Elizabeth Hand - Black Light

“I didn’t sleep with Axel Kern. I never have.”

“Thank god.”

His tone was so earnest that I laughed despite my anger. “What, are you a Moonie or something? You hate sex?”

“No. Of course not. It’s just that—well, this is all a trap, Lit. All of it here at this party—”

He turned to peer over the top of his armchair, like a kid playing hide-and-seek; then curled around again. “It’s all for you. Axel Kern—I’m not sure exactly what he is, but he’s sure as shit not just a movie director. Somehow or other my father conned Kern into thinking that he could do some work for him, but my father’s not here to work. At least not that kind of work.”

His voice dropped. “Have you ever heard of a man named Balthazar Warnick?”

“Professor Warnick?”

“God, you do know him—”

“No! I never even heard of him until tonight!”

“Well, he’s here because of my father—and because of you. I don’t know why, exactly—”

He began scratching nervously at his arms. “But I do know this—I know my father wants to hurt both of them. Warnick and Axel Kern. I hear him talking some nights, my father—talking to himself, but what really creeps me out is that it makes sense. I mean it’s like he hears a voice, or voices, telling him things. And I can tell by his tone of voice that whatever it is he’s listening to, he’s hearing it for the first time. And once he does hear about it, well, all this weird stuff turns out to be true. Like this party—I heard him talking one night, we were still in the city—and he just sort of listened to whatever it is he listens to, and finally he said ‘Fine, Kamensic Village, we’ll go there.’”

“But Jamie—people do move here. It’s not like you need some magic voice telling you about it. Lots of people have heard of this place.”

“He hadn’t. Not before that night. I know, because he had to get a map to figure out where Kamensic Village is—he thought it was in Massachusetts, or Maine. He didn’t know it was just upstate. He’s here because of you, Lit—you and Kern and that guy Warnick…”

His voice grew softer, more despairing. “Look, I know it sounds crazy, but you have to admit this place isn’t exactly Walton’s fucking Mountain. And my father is definitely into some weird shit. I think he’s in way over his head. My mother did, too—she thought he was in some kind of cult, she was even trying to collect stuff for a book about it, maps and things, but then of course my mother also thinks she’s the seventeenth incarnation of Mary Magdalene. So”— he lay his hands on his knees beseechingly. —“can you please tell me what’s going on?”

“But I don’t know. You—you drew that face in the air back there, in the bathroom—how?”

“I told you—I watched my father, and memorized what he did. It doesn’t always work—I have to focus on what I want to see, and”— he opened his palms, clapped them together. — “pffft! Like that. If it works.”

“But Jamie, why did it look like Axel?” He looked puzzled and I wanted to shake him, I was that frustrated. “The face you made in the air—it looked just like him .”

“Kern?”

“Yes! Didn’t you know?”

He gestured helplessly, his arms red-streaked where he’d scratched them. “But I wasn’t thinking of Kern. I was thinking of those things you see here on the doors, those creepy masks…”

His eyes went dead, and somehow that was more frightening than the thought that he could draw faces in the air. All the color drained from them, the way a blue jay’s feather goes from blue to gray if you strip the quills, and he stared vacantly into the air between us.

“I don’t want to see them,” he finally said, his voice listless as his eyes. I knew he was seeing something else in the room’s shadows; whatever it was, my skin prickled to watch it mirrored in his face. “But they’re always there. That’s why I get bent—so I won’t see them…”

He turned and grabbed my hand. His was icy cold, the long fingers flaccid as rotting leaves. I recoiled but he drew me closer, until his breath was on my cheek, nicotine and a faint green scent, crushed petals, the bitter tang of resin. “Come with me, Lit. You hate this place, you want to leave—come with me to the city. We can live cheap, practically for free. We can get high, we can hang out. If we leave tonight we can be there by morning. I mean, trains do stop here, right?”

“Well, yeah,” I said slowly. “Of course they do, the commuter trains come every day, but I don’t know about four A.M. on a Saturday…”

“Then we’ll hitch! There’s a place we can crash, a bunch of people I know are squatting there, it’ll be so cool—”

His hand tightened around mine and I nodded, not meaning Yes, not meaning anything; just trying to buy time to think.

“Why? I mean, why do you want me?” I said at last. I looked up, trying to will a spark back into those wounded eyes. “Why not Hillary, or Ali?”

“Because you’d know exactly what you were leaving. Hillary’s afraid to really go away—he just wants to hide at Yale for four years, and pretend this place doesn’t exist. But it does, and it’s not going to disappear—”

“But why not Ali?”

He shook his head. “Ali’s too much like me: she just wants to get high. Little rich white girls scoring nickel and dime bags…she’d never make it. She’s not tough, like you are. And she can’t sing.”

“Sing?”

“I’m getting another band together. I know these guys, they’ve been playing down on the Bowery for a few months now. We can get a regular gig there, and if we’re squatting we don’t have to make rent—”

“But I can’t sing ! I’m horrible at all that stuff…”

I blinked back tears, my turn to feel desperate. Because suddenly it seemed as though there was a way out of Kamensic, and this was it. I shuddered, feeling the rush of chilly prescience that overcame me sometimes when I was drunk—the same dizzying sense of hopelessness and relief, the same sickening perception that this was the real world, teenage drunks and junkies nodding out in corners, midnight’s promise given over to crushed pill capsules and empty bottles and the same record playing over and over again on a neglected stereo.

And none of it, none of us, would ever mean anything. We would never be famous; we would never be rich. None of us would become what we were meant to be, beautiful and brilliant and enchanted, destiny’s tots taking bows onstage and receiving armfuls of roses, reading our reviews in the New York Times and Rolling Stone. Ali would go quietly mad like her mother, Hillary would teach Cymbeline to yawning high school students and one rainy night drive his car into the Muscanth Reservoir.

Yet in a terrible way it was a relief to know these things. To imagine that life could be ordinary and barren; to know that nothing I did would ever matter, that the visions of another world and another self were nothing more than bad dreams, the bitter aftertaste of bad acid and too much Ripple wine. Whatever secret that Kamensic and the Benandanti held was trumped by what Jamie was offering me—the chance to escape, to go to the city and lose myself. No one from Kamensic Village—or anyplace else, anytime else—would be able to find me. Not in New York City.

Not if I didn’t want to be found.

“Lit?”

I looked up to see Jamie staring at me. I opened my hands. “I can’t sing, Jamie. I can’t even act, and around here that’s like saying you can’t read, or drive. Actually,” I admitted, “I can’t drive, either. But Hillary can sing, and Duncan—”