Black Light

1. Helter Skelter

MY MOTHER CLAIMED TO have been on the set of Darkness Visible when Axel Kern fired a revolver into the air, not to goad his actors but out of frustration with a scriptgirl who repeatedly handed him the wrong pages. My mother had, indeed, very briefly worked as a scriptgirl for Kern—this was before she settled into her eternal and prosperous run as Livia on Perilous Lives—so it wasn’t considered good form to doubt her, or even to demonstrate normal curiosity upon hearing the anecdote repeated whenever the subject of artistic temperaments arose; which, in our family, was often.

My father was friends with Kern long before Axel became a world-famous director. When I was born in 1957, Kern was my godfather. When I was a child he was around our house a good deal, and my parents dined often at Bolerium, his vast decaying estate atop Muscanth Mountain. But as I grew older Kern stayed less often in Kamensic, and by the time I was a teenager it had been years since I’d seen him. He and my father had a long history, as drinking buddies and fellow members of a loosely allied, free-floating group of bibulous Broadway and Hollywood people. Most of them are dead now; certainly their vices have gone out of style, except as veteris vestigia flammce. Only Kern made the leap gracefully from the old Hollywood to the new, which in those days wasn’t Hollywood at all, but New York: Radical Chic New York, Andy Warhol’s Factory New York, Black Light New York.

He was always a seeker after the main chance, my godfather. When, for a moment in the late ’60s it looked as though the movie industry was turning back to the city—where, of course, it had begun when the century was new, in warehouses and a brownstone on East Fourteenth Street—well, then Axel moved back, too, inhabiting a corner of a Bowery block that could best be described not so much as crumbling as collapsed. Exposed beams and girders laced with rust, sagging tin ceilings that exposed the building’s innards: particle board and oak beams riddled with dry rot and carpenter ants. The place was infested with vermin, rats and mice and bugs and stray cats; but there were also people living in the rafters, extras from the stream of low-budget experimental films Axel was filming in the city. Some had followed Axel out from the West Coast, but most of them were young people who had been living on the street, or in tenth-floor walk-ups in a part of the city that was light-years away from being gentrified. Speed freaks with noms du cinema like Joey Face and Electric Velvet; trust-fund junkies like Caresse “Kissy” Hardwick and her lover Angelique; a bouquet of sometime prostitutes, male and female, who named themselves after flowers: Liatris, CeCe Anemone, Hazy Clover. They were young enough, and there were enough of them, that Rex Reed christened Axel’s production space the Nursery. The name stuck.

In the movies Axel shot back then—Skag, Creep, House of the Sleeping Beauties—you can see how a lot of those people were barely out of junior high school. Joey Face for one, and CeCe, were only a few years older than I was, with acne scars still visible beneath their Bonne Bell makeup and eyeliner inexpertly applied. None of them were beauties, except for Kissy Hardwick, who possessed the fragile greyhound bone structure and bedrock eccentricity of very old New England money. Axel seemed drawn to them solely by virtue of their youth and appetites: for food (the gloriously obese Wanda LaFlame); for amphetamines and heroin (Kissy, Joey, Page Franchini); for sex (everybody). In Hollywood, Axel had been legendary for always bringing his projects in under budget; quite a feat when you consider movies like Saragossa or You Come, Too, with their lavish costumes and soundstages that recreated Málaga during the Inquisition or fifteenth century Venice. Now, in New York, he was famous for letting a Super 8 camera run for six hours at a stretch in a blighted tenement loft, and having the results look as garishly archaic as Fellini Satyricon.

I visited the Nursery only once, for a Christmas party when I was twelve. Traditionally my parents held a party at our house in Kamensic, rich plum pudding-y parties where the children ran around in velvet dresses and miniature suit jackets and the grownups drank homemade eggnog so heavily spiked with brandy that a single glass was enough to set them off, playing riotously at blindman’s buff and charades, singing show tunes and “The Wessex Mummer’s Carol.” Axel Kern was usually a guest at these holiday gatherings, but by 1969 he had set up shop at the Nursery and wanted to throw his own party there. In keeping with the pagan tenor of the times, it was a solstice celebration and not a Christmas party; but really it wasn’t even that. It was a rout.

This was before my father achieved his commercial success as TV’s Uncle Cosmo. He was signed to do summer rep at the Avalon Shakespeare Theater in Connecticut, and my mother was on one of her infrequent sabbaticals from Perilous Lives, Livia having shaved her raven tresses and joined an Ursuline convent in the French countryside. The birth of a new decade, 1969 swandiving into 1970, seemed almost as propitious as the birth of a new century. Radio DJs rifled through the hits of the last ten years and analyzed them as though they were tarot cards. In health class we watched grainy films that showed teenagers who took LSD, staring transfixed at candle flames (“look at the pretty blue flower!”) before they went mad and were trundled off to the loony bin in an ambulance. To my parents, the prospect of Axel Kern’s party must have seemed as much anthropological exercise as social obligation. So they put their own annual gathering on hold and we traipsed down to Axel’s place on Chrystie Street, with high hopes of an urban adventure.

In fact, the Nursery was disgusting. Even my father, who had holed up with Axel in a ruined East End London warehouse while he shot The Age of Ignorance, was hard put to conceal his revulsion at the broken furniture and overflowing trash cans, the rats skittering in the stairwells and longhaired boys nodding out in corners. Still, neither he nor my mother would leave. At the time I thought that this was some form of grownup loyalty, on a par with playing bridge with people you hated or taking roles in plays that were doomed to flop.

But I was frightened, and only slightly reassured when numerous adult friends from Kamensic showed up as the afternoon progressed. None of them brought their children, though. None of my own friends were there, and that was odd. People in Kamensic were not usually inclined to shield their young from the kind of bohemian horrors that the rest of the country was reading about in cautionary Life magazine articles.

The Nursery was on the top two floors of a building that had once been a herring processing factory. Inside it smelled of rotting fish and urine. An ancient cage elevator bore us up, cables shrieking, and finally opened onto a big seemingly empty room its bare plank floor coated with a layer of cigarette ash so thick it looked as though it were upholstered in gray velvet. In fact, there were a few people already there—it would be a stretch to call them guests, since they seemed to be in the process of crawling away from a terrible accident which had occurred somewhere just out of sight. Two women wearing silver Lady Godiva wigs and little else sprawled in a corner, one of them frowning as she dabbed at a series of small bloody puncture wounds in her friend’s arm.

“You think a doctah, maybe?” she asked, but her friend was silent. “You think a doctah?”

In the middle of the room a boy lay groaning, his blue jeans black with grime and hiked so low on his hips that I could see his pubic hair. My parents could see it, too, but they only raised their eyes to the ceiling (not much of an improvement) and hurried me to the next room.

Here there was more of an effort at the holiday spirit. The walls were painted black and hung with multicolored lights. A scrawny Christmas tree bowed threateningly close to the floor. Beside one wall there was a table where a woman in a sequined halter dress played bartender. The stereo blared “Come Stay with Me” while a few dozen or so people flopped around on a sectional sofa.

“Well,” my father said, arching one bristly eyebrow. “Will they let us join in any of their reindeer games?”

“Leonard! Audrina!” A man in a Nehru jacket and harem pants crossed the room to greet my parents. “So glad, so glad—”

While they exchanged hugs and my mother’s Tupperware bowl of homemade whitefish dip, I wandered over to inspect the Christmas tree. It was devoid of lights or Christmas balls, instead was covered with marijuana cigarettes, hanging from wire tree hooks. I eyed these dubiously: Were they even real? If they were, wasn’t anyone afraid of the police? In addition to the joints there was a half-hearted attempt at a decorative chain, orange thread strung with pills—Miltowns, black amphetamine capsules, a few Saint Joseph’s Baby Aspirin thrown in for color.

“Looking to see what Santa left for you?” a babyish voice piped behind me. “You look like you’ve been good.”

I looked around, embarrassed. A girl stood there, as old as some of the New Canaan girls who baby-sat for me. But this girl’s patrician features—dark brown eyes, retroussé nose, sharp chin—were all but lost beneath a patina of nicotine and mascara. She was terribly thin, with boy-cropped black hair, her face so thickly smeared with kohl it looked as though she’d just woken up and knuckled the sleep from her eyes. She wore a very short electric blue dress, sleeveless, and long dangling earrings shaped like fish. Her hands were small and dirty and yellow-stained, with nails so badly chewed they were like ragged bits of cellophane stuck at the ends of her fingers. A patchwork bag was slung over her shoulder. As she leaned toward me I caught a whiff of something sharply chemical, like gasoline or paint fumes.

“Hey, you know what, this isn’t a very good place for a kid.” She smiled, showing small white teeth. “I don’t want to bum you out. But maybe I could call your mother or father to come pick you up?”

I pointed across the room. “That’s them there.”

“Yeah? Well, that’s cool, that’s cool, that’s cool.” She fingered one of her earrings, and seemed to forget about me. After a minute I shrugged and turned to walk away.

“Bye,” I said.

“Oh!” She looked up, stricken; gave me a meltingly apologetic smile. “Nice talking to you! Bye-bye.”

She waved, a teensy little-girl wave. I thought she would leave, but she remained where she was, in the shadow of that pathetic tree, and scowled ferociously at her dirty bare feet.

“Charlotte! Oh, Charlotte, there you are—”

I looked up guiltily as my mother draped an arm across my shoulder. She was offhandedly elegant in black charmeuse, plastic champagne glass in one hand, cigarette in the other. “Lit, honey, will you be okay for a little while? Because there’s something your father and I have to do…”

It turned out that my parents had been corralled into going upstairs with a few others of the chosen, to watch Axel’s most recent opus. This was an underground film of a play inspired by Aubrey Beardsley’s The Story of Venus and Tannhauser. It had played briefly in a MacDougal Street storefront before being loudly condemned by Cardinal Spellman, among others, and finally closed by the New York City Department of Health.

And now, despite her laissez-faire attitude toward other aspects of my education, my mother had no intention of letting me see it.

“Sweetie, I know this is awful and you’re bored. We should have thought to ask Hillary to come with us. I don’t know why we never think of these things. I’m sorry—”

She sighed, smoothing back my hair, and smiled briskly as a producer we knew wandered past. “But we do have to see this, Axel thinks it could be a real movie and apparently there’s a part in it for your father though god only knows what that could be, I think the whole thing’s done in the nude. Here now, have some of the whitefish, we brought it so we know it’s safe, and maybe you can just curl up in a corner and read for an hour, all right, sweetie?”

She took my head in her hands and kissed me on the brow. “There! Bye now, darling—”

So I was left to wander the Nursery by myself. After a few minutes my unease dissipated. I just grew bored, and sat dispiritedly on a cinder block beneath a very large painting of a woman’s shoe. I’d been to enough grownup parties in Kamensic to know that adults behaved strangely on their own, but I was also young enough to have no real perspective on what I was seeing.

And what I was seeing appeared to be some grimy street scene, complete with bums and teenage runaways, that had been miraculously picked up and then plonked down some ten stories above the Bowery. Neighbors from Kamensic floated past, like well-dressed puppets moving across a dirty stage. For fifteen or twenty minutes a band played, deafeningly loud guitars and a cello held by a bearded man in a pink dress. Later I saw the bearded man fondling a woman while someone else filmed them. I sat on my cinder block, watching the door through which my parents had disappeared the way a cat will watch a mousehole. Around me, the crowd swelled until it seemed impossible that anyone could move. Then, abruptly, the place emptied. I was alone, and frightened. Had the other guests somehow been forced to leave? If so, were my parents being held hostage somewhere in this bizarre maze of rooms and bad behavior?

The thought terrified me. From somewhere far away I heard laughter, the shivering echo of breaking glass. With a cry I jumped up and headed for the door where I had last seen my mother.

It led into a narrow corridor: bare concrete floors, walls and ceiling painted black. There were other passages leading off this one, all crooked doorjambs and rotted sills, some of them strung with Christmas lights and one with barbed wire. I started down the first hall, almost immediately found myself entering a room where the floor was covered with writhing bodies. In one corner a thin young man in a black-and-white striped sailor shirt stood behind a Super 8 camera and trained a blinding spotlight on the proceedings. As I hesitated in the doorway he looked up at me.

“Hey,” he said, and frowned. “You’re early…”

I turned and fled.

Further down the passage there was more of the same: darkened rooms illuminated by 100-watt bulbs, handheld cameras grinding away as people danced or coupled or just sat vacant-eyed in the middle of rooms that were uniformly devoid of furniture. I had no idea where I was, and my anxiety was now full-blown panic.

Where were my parents?

My hands were sweaty; I had wiped them on my velvet dress so much it began to feel like damp suede. My short hair, neatly cut and combed for the holidays, was now stiff with dust, and stank of cigarettes and pot. Every room I passed seemed crammed with strangers. But except for a peremptory nod from one of the figures behind a camera, no one acknowledged me at all. I could feel the tears starting and I bit my lip, desperate not to cry, when in front of me the nightmarish corridor abruptly ended.

“Oh, please,” I muttered.

There was a door there, tall and painted with the same glossy black enamel as the rest of the Nursery. I stood a few inches away from it, held my breath, and listened: silence. Behind me slurred voices called out, names tossed from room to room—“Bobbie? Has anyone seen Bobbie? Where’s Bobbie?”—and then suddenly music roared on.

I reached for the metal doorknob.

“Ouch—!”

It was burning hot. I snatched my hand back, very tentatively ran my palm along the door, worrying that there might be a fire on the other side. But the door itself was cool. I knocked, softly; heard nothing but a dull metal boom. I covered my hand with a protective fold of my dress, carefully turned the knob, and peered inside.

It was empty. I glanced back at the dark hallway, then stepped in, shutting the door behind me.

I was in a long, high-ceilinged room. Not much different than the corridor I’d just left, except that there were no doors save the one I’d entered by. On the floor flickered a votive candle stuck onto a small white saucer. Its flame looked disproportionately large; so did my shadow, rising and falling as I stepped toward the candle. I knelt in front of it to warm my hands, then looked around.

“It’s green,” I whispered. “A green room…”

And it was. Not the lurid, concrete-stairwell green you might have expected to find in that place, but a soft, ferny green, dappled where the candlelight struck it, and so welcome after the Nursery’s endless black that I almost laughed out loud. I stood, went to one of the walls and touched it, half-expecting to feel the moist warmth of foliage. But no, it was just paint, cool and slick beneath my fingertips. I crossed the room lengthwise, walking slowly and running my hand along the wall. The candle gave everything an odd velvety glow, and the way my shadow leaped beside me only added to the strangeness. I felt as though I were inside one of those fairy rings that grew behind our house in Kamensic, ferns reaching high enough to form a curved green roof above my head.

And there was a sound, too, so faint it was several minutes before I really became aware of it—a soft, steady whoosh. At first I thought someone had left a tap running in a neighboring bathroom. But when I reached the end of the room, the noise grew even louder, and I realized it was not water but the sound of wind in the leaves. Not a gentle rustling, but the restless, unrelenting toss of trees in the night.

I cocked my head, puzzled. There were no windows, no doors save the one I’d entered by; no skylight. And it was dead winter in lower Manhattan—there were no leaves, either. Yet the sound was so persistent, and so near, that I almost imagined I could feel a cool breath upon my neck.

It’s a movie, I thought. They’re just running a movie somewhere…

I stood for a minute, listening, then turned. The votive candle had burned down to a nub. I was halfway across the room when I noticed something hanging on the far wall. Another painting, I thought, like that blandly weird canvas of a shoe. It was very big, so it was odd I hadn’t seen it when I came in, but unlike the other paintings I’d seen scattered around the Nursery, this one wasn’t immediately identifiable. It wasn’t a famous face, or a shoe, or a box of Cracker Jack. The edges were irregular and uneven, the colors dark swirls of brown and black and a deep, rusty red. I walked until I stood in front of it, and frowned.

It wasn’t a painting. Or rather, it wasn’t just a painting, but an immense slab of rock, perhaps ten feet high and twice as wide. It didn’t seem to be fixed to the wall so much as protruding through it. I could see no nails or wires, nothing on the floor that might support such an enormous weight. Its surface was smooth but uneven, with patterns in it like waves, and moist. I drew my hand carefully upward, the curved rock beneath my palm like something huge and alive, the flank of a sleek horse or bull. When I reached the middle of the stone I stopped.

There was something painted there, in colors so similar to the rock’s natural tones that I almost missed it. A figure as tall as I was, its body drawn out of proportion and its limbs all mismatched, and posed in grotesque angles. It stood upright, shoulders hunched and arms drawn up before it awkwardly. Dwarfishly foreshortened arms, painted in blurry dark lines to indicate fur. But the hands were human hands, and its legs, though furred, ended in human feet. One leg was oddly foreshortened—either badly drawn or meant to indicate that the creature had been injured.

The rest was merely monstrous. A striped, swayed back like a horse’s; long tail ending in a fox’s white point; a slender, curved shape hanging between its legs, that I knew must represent a penis. I grimaced and looked away, trying to find the creature’s face.

That was even worse. A face like a hideous mask, sitting square on its shoulders and staring straight out from the stone. The outline of the head was like that of a deer, and two asymmetrical antlers corkscrewed from its brow. Instead of a muzzle there was only a long black gash to indicate a nose or mouth, shading into lines sketched beneath to indicate a ruff.

But most dreadful of all were the creature’s eyes. Huge, round, staring eyes, the irises daubed dead-white, the pupils black pinpricks: two blank orbs unsoftened by lashes or lids or anything that might have lent them the faintest breath of humanity. They could have been a serpent’s eyes, or an owl’s; they could have been the glaring sockets of a skull. I started to shake, and stumbled backward for the door.

That was when I saw her.

“Hi,” she said. Her voice was low and breathy, as though she were talking to herself. But her eyes—wide and staring as those of the creature in the painting, but etched with green like leaves on dark water—her eyes were fixed on me.

“You know, I was going to tell you something,” she went on, absently scratching her head. “But I forgot, and then you were, you know—” She made a flurrying gesture. “—gone. And then I got worried…”

She was at the far end of the room, leaning against the wall. Not anywhere near the door—but then how else could she have gotten in? There was no other entrance, and I was certain I would have heard her, or seen the door open. The sound of the wind in the leaves rose and died away as I looked around in a panic. The girl continued to stare at me. After a moment she slid down to the floor, her patchwork bag beside her.

