Black Light

8. How Do You Think It Feels

AT BREAKFAST THAT MORNING I couldn’t eat; only sipped at some orange juice while my father read the Times.

“You’ll miss the bus,” he said, reaching for his coffee.

I nodded and stared into my glass. I’d made a quick job of cleaning my room, shoving the torn pages into the wastebasket and sweeping most of the seedpods under the bed. Now I felt exhausted and depressed. I’d never been very good at shaking off bad dreams, and last night’s clung to me like a fever. I considered pleading sick and going back to bed, but the thought of being alone in my room was worse than almost anything else I could imagine—except, perhaps, seeing Axel Kern that night at his party.

“Lit?” My father frowned over the top of the Arts and Leisure section.

“Okay, I’m off,” I sighed. “Don’t worry, Hillary’ll drive me—” I kissed him, grabbed the canvas bag that held my schoolbooks and started for the door.

“Your mother won’t be home this afternoon.” My father put down the paper and looked after me, his mournful face unusually pensive. “I have to go down to the city to see a casting agent. Then we’re going to meet your mother for dinner with the Kingsleys in New Canaan, and then we’ll all go over to Axel’s for this party. What are your plans, Lit?”

“I dunno.” I hesitated. I would never admit it, but the thought of going to Axel’s party without my parents now frightened me. “Actually, I’m not feeling so hot. I was thinking that maybe—”

My father gave me Unk’s best bone-freezing stare. “I want you there tonight, Lit.”

“But—”

“No ‘buts.’ Be there.”

“Right.” I nodded, defeated. “I’ll just go to Ali’s after school, I guess. Or Hillary’s—”

“Not with his parents gone; not if we’re not here. Call us from Ali’s house if you need a ride up to Bolerium. We expect to see you there this evening, Lit.”

“Yeah.”

I shouldered my bag and headed outside. It was a chill morning. The sky was dark and forbidding; to the east a thin line of blue was eroded by swiftly moving clouds. Alongside the road the trees were bare, save for a few oaks clinging to tatterdemalion crowns. I went next door, slowing to walk through the leaves in front of Hillary’s house. My unease was now fullblown dread: worse than when I listened to one of Ali’s ghost stories, worse than when I took the SATs, worse than anything I could remember. I knew this was ridiculous, but I couldn’t shake it. I stopped and stared down at the leaves, nudging them around to see if I could find the mask Hillary had tossed there the night before. There was no sign of it, and finally I gave up. I let myself in the front door and found Hillary in the kitchen beside the stove.

He raised a spatula in greeting. “Hey, Lit. French toast?”

“Yeah.” I poured some coffee and peeked through the window at my house.

“What’s going on?” Hillary dropped a chunk of butter into a skillet. “Is he, like, watching?”

“I don’t know. Wait—”

I pointed at my father striding out the side door of our house. He wore a long black greatcoat that flapped behind him in the wind, and even from this distance I could see his saturnine face scowling furiously as he swiped leaves and fallen twigs from the car windshield. Against the backdrop of stark trees and lowering sky he looked faintly threatening, like a wicked parson.

“He’s going now,” I whispered, as though my father could hear me. He clambered into the old VW squareback and backed it out into the road. I held my breath, fearful that he’d see Hillary’s car still in the drive and realize I hadn’t left. But he didn’t; only turned and headed off for the village train station. “He’s—gone.”

“Ali called.” Hillary handed me a plate swimming with maple syrup. “She wants to go to the Elephant’s Trunk. She can’t cut Interdisciplinary again, so I told her we’d pick her up afterward.”

I slid behind the table and ate while Hillary cleaned up. He seemed pensive, even brooding, and with his usual offhand grace had dressed the part—an old tuxedo shirt of Edmund’s tucked into his patched and embroidered jeans, a dark blue naval officer’s jacket. I watched him stalk across the kitchen, loading the dishwasher and gathering his books for school. I said nothing, recalling his anger last night. But I felt uncomfortable—it wasn’t like Hillary to stay mad about anything. When I finished eating we went out to the car, still without speaking, and drove to pick up Ali.

“I need earrings if we’re going to this thing tonight,” she announced as she clambered into the front seat beside me. She shivered dramatically. “God, it’s cold.”

Hillary eyed her outfit—short-sleeved black leotard, black ballet slippers, bell-bottom jeans so frayed her skin showed through. The same thing she’d been wearing yesterday, as a matter of fact. “Maybe you should put some clothes on.”

“Screw you.”

Ali leaned her head against my shoulder. I wrinkled my nose. She smelled of smoke and patchouli oil and something I didn’t recognize, a sweetish, faintly chemical odor. “Didn’t you go home last night, Ali?”

“Uh-uh. I crashed at Jamie’s.” She yawned, and I felt a stab of hopeless envy, seeing her in bed with Jamie Casson. She had dark circles under her eyes; her lips looked swollen and bitten, and there was a tiny greenish bruise on one arm. “You guys didn’t bring me any coffee, did you?”

Hillary snorted. “Yeah, sure, Ali! And pancakes, too! No, I didn’t bring you coffee. Wasn’t there any at his place?”

“No. Ralph won’t buy coffee. He says it’s, like, a capitalist plot to steal money from the Aztecs.”

“The Aztecs?”

“Or something,” said Ali defensively. “Gimme a break, I feel like shit.”

“That’s good. Cause you look like shit,” I said, and ducked as she elbowed me.

Hillary drove us to the Elephant’s Trunk, a head shop in Mount Kisco, where Ali bought a little brown vial of amyl nitrite (HEART-ON EXOTIC FRAGRANCE, the label read) and I tried on an orange-and-green paisley Indian print dress. It was low-cut and calf-length; long shirred sleeves, flowing skirt, no tassels.

“What do you think?”

Great, Ali mouthed. She sat on the floor, eyes huge as teacups, the open vial cupped in one unsteady hand. “Grrr—unh…”

She slumped against the wall. Ignoring her, Hillary stepped over to examine me. He frowned. “It’s sort of a funny color. It’s sort of two funny colors.”

“It’s orange,” I said.

“Well, yeah, that’s what I mean. It’s sort of a weird shade on you. I mean, isn’t it sort of a weird color on anyone, orange and green? I thought you were going with your mother—”

I gave him an icy look. “What, to Lord and Taylor? I like it—” I ran my hands over the bodice. “It’s cool.”

“Don’t listen to him, it’s great.” Ali got up and stumbled toward me. “And it looks really cool with those boots. But you need a necklace or something. C’mon.”

I picked out a pukka-shell necklace and a handful of silver bracelets so thin and supple it was like wearing a Slinky on my wrist. For herself Ali chose a pair of very large earrings, Mexican silver inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and shaped like peacock feathers. Hillary flipped through a bin of used albums, every now and then holding one up for me to see.

“Wow. In the Wake of Poseidon. Do I have that, Lit?”

“Dunno.”

“What about this: Supersnazz.”

Ali cozied herself back onto the floor and put on her new earrings. “Cool, huh? Hey, you want some of this?”

She unscrewed the vial of amyl nitrite and inhaled loudly. Behind the register the store manager looked up, glaring.

“Oh, great,” Hillary groaned. He shoved the album into the bin, turned to the manager, and smiled apologetically. “Boy, she sure loves that exotic fragrance, huh? I was just going to—”

“I said not in here. Get her out,” the owner commanded, pointing at the door. “Now.”

We went. “I don’t believe that stuff is legal,” Hillary fumed as he herded Ali into the car. “It can’t be good for you.”

“It’s not,” I said. “The next sound you’ll hear is her cerebral cortex hitting the floor.”

Ali laughed. Her pupils had shrunk to black specks and her wide tawny eyes looked gormless as a kitten’s. “Yeah. And the sound after that will be Lit picking it up again.”

Hillary shoved in an eight-track and started the car. “You’re a fucking mess, Ali.”

“Sure, man. But I’m cute.”

It took us most of an hour to get back, winding along old Route 22 through the maze of backroads and villages threaded into the foothills of the Siwanoy Mountains. Ali and Hillary fought over the eight-track.

“Black Sabbath.”

“T. Rex.”

“Black Sabbath.”

“T. Rex.”

“Duck season.”

“Wabbit season.”

“Duck season—”

“You are both total idiots.” I stuck my head out the window, trying to escape from flying tapes and Ali’s cigarette smoke. “Next time I’m walking.”

“Forget it, we’ll fucking compromise—”

Hillary punched off the tape player and fiddled with the radio dial. Finally he homed onto a faint signal.

Ali joined in with her hoarse sweet alto, and after a moment Hillary did the same—

Then the signal faded, and the car filled with the soft hiss of dead air. I stared out at the late-autumn vista— golden hills, lowering sky—and recalled Hillary’s stricken voice the night before.

What the hell does it mean, Lit? What does it mean?

I rubbed my arms. Ali lay passed out on the seat between us, her head on my lap and her fist jammed up against her mouth. Now and then her leg kicked reflexively against his, and Hillary would gently push her away. I fixed on that tiny star-shaped bruise at the crook of her elbow, and tried not to think of Jamie Casson kissing her there.

“What is it, Lit?” Hillary said at last.

I shook my head. I had felt uneasy for so long it was like a dull pain in my breast, or a throbbing headache; not something that could possibly come from outside me. I gazed out the window a long time before answering.

“I—I don’t know. Just this—”

I gestured at the trees gone glimmering gold and crimson beneath tungsten clouds, the leaf-strewn river winding alongside the highway. I had always loved this stretch of the road, the secret knowledge that Kamensic Village was crouched behind that last dark curve of the river. Now I could hardly bear to look at it.

“All this…” I said numbly.

Hillary stared straight ahead, after a moment nodded. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

No you don’t, I thought. None of you even have a fucking clue.

I glanced down at Ali snoring in my lap. Then with all my strength I slammed my hand against the door.

“Lit!” cried Hillary. “What the hell are you doing?”

A long red welt immediately bloomed across my knuckles. Ali opened her eyes to gaze at me blearily, then dropped back to sleep. Hillary glared. “Lit—”

“This fucking life—this place, you’re just bored here but I feel like it’s killing me—”

Hillary reached across Ali’s snoring form and tried to take my hand, but I pulled away. “You know it’s true, Hillary. It’s not so bad for you—everyone loves you, everyone loves her—”

I poked at Ali, still oblivious, and Hillary sighed.

“I know,” he said. “But it’s not that long now. Probably you’ll miss it when you’re gone—”

“Never. I will never miss it. If Kamensic fell into the goddam river I wouldn’t shed a single tear—”

“Oh, come on. You’d miss me. And you’d miss Livia, and Unk—”

“I’m sick of Unk. What Jamie Casson said last night was true—all these has-been actors—”

“DeVayne Smith just won the Oscar, Lit. And Mariel Gillian’s doing that new Beckett one-act—”

“But it doesn’t matter. What difference does it make, even if they were all Shakespeare? Which they’re not— my mother’s in a goddam soap opera and my father is Uncle Cosmo—”

“Give him a break, Lit! Unk played Toby Belch last year at Avalon—”

“It’s all bullshit.” I set my mouth and stared straight ahead. “Bullshit. Eighteen million versions of Oedipus Rex, but it’s always the same goddam play, it’s been the same goddam play for two thousand years—”

For the first time Hillary looked pissed off. “So stop talking about it and write a goddam new play, Lit.”

“How can I possibly write anything here?”

“Maybe if you were sober once in a while…”

“Fuck you, Hillary. Just fuck you.”

“‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks—’”

I turned away. Outside railroad tracks appeared alongside the Muscanth River, so that I had a momentary vision of three parallel trajectories, road river rail, all arrowing into the heart of the village. A few minutes later, Kamensic itself came into view.

“That toddlin’ town,” Hillary sang to the tune of “Chicago.” In my lap Ali chimed in sleepily.

“Kamensic, Kamensic my home town—”

I stared resolutely out the window. And, despite myself, shivered at the sight of it—snowy church spires and courthouse bell tower, bare chestnut trees and white-gabled library all rising from the autumn haze like the memory of the drowned village that lay beneath the reservoir. Even after all these years, it still took my breath away.

Not because it was beautiful. Though it was, deceptively wholesome as a Currier and Ives print. Shops neatly tended, dogs sleeping peacefully on the sidewalk, a young boy leading a black horse alongside the railroad tracks. Healy’s Delicatessen, where lemons bobbed like turtles in a huge vat of iced tea; the library with its incongruous sphinxes standing guard beside the steps; and, hidden behind a bend in the road, the black depths of Lake Muscanth.

And everywhere the trees—four- and five-hundred-year-old oaks and ancient beeches, huge dark hemlocks and the pair of massive holly trees that fronted Mrs. Langford’s tiny cottage beside the courthouse. Like Bolerium they seemed to protect Kamensic, that phantom village, so lovely that even now I ached to see it.

Yet what haunted me was not its beauty, but the way it shut me out. For all that I had lived there my entire life, for all that every face that passed me on the sidewalk would greet me by name, remember my birthday—and not just my birth date, but the weather on the day I was born—still somewhere within the town there was a mystery.

And it was a secret kept from me. I was convinced of that, the way some children believe themselves to be adopted. What I had seen at Jamie Casson’s house proved it. A man with living trees in his eyes and horns sprouting from his skull; and for all I knew everyone in Kamensic had seen that creature, and had never bothered to tell me about it. So like any cast-out lover, I longed more than anything else on earth to hold Kamensic within my embrace. But the village only looked deep into the lake that mirrored it; and, dreaming, saw Bolerium’s decaying horns and turrets, and the shadows of the mountain.

A rattle as Hillary’s car bumped over the wooden bridge spanning the river, willow leaves like calligraphy upon its surface. Ali sprawled across the seat, her head bumping my knee.

“See?” she crowed. “My brain’s falling out, but Lit’s catching it!”

“Lucky for you,” said Hillary with a touch of bitterness. “I’m hungry. You guys want to eat?”

Ali was up like a shot. “Deer Park.”

“Okay with me. Lit?”

“No…” I shifted, trying to get comfortable. “Damn it, Ali, move over.”

“But aren’t you hungry?”

“No.” I couldn’t bear the thought of being in that car another minute; couldn’t bear the thought of sitting with Ali or Hillary or anyone else.

“Hey, suit yourself—”

The car scraped against gravel as we passed the courthouse museum. And suddenly I knew where I wanted to be.

“Listen—drop me off here, okay?”

Ali grimaced. “I’m not going to Healy’s—”

“Me neither. I’m going to see Mrs. Langford.”

“Mrs. Langford? Now?” Ali looked at me as though I had just opted for a life of chastity, but Hillary silently angled the car in front of the courthouse.

“I just feel like dropping by. Plus I ate about five hundred pieces of French toast, so I’m not hungry. Here, keep this until I come over later—”

I shoved the shopping bag with my new dress into her lap. Ali made a face. “How’re you gonna get there?”

“I’ll hitch or something. See you—”

She waved as I bounced from the car, but Hillary said nothing; only pulled slowly back into the street. I waited to see if he’d look back. He didn’t, and I turned away.

The courthouse was older than anything in the village save Bolerium. When Bloodjack Warrenton burned the town, his men had inexplicably left it standing—Acherley Darnell in his Northern Sketches and Fireside Tales quoted a Leftenant Adams as saying it was “occupied by evil sprites.” Later, after Warrenton’s mysterious death, Polly Twomey was tried (and acquitted) there, and Darnell himself met his death in front of the small clapboard building. On the gallows he recited the First Pilgrim’s speech from The Duchess of Malfi, bringing tears to the eyes of those who convicted him as he cried, “Fortune makes this conclusion general, All things do help the unhappy man to fall,” and fell.

By the early 1900s, all cases were tried in county court fifty miles to the south. The Kamensic courthouse fell into disrepair, its cupola home to hundreds of little brown bats and its doleful bronze bell silent.

All that changed when Mrs. Langford arrived. Stage name Theda Austin, neé Hopiah Lee Magillicuddy, known as Hoppy to her friends—Mrs. Langford had been a celebrated stage actress, and the original Stella Dallas back in radio days. She and her husband, the actor Lawrence Langford, retired to Kamensic in 1931. Lawrence continued to work intermittently until his death in 1972 at the age of 101, but Hoppy took her retirement seriously. She devoted herself to reviving the courthouse, first getting its name on the Register of Historic Places, then raising the money to have it restored and turned into a museum. As such, it attracted perhaps a dozen visitors a year, who would push open the decaying screen door and be immediately absorbed by a zenlike torpor. I walked in now, the door wheezing shut behind me, and shaded my eyes against the steely light that spilled down from the clerestory windows.

The scrubbed pine floors and rows of wooden benches gave the place an air of prim sanctity, as did the portraits of gimlet-eyed magistrates on the whitewashed walls. This was offset somewhat by the very elderly woman in black velvet tam o’shanter and lime-green houndstooth tweeds who sat in the judge’s dock, peering through heavily bandaged spectacles at a newspaper. Beside her perched a voluminous carpetbag that in happier days had carried Mrs. Langford’s beloved toy poodle, Tinker. At her elbow a transistor radio leaned against a thermos. I could just make out the carnival strains of “C’mona My House” segueing into the Bossanova.

“Hello, Mrs. Langford? It’s Lit—”

“Is that Charlotte?” Mrs. Langford lifted her head, blinking. “Hello, hello…” She waved vaguely in my direction, then swatted at the radio, which gave a faint shriek and fell over. “I hate this music, it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever…”

I picked up the radio—like her glasses, thickly swathed with masking tape—and switched it off. “How are you today, Mrs. Langford? Any customers?”

“Oh, fine, I’m just fine. I don’t think we’ll see anyone today. Didn’t you hear? Axel Kern is coming back tonight—” Her vibrato rose thrillingly and she gave me a look of utmost rapture; then slumped back into her seat, shaking her head. “I just don’t know what will come of it, after all this time.”

“What do you mean?”

She gave me an inscrutable look, lifted a hand clattering with costume jewelry and draped it suggestively upon a cashbox with a neatly-lettered index card taped to its lid.

“I think you’re over twelve now?” she said hopefully.

I laughed. “I’ll be eighteen in March—” and put a dollar into her palm. Her hands shook slightly, and I had to stop myself from helping her as she fumbled with the cashbox.

“Eighteen.” Mrs. Langford was eighty-six. “When I was eighteen I was playing Maria in Twelfth Night. It was a small part but I stood out. That’s how Larry noticed me, you know—I stood out.” She lifted her trembling hand in the gesture I recognized from her old publicity stills. These invariably showed the Amazonian Theda Austin cowering unconvincingly before the menacing villains played by her slight husband. Now her face was creased as crumpled paper and blotched from sun and drink. Her kohled eyes rolled skyward as she cried, “Never be afraid to stand out, Charlotte.”

With a sigh she shut the cashbox, and tapped her thermos with a gnarled finger.

“Darling, would you mind opening that for me? My hands are bad today, the arthritis you know, I think I need to take a little something hot—”

“Sure.” I unscrewed the thermos. A wisp of steam emerged, fragrant with the scent of black-currant tea and sloe gin. I watched as she poured a hefty shot into the plastic lid.

“Thank you, darling—”

She sipped, eyes closed so that I could see where the kohl bled into the violet labyrinth of broken capillaries. Then they opened once more: brilliant green eyes, the whites unclouded, lashes still thick and black as a girl’s.

“Now. What brings you here? How is your mother?”

“She’s fine. I guess she’ll be there tonight. I—I just wanted to check something, that’s all.”

Mrs. Langford nodded and took another sip from her thermos. “Good, good. You go ahead and walk around, take your time, it’s not going to get very busy…”

She clicked the radio back on. I went upstairs, trying to keep from breaking into a run. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, and there didn’t seem much chance I’d find it even if I did. The second floor was even colder and darker than downstairs. I felt a surge of genuine fear, stepping between unlit curiosity cases and assiduously avoiding corners, and hoped Mrs. Langford was right about there not being any other visitors.

The museum’s collection was an ill-sorted mass of Tankiteke Indian amulets, woven oyster baskets, old shoes, and arrowheads, as well as hundreds of tattered books and scripts used by actors renowned in their times and now utterly forgotten. The Devil to Pay, The Iron Chest, a version of Romeo and Juliet where the lovers were miraculously revived at the final curtain. Beneath me the floorboards creaked. The slanting light darkened from steel-gray to lead. From downstairs I could hear Mrs. Langford’s radio announcing the three o’clock news. My head ached from trying to see anything in the early darkness; I wished I’d asked Hillary to come with me, or even Mrs. Langford. I was ready to give up when I bumped into a small case in the corner.

“Right,” I whispered nervously, and stooped beside it. A wooden square raised on four spindly legs, its glass top filthy with dust and dead flies. I blew on it, sending up a gray plume, then did my best to clean the glass with my sleeve. Set into one side was a small brass tag that read DONATED BY THE HONORABLE EDWARD P. FOOTE, 1964. IN MEMORY OF A FELLOW PLAYER. Inside, upon a bed of ragged velvet, was a frayed, leather-bound copy of Acherley Darnell’s collection of supernatural tales, Northern Sketches and Fireside Tales.

I had seen the book before, of course, here and in countless reprints, and like everyone else I had watched the Disney cartoon version of Darnell’s most famous story, “The Dancer at the Burial Ground.” But I had never actually read anything else by Darnell. I sat back on my heels and eyed the case warily, as though it might know what I had in mind. I took a deep breath and began to prise it open. There was no lock, but the hinges were so rusty that for a moment I was afraid I’d have to give up. I could hear a few mothballs rolling around inside it, and I tugged harder. There was a puff of mold and the smell of camphor. The wood strained and creaked, until with a final groan it gave way.

“Okay.” I bit my lip, tasted blood and dust. “Let’s get a look at you—”

I picked up the book, nearly dropping it in my urgency. It was heavy, bound in leather and brown cloth and with the title picked out in gilt letters. When I opened it a pressed leaf wafted from between the pages, tissue-thin, brittle as lichen. I tried to catch it, but as it fell the leaf disintegrated, melting into the air as though it had been made of snow. I sank to the floor and opened to the title page.

The frontispiece showed the author himself, with the legend DARNELL AS PROSPERO. A lean, dark man in a black cape, not at all the avuncular white-haired patroon I had imagined. Old theatrical engravings usually made me laugh, those pursey-lipped images of plump men in wigs as Hamlet, or fat-cheeked matrons playing unlikely Rosalinds.

But there was an unpleasant intensity to Darnell, with his thin, upcurved mouth and piercing eyes, long black hair falling disheveled about his gaunt face. He looked less like Prospero than Caliban. I tried to turn to the first tale, but the pages stuck together, and the book fell open at random to a page illustrated with a drawing of a shrieking man pursued by black shapes with huge glowing eyes.

I glanced uneasily over my shoulder. Mrs. Langford seldom navigated the steps, but I had a sudden irrational fear that someone else might. Around me the room had fallen almost completely into shadow. A single shaft of pale light streaked a windowpane curtained with cobwebs and insect husks. I thought of what I had seen in my room last night, and decided I didn’t want my back to any more windows, no matter how empty they seemed. I crept behind the glass case, leaned against the chill bare wall and flipped through the book.

“Waitstill Finch, or A Tragic Romance.” “The Tolling of The Muscounth Bell.” “A Tragic Tale of Olden Times.”

Page after page of thick brown-edged paper, interspersed with more gory drawings and the occasional engraving. “Heathen Customes in Modern Dress.” “A Savage Lover.” “The Infernal Hind.”

But then I turned to a plate that made the breath rasp in my throat.

