Black Light (18 page)

Someone grabbed my arm—the formally dressed guy who’d been directing traffic. I stared at him blankly, then said, “Jamie.”

He nodded wearily. “Your car—”

“It’s not my car.”

“Whoever—that drunk left his front door open.” He turned to motion at a Mercedes barreling toward us. “Fucking assholes,” he muttered, then shouted, “Over here! Sir—over here, please—”

I walked to the Triumph, closed the door, and returned to Jamie. “You’re working here?”

He gritted his teeth in a fake smile and beckoned another car. “You got it. Part of the deal my old man made with Asshole Kern. What a goddam cheapskate, like he couldn’t
hire
someone to do this? Yes, ma’am, right there! Thank you, sir! Hey, Lit—look out, will you? You’re gonna get killed”— He grabbed my arm, pulling me to the side of the road. —“and then I’d lose this nice job.”

I frowned, trying desperately to think of something to say. But Jamie just went on, “God, this bites. It’s only till nine, though.” He lit a cigarette and eyed the line of cars with revulsion. “But I don’t know who the hell’s gonna get all these drunks home.”

For a few minutes no new cars appeared. Jamie smoked silently and stared down the road, and I stared at Jamie. Finally he glanced at me sideways, eyes narrowing.

“Hey, you got a joint? No? What about Ali? She around?”

I gestured at the enormous stone gates flanking the estate’s entrance. “Yeah. I came with her. She was just here, I don’t know where she—”

“Shit—” Jamie tossed his cigarette and strode away from me as more cars hove into sight. “Back to work. Hey—
hey
! You can’t go in there—”

He shouted at a Karmann Ghia, then spun on his heel to wave at me. “See ya, huh?”

“Sure. Later.”

The knot of waiting guests had disappeared, and except for the occasional roar of a car mounting the hill, the night was quiet. I hugged myself against the chill and headed toward the gate. Seeing Jamie had given me a sharp burst of elation, but now that was fading into anxiety. Where the hell had Ali gone? I thought of Jamie sitting on the jukebox, fixing me with his prescient gaze; I thought of the antlered man moving with slow and dreadful purpose through the trees.

Blessed is she among women who is given these rites to know…

The wind came rushing up the mountainside, cold and smelling of woodsmoke. For one last moment I stopped to look at Jamie in the distance, his sullen swaying dance as he beckoned a car closer and then sidestepped out of its way, dust staining his trouser cuffs and his bow tie coming loose to flop around his neck. Then I hurried on.

I kept to the left of the dirt road, past parked cars, smoldering cigarette butts, an empty bottle of imported beer. Ahead of me Bolerium’s gates arched like a smaller study of the mountain itself, black and threatening. It made me feel faint and muzzy-headed, already drunk. I looked up guiltily when I heard voices.

“…don’t know
what
he’s thinking, it’ll be frost by the time they open…”

In the shadow of the gates people stood talking. Friends of my parents, men and women in late middle age, faces sun-creased, their voices brittle with drink. The women wore designer minidresses or ankle-length Halstons in harsh colors—bronze and silver, gunmetal blue—beneath furs still smelling of storage. The men were dressed like Ali’s father, in navy blue or tweed; a few wore tuxedos. I tried to will myself invisible to them, but it was no good.

“Charlotte
Moylan
! I didn’t
recognize
you—” The casting agent Amanda Joy, a plump woman resplendent in velvet cossack pants and gold brocade, raised her wineglass to me and grinned archly. “So
this
is what it takes to get you into a dress.”

“Hi, Mrs. Joy.” I gave her a limp wave as the others turned. “Hi, hi, hi…”

“Where’s your mother, Charlotte?”

“Unk going to make an appearance tonight?”

“Your dad here?”

I shook my head. A lock of hair fell across my face, vivid as a pheasant’s wing, and I felt myself blushing. “Uh, not yet.” I forced myself to nod pleasantly as I passed. Behind me their voices faded into laughter and affectionate mockery, the familiar rhythms of people who measured their acquaintance by the titles of shows forgotten by anyone but themselves—

“…when he was doing
Volpone,
that dreadful musical—”

“Not
him, darling, that was Michael
Rothman
and you’re thinking of
Antigone
—”

A minute later I was safe beneath the gate—a monumental stone arch, elaborately carved, its threshold consisting of the same coarse-grained granite that formed Bolerium itself. I leaned against the wall and stared at it hopelessly. “God damn you, Ali,” I whispered.