“Hey…” She beckoned me. “Come here—”

I hesitated. Then I went. After all, I was only twelve; she was older, but not old enough to seem dangerous. As I crossed the room I felt the gaze of that dreadful figure in the stone follow me. But I refused to look back, squeezing my eyes shut and taking tiny careful steps until I reached the other side. I opened my eyes then. The girl smiled up at me, and my terror faded. It was like one of my own friends smiling at me, welcoming and without guile, and somehow complicitous.

“I know who you are,” she said. She scooched over, patting the floor as though she were plumping a sofa cushion. I settled beside her, trying to arrange my velvet dress so it wouldn’t get dirty, and still being careful not to let my gaze fall on the rock painting opposite.

“Pretty,” she said, stroking my dress. Once more she gave me that ravishing smile. “You’re the godchild. Charlotte. Right?”

I shrugged and said, “Yes.”

She looked pleased, and started playing with the hem of her dress. There were runs in it, spots where the metallic blue fabric was so frayed you could see right through.

“You know how I know that?” Her lips were dry and cracked. She licked them, over and over and over, until a seam of blood appeared. “Because I am, too. Did you know that?”

“No,” I said shyly.

She nodded. “So we’re sort of related. Right? So that’s why I wanted to talk to you. Because of what happens to us. Just so you’ll know.”

She leaned toward me, and once again I caught that rank chemical smell. “No one understands about Axel. People think they do, they see the movies and read all that stuff but no one really knows. Except me.”

She took my hand and opened it, traced the lines on my palm the way my friend Ali did when we were playing fortune-teller. The girl glanced up, her gaze flicking from me to the far wall. Despite myself I looked, too; then quickly lowered my eyes.

She pointed at the rock painting and said, “You see that.” It was not a question. “Hardly anybody does. Do you know what it is?”

“No,” I whispered.

“A self portrait.” When I looked at her doubtfully she shook her head. “Not mine. His.”

This reassured me somewhat. Plus, I felt flattered by her attention, the fact that she was talking to me as though I were one of her friends and not a little girl. I thought of the strange artwork some of my parents’ friends collected, and the ugly paintings I had seen elsewhere in the Nursery, and ventured another glance at the rock painting. “Really?”

“Sure.” She lowered her voice. “You should see some of the other stuff. I mean, I probably shouldn’t talk about it ’cause you’re so young—but, well, some of it is very sexy. Definitely X-rated.”

She giggled. “That’s one of the amazing things about Axel. All this stuff, you know? It’s all sort of hidden in plain sight. Like the movies, and the paintings, and the books and things he collects—everyone thinks it’s just, like, junk—but really it’s all for a reason. He’s been very careful about what he brings into this place, and his other houses…

“Like, at Swarthmore I read this book about witchcraft, and I mean, his stuff is in there. I mean the things he owns, the manuscripts and that collection of—well, some of those sexy things—it’s all real. And you know what else, Charlotte?”

She placed a hand on each of my knees and drew her face to within inches of mine. “We’re real, too. All of us,” she whispered. Her expression was rapturous, her dark eyes huge. “Me, Precious; Joey and CeCe and Page…we’re all really what he says we are. Just like you, Charlotte. Just like you…”

She rocked back, tilting her head and looking utterly blissful. “Isn’t that amazing? All this energy, these vibrations all over the world—they’re all focused right here, on us! All these things are happening, like this new age is coming on and there’s all this amazing energy and these, like, radical changes, and we’re doing it! It’s happening right now, Charlotte, and you and me are in it. Doesn’t that just blow your mind?”

She crossed her hands upon her breast, the soiled blue fabric bunching between her fingers, and I tried to look as though I understood what she was talking about. It made a certain kind of sense to me—I had seen things on TV, and in Life magazine. I heard the songs on the radio, and read pilfered copies of Rolling Stone and Creem and Circus magazine, Viva and Rosemary’s Baby. I knew people thought that something was going to happen.

And when I saw pictures of people like this girl, or passed them in the street, with their gorgeous motley and occult jewelry, peacock-feather eyes burning like candle stubs and mouths slightly ajar, as though they had just glimpsed something marvelous, something unspeakable, something with a name that I would never know—well, then I thought something was going to happen, too.

“But you have to do it right.” I was daydreaming: when the girl jabbed me with her finger I almost jumped out of my skin. “That’s what’s gone wrong all those other times. No one did it right. But that’s not going to happen now…”

She made a funny, giddy face, shook her head so that her long earrings spun and sparkled. “Because I am strong. I am so strong, I am going to be the one who does it right! And then, Charlotte, you’ll be able to come and visit me on Sundays!”

She laughed and clapped her hands—just once, as though she’d performed a marvelous trick. I looked at her warily, not sure if she were making fun of me. But her delight seemed genuine.

“On Sundays?” I asked.

“That’s just a joke. Listen, don’t you know what happens here? People come, and they stay for a while; and Axel gets stronger. And stronger. And stronger. And I mean, this has all been going on for like a thousand years. Not here, not in this building, but—you know how everyone thinks this is the age of Aquarius? Well, that’s only part of it. That is the tip of the iceberg—”

Abruptly she turned and began rooting in her bag, loosening the drawstring ties and poking inside. “Where is it? God, I can never find anything—I hate this!” she cried, and upended the whole thing.

An astonishing array of objects poured onto the floor. Matchbooks, Lucite bracelets, gold hoop earrings, crushed and uncrushed cigarette packs, a spiral notebook, a pink rosary, innumerable pill bottles, a silver flask, drinking straws, loose change and rolled-up bills, an address book held together with rubber bands, wads and wads of newspaper clippings. I stared, amazed, but the girl just made an impatient noise and swept most of it to one side. Very delicately she picked through a tiny heap of dust and loose pills, choosing a black capsule and popping it into her mouth. Then she took the newspaper clippings and began smoothing them out on the floor.

I craned my neck at the flashlit image of Axel Kern escorting a coy, heavily made-up blonde past a police barricade, but the girl shoved these pages back into her bag.

“Here,” she said, stabbing at the single curling column that remained. “Read this.”

I stared at the accompanying photo, shot a surreptitious glance at the girl beside me. It was the same person, though in the picture her hair was silver and not black, her face immaculately made up, and her slim form clad in a white dress that glowed like a fluorescent tube. I read the caption.

“That’s the joke, get it?” Kissy Hardwick nudged me. She licked her lips again. “He’s not bigger than God. He is God.”

I didn’t say anything. I was only twelve years old, but at this point even I knew that this girl was nuts. Worse than nuts, she was on drugs—I’d seen her swallow that little black pill, and god only knew what else had already made its way from her magic bag of tricks into her mouth. I looked at the floor, trying to think of how I could leave, wondering if I could just bolt, when she grabbed my wrist.

“Tonight.” Beneath the thin fabric of her dress her breasts moved, and one pink nipple poked out through a hole. She was breathing too fast, her head nodding crazily. “Tonight tonight tonight. December 21. The winter solstice. Get it, do you get it? And I’m ready, I’m all ready for it to happen…”

I tried to pull away, but her grasp only tightened.

“Ow—”

“Right here,” she said, ignoring me. With her free hand she slapped at the junk on the floor. Matchbooks and earrings went flying, pills skidded away as her fingers closed around something. “’Cause I’m ready, I told them I was ready—”

She looked up, still holding my wrist; grinned that horribly incongruous doll’s smile and showed me what was in her other hand.

“See, Charlotte?”

It was a knife. Maybe six or seven inches long, blade and handle both carved from the same slender piece of bone. The handle end was narrow and russet-brown; the curved blade creamy ivory. As she turned it back and forth I could see tiny incisions in the handle, a series of lines intersected by smaller Xs. But the blade was broken—the end had been sheared off, leaving a jagged edge. When she ran her finger along it I could see that it was dull, no sharper than a piece of plastic cutlery.

“Huh. I’ll have to sharpen it I guess. But I’ll do it, that’s the key thing! I’m not afraid and—”

She stumbled to her feet, dragging me as well. Although she seemed to have almost forgotten me; I might have been another piece of awkward jewelry tied to her wrist. With a soft moan she began flailing back and forth. I thought she was having a seizure, but then she started to laugh, spinning in a clumsy pirouette with me staggering alongside, and I realized she was dancing.

“I’ll—do—it—!” she sang breathlessly. Something crunched beneath her bare feet. I looked down and saw that the floor was littered with seedpods, brown and as big as my thumb. “I’ll—”

At that moment the candle went out. I yelped, Kissy laughed; and the door at the end of the room flew open.

“Lit? Charlotte Moylan, are you—”

“Daddy!”

For a fraction of a second I could feel Kissy’s hand tighten about mine. Then there was a warmth at my ear, and a voice whispering, “Don’t forget!” With a giggle she let go, falling back against the wall.

“Lit! What the hell are you doing in here? Where’s the light? What’s that smell?”

My father stomped inside. “Jesus Q. Murphy, we’ve been ready to leave for an hour, where the hell have you—”

Light flooded the room from an unshaded bulb overhead. There was a soft crack, and the saucer that had held the votive candle shattered beneath my father’s foot. “Charlotte!” he said, hugging me to him. “Damn it, where have you been?”

He let his breath out in an explosive gasp and ran his hand through my hair. I leaned against his chest, smelling wine and the warm tobacco scent of his tweed jacket. “What, did you come in here and fall asleep?” he went on, rocking back and forth. “Your mother’s ready to call the cops—”

“No—no, I just got lost, I was looking for you, and then I came in here and we were talking—”

I gestured at the wall behind me, looked up to see my father frowning.

“‘We’? Who’s ‘we’?” He sighed, exasperated, and pulled me with him as he started for the door. “Come on, then, let’s go, we’re going to be ticketed as it is and it’s starting to snow—”

I slipped from his arm and whirled around. “Wait—”

Kissy Hardwick was gone. So was the rock painting. Only the walls were as I had first seen them, shimmering green, and the shattered husks of seedpods sown across the floor.

And, faint as a breath against my cheek, I could hear the rustle of wind in the leaves.

“Lit.”

I nodded obediently, without a word returned to my father. He draped his arm around me and we went down the hall, past other rooms that were all empty now; past the derelict Christmas tree and the shabby foyer where a boy was throwing up out the window, and where my mother awaited us by the elevator.

Neither of my parents ever said anything to me about the party; never even mentioned how strange it was that it had been Christmas, and Axel Kern was my godfather and I had not seen him, or even gotten a present. On New Year’s Eve we stayed at home and celebrated quietly by ourselves, watching TV, Guy Lombardo and Fred Astaire in Top Hat. The next morning, January 1st, 1970, I read in the Daily News about the death by drug overdose of nineteen-year-old celebutante Caresse Hardwick. Her body was found on the bathroom floor of her Chelsea Hotel apartment. Medical examiners estimated that she had been dead for at least a week, perhaps two. Her involvement with Axel Kern and his films was duly noted, as were the shocked reactions of family and friends. Nowhere was there any mention of a bone knife.

The truth was that, despite their friendship with Axel Kern, the world of the Nursery wasn’t my parents’ world at all. My mother was far too professional for such self-indulgence.

“Amateur night,” she’d always sniff when told of opening night parties where principal actors got smashed on champagne or gin. Still, in those days my father was a prodigious drinker. It showed on his face, and helped chart the odd peregrination his life would soon take as Uncle Cosmo on Tales from the Bar Sinister. His stories about my godfather were dark, though very funny as my father told them in his professionally Irish brogue.

Actually, all the stories I ever heard about Axel Kern were dark—the disturbing tales of his involvements with underage girls, the bizarre circumstances surrounding the death of his first wife and the madness of his mistresses; rumors that he slept with a loaded gun in his mouth, and especially those grotesque charges of drug use and cannibalism lodged against him by several bit players from Saragossa. These last of course were dismissed, but not before several weeks’ worth of scandalous publicity. The actors were disgruntled over their scenes ending up on the cutting-room floor, and in those days Kern’s extravagant reputation made him an easy target for lawsuits.

This was in the year following the holiday party at the Nursery. Only a month after Caresse Hardwick’s death, a woman actually had tried to murder Axel, though with a gun rather than a Paleolithic knife. She was arrested and subsequently imprisoned; still, public sympathies seemed to lie with her and not Axel Kern. The Manson Family killings were recent history. In their wake, ritual cannibalism practiced by a leading film director didn’t seem quite so far-fetched. The Nursery and Kern’s Laurel Canyon home were searched. Small quantities of peyote and psilocybin mushrooms were confiscated from the latter, along with esoterically obscene sculptures from the Mediterranean and Near East. Kern himself was hauled off to jail. My father helped him make bail (while he never went over budget on any of his films, Kern was famously insolvent), and stood by him while further accounts of Kern’s escapades—strange ceremonies involving Newport socialites and some livestock, a bas-relief missing from the Museo delle Therme in Rome—filled the papers and evening news.

Eventually most of the charges were dropped, save only those for drug possession. But an Icelandic shaman and two Lakota medicine men testified that the peyote and mushrooms were for religious use, and by the time the whole ridiculous episode had been supplanted in the headlines by the Pentagon Papers, Kern had paid several hundred dollars in fines and tens of thousands in legal fees. My best friend Hillary and I used to fight over the morning’s Daily News, giggling at the front-page photos of the gaunt hawk-faced man, his long dark hair pulled into a ponytail and his eerily intent eyes unshuttered by sunglasses. A year later he recreated it all on film for Granada Television, in the prize-winning documentary Suddenly, Last Summer. Throughout, his lawyer hinted darkly at a mass conspiracy that, if revealed, would shake not just Hollywood but Broadway, Capitol Hill and the Vatican.

To my great chagrin, that conspiracy remained a secret, at least for another few years. But the whole affair only deepened Kern’s friendship with my father. After his drug imbroglio, it was Kern who recommended my father for the part of Uncle Cosmo on Tales from the Bar Sinister. There wasn’t exactly a lot of competition for the role—a few unknowns, a former kiddie-show host on the skids and an ailing Vincent Price clone. But my father threw himself into the audition with his usual brio and walked out of the casting director’s office with a new job. He was sober by then, eager for work, and his devotion to Kern—always intense—became positively slavish. My mother used to laugh and say that the only thing my father wouldn’t do for Axel Kern was promise him his only child. Of course, she was wrong about that.

2. Some of These Things First

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING you have to understand is that we lived in a haunted place. A town that over the centuries had survived death by fire, water, wind; a town that endured—and not only the town itself, you see, but everyone who lived in it. The village was founded in 1627 as a far-flung remnant of the old Dutch colony of New Netherland. The oldest houses—stem fieldstone dwellings with steeply pitched roofs and gables—dated from twenty years later, but there were ruins of older houses still, wooden buildings burned to the ground by the Tankiteke Indians in retaliation for the slaughter of an entire Indian village. In the late 1700s the town was burned again, by the British General Eustis “Bloodjack” Warrenton, a convert to Jansenism who met an unhappy fate—murdered by Polly Twomey, a former tragedienne (her Ariadne in The Rival Sisters was rumored to be superior to Mrs. Siddons’s) and singer of bawdy songs, well known to be a witch. Warrenton’s mutilated body was found by his aide-de-camp in the woods outside of town. Cat-a-mountain, the villagers blandly insisted, what do you think? But those with Tory sympathies knew it was the witch.

A century later the White Hurricane of 1873 left the woods along the Muscanth River as desolate as though they had been struck by a meteor. The forest scarcely had a chance to regenerate when in 1907 it was drowned, the Muscanth dammed to form a reservoir that would provide water for the great city to the south. Most people moved their houses, by horse and oxen—you can see the photographs in the Constance Charterbury Library and the Kamensic Village Courthouse (now a museum, Open Weekends)—but some refused. Their homes lie there still beneath the green murky waters of Lake Muscanth, alongside rusted-out refrigerators and doomed autos and a few unclaimed corpses.

Through the centuries, high above it all stood the strange grand mansion known as Bolerium, its mottled granite walls so covered with moss and lichen they were nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding stones, its turrets and gables and cupolas thrusting from its walls as though carven from the mountainside itself. Bolerium seemed not so much separate from Kamensic as some marvel given birth by the town, phantasm or prodigy or portent. Its whorled-glass windows gazed down upon the lake’s deceptively placid dark surface as though dreaming of itself.

Bolerium was the oldest building in Kamensic. Legend had it that when the Dutch settlers arrived, the mansion was already there, torchlight guttering behind its thick panes and shadowy figures moving slowly through its corridors. This was absurd, of course. It would have taken years, decades, even, to build such a mammoth structure.

What was known about the house was that its granite blocks were not native to New York State, or even to the New World. During the Victorian era Owen Schelling, founder of Schelling’s Market and an amateur geologist, determined that the building material came from the Penwith peninsula, on the westernmost tip of Cornwall. And because of an unusual variation in the stones, he could assign them an exact provenance: the pastel-tinted cliffs of Lamorna Cove, where ancient quarries produced greenstone and the coarse-grained granite that gave birth to that country’s tors and neolithic forts and standing stones.

After Schelling’s discovery, Bolerium’s mysterious stones would periodically draw geologists from universities and museums across the country. They would carefully tap at the mansion’s walls and take their slender samples off to the city, where the results were always the same—an unusual mixture of Penwith greenstone and St. Buryan granite. The shaved and splintered rock was examined and dated and filed away, but the mystery remained: there were no records of Bolerium’s construction, no ship’s manifest detailing how or when or why a million tons of Cornish granite came to New York Harbor, and thence seventy miles inland to a remote hamlet where only hardscrabble farmers lived, and red men, and witches.

Town records showed the official date of Bolerium’s construction as 1743, and were attributed to the mansion’s first registered owner, an Irishman named Crom MacCrutch. According to village legend, MacCrutch brought with him the last remaining herd of Megaloceros, the so-called Giant Irish Elk, with the intention of establishing a sanctuary for them in the New World. This fact was duly typed on a yellowing index card, where I read it during one of the elementary school’s annual trips to the Courthouse Museum.

“That’s impossible,” Hillary announced disdainfully when I told him about it after school that day. We were kicked back in his basement watching The Munsters, Uncle Cosmo’s only television rival. “Those things were deer, not elk. Besides which they became extinct about twenty thousand years ago.”

“Well, that’s what it said in the museum,” I insisted, then went on stubbornly, “and Mrs. Langford said it was true. Plus how would you know?”