“That’s it…”

A crude black-and-white print showed a maniacally smiling figure, a man with the lurid grimace and goatish expression of a Restoration devil. He was naked, save for a swag of furs and bones around his waist, and capered wildly in front of a bonfire where several dithery-looking captives ineffectually waved their hands as they burned. The demon’s feet were clad in high laced boots, and from his head sprang two branched horns.

“The Wae-Be-No, A Savage Relict,” I read on the facing page.

“Charlotte?”

I gasped and looked up to see Mrs. Langford peering at me from the shadows.

“Oh! Jeez, you scared me!” I stumbled to my feet, trying to hide the book under my arm.

“I didn’t know where you were.” She glanced around, frowning at the cobwebs hanging from the ceiling, the pallid light that fell through dingy windows. “Good lord, this place is filthy. Hasn’t that girl come to clean?”

She took off her tam and swiped at the thick veneer of dust on a caseful of arrowheads. Then, as though she’d just remembered me, she turned and said, “We’re closing, dear—a little early, but there’s the party…” She stared pointedly at the volume under my arm.

“Right. I—I was just looking at this. I’m sorry. I’ll put it back—”

“Which one is that?”

She flapped the dust from her tam o’shanter and put it back on her head; then crossed to me, her cane thumping loudly. “Oh, yes, the Fireside Tales. That’s a very valuable book—”

I handed it to her, shamefaced. “I know—I was just, there was something—”

Mrs. Langford held the volume in one unsteady hand, straightening her glasses as she peered at the illustration of the horned man. “Well!” she murmured. She studied the picture as though she’d never seen it before. At last she gave it back to me and said, “Better put that back where you found it. Thank you, dear. Now, if you don’t mind waiting for me to close up, you can walk me home…”

I replaced the book, making a great show of closing the case. Then I escorted Mrs. Langford downstairs.

“There!” she exclaimed breathlessly when we reached the bottom. “Thank you, dear—”

I followed her to the judge’s dock. It was almost five, already so dim that the shapes of benches and chairs could only be guessed at. I turned on the electric lamp, and sank onto a bench to wait for Mrs. Langford to gather her things.

“I’m just going to finish my tea, dear.” She poured what remained and sipped it noisily.

I watched her, then finally blurted, “What was that a picture of?”

“What picture, dear?”

“In that book. The thing in the Indian legend.” I thought of sneaking in to watch The Exorcist a year before with Hillary. “Is it—is it like the Devil or something?”

Mrs. Langford put down her tea and stared at me, her green eyes wide. “The Devil?” She laughed, costume jewelry rattling. “I don’t think the Indians thought it was the Devil. Have you read the story?”

“No.”

“Well, Acherley Darnell says it was a god.”

“An Indian god?”

“Oh, no. Or, well, not just their god. The god of this place.” Her fingers fluttered and she stared thoughtfully at the ceiling as she went on, “He says it came over with the stones—but you should read the story.”

“Well, could I borrow it?”

“Lord, no!” Mrs. Langford looked affronted, then hiccuped loudly. “Pardonnez-moi. No, no, Charlotte—that book is worth a fortune, it never leaves here. You can find a copy in the library, I imagine…”

With a sigh she screwed the cap back onto her thermos, dropped it into her carpetbag and gave me an odd, almost avid, look. “Why are you asking about the book, Charlotte?”

I hesitated. If anyone in Kamensic might know about what I had seen, it would be Mrs. Langford. But the hungry expression on her mottled face and the way she continued to stare at me changed my mind. “No reason. I was just curious, that’s all.”

“Were you, Charlotte.” Her green eyes glittered: it was not a question. “Well, well.”

She tilted her head, the light from the single lamp igniting her features so that it was as though I gazed upon one of those terra-cotta masks, all empty eyes and gaping mouth. Then she lifted her hand and in a tremulous voice recited,

As she spoke the memory of the gruesome apparition came to me, its horrible humping motion and lunatic tapping at the floor of my room. Then it was gone. But for an instant there lingered in the darkness before me the ghostly afterimage of a face, swollen and pale as the egg sac of a spider. This faded into the wide fervid eyes of Mrs. Langford. I stared back at her, repulsed. My mouth tasted sour; there was a heavy pressure at my temples, as though someone sought to drive their fingers into my skull.

And still Mrs. Langford gazed at me. I shook my head, wanting to yell, to gouge at those glittering eyes; but then she was laughing, her dime-store bangles clanking as she stood and struggled into her moth-eaten wool coat.

“But I have to hurry if I’m going to get dressed!” she exclaimed. “Lila Moncrieff is supposed to pick me up at seven—”

I remained on the bench, my heart thudding. When I touched my cheeks they felt like scorched paper.

“Charlotte?”

I looked up. There was Mrs. Langford gazing at me with grandmotherly concern. Gone was the frightening intensity of a few minutes before. Her coat hung askew from her bent shoulders and her tam was plopped crookedly on draggled white hair, like a crow on a woebegone nest. I nodded and automatically started to my feet, crossed to the judge’s dock, and let her take my arm.

“Thank you, darling. Here, make sure that light’s turned off—”

We made our way slowly to the front door and then out onto the sidewalk, where I waited as she locked up. Above us bare-limbed trees scratched at a sky marbled black and purple. To the west heavy clouds massed like the shadow of Muscanth Mountain, their edges tinged scarlet. The wind had risen and sent leaves pinwheeling across the lawn. I walked Mrs. Langford to her little clapboard cottage nestled behind its paired holly trees. As she searched for her keys I stared at the mask that hung from her door, Bacchus leering from within a starburst of orange bittersweet.

“Thank you, dear.” Mrs. Langford withdrew a key hanging from a length of bright yarn and poked it ineffectually at the lock. When at last it gave way the door swung open, onto a cold dark hallway rank with the scents of mildew and old newspapers. “I’ll see you this evening, I imagine…”

A light clicked on. I had a glimpse of walls covered with ancient framed images of forlorn stars and playwrights. She stood for a moment, catching her breath, then turned to close the door.

“Good night, Charlotte…”

I waited until I heard the latch click. Then I walked out to the overgrown sidewalk and started down the street. I looked back to see if anything was revealed by the dingy windows fringed with tattered ivy, but hardly a glimmer of light shone through. There were no shadows, no flicker of movement; nothing at all.

9. Houses of the Holy

I ENDED UP WALKING to Ali’s house. As I crossed the village green the courthouse bell tolled five-thirty. Too late for me to run into anyone I knew driving home from school, too early for the commuters leaving Kamensic station. I stuck my thumb out once or twice when cars appeared, finally gave up and shouldered my bag, buttoning Hillary’s old jacket tight against the chill. I walked quickly, scuffing through piles of leaves and gazing wistfully into the village shops with their warm haloed windows, the smell of roast turkey erupting from Healy’s as the door flew open and Mr. Healy emptied his pipe onto the steps. I hurried by with head bent, and felt my melancholy fade as the village disappeared behind me.

It was two miles to Ali’s house. Not far, but the road wound precariously up Muscanth Mountain, and dusk fell early there. I knew the way by heart. My boots found smooth purchase between the stones and fallen branches covering the road, and the chill faded as I began to pant with the effort of climbing. Now and then I stopped, perching on one of the stone walls that bordered the road until I caught my breath. By the time I reached Ali’s driveway I could hear the Courthouse bell chiming faintly: six o’clock. I was at Foxhall.

The gravel drive spilled out onto the road. Behind it you could glimpse trees—birches mostly, Ali’s father had cut down everything else—their branches laced with light flowing down from the house. The stone walls were inset with two concrete pillars, one etched with FOXHALL, the other showing a stylized vulpine face, all pointed ears and sharp nose. I headed up the drive. A few minutes later I stood in front of the house, a dun-colored monstrosity that looked as though it had been constructed out of toilet paper tubes.

“Ali—it’s me—”

I went inside, shouting. From upstairs music pounded, Ali warbling along with “Gimme Shelter.” I stuck my head into the living room, a cavernous glass-walled space with built-in white furniture that made it look like a cross between a space capsule and a sepulchre. No sign of Ali’s father, save for an empty pitcher beading a glass coffee table with condensation.

“Lit!” Ali bellowed. “Get your ass up here—”

I went upstairs. Ali grabbed my arm and yanked me into her room, dancing over to turn down the stereo. There were Pre-Raphaelite posters on the walls alongside the Beardsley image of Tristan and Isolde; Polaroids of Ali and Hillary and Duncan and myself; a picture of Noddy Holder torn from Circus magazine. A cone of jasmine incense smoked on Ali’s desk, but I could still smell pot and tobacco smoke. “Where the hell you been? ’Cause I had this great idea—”

“Is it about food? Because I’m—”

“No—your hair, I’m going to henna your hair—” I scowled, but Ali ignored me. “I know I’ve got some henna left—”

“But I’m starving, please, Ali—”

She pushed by me and made for the bureau. “This’ll be great, you’ll look so fucking great—”

It took her a while, fumbling through drawers jammed with mascara wands and Biba lipgloss, L’air du Temps perfume and plastic envelopes of birth control pills, worn-out ballet shoes and innumerable black leotards.

“Hah! Here it is—” She held up an enameled metal tin decorated with hieroglyphs. “I was afraid I’d thrown it out.”

Resigned, I sank onto her bed. “Will it still be any good?”

“Definitely. This stuff lasts forever. Cleopatra probably used this same box—”

She pried it open and stuff like greenish smoke filled the air. Ali pinched some henna between her fingers, redolent of dried grass and incense.

“It looks like dirt,” I said.

“Oh, shut up and sit down. And put this over your shoulders. Just wait, Lit, you’ll be beautiful—”

She mixed henna and water in a cracked Wedgwood bowl, then carefully smoothed the greenish clay onto my hair. “Oh, man. At the party tonight they’ll be crazy for you. It’ll make you gorgeous.”

What it did was turn my hair flaming orange, the precise shade of a fox’s pelt in full winter growth. I shrieked when I looked into the mirror. Ali grinned.

“Wow. It looks great, Lit.” She dried my hair, leaving muddy streaks on the towel. “God, it looks so great. See, your hair should always have been this color. You just want to pet it—”

She touched it gingerly, that glowing mass that didn’t really belong to me. “Ooh, yeah. Excellent.”

I stood in front of the full-length mirror and glared. “God damn it, Ali. I oughta kill you—”

“One of these days your face is gonna stay like that,” Ali said, and tapped my nose. “Smile.”

“I look like that thing at Jamie’s house.”

“What? The sitar?”

“No, you idiot. The gorgon. The Medusa.”

She went to the window, hoisted herself onto the sill and lit a cigarette. “I think it looks totally cool. Before your hair was so—well, it was just beige. This is much better. Here, hold this—”

She shoved the cigarette at me and hopped off the sill. “—I’m getting dressed.”

She slid out of her Danskin and pulled on a velveteen Norma Kamali minidress with heart-shaped cutouts in the bodice, fluffed her hair, and proceeded to spend forty-five minutes putting on mascara. I kicked off my boots and jeans and got into my dress.

“Don’t you dare put your hair up,” Ali yelled when I started tugging my damp curls into a braid. “Just leave it. Look”— She stood behind me, close enough that I could catch the smoky smell of her skin, sweat and tobacco and jasmine. —“see how pretty it is now?” She thrust her fingers into it. “Medusa. Is that the one who started the Trojan War?”

“No, Ali. Medusa is the one who turned everybody to stone.”

She laughed. “So you can be the one who gets everybody stoned. Ha!”

I put my boots back on and we went downstairs. Despite the chill, Constantine, Ali’s father, was sitting out on the back deck overlooking the woods, a pitcher of screwdrivers on the table beside him. He was a slight man, with dark hair and Ali’s golden eyes, his sharp features starting to go slack from too much drink.

“Charlotte!” he said. “What happened to your face?”

“My face?” I clapped my hands to my cheeks in dismay.

He pointed at my dress. “It’s the only part of you that’s not orange.”

“C’mon, Dad, leave her alone.” Ali peered at a sheaf of blueprints stretched across the table. “What’s that?”

“Just some sketches I’m putting together for Axel’s opera.”

“I thought Ralph Casson was doing design for that,” Ali said innocently. She plucked an ice cube from the pitcher and ran it across her cheeks. “I mean, that’s what I heard.”

Constantine looked annoyed. He refilled his glass, took a long swallow, and said, “Well, he’s not. Ralph Casson is building the sets. I’m designing them. And I don’t want you trashing the plans, okay?” He replaced his drink and reached for one of the designs, but Ali grabbed his hand.

“Oh, please, Daddy—can we see?” Ali leaned over the table. “Hey, this is pretty cool. Check it out, Lit.”

She poked her finger at the blueprint, tracing something that looked vaguely like a chambered nautilus. “Dad? What is this? A pyramid?”

He shook his head. “It’s supposed to be a labyrinth—see, it’s kind of a cutaway view, so from the audience you’re looking inside it. These are all just preliminary sketches”— He picked up his drink. —“it’s actually a bitch to get the sightlines right. I have no idea how it’s going to work.”

I stood beside Ali and looked at each design as she flipped through them. All showed the Miniver Amphitheater, a small open-air theater on the Bolerium estate that dated back to Acherley Darnell’s time. Actually, calling it a “theater” was stretching a point. Despite the Kamensic Village Preservation Society’s continuing (and unsuccessful) efforts to have it declared a National Historic Site, the amphitheater was little more than a natural declivity on the mountainside, with stone and wooden benches set into the surrounding slope. Over the decades, the granite slabs had gradually sunk into the earth; their mossy tops now thrust at odd angles from the grass, like the remains of an ancient barrow. In Acherley Darnell’s time, the writer and his cronies often staged plays there, for their own amusement and the entertainment of the villagers.

Since then the amphitheater had fallen into decay. I dimly recalled attending a child’s birthday there when I was six or seven, and every few years the Preservation Society hosted a garden tea with Mrs. Langford officiating. But the staging area was small. More than sixty or seventy people would crowd the hillside.

“Isn’t it kind of dinky?” I asked. “I mean, for an opera?”

“Yup. But Ariadne isn’t Aida—it’s just one act and a prologue, small cast, no elaborate sets. In fact, Axel is actually dropping the prologue”— Constantine tapped a finger alongside his nose. —“and this is where it gets kind of neat. He’s gotten his hands on a fragment of a lost play by Euripides called Theseus at Knossos, and he’s going to stage it as the prelude to Ariadne auf Naxos.”

“Wow.” Ali yawned. “Don’t want to miss that.”

Her father ignored her. “The amphitheater would actually be a very nice place to mount it, pretty alfresco setting, all that. I think he’s going for some sort of modern staging—you know, kind of Beckett, kind of Godspell…”

He crunched an ice cube, then sighed. “Actually, I’m not sure exactly what the hell he’s up to. I think he’s doing this for the backers, trying to get the money to mount a full-scale version next fall. Or this could be just another one of his vanity productions. Who the hell knows. It’s a goddam job, that’s all I care about.”

Ali nodded absently, and I scrutinized the plans strewn across the table: sketches of crude, boxy mazes and prisonlike edifices of stone, elaborate topiary labyrinths and pop art meanders and designs like the rose windows of a cathedral.

“They’re great,” I said. I glanced over to see Constantine giving me a bleary smile. “Really beautiful. Is that what he’s going to do? Build a maze in the amphitheater?”

Constantine shrugged. “Who knows? He’s got some wacko conception about archetypal images or some such shit, the labyrinth of the mind. That kind of thing. There sure as hell isn’t a maze in the opera, though I guess the part about Theseus has a Minotaur in the labyrinth.”

He downed the rest of his drink, gently moved me aside, and started gathering his prints. “I better get these back together. You girls about ready? Okay—give me a couple minutes to change. I’ll meet you at the car.”

Constantine’s car was a vintage red Triumph convertible, the only vehicle in Kamensic that was even less reliable than Hillary’s Dodge Dart. Ali and I scrunched into the minuscule backseat, our legs tangled, as the car inched up the mountain toward Bolerium. It was nearly full dark now, and cold. I huddled against Ali’s small form, warming my hands beneath her velvet cape.

“You want us to push?” she shouted, as the Triumph crept almost to a halt.

“NO!” bellowed Constantine. He’d changed into a blue blazer and white shirt, boat shoes, no socks, with a red-white-and-blue Hermès ascot tucked under his chin. He looked (and drove) like a demented Cary Grant.

“Dad! It’s not going to—”

“NO PUSHING.”

“But—” I closed my eyes while they argued. My hair was still damp; I knotted my fingers about it, breathing in the henna’s sweet scent of grass drying in the sun, and hoped I didn’t look too ridiculous. The bizarre things I’d seen, or thought I’d seen, now seemed very far away. It was difficult to believe in antlered men or ghosts with Constantine Fox singing Judy Henske songs off-key in the front of a red convertible. I’d had a hit off a joint with Ali back in her room, and felt a pleasant anticipatory buzz about the party. My parents would be there, which wasn’t so great. Neither was the prospect of watching everyone in town suck up to Axel Kern. But I shivered at the thought of seeing Jamie Casson again, his languid mouth and bruised eyes and insolent voice…

“Hey, Lit—” Ali nudged me, hard.

“Ow! What?”

“Get out. We’re pushing.”

I groaned, clambering out as Ali squirmed by me. Constantine got out as well, and the three of us pushed until the car gave a low rumble.

“Get in!” yelled Constantine. Ali leaped in beside him, laughing hysterically, and I flung myself onto her lap, the door hanging open as we barreled up the hill.

“Very important to make a good entrance!” shouted Constantine.

“Yeah, like the circus,” Ali hollered back.

We puttered up the last few hundred yards, the road weaving among the great old-growth forest: hemlock, poplar, beech, white oak, all slashed with crimson and yellow and glowing in the headlights. Up here the cold wind ripped across the mountaintop and the trees creaked like a ship under full sail. Other than that there was no other sound. No music, no party voices. No other cars making their way up the mountain; nothing to suggest that anything lay behind those sentinel trees but wilderness.

But then the Triumph bounced over a rut. The chassis scraped against stone. Ali shrieked; Constantine swore. I sat up too fast, blinking and feeling slightly vertiginous, as though I’d just stepped onshore after days at sea.

“Hey! Dad, watch out!”

“Hold your horses, for chrissakes let me park…”

A few feet ahead of us a sawhorse had been set up as a roadblock. In front of it a spare figure in white shirt and black vest and trousers was directing traffic. Constantine snorted in annoyance and pulled the Triumph into a long row of cars parked at the side of the road. “I guess we walk from here.”

Ali hopped out before he could cut the engine. I followed, turned to see Constantine perched on the edge of the driver’s seat. The rolled-up blueprints lay across his knees. His hands curled around them protectively as he stared up the road to where guests milled around, laughing as they made their way toward the main entrance to Bolerium. Constantine’s bronze cheeks glistened faintly in the twilight, and even from where I stood I could see his dark eyes, at once tired and expectant.

“Thanks, Mr. Fox,” I said.

“Hmm? Oh, Lit—sure, sure.” He smiled and got out of the car, pausing to pat my shoulder. “You girls behave, now.”

I watched him walk unsteadily toward the others, who greeted him with more laughter and raucous cheers. In the darkness I could just make out Ali’s white face as she rushed to hug Duncan Forrester. I was heading toward her when a voice rang out.

“You left the door open. Hey! You left your door—”

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

He nodded wearily. “Your car—”

“It’s not my car.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sure. Later.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where’s your mother, Charlotte?”

“Unk going to make an appearance tonight?”

“Your dad here?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“…oooyyyehhh…”

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

“…ooyehh…”

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

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

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

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

“God, no—”

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

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

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

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

“No,” I whispered.

It was like watching a tree fall. The immense crown of antlers trembled as it twisted its head, vainly seeking its assailant. Then slowly, as though its legs were roots being torn from the earth, the stag tumbled to the ground.

With a shriek, first one and then another of the waiting hunters raced toward it. One plunged a spear into its belly; another clambered onto its side and began hewing its neck. Still another darted toward its face, thrusting a lance into its eye.

I could watch no more. I turned and ran down the mountain, catching myself when I stumbled, not stopping until I once again felt the familiar ruts and furrows of a path underfoot.

I slowed, panting, and looked behind me for signs of pursuit. There were none. I shivered: my dress hung limply, damp with sweat; my arms and legs were scratched and smeared with dirt. Voices drifted down from the hilltop, their somber undercurrent heightened by a single sharp cry of grief, like a blade drawn against a stone. On the summit I could see the thrusting finger of the column; the elk’s curved antlers, like the rib cage of some extinct reptile; the stooped figures of the hunters intent on disemboweling their prey. I was far enough away that I felt safe, but now that I was safe I perversely wanted a better look. So I made a half-circuit of the hillside, keeping low until I found a natural hollow that hid me, even as it gave a better vantage point.

Above me the hunters worked without talking. The only sounds were the wind and the measured hack and crunch of bone against bone, bone against rock, stone against skin. In the grass, the slain megaloceros loomed like the remains of an ancient fortress. The wind shifted and brought with it the stench of slaughter. Blood and fat, excrement and trampled grass, turned-up earth. I gagged, wiping tears from my eyes and moving uphill slightly to escape the shifting breeze. When I looked up again, the scene had altered.

The great stag was gone. Or rather, it had diminished. What I saw now was not the massive creature felled by the hunter’s spear, but something smaller, its curves more graceful—and familiar. Even in the half-light I could make out its color, pale brown darkening to gold, and its antlers, a dozen tines still furred with autumn velvet. A twelve-point buck. Magnificent in its way, but no dream-elk; no enchanted stag.

The figures crouched around it had changed as well. There were still a dozen of them, with one slight man standing apart from the rest. He alone spoke, chanting in a high, almost boyish voice; words that were meaningless to me. The others worked deftly and in silence, slicing chunks of raw meat, tugging strands of sinew and glistening fat from the hide. But the knives glinting in the dimness had metal blades now, not flint or obsidian. Their clothes, too, were less primitive, dun-colored robes or loose trousers of cloth, rather than ill-cured hides and pelts. I thought I could smell smoke and my eyes stung; but when I blinked the scene changed again—

—yet O so slowly this time, so that I could actually see it change, centuries passing, millennia perhaps: the figures blurring as though I glimpsed them through a rainy window. Now they stood solemnly in a line, their eyes dark holes and their mouths open, though they made no sound. Only the slight sharp-featured man continued to chant, his arms raised above a figure on the ground before them. At first I could not see it clearly, but then it seemed that this, too, changed, so that I was no longer half-crouched upon the hillside but standing in their midst.

“I so ylikitatos, I so oreos,” sang the man beside me. The eerie light made him look as though he had been cast in lead. All save for his hair, black and singed with silver like ash, and his eyes. These were deep-set, sea-blue and sorrowing; the most melancholy eyes I had ever seen.

“Dionysos, Zagreus, eho pi i aftos…” He tilted his head, staring at the slaughtered deer at his feet, then glanced at me and made a graceful, almost welcoming gesture. I looked down and began to shake uncontrollably.

The deer was gone. In its stead was a human corpse. He lay on his side, naked, arms pulled in front of him and bound at the wrists; his legs taut and angling away from his body, ankles tied. His skin was so pale that it seemed to glow, and his dark hair fell in ropy tendrils across his face. Here and there small dark crescents gleamed—beneath his rib cage, above his groin, on his neck and both thighs. At first I thought they had been scored by knives.

They had not. Each little half-moon held even smaller wounds like tiny beads: the imprints of human teeth. Beside one nipple a pistil of torn flesh gleamed, and blood seeped from it like nectar. Ivy twined about his wrists and throat, its tendrils braided into his hair. His eyes had been gouged out, and blossoms forced into the empty sockets, poppies whose white petals Uttered the ground. Poppies filled his mouth as well, cleaving to his tongue and lips. Beside his head two antlers had been set, their upcurved tines like skeletal fingers.