I loathed going into parties by myself. And how could I skulk into Bolerium unnoticed, with my orange dress and flaming hair? I decided to wait beneath the arch until someone I knew arrived. Even entering with my parents would be preferable to entering alone. I tried to remember when I’d last visited Bolerium—five years ago? seven? We had always driven up to the main house, and so I’d only glimpsed the strange figures carved into the stone, like graffiti on a tunnel wall.

Now I saw that there were hundreds of fantastical creatures, so many that they seemed to be giving birth to each other. Birds with the heads of men; cats whose forked tongues unfurled into flowering vines; leaping stags with multifaceted eyes like those of dragonflies or bees.

But then my gaze was drawn to a single figure, carved amidst a thicket of coils and chevrons that seemed now to be eyes, now breasts, now huge-eyed owls with triangular wings. The figure sat cross-legged, its back very straight, its eyes wide and expressionless. From its brow rose two horns, stiffly divaricated as a child’s drawing of antlers. One hand was raised, palm out; the other rested in its lap. When I looked more closely I saw that it clasped a penis, thick as a cudgel and circled by what appeared to be a grinning snake. I grimaced, then very tentatively touched the carving. For an instant I felt a sort of motion there, a faint vibration, as though the ground beneath me sent a warning tremor through the arch.

“
Hey
—!” I reared back against the far wall. “What the…?”

The grotesque figure was gone. I squinted, trying to find it among the crude representations of birds and eyes. I ran my fingers over the carvings, stood on tiptoe as I searched: all in vain. Where it had been there was only an ornate mob of attacking owls and arabesques.

My fear returned in a slow, steady pulse. I had seen no one else since I walked beneath the arch. The trees blended into a darkness impenetrable as stone. I took a deep breath, fighting panic, and stepped back into the road.

It was empty. My parents’ friends had disappeared. So had Jamie, though the parked cars remained and I could see footprints in the dust. But not only was I alone. I could
hear
nothing. No cars, no echo from the village; no faraway wail of trains. There were no crickets, no night-birds, no music.

Nothing.

The silence was a horror. Before I could lose my nerve I turned and walked quickly back beneath the arch, into the domain of Bolerium.

By some trick of the light—perhaps the moon was rising?—I could see better here. The dirt road widened into a driveway, its tarmac in such disrepair that Indian grass and sumac had sprung up between the cracks. To either side reared a line of white oaks, and beyond the trees I could glimpse the estate’s rolling lawn. And
surely
I should be able to spot someone I knew there…

But there was no one, and I could only imagine the cold had driven the party inside. I walked on, amazed at how terrible everything looked. The grounds at Bolerium had always been disreputable. Right now they seemed a wilderness, overgrown with dead stalks of meadowsweet and joe-pye weed taller than I was. I couldn’t even see the house, hidden behind its gnarled hedge of rhododendrons at the hill’s summit. There were no lights to hint that anything was there, no sound beyond the thrum of blood at my temples. A twig snapped beneath my boot; there was a faint popping in my ears.

And suddenly I could hear again. Tall grasses whispering; the susurrus of dried milkweed pods. But nowhere the sound of music or laughter. Nowhere the sound of anything human. A few more minutes and I reached the top of the slope. I stopped and looked back.

Behind me stretched the driveway. Little more than a track it seemed from here, beaten earth winding between oaks and beech and hemlock. I shoved my hands into my armpits to keep warm and looked in vain for Axel Kern’s house.

It was gone. Instead I saw only a wasteland of grass rippling as the wind rushed past, acrid with the scent of dying leaves. There was an unmistakable salt tang to the air, though I knew the ocean was miles and miles away. I shivered, my hair whipping into my face and my dress blown taut against my legs. Above me stars blinked into view, faint at first but growing more and more brilliant, until the sky glittered and the grass shone silver with frost. I stared at the sky, feeling stoned and dreamy and bitterly cold; unsure if I was still awake, or sober, or even myself.

