Black Light (41 page)

I began cutting. It didn’t take long, once I’d figured out how to position the scissors and pull my wet hair taut so I could shear it off right at the roots. When I was finished, the sky had turned from charcoal to the color of tarnished tin. Wet curls stuck to my boots; I kicked them away, reached down to wipe my boots clean with a leaf. When I ran my hand across my skull it felt bristly, the hair spiky and ragged.

“Fuckin’ A,” I said. For the first time in what felt like days, I laughed.

Precious Bane was right. I felt great.

From the black ridge of western mountains came a long low wail: the four-thirty-five train coming down from Beacon on its way south to the city. I brushed myself off quickly, shoved the scissors back into my pocket, and began to run. I passed parked cars along the way, the same Karmann Ghias and BMWs and fake woodie station wagons that I’d passed on my way up.

And, past the curve where the road forked to go to Jamie Casson’s house, an old blue Dodge Dart, two figures perched ghostlike on its hood.

“Lit! Jesus freaking Christ, Lit, where the fuck have you
been
—”

Hillary jumped down and ran to me. For an instant Jamie remained where he was, and in that instant I had a flash of when I’d first seen him scarcely twenty-four hours before, frozen in the jukebox’s glow like a dragonfly in amber, all the promise and beauty of flight and none of the risk. Then he, too, was alongside me, rubbing his hand across my skull and whistling.

“Whoa! Nice job!”

“What the hell did you do to your hair?”

“Where’s Ali?”

“Where’s your clothes?”

“Where’s—”

From the southernmost slope of the mountain came another wail—the firehouse siren—then another.

Hillary frowned. “That’s the ambulance.”

I took a deep breath. I pulled away from them, and nodded. “We gotta get out of here.”

“But Ali—”

“Ali’s dead.” I pressed my hand against Hillary’s mouth, squeezed my eyes shut. After a moment I opened them. “She OD’d on heroin. Or opium, or some kind of shit. But she’s dead, and if we stick around here we’re going to be fucked.”

“But—” Hillary looked at me, dazed. “She can’t be dead,” he whispered.

“Hillary. We have to go. I’m sorry—I know it sounds horrible, you have to believe me because I
feel
horrible—but we can’t stay. At least, I can’t stay.”

I started for the front of the car. Jamie stared at me. I couldn’t tell if he was stunned or just stoned. When I reached the door I stopped and looked at him.

“You said you had friends in the city. You said we could crash there and we wouldn’t need money. At least not right away—”

He nodded. “Right.”

“Do you have money now? Enough for the train?”

He swallowed, then patted the front of his black jeans. “Yeah. About a hundred bucks. Kern paid me in cash for the parking job.”

“Okay.” I let my breath out, opened the door and slid across to open the other door for Hillary. “Hillary—can you drive us to the station?”

Hillary just stood there, staring at me through the wet windshield. At last he got into the car and shoved the key into the ignition. “Where are you going?” He sounded like my father when he was so angry he couldn’t bear to look at me.

“To the city. Jamie has some friends, we’re going to jam together—”

“You can’t play shit. You can’t even sing.”

“I can write. I’m going to write songs.”

“The fuck you are,” snarled Hillary.

But he drove us. In silence, none of us speaking though I have no idea what the two of them thought, if they believed me or if they were just as fucked up as I was; if maybe each of them had found a different door that night and walked through, walked through the world and came right back out on the other side in Kamensic Village, just like always. It wasn’t until we reached the bottom of the hill that I turned to look back at the mansion.

It was in flames, towers and turrets and ruined chimneys blazing as the darkness behind it swirled and thickened. I gasped, but then a sudden radiance spilled over Bolerium’s facade and I saw that it was not on fire at all, but aglow with sunrise.

And yet it was not that, either. As quickly as it had blazed the light died away. There was a faint forlorn cry, the howl of an animal that has been torn from its master and sent to shiver, alone, in the darkness. Then Bolerium stood as it ever had, black and forbidding yet also protective; keeping watch over the town and its children.

The car bounced around the curve, the mansion disappeared. In front of us was Kamensic Village, its dreaming church spires and white clapboard buildings, ancient courthouse and trees stubbornly clinging to their last yellow leaves. There was my house, just as it had been that morning, save the terra-cotta mask was gone. There was Hillary’s.

And there was the station, burnished by the glow of the town’s only streetlight. Hillary drove right up to the curb, braking too hard so that I had to brace myself against the dashboard.

“Goodbye,” he said. He sat rigidly in the driver’s seat, staring at the tracks in front of us. “Good fucking riddance.”

“Why don’t you come?” asked Jamie.

Hillary shook his head. His face grew very red, and he made a strangled sound. “You sure?” said Jamie. Hillary squeezed his eyes shut, nodding.

Outside, the train hooted. A silver thread unfurled along the tracks, deepened to gold and then blinding white.