“…to maheri,” sang the slight man. He opened his hands to let more petals fall upon the corpse’s face. “To maheri is tas hiras o kozmos. Apopse ekaika zontanos, apethanon: i me ta stafilia! i me to meli, i me to krasi—”

“I se to krasi,” the others replied. The wind rose and the petals spun into eddies of light and dark. “I se to krasi—”

“I me to krasi.” Another voice, so faint it was like the wind in my ears. “I me to krasi apethanon…”

It was the bound man; the man I thought was dead. With nightmarish slowness his head moved, until it faced me. His mouth opened, lips curving into a smile as ruined petals spilled upon his breast. His teeth were stained black with blood; when his tongue thrust between them shining larvae spun from it like thread.

“Blessed is she among women who is given these rites to know,” he whispered; “Blessed are you who comes willingly unto the god…”

And then, jarringly, the scene changed one last time. Instead of the malign archaic figures upon the hillside, I now looked upon a young man perhaps ten years older than myself. He wore khaki pants and a white shirt rolled up to the elbows, unfashionable black eyeglasses and unfashionably short hair. Behind him the outlines of the hillside blurred. I could just make out the ruins of a building, russet and sepia-toned like an old photograph. The young man was crouched in front of a tumbled arch, its pedestals still bearing great honey-colored blocks of stone. Beside him a wooden box held hammers and a pickax. His hands moved back and forth, back and forth, with dreamlike patience; as though he had been doing this for centuries.

It was a few seconds before I figured out that he was holding some kind of screen, sifting earth and smiling absently as he did so. Now and then he ran a hand across his brow, leaving a smear of dust in its wake, and looked up, grinning at the sky, the shattered arch behind him.

Unlike all that had gone before, there was a palpable sense of warmth to this scene. Despite the wind gnawing at my back, despite the rustle of grasses around me, I knew that if I could only touch that fallen arch it would be hot beneath my fingertips, and the young man’s cheek would be slick with sweat. I took a step forward, but before I could do more a second figure appeared behind the first. A slight man in a dark suit, head down so that I could only see a crown of dark hair smooth against his skull.

He stepped from beneath the arch, though I had not seen him there a moment before. As he did so, the first man turned and greeted him, smiling. I could not hear their words, but the young man looked delighted. The other man’s expression was infinitely sad. Slowly, almost reluctantly, he lifted his head, and I covered my mouth to keep from crying out.

It was the same man who had presided over the slaying of the great elk and the human sacrifice I had witnessed minutes earlier. Now he wore modern dress, but his gestures had the same mannered grace as before. He walked until he stood beside the young man, who was motioning at the sieve in front of him. The older man nodded and lifted his hand. Behind him, upon the arch’s twin columns, a stone began to move. The young man continued to speak. The second man stepped backward, his hands held in front of him as though in supplication. Above them, the stone inched forward, until it perched at the very edge of the arch. The young man’s mouth moved, his brow furrowed. He turned, glanced up and saw the stone. For one terrible instant they all were there before me, stone boy man. Then in utter silence the stone plunged from the column, toppling until it landed upon the young man and crushed him.

Overhead the sky was blue-white. Eddies of dust rippled like miniature dunes swept by the wind. A huge block of stone lay near enough for me to touch. As I stared something moved from beneath it, the glistening head and eyes of a crimson serpent that turned into a skein of blood unraveling at my feet, and the white tip of a finger that twitched and then was still.

I did not see what happened next. I was already gone, running blindly down the hillside with the wind roaring around me and my own voice burning in my throat. I ran and ran and ran, finally collapsing at the edge of the drive. There were trees here strung with Chinese lanterns, and tiki lights on poles. In the near distance shadowy figures passed in and out of the golden portal that was Bolerium’s massive, open front door. I was on my hands and knees, my bare legs scraped and raw, my hair tangled with dead grass and falling into my eyes. At the sound of footsteps I tensed and closed my hand around a rock.

“Lit?”

Someone touched me on the shoulder.

“Get the fuck away from me!” I shrieked and threw the rock so that it careered wildly into the darkness, stumbled to my feet and began to run. I only got a few steps before strong hands grabbed me.

“Lit! Lit, for chrissakes—calm down—”

I shook my head. “No—get away!” I gasped. “Get the—”

“Lit—come on, come on, sweetie—look at me!”

I looked.

“Ralph Casson—remember? We met yesterday, my son Jamie—”

“Ralph!” I began to cry with relief. “Oh, my god, you have to get the police, you have to get somebody—”

“Hey—sit down over here for a sec. Okay?” He put his arm around me, hugging me to him, and for just an instant let his palm rest against my forehead. “Oh, dear—you’re burning up. Come on, this way—”

He led me away from the drive and onto the overgrown lawn. I wiped my cheeks and looked up at him gratefully. “I—I was—”

“Shhh.” He squeezed my arm. “Let’s go over here where it’s quiet, and you can mellow out for a few minutes…”

I nodded. He stared down at me, unsmiling, his pale eyes wide with concern. Instead of faded coveralls and carpenter’s belt he wore a shiny ultramarine jacket, and his gray-blonde hair hung loosely to his shoulders.

“…mellow out,” he went on. “Right? And tell me what happened…”

My terror faded. I felt disoriented, slightly dizzy; as though I’d been yanked from deep sleep into daylight. And seeing Ralph Casson there unsettled me, even more so than when I’d watched him rolling a joint in his kitchen. I fidgeted, but Ralph only held me tighter, so that I could feel his heartbeat, and smell the too-sweet scent of jasmine oil.

“Let’s go,” he said.

We headed toward the back of the mansion. Above us, Bolerium’s chimneys and crumbling turrets rose like the skyline of some fantastic city. The north tower’s famous stained-glass windows had an infernal glow; figures could be seen moving behind them, small and serenely intent as spirit puppets in a shadow play. On the lower stories, the casements of all the arched gothic windows had been flung wide, voices and music drowning out the wind. Laughter, a man’s falsetto shriek; the mingled strains of Telemann and “Rebel Rebel” and an old song by the Nursery’s house band. I was so conscious of Ralph Casson’s arm around me that I thought I might pass out. I swallowed, my mouth dry, and pointed at the base of the house, where a broad flagstoned patio extended out onto the lawn.

“What’s—what’s that?”

Along the border of the patio, all the French doors were open. A strange velvety light poured out onto the flagstones, so rich and deep a blue it was like spilled paint. I blinked: the light made the edges of things appear soft, as though grass and trees and wrought-iron furniture had all grown cobalt fur.

Ralph shrugged. “Black light. Axel’s doing the whole light-show trip, hired some company from Far Rockaway—”

As he spoke, a woman in a gypsyish dress with absurdly long sleeves stepped outside and began dancing by herself, eyes closed, hands drawing imaginary pentagrams in the air.

“Oh, goody,” said Ralph. “I was so afraid Isadora wouldn’t be able to make it.” He gestured at a stone bench overlooking the patio. “Your chaise awaits, ma princesse tenebreux. Sit.”

I slipped away from him, sat down too hard on the bench. It was cold, the surface crinkly with lichen. “Ouch,” I said, moving as far from Ralph as I could. He just fixed me with that brazen stare.

“So. Speak.”

“Do I have to play dead, too?”

He laughed and settled himself beside me. I looked away, at the baroquely weird scene in front of us. The Stooges had edged out Telemann and David Bowie in the Background Music Sweepstakes. In some of the downstairs windows banks of candles had appeared, silvery sparks flickering against a lurid blue cyclorama. The wind shifted; instead of woodsmoke, it carried the headier fragrance of marijuana and roasting meat.

And the woman on the patio had stopped dancing. She stood with her head slumped, arms hanging limply in front of her. After a minute or so she began to lift them. She swayed back and forth, eyes still shut tight and mouth slack. Her long skirt was hitched up so that I could see she was wearing only one desert boot; her other, bare, foot was black with grime. Watching her I felt the return of that horror and strangeness I had felt on the mountaintop; a growing fear that it might break through here. When Ralph touched my knee I jumped.

“I actually would like to hear what spooked you up there,” he said. “You looked pretty freaked out.”

I bit my lip. “I can’t,” I said at last, hopelessly. Because how could I ever explain anything about Kamensic to someone who hadn’t lived there all his life? Especially a grownup; especially Jamie Casson’s father. “It’s—it’s just so…”

“Listen. Lit.” Ralph lowered his voice and let his hand rest upon my knee. “Is this some kind of—drug thing? Because if it is, I won’t tell your parents—I can help you, but you’ll have to tell me what it was you—”

“No! I mean, I wish it was—but it wasn’t, I wasn’t—I’m not on anything.”

“So…?” He turned and took my chin in his hand. His fingers were rough and calloused and smelled of jasmine. “Hey, come on—you know you’ll feel better if you talk about it.”

So I talked about it. Somehow the angry music and marijuana smoke and velvety light made it seem not so strange to be telling an adult I barely knew about something I wasn’t sure I had seen.

“…was like I went the wrong way up to the house, but there’s only one road, and anyway the road was gone…”

As I spoke Ralph Casson nodded and his eyes widened, not with disbelief but as though I were confirming something he already knew. When I faltered, trying to think of a way to describe the stone column I had seen, or the terrible sound the stag had made when it was wounded, Ralph didn’t interrupt, or question me. He said nothing at all; only let his gaze lift from my face to rest upon the black hillside behind us. All the while he continued to hold my chin in his hand, and gradually he let his fingers creep upward until they splayed across my cheek, stroking it.

I didn’t pull away. His touch was hypnotic, it made me feel as though he were gently pulling the story from me, as one carefully plays out the string of a kite against a steady wind. He didn’t say a word, until I mentioned the slight sharp-featured man who had chanted over the slaughtered deer and a living corpse bound with ivy.

“Describe him,” Ralph broke in. The scent of jasmine flooded me as he trailed a finger across my upper lip. “Tell me.”

I shook my head, puzzled.

“Describe him.” Ralph’s voice rose slightly. He moved his hand so that his fingers knotted in my hair, then pulled my head back. Not forcefully but irresistibly, so that my neck was exposed to him. He ran a finger down the ridge of my windpipe and probed at the hollow of my throat; then traced the skin above my breasts. “Lit. You have to tell me. What did he look like?”

“He—he was small.” I wasn’t sure if I should be frightened; if so, what precisely I should be frightened of. “About as tall as me, and he had sort of gray hair. Black hair, but turning gray. And blue eyes. I think.”

“Balthazar.” Abruptly Ralph let go of me. He smiled, those intense eyes glowing with reflected light. With deliberate slowness he slid his hand beneath the front of my dress, until it caressed my breast. I felt my nipple harden as he circled it with one finger. But he drew no closer, made no move to kiss me; only tipped his head to regard me measuringly.

“Well,” he murmured. “Aren’t you the lucky girl.” His palm covered my breast and for a long moment he held it there, so that its warmth seeped into my skin. A sharper scent cut through the smell of jasmine. Unexpectedly he slipped his hand free, and raised it to brush a strand of hair from my face.

“‘Meet the new boss,’” said Ralph Casson lightly. He stood and stretched, his back to me, and stared at Bolerium’s glowing violet windows, the patio empty now save for a cigarette smoldering on the flagstones. “‘Same as the old boss.’”

I shook my head, trying to hide confusion and arousal, and anger that he’d drawn away from me so suddenly. “Who—who was it? Do you know him?”

“Know him? Sure.” He didn’t bother to glance at me. “Balthazar Warnick. I studied under him at the Divine. Cultural anthropology. Comparative religion. We had a falling out, over—well, call it structuralism.”

I looked at him blankly. “What’s that?”

“The way the world is arranged. I thought he was wrong, but I’ve come to see the error of my ways. Now I can find him and tell him he was right all along,” he added.

“But I don’t get it—what was he doing up there?” I jabbed a finger toward where the standing stone had been. “Nothing’s there now! It was—is it witches?”

“Witches?” Ralph Casson began to laugh. “Oh, you poor benighted child! No, it’s not witches. Don’t you know what this place is? This little bedroom community Shangri-la you have here? This incredibly groovy little place conveniently located just seventy-two minutes north of Manhattan?”

I glared at him. “No.”

“Why, it’s the sacred fucking grove!” he exclaimed bitterly. He pointed to a neighboring hillside that blotted out the sky to the east, then to the service road winding down from the far side of Bolerium to the village. “I mean, right there you’ve got Sugar Mountain, and Muscanth here’s your fairy mound, and down there’s the river where boys drown trying to fuck Undine, and here at Bolerium—”

“Charlotte! Where have you been?”

I turned to see Duncan Forrester weaving across the patio. He was wearing his sister’s fuchsia tank top over ragged blue jeans, blue eye makeup and Ali’s black cherry Biba lipgloss. The blouse was too small for him: the seams had split across the front, so that you could see glitter sparkling in his chest hair. He stopped and stared at me, grinning with totally blitzed good humor; then leaned forward to frown at the top of my head.

“Tell me, Charlotte—is it my eyes, or has your hair turned quite gold with grief?”

“It’s henna. Ali did it,” I said dully. Because Duncan’s appearance had the opposite effect of reassuring me. As clearly as though it had been spelled out on a banner overhead, I knew that everything had changed. Whatever happened next, neither Duncan nor any of my other friends were going to be able to stop it.

“Ah: another mystery solved!” Duncan raised his eyebrows, shedding tiny flakes of silver. “Miss Fox in the bedroom with the curling iron. Très rouge, Charlotte, très très rouge.” He turned to Ralph. “Hi. I’m Duncan Forrester.”

Ralph stared at him in distaste. “Ralph Casson,” he finally said.

“Charmed, charmed…” Duncan wandered off a few steps and gazed at the sky. “Is there a full moon tonight? Is there a moon at all?”

“I think I’ll leave you to your little friend,” said Ralph, and walked away. As he passed Duncan he made an elaborate show of giving him a thumbs-up. “Groovy threads, man.”

“Who the hell is that?” asked Duncan, throwing an arm over my shoulder. He held up a fifth of Tanqueray, already half-empty, eyed it wistfully before taking a swig.

“He told you…Ralph Casson.” I watched until he disappeared around a corner, turned back to Duncan. “He’s doing sets or something for Axel. His son is that new guy Jamie—”

“Oooh, yes.” Duncan lowered the bottle. He flicked a drop from one corner of his mouth, then smoothed out his lipgloss. “I met him. Jamie Casson. The new guy. He has a sort of—spiritual quality, don’t you think?”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I think he’s a junkie.” Duncan pursed his lips. He looked less like Marc Bolan than Don Knotts in drag. “Hillary is inside having a fit looking for you. Très formidable. And you know who’s here? Precious Bane! And Hillary said there’s supposed to be a band later, or a movie, or something…Tell me, Charlotte, do you like what I’m wearing?”

He spread his arms to model the tank top. I heard another seam rip. “Damn.” Duncan sighed. “Do you know, I spent an hour picking something out, this beautiful old peach organdy Balenciaga gown of my mother’s—and then I got here and walked inside and there was some guy and you know what? He was wearing the same dress.”

He made a tragic face. More mascara and glitter rained onto his cheeks. He took another mouthful of gin and started for the patio.

“You’re not going to get sick, are you?” I asked.

“Never mix, never worry.” He handed me the bottle. I sniffed it and took a sip. “Don’t look like that, Charlotte, Tanqueray is mother’s milk to me. My mother puts it on her muesli. Come on, you’re missing everything. It’s like the Tomb of the Unknown Hairdresser in there. Give me that—”

I handed him the bottle. “Wait till you see inside,” he announced when we reached the patio. The music had momentarily died away, though the rumble of conversation was loud enough that Duncan had to yell for me to hear him. Beside the doors, windblown asters and chrysanthemums erupted from terra-cotta vases shaped like amphorae. In the ultraviolet light the swollen flower heads looked dark as blood, but everything else had an edgy dark-night-of-the-soul glare. A jackknifed cigarette stained with lipstick lay on the ground, still smoldering. Without pausing Duncan swooped down to nab it. He toked it as though it were a joint, tossed it into the bushes, and propelled me through a doorway.

“Don’t bother thinking. Just go—!” he shouted.

It was like diving underwater; like being pushed into one of those huge, extravagantly lit aquariums you see at louche nightclubs or fabulous Malaysian restaurants, where nightmarishly beautiful fish dart in and out of coral ziggurats, skeletons and organs visible through their skin; then devour each other before your eyes. From outside, it seemed that the UV lights were trained on the entire main hall, but they were not. They were fixed in upright columns all along the outer perimeter of the room, so that I walked through a glowing cobalt corridor; then almost immediately was in darkness so profound I thought the power must have blown.

“Dunc?” I called nervously. “Dunc!”

But he had already disappeared. I stood and tried to get my bearings, after a minute figured that the lights actually had not gone out. I was in the broad inner hallway that ran along the back of the mansion like an extension of the patio. But once past the rows of black lights, there were only candelabrums for illumination. These hung by long chains from the vaulted ceiling: great clusters of horns and antlers like knotted fingers with candles thrust between. The soles of my boots grew slick with wax; directly under some of the larger candelabrums fragrant stalagmites thrust up from the slate floor.

The noise was deafening. There were people everywhere, half-seen through candlelight and a veil of periwinkle smoke. They looked like those ghostly afterimages you get when you stare into the sun and then look away; figures so swaddled within their flamboyant clothing that I couldn’t tell if they were really human, let alone male or female, old or young. A grotesquely tall, emaciated woman with a white afro and skin lacquered gold and crimson; twin matrons in chaste Chanel suits and pearls, their heads shaved; a boy wearing lederhosen and an ammo belt. Bare, glitter-encrusted breasts like the ripple of light on a trout’s belly; eyes like holes gouged in a green melon. For one split second I had a vision of Duncan Forrester, laughing beneath a tapestry; but as I took a step toward him he disappeared. In his stead there was only a suit of armor hung with plastic Hawaiian leis, a yellow happy face beaming from its visor.

With a roar the music suddenly came back on. The whole place erupted into laughter and cheers.

I covered my ears and started threading my way through the dark, to where I knew a doorway opened onto the music room. Drinks spilled on me, a girl shouted my name. I almost tripped over a prone body but was held up by the crowd.

“Hey, Red! Here—”

Someone thrust a joint into my hand. I sucked on it, my fingers damp with someone else’s spit; then held it up over my head to be snatched back. Before anything else could come my way—magic needles, wreaths of poppies, an arrest warrant—I lurched forward, and at last found the way out.

There was no door; just a high arched entry, so wide you could have driven a VW bus through it. For all I knew that was how all those guests arrived. A small cluster of relatively sedate-looking people stood in the passageway. Men in tuxedos; Amanda Joy and her rival, the agent Margot Steiner. Opposite them lounged my high school classmates Christie Smith and Alysa Redmond, in matching white silk jumpsuits, whispering to each other with fingers interlaced. As I walked by they glanced sideways and smiled.

“Hi, Lit.”

“Hi, Lit. Great party…”

As though I had something to do with it. I gave them both a wobbly smile. “Hi, Alysa. Christie. Have you seen Hillary any—”

I stiffened. One of the tuxedoed men was laughing at something a companion had said. He turned casually in my direction—a short slight man with dark silver-touched hair, a keen blade of a nose and disarmingly alert blue eyes. When he saw me his laughter did not stop, but there was a nearly imperceptible change in its timbre, as though he’d drawn a breath of cold air. His gaze caught mine and held it. Not challengingly, not fearfully, but with disbelief—

But a sort of disbelief that seemed almost like ecstasy, a raw surge of emotion that I had never observed before, and certainly never directed at me. His brow furrowed and his blue eyes narrowed, as though he was not quite sure of what he was seeing. Then he turned away again, so that I saw only the back of his bespoke tuxedo jacket.

It was not quickly enough. I had recognized him. The man I had seen atop Muscanth Mountain; the man Ralph had named Balthazar Warnick.

Yet what terrified me, what sent me pushing past that little crowd and into the reassuring silence of the music room, was not the memory of slashing wind or the soft dreadful cries of the dying stag. What was most horrible was that, somehow, in that flash instant, Balthazar Warnick had recognized me. The unguarded look he had given me was not mere disbelief. It was the joy I had seen on Peter Burke’s face when he learned his son Evan was not dead in a place crash, but had missed his flight. It was the look my mother had one dawn when I hadn’t bothered to call first and returned home from an unexpected party; the look of a man seeing a loved one he thought dead. And the revenant was me.

10. The Punk Meets the Godfather

I STUMBLED INTO THE music room. After the shrill, overheated melee of the outer hall, it seemed positively monastic. Tiffany lamps and austere Prairie School lanterns cast a cozy glow over worn leather furniture—hassocks, oxblood couches, armchairs large enough for two people to sleep in side by side. Which at least one blissed-out couple was doing, the woman’s miniskirt still hiked up to her waist while her partner snored.

Otherwise the place was empty. Oriental rugs were scattered across the floor, not the elegant Chinese silk pastels favored by my parents but thick rough-textured rugs from Turkey and Afghanistan, wool so heavy it left your fingers sticky with lanolin, with intricate mazelike patterns dyed in the autumnal hues of the wines Axel Kern loved: claret, burgundy, the golden bronze of Armagnac, pale sunlit sémillon. The floorboards were worn and creaked underfoot; the plaster ceiling cracked and blotched with water-stains. There were music stands holding black-and-white photographs of a naked Marilyn Monroe, a harp hung with a Soviet flag, a Steinway covered by a fringed paisley shawl. A shabby polar bear rug lay in front of a huge stone fireplace where a fire crackled. The room was so big, and so inadequately heated, that I hurried there to warm myself. I avoided the polar bear—its fur matted, the color of city slush—instead stood on tiptoe on the tile border in front of the hearth.

The fire must have been blazing for hours. There were logs as large as I was angled across the brass firedogs, and a mountain of ash beneath. After a minute or two I blinked, my cheeks burning, and stepped backward until I leaned against the Steinway. I could still hear laughter and thumping music, and fainter strains from other parts of the mansion. I was debating whether to brave the hall again or head off in search of Hillary, when someone grabbed my ankle; someone beneath the piano.

“Lit Moylan,” a voice intoned drunkenly. I tried to pull away but the hand moved up to my calf and gripped me. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Hillary?”

I had to lift the fringed shawl before I could see him, lying on his stomach, his flannel shirt open and his long hair sticking out like Struwwelpeter’s, a heap of apple cores beside him. “Gee, Hillary, I thought you were prostrate with grief looking for me.”

“I am. I’m completely housebroken. Get down here—”

I slid beside him. He kissed me sloppily, his mouth tasting of red wine and apples, then drew back, puzzled. “Your hair smells funny—Christ, your hair looks funny! What happened?”

I pulled away. “Nothing.”

“Nothing? You look like—well, I don’t know what you look like.” Hillary reached behind him and grabbed a wine bottle. He took a long pull, then regarded me thoughtfully. “Actually, you know what you look like? That picture in Ali’s room.”

“Really? ‘The Lady of Shallott’?”

“No. The creepy one, that girl with the red hair and the ripped white dress who looks like she’s pulling her hair out—what’s his name? Stuck? Gluck?”

“You idiot.” I turned angrily and crawled back out. “I hate that picture—”

“Munch,” Hillary said, snapping his fingers. “That one! Hey, where you going?”

“Leave me alone! And it’s orange, not white.”

Hillary stared at my dress. “Yeah, no lie.”

“Fuck you.”

I stormed from the room, not even noticing which doorway I left by. I was such a roil of pure emotion—embarrassment, fear, excitement, arousal, rage—that I felt sick to my stomach. I was halfway down a darkened hallway before I stopped to catch my breath. Overhead the ceiling was so ornately carved it seemed hung with dark crumpled linen. I glanced back for the telltale glow of firelight from the music room.