But gradually I became aware that there was something else upon the desolate summit. At the edge of the high moor reared some kind of pillar or column. It reminded me of the stones in the Kamensic graveyard, those carven animals with neither name nor epitaph upon them, standing watch over the graves of patroons and dead movie stars.

I was too far away to see if it was, indeed, a monument. But inexplicably I found myself walking toward it, as though it had been my destination all along. The wind grew colder. My ears ached and my fingers grew numb. There was an overpowering reek of the sea, of ebb tide and decay; of the wasteland for which the standing stone served as sentinel and threshold. In a few minutes I stood within its shadow.

It was a granite pillar twice my height. Upon its rough surface letters or symbols had been carved. The capital bore the crude outlines of a face, and I could make out the pitted remnants of eyes, nose, gaping mouth. Beneath this the stone had worn away so that only a few written characters remained, sinuous letters that ran from its weed-choked base to the decayed visage at its top. There was something repellent about those undulating characters, as though they held hidden representations of awful things; the spoiled swollen coils of entrails, the burst vesicle of an oak gall that reveals teeming spiders in its husk. I shut my eyes but that was even worse. The grotesque characters writhed across my eyelids, entwined with the spectral tendrils of capillaries, nerve endings, muscle tissue, as though burrowing into my skull. After a minute I opened my eyes.

In the darkness voices echoed. A sustained despairing wail was joined by a chorus of howls and yelps, and the unmistakable sound of footsteps.

“…oooyyyehhh…”

And now I could hear panting, a tormented sound louder than any human voice; the clatter of hoofbeats and those unrelenting cries of pursuit all coming toward me.

“…ooyehh…”

Desperately I looked around for a place to hide, but the hillside was barren of anything except the ruined column. I shrank back, crouching, scrabbled in the dry grass for a weapon but found only cold earth and bits of shattered rock. I yanked at the folds of my dress, steeling myself to run if I had to, and waited.

An instant when the landscape was still. Then beneath me the ground shook. Pebbles bounced against my bare knees. A black shape blotted out the horizon then broke away from the greater darkness. Its head swept back and forth, droplets of blood flying from its mouth. It halted, swaying slightly, then stumbled toward the column.

It was a deer. No: not a deer: a stag, a huge heraldic creature that towered above me black and silent as the pillar. The span of its antlers was greater than that of my outstretched arms. Behind them I could see its humped back, like glimpsing a hilltop through leafless trees. It moved with painful slowness, stones flying where its hooves struck them. When it was only a few yards from where I hid it halted and dipped its head. I covered my mouth to keep from crying out.

It had been flayed, the flesh stripped from jaw and muzzle and brow-ridge so that the entire skull was laid bare. I could see the smooth concavities where its eyes should be, its curved mandible and great peglike teeth fixed in a skeletal grin. Bloody furrows led to where its exposed vertebrae burrowed into the hair of its back. As it panted its breath spurted in white gouts from its nostrils.

“God, no—”

I staggered to my feet, but before I could flee the stag turned. Cries rang out all around us. The stag stood with one foreleg raised, and I gasped.

The skeletal visage was gone. In its stead was the image I had seen in Hillary’s book so long ago: the
megaloceros,
the Irish elk. It lifted its massive head and stared back at me. Its eyes were each the size of my fist, golden brown, with striations of green and amber radiating through the iris. Behind us the cries grew louder, but the stag seemed to take no notice. I could hear its breathing, like the rhythmic pumping of a bellows, and see its breath silvering the air. When a howl rang out from the darkness the stag tilted its head to gaze at the sky, and its antlers blotted out the stars. Then the hunt was upon us.

It was as though a wave broke upon the hilltop. A dozen figures crested the rise. They ran like dogs, bodies bent close to the ground and long hair flying behind them, and so swiftly I could not tell if they were men or women, or even if they were clothed. A few carried spears or cudgels. Most were unarmed. I could smell them, rank sweat and dried grass and carrion. I don’t think they saw me at all.

They raced toward the stag, and I slipped behind the column so that I could watch without being seen. The stag stood silently. Only the vapor staining the air about its head indicated that it was alive, and not some grotesque monument. One of the hunters broke away from the rest and darted beneath the great beast, jabbing at its leg with a spear; then thrust it upward into the stag’s breast.

“No,” I whispered.