Hillary said nothing, only tightened his lips and stared fixedly at the television. But at the commercial he stalked upstairs, returning a few minutes later with two oversized volumes. He set them side by side on the coffee table and then opened the first, a heavy old book with a stained blue cover and the title Ancient Man in Briton stamped in gold letters.

“How would I know?” he demanded, and opened the book. Flecks of paper and dust flew up. There was a faint smell of mold as he flipped through the pages, and finally stopped. “From this—”

He stabbed at an illustrative plate, its sepia tones tinged with gray and feathered with the remains of silverfish.

“‘Irish Elk,’” I read out loud. “Peat burial in Hound’s Pool, Devonshire, alongside of human remains.’ So?”

“So that was ten thousand years ago,” Hillary sniffed. “And wait, look here—”

He shoved aside the first book and opened the second. A glossy guide to prehistoric mammals, it had been a Christmas present several years earlier, when Hillary’s passion for saber-toothed tigers had driven me nuts. “Look at this,” he commanded, and pointed at a two-page spread.

Above the legend were realistic illustrations of what looked like pretty ordinary deer, the same kind of deer that leaped across the road in front of the school bus or nibbled apples from the trees in our front yard. Save only this: the deer in the pictures were crowned by absolutely massive mooselike antlers, spreading upward and out like the canopy of an oak, and so huge it seemed impossible that the creatures could have held their heads erect.

“Holy cow.” I whistled and read the rest of the caption.

I shook my head. “They weren’t extinct twenty thousand years ago—it says here they found some in Europe in 500 B.C. So—”

Hillary rolled his eyes. “So that’s still over two thousand years ago, Lit! Listen—there’s no way anyone ever had an Irish Elk in Kamensic, okay?”

“I’m just telling you what the sign said in the Courthouse Museum.”

“The sign in the Courthouse is wrong. And what the hell would Mrs. Langford know about it, anyway? She believes in Bigfoot.” Hillary collected his books and swept back upstairs, yelling his parting shot. “Your dad just called. You’re supposed to go home.”

Hillary was my best friend and next-door neighbor. His parents were the Fabulous Wellers, Natalie and Edmund: English actors who had made their debuts alongside Laurence Olivier in a 1940s production of Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and gone on to mainstream success in the 1950s and early ’60s with a series of Ealing comedies in which they played Flo and Moe Fleck, divorced private investigators who continued to work together despite past (and continuing) infidelities. In real life, both were homosexual. Natty’s youthful passions were notorious and flamboyant. She had run off with the wife of a Chicago financier and later had a long-term, dish-throwing relationship with a predatory blonde starlet named Ada Morn, before marrying Edmund, whose own lovers tended to be men of his own age and temperament: stable, soft-spoken, quietly humorous.

Now both were in their early fifties. Like my father, Natalie and Edmund were part of the repertory company at the Avalon Shakespeare Theater in Avon, Connecticut, and otherwise spent their time raising bees and restoring old-stock apple trees with names like Foxwhelp and Ten Commandments. Hillary was their only child. He was named for Sir Edmund Hillary, a family friend.

“It was actually quite a sacrifice for them to make,” he remarked once when we were hanging out at Deer Park. “I mean, probably they really wanted to name me Bob, or Stan—”

“Or Butch.”

“Or Butch.” He nodded sagely and took another swig of his beer. “But they stuck to their guns and named me Hillary, damn it. They’re good people, my parents. Good damn people.”

I don’t remember the first time I met Hillary. He was just always there, like the Wellers’ old apple trees and weathered colonial farmhouse that formed the backdrop to my own house. We were the same age and in the same grade at the Kamensic Village School, and, except for a dicey few months in early adolescence when we hated each other, completely inseparable. We roamed freely between our two homes, eating and playing and later sleeping together, companionable as puppies. When my parents were away, rehearsing or performing, I stayed with Hillary. When Natty and Edmund went to England for three months to tape a Flo and Moe reunion, Hillary lived with us. Some people thought we were brother and sister, and there was a superficial resemblance. We were both tall, with shoulder-length hair, though Hillary’s was jet-black and mine a rather dingy dark blonde. And we both had large, oblique eyes. Mine were such a pale gray as to seem luminous; Hillary’s a deep hazel, the color of new moss on old bark. When we were fourteen we began what was to be a long-time pattern of falling in and out of love with each other, alternating between passionate declarations and equally heartfelt platonic discussions of why it was a far far better thing to remain best friends. This didn’t stop us from sleeping together, usually after a night of drinking at Deer Park. Sex with Hillary was fun, the way sex with my other friends was fun: occasionally confusing but never punitive. Our parents were remarkably grown-up about steering us toward various methods of birth control, and so none of us got pregnant. My own couplings were frequent and sunlit, more like swimming than sex; the only mystery about sex was that there was supposed to be a mystery. That troubled me. I would have thought it was all just artistic license, troubadours and rock stars wailing about love when they might just as well have been singing about Constantine Fox’s red convertible.

But then I would get disturbing hints that it was otherwise; like the fading signal half-heard on a radio late at night, the chopped echo of a song that sounds more beautiful than anything you’ve ever heard before, a song you never hear again. Sometimes it was a real song that made me feel that way, like the first time I heard Joel Green do “Cities of Night,” with its offhand, sloping chorus and melancholy saxophone. Sometimes it was just something I heard about—a movie I’d never seen, like Midnight Cowboy; a book I’d never read, like Venus in Furs. And sometimes it was just the sound of the wind in the leaves at night, lying in bed after having left Hillary in his room, the two of us more feverish after lovemaking than when we’d started.

There were never any recriminations between Hillary and myself. In that we really were like siblings. Our sex was never perfunctory, but neither was it especially passionate—we saved that for our talk, which was endless and endlessly poignant, fueled by the shared conceit that we were soul mates, doomed in this life to never quite connect romantically but otherwise inextricably entwined. Whatever psychic wounds we exacted upon each other, they were clean ones, and healed quickly.

Which was just as well, since we were always cast opposite each other in school plays. Hillary was not an exceptional actor, but by the time we were sixteen he was handsome, with wry comic timing and a pleasant if unremarkable baritone. You could never capture his good looks on film—he was too animated, hands gesturing wildly as he told some ridiculous story about his parents, long hair flying wildly around his lean face. But in high school productions he was Sebastian, and Benedick, and King Arthur in Camelot. People fell in love with Hillary when they saw him onstage. Me, they remembered as the Aunt Abby who fell into the front row during Arsenic and Old Lace.

Oh, I was crazy about it all. Rehearsals, backstage intrigue, the whole tatty-golden hierarchy with its smells of sweat and spirit gum and melting gels, dust burning off the followspots and the reek of marijuana seeping down from the light booth. I would invariably beat out the competition for Rosalind or Viola or ’40s ingénues—not because I was talented, but because I was boyish. I had none of my mother’s aristocratic glamour. Instead, I was a throwback to my father’s ancestors in County Meath—broad freckled cheekbones, wide mouth, ski nose; narrow-hipped and long-legged. I looked good in trousers or vintage suits. I could fence and do cartwheels, knew the steps to a dozen reels and hornpipes, was strong enough to handle a broadsword. In full stage makeup I could even pass for a slightly eccentric romantic lead, bedraggled Helena to my mother’s Titania.

But I was absolutely bone-lazy: loathed learning my lines, hated acting exercises, refused to breathe from the diaphragm. And I had such a bad sense of direction that blocking was a nightmare. I could never remember where upstage was. The lights blinded me. I stepped on people’s feet and forgot my lines, and had such horrible stage fright that I threw up before every performance. More than once Hillary had to literally push me onstage from the wings. Anywhere else on earth, I would have been banned from school productions, or sent for extensive counseling to determine why I insisted on acting in the first place.

Finally, to save face, I announced to my family and friends that I was going to be a playwright; and to this end began carrying around a notebook and a copy of The Bald Soprano. At night, alone in my room, I’d sit in front of an old Underwood typewriter, a filched bottle of vodka under my desk, and write. Actually, what I really did was drink, and listen to the radio through my headphones. But the line about being a playwright worked. People stopped pestering me to try out for plays. For a little while, at least, I felt as though I fit in.

Because this was Kamensic, and Kamensic was theater. What the village had, and has, is actors. Real actors, Broadway actors as well as Hollywood royalty, from Tallulah Bankhead and the Lunts, D. W. Griffith and DeVayne Smith, to lesser-known survivors like Theda Austin and the Wellers. Later there would be aging rock stars and hosts of twilight television (Cap’n Jack and Officer Hap and Gore DeVal), as well as retired icons from King of the Hillbillies and Tales from the Bar Sinister.

This last was where my father made his living, as the eponymous watering hole’s cadaverous yet elegant bartender, Uncle Cosmo, affectionately known as Unk. Tales from the Bar Sinister was fabulously popular on network TV in the early 1970s and had a long and happy half-life in syndication. My father couldn’t go out for groceries without being recognized, and everyone from waiters at the Muscanth Restaurant to kids on 125th Street called him Unk. Years later, when the show was picked up by Nickelodeon, Unk became a genuine pop icon. Recalled fondly by his original fans, embraced by a new generation who loved his moldy tuxedo, his garish Cryptkeeper makeup, and Peter Lorre voice. Our magazine even ran a cover: (H)UNK! it read, beneath his kindly crepuscular face.

Back then, and like everyone else in Kamensic, I took it all for granted. My father with his horror-show garb, mother with her daytime Emmys and TV Guide Reader’s Choice Awards. In Kamensic, Unk was spoken of as respectfully as Hume Cronyn or Jason Robards. At the annual village Christmas party my mother’s reading of “A Christmas Memory” reduced everyone to tears.

“Your mother.” Hillary shook his head, staring at my mother’s slender figure perched on a stool at the front of the Town Hall, surrounded by banks of sweet-smelling pine boughs and clumps of ghostly white mistletoe. “In the old days they would’ve burned her at the stake.”

“Along with your mother.”

“Yeah.” Hillary slumped down into his seat. “Actually, they probably would’ve burned the whole fucking town.”

If Kamensic was a strange place to grow up, I never knew it. My mother worked outside the home before most women did, but then so did everyone else’s mom, acting or dancing or singing or designing costumes. I was lucky enough to be raised by my father rather than a housekeeper or nanny. Except for the three years when Bar Sinister was being shot in California, it was Unk who got up with me every morning, Unk who made my brown bag lunches and waited for me at the bus stop, Unk who met me each afternoon. My mother of course was in the city, taping Perilous Lives. My earliest memories are of waking at four A.M., lying in bed, and hearing her pad softly about our rambling house as she gathered her makeup bags and fashion magazines, and the more purposeful sound of my father in the kitchen, making her breakfast. Smells of coffee and scrambled eggs floating up through the chilly dark house; then the huffing of our Volkswagen squareback as my father drove my mother to the station, so that she could catch the first train to the city and make a six-thirty call.

My mother’s married name was Audrina Moylan. As a girl in London she had played all the Shakespearean ingenues, Ophelia, Cordelia, Rosalind; but it was as Audrey Gold that she created the role she inhabited for forty-some years, that of Livia Prentiss on Perilous Lives. Livia was raven-haired and raven-hearted; a suburban Medea in Bob Mackie gowns who seduced, poisoned, throttled, baited, stalked, and reproached her television clan for sixty minutes a day five days a week. Livia’s children were numerous and quarrelsome as those dragon’s-teeth sown by Cadmus, and Livia herself was something of a hydra, impossible to kill, prone to ridiculously unbelievable recoveries: from cancer, coma, drowning, childbirth. The character of Livia was equally immortal, but my mother had shed her Shakespearean aspirations with as little thought as a snake sheds its skin. She reveled in Livia, collected her Emmys and displayed them proudly in the living room beside infant photographs of her only daughter and a silver-framed picture of my father and Axel Kern at the Oscar ceremonies, the year Kern won for directing Die by Night. My mother loved her daily treks to the city, thrived on them; and while she claimed to love Kamensic, she is the one person who always seemed immune to its disquieting charm.

I grew up in Kamensic; everyone I knew grew up in Kamensic. Our parents worked in the city, as actors or directors or designers or dancers; but I had seldom been to the city alone, without my parents. Our houses were very old—those fieldstone fortresses left by the Dutch patroons, a few colonial farms left unburned by Warrenton’s raid—or else they were aggressively new, futurist machines designed by Vuko Taskovich or Michael Graves, the approximate shape and color of battleships. My family lived in one of the colonials, set within a broad swathe of lawn in that part of town known as The Hamlet. This was where the Constance Charterbury Library was, and Schelling’s Market. On Sundays we had brunch with our parents’ agents at the Village Inn. When my father was rehearsing for the Avalon Shakespeare season, groceries were delivered via bicycle from Schelling’s. Every year at my birthday party, my father would make a surprise entrance as Unk, which would send my guests into gleeful fits and me into an absolute rigor of embarrassment.

Still, while having Uncle Cosmo as a parent was mortifying, a lot of my friends had it worse. Duncan Forrester’s father had remarried a famous feminist sculptor who filled their rose garden with enormous bronze castings of her vulva. Linette Davis’s mother, Aurora Dawn, had been a model and actress in the Warhol Factory who was famous now for drunk driving. Sport and Jacey Finn had six sons with golden hair and emerald eyes, all addicted to heroin. In a lot of ways Kamensic seemed like a throwback to medieval times, a walled fortress with a high child-mortality rate. There were not many children in Kamensic, certainly not as many as in the neighboring towns of Goldens Bridge and Mahopac and Pawkotan. Children were at once cherished and expendable; families were large, so that even if one or two of the older kids were lost to drugs or madness or the Ivy League, the younger ones could always be found hanging out in front of the library, or fidgeting in the back of the Congo Church during benefit performances of new works by Beckett or John Guare. The Vietnam War swept by us like an Angel of Death distracted by other things: there were enough Kamensic boys of age to fight, but somehow no one was ever drafted. Our parents were unilaterally against the war, the town was against the war; and that seemed to be enough to protect us.

We were all wild things there. Indulged or ignored by famous parents who traded psychiatrists, agents, drug dealers, spouses; shielded by the miles of wood and mountain that stood between us and the city to the south, the desultory suburbs all around. Kamensic itself stood guard against the darkness I sensed sometimes on a June day, the sun glaring off the surface of Lake Muscanth as though off a blue-lacquered plate, crimson dragonflies lighting upon my bare knees as Hillary and I lay naked in the summer warmth.

But still we knew something was there, waiting. Sometimes I imagined I could hear it—a sound that was just barely audible, an engine thrumming somewhere deep below the water like that faerie mill that grinds salt into the sea. Ali heard it, too, and she said she knew what it was—

“The dead bell.”

“The dead bell?” This was when we were thirteen or so, and Ali was reigning queen of slumber parties because of her repertoire of ghost stories and morbid lore. Ali was Alison Fox, my other best friend. She lived in a vast gray argosy of a house on the far side of Muscanth Mountain. Her parents were recently separated. At least I had both parents, even if there were times I longed to live somewhere else, Somers or Mahopac or Shrub Oak, with a father who worked for IBM and a mother who stayed home and played bridge on Thursday nights. It was a snow day and we were at my house, waiting for Hillary to join us so we could play Monopoly. “What the hell is that?”

“You know. Up there”— She cocked a thumb at the window. —“at Kern’s place. That bell in the gate. It rings when someone’s going to die.”

“So how come it didn’t ring last week when Mr. Lapp died?”

Ali cracked the window open and lit a cigarette, kneeling on the floor so the smoke would drift outside. “’Cause it’s not when just anyone dies. It’s like a banshee or something. It only rings for certain people.”

“Like who?” I was dubious. Ali was weirdly superstitious—she believed “I Am the Walrus” actually meant something, and had a bizarre theory linking Brian Jones’s death and the film version of Rosemary’s Baby—but she was also more plugged into local gossip than I was.

“Like Acherley Darnell. And all those people who killed themselves.”

“Acherley Darnell died two hundred years ago. That bell’s just for decoration or something.”

“Uh-uh. And you know what else—they killed someone every time they made one.”

“When who made what?”

“The people who made that bell, in England or wherever it came from. It was a custom. They would pour the melted bronze into a mold, and then they would take a person and zzzzt”— Ali mimed drawing a blade across her throat. —“they’d cut their neck and put the blood in with the metal. Because otherwise the bell would crack, and you’d never get the tone right.”

All this was actually starting to give me the creeps, but I didn’t want Ali to know that. I gave her a disgusted look. “What a bunch of crap.”

“It’s true. I mean, my father said Kern told him it was true,” she insisted. “Why would he make it up?”

“He makes all those movies. He makes everything up. That bell probably came from some Dumpster in Larchmont.”

“Hey.” Icy wind gusted into the room and there was Hillary, shaking snow from his hair as he tossed his ski jacket onto the floor. “How come the board’s not set up?”

“Cause Ali’s running her mouth again, that’s why.”

I pushed past Hillary, heading into the next room to get the Monopoly set. The truth was, I felt annoyed by Ali’s story. Not because it was another one of her crazy anecdotes, but because I’d never heard it before. Axel Kern was my godfather, after all: I was the one who’d spent childhood evenings at Bolerium listening to his tales and watching movies in his screening room with my father, while the wind roared through the broken windows Axel never bothered to fix, and voles nested in the velvet seat cushions.

In Kamensic you could never trade much on fame, your own or your family’s—everyone was either famous, or sort of famous, or had been famous. The exception was Axel Kern. Because Kern wasn’t just famous. He was notorious, perhaps even dangerous. Like Acherley Darnell, who had been found guilty of the murders of his own daughter and her lover and hanged in front of the village courthouse, his body left on the gallows overnight. The next morning it was found swinging from one of Bolerium’s parapets, throat cut and body bled as though he had been a hare.