It was gone.

“Damn,” I whispered.

I was in one of those labyrinthine oak-paneled passages that wound through Bolerium like the trails bored by deathwatch beetles, opening upon anterooms and stairways, pocket libraries and maprooms, and even upon a tiny private chapel where it was said Acherley Darnell had been shriven the night before his execution. As a child I had sometimes wandered in these halls, when the adult conversation bored me and I’d tried unsuccessfully to find my way to the kitchen in search of normal food, rather than the robust and inedible spreads that Axel and my parents loved: morels, imported truffles and dark bread, venison studded with juniper berries; fiddleheads and shad roe.

But I could never make any sense of the corridors. Sometimes I found the kitchen, and Axel’s housekeeper would give me turkey sandwiches and a glass of milk before sending me back. But just as often I would wander for what seemed like hours, futilely jiggling doorknobs, climbing narrow stairways where the ceiling grazed my head, staring out lead-paned windows onto the slope of Muscanth Mountain and the distant play of light upon the lake. Eventually, of course, I always found my way back; but ever after was haunted by dreams of dim passages, muted voices speaking behind walls; doors I could never quite open and words I could not understand.

Now I felt that same dread returning. And I was starving. So I went on, trying to ignore the pulse of music from behind the walls, the flicker of movement behind half-closed doors. In front of one there was a stack of unopened mail that came up to my waist; by another someone had dumped an ashtray. The walls held some of the artifacts scattered throughout Bolerium like the detritus of a fabulous library. Old, sepia-tinted photographs of places in western England: Land’s End, The Lizard, a group of standing stones called The Merry Maidens. A huge gilt frame that held an oil painting in the style of Landseer, its colors so dark I had to squint to determine its subject: ravening hounds and an embattled stag, the deer poised upon the edge of a cliff with its head thrown back. An engraved brass plaque gave its title, “AT BAY.”

And after this, an entire hallway filled with a series of maps, the earliest dating back to the 1600s. All depicted the changing contours of Kamensic’s boundaries—a farm, the Indian burial ground overlooking Lake Muscanth, the Old Post Road. I stopped to peruse these, looking for my own house. I never found it, which was puzzling—it was on the Register of Historic Places, and often mentioned in local histories.

What was even stranger was that the one local landmark which should not have changed over the centuries—Muscanth Mountain—did change, at least on these ordnance maps. The oldest chart, dated 1601, showed a vast Himalaya of a peak, snow-covered, with black stones thrusting from its side like a reptile’s dorsal spines. Only three years later, Muscanth was a mere hillock, the silhouette of Bolerium already blotched onto it in tea-colored ink.

But the next map showed yet a different view, and then another: as though the mountain were a lake or marsh whose environs swelled or shrank according to the seasons. Its placement never varied. Neither did the shadowy outline of Bolerium. Only the exact size and shape of the mountain itself seemed to be in question.

This was odd, though of course old maps are notoriously unreliable. Yet even the more recent charts, dating from the 1930s, shared this anomaly. I stared at one, frowning, and recalled Jamie Casson’s complaint—

Every time we come down that mountain it’s like a different road…

But what if that wasn’t it, I thought, and shivered. What if every time we come down that road, it’s like a different mountain?

As if in answer a tide of laughing voices rose and ebbed somewhere just out of sight. I lingered another moment in front of the maps, then went on.

The air grew cooler, as though I had wandered far from where the other partygoers held court. The cracks beneath closed doors hinted at what was inside: candles, a halogen glare that meant 16mm cameras; the ubiquitous fuzzy glow of ultraviolet. Occasionally I caught a whiff of something other than lemon polish—marijuana smoke, candle wax; a woman’s perfume, heavy with the sweet notes of vanilla and jasmine. My stomach growled, and I had the beginning of a headache stabbing at my eyes.

“Come on, come on,” I muttered, squinting as I tried to figure out where the hell I was: absolutely nowhere. In front of me the passage wound on. Behind me there were only all those doors, like the sets of some demented game show. “Shit.”

I stopped and ran a hand through my knotted hair, steeling myself to kick in the next door I saw, when light flooded the hall in front of me, brilliant red. I stiffened, saw yet another door that opened inward. There was someone inside—two people. Their shadows rippled at my feet, and I stepped quickly to one side.

“…knew you’d find her! Why else would you be here?”

“Don’t be a fool. I had no—”

Abruptly they grew silent. I pressed myself against the wall and held my breath. I knew the first voice. It was Ralph Casson, his tone nearly strangled with rage; and the second voice, too, I almost recognized, a voice so oddly familiar that at first I thought I must know it from a movie or song.

But then the shadows moved closer. The pool of crimson light at my feet diminished and disappeared. In the doorway stood two figures, staring at me. Not in complete shock, but not quite as though I were expected. More like they had expected me sooner, or later, or in other clothes.

“Lit,” Ralph Casson pronounced. “Here you are.”

“Giulietta,” breathed the second man: Balthazar Warnick. He ran a hand across his brow, glanced quickly at Ralph, then at me. “You—he said you were here, Giulietta, but…”

He stepped toward me and I shrank from him. “I don’t know you,” I said, sounding unaccountably childish. I looked at Ralph, who cocked his head and beckoned me to him.

“Lit,” he said, correcting Balthazar. “This is Lit Moylan.” He put his arm around me, leaning his head so it rested atop mine. “She and my son Jamie are in school together.”

Balthazar Warnick continued to stare at me. Behind him I could just glimpse a room, not much bigger than a closet, really, bare of any furniture and lit by a single red bulb in the ceiling. After a moment he stepped out into the hall, seeming disconcerted, almost fearful. But then he nodded, smoothing the lapels of his tuxedo jacket and gracing me with an ironic bow.

“Lit,” he said. “I am delighted to meet you.”

He extended his hand. I glanced at Ralph. He gave me a reassuring nod, and so tentatively I took Balthazar’s hand in my own. I thought he would shake it. Instead he drew it to his lips and kissed my knuckles. Mortified, I looked down at my boots.

“Please,” I said. Balthazar smiled coolly and withdrew his hand.

Ralph laughed. “They teach you that at Greenwich Country Day School, Lit?” I flushed, and started to snap back at him when another figure appeared in the red-lit room behind us.

“Boys, boys, boys,” a voice scolded. “You must learn to share.”

I looked up. Someone stood there, head and shoulders above Balthazar and Ralph, glowing as though just pulled from a kiln. An aureole of cerise hair; milk-white face save for two slashes of rouge like arrows drawn across her cheeks; a voluptuous mouth green as poison apples. A gold sequin winked above her upper lip, and her eyes were so thickly mascaraed they looked like spiders. She stared at me and smiled, then with a flourish raised her hands. She placed one upon Balthazar’s shoulder, the other upon Ralph’s, pushed them aside and walked between them.

“I learned that from Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments,” she explained. Her voice was deep but breathy, very hoarse, as though it was a continuing effort to speak. She put a long, blunt-tipped fingernail under my chin and tilted my head back, until I was gazing directly into those liquid brown eyes.

“Charlotte Moylan?”

I nodded.

“I’m Precious Bane.”

“I—I know.”

How could I not know? Precious Bane, née Wally Ciminski, the Jersey City steno pool speed freak turned transvestite hustler and Nursery film idol, imperiled star of Necromancer and House of the Sleeping Beauties. Heroine of Russ Greer’s anthemic 1972 hit “Cities of Night,” with its teasing refrain and daring references to sexual acts even I, liberated child that I was, could only imagine; Axel Kern’s confidante and, it was rumored, lover, though my parents refused to believe that.

Looking at her now, I had difficulty believing it, too. Precious Bane was just too huge. She towered on silver platform shoes, her linebacker’s shoulders expansive as a condor’s wings, enhanced by a Barbara Stanwyck jacket wide enough that Barbara Stanwyck herself could be hiding in it. The halo of cerise hair shimmered when she moved, and a very short black polyester skirt skimmed the tops of her thighs. The effect wasn’t exactly what you would call a paragon of feminine beauty, but neither was it laughable. She was like a statue damaged by time and weather, her beauty increased by exposure: she was too much herself, her gift stemming from her own unshakable belief that she was fabulous. And so you thought so, too.

“Your godfather sent me to find you, sweetie.” She smiled, showing a lot of big, yellow teeth. “Ready?”

I swallowed and looked around uncertainly. “Uh, sure. I guess.”

Precious Bane plucked at my hair, frowning. “Maybe we better stop by the little girl’s room first? You’re a bit untidy. Here, this way—”

She steered me into the red room. Ralph Casson started after us, but Precious Bane turned and held up her hand like a crossing guard.

“Uh-uh-uh. No boys allowed. Sorry.”

“But—”

“I’m sure we’ll all find time to have a nice visit later.”

I peeked around her, trying to catch a last glimpse of Balthazar Warnick. But the door slammed shut before I saw anything except Ralph Casson staring after me with a greedy, almost gloating, look.

“There.” Precious Bane shook her head. “People come and go so quickly here,” she said, and clomped across the room. There was a single door set into the far wall, its glass knob sparkling beneath the crimson bulb. “I don’t know why Axel comes here—I loathe it. Those trees, this house—I always expect to find Mrs. Danvers rummaging through my underwear.”

She yanked the door open and announced, “Ta da.”

Before us was a small room shaking with the roar of a stereo and crowded with people I knew. DeVayne Smith and Amanda Joy; Mrs. Langford, resplendent in frayed taffeta; Constantine Fox and a woman I recognized as the opera singer Yvette deMessieres, wearing a velvet pantsuit and an extremely pained expression; my parents and several of their closer friends. At the front of the room hung a motion picture screen, where black and white figures moved jerkily as subtitles flashed.

UN FILM DE AXEL KERN

It took me a minute to figure out exactly what room we were in—Acherley Darnell’s private chapel—and to discern the sparely elegant figure standing off by himself to one side, eyes closed, a rapturous expression on his face as he listened to the music blasting from speakers perched atop a fireplace mantel: Axel Kern.

“Ooh!” Precious Bane clapped her palms over her ears. “Too loud.” She hesitated, then shrugged, put a hand on my shoulder, and gestured at the chapel.

“His Satanic Majesty awaits,” she shouted, and we went inside.

Once upon a time the chapel had actually resembled a mid eighteenth century New England place of worship. Whitewashed walls, stern wooden pews, an altar of unpolished hemlock and wrought-iron lanterns suspended by chains from the ceiling. This at least was the image on display in engravings from various Darnell biographies.

But every picture I had ever seen, in the courthouse museum or Bolerium itself, showed a distinctly more sybaritic temple, hung with the heads of animals hunted by Darnell and his ancestors, the windows draped in ivy that had crept through cracks to spread like mildew across the walls. I had never actually been in the chapel before; right now I would rather have been just about anywhere else. All eyes turned as I entered. Constantine Fox gave me a watery grin. My father beamed. At his side, my mother looked pale, her eyes red, but when she saw me she smiled thinly and I could see her mouthing my name, though of course I heard nothing, except for that music and its ominous bassline.

With the shriek of a phonograph needle the music ended. In the near-silence I could hear only the whir of a projector. I shrank closer to Precious Bane, catching the powdery-sweet scent of her pancake makeup, the acrid odor of sweat-stained fabric. She looked down at me, brows furrowed in a Kabuki representation of concern.

“Are you all right, sweetie? Aw, shit—we never got you cleaned up. Oh well, he won’t care—”

She led me to one side of the room, walking past the little mob of revelers. Slowly people began speaking again, voices scarcely raised above a whisper. I hoped they were just embarrassed by the sudden stillness, but I couldn’t help thinking that they were talking about me. I craned my neck to see my parents, but they had turned away to greet another friend from summer stock.

“Don’t slouch,” commanded Precious Bane. She glanced at the bodice of my peasant dress and frowned. “And you ought to wear a bra. You don’t want to end up looking like those ladies in National Geographic, do you?”

I laughed, but she only shook her head. “Youth is wasted on the young.”

We were alongside the first pew, a few feet from where Axel stood gazing at the ceiling. His hair was longer than when I had last seen him, iron-gray but streaked with black. Yet he looked no older; he had the same chiseled, hawkish features, the same deep-set eyes set above a face heavily lined yet oddly youthful. There was a rawness to Axel, an understated feral quality as disturbing as it was compelling. You could always smell him; not some expensive cologne, nor yet the smoky afterthought of his Sobranies, but Axel himself: his sweat, the earthy scent of his hair, an unnamable attar that I knew must be grown-up sex. Some people mistook this rawness for mere vulgarity, and shunned him; women mistook it for shyness or vulnerability, and suffered. There are photos of Nureyev that remind me of him, Nureyev and perhaps the young Klaus Kinski, with their Slavic grace and that tinge of cruelty about their mouths, like the spot of blood on a house cat’s paw.

But it was on a class trip to the Met, when I saw a golden burial mask from a Scythian grave at Pazyryk, that I truly recognized Axel Kern. The same gypsy eyes, the same glint of festal savagery. He knew the power of his appearance and played up to it, favoring clothes that would not have seemed out of place in a cossack’s regiment or opium den. Flowing trousers of canary-yellow, blood-red, sky-blue; cracked leather boots; knee-length tunics embossed with gold medallions and violet starbursts; plain black turtlenecks and black leather pants. The effect was not so much psychedelic hangover as it was a deliberate affront. No matter how you dressed when meeting Axel Kern, you never had on quite the right clothes.

Tonight he wore a long, emerald-green kimono patterned with ferns, his hands swallowed by sleeves long enough to trip over. He stared at the ceiling, his expression so intent that I looked up, too, saw nothing but coppery-green leaves and tendrils. When I brought my gaze back down, Axel Kern was staring at me, his eyes the same verdant, mottled shade as the ivy overhead, his pupils the size of poppy seeds.

“The girl with the mousy hair,” he said, his voice thick. “Charlotte Moylan—but look how you’ve changed! Little Lit, little Lit…”

He smiled, extending one silk-emblazoned arm to beckon me closer. I went reluctantly, looking over my shoulder for my parents or even Precious Bane.

They were gone. Everyone was gone. I had a glimpse of Constantine Fox, hesitating in a small side doorway and looking confused, as though trying to remember where he was. His eyes locked with mine and I caught a flicker of something, warning or admonition or perhaps just drunkenness. Then he, too, disappeared. I was alone with Axel Kern.

“I’m so glad you finally got here,” he said. On the screen behind him the film rolled on, a woman’s face going in and out of focus, a man throwing feathers in the air. “I’ve been waiting all this time…”

He looked as crazily blissed-out as any of his guests as he pulled me to him, the folds of his kimono falling around my face as he whispered, “Ah, Lit…

“Welcome home.”

11. Beyond the Green Door

BALTHAZAR WARNICK STOOD IN the hall at Bolerium and stared at the closed door in front of him. It was of wood stained a rich deep green, the color of moss in the darkest part of the forest; through seams and chinks in the paneling he could feel a fine cold breeze. His hand clasped its polished brass knob as he leaned against the portal. An observer might have thought he was striving to hear something on the other side of the door. Frightened whispers, urgent cries, the soft thunder of a heaving bed.

But Balthazar was not listening. Or rather, what he was listening for was not beyond the door but in the hall behind him. His heart was beating so hard that he thought, absurdly, that someone might hear it and take him by surprise.

And that is very nearly what happened.

“Professor Warnick.”

Balthazar whirled. When he saw Ralph Casson he stared at him in silence for a long time, at last drew a long breath.

“You found her. How did you find her?” he asked.

Ralph Casson smiled. “You’re really surprised, eh, Professor? You really never thought I was very good, did you?” His tone was light, bantering even, but his blue eyes clouded as he leaned against the wall, angling himself so that he could look down upon Balthazar and have a clear view of the corridor beyond him. “Man, you really blew me off last time I saw you—you know that? When we were at that cocktail party with all your tight-assed friends—”

Balthazar shook his head, his expression pained. “Not my friends, Ralph. The Conclave. You knew when we started—”

“I knew fuck-all!” Ralph cried. “I joined you in good faith, Balthazar—good faith! I spent six years at the Divine—I worked for you, I went to Herculaneum when you told me to, I never even questioned what you did to Corey Lesser there, I typed your fucking index cards!”

His finger stabbed at the air between them as Balthazar watched, unblinking. “And how did you repay me? Exile, man—fucking exile, like I was some neophyte!”

“You betrayed us, Ralph,” Balthazar murmured. He moved ever so slightly, so that his hand remained on the doorknob but was hidden by a drape of black tuxedo jacket. “The day you joined Kern in Malta, it was over.” He shook his head regretfully. For the first time his eyes met the other man’s. “I warned you. I went to the airport—”

“Fuck that,” Ralph spat. “When the hell did you ever use an airport—did you fly here, Balthazar? Did you?”

“The choice was yours, Ralph. It was always yours. You went with the Malandanti. You’re here now—”

“So are you!” Ralph crowed, banging his palm against the wall. “You’re here, too, Balthazar—so what does that make you? Why are you here? Where’s your invitation?”

Balthazar forced himself to keep his tone even. “I came because of Giulietta, Ralph. You know that. You called me—”

“That’s right!” Ralph said with vicious triumph. “I called, and you came—just like that! What did the Conclave have to say about that, Balthazar? Do they even know? Did you tell them—”

“They know.” Balthazar broke in quickly: it was not precisely true. “Verrill knew even before I did. There was a disturbance at the temple of Dionysos Limnaios. Trees moving; a voice crying out that Pan is free—”

He hesitated before going on. “If I had not been remiss in my responsibilities at the Orphic Lodge—”

“You could have done nothing. You understand? Nothing,” Ralph said. “They’re moving, Balthazar—all your old enemies are waking. Here; in Penwith and Akrotiri and Rajputana—everywhere!”

He took a step closer to the other man, his hand sliding down the wall until it was only inches from where Balthazar clasped the doorknob. “How does that feel, Professor Warnick? Knowing that all your vigilance is for nothing? Knowing that your whole world is going under”— Ralph snapped his fingers and drew back, laughing. —“just like that.”

“Oh, I think the world has a few revolutions left in it, before it all spins out of control. And the—events—at West Penwith were not unexpected,” Balthazar said lightly. He smiled, was rewarded by Ralph showing an instant of discomfiture before the older man continued, “But you and I both know that’s not why you went to all the trouble to get me here. Where is she, Ralph? Where is Giulietta?”

“Lit.” Ralph drew the word out. “Got that, Balthazar? At least for this particular turn of the karmic wheel, her name is Lit. Kind of a funny name, considering all that bad stuff that came down back in Moruzzo—”

“Stop it.” Balthazar’s voice broke. His face grew pale. “Stop it.”

“—and I mean, it’s kind of ironic, don’t you think it’s sort of funny, here you’ve spent, like, what? Five thousand years? Ten thousand years? Anyway, a really, really long time, battling these Malandanti—and there you were back in Moruzzo, in love with a girl who was actually one of them. Your own masters were the ones who burned her at the stake and where the hell were you, Balthazar? What were you thinking, why didn’t you—”

“Stop.”

Between them the air crackled, flickers of electric blue and gold like iron filings swirling around a magnet. One of the sparks flew dangerously close to Ralph’s face; he cried out, slapping a hand over his eye.

“You bastard! You blinded me—!”

With a groan Ralph fell back against the wall. His fingers splayed across his cheek, blood seeping between them. Balthazar stared, remorse welling up in him like panic; then turned and flung the door open.

“No!” shouted Ralph.

Framed within the door’s opening was the landscape of a dream: a corrugated expanse of hills bare of any trees, their summits crowned by stone ruins and overgrown with yellow-blooming gorse and tiny, thorn-spun roses. Overhead the sky was dark gray, swept with clouds that scudded toward the western horizon, showing gashes of soft blue between them. Then the clouds dispersed and all melted into an endless vista of indigo ocean, its surface scarred by white cresting waves. Birds wheeled overhead, and there were bees in the flowering gorse; but the scene was utterly silent, a vivid film with the sound turned off. From where he stood in the doorway, Balthazar gazed upon it as though poised on a neighboring hilltop.

“In nubibis,” he whispered, and stepped through the portal.

A sickening instant in which he seemed to plunge, his head roaring and the wind raking his face. Dimly he was aware of a voice shouting, the dulled sensation of something tugging at his hand as at an anaesthetized limb. Then there was a smell of salt and wet granite, the pounding of waves against the cliffs and the unbearably sweet, high-pitched cry of a linnet. Balthazar stumbled upon the rocky ground, caught himself, and straightened.

He stood upon one of the tor-capped hills crowding the westernmost point of Cornwall. Maps showed the place as West Penwith, the peninsula that toed into the Atlantic at Land’s End. But the Benandanti had another name for it: Affon, the land between. Affon stretched here but also at myriad other spots across the globe. Places that existed both within and without of time, places that the Good Walkers had created and stood guard over for countless millennia; places where they watched, and waited, and prepared for the great conflict that had been building over the entire history of their world, and others.

Penwith was one such place. The Orphic Lodge in West Virginia was another, and the University of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine a third. The rest were scattered throughout the world that the Benandanti and their enemies had shaped: in the Aegean and Anatolia, across the subcontinent and the vast Eurasian steppes; in London and Rome, amidst the ruins of the ancient Dravidian cities of India and Pompeii. Any place where the ancient gods of the earth had walked and been worshipped, in Crete or along the Ganges, in Siberia or the Orkneys—there the Benandanti had built their own temples and places of learning, their banks and basilicas and steel-lined bunkers. All were linked by the Benandanti’s portals, each bearing the Benandanti’s motto—Omnia Bona Bonis—in carven script or hidden cantrip. If you were to look at a map of the world the Benandanti had made, it would be webbed with these portals and the occult paths between them, the way a lacquered globe can be webbed with cracks. And in the same manner that the globe will break, its veneer shatter, when the cracks overtake it, so the Benandanti had shaped their assault upon the old world and old gods that had preceded their own: by stealth and manipulation, thievery and coercion, auto-da-fé and conversion.

But yet there were places on the earth where the Benandanti did not hold sway. And it was to one of these that Balthazar Warnick had come after witnessing the destruction of the herm—

Bolerium. He went unwilling, but unable to resist the summons.

For summons it had been, just as Ralph Casson had said. No vision of Giulietta Masparutto could have gone unanswered, no thought of her brushed away; no matter that it scorched him, left him breathless and burning as though he had stuck his hand into a bonfire. Balthazar could no more ignore the memory of that voice and its whispering echo through the eons, than he could have torn his soul and mind from the battle he had entered into when the hills around him were covered with trees, and the standing stones stained red with wine and blood.

So he had entered Bolerium; uninvited, unseen. It was a sacred place, as sacred to the Malandanti as the Divine was to the Good Walkers. For two thousand years Bolerium had been one of their last refuges, and no one of the Benandanti’s portals would vouchsafe entry there. Instead Balthazar had made his journey from the Orphic Lodge and entered Affon, and from thence had used one of the ancient propylons that served as stepping-stones between past and future, joining the holy places of Benandanti and Malandanti alike.

Because Heraclitus was wrong. You could step into the same river twice. Time itself was that river, the Benandanti and Malandanti its navigators; their respective gods the stars they steered by. But in going to Bolerium, Balthazar had made his way through treacherous shoals, and risked more than he cared to think about.

Now he could see the propylon that had served as his way station: a granite pillar twice man-high, plain and unadorned where it sat upon the very top of the hill. At its base thistles nodded in the wind, and bright yellow finches worried their seeds with plaintive voices. Balthazar gave a sigh of relief. He stepped toward the propylon, and immediately went crashing to the ground.

