Black Light (13 page)

The head had been driven a good six inches into the ground. Upturned earth surrounded it like black foam. In the lingering twilight it seemed to glow, so that Balthazar could see every detail of the carven visage: its oblique slanted eyes, the mouth upturned into a faint smile, hair curled tightly as bunches of grapes atop its head. Beneath its face the legend could still be clearly read:

WITHIN A GREATER GNOMON ALL THE NIGHT

Somewhere above him laughter rang out once more. Balthazar’s hands tightened into fists. He took a step closer to the pillar, rage roiling in his chest; but even as he drew his foot back to kick it, the herm’s features began to fade. Carven curls and etched mouth, ivy tendrils and stubs of horn all melted into the granite, as though they had been traced there in ice; as though they had never been at all.

Except for the eyes. Instead of fading, these grew more distinct, iris and pupil and long black lashes darkening,
thickening,
until Balthazar was staring into a gaze as keenly alert as his own.

“No!”

With a cry he recoiled. The eyes blinked, once; then tracked back and forth as though searching for something—until, finally, they focused on him.

Balthazar could not move. He felt blind horror, as though he stared into the lidless orbs of a great shark: the same raw hunger, without the faintest shading of human thought. The laughter came again, louder now; and suddenly the ravening eyes squeezed shut. A dark tear appeared at the corner of each one, twin arabesques that swelled until they were as large as Balthazar’s clenched fists. The air shivered as with rain. Like mouth and nose and face before them, the eyes melted into the granite and were gone.

Yet for just an instant longer the tears remained, shining upon the dark granite. Then, soundlessly, they burst and streamed down the sides of the fallen pillar. One last time the laughter rang out and died away, and Balthazar thought he heard the echo of his own name.

About him the night was still. From the woods a whippoorwill hooted. Inside the Orphic Lodge a clock softly chimed. Very slowly, as though settling into sleep, Balthazar crouched beside the broken herm.

Wind rustled the trees and sent the first autumn leaves flying. A cricket leaped onto the fallen stone. At the edge of the lawn something moved in the high grass; something that made a guttural sound. There was a smell of the sea, and roasting flesh. Balthazar extended his hand to where dark liquid pooled in the hollow of an ivy leaf that had blown against the pillar. Tentatively he dipped his finger into it, then brought it to his tongue.

And tasted wine, a fire that seared his mouth and made his eyes water even as he thirsted for more: wine and earth and the coppery taint of blood.

H
ILLARY’S PARENTS WERE STILL
out of town, taping an episode of
The Love Boat,
so after we left Jamie Casson’s house he came over for dinner. I was relieved. I felt exhausted and a little sick from drinking, and was glad to let Hillary chatter with my mother about industry gossip—whose agent was screwing whom, which characters were going to be killed off next season when the cast of
Perilous Lives
boarded an airplane that would crash into the Bermuda Triangle.

My father seemed to have caught my mood. He sat brooding at the head of the table, picking at his spaghetti carbonara. He watched me so closely that my stoned paranoia went into overdrive. I decided to feign illness and flee to my room.

“Umm, you know, I sort of don’t feel so hot—” I cleared my throat, fidgeting in my seat, when Hillary turned to my father.

“So, Unk—did you hear Kern’s back in town?”

My father hesitated. “Yes. I’d heard,” he finally said.

“Is he? That’s nice.” My mother tore off a tiny piece of Italian bread and nibbled it, gazing at tomorrow’s script beside her plate. “Who’s he married to now?”

“I didn’t ask—”

“You should have. I was so embarrassed that time with Marlena Harlin, you really should think to—”

“He’s mounting an opera,” my father went on. “I think he said
Die Fledermaus
—”

Hillary shook his head. “
Ariadne auf Naxos.
”

Unk glowered, the same look he gave recalcitrant customers—usually zombies—at the Bar Sinister. “Would somebody let me finish? Whatever the hell it is, he’s gotten backers for it and he wants to rehearse it here—”

“Where, dear?” My mother poured herself more Chianti. “I mean, here in Kamensic, but where?”

My father sighed, defeated, and reached for his coffee. “The Miniver Amphitheater.”

“Oh, I have been
longing
for someone to restore that place! At the last town meeting I—”

“So there’s a party there tomorrow, or something?” Hillary asked, all innocence. My mother stiffened. After a moment she shot my father a look.