Nothing like that had happened to Axel Kern—yet. My own childhood memories of him were complex and rather strange, shaded as much by my physical impressions as anything else. These were startlingly acute. I have a strange gift for recalling sensations, and my father sometimes joked that I was psychic, though my mother would not allow a Ouija board in the house, and when I received an Amazing Kreskin’s ESP game for my birthday one year, she made me give it away. So while I recognized Kern’s famous profile—the tilted, deep-set eyes and high cheekbones, the iron-streaked dark hair and tawny skin that added to his exotic, unsettling persona—what I recalled most about him was the acrid scent of his trademark black Sobranies and the taint of red wine on his breath, at once sweet and foul. Or the way his hands felt when he occasionally and absently stroked my cheeks. Kern was not overly affectionate, at least with children, though he was always kind to me. His hands were large and heavily lined, as his face would one day be; it always felt as though he were wearing leather gloves, supple and rather tough. Yet his clothes were extremely dandyish, even for that foppish age. Custom-made Carnaby Street suits of silk velvet the color of ormolu. Belgian lace shirts so fine I could see through them to his coppery skin and the thick curling hair of his chest. Embroidered Berber robes from Morocco; cowboy boots of ostrich and elephant and python and what Axel solemnly assured me was mastodon, from a corpse recently uncovered in Siberia. I recall all of these, and his voice, lilting for such a big man—Kern was well over six feet—though I remember little of what he actually said. Probably this was because he seldom spoke to me. As I said, he had scant use for children.

Still, I had always felt a proprietary claim on him. And Ali’s story about the bell, ridiculous as it was, pissed me off. Now I stomped around for several minutes, hearing her laughter from the next room and the wind battering the storm windows.

“Lit?”

I looked up to see Hillary standing in the doorway. “I’m getting it,” I said curtly, and yanked the Monopoly set from a bookshelf.

“You and Ali having a fight or something?”

“No. I’m just sick of her stupid stories, that’s all. Look out—”

Hillary moved aside to let me pass. “Lay off her, will you?” he said softly.

“I’m not—”

He grabbed my arm before I could step back out into the living room. “Her mother has a boyfriend,” he whispered. “My father told me. They’re getting a divorce…”

I hesitated, looking out to where Ali still sat on the floor, watching cigarette smoke seep out the window cracked above her head. Beside me stood Hillary. I could hear his breathing, and when I glanced up I noticed for the first time that he had gotten taller, that all of a sudden he was bigger than I was. His hand was still on my arm. I could smell his hair, damp from the shower, and the warm scent of his skin beneath layers of flannel and wool. “Lit,” he said again; but I pulled away.

“All right then.” I flounced into the room, glaring at Ali. “Will you put that out, Ali? My father’ll kill you if he finds out. Come on, let’s play.”

After that I never asked her about the dead bell. If she started telling stories about Axel Kern, or the Village, or any of its odd history, I listened but said nothing. Somehow Hillary had made me feel that we had to protect Ali, and so I did. Much of the time I did so reluctantly, because Ali could be a bully; but I knew Hillary was right. We had to protect her, as the town protected us. It would be a few more years before Axel Kern returned to Kamensic and our world shivered apart, like a crystal vase vibrating to that dimly heard note. By then it was too late to protect anyone.

3. Ghosts

IN ANOTHER HOUSE NEARLY a thousand miles from Kamensic, atop a mountain far more isolated than Mount Muscanth (though no less strange), a man sat looking down upon the dying sun as it dipped beneath the trees. He was a very slight man, small-boned but strong-featured, his black hair curling almost to his shoulders and tinged with gray. The ruddy light spun a fine web across his sun-taut skin, but otherwise it was impossible to guess his age—his full cheeks were rosy as a child’s, his eyes a penetrating sea-blue beneath bristling black eyebrows. His first year undergraduate students always thought him quite ancient, forty at least; but those who went on to more advanced and esoteric studies at the University of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine were nonplused to find that as years and even decades passed, their Professor changed very little; and only the very wisest of his protégés gradually realized that, in fact, Balthazar Warnick never aged at all.

He sat now within an enormous bay window overlooking the Agastronga River far below. A hawk drifted lazily past, its wings tilting as it caught the air currents and finally plummeted out of sight. In the distance stretched the Blue Ridge mountains, their peaks a sunset archipelago thrusting upward from the October mist, light like molten copper trickling down their slopes. Balthazar Warnick leaned forward, tracing the hawk’s path. On the window ledge a note was perched, expensive stationery covered with the fine spidery handwriting of the Orphic Lodge’s formidable housekeeper—

Balthazar sighed. Three weeks was far too long, of course, even for such a monotonous (and unpleasant) task as the pharmakos. But still he lingered at the window, putting off his duty for one more minute as he stared into the autumn haze.

His knee bumped against something, and he looked down to see the Benandanti’s orrery leaning sideways on the faded velvet window seat. A jeweled model of the solar system, sun and planets and little moons all formed of semiprecious stones. But one of the gold wires had become twisted, the lapis lazuli Venus perilously close to being thrown from its delicate orbit. Balthazar had set it here months ago, meaning to set about the careful task of repairing it with more gold filament.

But then the busy weeks of the University’s spring term had begun, with their round of oral and written dissertations, the painstaking process of winnowing Molyneux scholars and the painful one of dismissing those who had failed to live up to their promise, or otherwise crossed the Benandanti. And so the months had passed, until finally today Balthazar had returned to the Orphic Lodge, to find the Benandanti’s mountain stronghold isolate and calm as ever, and the little orrery yet unhealed.

With a sigh he picked it up and set it idly upon one knee, toying with the lapis representation of Venus—marble-sized, its surface etched with faint golden striations that felt like fine hairs beneath his fingertips. He rolled the glowing bead back and forth, back and forth, until heat began to rise from it, and tiny gray fronds like steam. He drew his hand back, smiling a little as the blue orb danced upon its filament; then whistled softly as his thumb caught upon the jagged bit of protruding gold filament. The orrery bounced upon the velvet cushion and came to rest against the window. Balthazar swore beneath his breath and drew his hand to his mouth, sucking another crimson bead from his thumb. On its abbreviated transit, gold-veined Venus spun and strained at its wire lead like a june beetle on a thread, and made a noise like a woman humming.

“‘In coelo quies,’” he murmured. There is rest in Heaven.

Somewhere within the vast reaches of the Orphic Lodge a clock struck the hour, six sweet clear chimes that rang out like water cascading into a well. The notes hung in the air a moment and Balthazar listened, waiting for the echoes to fade.

But instead of dying away the sound grew almost imperceptibly louder, as though someone ran a moist finger around the lip of a crystal glass. Balthazar frowned. He looked toward the door, but of course there was no one there.

He shivered. Still the sound went on, maddeningly faint, and as it did so the hairs on his arms prickled.

Because there seemed to be another sound behind that eerie note. A noise like scratching, or static, that as the moments passed resolved into a cluttering whisper he could just barely hear: as though a radio droned in some far-off part of the house. Balthazar shook his head. With stony calm he turned, straining to hear.

And now the sound grew—not louder, but more distinct. He held his breath, listening. There was a crackle of static. Myriad voices chattered and whistled, with now and then an unsettling whoop like an angry gibbon. Balthazar listened, every hair on end; then grew rigid as the room fell silent.

A moment when he could hear only his own breathing. Then suddenly a voice began to speak in mid-sentence, a voice so thin and faint it was like the clicking of ants within the walls.

A voice he had last heard almost four hundred years ago.

“Giulietta,” he whispered. “Giulietta…”

… do not understand why I have been summoned here…

A young woman’s voice, speaking in the dialect of the Italian village of Moruzzo, her tone calm but Balthazar knew, ah! he remembered: she had not been calm at all.

—Do you know of anyone in this village who is a witch, or a Malandante?

A second voice now, a man’s, with the airy accent of Vincenza. His tone neither threatening nor pleading but almost playful, rehearsing a well-known part with an actor who had perhaps forgotten her lines.

Of witches I do not know any, nor even of Benandanti. The girl laughed throatily; but a moment later went on, her voice rising. Father, no. I really do not know. I am not a Benandante, that is not my calling. And certainly I am not Malandante. I do not know whether any child in our village has been bewitched.

At the word Malandante Balthazar shuddered as though a sentence had been pronounced. The voice of the inquisitor rang out, more sternly this time.

—-Yet you saw the son of Pietro Ruota.

I went to see the sick child…The girl hesitated, then went on. The father asked for my help, but I could do nothing. I told him I did not know anything about it. I—I have not invited anyone to the games to which the Benandanti go. She laughed again, a sound like rope fraying.

—Why did you laugh? the man demanded; and Balthazar’s throat burned as he felt the same words welling inside him: O Giulietta, why did you laugh? He saw her again, a tall girl with bold eyes, uncanny ice-blue eyes that had already stained her with the epithet strega; that and the fact that she rinsed her hair with Egyptian herbs to give it color and strength, and lay with men but had never borne a child.

—Why did you laugh? repeated the inquisitor.

Balthazar heard her feet shuffling against the bare wooden planks as she swore beneath her breath and finally said,

Because these are not things to inquire about, because they are against the will of God.

—And how would you know what is the will of God? the inquisitor cried.

Silence. Then, in a clear sure voice the girl answered, It is said that when they assemble, the Benandanti must fight for the faith of God, and their enemies fight for the Demi’s.

—But for the faith of what God do they fight?

Silence. Balthazar’s heart pounded and he moaned aloud. All around him was the darkened stall swept clean of hay and dung. A single small clay lamp had been thrust into an alcove to send shadows skittering up the splintered cedar walls and greasy smoke spiraling toward the mud-daubed ceiling. Beneath the stench of burning oil he could smell her, a faint musk of salt and fennel stalks, her auburn hair scrubbed with sand that still reeked of the river-bottom. Even from across the room, even from across the centuries, he could feel that she did not flinch, as the inquisitor thundered once more.

—For the faith of whose God do they fight?

In his corner the scrivener’s quill snagged upon the parchment in front of him. Still the girl said nothing. After a moment the inquisitor took a deep breath, and asked, —Then tell me the names of their enemies, of the witches. The Malandanti.

The girl lifted her face. Tangled auburn curls fell back from a high forehead, and her eyes burned white in the darkness as she calmly replied, Sir, I cannot do it.

—Yet you say that they fight for God. I want you to tell me the names of these witches.

Balthazar shuddered. As though she sensed him there the girl trembled, too. She rubbed her hands along her bare arms and glanced around the room, not nervously but with great care, as though tracking a mouse by the sound of its footsteps. And then she found him; recognized him, even though his face was hidden by the sooty folds of the domino. Her linen shift made a sound like the wind in the cornstalks, counterpoint to the scratching of the procurator ab actis where he sat in a corner transcribing her words, his face lost within the domino’s hood. He would not look up to meet her eyes. The girl’s gaze remained upon his hunched figure, and Balthazar could see hopelessness settle on her thin shoulders like a rook.

I cannot name nor accuse anyone, she said at last, tearing her gaze from the scrivener. She shook herself, then gave him a thin smile. Whether he be friend or foe.

—Tell me the names of these Malandanti.

Boldly the red-haired girl met the inquisitor’s eyes. I cannot say them.

The inquisitor pounded his hand against the wall, the folds of his domino flapping like black sails.

—For what reason can’t you tell me this? he cried. In a neighboring recess a horse whinnied. —For what reason?

The girl’s voice rose angrily. Because we have a lifelong edict not to reveal secrets about one side or the other!

—You assert that you are not one of them—why are you obliged to obey them? The inquisitor stepped away from the wall. Dust curled around his booted feet like smoke, and reddened the hem of his robes. He lifted his cloaked head and inclined it very slightly to where the scrivener was bent over his lap-desk, his breath clouding the autumn air; and across all those intervening years Balthazar could feel the malice of that hidden gaze, a cudgel crashing onto his back.

Because, of course, the inquisitor cared nothing about the girl. His only concern was that villagers claimed that she was a strega, and so might have corrupted her lovers; and one of those lovers was under his care. She was seventeen, too young to have been taken by the Benandanti as one of their own. Besides which she was a girl, and women rarely gained entry to the Benandanti’s libraries and refectories, and then only as servants. The inquisitor himself knew this, because he was a Benandante, as was the girl’s lover. He sought only to learn if her young cicis-beo had betrayed the Benandanti’s secrets to her; but now the girl had betrayed herself. He raised one white hand to his cloaked face, the fingers long and slender and seemingly bloodless as bone, and slowly shook his head.

—Giulietta Masparutto, he said. The words came out quickly now, his tone grew distracted, even bored. Your words condemn you as Malandante. Our land is full of witches and evil people performing a thousand evils and a thousand injuries against their neighbors. There is an abundance of such misbegotten people, and I have been chosen to act as inquisitor general and judge over cases such as yours. With the counsel of those who are expert in the laws of God and Good Men, you, Giulietta Masparutto, are arraigned in my presence and will now hear the penance to be imposed, as follows:

First, I condemn you to a term of twelve months in a prison which we shall assign to you….

What have I done? the girl shouted. Her cheeks flushed as she tossed her head furiously. I have done nothing, you know that I have done nothing—

—We reserve to ourselves the authority to reduce these penalties or absolve you, in whole or in part, as we may deem best…

With a cry she whirled, to turn accusatory eyes upon the hooded figure whose quill moved unrelentingly across his parchment. But the scrivener did not look up, and the girl quickly turned back to her questioner.

Please, she cried, I am needed here, my cousin Ilario is ill—

But already there was the scraping sound of the barn door being pulled open behind them. Sunlight slashed through the narrow stall, blinding her; a few yards away the horse whinnied again in excitement. Two barefoot young men in the soiled brown robes of cenobites stepped uncertainly through the doorway, frowning when they saw the girl.

—This one, Father?

The inquisitor nodded. He gestured dismissively as he strode past them, his robes sending up more dust as he tugged his domino from a gaunt face slick and reddened from the heat.

—Yes, he said brusquely, and fanned his cheeks. In the doorway he paused, waiting until the two men had dragged the struggling girl past him and out into the courtyard. Sunlight made a ragged halo about his black-clad figure, dust-motes a rain of golden coins about his shoulders as the inquisitor gazed at the scrivener in the room behind him, slowly gathering his things. After a minute the inquisitor spoke.

—She did not betray you.

The scrivener bent to retrieve a leather satchel. He shrugged without lifting his head. The inquisitor continued to stare at him. Finally he asked,

—Is she Malandante?

The scrivener stooped, silent, beside his bag and little wooden traveling-desk. He shook back the domino from his face, blinking at the sun.

I do not know, he lied. But the villagers say she has the sight.

The inquisitor gazed down at him, his expression cool. —If that is true, you might have brought her to us. His mouth twitched into a bitter smile. We could have found a place for her, Balthazar. Better that she serve us than another master. A word from you could have saved her.

He turned and walked out into the courtyard, light swirling around him like flame. Balthazar watched him go, his eyes burning; then suddenly drew his hand to his face.

Giulietta.

He closed his eyes, opened them to see about him the familiar lines of his study.

“Giulietta,” he repeated, and buried his face in his hands.

4. No Fun

THERE WAS SOMETHING ELSE strange about Kamensic, and that was its suicides. Some of these had taken place so much before my time that they had the solemn, dingy aura of ancient myth. But by the year I started high school there had been ten or twelve of them: deaths by hanging, by jumping off Darnell Bridge into the reservoir, by drug overdose, by gunshot, by carbon monoxide and straightedge razor. Almost all of them were teenagers, although the mother of my friends Giorgio and Nastassia Klendall killed herself when we were in high school, climbing to the roof of their four-story village Victorian and jumping off. The note she left in the kitchen, weighed down by an empty wine bottle, read only

The deaths were seldom spoken of, but they were not hushed up. They were treated as normal deaths, as normal at least as dying in your bed at the age of ninety-seven with a hooded peregrine falcon on your breast, as Gloria Nevelson did, or expiring of lung cancer after smoking three packs of Kents a day for thirty-four years, like Clement Stoddard. And there was certainly no religious distress or stigma attached to the suicides. Despite the presence of its century-old Congregational Church, Kamensic was not what you could call a religious place. There was no minister affiliated with the Congo Church, which in any case was used almost constantly as an informal rehearsal space. Occasionally out-of-towners would arrange to be married there—it looked so charming, tucked in amidst the maple trees with the Muscanth River meandering in the background and all those eccentric, theatrical villagers mowing their lawns!—but they brought their own clergy or made arrangements with the justice of the peace.

The only time I ever saw the church used for something like its intended purpose was at funerals. And I never realized how bizarre, even disturbing, these must seem to outsiders, until I was much older and attended a funeral down at Sacred Heart in Yonkers, with Irish Catholic relatives of my father who wept while incense burned and an Irish tenor sang the “Ave Maria” in a voice so pure that I wept myself, though I scarcely knew the deceased.

It was not like that at home. In Kamensic there was solemnity but no real grief; no service save for readings from Shakespeare or Aeschylus; no music until the very end. The church’s rough-hewn wooden pews would be draped with ivy and evergreen boughs, even in midsummer, and the lovely, stellated wild tulips that grew in rocky crevices on Muscanth Mountain. All of the casement windows would be opened, no matter the weather, and the doors as well; but no coffin or casket ever entered the building. Only as the brief ceremony of readings ended would someone commence playing on a flute in the back of the church, and those gathered would leave, to reconvene at the cemetery a few hundred yards away. The music was always the same, a haunting, repetitive melody, not filled with sadness so much as longing and a strange, almost exhilarating intimation that something was about to happen.

But what that was, I never found out. Nor did I ever learn who played the flute: I never saw anyone, either in the back of the church or in that tiny choir-loft where choirs never sang. At the cemetery a plain wooden coffin would lie on the ground, its top strewn with poppies and anemones; in winter, there would be the poppies’ dried seed-heads, ivy, and holly. Beside the coffin was the grave, freshly dug, the soil protected from rain or snow by spruce boughs, and beside the grave the women would stand in a line. Usually someone would say a few words, but it would always end with my mother standing at the head of the grave and reciting in her fine clear girlish voice—

Then the unadorned box would be lowered into the grave. This was always done by women; never men. Sometimes it would take only four of them, sometimes six or even ten, as when Chubby Snarks, an old vaudevillian who weighed three hundred pounds and was buried with his notices, choked to death on a cornichon. The women would strain and groan, but at last it was done. Robins and thrushes would alight upon the mounded earth, to hunt for insects there, and butterflies drawn by the flowers.