“No—you—don’t—” a voice gasped behind him. Someone grappled with his legs; Balthazar kicked out awkwardly and pulled away. He sat up, panting, and saw Ralph Casson sprawled in the high grass. Around his right eye a series of fine crimson lines radiated, as though it were a medieval image of the sun. Drawn in the air behind him was the blurred outline of a door, and within that faint rectangle Balthazar could just make out the corridor he had fled, vying with the misty stretch of sky above the sea.

“Tag,” Ralph said, and grinned. “You’re it.”

Balthazar stumbled to his feet. “You can do nothing here!”

“Nor can you,” retorted Ralph. He stood and brushed grass from his suit jacket, its vivid ultramarine muted in the brilliant light. He looked around, blinking. For an instant sheer wonder washed across his face, and Balthazar could see a ripple of the boy in the ruins of the man he had become. The ardent undergraduate too easily moved to tears; the older student infuriated by the revelations of Procopius, himself a loyal Benandante, and that vengeful courtier’s venomous attacks upon the imperial consort Theodora; the longhaired young man with head bent over Girardius’s account of the Necromantic Bell in one of the secret libraries at the Divine, his lips moving as he first uttered the words of the incantation that would make final his betrayal, and his expulsion.

But then Ralph turned to face his former mentor. Amazement faded into mistrust and restrained fury as he gingerly touched the web of broken skin around his eye. “You should not have done that, Balthazar,” he said softly. “I came to you in good faith, to bring you news of your lover—”

Balthazar broke in angrily. “You manifested a sending at the Lodge—”

“I did not. That was no vision, Balthazar—the god walks, the cycle begins. He drinks and fucks and readies himself for his rebirth, even as we speak. This is what your carelessness has cost the Benandanti, Professor. You should have been more vigilant. The times were propitious for his return, the world is ready—as ready as it gets, these days,” he added with a shrug. “Time to face the music, Balthazar! Your reign is almost over. And that”— He swept his hand out, indicating the ghostly door in the air behind them. —“that is where it will all end: in Bolerium.”

“In delirium, more likely,” said Balthazar. He had calmed himself enough that his voice was steady, though he kept his hands in his pockets so Ralph would not see how they still trembled. “He’s not a very reliable god, is he, Ralph? And Axel Kern is rather a poor choice of avatar—he’s too well-known! Who would dare kill him? The cycle will never be completed,” he ended, and allowed himself a smile.

“You’re wrong, Professor Warnick. His followers—”

“Lackeys,” said Balthazar derisively. “Drug addicts, prostitutes, inverts—none of them could do it. They wouldn’t dare—that would be like tearing up their meal ticket, wouldn’t it? And I imagine most of them possess a minute degree of feeling, or common sense, certainly enough to keep them from murdering him. Not to mention the complicated legal situation that would devolve—some deranged hophead slaying a famous film director in the name of an ancient religious rite!”

Balthazar laughed. “No, I just can’t see it, Ralph. Who would do it? Willingly, mindfully, in accordance with the mysteries? No one—”

“The girl would.” Ralph’s face had turned crimson; the outlines of the wound Balthazar had given him bled into his rage. “The girl you remember as Giulietta: Charlotte Moylan. Lit.”

Balthazar froze. “You’re lying,” he whispered. Though he knew, had always somehow known, it was the truth.

“No, Balthazar. I’m not lying. She was chosen years ago. She’s his goddaughter, she grew up within the enclave—”

“Does she know?” Balthazar’s voice cracked. “Does she—”

“She knows nothing,” said Ralph. Relieved, Balthazar closed his eyes for an instant, opened them to see the other man staring at him. “Yet. In Kamensic they all grow up under the Malandanti’s protection, but the children never know, not at first…

“But she will learn, Balthazar. She is with him at this very moment. And you know what happens next—”

“I forbid it.”

Ralph burst out laughing. “Forbid it? Don’t be an idiot! You’re not her father—you’re not even her lover, now. No, there’s nothing you can do, Balthazar, except maybe watch the proceedings…”

His laughter trailed off into the sound of waves and birds wheeling overhead. He threw his head back, staring into the sky as Balthazar watched him measuringly. For several minutes neither man spoke. Then,

“I will go to her,” Balthazar said. Absently he plucked a yellow gorse blossom, rubbing its petals between his fingers. “She’ll listen, she’ll remember—”

“She will be afraid of you.” Menace undercut Ralph’s tone as he tore his gaze from the sky. “There was a sending, but it wasn’t of the fallen herm. I showed her you, Balthazar. In various fancy dress, and doing an estimable job of presiding over various rites—”

“She’ll know it was false!”

“But it wasn’t all false, Balthazar. I showed her Corey at Herculaneum—hard to forget such a thing if you see it at an impressionable age, isn’t it? And as for the rest, why would she doubt it?” Ralph shot the other man a look composed equally of pity and disdain. “She’s just a girl, Balthazar. She has no knowledge, no memory of you or your history. Her parents serve the god but they aren’t adepts—they’re actors. Mediocre actors,” he added with a trace of viciousness. “Ignorant. That is what the great Dionysos is reduced to now—whores and speed freaks.”

“Then why do you serve him, Ralph?” For the first time Balthazar’s tone was genuinely curious.

“I serve nobody. I told you that ten years ago—”

“Then you’re a fool. We all serve something. I do so with full knowledge—”

“You do so as a thief,” Ralph said. “You and all your kind. The Good Walkers—nothing but poachers and thieves. And murderers.” He extended his finger and drew a figure in the air. Faint gold letters appeared, almost immediately faded.

“‘God is the author of all good things,’” Ralph recited, lifting his eyes as though reading the words in the sky above him. “‘To continue the good customs which have been practiced by idolaters, to preserve the objects and the buildings which they have used is not to borrow from them; on the contrary, it is taking from them what is not theirs and giving it to God, its real owner.’ Saint Augustine,” he ended. “See, Professor? I really was paying attention in class, all those years ago.”

Balthazar shook his head. “If you think you act freely, he has deceived you, Ralph. ‘The god of illusion’—”

“Oh, no. ‘The god of ecstasy,’” Ralph drawled. “Tell me something, Professor: why does the Devil have all the good music? At least I have sense to know which way the wind blows, right? Oh, she’ll go to him very willingly, and the rest—the rest will follow. Twenty-four hours from now the cycle will already have begun again. The Malandanti will be that much stronger. Unless…”

He lifted his hands and waggled them suggestively. The gorse petals dropped from the blossom that Balthazar held, and the older man tossed the spent flower into the wind.

“Unless what?” he asked wearily.

“Unless the Benandanti initiate me into the Conclave.”

Balthazar snorted. “That’s impossible! You betrayed us, Ralph—”

“No. I refused to murder Corey,” Ralph replied. “I refused to kill my best friend, when it turned out he wasn’t going to be as useful to you as you first thought. I refused to be your straw man—”

“You obstinately refused to obey my command: you invoked Erichto, you stole entry to our portals, and you paid the price. And Corey died all the same,” Balthazar added regretfully. “And for what? For nothing, Ralph. We will always triumph. Why didn’t you listen to me? How could you have imagined you would get away with it?”

“I did get away with it. I’m here now, right?” Abruptly Ralph turned and began striding toward the hilltop. Balthazar watched him, his mouth tight; then quickly followed. Around them tiny blue butterflies dipped in and out of the gorse. The sun burned down, strong enough that the bracken crackled dry as autumn leaves beneath their feet. On the westernmost edge of the sea a fog bank was beginning to take shape, like a wall between land’s end and the world beyond.

They climbed in silence, their suit jackets flapping in the wind. When he reached the summit, Ralph halted and turned, waiting for Balthazar to catch up.

“So you won’t petition the Conclave on my behalf.”

“There would be no point.” Balthazar stooped and picked up a stone. He drew his hand back and threw it, a black jot like a bird arcing higher and higher, until it disappeared. “None.”

Ralph wiped sweat from his cheek, wincing as his hand grazed the scar around his eye. “Well. I didn’t think you would, actually. But I thought I would at least show you common decency, and give you the chance. You’ve really fucked yourself, Professor—you know that, don’t you?”

When Balthazar said nothing the other man went on. “She’ll go with the god. When she kills him it will start all over: Finnegan, begin again! You will have the pleasure of seeing your eternal love betray everything you’ve lived for…And I will have the pleasure of watching the Conclave find out about your negligence. By then it will be too late: the first gods will return, and the Benandanti will be defeated.”

Balthazar looked at him with contempt. “You always were a rebel without a clue. Wasting your life, thinking that Dionysos or Erichto or Spes will prove kinder masters than the ones you had at the Divine! Would you spend your years rooting in the dirt with them? You could have worked with the Benandanti, you could have served us—”

“As a goddam foot soldier. Forget it, Professor. It’s over.”

Ralph turned and walked to where the granite pillar loomed against the gathering mist. A few feet away, tucked amidst the thistles and the gorse’s reddish thorns, grew a small laurel bush. Its leaves were jade-green, smooth as marble. Ralph stood eyeing it contemplatively. Then he stooped and took one of its gnarled branches in his hand, twisting it until it pulled loose.

Balthazar watched in silence as Ralph crushed one of the laurel leaves between his fingers, sniffed it and then put it into his mouth. He chewed, grimacing; then spat into his hand. He took the branch and began to rub it between his palms, faster and faster, the leaves switching back and forth in a green blur.

Daphnomancy, thought Balthazar.

“That’s right,” said Ralph.

“Parlor tricks,” Balthazar retorted, but Ralph only stared at the branch whirling between his hands. The solar scar upon his cheek began to glow. As though catching a spark from it the laurel burst into flame. There was a harsh scent, black wisps of ash, and the crackle of burning leaves. Ralph continued to hold the branch, turning it this way and that so the wind fanned the little blaze.

“There,” he said, pleased. “Have a look, Balthazar.”

Within the flame were two tiny figures, a girl whose fiery hair trailed into the edges of the blaze and a robed man with saturnine features. The man was speaking, his voice thin as the wailing of the birds overhead.

“…the amazing thing about Fellini, he’s always doing the same thing, it’s always the same thing…”

The girl said nothing, only rubbed her arms as though she was cold. Watching her Balthazar felt tears score his eyes. He swallowed, his mouth dry and throat aching, and turned to Ralph.

“Free her.”

Ralph shrugged. He dropped the branch into a patch of gorse. Yellow flames devoured the girl’s image. With a soft hiss the fire went out. A coil of smoke rose into the air and joined the mist that had begun to cloak the hilltop.

“I’m not holding her, Balthazar.” Ralph sighed and ran a hand across his face. He suddenly looked very tired. “She’s a part of it, that’s all. There, in Kamensic—I have no more power over her than you do…

“What was it you always used to say, Professor? That we all have our parts, that they never change and we only fuck ourselves if we try to change them—”

Balthazar allowed himself a small smile. “I’m certain I never said that.”

“Well, words to that effect. We do the same things over and over and over again, down through the centuries; we worship the same gods and slaughter them and wait for them to be reborn. The pattern repeats itself endlessly. Nothing ever really changes—”

“But that’s exactly why we must be resolute!” cried Balthazar. “To keep the chaos at bay, to maintain order—”

“One man’s order is another guy’s ordure. If you take my meaning.”

Ralph stood, shading his eyes. The mist had thickened until it was impossible to see more than a few yards in any direction. Sunlight charged the fog with a preternatural brilliance, so that it was like staring into the milky glowing heart of an opal. Ralph blinked, trying to find the portal within the shifting clouds. For an instant the mist cleared and there it was, a dark lozenge hanging in the air like a watercolor by Magritte.

“I have to get back to the party,” said Ralph. He looked at his former mentor, stoop-shouldered, graying hair blown across his melancholy face, and unexpectedly felt a spasm of regret. “I—I guess I’m sorry, Professor Warnick. That we couldn’t find any common ground. That we couldn’t reach an understanding.”

“Let her come to me,” Balthazar pleaded one last time. He opened his hands to Ralph beseechingly. “Please.” In the blanched light he looked small and wizened, a goblin in black formal wear grasping for something that would forever be out of reach.

“She’s not mine to give, Balthazar,” said Ralph softly. He turned and strode toward the portal, raising his arms as though to embrace it. At the last moment, before stepping through, he looked back. “She’s pledged to the god of illusion. And you know what that’s like. She’ll fuck him, and then she’ll kill him. Or else he’ll drive her mad, and she’ll kill herself. There’s nothing you or I can do about it. Except watch the fireworks.”

He entered the portal, one hand lifted in farewell. His figure grew dark, as though obscured by smoke, and faded. The outlines of the portal remained. Balthazar Warnick stared at it, his mouth contorted with grief; then buried his face in his hands and began to weep.

12. You Set the Scene

ACHERLEY DARNELL’S FORMER CHAPEL was freezing. The rows of clerestory windows were open and the night wind blew through, stirring the ivy clustered around the leaded glass. After a few minutes it started to rain. Sleety drops came splattering inside, and drifts of tattered oak leaves that made the stone floor slickly treacherous and gave the entire room a dank, graveyard smell. There was a hole in the elbow of my new peasant dress. When I poked my finger through, my arm felt like something dead, icy and goose pimpled. But I was too embarrassed to tell Axel Kern I was cold, and he appeared to be too stoned to notice.

“The amazing thing about Fellini, he’s always doing the same thing, it’s always the same thing.”

Axel stood in front of the movie screen, swaying back and forth. His voice was at once drifty and impassioned, a tone I recognized from my own friends when they were totally wasted, but which I had never heard coming from an adult. On the screen behind him, the man pulling feathers from a pillow was now part of a daisy chain of dancers against a blinding white sky.

“That’s what’s so amazing about Fellini.” Axel scowled at me, as though I had argued with him. “While everyone else is, like, consumed by creating something new. New new new new. Whereas real art lies in finding those things that are always the same. You know what I mean?”

“No.” Discomfort made me bored and defiant. “I have no fucking idea.”

“Yes, you do. You’re a smart girl, Lit, And I don’t just mean art—I’m talking about everything. History repeats itself; so does politics, and religion. So do individual human beings. It’s all like this—”

Teetering slightly he drew a big, loopy circle in the air with his finger. It seemed to make him dizzy. “See? It all goes like that. The eternal return. In my end is my beginning. Over under sideways down. When will it end?”

He leaned back on his bare heels, almost fell but grabbed the edge of the table doing stand-in for an altar. “Oops. That’s what people don’t understand about my movies. They’re all about tradition. The importance of tradition in the modern world. Future shock, past perfect. You know what I’m saying?”

I looked at him dubiously. “Necromancer was about tradition?”

“Of course. What’d you think?”

“I thought it was about that guy’s head spinning around while snakes came out of his mouth.”

“Oh, please. We’re talking subtext here.” Axel lifted a hand and made a fey gesture at the movie screen. As if by magic the black-and-white film clip ended; leader scrolled across the screen, and then an out-of-focus color shot of Richard Burton in a library. “Protest engenders revolution. Chaos presages rebirth. The Exorcist begets The Heretic. Precious Bane gives birth to—well, to your friend Duncan. Nothing ever happens only once.”

He let his arm drop, sighing. “That’s what no one understands. All this talking about a new age, all this stuff—it’s just part of the cycle. The world can only stagger on for so long before it has to shake everything off and start all over again. Like a snake”— He wriggled suggestively, the emerald kimono sliding off to reveal his bare shoulders, the skin smooth and dusky gold. —“the world has to shed its skin. Things have to change. Radically.”

I was only half-listening. On the screen Richard Burton was shouting at another priest.

“You never told me there were mysteries!”

The second priest shook his head. “My whole life has been about a mystery.”

“Lit?” Axel Kern put his hand atop my head. “Listen to me. Things are happening. Right here, right this minute. And you’re a part of it—whether or not you believe me, whether or not you want to be.”

Suddenly he no longer seemed stoned or drunk; suddenly he looked very sad. “Just as I am,” he whispered.

He drew me close, not as a lover might but protectively. The way my father used to hold me sometimes, when I’d had a bad day, or he had. “Tell me what you’ve seen, Lit. Here in Kamensic since the leaves began to fall. Tell me what you saw.”

I stared at my hands, the hole in my orange paisley peasant dress. I remembered that awful four A.M. vision of Axel Kern and the leaf-struck eyes of the horned man; the heat of Ralph Casson’s hand on my breast and the way he had stroked my arm as I told him about what I’d glimpsed on the mountaintop. Not at all the way Axel held me now; not at all as though he wanted to save me from something.

“Weird stuff,” I said at last, falteringly. “This—well, like some kind of human sacrifice, up there behind Bolerium—”

I pointed at the open windows, rain slanting behind them like bars of black metal. “And the other day, at Jamie Casson’s place. I saw this man. But not a man—he had horns, he was moving in the woods—”

“The god,” Axel said softly, nodding. “That’s who you saw.”

“But what god?”

“The first one. The oldest one, except for Her,” he added, glancing at the open window as though he expected to see someone peering in at us. “The dying god, the hunter who becomes the hunted. The bull from the sea. The sacrificial lamb. Giles Goat-Boy. Drain this cup, drink his blood. Eat and be eaten.”

I would have thought he was making fun of me, or just going off on another crazy riff—except that I had seen something, in the woods and on the mountain.

And what else could possibly explain it? Unless I was insane, or drunk, or someone had slipped acid into my orange juice that morning—none of which seemed totally out of the question. I looked at Axel warily.

“That’s what it was? A—some kind of god?”

Axel nodded.

“But how?” I asked. “Why?”

“Why not? ‘All men have need of the gods.’” He raised a finger, tapped his brow. “Homer. And when the half-gods go, the gods arrive. Actually, it’s been happening for a long time—haven’t you noticed, Lit?”

His gaze was piercing, almost angry. I stared uneasily at the window.

“No.”

“Don’t lie to me.” His hands tightened around my arms, not painfully, but so that I could not edge away. “I know you have. Because I’ve seen you.”

He tilted his head, unsmiling, put a finger beneath my chin and tipped my head back until I was staring at him.

And there, for just an instant, I saw him: the leaf-eyed figure moving through the trees, horns tangling with the branches above him and the smell of oak mast. But before I could react the vision was gone. Instead there was something else flickering there, a face pale as my own but frowning, with great bruised eyes and hair shorn so close it was like gazing at a skull, threads of light rippling up and down his arms from the Seeburg and cigarette smoke in my nostrils.

“What?” demanded Axel. He shook me gently, pulling me so close that his unshaven chin grazed my forehead and the panels of his kimono opened about my face. “What do you see? Tell me…”

I blinked, dizzy; then Jamie Casson’s image was gone as well. I could feel my heart racing, but before Axel Kern could notice I edged away from him—carefully, pretending interest in the ivy twining down the walls.

“It’s—it’s gone,” I murmured. I reached to touch the underside of one heart-shaped leaf. “But it was the same as what I saw before. The horned man. The thing in the woods…”

Suddenly I was rent by such horrible yearning that tears sprang to my eyes. I gasped—and everything tumbled together inside me, the feeling I had when I’d met Jamie Casson, the memory of a song played on a flute and the haunted rush of wind in the leaves, the shadow of the doomed stag upon a hilltop and a boy silhouetted on a jukebox: all of it somehow was the same thing, and if I could only find the pattern between it all, trace the lines that ran like veins within all those shadows—then I would be free of them. Then I could escape.

But not yet. Axel towered beside me. His hand covered mine, moved it from the ivy until my palm lay upon his breast. Beneath his green kimono he was naked; my fingers tangled in the thick hair on his chest and the fabric of my dress bunched up around my thighs. He leaned forward, raising his arms until they rested against the wall, the heavy drape of his kimono forming a canopy so that I was surrounded by him. Dim light filtered through the green silk; flaws in the cloth shone like stars. He put one hand on the back of my neck and thrust my head forward against his breast, pushed me until my mouth found his nipple. My lips closed around it and he moaned as I kissed him, ran my tongue over his nipple until it stiffened, became a small swollen seed in my mouth. My cheek rubbed against the hair of his chest, damp now and hot as though sun-warmed. There was a smell of musk and balsam, the acrid tang of salt upon my tongue. When I drew my hand across his breast I could feel the steady thump of his heart, like another hand beating beneath mine. I started to move, reaching to embrace him and pulling up my dress; when he murmured, “No,” and drew away from me.

“What?” I asked hoarsely, half-blinded by the sudden surge of light as he pulled his kimono back around him. “What is it?”

Axel looked at me muzzily, as though uncertain where I’d come from. The rapt intensity that had candled his eyes a moment before was gone. Rain silvered his gray-streaked hair, and his cheeks looked raw and red from the cold. Suddenly he just seemed stoned, a little tired, the lines around his eyes more pronounced when he smiled.

“Later.” He plucked a sprig of ivy from the wall and tucked it into my hair. Behind him dancing figures stretched across the movie screen, the screen itself rippling as the wind nudged it. “It’s cold in here…”

He turned and began to walk a bit unsteadily, holding on to one of the pews for balance. I stared after him, my bewilderment giving way to anger.

“Tell me!” I demanded. I ran after him, grabbed his wrist and tugged it imploringly. “Axel, please—tell me, you said it was real, tell me what it is!”

He stopped and drew a hand across his eyes. Above us the hanging lanterns swung slightly back and forth. “God, I’m tired. But—yes, it was real. It is real. But it’s probably impossible to explain, even—even to you.”

He leaned forward to stroke my cheek, his hand cold and smelling of some sweet resin. “Because the hardest thing to understand is that nothing ever really changes, Lit. Nothing really dies. Not even very old things; not even gods. They flicker in and out of view, that’s all”— he gestured at the screen above us, then at the simple chapel altar. —“they go underground and they seem to die but they only sleep, they gather strength until finally they’re reborn. Because gods have seasons, too, time moves differently for them, it might take a hundred years or a thousand, but then their seasons come round again and they always return, they always return…”

He began to chant, so softly I had to strain to hear him.

He fell silent. There was no sound save the rain tapping against the windows and the midnight hum of the film projector, and faintest of all an echoing reverberation of music through the stone walls. Beside me Axel Kern stood deathly still, as though listening for a reply. For a long time I said nothing. Then,

“If that was a god,” I said, “if it was some kind of—thing—what is it doing here? In Kamensic? Why isn’t it in Greece or someplace like that?”

“Because this is where he will be born, this time. This is where his children live. It is his sanctuary. Not the only one, but a place where his worship is strong.”

I looked incredulous. “Kamensic Village?”

“Why not? This is where the stories come from, Lit. Come on—haven’t you ever noticed anything strange about this place?”

“Yeah.” I shrugged. “I guess so. But normal people live here. My parents live here. They have jobs. I go to school. It’s not like they’re out performing human sacrifices or something.”

Axel raised an eyebrow. “Just how normal do you think Kamensic is, Lit? How normal do you think I am?”

He peered down, brushing the hair from my forehead and tracing a circle there. “Walking in the woods and seeing things like you saw, walking into this house and talking to people like Precious Bane and Ralph Casson and me—

“How normal do you think you are, Lit Moylan?”

I pulled away. “Look, I don’t care! I hate Kamensic, I can’t wait to get the fuck out of here, I hate it—”

“You shouldn’t. It protects you, Lit. Just like it protects all of us…”

He pulled the kimono tighter about him and said, “Didn’t you ever wonder about things like that, Lit? Synchronicities? Like sometimes you dream about something and then it happens? Like when you’re thinking about an old song, a song you haven’t heard in years, and then you’re in the car and suddenly it comes on the radio?”

“Well, sure. I mean, yeah, that happens all the time. To me.”

Axel nodded solemnly. “Me too.” He began to sing in a low voice, as though trying to remember the words.

