just Hollywood but Broadway, Capitol Hill and the Vatican.

To my great chagrin, that conspiracy remained a secret, at least for another few years. But the whole affair only deepened Kern’s friendship with my father. After his drug imbroglio, it was Kern who recommended my father for the part of Uncle Cosmo on Tales from the Bar Sinister. There wasn’t exactly a lot of competition for the role—a few unknowns, a former kiddie-show host on the skids and an ailing Vincent Price clone. But my father threw himself into the audition with his usual brio and walked out of the casting director’s office with a new job. He was sober by then, eager for work, and his devotion to Kern—always intense—became positively slavish. My mother used to laugh and say that the only thing my father wouldn’t do for Axel Kern was promise him his only child. Of course, she was wrong about that.

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING you have to understand is that we lived in a haunted place. A town that over the centuries had survived death by fire, water, wind; a town that endured—and not only the town itself, you see, but everyone who lived in it. The village was founded in 1627 as a far-flung remnant of the old Dutch colony of New Netherland. The oldest houses—stem fieldstone dwellings with steeply pitched roofs and gables—dated from twenty years later, but there were ruins of older houses still, wooden buildings burned to the ground by the Tankiteke Indians in retaliation for the slaughter of an entire Indian village. In the late 1700s the town was burned again, by the British General Eustis “Bloodjack” Warrenton, a convert to Jansenism who met an unhappy fate—murdered by Polly Twomey, a former tragedienne (her Ariadne in The Rival Sisters was rumored to be superior to Mrs. Siddons’s) and singer of bawdy songs, well known to be a witch. Warrenton’s mutilated body was found by his aide-de-camp in the woods outside of town. Cat-a-mountain, the villagers blandly insisted, what do you think? But those with Tory sympathies knew it was the witch.

A century later the White Hurricane of 1873 left the woods along the Muscanth River as desolate as though they had been struck by a meteor. The forest scarcely had a chance to regenerate when in 1907 it was drowned, the Muscanth dammed to form a reservoir that would provide water for the great city to the south. Most people moved their houses, by horse and oxen—you can see the photographs in the Constance Charterbury Library and the Kamensic Village Courthouse (now a museum, Open Weekends)—but some refused. Their homes lie there still beneath the green murky waters of Lake Muscanth, alongside rusted-out refrigerators and doomed autos and a few unclaimed corpses.

Through the centuries, high above it all stood the strange grand mansion known as Bolerium, its mottled granite walls so covered with moss and lichen they were nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding stones, its turrets and gables and cupolas thrusting from its walls as though carven from the mountainside itself. Bolerium seemed not so much separate from Kamensic as some marvel given birth by the town, phantasm or prodigy or portent. Its whorled-glass windows gazed down upon the lake’s deceptively placid dark surface as though dreaming of itself.

Bolerium was the oldest building in Kamensic. Legend had it that when the Dutch settlers arrived, the mansion was already there, torchlight guttering behind its thick panes and shadowy figures moving slowly through its corridors. This was absurd, of course. It would have taken years, decades, even, to build such a mammoth structure.

What was known about the house was that its granite blocks were not native to New York State, or even to the New World. During the Victorian era Owen Schelling, founder of Schelling’s Market and an amateur geologist, determined that the building material came from the Penwith peninsula, on the westernmost tip of Cornwall. And because of an unusual variation in the stones, he could assign them an exact provenance: the pastel-tinted cliffs of Lamorna Cove, where ancient quarries produced greenstone and the coarse-grained granite that gave birth to that country’s tors and neolithic forts and standing stones.

After Schelling’s discovery, Bolerium’s mysterious stones would periodically draw geologists from universities and museums across the country. They would carefully tap at the mansion’s walls and take their slender samples off to the city, where the results were always the same—an unusual mixture of Penwith greenstone and St. Buryan granite. The shaved and splintered rock was examined and dated and filed away, but the mystery remained: there were no records of Bolerium’s construction, no ship’s manifest detailing how or when or why a million tons of Cornish granite came to New York Harbor, and thence seventy miles inland to a remote hamlet where only hardscrabble farmers lived, and red men, and witches.

Town records showed the official date of Bolerium’s construction as 1743, and were attributed to the mansion’s first registered owner, an Irishman named Crom MacCrutch. According to village legend, MacCrutch brought with him the last remaining herd of Megaloceros, the so-called Giant Irish Elk, with the intention of establishing a sanctuary for them in the New World. This fact was duly typed on a yellowing index card, where I read it during one of the elementary school’s annual trips to the Courthouse Museum.

“That’s impossible,” Hillary announced disdainfully when I told him about it after school that day. We were kicked back in his basement watching The Munsters, Uncle Cosmo’s only television rival. “Those things were deer, not elk. Besides which they became extinct about twenty thousand years ago.”

“Well, that’s what it said in the museum,” I insisted, then went on stubbornly, “and Mrs. Langford said it was true. Plus how would you know?”

Hillary said nothing, only tightened his lips and stared fixedly at the television. But at the commercial he stalked upstairs, returning a few minutes later with two oversized volumes. He set them side by side on the coffee table and then opened the first, a heavy old book with a stained blue cover and the title Ancient Man in Briton stamped in gold letters.

“How would I know?” he demanded, and opened the book. Flecks of paper and dust flew up. There was a faint smell of mold as he flipped through the pages, and finally stopped. “From this —”

He stabbed at an illustrative plate, its sepia tones tinged with gray and feathered with the remains of silverfish.

“‘Irish Elk,’” I read out loud. “Peat burial in Hound’s Pool, Devonshire, alongside of human remains.’ So?”

“So that was ten thousand years ago,” Hillary sniffed. “And wait, look here—”