As a child I thought the cemetery was the most beautiful, even idyllic, spot in Kamensic, with its flowering dogwoods and shads and forsythia, and so many apple trees it might have been an orchard. Daffodils bloomed underfoot, and more of the tulipa saxatilis; there were bluebells and periwinkles and, everywhere, ivy. And of course there were the gravestones themselves, carved figures of winged foxes and men with the heads of birds, of lionesses and deer and serpents, commemorating the dead from wars and influenza, fire and cancer and noose. The strains of the flute would die into the sound of wind in the leaves, and the children would run off to play quietly among the grave markers. When the coffin was lowered the villagers shared the task of heaping soil back upon it; and when this was completed the last part of the ceremony was performed. Mrs. Langford would produce several bottles of red wine. My father or one of the other men would open them, and the bottles were passed around. Everyone drank from them, even children—I can remember spitting out my mouthful, and my mother smiling gently as she wiped off my mouth with her handkerchief. Sometimes only one or two bottles were quaffed this way; sometimes a dozen or more. Then everyone would leave—not very quietly, either, and generally to my house or the Wellers’. People would speak fondly of the deceased, but there was no sense of genuine grief or bereavement, even with the suicides of the village children. It was as though you one day discovered a dead chipmunk in the woods, half-buried in the leaves; but every day thereafter it was harder and harder to find, until at last it was gone, completely swallowed by the earth.

So it was with Kamensic: swiftly and remorselessly as an ermine, it devoured its own young.

Somehow it never appeared strange to us. After all, what else did we know? It was the early 1970s, we were thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old. We absorbed Kent State and the Manson Family, evacuated our classrooms for bomb threats and stayed home from school when Albert Shanker called our teachers to strike. Death just seemed to be an occupational hazard if you were young. What shocks me now is how we were all expected to simply take it for granted, how often we met on the playground or school parking lot and spoke in whispers, glancing over our shoulders as a brother or sister of the deceased would arrive and take their place among us. Famous or notorious as Kamensic’s residents were, there were no talk shows, no tabloid headlines, and certainly no school psychologists waiting to comfort the bereaved. Even when Phillip Lawton’s son died—the New York Times reported it as a bad reaction to a bee sting, but we heard otherwise—and the television crews appeared, the people of Kamensic drove them away.

“Have you no decency?” cried DeVayne Smith at the train station where the reporters had gathered, his basso voice quavering with rage. “Go from here, now—go—”

They went. Confronted with the angry mob that had rushed to Lawton’s side—not just DeVayne Smith but Gracie Burrows, Constantine Fox, my own parents, and Axel Kern—the reporters shot a few seconds of taped footage, got into their vans and fled. Fifteen minutes later, heading south on Route 684, a deer ran in front of the van and it crashed. The footage never aired. Lawton’s son was buried in the Kamensic Village cemetery, alongside a weathered statue of an angel with folded wings and a wolf’s muzzle.

5. Children of the Revolution

HILLARY AND ALI AND I were inseparable as the petals of a rose. Ali had been my best friend since the first day of kindergarten. We had stood in the playground weeping as our parents left us, and then fallen into each other’s arms, wailing—a story which we heard repeated, say, a thousand times over the years. Ali was slight and fey, as I was big-boned and (much against my will) commonsensical. As a girl she wore white fishnet stockings and plastic go-go boots to parties, her long black hair so thick that when you ran your fingers through it they stuck, as though it were taffy. My own hair was a mess, thin and lank. My mother finally gave up on it and brought me to her hairdresser in the city.

“Chop it off,” she ordered, snatching up her copy of Women’s Wear Daily and sinking into a pink lounge chair. And chop it off he did, leaving me with a horrible pixie cut. I was tall for my age, skinny as a rail. With my cropped head I looked like a very young ex-con and was constantly mistaken for a boy. It wasn’t until I was thirteen that I rebelled and insisted on growing my hair out. It took two years, but by the time I reached high school I was a reasonable facsimile of a girl, with shoulder-length hair and narrow hips, though still too quick-tempered and clumsy as a young St. Bernard.

Hillary, on the other hand, remained blithe as ever. He was one of those kids whose popularity transcends the rigid class barriers of high school. The jocks liked him, the freaks who smoked pot between classes, the kids in the Honor Society, teachers: everyone. Once a guy from Mahopac called Hillary’s father a fag, and even though Ali pointed out that, technically, this was true, Hillary sat down and patiently explained the word’s etymological origins until the guy finally shrugged.

“Well, shit, if you don’t care that your old man’s a fag, neither do I,” he announced, and bought Hillary a beer.

In 1974, nobody cared; at least not in Kamensic. David Bowie had appeared on Don Kirschner’s Rock Concert wearing eye makeup. Duncan had seen the New York Dolls perform in drag at Club 82, and even Hillary sometimes wore electric blue mascara to parties. I made my own bid for bisexual chic by dressing à la Joel Grey in Cabaret, in a moth-eaten tuxedo and battered top hat. I still have a Polaroid photo that Ali took of me then: strange lunar eyes so pale they seemed to have no irises, upturned nose and dark eyebrows, a slight overbite that had failed to yield after three years of braces.

“God, look at me,” I wailed, when the offending image dropped from Ali’s camera onto my living room floor. We were going to a cast party, Ali resplendent in a red leotard and Danskin skirt, me in my tatty Marc Bolan finery. “I look like—I don’t know what I look like.”

“You look fine,” said Ali, shoving the camera in her leather satchel. “‘Divine decadence.’ Right, Unk?”

My father nodded, giving me one of his mock-solemn looks. “Charlotte is jolie-laide. Interesting-looking. Like her mother.”

At this my mother frowned over her script, her face larded with Christian Dior unguents. “Charlotte is far more jolie than laide. And I am not interesting-looking.”

“You’re beautiful, Audrey,” Ali said soothingly and with the assurance of someone who truly was. Even at seventeen she was petite, just five feet tall, with a round smooth body, small round breasts and milk-white skin, freckled all over. She still had that wild mane of black hair framing a wide, expressive face—freckled cheeks, sweetly pursed mouth, honey-colored eyes, a small gap between her two front teeth. Hillary teased her and called her Colette, which for a little while made Ali hope that perhaps he was in love with her. They slept together a few times, but then Hillary started going with a Swedish exchange student with even more fabulous hair, and that was the end of that.

Ali’s parents did indeed get divorced. Ali lived with her father in Kamensic, and spent alternate weekends in the city with her mother, a one-time principal dancer with the New York City Ballet and former Balanchine muse. Ali’s father, Constantine, was a set designer. Ali had inherited his gifts—she would have made a wonderful illustrator, with her eye for the grotesque combined with her skills as a draftsman—but Ali wanted to be a dancer. She had studied since childhood at Madame Laslansky’s famed Manhattan studio, but despite the years of training she moved with an oddly stilted grace. Not like a dancer at all; more like a fox stalking, stopping to listen, and then flowing forward, always on the balls of her feet so she looked slightly tippy-toed, as though she were about to pounce. In our freshman year she auditioned for both the Joffrey and the School of American Ballet, but was turned down for both.

She was different after that. Wilder—she’d always been wild, but now there was a hysterical edge to everything she did, from dancing at parties to streaking during away football games at Carmel and Goldens Bridge. When I think of Ali I think of her naked: she shed her clothes like a toddler, unthinkingly, stripping to slide into the lake or to join some boy in the mossy woods behind school. Or else she wore leotards, black Danskins and black Capezios on her tiny feet; a ragged flannel shirt tied around her waist so the sleeves flopped against her thighs, her glossy black hair slick against her skull.

That was how she was dressed the day we met Jamie Casson. It was a damp afternoon in our senior year, the week before Halloween. The end of high school seemed like a formality to be dispensed with as quickly as possible. We’d both recently applied to the college of our choice—Hampshire College for Ali, NYU for me. Half the time we’d hardly bother showing up for class at all, save to find our friends in the parking lot and check out whose parents were out of town scoping locations for a new film or rehearsing. That was how we knew where the parties were, and that’s how we spent most of our time.

It was a strange autumn; not just that one October night, but all the weeks leading up to it. Though I never spoke of it, I felt a real foreboding at the idea of leaving. Not leaving school, but leaving Kamensic—and leaving Hillary, who had aced us all and already been accepted by the Yale School of Drama. Yet in some weird way the thought of going away from the village disturbed me more than anything else. I wondered if Ali felt it, too. Sometimes she would grow silent and oddly alert, as though focused on a faint sound, thunder or the rustle of footsteps in dead leaves. But she never told me what she was thinking.

That rainy Thursday afternoon I felt fiercely restless. By the end of the day I thought I’d start screaming if I couldn’t escape: from school, from the rain, from my own too-tight skin. I met Ali in the parking lot by Hillary’s old Dodge Dart. Behind us the dismissal bell shrieked. The rain had slacked off, though a cold breeze shook the trees and sent water arcing onto our heads. Ali lit the butt-end of a joint; as usual, the pot made me feel worse, paranoid and fuzzy-headed. But Ali grew loopy, laughing and walking backward through the woods.

“Something’s gonna happen now. Don’t you feel it, Lit?” Her golden eyes narrowed as she took out a cigarette. “Don’t you feel it?”

We cut through the trees, heading out along the railroad tracks. I shrugged and kicked at the gravel underfoot. “I guess.”

The truth was I felt a vague foreboding, a sense of malevolent purpose in the way the tree-limbs moved and the pattern of raindrops beaded on the railway ties. But Ali walked alongside me happily, smoking and singing.

She tossed her head back. “Isn’t it fucking great to be alive?”

“I dunno.” I shivered. I had on one of Hillary’s old corduroy jackets, too big for me but worn and comforting. “I do feel sort of weird. Maybe something is going to happen…”

Ali laughed. “I always feel like something’s gonna happen. And nothing ever does.”

She dropped her spent cigarette, veering from the tracks onto the overgrown path that would bring us to Mount Muscanth.

It wasn’t a real mountain, of course, just one of those outriders of the Catskills that straggle down from the northwestern part of New York State. But on its north face there was a bare stone outcropping where you could sit and look down upon the village, and it was as though you were in another world. The air smelled of dying leaves and earth, and as we walked there were birds everywhere, and tiny things moving underfoot.

“I’m beat,” Ali exclaimed. “Hang on a minute—”

We stopped before a stand of forsythia that had run wild. I was stooping to settle beneath it when the earth at its roots seemed suddenly to shiver.

“Fuckin’ A—” Ali gasped. “Look out!”

At her feet the ground was fuming with a gray cloud of shrews no bigger than my thumb, dozens of them scurrying about, utterly heedless of us. At first I thought something must have disturbed them. But as we watched I saw that no, they were all hunting—feverishly, lunging at black beetles and ants pouring up from beneath the rotting leaves, teeth slicing through shiny carapaces and the dull gray coils of millipedes, their white claws delicate as fronds of club moss. They tore at the leaf-mold in a fury, scrabbling over puffballs that sent up clouds of spores like minute bomb-bursts. I held my breath and lowered myself to within a foot of this seething world, watching as two shrews had a tug-of-war with an earthworm. After a minute they separated and ferociously attacked each other. I was so close I could see tiny droplets of blood spatter onto the forsythia and smell their faint foul musk.

And still the shrews raced on, fighting and hunting and eating. To them, I had no more being than a tree or stone. I was entranced, and would have remained there for the entire afternoon, maybe, if Ali hadn’t pulled me away.

“Enough with the fucking Wild Kingdom, Lit; it’s gonna rain. Come on, let’s go to Deer Park.”

About halfway down we emerged onto a narrow ridge of stone, slick with moss. A scant yard in front of us the ridge sheared away, so that we gazed down upon the tops of red oaks and huge lichen-stained boulders. If you knew where to look, this was where you could catch your first glimpse of the ruinous beauty that was Bolerium. I edged back until I could wrap my arm around a tree—I was wearing knee-high lace-up Frye boots, well broken in but a bad choice for climbing. Ali walked fearlessly to the lip of rock and looked out.

“I can’t see it,” she said, frowning.

I squinted, trying to distinguish between the mansion’s granite walls and the gray trees that stood between us. “It’s too rainy,” I said at last, feeling a vague disappointment.

Ali shook her head. “Uh-uh. It’s hiding.”

We turned and scrambled on down the path. When we finally burst out of the woods onto Kinnicutt Road, it was into a world gone gold and white, yellow leaves covering the tarmac and birches ghostly in the mist. Ali shivered in her leotard and pulled her flannel shirt over her head like a hood. I pulled Hillary’s jacket tight around me, wincing as a black BMW raced past and sent water splashing over us.

“Asshole,” I shouted.

If there was a wrong side to Kamensic, that’s where we were now: Kinnicutt Road, a chopped-up remnant of the Old Post Road that a hundred years earlier had linked Boston to the fractured villages strung across New England. Ten miles or so along, Kinnicutt fed into Route 684, the new interstate that connected the city with the north. But here it was a scumble of cracked asphalt, broken glass winking from a shoulder overgrown with nightshade and fox grapes and jewelweed. There were no houses along this stretch of Kinnicutt, no other roads; only a defiant tributary of the Muscanth River threading alongside the tarmac.

Now it felt almost inutterably desolate. The air smelled faintly of diesel fuel. Ahead of us the road narrowed, unyielding to the woods that crowded to either side, and finally faded from sight. My dread intensified until I considered making up some excuse to head home—stomachache, homework, fever.

But then the trees fell back, revealing a drab patch of sky. In another minute I could make out the parking lot and dull mass of cinder block that was the Deer Park Inn.

“Hillary’s here,” remarked Ali. And yes, there was his Dodge Dart by the front door. That made me feel better, and the sight of Deer Park’s venerable sign: a huge Sweetheart of the Rodeo, suspended between two worm-riddled telephone poles. Years ago during a storm the sign had been cloven right down the middle. Now only half of the cowgirl remained, one eye, one arm holding a lariat, one foot in one frilled cowboy boot; and beneath her what remained of the bar’s legend:

We crossed a parking lot awash with cigarette butts and beer bottles. Once behind the squat building you found more ominous detritus: spent sets of works like crushed centipedes, crumpled cellophane envelopes, scorched spoons, empty matchbooks. Two bikers sat on the steps drinking Budweisers. They watched us pass, eyes glazed, but said nothing. Entering I felt the customary frisson of excitement and blind terror; and was relieved to spot Hillary standing by the jukebox, resplendent in an old military jacket and embroidered turquoise shirt.

“Jeez, it’s packed,” shouted Ali.

Deer Park was so small it never took much to make a crowd. High school kids mostly; a few more bikers playing pool in the corner; some older kids who’d moved on to college a few years earlier, and either graduated or drifted back to town. Beer lights flickered through the cigarette smoke—Budweiser, Rhinegold, Pabst Blue Ribbon—and the jukebox was roaring “Jailhouse Rock.” There were Halloween decorations on the walls, leering witches and black cats. Over the bar hung a mounted stag’s head with a pumpkin nestled between its antlers. As we crossed the room people yelled out to us, and somebody began chanting—

“I got to piss,” Ali announced, and made a beeline for the bathroom. I turned to wave at Hillary. He was talking to a boy perched on top of the jukebox, a wiry figure with unfashionably short hair, dressed completely in black.

Hillary raised his beer. “Lit! C’mere—”

“Hang on!” I shouted, and headed for the bar. “Hey, Jim. What’s the deal? It’s so crowded—”

“Tell me about it.” Jim Charterbury worked at the Lifesaver factory down in Portchester and moonlighted at Deer Park at night. He pointed at one of the cardboard witches and shook his head. “Fuckin’ Halloween, man. Got the bikers howling at the moon. What’s going on with you?”

“Not much. Who’s that with Hillary?”

“Dunno, some kid just moved here. You want the usual?” I nodded and stuck a few crumpled bills on the bar. Jim poured two drafts, filled a shot glass with rail whiskey and dropped it into one of the mugs. I downed this, grimacing, and shivered.

“You look like my dog when you do that.” Jim slid me the other mug, put a stack of quarters alongside it. “Go crank up something beside Elvis Goddam Presley, will you? These bikers are driving me nuts.”

I took the quarters and my drink and elbowed my way through the room. By the time I reached the jukebox I wanted another beer.

“Hillary.”

“Hey, Lit.” Hillary handed his bottle to me. I took a swig—lukewarm, he’d been here for awhile—and glanced at the boy on the jukebox. “Jailhouse Rock” segued into “Born to Be Wild.” Behind the bar Jim gestured at me frantically, and I jingled the quarters in my fist.

“Hang on, I got to do something about this music”— I looked pointedly at the boy sitting on the old Seeburg. —“but first your friend has to move his ass.”

“Right.” Hillary made a low bow. “Jamie? This is Lit—”

I stared at him and nodded. I felt the weird clarity that came over me sometimes when I drank, when suddenly I could see how my friends would look when they were old: where the lines would fall alongside Hillary’s mouth, where his hair would thin at the temples. Other times it was an awful certainty that was like a rank taste in the back of my throat, the fear when I stared at Duncan dancing in Deer Park that something terrible was going to happen to him; the less numbing recognition that Ali was never going to make it as an dancer, no matter how much she still wanted to. These were things I didn’t talk about anymore. Ali laughed at me, and when I tried telling Hillary it made him nervous.

Standing there now I felt that same strange sense of recognition, and a profound, almost nightmarish, unease. I glanced at Hillary, but he just grinned. I swallowed, my tongue thick with whiskey and cheap beer, and looked at the boy on the jukebox. He wore black jeans low-slung on narrow hips, dirty black Converse high-tops, a moth-eaten black sweater.

“What are you, Johnny Cash?” I asked.

He met my eyes disdainfully. He was rangy, a few inches taller than me, with dark blonde hair cut so short you could see the shape of his skull, sleek as a ferret’s. That more than anything else made him seem otherworldly. Everyone I knew had long hair. The boys I hung out with, the boys I slept with, all resembled Hillary. Beautiful straight teeth courtesy of Doctor Tolmach, skin kept clear by weekly visits to dermatologists, shoulder-length hair thick and glossy as a golden retriever’s.

Not Jamie Casson. His skin was faintly sallow, and so fair I could see the tracery of capillaries across his cheeks, like a leaf’s fine-veined web. His eyes were huge, heavy-lidded; the flesh beneath them looked bruised. Great wounded eyes, of a startling turquoise, deep-set above a pug nose and thin, girlish mouth. The only person I’d ever seen who looked remotely like him was Lou Reed on the cover of Transformer, or maybe Louise Brooks in an old photograph I’d seen in the Courthouse Museum. I could imagine my parents approving of Jamie Casson’s hair, if nothing else.

But I thought he looked decadent and faintly sinister, perched there on the old Seeburg. The music rattled on; he continued to stare at me. When the song ended, he raised himself up slightly on his hands, then abruptly sat down, hard, on top of the jukebox. There was the scrape of a needle on vinyl, and “Born to Be Wild” started again.