He started to pace across the room, head cocked and hands held out from his sides. It was like some clumsily executed dance, and I felt embarrassed watching it, embarrassed to be here at all. Axel was drunk, or worse; the spliced-together bits of films were just another fractured indulgence. Faded figures moved across the screen; there were a few black frames, and then a burning pyre filled the white square. Above it a laughing woman was suspended on a rack, while another woman in modern dress looked on, her expression more bemused than horrified. I could hear the hum of film scrolling through the projector, the slap of Axel’s bare feet upon the stone floor.

At the front of the room Axel stopped. He lifted his head, shadows spilling upon him so that his face looked ravaged, no longer the golden death mask but the split skull beneath. His voice sounded cracked and hoarse.

He fell silent. The screen behind him went white, covered with balloons of magnified dust. From the back of the chapel came the insistent flapping of loose film on the projector.

“Don’t move a muscle,” commanded Axel. His head snapped forward and he raised his arm dramatically, like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

“Page!” he bellowed. His eyes narrowed as he reached into a hidden pocket of his kimono, withdrew a box of Sobranies and lit one, frowning. All of a sudden he looked like the imperious director who had punched out a Time magazine photographer on the set of You Come, Too. “Get the fucking reel, Page!”

From behind the second-to-last pew a head popped up.

“Got it, got it—” the man yelled in a raspy Bronx accent. “I’m gettin’ it for chrissakes, keep your panties on…”

He clambered over the pew, heading for the alcove where the projector was, its spool of film spinning maniacally. He wore black jeans and a ratty black-and-white striped sailor shirt. From behind he could have been one of my friends, rangy and stoop-shouldered.

But when he reached the projector light splashed across his face and I recognized him. The same man I had seen at Axel Kern’s holiday party when I was twelve, filming an orgy; the same man who had looked at me then, perplexed, and said You’re early. Thirtyish, with thinning black hair and a swarthily handsome face, broad cheekbones scarred by acne and a thin remorseless mouth: Page Franchini. Sometime NYU film student, he was Axel’s chief cameraman and general Nursery flunky. He’d followed Axel to Hollywood but had never been able to find work there—he wasn’t union, he wasn’t reliable, he wasn’t even a very good cameraman. I knew him from “Cities of Night” and also from one of his solo efforts, an “experimental” film called Gravity Train which was notorious for a thirty-four minute blow-job sequence involving Precious Bane and a man dressed as an Apollo astronaut.

“Well. I’ll see you later, Lit—”

I turned as Axel smiled at me absently. He lifted his hand in farewell, turned and strode toward the door at the front of the chapel. I watched in disbelief as he left, not even bothering to close the door behind him.

“Hey, you.” It was a minute before I realized Page Franchini was yelling at me. “Sweetheart, jailbait, whoever you are—c’mere and give me a hand, huh?”

I swore beneath my breath, stared resentfully at the man fiddling with the projector. He looked up and glared, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. “Come on! I’m not gonna tell your parents you’re making out with their friends—”

“Asshole,” I muttered, but I walked over. The projector was sitting on an upended stereo speaker, surrounded by silver film canisters and cigarette butts and a battered paperback copy of Sanctuary.

“Okay, you hold this piece of leader here, it’s torn, see, just hold it so I can get the rest of this crap where it belongs—”

He shoved a ragged tail of loose film at me, yanked the reel from the projector and slid it into a can. Then he took the leader, threading it between his fingers as he held it up to the light.

“It’s shot,” he said regretfully. “Ruined. I duped that for him ten years ago. Juliet of the Spirits. He wanted a few of the frames for Saragossa. That scene when they burn the girl at the stake? There’s, like, six frames of Giulietta Masina in there, totally subliminal, I guess it’s supposed to secretly make you think Axel is Fellini.” He dragged at his cigarette, exhaled and rolled his eyes. “Sure, Axel.”

I picked up one of the opened cans, breathed in the sweetish scent of new film stock. When I looked up, Page was watching me, brow furrowed.

“I remember you,” he said at last. “That party. You were the little girl in the black velvet dress. I was tripping my tits off, I thought you were a hallucination.”

“Maybe I was.”

“Ha ha. No, it’s crazy, I thought you were—” He stopped. “Well, never mind what I thought. What are you, sixteen?”

“Seventeen. I’ll be eighteen next March.”

He dropped his cigarette on the floor and ground it out. “I was your age when I met Axel. First time a guy ever fucked me. Why don’t you be a good kid and go on home, huh?” He reached over and roughly took the film can from my hands. “It just gets old after a while, you know?”

I watched as he began sorting through a box alongside the projector. I felt defensive of Axel, and humiliated that this guy had seen us together. I tried to come up with some retort, finally said, “He’s my godfather.”

“Always a godfather, never a god.”

“He’s just like a really good friend—”

“Oh, please, spare me.” Page put the last of the film cans into the carton, straightened and shook his head. “Look, I don’t know who you are and I really don’t give a flying fuck what you do, sweetheart. But if you’d seen as many pretty little girls as I have, lying on the floor with a spike in their arm or drinking so much they walk out a sixth-floor window—”

He laughed bitterly. “Well, you’d turn right around and go on home to momma.”

“Oh, yeah? Then what are you doing here?”

“Me? I’m part of the floor show, sweetheart. I couldn’t leave if I wanted to. He’d kill me.” He reached out, took my chin between two fingers and looked straight into my face. I stared defiantly back at him. “But maybe you’re different.”

He gazed at me, then laughed. “Maybe you’re really a tough cookie, huh? ‘Voûtes êtes vraiment une déguelasse.’”

“What does that mean?”

“Forget it.” He hefted the box of film and cocked a thumb at the back of the chapel. “That your boyfriend?”

I turned to see Hillary standing in the doorway, hands in his pockets and looking hangdog. When he saw me his face lit up.

“Lit!”

I walked over to him. “Hey, where’d you go?”

“Me? You were the one who—”

“Later, kiddies,” said Page Franchini as he edged past with the film carton on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry.” Hillary sighed and put his arm around me. “Look, you want to go home? This is all kind of bringing me down. I’ll drive you back—”

“No. I—I’m supposed to go home with my parents,” I lied.

“Really?” As we went into the corridor Hillary shook his head. “But they already left. I mean, I think they left, it looked like your car. That’s why I was so bummed, I thought you’d gone without me…”

“Oh.” There was an awful hollow feeling in my stomach, and I stammered, “Are—are you sure it was my parents?”

“Well, no, I’m not positive. But—yeah, it looked like Unk. Why?”

“Nothing. I just—well, they didn’t tell me, that’s all.”

“So come on, then. I’ll drive you back.”

I pulled away from him. “No. I don’t want to go. I’m just surprised.”

“Probably they couldn’t find you.” Hillary grinned, pushing the long hair from his face. “I know I couldn’t. Well, okay, if you’re staying, I will, too. Listen, Ali and that guy Jamie said they were going upstairs to find Dunc, he had some hash or something—”

He pointed and I looked down the hallway, frowning. “This isn’t how I came in.”

“Yeah, well, this is how we’re going out. This way…”

He took my hand and we walked down the passage, more brightly lit than the corridor where I’d seen Ralph Casson and Balthazar Warnick. A few people floated by us, giggling blondes and middle-aged couples in formal wear, a very drunken Margot Steiner. When we passed a tall, narrow window I stopped and looked out.

Below stretched the downward slope of Muscanth Mountain, and the black reflection of the lake. Rain gave everything a creepy, urban sheen; made the bare trees look sleek and metallic and the overgrown lawn brittle, as though encased in ice. I could just make out the road snaking down to the village, the rows of parked cars like overlapping scales on a butterfly’s wing.

“Is Jamie done parking?” I asked.

“I think so. He was only supposed to do it till nine or nine thirty.”

“What time is it now?”

“Not that late,” shrugged Hillary. “After midnight.”

“Midnight! It can’t be after midnight—”

“Time flies when you’re having fun. Come on, Cinderella…”

We slipped into a stairwell, climbed until we came out onto a wide landing where a chandelier made of deer antlers hung from the ceiling, a hideous thing webbed with dust and dead moths. Only one of the bulbs was working; it made our shadows look shrunken, and did little to dispel my unease when something scuttled across the uneven wood floor.

“Ugh! What was that?”

Hillary laughed. “Wait’ll you see what Kern gave Jamie as a tip. It’s in here, with the rest of the zoo—”

I followed him across the landing. This part of Bolerium looked as though it had gone a very long time without visitors. Dead leaves covered the floor, and acorns. A single window had cracked panes taped over with cardboard, and beneath it a window seat was covered with wet, moldering newspapers. Music pounded from behind a closed door, a reassuring wail of guitars and feedback. Hillary pushed the door open and we entered.

“Greetings, my children,” he announced. “It’s showtime.”

We were in a large room, lit only by an ultraviolet bulb screwed into an ornate fixture in the center of the ceiling, a plaster medallion shaped like a flower. There was a mattress on the floor, covered with pillows and an India-print spread, and a circle of small rocks that glowed with spectral brilliance in the black light: acid green, cyanic blue, sickly chartreuse. A stereo was shoved into one corner, a cheap Kenmore lift’n’play model with a bunch of albums queued above the turntable.

“Hey…” someone said thickly.

One of the pillows moved: Ali. Next to her Jamie Casson sat cross-legged, still in his uniform of tuxedo pants and vest. The sleeves of his white dress shirt were rolled, the shirt unbuttoned so I could see his pale chest, hairless, his skin tinted ghastly blue by the light. His head was tilted back and his eyes closed; his features disquieting, almost disturbing, in repose. There was something poisonous about him: if you cut him his blood would burn you. More acorns and dead leaves were strewn across the floor, drifting atop album covers and soiled clothing.

“Oh, very nice,” said Hillary. He kicked his way through a heap of flannel shirts and bent to retrieve a small envelope folded from a magazine page. He smoothed it open, licked it tentatively, and scowled.

“God damn it.” He looked at Jamie, then tossed the empty packet aside. The floor was covered with them, like spent matchbooks among the acorns. I stooped to examine one of the envelopes, and saw then that they weren’t acorns at all. They were the seed-heads of poppies. Scores of them; hundreds. Not the little dried husks nodding in Kamensic’s gardens, but pods the size of small plums, their skin smooth and slightly moist. I held one up, squinting in the weird blue light, and scored the rounded surface with my fingernail. Thick liquid oozed out.

“Fuckin’ A,” whispered Hillary. He looked at me and shook his head helplessly. “They’re gone.”

I hurried to the mattress, bent until my face was inches from Ali’s. Her breath touched my cheek, cool, scented with lactose and wintergreen. The blue light gave her skin a niveous gleam, as though it had been thickly powdered. Sweat pearled in indigo beads upon her upper lip.

“Ali,” I whispered, fighting panic. “Ali, can you hear me?”

Without warning her hand shot up, closed around my jaw and pulled me down. She kissed me, her mouth cold and her tongue tasting of sugar; but when her eyes opened they were bright and feverishly excited.

“Lit,” she said hoarsely, and grinned. “Where’d you go?”

“Christ! You scared me! I was downstairs, remember? Where’d you go?”

“Here.” She sat up groggily, reached to tug at Jamie’s short hair. “Jame. Company.”

“Leave him.” Hillary sank onto the blanket. “Listen to me, Ali—”

Ali smiled. “Fuck off, Hillary. Chipping, I was just popping—”

She tapped the inside of his elbow. Hillary slapped her hand away.

“God damn it. God damn it, Ali—”

“Look who’s talking.” She swept one arm lazily across the floor, brought up a handful of dried petals and tossed them into his face. “Pussy.”

“Ali. Please—” Hillary grabbed her hand and Ali gazed back at him, eyes glittering. His cheeks flushed; he blinked, holding back tears, and turned to the boy on the mattress beside her. “Jamie, I’ll fucking kill you…”

“Leave her alone.” Jamie’s voice rose ghostly from the mattress. He pushed himself up, his eyes gone to black and his lips dry and cracked. “Hillary, man. Leave her alone, huh?” When he stood petals fluttered around him. He took a few uneasy steps to the far side of the room, shuddered and for the first time noticed me. “Lit. How’s it goin’?”

“Great. Oh, I’m just great.”

Ali watched me, still smiling; then reached to curl a tendril of my hair around one finger. The album ended. In the brief silence before the next record dropped I could hear the staccato chirp of crickets somewhere in the room. There was a sudden gust of sound from the party below, laughter and the thump of a bass; then the album fell and music started once more.

“Look at you, Lit.” Ali reached for a cigarette, struck a match against the floor. “Do you eat men with your new red hair?” She reached forward to link her hands around my waist. Between us rose a thin plume of smoke. “Beware, beware.”

Ali flopped back onto the mattress. Hillary stood watching us, and I couldn’t tell if he was still enraged, or just depressed. Beneath the black light bulb Jamie swayed and stared at his hands.

“Show her Camille. That’s Jamie’s sun scorpion,” Ali explained. “Axel gave it to him.”

“I thought it was a spider,” said Hillary.

“It is.” Jamie stumbled to the wall, bent and picked up a glass globe the size of a soccer ball. He turned and held it out to me. “Sun spider, sun scorpion they sometimes call it. He brought it back from Oaxaca.”

I peered inside. Upon a bed of sand and small stones rested a creature the length of my hand, chocolate brown and covered with short stiff hairs, with long front legs that ended in pincers. It had myriad black eyes, clustered like currants upon its head. Suddenly it leaped in my direction, bashing itself against the side of the globe.

“Jesus!”

“Calm down. It’s not poisonous—” Jamie pointed at the spider, now tensed into a brown hairy fist. “She hunts things and crushes ’em with her jaws. See? No poison.”

I made a face. “Next time get a pony.”

“Wait! Come here—”

He moved until he stood directly beneath the overhead bulb, angling the globe so that it was bathed in ultraviolet. “Check this out.”

I looked cautiously. The sun spider had hunkered down with pincers raised. Beneath it the stones were nearly invisible in the black light. But like magic, as Jamie tilted its prison the ghostly image of a purple death’s head appeared on the spider’s carapaced back. I whistled.

“Whoa! That’s amazing—”

Jamie grinned. “Cool, huh? Axel showed it to me. It only appears under UV light. Like certain kinds of rocks and stuff.”

“Like all of this.” Ali rolled onto her stomach and gestured at the dingy room. “Like this whole place. Kamensic. Everything…it only comes out at night. You know. It moves when you’re not looking. It’s like a fucking ghost town. Wanna know what I think?”

“No,” Hillary blurted. “You’re too fucked up to think anything—”

“Yes,” said Jamie. “Tell me.”

“I think the real town is down there under the lake,” Ali said. “I think everyone is there. When they moved the houses and dammed the river and made the reservoir…I think all the real people went under there. I think all the real people were drowned.”

Hillary rolled his eyes and I snorted. Only Jamie nodded, walking with precise stoned steps to where Ali lay. He placed the globe on the floor and knelt beside her. “Yeah?” he said. “Then who are we?”

“Ghosts. We’re all ghosts. Of course.”

“Don’t be a jerk, Ali.” Hillary looked so furious I was afraid he might hit her. The black light made him look like some weird statue, Avenging Spirit or The Spurned Lover or something even worse. “Why are you even saying that?”

But Ali and Jamie were out of it. Jamie was stroking her back, not with anything like desire but absently, the way you stroke a cat. And Ali was utterly heedless of him; her eyes were dark bruises in a face the color of twilight, her black hair bleeding into the shadows. Wasted as she was, I knew by her expression that she was on a roll: the Ali of all those slumber parties where I would be too scared to fall asleep, the Ali who knew stories about girls named Topaz and Juniper and Sweet Lavender: girls who all disappeared before dawn, stories that all ended with a scream.

“This is the story of Giulietta,” she said, raising herself so that she stared straight out at the closed door, her eyes wide and black. “She was a girl a long time ago in Italy, in a small town in the mountains. After the Black Plague, during the Insurrection—”

“The Inquisition,” hissed Hillary. I put my hand on his arm to silence him.

“—during the witch trials. She was not the most beautiful girl in the village, but she had many lovers, though she did not become pregnant, or marry any of them. And because of this the villagers said she was una strega: a witch. And they talked about her, and made accusations, until finally the priests came from the cities, the investigators—the inquisitors—and they questioned her.

“She was not a witch, of course. There were no witches. There were only the people who worshipped the old gods, and the priests hated them and killed them, and they called their gods devils. If they found out you were one of them, you would be brought to trial, and if you did not renounce your gods then the priests would burn you. But Giulietta would not renounce the gods, because she was a chosen one. She had her mortal lovers, but she was also the beloved of the god of the mountain. And she was also the lover of a priest—”

“A priest?” interrupted Jamie.

Ali nodded. “Sure. Back then priests all had lovers. Some of them had wives. He was a man from the village who had gone to Rome to study, and remained there as a librarian. He was not an inquisitor but a scholar; but when the complaints reached the Holy Office and they sent their interrogators to the village, this man was asked to accompany them and to aid them in their work, since he knew the villagers and the surrounding countryside.

“He had not seen Giulietta for several months, and while they were in the village preparing for their task he visited her and tried to warn her. He went to her at night, and begged her to recant.

“‘But I have done nothing wrong,’ she said.

“‘I know that,’ said her lover. Though he did not quite believe her: he was a priest, after all—and even though he loved her, he couldn’t stop believing that she was wrong—but still he wanted to save her.

“‘Recant and marry me,’ he begged her.

“‘Will you give up your god?’ she asked.

“He said no. But he loved her—she knew that—and she loved him. So she stayed with him that night, and the next morning after he left the inquisitors came, and took her. They questioned her but she would not admit to having done wrong: she had done no wrong. But she would marry no one and none of her lovers would stand up for her.

“‘Where is your god now?’ asked the priests; but Giulietta said nothing except ‘He will come. He will come.’

“And all the while her lover was there in the same room with her, writing it all down…

“They found her guilty. They told her she would only be imprisoned, they told her lover the same thing. But they lied. The next day they took her to a field outside the village and they burned her alive. Her lover went mad: the other priests struck him on the head with stones, to make him unconscious, and so that he wouldn’t bring shame on them by killing himself.”

“What about the god?” I broke in. I had crept forward until I was sitting on the floor beside the mattress. My heart was pounding, just as it always had during one of Ali’s stories—but there was something worse about this one, something about it that made me feel nauseous and dizzy and revolted.

I wasn’t going to tell Ali any of that, though; so I only repeated my question.

“Oh, he came.” Ali was sitting up now on her knees, hands flat upon her thighs so that she looked like a sphinx. “After they left the field, after they all went home, he came…

“Her lover woke—they had brought him to the back room of the village church—and that evening as the sun was setting he returned to the field. There he found the ruins of the fire, and what remained of his beloved. They had not even bothered to take her remains for burial, when they learned of her execution not even her parents or her brother or any of the other men of the village had come to claim her. Only the priest was there, alone. He found her bones in the embers, bones and grease, that was all that remained of her. And he did go mad, then—

“And that was when the god came.

“He thought it was the Devil, because of his horns. He walked down from the mountain, through the trees at the edge of the field, and when he got to where the priest lay upon the ground the Devil spoke to him.

“He said, ‘Go to the top of the mountain and remain there; otherwise you will die.’

“And the priest said, ‘Without her I want to die.’

“But the Devil shook his head and said, ‘No.’ He bent and picked up a fragment of her rib, and in his hands it became white and not black, and when he raised it to his lips it was no longer a bone but a bone flute. ‘Because of you my beloved Giulietta is dead,’ he said to the priest. ‘It will be your punishment to live with that always. And because you have named me your enemy and are among those who seek to destroy me, you yourself will never die; but it will be no joy to you but torment everlasting.’

“And then the Devil began to play upon his flute. And the song that he played was so full of grief that the mountain wept, and as it wept it became a torrent, and the tears of the Devil and the tears of the mountain swept down and became a flood that overtook the village. And it was drowned, and all who lived there died; all except for the priest who had been Giulietta’s lover.

“When the waters receded, people from the towns and neighboring farms came. Where the village had been they found a lake of black water that seemed to glow blue-black from somewhere deep within its depths, and which reflected the face of the mountain that rose above it. And it was upon the mountaintop that they found the priest who had betrayed Giulietta and brought about the destruction of the town. He had been bound with strands of ivy to a tree there; it had kept him from escaping, it had kept him alive. When they freed him he said not a word but returned to the city and his masters there.

“The village itself remained within the lake. Over the centuries people would try to dive and bring up the treasures that were rumored to be there, but no one ever succeeded. The lake was cursed. No one who ever went beneath its surface returned. Sometimes late at night, people in the neighboring countryside say that they can hear the sound of bells ringing, a tocsin warning the villagers of the flood that would engulf them; but other people who have heard it say that it is the sound of a bone flute.”

All this time the album had been playing, a steady sonic tide of feedback and guitars. Now, as though on cue, it ended. The room was silent except for the metallic scrape of crickets and the ceaseless background din of the party roaring on behind Bolerium’s walls. Ali bowed her head, smiling slightly, like a child waiting to be rewarded. Beside her Jamie lay on his back, one hand across his eyes and the other on Ali’s shoulder. I couldn’t tell if he had nodded out or was still listening. His mouth was parted in a half-smile, his chest moving slowly up and down as he breathed.

“Nice, Ali,” Hillary sneered. He still stood a little apart from the rest of us, but despite his tone he seemed to have relaxed somewhat; at least he no longer looked as though he intended to strangle Jamie. “What, you get that from Night Gallery?”

Ali just smiled and shook her head. I took a deep breath, trying to make myself look and sound less frightened than I was. “Ali. Where did you hear that?”

“Axel told me.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I can’t remember—a long time ago, maybe?”

Like someone roused from deep slumber Jamie suddenly groaned and turned, so that he was almost straddling Ali. “Nice bedtime story. I told you, this place is fucking weird. The whole town is nuts. Your buddy Kern is running around giving out shit like it’s candy—not that I’m complaining, don’t get me wrong—”

“Forget it,” Hillary said. “God, I can’t take this. I’m not going to stand here and watch this…”

He stooped and ran his hand across the floor, stood and opened his palm to display broken poppy calyxes, the cracked plastic casing of a hypodermic needle. He looked at me, his face rigid. “Lit. I gotta go. I—”

He turned, throwing the needle and crushed seed-heads onto the mattress. Ali squealed, Jamie swore and ducked. A moment later the door slammed.

“What’s his fucking problem?” Jamie sat up, fumbling with the bedspread until he found the needle; then leaned over and picked up an ashtray filled with spent matches and a blackened spoon. “C’mon, Lit…”

I shook my head. Ali peeked up at me, brow furrowed. “You do opium, Lit. All that stuff. It’s the same thing.”

I thought of smoking opium in Ali’s room, the little smoldering bit of resin impaled on a needle with a glass cupped over it to capture the smoke; then looked down at Jamie carefully opening one of the little envelopes. It was empty. He licked the paper and tossed it aside, probed under the mattress and withdrew another packet.

“No,” I said. “I—I’m going to go talk to Hillary.”

Ali nodded. “Tell him not to be pissed off, okay?”

“Yeah,” said Jamie. “Don’t go away mad. Just go away.”

Outside the hall was empty. “Hillary?” I called softly, then louder. “Hillary—”

There was no sign of him. I retraced our steps, returning to peer down the narrow stairwell, its risers filthy with dead leaves and twigs. It was too dark to see anything there, and behind me only a thin glowing band of ultraviolet showed where I’d left Ali and Jamie. Rain beat relentlessly at the eaves, a moth battered at a windowpane. From downstairs echoed the faint wail of “Stairway to Heaven.”