“Oh, surely not. I mean, he hasn’t been back in
years,
Bolerium must be an absolute shambles—”

“It’s time,” said my father. “You knew he was coming…”

My mother’s lips tightened. She shook her head emphatically and stared back down at her script. My father turned to Hillary, his voice as archly guileless as Hillary’s had been a minute before. “So. Where’d
you
hear about the party?”

“Uh—this new guy at school. Jamie Casson. His father told us. I gave him a lift home—”

My father’s voice rose sharply. “Ralph Casson?”

“No—his son, Jamie. He’s in my—”

“Ralph Casson? He’s here? You met him?”

Hillary fell silent and glanced at me for help.
Thanks a lot,
I thought; then said, “Yeah. They’re staying in the caretaker’s cottage. Ralph Casson’s designing the sets for the opera.”

“No, he’s not.” My father’s voice was fierce, almost angry; but for some reason that only made me want to argue with him.

“Yes he is. He told us he was doing the sets.”

“He may be
building
them. He’s
not
designing them. He’s a goddam handyman—”

“He’s a master carpenter,” my mother broke in gently. “And he’s very good—he studied ancient architecture at university, before going into the theater.” She turned to Hillary and explained, “This is just another example of masculine rivalry that goes back long before you children were even born…”

“Oooh la la,” said Hillary.

“
Not
that kind. And it doesn’t even involve
us,
really—” She gave my father a warning glare. “It’s between Axel and Ralph and—some friends. And it goes back a
very
long time. Unk sided with Axel—”

“And Ralph went independent,” finished Hillary. He looked very pleased with himself, but when I watched my parents I saw something complicated, almost disturbing, pass between them. My stomach lurched: all I could think of was that snowy morning when Hillary had whispered that Ali’s parents were getting divorced.

“Right,” my father said after a moment. “Ralph remained—independent.”

I knew by his tone that he was talking over our heads. Hillary didn’t even notice. He speared some spaghetti, wolfed it down and asked, “So this party’s tomorrow? What time?”

My mother’s delicate eyebrows rose. “Are the children invited?”

“Everyone’s invited.” My father sighed. For an instant I thought he was going to leave the table. He pushed his chair back and stared out the darkened window behind us. In the distance the ragged bulk of Muscanth Mountain blotted out the stars; but at its very tip I could see a faint glimmer of gold, as though bonfires burned there. My father stared at it for a long time. At last he said, “It’s not an invitation you can turn down.”

“Cool.” Hillary grinned. “Too bad my folks’re out of town.”

My mother shook her head, striking her best Livia Defending Her Young pose. “Darling, are you
sure
? After that trouble in—”

“Absolutely.”
My father turned with such force that everything on the table bounced. “Axel hasn’t seen Lit for years. He’s her goddam
godfather,
Audrey—”

My mother set her mouth and glanced down at another page of script. “Do you have something nice to wear, Lit?” she asked calmly. “We’ll have to go to Lord and Taylor if you don’t.”

“I can always borrow something from Ali.”

“Fine.” She nodded without looking at me, and I almost pointed out that any dress that fit Ali would only come up to my crotch. But my mother had deliberately lost herself once more in Livia’s world, slitting her eyes as the wickedest woman in daytime television plotted her family’s downfall.

When we finished eating I walked Hillary next door, the two of us scuffling through piles of leaves and hunching our shoulders against the chill. “What the hell you think was going on at dinner?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I—Do you think they’re getting divorced?”

Hillary laughed. “You nuts? Your mom and Unk are, like, the only people in this whole town who would
never
get divorced! No
way
.” He grabbed me and rapped my head with his knuckles. “You idiot. Is that what you’re worrying about?”

“I guess. I don’t know. They were just acting so weird.”

“What, somebody in Kamensic is acting weird? Wow, alert the media.” He shook his head, clambering atop the tumbledown stone wall that was the dividing line between our property and his. “
Everyone
here is
always
acting weird. No, this is something about Ralph Casson. He’s bizarre, man. Jamie hates him. I mean, he
really
hates him.”

“How come? He seems okay to me.”

“I don’t know.” I followed him to his front door. Hillary stood there for a minute, staring at the terra-cotta mask hung on the knocker. The porch light spilled too brightly onto its blank face, two small holes for eyes, its mouth a black slit. “It
is
weird,” he said, almost to himself. “We never think about it, but Jamie said you never see stuff like this in the city. Or anywhere else, probably.”