“LIT?” From across the bar Jim Charterbury yelled. “What the fuck are you doing?”

I mouthed Sorry! Hillary and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. The boy on the jukebox tipped his head to one side and regarded me through slanted eyes.

“I’m Jamie Casson.” It sounded like a challenge. “What the hell kind of name is Lit?”

“Her name’s Charlotte, that’s what everyone calls her,” Hillary explained, then added conspiratorially, “She is the madhouse nurse who tends on me, It is a piteous office.”

“Don’t mess with her, man,” warned Hillary. “She’s got a temper, she’ll clock you if you mess with her—”

“Right,” I said, pretending to swing as Hillary pulled me close in a bear hug.

“—and she’s crazy,” he yelled.

“Crazy like a fox.” Someone poked me from behind and I turned to see Ali. She raised her eyebrows quizzically to Jamie Casson. “Umm…?”

“This is Jamie,” I started to say; but then I saw the two of them looking at each other. Like that Aubrey Beardsley black light poster Ali had up above her bed, “How Sir Tristam Drank of the Love Drink.” Two beautiful children etched in violet and dead-white, so intent upon each other that the air between them all but glowed; heavy stage curtain drawn at their backs but you already suspected what lay behind it.

“Well, hey, Jamie,” Ali repeated. “How’s it goin’?”

I shifted and knocked up against a table. Bottles rattled; Hillary rolled his eyes.

“Sasquatch,” he said, looking at my boots. I blushed, but no one else had noticed. Beside me Ali had drawn back into the shadows. Her amber eyes were half-closed, but already I could see the faint glister of desire there like a burgeoning tear. I looked away, embarrassed.

“Jamie Casson,” Hillary went on, leaning over to drape an arm around Ali. “He just moved up from the city. His father’s doing something up at Kern’s place.”

“Oh yeah?” said Ali throatily. “So you want a beer, or—something?”

I glanced at Hillary, to see if he was taking this in. Because this was nothing like witnessing love at first sight; more like watching a pair of cars approaching each other way too fast on a lonely stretch of old Route 22, and being too paralyzed with fear to yell for help.

“Great,” I muttered. I edged toward Hillary, wanting his opinion on this. There was a thunk as I bumped against a chair, and with a clatter it toppled onto Hillary’s feet.

“Ow—god damn it, Lit!”

Ali laughed. “Man, you are such a klutz!”

Only Jamie said nothing; just looked up and for a long moment held my gaze. Light blazed from the jukebox, making him seem washed-out and insubstantial, the shadow of another figure I couldn’t quite see. There was something odd about the way he looked at me. His pale eyes were questioning, almost pleading, as though he was waiting for me to speak. But I felt awkward and ugly in my heavy boots and Hillary’s old jacket. So I just stared back, challenging him to recognize me as something besides Hillary’s clumsy best friend.

Finally, “I got to get back,” Jamie said. He swung off the jukebox, ambled to a table and hooked a worn suede windbreaker onto his thumb. “I’m broke, anyway…”

I felt a pang, until Hillary nodded. “I’ll give you a lift. Lit? You want to come? Ali?”

I nodded, hurrying to the jukebox and sliding in the quarters Jim had given me. “Yeah—I’ll meet you at the car—” I punched in a half-dozen songs, downed a beer that had been abandoned on the old Seeburg, and went to join them in the parking lot.

The rain had stopped. The sun was going down in a smear of orange and black, and a small crowd had gathered on the steps, passing joints and bantering. Duncan Forrester and his girlfriend Leenie, Christie Smith, Alysa Redmond: the usual suspects lowlighting with bikers and trying to score. If the cops ever decided to bust up Deer Park, the papers would have a field day; there were enough Famous Children at that dive to fill an inch of column.

“Charlotte!” Duncan shrieked, throwing his arms around me. “Don’t say you’re leaving—”

“Ouch!” I cried, wriggling free. Duncan was skinny and lank-haired, with a hatchet face that was so enormously improved by stage makeup he’d taken to wearing it on weekends, whether or not he was in a show. Even more incongruous was Duncan’s voice, a rich baritone that (in my father’s words) could charm the teeth from a snarling Doberman. When he’d played Billy Bigelow in Carousel last year, entire busloads of cheerleaders had wept during his death scene. “Dammit, Dunc, that hurts. I got to catch a ride with Hillary.”

Duncan looked stricken. “C’est terrible,” he cried. “How will we have any fun without you?” Last summer, someone had told Duncan he looked like Marc Bolan. Since then, he’d affected a ridiculous accent along with Yardley midnight blue eyeliner. “C’est impossible—”

“Oh, try.” I licked my finger and wiped a blue smudge from his cheek. “God, you’re a mess, Dunc. See you—”

I hurried to where Hillary’s decrepit car was parked beneath a tree. Ali and Jamie stood sharing a cigarette, while Hillary swiped yellow leaves from the windshield.

“You always lived here?” Jamie dropped the cigarette. We all nodded. “Man, I don’t know how you can stand it.”

“It’s not so bad.” Hillary slid into the front seat and began sorting through a pile of eight-tracks, adding, “You just need the right attitude.”

“And a ton of money,” said Ali as she swung in beside Hillary. “And good teeth.”

“Fuck that. This place creeps me out.”

Ali looked bemused. “Deer Park?”

“No. This town—” Jamie got into the back, rolled down his window and stared to where Muscanth Mountain rose above us, mist lifting slowly from its slopes. “It’s weird. I don’t like it.”

I clambered in beside Jamie, pushing empty beer cans onto the floor. The eight-track roared on with considerably more power than the car, blasting Slade as we bellied slowly out of the lot.

“You’re up at Kern’s place, right?” yelled Hillary.

Jamie hunched down in the seat. “Yeah.”

We drove back into town, turning off Kinnicutt and onto the labyrinthine road that wove through the village and then up Muscanth Mountain. The dying sun cast a milky haze over the rough contours of the surrounding hills and forest. A kind of light I have only ever seen in Kamensic in autumn, light like powder shaken onto the landscape, mingled gold and green and a very pale opalescent blue. The air smelled sweet and slightly rotten. The old houses and ramshackle mansions took on a detached glamour, their stones and clapboards softened by a golden haze of oak leaves, the neglected lawns smoothed by distance. Pumpkins sat at the end of driveways alongside sheaves of corn, and on the front doors appeared those idiosyncratic emblems of Halloween in Kamensic—ugly little terra-cotta masks with gaping eyes and mouths, hung by bits of coarse twine. Crude versions of the traditional masks of comedy and tragedy, they appeared every year at the end of September in the Scotts Corners Market, along with jugs of cider and ornamental gourds and coils of hempen rope. Cub Scouts and the League of Women Voters sold the masks and donated the money to the volunteer fire department. I never knew where the masks came from. They were heavy lumpen things, with dried clay coils for hair and clumsy, almost primitive features—a tiny depression to indicate the nose, hollow eyes, gashed mouths. I hated them. They embarrassed me, and in some strange way they frightened me, too. Once at the Courthouse Museum I asked Mrs. Langford what they were for—

“Well, they’re for Halloween,” she said, frowning. She reached for her thermos of black currant tea spiked with sloe gin, poured herself a cupful, and sipped. “Just a local custom, that’s all. To show our allegiance to the gods, you know.”

And she fingered the brooch she wore on her breast, a pair of beautifully figured masks of gold. One mouth curved into a delicate smile; the other was less a frown than a grimace. No one would ever tell me more than that, nor why the masks were never saved from one year to the next but instead were broken.

“That is an idiotic superstition,” Hillary yelled once at his mother. This was a year or two earlier, when we were fifteen and Hillary facetiously wore a NIXON’S THE ONE! button to school every day. Natty stood in their backyard wielding a hammer and a mask wrapped in a tea towel, surrounded by neatly raked piles of leaves and burlap sacks.

“Oh, hush, Hillary,” she said impatiently. “Oooh, I hate this—” She winced and brought the hammer down. There was a muted crunch. The towel opened like a blossom, spilling shards of broken terra-cotta.

“Then why do you do it?” Hillary demanded.

“It’s good for the soil. Good drainage.” She began gathering the pieces into the towel, humming. “Hand me that basket, will you, dear?”

“Not until you tell me why,” Hillary insisted. “You don’t go to church, you don’t even vote—why do you mess around with those stupid masks?”

Natty ran a hand across her face, leaving a trail of dirt. “Oh, Hillary.” She turned and set the broken mask on the stone wall. “Look at Lit, she’s not complaining—”

“Yes I am.” I nodded emphatically, walked over to inspect the bits of terra-cotta. “They give me the creeps. I hate those things.”

“Really?” Natty looked genuinely surprised. She wiped her palms on the front of her baggy jeans, set her hammer on the wall, and started for the house. “Why ever would you hate them?”

We followed her into the kitchen. Natty heated some cider and we drank it, warming ourselves as she washed up at the sink. “You shouldn’t be afraid of the masks, Charlotte. You of all people.”

“Why? Because my father is scary Uncle Cosmo?”

“Noooo…” Natty dried her hands, looking very English with her sturdy pink face and pink Shetland sweater, her pants smudged with dirt. “Because you’re an actor, darling!” she said in her plummy voice. “Because you were born to it—”

“I wasn’t born to it,” I snapped. Only a week before I’d made a fool of myself in Arsenic and Old Lace. “I hate it, and I hate those things—”

“Oh, don’t say that, Lit.” Natty’s gaze widened. “It’s what we all live for—”

“It’s a job, Mom. It’s just a stupid job.” Hillary hunched over his cider and stared at her balefully. “I mean, you’re not doing Shakespeare—”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” said Natty. “Besides which, Lit’s parents, and your father and I, have done Shakespeare—”

“Oh, come on! Unk is starring in an Addams Family ripoff and you guys are—”

“It doesn’t matter.” Natty’s cheeks glowed bright red. “‘No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en, In brief, sir, study what you most affect.’”

Hillary sneered, “I’m not going to waste my life on goddam sitcoms—”

“Don’t you swear at me!”

“—and all this superstitious bullshit.”

Natty stood with her back to the counter, head thrown back. She looked as though she was about to burst into tears. I put my hand placatingly on Hillary’s and said, “Those masks just seem so tacky, that’s all, Mrs. Weller.”

“Tacky!” She sounded like Lady Bracknell contemplating a handbag. “Tacky? You children grew up on them.”

“Give me a break, Mom!” Hillary said, exasperated; but his fury was gone. “We grew up on takeout from Red Lotus—”

But Natty was already striding out of the kitchen. I slid off my chair and trailed behind her, and after a moment Hillary followed. We found her in a small, narrow, very cold room that had been the old farmhouse’s pantry, but which now housed Natty and Edmund’s books and theatrical memorabilia—tattered broadsheets, yellowed newspaper clippings in dusty frames, dogeaten scripts.

And plays, of course: the entire Oxford Shakespeare and all of Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde, as well as numerous lesser lights that had quickly burned out—A Sun for the Sunless, From Arcadia to New Rochelle, Madame Levinskey’s Hat. Except for the absence of certain titles, and the obviously British slant, the collection could have belonged to my own parents.

“Oh god, Mom,” Hillary moaned. “Look, you don’t have to—”

“Hush,” commanded Natty. She began squinting at titles. “Where is it…?”

I wandered to one corner and picked up an ancient publicity photo of Hillary’s father, playing the lead in a Manchester production of Charlie’s Aunt. I was always torn between embarrassment and sentiment by this old stuff, as though it had been our parents’ baby shoes. I stared at the photo, trying to find some resemblance to Hillary in the white-faced, pie-eyed performer wearing full matronly drag.

“You know,” I began thoughtfully, “you really do sort of look like—”

“Lit! Cut it out—”

“Here it is!” Natty crowed, and held up a book. “The Mask of Apollo. Your father gave me this for our anniversary, oh, almost ten years ago…”

She thumbed through it, raised an admonitory finger and began to read.

“‘ It is hard to make actors’ children take masks seriously, even the most dreadful; they see them too soon, too near. My mother used to say that at two weeks old, to keep me from the draught, she tucked me inside an old gorgon, and found me sucking the snakes.’”

She finished triumphantly. Hillary and I looked at each other, then burst out laughing.

“Oh, right, Mom! So where’re the snakes?”

Natty frowned, with a sniff replaced the book on its shelf. “Obviously you two are not old enough yet to appreciate the subtleties of our profession,” she said, and headed for the door. “Tell your father I’m going up to the market for some more milk.”

Now, as Hillary drove past our house I could see this year’s mask, a bland face with two small eyes poked above puffy cheeks and a surprised O of a mouth. My mother had draped ivy around it, carefully clipped from the back wall.

“Doesn’t it make you feel weird?” asked Jamie Casson.

“Huh?” I started. “What?”

“All this bizarre stuff…” In the front seat Hillary and Ali ignored us, continuing a longtime debate about David Bowie. “I mean; what the hell are those?”

Jamie pointed as we passed the cemetery. Strange stone animals stood guard over the oldest graves, their features worn away so that one could only guess their species: insect? bird? wolf? Clay masks leaned upon some of the mounds; others were extravagantly draped with wreaths of ivy. “It’s like The Exorcist around here…”

“I know what you mean.” I glanced at Ali, willfully oblivious to us, then leaned toward Jamie. “About Kamensic—”

I wondered if I could tell him what I was thinking. That the town frightened me, too, even though I’d grown up there; that sometimes when I drank I could see things in the faces of my friends, and hear the echo of something like distant music, the dying notes of a bell.

“It—it feels dark,” I said. “Even in the morning, it feels dark—”

Jamie stared at me, his pale eyes luminous, and slowly nodded. “Right. And the roads…”

He gestured at a dirt track snaking off behind the cemetery. It was marked as were all the streets in Kamensic, by a wooden fencepost topped with a long, arm-shaped signboard that ended in a pointing finger. “We came into town that way, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And from Kern’s place, you can see that road coming down the mountain.”

“Right…”

“But you don’t see this road—the one we’re on now. And this is a much bigger road.”

I shrugged. “Maybe the trees block it or something?”

Jamie shook his head. “No way. It’s weird. Like at Grand Central, you go to check out the stops up on the boards, and Kamensic isn’t even there. It’s not listed anywhere. Same thing with the train schedule—nada.”

In the front seat, Hillary glanced over his shoulder at us. “So?”

“So how the hell do people get here? I mean the train stops in town, right? There’s a train station, the conductor calls out the name—but if it isn’t even on the schedule, how do people know to come here?”

Ali rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. Anyone who needs to get here, gets here. It’s not like it’s fucking Brigadoon.”

“No! I’m right, I know I’m right!” Jamie jabbed at the window with one nicotine-stained finger. “Every time we come down that mountain it’s like a different road. Like when Hillary drove up before, we passed this cliff looking down on the lake. How come we’re not going that way now?”

“Because we’re going to murder you and dump your body in the reservoir,” said Ali. “Christ, where’d you move from, the South Bronx? Relax, will you? Enjoy the ride—”

Jamie sighed and leaned against the door. For a moment he looked very young: I could see where his chin had broken out, and how his fingernails were bitten down to the quick. “This is just a weird fucking place. You hear all kinds of stuff at night—”

Hillary laughed. “Those are called animals, Jamie.” He turned the car up the narrow switchback that ran along Muscanth’s southern face. “Like deer and things like that. Foxes.”

“Nothing dangerous,” said Ali. “No grizzly bears. No wolves.”

“Someone was killed here by a mountain lion,” I said.

“That was two hundred years ago, Lit.” Hillary made a face, then yelled, “Oops, there’s one now!” He swerved to avoid a chipmunk in the road.

“It’s still creepy,” said Jamie obstinately. “Plus it’s like Hollywood Squares, all these old actors. That weirdo lives here, the guy who’s Uncle Cosmo on Bar Sinister—”

Ali whooped. “Oooh, scary Unk!”

“That’s my father,” I said.

“Damn straight,” Hillary agreed heartily. “Her damn Dad. Never say a word agin’ him, Jamie—”

Jamie slumped down, defeated. “Oh, forget it. Anybody got a joint?”

“Nope,” said Ali. “Sorry.”

“Plus we’re almost at your place. There’s Bolerium—” Hillary tipped his head, indicating where the mansion’s gray walls gleamed faintly through the trees. “But I don’t remember where your driveway is, so tell me when we’re coming up to it—”

Jamie pointed behind us, at a road nearly hidden by the ruins of a stone wall. “That was it.”

“Whoa!” Hillary yanked at the wheel, frantically steering the car away from a pile of rocks. Jamie laughed.

“Hey, man, sorry. Watch that ditch there—”

The driveway was so narrow only one car could pass at a time. In places the dirt and gravel had been completely washed away, so that we drove on sheer bedrock. Hillary swore as the Dodge Dart scraped against stone and fallen branches.

“God damn, the muffler’s going to go—”

I squinted out the window. Twilight was falling quickly now, the autumn haze fading into a fine clear evening. To either side of the road a hedge reared, easily eight or ten feet high, a brambly mass of quince and dog roses and the tangled creepers of fox grapes. Birds darted in and out through gaps in the hedge. Winter birds: chickadees, blue jays, a raven carrying a dead vole.

“Wow,” I said. “Look—” But already it was gone.

“How much farther?” asked Hillary. “’Cause this car ain’t gonna make it…”

“Just up here.” Jamie frowned. “I think. Soon, anyway.”

He stuck his hand out the window and tugged at a grapevine. “Hey, check this out—”

A small explosion of leaves as the vine snapped. Jamie held up something like a plant from a Dr. Seuss book, all spiraling corkscrews and bright purple clusters.

“Cool!” said Ali. “Grapes!”

“Sour grapes, I bet.” Jamie pinched a violet bead, popped it into his mouth and grimaced. “Yech—”

“Let me try one—” Ali snatched the vine from him. An instant later she turned and spat out the window. “Ugh, that’s disgusting—”

The vine fell onto the floor, where I rescued it from between empty cans of Budweiser. The grapes were small but perfectly formed, and sticky with juice. I sniffed tentatively, inhaling their heavy, almost animal, musk; then bit into one.

“This one’s sweet.” Though the skin was slightly acrid—numbing, almost, like rubbing your lips with cocaine. I sucked it thoughtfully before swallowing it, tiny seeds and all.