Well, Hillary hated that: he wouldn’t have gone that way. I went back across the landing, shivering, my stomach knotted.

“Hillary?”

The hall continued, up a few rickety steps that threatened to give way when I walked on them. It smelled dank. Not the closed-up, mildewy odor of an old house, but wet and somehow alive, the scent of a marsh or rotting stump. To my left was an exterior wall, crosshatched with small windows through which lavender-tinged light seeped into the corridor. To my right was the other wall, barren of anything—no doors, no lights, no paintings. I walked very slowly, scuffing the toe of my boot on the floor to make sure I wouldn’t trip on a sudden loose board or step. After a minute or two I reached to touch the outer wall, for balance; and was surprised to feel not paneling or plaster but stone. It was cold and damp, the surface rough. When I flattened my palm against it I could feel lichen, so brittle it crumbled at my touch.

“Damn it, Hillary, where’d you go?”

My voice echoed back at me, too high and shaky to fool anyone into thinking I wasn’t scared. The passage took a dogleg to the right. I turned the corner, saw a window that took up most of the outer wall, and through this I could glimpse what seemed to be a dormer, thrusting outward high above the hillside. Sure enough, when I passed the window I found a door, the first I’d seen since leaving Ali and Jamie Casson. The corridor wound on. Chunks of stone littered the floor, and shards of broken glass. The air above me was crisscrossed with rafters formed of immense logs. Even in the darkness I could see pale hanks of cobwebs strung between them, patterned with the ghostly remains of insects. Rain lashed the dormer windows, finding its way through cracks to spatter me. Still I stubbornly kept on, head bowed against the rain; when behind me echoed a deafening crash.

“Oh—!”

I shrieked and backed up against the inner wall. On the floor beneath the window lay a twisted piece of wreckage. It stirred wildly in the wind, and at first I thought it was alive, struggling amidst the glitter of rain and broken glass. But then I saw it was a branch, ten or twelve feet long, rain-blackened and so thick with lichen it resembled a piece of coral dredged up from the sea. I stared at it, then stood on tiptoe to peer through the shattered dormer.

There were no trees. Far, far below, Bolerium’s ragged lawns gave way to the black swathe of old-growth forest. Oaks and hemlocks tossed angrily in the wind, and skeins of dead leaves like a net thrown up against the sky.

But between here and the first trunks rearing up from the mountainside was a good quarter-mile. There was no way any branch could be hurled such a distance, not with enough force to reach Bolerium’s upper stories. I stepped back and nudged the tree-limb with my boot. A slab of bark fell to the floor, revealing a soft white pith like marrow. I stooped to examine it more closely when the dormer above me shook. There was a dull roar, a violet flash that left skeletal afterimages burning in the air around me. Something bit at my neck. I clapped my hand there, saw my fingers gloved in red. Glass and wood flew everywhere; acorns rattled down like hail. The window’s lead muntins buckled as a massive branch ripped through them. With a cry I fled, stumbling blindly until I found the door just past the window—an arched wooden door made from a single board, furrowed with dry-rot and scabs of grayish moss.

But there was no knob, no handle; nothing that would serve as a means of opening it. Behind me echoed the steady crash of glass, and worse. When I glanced back, I saw tree-limbs thrusting through the ruined dormer. The corridor was impassable, a black thicket of glass and broken tree-limbs; but when I looked desperately in the other direction I saw only darkness, with not even a seam of light to show where I might escape. The wind rose to a howl, the wall of tree-limbs shook as though something moved within them—

And then it seemed that something did move there. Something black, its head crowned by spars of lightning, its forelimbs jagged as the dead branches. I could hear it breathing and measure its approach by the sound of glass and wood splintering beneath its tread. Frantically I pounded at the door, kicked and pushed until with a grinding sound it gave way. An explosion of rotten wood, and there was a hole big enough for me to pass through. I forced my way in, the splintered panels scraping my arms. Cold air rushed by, the floor felt rough but I saw nothing save the pall of dust swirling around me. Only when I straightened, wiping grit from my eyes and coughing, did I see where I was.

“Jesus…”

I stood upon a vast plain, a dead white sky burning overhead and stands of birches scattered everywhere like standing stones. Wind beat relentlessly against me, a wind that had beaten down the trees as well—they all grew leaning in the same direction, branches rippling as though trapped in a dark current. Tiny midges swarmed everywhere, evil things with rust-colored wings and red eyes. I slapped at them but it did no good. They bit at my flesh and clustered so persistently around my face that I began to run, half-crazed.

“Get away, get away!” I could scarcely hear my own voice for the wind. I stumbled on, my boots crushing the undergrowth; then stepped into a hole and fell, wrenching my ankle. “Ow—”

Underfoot was a springy mat of moss and some coarse shrubby plant, clouds of lichen and small gray stones. The midges were even worse down here, but I refused to get up. I was bleeding from scores of tiny cuts, my dress torn and blotched with dirt. I felt numb, no longer frightened but completely blank, as though I’d just come out of some beer-stoked blackout. I lay there as the midges crawled across my hands, watching as crimson beads welled up behind them and the insects lifted back into the air. The wind wailed, my fingers grew white with cold. I knew I could freeze to death but I didn’t care. I buried my face in my arms and cried, wishing I were home in bed; wishing I were asleep, or dead: anything but here.

I must have fallen asleep then, and dreamed. Not a dream of home, or even of Bolerium’s damned chambers, but a dream in which the wind became the sound of my own name.

“Lit…Lit…Lit…”

I was dimly aware of the cold and thorny underbrush, the ripple of insects across my face. But gradually the voice became as irrevocable as those other things, persistent as water falling on my face. I stirred, blinking painfully. Dried blood adhered to my eyelids; when I licked my lips they felt cracked and raw.

“Lit.”

I lifted my head. Overhead the sky had gone from deathly white to a violet dark and rich as claret. The horizon was slashed with red so brilliant I had to shade my eyes. It took me a full minute to make out anything in the unearthly light.

“Lit…”

A figure was moving across the plain. I whimpered, thinking of shadows taking shape within fallen trees; but as the figure drew nearer I saw that it was not some awful spectre but a man in an ultramarine suit jacket, his long hair a bright corona around his face. He had his hands in his pockets, and walked matter-of-factly to where I had fallen, as though this were the most normal thing in the world.

“Hey,” he said, and stopped. For a moment he stood looking down at me, face glowing in the carnival light. His expression was tender, tinged with what might have been regret or just exhaustion. A halo of midges formed around his face. He waved his hand absently; the insects flashed bright as embers, then in a burst of white ash disappeared. “Are you all right, Lit?”

He crouched in front of me, smoothing the hair from my face, ran a finger along my eyelid and winced. “You’re hurt,” he said. “Come on—”

I held my breath, fighting tears; then nodded and let him help me to my feet. My fingers and toes throbbed, but Ralph seemed immune to the cold. He shrugged out of his jacket and I put it on, its warmth enveloping me as though it had been a down parka.

“B-b-b-but you’ll f-f-freeze,” I protested.

Ralph laughed. “Neither rain nor snow nor hellfire can touch me, kiddo.” He lay one hand against my cheek, and yes, it was warm—not merely warm but hot.

“H-h-how—”

“Something I learned at college. Feel better? Yeah? Think you can walk? I want to show you something…”

We walked, me huddled in his jacket, Ralph with one arm slung over my shoulder. Reindeer moss crackled beneath our feet, and while the midges buzzed everywhere, they now stayed away from us.

“Where is this place?” I asked when several minutes had passed.

“The Land of the Dead.” Ralph’s voice was flat, his arm around me the only comforting thing in that vastness. “The charred forest. The taiga—”

He extended his free arm, indicating the endless steppe, bowed birch trees like the ribs of fallen giants and lichen covering the earth like mist. The wind was a wall crashing down; the sunset the world behind the wall, nightmarish yet inescapable. There were no stars, no moon. A few yards in front of us stood a single large birch tree, its bark tinged pink from the sunset, its leaves blade-shaped and yellow as buttercups. Behind it the sky glowed like a furnace, black edged with purple, the horizon riven with crimson and a single brilliant ribbon of gold that spewed from the earth like a flame. It was so beautiful it made me shiver; but it was a beauty composed mostly of terror. I could imagine no people living there, nor even animals; nothing save those bloodthirsty midges.

“Oh, but people do live here, Lit,” Ralph said, in the same soft, vague tone he had used before, as though talking in his sleep. He let his arm drop from me, bent, and began to dig in the ground. I crouched beside him, watching. The earth was hard but when he broke through the surface it became friable, falling in small chunks from his hand. He continued to dig, pausing now and then to examine what he found; finally held up a small piece of reddish rock.

“Ochre.” He rubbed the stone between his fingers and it crumbled, staining his hands. “‘Farben auch, den Leib zu malen, steckt ihm in die Hand, dass er rötlich möge strahlen in der Seelen Land.’”

He turned. With the chunk of rock he drew upon my forehead and upon each of my cheeks; then carefully smoothed the ochre across my skin. “That’s from Schiller. ‘Put ye colors into his hand, that he may paint his body so he will shine redly in the Land of Souls.’”

“What—what do you mean?”

He stood, rolling the piece of rock between his fingers and staring at the horizon. Very carefully I touched my cheek, drew my hand away and smelled damp earth and another odor, cold and faintly metallic, like old pennies. I looked at Ralph; he raised his arm and with a flick of his wrist threw the stone toward the sunset. It arced high above the lone birch tree, and by some trick of the light seemed for an instant to hang there and glow, not like a spark or star but like some glittering aperture, a watchful eye in the void. Then it was gone. I did not hear where it fell.

“There they are,” he murmured.

I looked where he pointed. On the horizon, a dark smudge appeared. I squinted, thinking at first it was another stand of birches suddenly made visible by the angle of the sun. But the smudge grew larger, broke into smaller jots of darkness and then regrouped. Soon it was near enough that the wind brought its sound. A jingling as of many small bells, unmelodic but constant; voices calling back and forth; an occasional explosive huffing. I glanced at Ralph uncertainly, but he only continued to peer into the deepening shadows.

Minutes passed. The breeze became a cold blast, and now along with the walking music of the caravan the wind carried its scent. Woodsmoke, birch leaves, the pungent and recognizable stench of unwashed bodies. But most of all a dense, warm, animal smell, far stronger than any familiar grassy barn odor—the only thing I could liken it to was the sharp, almost angry musk one encounters at a zoo. I moved closer to Ralph. He did not acknowledge me beyond nodding, his eyes fixed on what was approaching.

A moment and they were only twenty feet from us, near the birch where I had last glimpsed the bit of ochre that Ralph had tossed away. It seemed to me that full night should have fallen by now, but the eerie twilight had not corroded into darkness. If anything, the sky had grown more brilliant, the colors a tumult of lavender and violet and crimson.

Certainly it was bright enough that I could see clearly the little group that had stopped in front of us. I counted eleven of them, slight slim-bodied figures, most no taller than myself. Their clothes were archaic but gorgeously designed—long skirts of hide or fur, dyed red or sky-blue and hemmed with ropes of beadwork and bone; strange open jackets of the same material that were almost like frock coats, trimmed with white fur and small triangular brass pendants. I could see their features very clearly, high cheekbones and skin the color of bronze, onyx eyes and hair. The men wore small conical caps of short dark fur. Their facial hair was sparse but unshaven, their chins ending in wispy black beards. The women had their hair in long braids, strung with still more beads and white feathers; all save one, whose braid was laced with leather tassels dyed red. On their feet were flat-soled shoes of carven wood and hide. They spoke in soft fluting voices that were more birdlike than human, broken now and then by laughter or the cries of two small children toddling behind the grownups. As they moved across the taiga clouds of insects sprang up about them, gilded by the sunset. Watching them I felt a profound, almost childish joy—

Because, marvelous as the people were, what was most wonderful of all was that every one either rode or walked beside a reindeer. Not huge and terrifying stags like the one I had seen slain; nor were they the graceful, golden deer that leaped across the roads in Kamensic. These animals were like nothing I had ever seen before, save in the fairy-tale posters by Edmund Dulac that hung in Ali’s room—small, graceful, almost dainty creatures, their fur the soft gray of a kitten’s belly. Even their antlers seemed toylike, the tips sawn off and strung with gold filigree and brass bells, a child’s memory of Christmas Eve and restless movement upon a rooftop. Small as they were, they seemed to bear their slender riders with ease; all save the two animals which brought up the rear of the cavalcade. The first of these carried no rider, but only a large bundle wrapped in deerskin and bound with leather thongs.

But it was the last reindeer that was truly a creature from a dream. Snow-white, its fur dazzling in the eternal twilight. It alone bore antlers that had not had their prongs sawn and blunted, and it alone carried neither saddle nor any other ornament. A solitary figure walked alongside it, head bowed and hidden beneath a fur hood. A figure slight as the others but wearing garb that seemed at once more archaic than their own, and more hieratic— a long tunic of supple hide, and over this a long open-fronted jacket, white and unadorned save for bands of white fur at cuff and hem. At the neck hung a necklace formed of myriad loops of crimson beads, heavy and pliant as a woven scarf.

The figure walked in silence, its feet moving in step with the animal’s. The white reindeer drew closer to its fellows, cropping at the coarse moss beneath their hooves, but before it could join them its keeper raised a hand bearing a long thin wand and slapped it upon the flank. The white reindeer halted. The figure struck it again, and this time I could see that the wand was in fact an antler, all its points shorn save two which formed a V at the tip. At the wand’s touch the reindeer shook its head and snorted in protest. The figure cried out a word of command; the animal immediately fell silent and began to nose the moss at its feet.

“See how it listens to you,” a voice breathed beside me. I started—I had forgotten Ralph was there—but before I could question him the figure took a step away from the animal and stood directly beneath the birch tree. The wind tore at the milky folds of the tunic and made ripples in the hood’s thick fur. The figure stood for a moment, wand in one hand. Then it tugged the hood back, and turning to the white reindeer cried out again. Louder, so that the other people stopped milling about and stood docile as their little herd. The command meant nothing to me, of course; but this time I recognized the voice. I began to shake my head, mouthing the word No over and over again until Ralph had to cover my lips with his hand.

“Yes, Lit.” With his other hand he forced my head up so I could see. “Oh, yes, yes, yes…”

Where the furred hood had been was a brilliant corona of red hair, unbound and streaming in the wind like a pennon. It framed a face sun-coarsened and angular as the others’, but even in that remote place utterly unmistakable. The same tilted nose, the same black eyebrows belying that bright hair; the same pale, almost silvery gray eyes. I had stepped through a portal in Bolerium, to stand beneath an eternal arctic sunset and gaze upon myself.

“No!”

I yanked free from Ralph, shouting. As I did the red-haired girl jerked her head upright and stared at me, her expression mirroring my own.

“Stop it!” hissed Ralph. Before I could dart away he grabbed me again. “Can’t you tell? She sees you!”

I froze. Because indeed the girl continued to gaze at me, pale eyes narrowed, mouth pursed as though about to speak. The others remained apart from her, tending their herd and the two children, who were busy gathering twigs and brush for a fire. At the redhaired girl’s side the white reindeer nuzzled at the ground. After a minute she reached to lay one hand upon its flank. Her eyes never left mine.

The realization that she could see me was terrifying. I buried my face in Ralph’s jacket, but it was no use. Within moments I was peering out at her once more. He began to stroke my hair, murmuring wordlessly; and that suddenly made me think of something.

“It can’t be me. My hair isn’t real. Ali hennaed it for me this afternoon…”

Ralph shrugged. “Neither is hers—”

He held up his hand, thumb and forefingers still stained from the ochre he had toyed with earlier. “It’s what they do—”

“Who? Who does it? Who is she?”

“She is as you see her: a girl, your age. I do not know her name, but perhaps she does not have one; at least, not what we would recognize as a name. She is their go-between, their navigator. Their pathfinder. She travels between this world and the realm of the dead. Her people call her samdanan, She Who Dances. But if you were to study ethnology under Professor Warnick at the University of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine, he would tell you that samdanan is just another word for shaman, and that it shares its roots with the Sanskrit sraman, which is not dissimilar to the Mongolian samoroj, or the Manchurian sam-dambi, which means ‘to dance.’

“Yet if you were to visit the village of Moruzzo several hundred years ago, the farmers would call her strega: a witch; just as they named Polly Twomey here in Kamensic. But there is still another word for what she is, Lit—

“Malandante.”

As I listened the scene in front of me began to blur; not as though I were passing through another portal, but as though a pale scrim had descended from the twilit sky. But it did not hide the taiga, or the redhaired girl and her antlered familiar. Instead other, more shadowy figures began to move beside her. They were no more of that time or place than I was, and yet they were somehow known to me, as though I had dreamed of them long ago, or seen them in a film which until now I had forgotten. A girl in a white shift, her face streaked with soot. Another girl in a blue dress and bright earrings. A rangy longhaired figure in a veil which I at first thought was another girl, but whose face beneath coarse linen was that of a man, clumsily rouged and with blackened lips. They walked back and forth in front of the redhaired girl, insubstantial as smoke and completely oblivious of each other. When a few moments had passed, first one and then another began to execute a crude sort of dance. So awkward were they that it was several minutes before I realized they were dancing—hopping up and down on one foot and moving in gradually widening circles, away from the girl Ralph had named samdanan, dust rising where they stepped.

And this, too, was grotesquely familiar. It filled me with horror, even as I struggled to recall where I had seen such a thing before, this clumsy, almost monstrous display of—

What? Mockery? Revulsion? Their movements were too crude to seem part of any sacred ritual, and yet they were undeniably choreographed, and undeniably alike. Even if the dancers took no notice of each other, even if they somehow were taking part in this bizarre performance over a period of thousands of years: still it was the same dance. In the midst of it all the redhaired girl remained motionless, her hand still upon the reindeer’s flank, her eyes watching me across the centuries.

“She sees you as you see them,” said Ralph. “And as you see her—as patterns in the dance. It is the one thing she can recognize down through the ages, the one thing that is not bound by the taiga or by her own time—

“—just as it is the only thing that you perceive, Lit,” he ended softly.

“I don’t know what you mean.” The hopping steps of the ghostly figures was hypnotic; it was an effort for me to form the words. “I don’t know anything about dancing, or—or any of this…”

Ralph shook his head. “I didn’t say you knew anything about the dance, Lit. I said you could see it. Just as she does. Do she think she understands? Do you think she recognizes us, or knows any more of our world than we do of hers?”

“But—but we do,” I said weakly. “You said so, you said she was called—a magician or something, you said Professor Warnick taught you—”

“Professor Warnick knows nothing!” Ralph’s voice rang out, so keen with rage I shrank back and expected the dancers to do the same. But he might have been a moth fluttering in the night sky, for all the notice they paid him. “He and his masters give names to things, that’s all, and think themselves wise! As though naming a thing is knowing it!

“Do you know what they call them, Lit? Malandanti. It means Those Who Do Ill—yet it means nothing, because it is only a perversion of what the Benandanti call themselves! And they have ever been blind to those things which they did not create, those things they did not name—

“But what this means is that they are blind to the entire world. Because even though they would like to believe that their god created it, and that their god watches over it as though it were a naughty child—still the world escapes them. They have no more understanding of its true nature than you or I do of theirs—”

He pointed at the phantom dancers. Their steps had become synchronized, so that even though they moved without seeing each other, they now formed a single chain, heads bobbing and arms extended as they hopped in a widening circle beneath the solitary birch. Of the herders, only the redhaired girl appeared to see them. The weird twilight had grown deeper. It touched her with a soft purplish glow and made her hair spark like copper wire, and flowed between the dancers so that they seemed to be stepping in and out of a moving stream. Now it was those others and their antlered mounts who seemed insubstantial, bright streaks upon a moving backdrop. I shook my head, struggling with a sensation that was not so much drowsiness as a deadening languor. I felt as though I had been dropped in amber and was slowly turning to stone. When Ralph placed his hands upon my shoulders I did not move; nor when he stroked my collarbone, pushing back the jacket I had been wearing so that it dropped to the ground. I no longer felt the cold, or the wind; though I could see where it rippled the leaves of the birch tree, and stirred the rustling mat of undergrowth. I could feel nothing but Ralph Casson’s touch.

“Tulamaka.”

The word came to me as though breathed in my ear, but it was not Ralph’s voice. Beyond the circle of dancers the redhaired girl’s eyes locked with mine. If I had any doubt before that she could see me, at this moment I had none; nor that she recognized me.

“Balthazar would say that she called you ‘fire-spirit,’ whispered Ralph. “Or ‘guardian of the forest,’ or ‘beast-wife,’ or ‘mistress of animals,’ or ‘bacchante.’

“But what she actually said is none of those things. Her name for you is unknowable, because it is no one thing. That is what the Benandanti will never understand. There are gods upon gods down the eons, and goddesses as well; and other things which the Benandanti have no name for—and thus they have no knowledge of them.

“But these are what the Malandanti serve. The unknown: the unknowable. That is why they give themselves no name, and also why their gods have many names; whereas the Benandanti believe that their master has but one.”

I tried to shake my head, found I couldn’t move. With great effort I spoke. “But—what are the Benandanti?”

Ralph’s voice grew harsh. “It is what they call themselves—‘The Good Walkers,’ and also ‘Those Who Do Well.’ That is how they see themselves: as the protectors of this world, keeping it safe from what they perceive to be dangerous to its order, and their own. But those who set themselves against the Benandanti are not treated gently, Lit—do not ever fool yourself into believing that. Even those who have served them loyally for time out of mind, may one day find themselves cast out, and—”

He fell silent. His hands upon my neck relaxed, and as they did I discovered that I could move again—though slowly, painfully, as though I were recovering from some injury. I turned to see the dance continuing before us, the dusk unaltered except where a few brilliant stars now blazed within the sky. There were more dancers now, some of them dressed in clothes that seemed less archaic though still strange to my eyes—robes and loose trousers, ribbons of bright yellow like saris or sarongs, the bright motley of harlequins. Many of the dancers were naked, or nearly so, their garments torn; and as I watched I saw another figure join the endless chain—one of the herders I had first glimpsed upon the taiga. Before I had thought its panoply of beads and leather ribands belonged to a woman, her long hair braided with bright red tassels.

But now as the figure took its place within the circle I saw that it was a man dressed as a woman. His face had been carefully scraped of any hair and his lips reddened, the same coppery color as the girl’s unbound tresses. When he moved it was with an elaborate effeminacy, his hands drawing circles in the air as he stood on one leg, like a heron, and then began the same strange hopping dance as the others. I thought of what Ralph had just told me, that the Benandanti—whoever they were—could name these things but not comprehend them.

I believed him. The man-woman ducked in and out between the other dancers, his arms snaking through the air. He did not look ridiculous, but frightening: his eyes wide and staring, his mouth a red gash in a face powdered white with wood-ash. As he leaped his braid tossed wildly, and its crimson tassels crowned his head like feathers, or horns.

And suddenly I knew what he reminded me of—the cave painting I had seen in the Nursery five years before. The same blankly staring eyes; the same slashed mouth. But strangest of all was the way one leg was raised, a clumsy accessory to the dance—and that, too, reflected the image of a man in animal costume, his foot injured or grotesquely foreshortened.

“But I’ve seen him!” I cried, pointing.

“Who?”

