Elizabeth Hand - Black Light

I stared at her, disbelieving, then tried to bolt for the door. But she pulled me back to the center of the room, where a large mattress was set on a low platform, covered with paisley scarves and an old Victorian crazy-quilt. Bottles were arranged around the platform—dozens of them, burgundy and brandy and Southern Comfort, sloe gin and Boone’s Farm Apple Wine—bottles and incense burners, brass trays and vials, decanters and long-stemmed pipes and even a hookah, its tubes spilling onto the floor like entrails.

“A movie? Christ, it looks like a fucking head shop exploded—”

“Name your poison,” advised Precious Bane. “It’ll make it easier for you.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“I mean it. Have a little drinkie.” She hesitated, head tilted; then leaned forward and kissed me on the mouth. “Good luck,” she said, and crossed to the door.

Despairing, I watched her go. She stopped to look back at me, her oversized frame filling the narrow space; drew one hand to her mouth and blew me a kiss.

“Remember, honey—don’t get even. Get mad .”

The door closed. I was alone.

“Great. This is fucking great.”

I went to the platform and sat. A more comforting scent hung here, patchouli and the musty smell of mothballs. I ran my hand through my hair and sighed, fighting tears, stared down at the ludicrous assembly of liquor waiting for me. After a minute I picked up a bottle.

There was no cork. I sniffed it, then took a swig. A spark of heat on my tongue, sweetness and a tart aftertaste like unripe apples. I drank some more, finally set the bottle down, knocking it against a dark-green decanter that sloshed as it toppled over. I caught the decanter before it fell, but when I replaced it I saw a cloisonné tray alongside, patterned with ivy and honeybees. There were little squares like fudge on the tray, wrapped in foil. Not aluminum foil but some thinner material that you could see through, like cellophane. I frowned and picked up one.

It was heavier than it looked, with a thick, perfumey smell. I peeled back a corner of the wrapping. The square beneath was sticky and dark, the color of burnt toffee and with the same faint sickly scent I had caught on Ali’s skin. As though it had hissed at me, I yelled and threw it as hard as I could across the room.

With a thunk it struck the projector, ricocheted off and landed somewhere in the shadows. The jerkily moving figures on the wall trembled, then continued their monotonous posturing.

“God damn it!” I picked up the tray and sent it skimming toward the projector. Silvery cakes flew everywhere. This time I made a direct hit. The projector thudded to the floor; a blue-white arc swept across the wall like a comet and disappeared. The projector lay on its side, reels grinding as its lens glowed like a small imprisoned moon. There was a flash, the stink of burning film. With a soft pop the projector’s lamp went dead.

I stared at it, a little fallen monolith surrounded by glints of silver where the opium cakes were strewn. My skin was cold and my heart beating much too fast. The wall hangings moved slowly in and out. A candle sizzled and there was a scorched smell, like burning hair.

From behind me I heard something walking; something far too big for that room. Its stride was heavy and uneven, as though it limped or dragged a broken limb. Where its head scraped against the ceiling chips of plaster fell. I held my breath as its shadow fell in front of me: the shadow of an enormous tree, branches like black lightning. It stood behind me, unmoving, inexorable. Finally I turned to face it.

It was not a tree, but a stag, the same monstrous creature I had seen slain upon the mountaintop. Its antlers curved upward, so huge it seemed they must hold up the massive roof of Bolerium; its legs like columns, ending in scarred hooves splotched black and green with lichen.

The stag lowered its head. Droplets of rain fell from the ridge of stiff hair upon its humped back, and I saw that one hind leg was badly wounded. Blood oozed from three long downward slashes in the matted fur. There was a shimmer of white within, the glossy pink bulge of exposed muscle. Its breath came in short bursts— huff huff huff— that smelled of sun-warmed bracken, goldenrod and yellow coneflower, hawkweed and beechnut. As it staggered toward me I cringed, helpless: it was too huge, it would crush me as it fell…

But it did not fall. Its shadow swept across me, and for an instant I felt its warm breath upon my face. When I looked up again, the great stag was gone. In its place stood Axel Kern. The emerald-green kimono drooped from his frame. A wreath of entwined ivy and grape vines sat crookedly on his brow, leaves tugging at his hair. Like the deer, he swayed slightly. His breath and even his sweat reeked of wine.

Yet when he reached to lay one hand against my cheek, his touch was steady and reassuring, the brilliant green-flecked eyes nearly incandescent; but not the least bit drunk.

“Lit.” He smiled. “You came.”

I stared at him, then scrambled to my feet. “Right. And now I’m leaving—”

“No. Not yet.”

His hand shot out to grab my sleeve. I kept going; he yanked me backward and the sleeve tore. I turned furiously.

“You can’t make me stay!” I shouted. “You can’t—”

“Yes I can, Lit.”

“Yeah? How? By killing me, like you killed Ali?”

The maddeningly calm smile never left his face. “I didn’t kill Ali. Girls overdose all the time—”

“Around you they sure do.” I tried vainly to pull my hand free. “Kissy Hardwick, Laura Stone—”

“Laura would be very flattered that you called her a girl.”

“Fuck you.”

Axel Kern sighed. “You are mistaken if you think I have ever killed anyone, Lit.”

“Right—you just gave them drugs—”

“No, Lit.” He wiggled his eyebrows and twirled an invisible mustache. “I don’t give people drugs. I am drugs.”

“You’re fucking crazy, is what you are! You’re a fucking psycho!”

To my surprise he let go. I backed away from the mattress, but instead of following, Axel remained where he was. He was staring at the opium cakes, gleaming on the floor like so many little fish left mudbound at ebb tide. After a moment he stooped to pick one up. He turned it back and forth so it glittered in the candlelight, then looked at me and asked, “Do you know what this is?”

“Yes,” I snapped. “It’s opium.”

“No.”

He shook his head. His long hair had tangled inextricably with the vines upon his brow, so that green tendrils and darker grape leaves seemed to thrust from the skin beside his temples, and a spiral of ivy nestled in the hollow of his throat as though inside the bole of a tree.

“No,” he repeated. He lifted his arms. In a shimmer of green the kimono fell to the floor. He was naked, but his lean body had none of the softness I would have expected in someone my father’s age. His arms were smoothly muscled, covered with fine dark hair like an otter’s, his legs beautifully formed, save where a glossy red scar ran along one thigh. Only his face held that mixture of cruelty and amusement that I had seen so often over the years, as he told of some producer’s fall from grace or the death by misadventure of an old, beloved friend.

Now he looked scarcely older than one of my own friends, though more broad-shouldered, his hair like a winter sky, his face heavily lined. I stared at him, too tired to be embarrassed or aroused. But then it was as though my vision grew fuzzy, as though this were a film that had suddenly gone out of focus.

Because I was no longer seeing Axel Kern. It was like one of those optical illusions that would leave me fuming as I struggled to find the Young Girl in a blot of ink, when all I could see was The Crone. For a fraction of a second both figures would be there on paper, maiden and hag, and then I would have to try all over again to bring one or the other back in focus.