“Here we are,” announced Hillary as the Dodge Dart humped over a fallen log. “Jesus, that road sucks. Can’t Kern pave it or something?”

“He’ll never pave it,” said Jamie disdainfully. “Mister Famous Director. He’s so cheap he squeaks.”

Ahead of us the corrugated drive gave way to meadow, a wide sloping expanse of knee-high grass. Patches of goldenrod nodded in the evening breeze, so bright a yellow it was as though the sun still shone in spots. Crickets buzzed softly. There was the intermittent drone of a power saw. We stepped out, blinking in the half-light, and Jamie peered into the distance.

“My father’s around somewhere,” he said as the power saw roared on again.

Ali yawned. “He mind if I smoke?”

“Hell no. My dad’s a really groovy kind of guy. A really groovy kind of asshole.”

Ali nodded. She pulled off her damp flannel shirt and tied it around her shoulders, smoothed the front of her leotard and looked around appraisingly. “Well, it’s a nice place.”

She grinned, a flash of white teeth with that odd little gap between them, and wandered away from the car. The boys started after her. Jamie said something to Hillary and Hillary laughed.

“Fuckin’ A, man…”

I hung back, shivering, and buttoned up Hillary’s old jacket. Underneath I wore a floppy white peasant blouse, intricately embroidered with long green tassels that dangled from the too-long cuffs. The blouse had seemed like a wonderful piece of exotica when I bought it at a head shop during the summer. Now it was nowhere near warm enough, and the thin cotton felt clammy against my breasts. I poked the tassels up into the sleeves, and hesitated before following the others.

Before me stretched the meadow. The scent of fallen leaves mingled with the fragrance of woodsmoke drifting overhead, and crickets chirped mournfully in the dusk. I glanced down, saw my boots coated with moisture pale and insubstantial as mildew. When I looked up again it was as though I were gazing, at the world through a fogged window. The outlines of everything were blurred. Ferns faded into a fallen rock wall, its stones indistinguishable from the trunks of trees. The trees themselves receded into a greater darkness. The wind rattled their bare branches and I stared, my heart thumping.

Because suddenly I wasn’t looking across a twilight field, but into a pool, black and depthless beneath a haze of mist. I no longer saw my friends moving in the distance, but only their reflections on the water’s surface, flattened images stirred by a cold wind that made the hair on my arms rise. Within the dark reaches other creatures moved, recognizable by their shadows: the flash of a tail beneath the surface, the flicker of something like a wing. The hum of insects faded into the ripple of water on stone. I took a deep breath and tried to focus on something familiar: Hillary’s jacket chafing at my neck, the way my boots pinched…

It was no good. Dizziness swept over me. The meadow’s autumn incense gave way to another smell, the dank odor of standing water, rotting wood. My mouth grew dry, my tongue hard and swollen. Something horrible seemed caught in the back of my throat, a viscous strand of water hyacinth or old-man’s beard. I coughed; the putrefying smell grew stronger, moist tendrils thrusting against my tongue as I struggled to cry for help. In front of me the air billowed, liquiscent.

I screamed then, but it was like screaming underwater. In the distance three bright shapes shivered and disappeared. I blinked. In front of me shone an unwavering sweep of pure blue, so beautiful that my eyes filled.

Because I recognized that color: it was the blue that shades the sky sometimes in your dreams, the blue you see when a kingfisher dives and for an instant everything before you coheres into one thing, bird lake sky self: and then is gone. That is the color I saw then, and somehow I knew that this was the sky, a truer sky than I had ever seen, and that I was gazing up into it from the bottom of the deep and troubled mere that was our world.

But before I could fully grasp this, or wake to find myself drowning, something moved above the surface of the water.

I thought it was a falling tree, its branches clawing at the sky. But it moved too slowly for a falling tree, and when it seemed almost to touch the water it halted. No leaves grew upon its tangled limbs, and I realized that they were not branches at all. They were monstrous antlers. What I had at first perceived as the tree’s grotesquely gnarled bole was a head—not a stag’s head, but a man’s. His staring eyes were huge, the irises strangely variegated. Tawny yellows, moss-greens, the murky brown of leaves at the bottom of a lake; the colors radiating from a pupil that was ovoid, like a cat’s. His mouth was parted so that I could see the moist red gleam of his inner lip and the tip of his tongue. As he gazed into the water I trembled, afraid that he would see me there.

But after a minute passed a deeper dread filled me—because he did not see me at all, and surely he should? Surely it was impossible that something so huge would not notice another creature scant feet in front of it?

Yet it did not, and as this realization grew in me, so did my terror. That I could be so insignificant, that it was possible for me to move through the world and have my presence as unremarked as that of a spider spinning its web in the tall grass. And like the spider I could be casually destroyed, my passing neither mourned nor noticed by this monstrous being. An arm’s-length away from me the horned man dipped his head closer toward the water’s surface, as though he would drink there. He did not, but hesitated an inch or so above it. The surface remained smooth, the glassy air untroubled. Only those daedal eyes moved very slightly within its great head, as though it gazed questioningly upon its own image.

I shuddered. Because there was something horrible in that gaze, a sort of mindless potency that made me think of water lilies choking a pond, infant voles squirming in their nest of cast-off hair. The odor of fetid water melted away. A sweetly aromatic smell filled my nostrils, oak mast and burning cedar, grapes warming in the sun. The immense figure swept its head from side to side, and I could hear its antlers slicing through the air. I was terrified it would catch my scent, but instead the creature turned. I saw it clearly against that elysian sky, its speckled eyes ravenous as an owl’s. Then it stepped away, moving in an odd, stilted manner. I caught a glimpse of its torso, arms smoothly solid, legs and chest and buttocks well-shaped as any man’s. Save only between its thighs, where its phallus mounted, grotesquely large and rigid as though hewn from wood. Once, Ali and I had found an image like this in one of Hillary’s books—an ithyphallic carving from ancient Greece, its face worn away to nothing save the faint indentations of eyes and lipless mouth; armless, legless, only its ludicrous member intact.

“Ooh, Daddy, buy me one of those!” Ali had squealed. But seeing this creature now I felt only horror, and panic lest it turn and catch sight of me.

It did not. Its long legs swung stiffly through the underbrush, its antlered head swung back and forth as slowly it receded from view. For one last instant I glimpsed its silhouette fading into the trees, and could almost have believed I imagined it: a strange manlike pattern formed by leaves and shadows and darting birds. But then I recalled its eyes, at once empty and devouring. I took a deep breath, as though struggling to wake from a dream, and stepped forward.

Around me the evening air shivered. I could feel it sliding like cool water across my face, and once more smelled fallen leaves, damp earth. In the distance an owl hooted. Something struck my upper leg and I looked down to see a cricket tumbling into the shadows at my feet.

“Lit! Move your ass!”

All was as it had been. In the tall grass Ali hopped up and down and waved impatiently. Beside her Hillary made faces, moving his arms semaphore-wise, and Jamie Casson stood atop a pile of stones with his shoulders hunched against the chill. I stared at them, frowning. My eyes ached the way they did after I’d fallen asleep in the sun, and I wondered if I had somehow fallen asleep, or experienced some kind of acid flashback.

But whether I had or not, I knew I was stuck with it. Whatever I had glimpsed—a man with leaves in his eyes and the terrible slow gait of an avalanche destroying a hillside—was etched upon my mind’s eye as clearly as my father’s face, or my own.

“Lit!”

“Hold on, I’m coming—” I began to wade toward them, getting soaked by wet goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace. “Did you—did you—”

I paused, feeling sick to my stomach. Did you see the world turn to water? Did you see a man with horns?

“You looked like you were trancing out there, Lit.” Hillary grabbed my shoulder. “You okay?”

“I—I think so. I guess I just sort of spaced or something.”

“Like, wow. Played Black Sabbath at 78 and saw God, right?” Ali leaned against Jamie, and he dropped his arm companionably around her. “Let’s go before you totally wig out…”

“I’m fine.”

Hillary continued to stare at me, finally shrugged. “If you say so.”

We walked across the field. Overhead the sky deepened from gray to violet. A few stars appeared. I forced myself to stare at them, and to count the seconds between a cricket’s song: anything to make the night seem mundane. I still felt shaky, and clung more closely to Hillary than usual. It felt weird to be here with his arm around me and the night wind biting into my neck; weirder still to look over and see Ali and Jamie the same way, as though they’d known each other for years instead of just an hour.

And it was strange to find myself this close to Bolerium again. I knew kids who used to come to the abandoned guest house, to get high or fuck in the empty bedrooms, but I hadn’t been here since I was seven or eight. Back then it was all neatly mown grass and stone walls, with hollyhocks and delphinium shading the cottage.

Now the guest house wasn’t abandoned anymore. At the edge of the overgrown field rose the stands of oak and hemlock and beech that comprised the old-growth forest covering Muscanth Mountain, one of the only virgin tracts left in the Northeast. Within their shadow stood the house, looking even smaller than I had remembered. Another one of Kamensic’s fey architectural artifacts, like the Mies van der Rohe mansion that had a tennis court on its roof, or the sixteenth century Austrian longhouse that had been reconstructed on Peter Nearing’s estate.

This was nowhere near as grand as either of those. It was someone’s idea of a French country cottage, built in the 1920s when the first wave of silent film stars settled in Kamensic. I remembered my parents talking about it during a visit to Bolerium. One of Axel Kern’s mistresses had lived here, before she had a nervous breakdown. It was an awful story—my parents absolutely refused to tell me what happened, but over the years I’d combed together most of the details. Drugs, and a murdered infant, or perhaps it was stillborn; the mistress found in the woods, a struggling fawn in her lap and her breasts bloody where the frenzied animal had bitten her. Her family hauled her off to Silvermire for electroshock and primal scream therapy. It was later rumored that she became a Jesus freak, before starting her own business selling real estate in Chappaqua.

The cottage had been unoccupied since then, and still looked it. Two gnarled lilac trees clawed at its walls, their branches shedding leaves like withered hearts. Layers of paint had been badly stripped from the front door, which was half-open so that you could hear opera blaring from inside. Beside the lilacs leaned a pair of rusted bicycles, and a huge and incredibly fake-looking sort of effigy.

“What the hell is that?”

I walked over and poked it—a gigantic green head, twice my height and made of molded plastic. Somehow it made the memory of the horned man less dreadful, more like the residue of a bad dream or bad drugs. It had round staring eyes and a grinning mouth filled with peg-like plastic teeth. Wormy green rubber spirals drooped from its head. A long red plastic tongue protruded from between its gaping mouth, flapping in the breeze like flypaper. On top there was an empty beer can and a wooden sign, with letters picked out in bottlecaps.

VILLA OF THE MYSTERIES

“That’s the gorgon,” Jamie replied, as though addressing an idiot. “Didn’t you see Hercules in the Underworld?”

“Uh, no.” I scrunched down to peer into its mouth. Water had pooled behind its grimace and become a trap for yellow jackets and daddy longlegs. “How disgusting. What’s it doing in front of your house?”

“My father designed it. He also did the monster bees in Empire of the Anguished. Also Sirena the Ageless in Blood Surf and the talking rocks in Satan’s Hammer. Ever see those?”

“No. Sorry.”

“No one did.” Jamie looked tragic. “That’s how come we’re living in this dump.”

He edged past me, shoving the half-opened screen door so that we could follow him inside. “Watch your step,” he said and stooped to pick up an electric drill. Ali and Hillary wandered past him, kicking aside a newspaper. “This place is a fucking bear-trap—”

“You’re not kidding,” said Hillary.

Inside smelled of mildew and marijuana smoke, the hot reek of carpenter’s glue and solder. The low ceiling was traversed by heavy beams hung with bundles of rope, a hacksaw, wire mesh. There was hardly any furniture—an old horsehair sofa and two unsprung armchairs. Sheets of plywood leaned against one wall; two-by-fours were stacked alongside another, and there were mason jars everywhere, filled with nails, screws, nuts and bolts, metal hinges. India-print bedspreads were pinned over some of the windows; in others you could clearly see the great webs made by golden orb weavers, and the spiders themselves poised in the center, like flaws in the glass. A big old wooden hi-fi console stood beside a crumbling fireplace, opera blasting from its torn speaker.

“Welcome to Hodge Podge Lodge,” said Jamie.

“I thought it was the Villa of The Mysteries,” said Ali.

“Uh-uh. That was from Medusa Enslaved.” Jamie crossed to the stereo, scowling. He turned off the opera and began flipping through a stack of records, finally found something and put it on. There was the crackle of dust on the needle, and then music, the same few notes picked out on a piano. “You guys hungry?”

We drifted into the kitchen, a dim room with rough-hewn cabinets and a few battered chairs. Hillary flopped down at a trestle table strewn with the remains of breakfast—a jar of imported marmalade, half-eaten toast, tin mugs of cold tea.

“Yeah, as long as I won’t catch something,” said Ali.

I plonked down beside Hillary, moaning. The beer and whiskey had burned off, and I could feel the beginnings of an early hangover. “I would kill for some coffee.”

“How about some ants?” He held up a piece of toast filigreed with tiny insects. “Mmm mmm good. Can you imagine Flo and Moe here?”

“No. I can hardly imagine me here.”

At the sink Ali clattered and smoked. Jamie filled a teakettle and put it on to boil, and I rested my head on the table. From the living room music echoed, and Hillary sang along in his reedy baritone—

And then I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew I was jolted awake by the teakettle’s piercing whistle, and a man’s voice booming.

“Why aren’t you kids in school?”

I sat bolt upright. Ali dropped her cigarette in the sink and looked around furtively, but Jamie only took the kettle and began to pour boiling water into a brown ceramic pot.

“Hello, Dad,” he said. “How’s it goin’?”

It was like a fast-forward glimpse of how Jamie would look in twenty years. Into the kitchen strode a wiry man in faded coveralls and carpenter’s belt heavy with tools, his shoulder-length blonde hair going to gray and receding from a high sunburned forehead, so that you could see the taut lines of face and skull. The same haunted eyes, mocking as Jamie’s; the same wry mouth. He walked over to his son and jabbed him with the blunt end of a screwdriver. As he passed me I caught the distinct smell of marijuana smoke.

“You young scalawag, you,” he said, peeking into the teapot. “Wait’ll the truant officer gets here.”

“It’s night, Dad.” Jamie gestured at the window. “See? Dark: night. No school.”

The man turned to survey the rest of us. “Well, well. Our nation’s youth in revolt. I’m Jamie’s Dad. Ralph Casson.” He nodded and shook my hand, then Ali’s, then Hillary’s, repeating his name solemnly each time. “Ralph Casson. Ralph Casson. Ralph Casson.”

I glanced at Hillary, but he just grinned. “Hi, Ralph. We met this morning.”

“Of course we did.” Ralph Casson slid the screwdriver back into his toolbelt and grabbed one of the enameled mugs. He sipped, made a face, and handed it to me. “So. Which ones are you? Debutante daughters of Miss Broadway 1957? Antonioni extras in town for the fall foliage tours?”

Ali found a windowsill wide enough to perch on and settled there. “I’m Alison. This is Lit—”

“‘Lit’? What the hell kind of name is that?”

“It’s for Charlotte,” I said, and felt myself reddening. “But nobody calls me that.”

I stared at my clunky boots. My hair cascaded into my face but I let it stay there, until I felt a hand brush it away.

“Charlotte. You’re right, I don’t think you’re a Charlotte.” I looked up into Ralph Casson’s frank, slightly manic gaze. He pulled his fingers gently through my tangled curls, let the hair fall back into my eyes as he drew away. “How about Thalia?”

“How about Bigfoot?” suggested Ali. Hillary and Jamie laughed, but Ralph shook his head.

“‘ A lovely being,’” he said, “‘scarce formed or moulded, a rose with all its sweetest leaves yet unfolded.’”

“Oh, bra-vo, Dad.” Jamie’s sarcastic voice drowned out Ali’s hoot. Ralph Casson winked at me, then crossed to the sink and began washing his hands.

“Watch your step, Jame,” he remarked over his shoulder. “You don’t want to get into bad company in this place.”

“Who’s bad company?” said Ali. Ralph turned and shook his hands, sending water over all of us.

“You.” He tilted his head at Ali, then me. “Her.”

Hillary pretended to be affronted. “What about me?”

“You?” Ralph regarded him disdainfully, then said in an arch, Glinda-the-Good-Witch voice, “You have no power here!”

“And they do?”

“Oh, Christ, please don’t get him started—” begged Jamie.

“Don’t you know the Mahamudratilaka?” Ralph raised one hand as though delivering a benediction. “‘ Go not with young women over twenty, because they have no occult power.’” He sighed. “Kids these days. What do they teach you?”

“You sound like my old man,” said Ali.

“Does he know the Mahamudratilaka?”

“Probably,” said Hillary. He sniffed at a glass of milk left over from breakfast, then poured it into his tea. “So what are you doing here? Fixing up this place for Kern or something?”

“Or something.” Ralph began rummaging among canisters and mason jars on the counter, finally settled on a large Earl Grey tin. He pried off the top and fished out a plastic baggie full of marijuana, opened it to remove a packet of ZigZag papers, and began rolling a joint. I quickly turned my attention to a jar of marmalade, trying not to look shocked. I knew adults in Kamensic who smoked (there were certainly enough who drank), and probably did other things as well, but I had never actually witnessed somebody’s father crumble a bud into a rolling paper. Ralph finished rolling the joint, lit it, and inhaled deeply.

“Hillary?” Smoke leaked from his nostrils as he leaned over to pass the joint to Hillary. Hillary waved it on. So did Jamie—he seemed wary around his father, not afraid exactly but tense.

But Ali took the joint and sucked it eagerly. I did the same. I actually hated getting high. It made me cough, and I worried so much about saying something stupid that I would just sit in paranoid silence until it was time to go home. But I was too self-conscious to refuse, certainly in front of Jamie’s father.

“Thanks,” said Ali.

“No prob.” Ralph leaned against the counter and ran a hand through his thinning hair. “So. Axel’s coming back this weekend. I gather you guys know him?”

Hillary cocked a thumb at me. “He’s her godfather.”

“Oh yeah? That’s cool. So you heard about the party, right?”

“No.” I took a spoonful of marmalade and sucked it. “What party?”