“I have to go,” I whispered. I leaned over and kissed Hillary on the mouth. “I love you, Hillary—you know that, right?” He nodded again, eyes still shut. “And I’ll find you—I’ll see you, for sure, you can come hang with us in the city, it’ll be great—”

“C’mon,” said Jamie. He stood outside the car, looking nervously back in the direction of the mountain. “Be just my luck, my old man shows up and fucks this up for me—”

“That won’t happen.” I stepped out of the car onto the cracked concrete of the parking lot. “Not this time.”

We stood side by side, waiting for the train. Behind us there was the roar of a car engine and the sound of raining gravel. The roar grew fainter, as Hillary’s car drove back up the winding road to Bolerium. I waited until I knew it was out of sight, and turned.

I looked at the town, drowsing shopfronts and tattered playbills, Healy’s Delicatessen and the Constance Charterbury Library, and beyond them all the mountains and the lake and the woods, trees bowing to the coming winter and deer seeking pasture in the farmland to the south. Then there was a deafening sound as the train arrived, and Jamie Casson was tugging me after him across the platform and toward one of the middle cars.

“Come on! Lit, this is it—”

I looked over my shoulder as I ran, the wind cold on my shorn head; and leaped after Jamie into the back of the car. As the train began to move I stood in the open doorway and stared back at it all. I knew this was it, farewell to Kamensic, Kamensic with its trees and its children and the sleeping god who fed on them. The floor beneath me swayed back and forth, the trees swept past black as deep water as we headed south to the city. It had been a while since I’d visited but I knew there would be other gods there, sleeping gods and people who were sleeping, too, even if they didn’t know it, half-dead and just waiting for someone like me.

“Right,” I whispered.

I ran my hand across my ragged scalp and laughed, thinking of Jamie Casson straddling a jukebox while I sat in a Bowery bar and wrote in my notebook; thinking of all those sleeping people. I laughed, because I knew that even if it took a year—even if it took ten years, or a thousand—I would be the one to wake them.

Elizabeth Hand (b. 1957) is the award-winning author of science fiction and fantasy titles such as
Winterlong
,
Waking the Moon
,
Black Light
, and
Glimmering
, as well as the thrillers
Generation Loss
and
Available Dark
. She is commonly regarded as one of the most poetic writers working in speculative fiction and horror today.

Hand was born in San Diego and grew up in Yonkers and Pound Ridge, New York. During the height of the Cold War, she was exposed to constant air raid drills and firehouse sirens, giving her early practice in thinking about the apocalypse. She attended the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, where she received a BS in cultural anthropology.

Hand’s first love was writing, but many Broadway actors lived in her hometown of Pound Ridge, and by high school she was consumed with the theater. She wrote and acted in a number of plays in school and with a local troupe, The Hamlet Players. After college, writing stories became her primary interest, and the work of Angela Carter cemented that interest. Hand realized that she wanted to create new myths and retell old ones, using a heightened prose style.

Hand’s first break came in 1988 with the publication of
Winterlong
. In this novel, Hand explores the City of Trees, a post-apocalyptic Washington, DC. The story focuses on a psychically enhanced woman who can read dreams and her journey through the strange city with her courtesan twin brother. The book’s success led to two sequels:
Aestival Tide
and
Icarus Descending
. All three novels were nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award.

Beginning with the James Tiptree, Jr. Award–winning
Waking the Moon
, Hand wrote a succession of books involving themes of apocalypse, ancient deities, and mysticism.
Waking the Moon
centers on the Benandanti, an ancient secret society in modern-day Washington, DC. that also appeared in
Black Light
, a
New York Times
Notable Book.

In 1998, Hand released her short story collection
Last Summer at Mars Hill
. The title story won the Nebula Award and the World Fantasy Award. Most recently, she has published two crime novels focusing on punk rock photographer Cass Neary—the Shirley Jackson Award–winning
Generation Loss
(2007) and
Available Dark
(2012).

When Hand isn’t writing stories of decadence and deities, she divides her time between the coast of Maine and London, with her partner, UK critic John Clute. She is a regular contributor to numerous publications, including the
Washington Post
and the
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
.

Hand is the oldest of five siblings in a very close-knit family. This photo shows them in 1967, on one of their camping trips to Maine and Canada. All five kids, then under the age of ten, shared a canvas tent with their parents. From left to right: Brian, Patrick, Elizabeth, Kathleen, and baby Barbara. “Maine imprinted on me during this time, which is why I've lived there for the last twenty-five years,” Hand says.

Hand in her driveway with her beloved family dog Cindy shortly before leaving for college in Washington, DC. “Note the skirt, made from a pair of massively embroidered jeans; my favorite red velvet beret, which my mother gave me for Christmas and which disappeared under dark circumstances a few years later; my Mom’s suede jacket (I added the denim cuffs); and needlework belt with my initials on it, made by my grandmother Hand. You can’t see them, but I was also wearing my lace-up Frye boots.”