Suddenly he gave the mask a tug, yanking the hempen cord from the door. “What the hell does it mean, Lit?” he asked in a low voice, and held up the ugly grinning face. “What does it
mean
?”

I shrugged. “I don’t think it means anything,” I said, but that wasn’t true. As I stared at the tiny mask between Hillary’s fingers I felt revulsion and something very close to fear. Again I saw that terrible figure moving slowly through the trees, and heard the rustle of its antlers as they tugged at the leaves. “Hillary…”

Hillary’s eyes remained fixed on the mask. His expression grew dark. Before I could say anything more, he tossed the mask into the drift of leaves beside the porch.

“I just want to get out of here,” he said softly. “I just want to get to New Haven and never see this town again.”

He opened the door and slipped inside. For a moment he hesitated and I saw him framed in shadow, the porch light igniting his face so that he resembled the mask, his mouth a livid gash and his eyes blackly staring. He dipped his head in farewell.

“’ Night, Lit. See you.”

“Yeah…”

He shut the door. I waited, half-expecting him to come back, to ask me in, to act like Hillary again. But he didn’t. After a minute or so I turned and started back to my own house, glancing at the pile of leaves where the mask had landed. There was no sign of it, and even when I kicked through the heap, sending a spray of gold and brown and scarlet up into the night, the mask remained hidden.

When I got home my parents were already in bed. I called Ali; her phone was busy, and after three tries I stopped. I went into the darkened living room and sat in the wing chair by the window, staring out at the silhouette of Muscanth Mountain. Lights still burned from the promontory where Bolerium stood, but whether these were indeed bonfires, or just light glowing from the mansion’s windows, I couldn’t tell. After a while I stood, yawning, and crossed to the fireplace mantel, where my mother’s awards and the photo of my father and Axel Kern leaned against the brick.

But the photo was gone. I frowned, glancing around to see if my mother had moved it to one of the end tables cluttered with old scripts and issues of Italian
Vogue.
It wasn’t there, either, and when I checked to see if it had somehow fallen on the mantel I found nothing. Finally I gave up. I went to my own room, a small haven under the eaves with a map of Middle Earth on the wall and George Booth cartoons torn from
The New Yorker,
the ceiling covered by a collage I had made of magazine and newspaper pictures.

“That’s your whole problem right there,” Hillary had said once, pointing to a photo of Lou Reed thumbtacked onto a publicity still of the Moody Blues. “You can’t make up your mind whether you want to be a freak or just totally uncool.”

He was right. I was tainted by the same impulse that made my parents adhere to their Oriental rugs rather than shag carpeting, oak harvest tables rather than glass-and-chrome bookshelves. I stared up at the ceiling, then hopped onto the bed and peeled away the Moody Blues, in their place stuck a page torn from
Creem,
showing a silver-haired Iggy Pop in a recording studio. Then I collapsed back onto the unmade bed, kicking its flimsy India-print spread onto the floor, and turned on the radio.

It was the nature of the thing:

No moon outlines its leaving night,

No sun its day…

Alison Steele’s dusky voice filled the room. She read a poem and an excerpt from
The Prophet,
segueing into trancey music. Tonto’s Expanding Head Band, Lothar and the Hand People, a band I’d never heard before singing about the Autobahn.

“Fahn, fahn, fahn
…”

I reached for a broken-spined paperback on the floor:
Greek Plays for the Drama.
I was weeks behind in my reading. With a sigh I thumbed through it until I reached the selection from Euripides I was supposed to have memorized for class on Monday.

‘When is this worship done? By night or day?’

‘T’is most oft performed by night:’

‘A majestic thing, The Darkness!’

‘Ha! With women worshipping?

Tis craft and rottenness…’

Behind me the radio pumped out its strange music, muted voices chanting over a synthesized drone. It made my head ache, that and the last vestiges of Ralph Casson’s pot. After a few minutes I turned off the light. I felt edgy and frightened, the way I felt anticipating a test I hadn’t studied for. But I fought the urge to sneak over to Hillary’s house for comfort—he’d just lecture me again on my drinking. So I pushed Euripides onto the floor, switched off the radio, and crawled under the covers with my clothes on. My window was cracked open; chill air threaded into the room, bringing with it the acrid smell of damp birch bark and fallen leaves, the creak of insects. At last I fell asleep.