“There’s a big bash this weekend. Halloween party. I gather there’s gonna be a lot of the usual suspects around. Rock musicians. Pulitzer Prize winners. Norman Mailer, local riffraff. You see Axel much?”

I shrugged. “Not for a long time. He’s hardly ever here. I think my folks saw him, I dunno—maybe two years ago? He doesn’t stay in Kamensic much.”

“Why would he want to?” Jamie turned to Ali. “How come he’s not your godfather?”

“I wasn’t born with a caul.”

“What’s a caul?”

“It’s a joke,” I explained. “He and my father’ve been friends for a while, that’s all. I didn’t even know he was back in town.”

“He’s not, yet,” said Ralph Casson. “He’s getting the money together for Ariadne.”

Ali frowned. “Ari Who?”

“Ariadne auf Naxos. The sublime music that was playing when you arrived, before Jamie put on whatever the hell this crap is. It’s an opera. You guys know what an opera is?”

I laughed, but Hillary cleared his throat and warbled in his best falsetto—

Ralph gave him a thumbs-up. “Hope for the future! Yeah, that’s Axel’s new baby. He’s got some big backer in Italy, one of the DeLaurentises or somebody, wants to sink a bundle in it. That’s why we’re here—I’m doing the sets.”

Hillary and I glanced at each other. Anything connected with Axel Kern would be a plum assignment, and Ali’s father could have used the work. I stole a look at her. She seemed surprised by this revelation, but said nothing.

“Well, anyway, some kind of Big Do this weekend. Maybe catch some of you there.” Ralph stretched and began patting absently at the tools dangling from his waist. “Okay. Back to work. Jame, you seen my T square around here?”

“Nope.”

“What about my X-Acto knife?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Yeah, well, keep an eye out for ’em, okay?” He ambled across the room. “See you later, Hillary. Ali.” In the doorway he paused to flash me a grin. “Thalia.”

When he was gone Jamie sank into a chair. “God, I’m sorry.”

“He’s all right,” I said.

“Hey, he’s cool.” Ali gave Jamie a stoned smile. “Can he read auras? Harmony Shakti did that for me when I was over there last week.”

“Who’s Harmony Shakti?”

“Rachel Meyerson’s mother.” Hillary tilted his chair back and wedged his knees beneath the table. “A total fruitcake. Your father doesn’t seem like a total fruitcake.”

“Yeah, well, everything’s relative.” Jamie tapped the butter dish with the wrong end of a fork, his turquoise eyes a little too bright. “You oughta meet my mother.”

“Where’s she?” asked Ali.

“Getting her aura read somewhere down in Tennessee.” With a loud tink Jamie dropped the fork into an empty mug. “She’s part of an experiment in expanding the radical sexual and spiritual consciousness of our nation.”

Ali frowned.

“She dumped me and my father and joined a commune.”

“Cool,” breathed Ali. Hillary gave her a disgusted look.

“That’s a drag,” I said, but Jamie only sighed.

“I’m beat. I think I’ll crash for the night.” He eased from his seat, hands slung into his pockets. “Hillary, man. Thanks for the lift. Lynn—”

“Lit,” I said.

“—Lit. I’ll see you later.” He got halfway across the kitchen and stopped to look back at Ali.

“Hey,” she said, suddenly bouncing up, “where’s your bathroom? I gotta take a leak—”

“C’mere, I’ll show you.”

Hillary and I watched them go. We waited for Ali to return, but after a few minutes Hillary said, “I think they’ve gone to look at his etchings.”

“His aura.” I brushed the hair from Hillary’s eyes, and pointed at the front door. “Come on. I’m pretty beat, too.”

We went outside. Above us stars blazed, and the wind was no longer chilly but downright cold, sending acorns rattling down from the trees. The sound made me think of the horned man and I shivered, buttoning my jacket and wrapping my arms around Hillary.

“Well, gee, Charlotte.” He gave me a rueful smile and drew me close. “Isn’t it nice to make a new friend?”

“And his groovy asshole father.”

We got into the car and I looked back at the cottage. All the windows were dark; the front door was shut. But as we pulled away Ralph Casson emerged. In one hand he held a hammer, swinging it lazily back and forth. The other cradled a long two-by-four like a shotgun. When he saw us he waved, raising the hammer in a triumphant pose.

“All power to the People’s Party, Comrades!”

“Right on,” hollered Hillary. The Dodge Dart groaned as it crept away, and crickets flew up around us like water spraying from a ditch. When we reached the bottom of the driveway Hillary grabbed my arm and squeezed it hard, the two of us giving the mountain a quick backward glance as the car slammed onto the paved road.

“This will end in tears,” said Hillary. He smiled but his eyes were grim. “Big fat fucking tears.” He gunned the motor and drove much too fast the rest of the way home.

6. Things Behind the Sun

IN HIS STUDY, BALTHAZAR Warnick stood in front of the window, gazing into the twilight of the Blue Ridge but seeing only the anguished face of Giulietta as she was led away by the agents of the Benandanti. When someone touched his shoulder he gasped, and held up his hand as though warding off a blow.

“Professor Warnick?”

He blinked. Beside him stood Kirsten Isaksen, the Orphic Lodge’s forbidding housekeeper. Her thin mouth was pursed, her customary scowl tempered with concern. “You have forgotten your supper, Professor. I’ve brought it up on a tray for you.”

Balthazar drew his hand across his eyes. “I’m sorry, Kirsten, I—”

“It is here.” Kirsten turned and busied herself with setting a heavy silver tray upon Balthazar’s desk, moving aside heaps of paper and a long, coiled parchment scroll. “Grillet laks med dill, also kurkkusalaatti. And please see that you eat it all, Professor, the cat is ill when you give her salmon. The dill is very fresh”— She picked up a yellow-green sprig and waved it admonishingly at Balthazar. —“and there is Tosca cake for dessert. And I am to remind you yet again that you have not performed the pharmakos.”

Balthazar nodded, composing himself. “Yes, yes of course. Thank you, Kirsten, thank you very much—” He pulled an immaculate green paisley handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his thumb with it, wincing as blood welled from the cut left by the orrery. “Dinner looks very nice, and yes, I promise, I won’t feed it to the cat ever again—thank you, that’s very nice, you can bring my coffee up in a few minutes…”

He escorted her into the hall, Kirsten towering above him. When they reached the head of the stairs, she turned. “The coffee is already made, you may get it for yourself. I am going to Front Royal to see a movie. Good night, Professor.”

Balthazar watched her go downstairs, waiting until her brisk footsteps echoed into silence. Then he allowed himself the luxury of a long and heartfelt sigh, and returned to his study.

The salmon was, indeed, very good—Kirsten was a famous if imperious cook—the new dill fragrant as clover, the Tosca cake perfumed with almonds and heavy cream. He tried to force Giulietta’s memory from his thoughts and focus upon the long and irredeemably tedious recitation that was the first rite of the pharmakos—a task he hated, and which it was always a good idea to be well fortified against. When he had finished eating, Balthazar diligently brought his tray down to the kitchen, murmuring apologies as the Lodge’s cat ran to meet him at the head of the stairs.

“I’m sorry, but you are very ill when I give you salmon. Please forgive me.” The cat regarded him through contemptuous yellow eyes before stalking out of sight.

Slowly, Balthazar made his way through the Orphic Lodge’s labyrinthine halls. Past rooms where stacks of books tottered beneath windows draped in velvet the color of claret and very old port, but smelling of myrrh and lemons; past rooms filled with blown-glass globes strung like drying gourds across the ceiling, globes which, if one peered into them, revealed tiny seashores aglitter with azure surf and crimson sails cast like confetti upon impossibly distant swells; through doors that opened without a touch as Balthazar’s shadow grazed their panels, and by other doors that in all his years he had yet to see inside; and last of all, through a corridor filled with monastically simple rooms all made ready for the annual autumn retreat.

Finally he reached the end of the east wing. He walked down the servants’ stairway to the kitchen. There he found a reassuringly utilitarian demesne, and hot coffee in the old electric percolator. His cup and saucer were set reproachfully beside it, along with a plate of Kirsten’s ginger cookies and another note—

Don’t delay! Even when prepared it is dangerous to postpone what must be done! He laughed. “Very well, Kirsten. I won’t delay…”

He poured his coffee, feeling the profound melancholy that always assailed him at the thought of the pharmakos, and looked up. High above one of the gleaming institutional stoves a plaque was suspended. Its legend swirled in gothic lettering, blue and gold and emerald green:

All things are Good with Good Men. The motto of the Benandanti, “the Good Walkers,” “Those Who Do Well.”

Though sometimes—this was one of them—Balthazar felt more like an unwilling gaoler than a good man. For several minutes he stood, sipping his coffee and watching the twilight deepen. At last he crossed to the kitchen door and stared outside. A short distance away there was a small declivity in the lawn, four or five feet across, and just beyond the shadow of the encroaching woods. In the middle of the hollow stood a pillar, man-high, thrusting up from the tangle of grass and weeds like an overgrown grave marker.

But it was no grave marker. It was a herm, a granite stone that was thousands of years old, filigreed with lichen and bird droppings. Its base was just wide enough that Balthazar could have wrapped his arms around it, and it narrowed very slightly toward the top. Words were carved up and down the column, some in ancient Greek characters, others in Latin, and the most recent—going back only a few centuries—in English.

The herm was crowned with a carven man’s face. Time had softened it, so that the features were blurred, the cheeks pocked and bearded with moss. One side of the nose had been chipped away. But you could still make out the deep-set, almond-shaped eyes and thin curve of its mouth, and see quite clearly the outlines of ivy twining through its hair and around the broken stubs of two small horns poking from its head. Once upon a time, and very far away, the herm had been venerated. More recently, like others of its kind, it had been thrown down by an angry mob of Puritans. The Benandanti had salvaged it and brought it here, where students on retreat thought it one of the Lodge’s myriad oddities, like the winged homunculi in Brother Vaughan’s study, or the housekeeper’s narwal tusk. Those impertinent enough to question Kirsten about the herm were told brusquely that it was a sundial.

But it was not a sundial. It was an oubliette, a prison; and Balthazar Warnick was its keeper. Now he stared out at the somber pillar and once again sighed, recalling Giulietta’s face and putting off his duty for one more minute.

“Ah, me…”

It had been warm enough that Kirsten had left open the door leading out onto the veranda. Moths fluttered against the screen, and he could smell damp earth where she had watered the rows of fuchsias in their hanging baskets. On its shelf an arm’s-length away, the kitchen Timex glowed faintly.

Crack.

Without warning the sound ripped through the kitchen. Echoes trailed after it throughout the Lodge like gunshots. Balthazar jumped, then raced onto the veranda, the screen door banging behind him.

Above the western mountains the clouds had darkened to black and violet. But directly overhead the sky was a strange flat silvery-gray that gleamed like falling rain. As Balthazar stared down onto the lawn he winced and shaded his eyes—the silvery light hurt, as though he gazed into an unshaded incandescent bulb. At the same time there was a weird murkiness to the light: it cast no shadows, so that when he tried to focus on individual objects below—a clump of hostas, the stone birdbath that Kirsten religiously filled each morning—he found them shadowed as by heavy fog.

But a fog that coruscated and gave off threads of metallic brilliance, and made a shrill sound as it did so; a fog that hummed. Sweat stung Balthazar’s eyes as he fought to see something in the deathly haze. The humming grew louder, but no matter how he struggled to find its source he could not. It seemed to come from everywhere, a horrible resonate note that made the air shiver, so that he imagined he could see individual atoms dancing like beads of water upon a red-hot stone.

And then he could no longer hear the note, but only feel it, a vibration that made his very bones tremble. The pressure in his ears became a spike driven through his temples. Around him the silvery air wheeled and sang, as though it were a pool that had been stirred by some great ship’s passing. There was a stifling smell; when he breathed he tasted burning leaves.

“What is it?” Balthazar screamed into the shining vortex; but could not hear his own voice. “What is it?”

And then an answer came to him. The roaring did not diminish, but it began to focus, so that he could track its source: a point some twenty yards down the sloping lawn. The whorl of silver light thinned like mist before the sun. The humming faded into silence. Balthazar took a deep breath and gazed out upon the lawn.

The last streamers of uncanny light were lifting. Overhead the night sky was a calm sweep of indigo strung with stars. Yet at the same time a faint glimmer still hung about the grass, so that he could see the shadows of tiny cloverheads, the serrated edge of a fern. The charred odor faded. A sweetly vegetative fragrance filled the air, a scent that made Balthazar think of fruit ripening and then rotting in the heat. When he swallowed, pollen rasped the back of his throat, and he coughed.

In answer, low laughter sounded from somewhere below. Balthazar looked but could see nothing but the tops of ferns moving as though stirred by the wind. Suddenly he cried out.

“No!”

He ran from the porch. Fingerlings of light flashed around him, and again he heard that soft mocking laughter.

“No,” Balthazar repeated, and stopped.

The herm had been destroyed. It lay upon the grass in two pieces, severed through the middle as though someone had taken an ax to it. A black streak ran across the granite’s coarse veining. Balthazar stooped to touch it. When he withdrew his finger, it was greasy as with soot. He sniffed, grimacing at the reek of sulphur, then stood and walked slowly around the fallen pillar.

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:

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.

7. Dancing Days Are Here Again

HILLARY’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.

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.

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.

In the middle of the night I woke. The crickets had fallen silent, and the night was given over to the wind. Just a front blowing in, but hard enough that the windows rattled and I could hear tree limbs rapping at the walls.

Hhhhhhhuuuhhh…

I pulled the paisley spread tight around my shoulders and held my breath, listening.

Hhhuuuu…

Dread seized me then—dread but also a sort of exultation, an unbearable longing. The realization that something was going to happen, was happening now.

This is a weird place…you hear all kinds of stuff at night…

I remembered how Jamie had looked sitting on the jukebox with light welling up around him like a wave; and the shiver of recognition when I realized I had never seen anything so beautiful, so solid, in my life.

Outside the wind rose louder still. With it there came another sound, the wail of a train making its way southward past the far shore of Lake Muscanth. I lay on my back and focused on the beating of my heart, the rhythm of my breathing: anything so as not to hear the wind.

The next thing I knew I was wide awake. Something had disturbed me, a sound like the nervous tapping of a foot. It came from within my room, and even in those first hesitant moments of wakefulness I knew absolutely what it was not—not the sound of water dripping, not a mouse moving within the walls, not one of my parents padding to the bathroom. This sound was at once more subdued and more insistent. There was a manic quality to it, like a restless child rapping for attention, but a child who has forgotten why she wanted your attention in the first place. I sat and listened, sleep falling from me, and waited for the sound to fade away.

It did not. Neither did it grow louder, but as the moments passed the rhythm of the tapping quickened. I could see nothing, not even the pale outline of my window. My breath came harder; I began to suck air through my mouth as loudly as I could, trying to drown out that sound. But I could not.

Nor could I look away. And very slowly I began to see something take shape within the corner of the room. The relentless tapping continued, but now I could see that the noise was connected to blots of darkness jumping within the gray, and tiny silvery sparks. The flickering interplay formed a pattern, and I had the terrible feeling that I should recognize it, that it should somehow make sense.

And then, in one awful flash, it did. The thing in the corner was a man. Not a man, but half a man, bisected down the middle so that I saw one side of its head, one arm hanging loosely beside its truncated torso and worst of all, one long pale leg hopping like a pogo stick. The jots of black I had discerned were its eye, its rib cage, the broken crescent of its mouth. There was no hint of carnage. No bloody shreds of flesh, no shattered bones.

And somehow that was worst of all. That this cloven thing should be within a few feet of me, jigging mindlessly as a scarecrow in the wind, for no reason whatsoever.

But it was not mindless. Because now the asymmetrical features of that face began to come into focus. A swollen scar of an eye like a bullet wound; the white triangle of its bifurcated chin; a lopsided mouth curving into a leer: all cohered into the dark reflection of a face I knew. The eye blinked; the mouth grinned. The rhythm of its movement grew suddenly, obscenely clear as I recoiled on the bed.

“No—”

It was Axel Kern. His grin widened, a poisonous quarter-moon. I thrashed across the bed until my back jammed against the wall. The black shape bobbed up and down, up and down. With each moment it drew closer to me, until I could smell it, animal musk and the odor of charred leaves. It was close enough now that it could touch me: its single arm lifted, fingers knotted and dark as it reached through the darkness.

“Lit…”

I screamed and kicked out. A hand tightened around my ankle, nail and bone biting into bare flesh. With a shriek I tried to fling myself from the bed. Then there was light everywhere, and someone shaking my shoulder.

“Lit! Lit, wake up!”

“No—god, let go—!”

“Lit!”

I looked up to see my father in his pajamas, hair awry, eyes wide but bleary with sleep. “Lit—are you all right?”

“No! No, there’s—”

But of course the room was empty. My India print spread lay where I had dropped it. Beside it Greek Plays for the Drama crowned a heap of dirty clothes and record sleeves. My father stared down at me, his face torn between concern and annoyance. “Charlotte. I think you had a nightmare.”

“Yeah…” I took a deep breath. “Yeah, I guess I did.”

He glanced pointedly at the clock. It read three-twenty. “Well, your mother has a six o’clock call. I’m going back to bed.”

“Right. Sorry, Dad, sorry…”

He stumped back to his room, switching off the light as he left. I watched him go, then sat up in bed watching the numbers flip over on my digital clock while the window went from black to violet to gray. When I woke, the room was filled with light, and my father was pounding on the door, shouting that I was going to be late for school again.

“Oh, fuck,” I groaned. I started from my bed, and stopped.

Something was strewn across the bedroom floor. At first I thought they were leaves, but no—they were the pages of a book, torn and scattered everywhere. Between them were heaps of seed-pods, round and dull brown, almost black, with a tiny raised ridge around the flattened top. I scuffed across the floor, pods rolling beneath the bed. At the window I stopped.

There were more pages here than elsewhere, more dry husks. I crouched, sifting through the mess until I found the book’s cardboard jacket. Its spine was split, the cover scorched so that the twin faces of Comedy and Tragedy were almost unrecognizable.

Greek Plays for the Theater

“Damn it,” I whispered.

I stood and kicked angrily at the pages, snatched one as it came fluttering back down. It was blackened from top to bottom. As I held it, the paper shivered between my fingers, then crumbled into ash. Only a fragment remained, like the damp impression of a leaf, the letters jagged and black as though stamped upon my hand—

Join us.