“That one, there—”

But already the man-woman was gone, lost within the moving circle. I pulled away from Ralph, no longer caring if it was cold, no longer caring if I was a million miles or a million light-years from Kamensic. “I saw him,” I repeated angrily. “At the Nursery when I was twelve. There was a painting there—a cave painting, it was hanging in one of the rooms. Kissy Hardwick saw it, too—she sat and talked to me for a while. It was right before she died…”

My voice trailed off. I thought of the girl in the torn blue dress, her patchwork bag spilling open on the floor between us to scatter its glittering array, pills and peacock feathers, tarot cards and earrings and a knife carved of bone…

“She had a knife,” I said. My eyes widened but I no longer saw Ralph, only that archaic blade, its handle burned russet and scored with minuscule lines. “She said she was his godchild, too, and that we were all real—she said that we were all real…”

“You are,” whispered Ralph. “Watch—”

In my mind’s eye a small dirty hand still grasped the bone knife, turning it so that light touched the tiny incisions, momentarily causing them to glow. Then it was as though someone tossed dust into my face. My eyes teared as I drew back and raised a hand before me.

But there was no dust clouding the air; only a small spare figure standing alone beneath a birch tree. The circle dance had retreated, so that they were small black columns ranged against the purple sky. So had the little group of reindeer herders. They were perhaps fifty feet away, no longer tending their animals but aligned side by side, watching the redhaired girl. Beside her stood the white reindeer, head upraised.

And it remained thus, absolutely still. Were it not for the way its skin shuddered beneath the skeins of midges upon its flanks, I would have thought it a statue carved of stone or snow. Beside the reindeer lay the bulky, fur-wrapped bundle that had been carried by its mate, and above it stood the girl, gazing at the birch with her hands cupped in front of her. In the eerily charged light I could see her clearly—the too-vivid stain of cinnabar and ochre upon her hair, a network of reddish lines striating her cheeks. Her eyes were wide open, the pupils lost within silvery irises, and that, too, gave me a flash of the figure in the cave painting with its maddening stare.

“Why does she look like that?” I whispered.

“Poppies,” said Ralph. “Papaver somniferum…”

He bent and let his fingers play with a dried stalk, one of thousands nodding in the night wind; then straightened, stripping dead leaves and an oval seed-capsule from its tip. He held it out to me, a small brown globe with a ridged crown about its top. I shook my head.

“No,” I said. “I—I don’t want it—”

Ralph ignored me, taking my hand and prising it open so that he could place the seed-head in my palm. “Don’t worry,” he said, his smile edged with disdain. He closed his hand around mine, squeezing it shut so the seed-capsule splintered and cut into my palm. “It’s outgrown its usefulness, except for the seeds. You have to pick them after they bloom, before the capsules are fully ripe. And to get any kind of high you have to eat a lot of them”— he inclined his head toward the girl beneath the tree. —“like she has.”

As though she had heard us, the girl started, blinking; then turned away. She walked slowly, stumbling and catching herself in a stoned parody of the circle dance. When she reached the bundle on the ground she hesitated, then knelt beside it and began to fumble with its leather bonds.

It took her several minutes, unraveling thongs and layers of hide and tossing them aside. Despite my fear I found myself inching forward to see.

“Oyum kami,” she said, and leaned to embrace what lay before her.

It was the body of a man, naked, his dark hair falling loose from beneath a conical leather hat. His face was gaunt, the high cheekbones scarified with straight lines; his eyes had been sewn shut. But even from that distance, even across all those thousands of years, I knew him.

“Axel,” I breathed.

“Kami bö,” whispered the girl. She took the ravaged face in her hands and kissed it, lingeringly, moving from brow to mouth to chest. Then she pressed her open palms upon his breast, threw her head back and began to wail. It was a horrible sound, made more dreadful when the others of her tribe joined in. I clapped my hands over my ears in a futile attempt to drown it out, while beside me Ralph watched raptly. The lament went on and on, the girl’s voice rising to a scream and abruptly falling silent. The rest, too, fell still, though there remained an ululating echo that took a minute to die away. I looked around, and saw the distant circle of stationary dancers silhouetted against the twilight.

“She is preparing him for sky burial,” said Ralph in a sleepwalker’s voice. “He is her father. Her father and her lover, and their god.”

“How—how can he be a god? He’s dead and I—I can see who he is.”

“He is dead because she killed him.”

“But why?”

“Because it is what must be done. Because he is the god who travels between worlds. Between animals and men, between this world and the world of the dead. He is a god, and goes willingly; but we must help him on his way. That is the compact men and women made with the gods, long ago. That is what the Benandanti forget, or refuse to remember—that death is a journey, too. It’s all like this—”

He made a circular motion in the air, the same words and the same gesture Axel Kern had used in the chapel at Bolerium. I shook my head, too tired to argue or question him.

Ralph did not to notice. “The Benandanti see all other ways as chaos, and that is what they fear more than anything,” he said. “Mysteries. They seek to explain away all that they can’t control. When all else fails, they destroy what they do not comprehend. They made themselves the foes of the great mystery religions and their adherents, and for millennia have stood guard against the rebirth of those forces which they believe will undo all their own great works. And this—”

He swept his arm out in front of him. Light streamed from it like sparks from a smoldering log. “This is where—and when—the Good Walkers were born.”

A few yards away the redhaired girl lifted her head, staring at the sky as though she saw her own image reflected there. In the distance the waiting circle was still. Between the two, silent girl and assembled dancers, only the scattered members of the reindeer tribe seemed alive, the air before them touched with vapor where they breathed. We might have been there for a quarter-hour or a thousand years, frozen figures on a great chronometer, when suddenly something else moved upon the horizon: a black cloud that broke apart and reassembled as it drew toward us, dispersing the motionless dancers as though they were rotting fenceposts.

At the same time, the girl bent forward—slowly, with, no sense of urgency—and began to gather the corpse in her arms. It seemed weightless, or else she was far stronger than I. She hefted the body and started toward the birch tree. Her expression was so far beyond grief or normal human sorrow that it was masklike, almost peaceful. It was the face of the virgin holding her son, or Demeter carrying the grain to be winnowed. I could not imagine this girl laughing or weeping or even sitting in repose; could imagine nothing but this solemn bearing away, repeated for all eternity. When she reached the foot of the birch tree she paused, head bowed.

That was when I realized what the moving figures on the horizon were. They were horsemen, riding steeds hardly bigger than the reindeer but far more fleet. The air rang with the sound of their hooves, the jingling of harness and their voices, high and clear and jubilant, as though they had just awakened to a morning golden with sun and all of life a promise.

And perhaps it was morning, because now I had to shade my eyes to see them. The uncanny twilight that had bathed the steppes was breaking up. Tatters of gold shone between indigo clouds. Stars flickered in them like fish in a net, then disappeared. The sudden flood of light made even far-off objects seem distinct, crisp as though cut from paper. I could make out tufts of hair bristling along the horses’ necks, the serpentine patterns embroidered upon harnesses and the same patterns repeated in tattoos upon the bared breasts of the horsemen. There were women, too, their hair in pigtails like the men, their expressions no less fierce and joyous.

But what was strangest about them, and most unsettling, was that each horse wore a kind of headdress, tasseled and heavily embroidered in bold colors—blue, red, black, green. The headgear covered their skulls so that only their eyes were visible through small holes, and rose in two leather pillars between their ears. Gorgeous branching pillars, tasseled and hung with ornaments of gold, and unmistakably meant to signify antlers.

“See how it begins?” said Ralph in a low voice. “They are like cuckoos, leaving their young to nest in the homes of others, until eventually of course all the others are driven out, driven to extinction by them.”

“But who are they?”

“They are the Benandanti, although it will be centuries before they give themselves that name. Right now they are little removed in time and belief from their origins, which are as you see them—”

He nodded toward the girl. “And this, too, the Benandanti can neither accept nor forgive—that they issued from the same stock as those mysteries which they most despise; that their gods and monuments are formed of the same blood and stone as ours. That if you go back far enough and long enough, you will see only two faces staring at you from the darkness: the hunter and the mother. The Benandanti deny one and have debased the other; but they will not be denied forever. Gods do not die any more than we do. They sleep, and are awakened, and sleep again. They weave the same patterns endlessly, and all through time we are only bright bits of color picked out across their work.”

And then I saw not just the taiga unfolding beneath the sunrise, but an entire world, a glowing diorama with colored globes whirling overhead and small bright forms moving on the earth, like miniature puppets or gaming pieces. There were the reindeer people, frozen beside their horned steeds, and there the invaders upon their caparisoned horses, a carpet of dust beneath their hooves. The reindeer tribe did not move, not until the horsemen were upon them; and then they toppled like chesspieces scattered by a child, the undergrowth beneath them and red.

As though it were a time-lapsed film, the scene changed, to men and women standing quietly between cattle with huge curved horns; and yet it was not different at all. The men raised knives and slaughtered one of the bulls; a woman wept, and another coupled with a man in the dirt. And then again there was a circle of girls and boys, holding hands and executing an intricate dance, leaping from one foot to the next while in the center a man was bound to a tree with looping strands of ivy. The dance broke up but the man remained, a girl holding a cup to his lips while he drank, red running from the corners of his mouth and staining his breast. Flames rose about him, and once again the horsemen came, though they were different this time, their mounts heavier and the riders armored. And yet again there was a young girl, redhaired, naked, embracing a woman while others stood in a protective circle about them. The woman became a man, but the redhaired girl did not change. The man stood motionless while she tore his robes from him and drew him to her until the two of them collapsed to the earth. There was a burst of crimson and gold; the man disappeared. The girl remained, consumed by fire.

And then I saw before me the same scenes that had been enacted upon Muscanth Mountain. A boy lying upon the ground, bound with ivy; a stag crashing down as hunters rushed to draw blood from its breast.

Only this time I did not run away. Like all those other figures suspended between earth and sky I was caught in the pattern. I turned to Ralph Casson, and he nodded.

“Yes,” he said, as though I had finally guessed the answer to a riddle he’d posed hours ago. “It’s all real, Lit. As real as anything gets, actually.”

“But—but I don’t know anything!” I cried. “How can I be a part of any of it, your Malandanti or the rest, when I just heard about them tonight?”

“Doesn’t matter. When has ignorance ever excused anyone? Gods need to be born, and they need avatars to assist them. That’s you.”

I kicked at him angrily, succeeded only in sending up a spray of twigs and moss. “Avatar? What the fuck’s an avatar? And if it’s so goddam important why don’t you do it? Why aren’t you it?”

For an instant I thought he’d strike back. His eyes narrowed, his mouth grew tight, but almost immediately his expression softened.

“Oh, Lit…I wish I were. More than anything—more than I have ever wanted anything on this earth, love or money or children, I’ve wished to be one of them. Any one of them—Benandanti or Malandanti, I never cared which!—but one doesn’t choose these things. One can only be born to it, or chosen.”

“Then what can you do?” Fear stoked my rage as easily as alcohol did. I began to feel buzzed, and stared challengingly at Ralph’s disconsolate face. “Why the fuck do they even bother with you?”

A tremor ran along one side of his mouth. “Oh, but they don’t bother with me, Lit,” he said, almost in a whisper. “That’s the whole problem. That’s what the problem has been for, oh, about twenty-two years now, ever since I went to college and made the mistake of trying to join a club that didn’t want me for a member. Have you ever had that happen to you, Lit? Has it?”

“N-no,” I said. “I mean, I don’t think so…”

“Of course not,” he murmured. “Of course not, how could you? Growing up there in Brigadoon—you’re one of them. Even if you’re not with Balthazar and his fucking Conclave, you’re still one of the Chosen Ones. How could you know anything about what it’s like, not to be chosen? To have this whole magical world open up to you for a little while, and then suddenly to have it all end—to have all the doors slam shut in your face? How could you know anything about that?”

How could I know anything about what you’re even talking about? I thought, biting my tongue.

Ralph didn’t notice. His hand remained on my arm, but I might have been a tree, for all the attention he paid me.

“I was hardly older than you are now when it happened. I wanted to be an architect. I’d been accepted at Yale and the University of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine—both great places to study. I chose the Divine, but instead of architecture I was seduced by archaeology. Literally seduced, by a doctoral student named Magda Kurtz. Because of her I changed my major to classical archaeology—I was eighteen, what did I know?—and that was when I met Balthazar.

“Have you ever fallen in love with a teacher, Lit? Because that’s what I did. Not physical love, of course, but this complete, all-consuming obssession. I couldn’t sleep, because I was so thrilled by him. By his ideas, his vision, his methods…This was in the fifties, remember, when you would go someplace to study law, or medicine, or physics, or English lit; and that was pretty much what you learned. Anything else, any kind of liberal arts education—well, that was just sort of going through the motions, pretending that any of these disciplines might have any bearing on each other.

“But that’s exactly what Balthazar Warnick taught. That everything was connected, that nothing ever happens by mistake. That there’s a—a sort of master plan for the world—”

I frowned. “It sounds like religion.”

“It is religion. Or, rather, all Western religions are it: part of the Benandanti and the system for control that they’ve developed over thousands of years. And the school itself is a religious school, administered by an ancient order—so, well, it comes with the territory, doesn’t it?”

He looked down at me, smiling. The color had rushed back to his cheeks; not even the strange wavering light could cloak how happy he looked, remembering. It seemed pathetic, and it depressed me; to think of somebody’s father feeling like that. I made a face but Ralph went on, oblivious.

“I began studying Cycladic cultures; the influence of ancient Anatolia on the Greek islands. Balthazar encouraged me. The bastard! He let me believe they would take me on, that if I worked hard enough, long enough, the Benandanti would accept me. But they never did.

“I finished my undergrad work at the Divine and went on to graduate school there. Magda helped me—she was the one who first told me about the Benandanti, and she showed me how I could recognize them. Because once you know they’re there, you see them everywhere—in government, in the Church, the military, universities— you name it. I went on several digs—Pamphilia in Turkey; the library at Herculaneum. I was still thinking like an architect. I explored the Roman mausoleums at Pamphilia, and was struck by how much they resembled the Ecclesiasterion at Prieme. Sacred spaces, theater and tomb, both defined by thresholds, by porticos and prosceniums—

“And by something else. I discovered that there were hidden passages that served as entries to secret chambers in the tombs and theaters. Not just tunnels, but words of power carved within the entablature. Magda knew of them, because she was a Benandante. She showed me how to find them myself. Which was forbidden, of course, but that was when I began to learn about the Benandanti’s portals—the doors they use to travel in time and space. That was how you got here”— He swept his arm out grandly, as though he had personally brought the taiga into being. —“and that’s how you got to see everything you’ve seen. Lit,” he ended, and tousled my hair.

I pulled away. “What do you mean?”

“I mean all those things you saw—on the mountain, and by our house. The sacrifice, the horned god—”

“You put them there? You?”

“No. I didn’t put them there. I opened the doors, that’s all. The portals. They’re everywhere, like the Benandanti are everywhere. You just have to know how to look for them. I spent six years, studying at the Divine—six years of learning how the Benandanti created the portals, and where, and why…”

He fell silent. I thought of the horned man moving through the trees by Jamie’s house, the standing stone atop Mount Muscanth and the crumbling doorway in Bolerium that had opened onto this wasteland. Cautiously I asked, “Well…what happened then?”

“Nothing.” Ralph’s tone was so light he might have been giving the punch line of a joke. But his expression was anguished. “Not a fucking thing. I was dismissed. My dissertation panel said my work was stolen, and they threw me out.”

“Stolen?”

“Plagiarized. They knew it wasn’t—it was an excuse, that’s all. I went home that afternoon and found my apartment had been ransacked. All my notes were gone, the copies I’d made of manuscripts and books in their libraries all over the world, the maps I’d drawn up—all gone. They took them—he took them. Balthazar Warnick. But—” Ralph tapped his forehead. “The one thing they couldn’t take was what was in here. ’Cause I’d memorized a lot of it. And I’d already been through some of their portals—in Herculaneum, and at their retreat house outside D.C., and again in Italy and—well, here, for chrissakes! Oh, yeah, quite a few places, you’d be surprised! Balthazar would be surprised,” he said maliciously. “It was too late to change that, and so they did the best they could to ruin my life. Blackballed me every time I’d try to enter another doctoral program, got me fired from jobs, turned my own goddam wife against me—

“But not this time. The buck stops here, now—’cause I’ve got you, Lit Moylan.”

He grinned and all the malice was gone. He looked like the same cheerful, slightly stoned hippie dad who’d first greeted us in Jamie’s kitchen. “A smart pretty girl like you—I told Jamie he’d make new friends here,” he said, and laughed. “Lots of nice people, here in fucking Brigadoon…”

He took a quick step backward. At the same time he raised his hand, twisting it so that his fingers seemed to ripple, a magician performing a complicated card trick with no cards there. Then he cried out and his voice died into the crackle of flames. Around us there sprang a circle of blazing light, fire leaping until it arched above our heads like a gilded dome. But there was no heat, and while smoke thickened the air between us it had no scent. I tried to lunge past it but Ralph stopped me, shouting.

“No! It protects you—and me, while I’m with you—”

I shaded my eyes, struggling to see past the column of flame. I could just make out the slender figure of the girl, standing with arms outstretched beneath the tree, her mouth a gaping O of fear and dismay. In the branches above a dark form seemed to thrash, but then I saw that it was the corpse, its limbs beaten back and forth by flame. Fire raced along the branches, white bark crackling as the wood beneath blazed a searing blue. Behind her I could dimly see the line of horsemen, rising and falling in place like some infernal carousel, riders and mounts shifting from antlered masks to golden armor to white robes and red crosses, green and black and yellow uniforms streaked against a fiery field, and then back to those first horsemen again; and between them all like shadows on a cavern wall the images of animals, running, leaping, grazing animals. Bison and lionesses, reindeer with salmon splashing about their cloven feet, mammoths and bears and owls with the eyes of men.

Then it was gone. A flare of purplish light and the figures collapsed, disintegrating into falling ash. Only the girl remained, gazing at a tree where the skeletal remains of a human corpse could be seen, white bones tangled amidst white branches. She looked calm, unnaturally so, her eyes half-opened and her hands limp at her sides. The reindeer herdsmen had disappeared. Behind her stretched the taiga, the lichen-covered plain broken by stands of charred birch trees, and here and there a lone slab of granite thrusting up from the earth. Twilight had somehow eroded into dawn, with no real night between. The eastern edge of the world had begun to glow deep red, a shade so dark it had the blackish humor of a wound that will not heal.

“No…”

I could not bear to see whatever awful sun might rise there. I shut my eyes and buried my face against Ralph’s arm. He moved to embrace me, but then something impelled me to look up again.

I saw the redhaired girl moving as if in mockery of my own fear, into the arms of a tall form standing behind her. I wondered if this was some psychic projection of Ralph Casson, but no. The figure stirred, long braid falling to brush against the girl’s cheek, revealing a face smeared with ochre and wood-ash.

The man-woman. Gone was the creepy aura that had frightened me before; gone, too, any semblance to a real woman. He held the redhaired girl gently, big hands stroking her hair, his chin nestled against the top of her head. There was nothing remotely sensual about their posture, but at the same time it was so intensely intimate that I lowered my eyes. I was too conscious of Ralph there beside me, the way he was different from any boy I’d ever been with. Not just bigger but somehow more solid, more real; even though I could feel that his arms were slack where Hillary’s were not, his hair thinner, his skin harder and more coarsely textured. It was like leaning against a tree and being able to feel it thrum with life. I was confused but also turned on; to hide it I pointed at the girl.

“What’s her power, then?”

“I told you: ‘Go not with young women over twenty, because they have no occult power.’”

“That’s bullshit.” I stared at the girl, still locked in embrace with her shaman consort, or brother, or whatever the hell he was. “Even if she does, I don’t.”

Ralph looked amused. “And why the hell do you think you would even know if you did, Lit Moylan?”

“I—well, I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m not some goddam sacrificial virgin, I’ll tell you that.”

“Oh, I know.” He took my face between his hands and held it firmly. It didn’t hurt, but when I tried to move he slid his thumbs until they sank into the flesh beneath my jaw. He pressed, hard, against my windpipe. “Believe me, Lit—neither Axel Kern nor Balthazar Warnick nor anyone else would have any interest in you at all, if you were a virgin.”

He shifted. One hand remained tight about my jaw; the other moved slowly down, tracing the ridge of muscle that marked my windpipe, then fanning out so that it covered my collarbone, the fingers slipping beneath the top of my dress. A flicker as I recalled sitting with him on the bench outside of Bolerium, feeling drowsy, nearly hypnotized as he pressed his palm against my breast—

But there was nothing of that now. I began to struggle, the knot in my stomach tightening as he pulled me to him. “You fucker,” I choked, and tried to kick him. His hand swept from my throat to my hair, yanking my head back as he shoved his leg between mine. I cried out; he pushed my face up to his, and kissed me.

“They owe me this,” he said. He stared at me, his blue eyes soft. “Oh, yeah—”

He kissed me again, teeth clicking against mine as I clenched my mouth shut. He made a low frustrated sound but before he could do more I angled my head sideways and bit him, hard, on the mouth.

“Ah—you bitch—!”

Blood spurted against my cheek and I spat at him, kicking viciously. His shout became an enraged growl,

“Don’t you dare, don’t you dare bite me—” I tried to break free but he held me, no pretense of gentleness this time. “You goddam bitch—”

“Let her go.”

Ralph looked up, his head snapping back. “Who the fuck are—”

“Let—her—go.”

It was the man in the long robe and woman’s braids; the man who had been embracing the redhaired girl. Only now he seemed taller—wild-eyed, his breath rank—and undeniably real, not some diorama figure from a fever-dream. Ralph stared but it was as though he didn’t really see him—Ralph’s eyes were unfocused, his mouth working as though he continued to shout at me. The other man loomed beside us; I could feel the nap of his deerskin robes, the soft tufts of colored wool that formed tassels along his sleeves as he raised his hand. I thought he would hit Ralph. Instead he let his arm fall, the leather fabric rippling down to hide me.

“This way!” the man hissed. He grabbed my arm and I stumbled after him, underbrush crackling underfoot. I looked back and saw Ralph staring at us in disbelief, and behind him the spectral silhouette of the girl who was my double, still motionless beneath the birch tree with all the taiga surrounding her, bathed in the crimson glow of sunrise.

Then the light shifted and grew more diffuse, as though a fogbank had crept across the plain. The girl’s clothing melted into shadow. Darkness poured from her like water and the birch tree, too, started to change. Its trunk grew wizened, its branches gnarled. The curved cage of bones propped on its limbs began to shake, as with a sound like ice shattering the skeleton reared into the air. Leaves leaped from the tree to cover it; strands of ivy shot up like spears to wrap around ribs, skull, fibula, sternum, until the entire form was clothed in greenery. Only the eyes remained free of leaves, such a deep black they seemed to glow. On the ground beneath the girl watched. Her stupor suddenly broke, and with a sharp cry she clapped her hands.

The leaf-cloaked mannequin lifted its arms. Ivy fell from them in a rain of green, and other vines sprouted as well, leaves larger and less variegated than the ivy, with pale yellow tendrils coiling like fingers about its shoulders and throat. Tiny globules erupted from these vines, burgeoned into darker globes that began to ripen, until a crawling mat of purple covered the green man. He thrust his head back, chest exposed to the rising sun. Bunches of grapes exploded from him, raining onto the ground and bursting, their juices soaking into the earth. I could smell them, a sweetness so intense my mouth watered.

“Not now,” a voice said softly. “Turn quickly, Lit, don’t look—”

Strong hands closed around mine. I ignored the warning, and strained to see what was happening as he pulled me after him.

The taiga was gone. In its stead was a softer landscape, hills climbing into mountains, slopes covered with trees, sunrise touching their limbs with gold. Of Ralph there was no sign. But the girl remained, unclothed, her breasts and pale skin and hair turned to copper by the dawn. At her feet poppies rippled in the wind—I could see their papery petals, white and red and pink, the green-furred stems and, on some of them, the swollen seed-calyx where the blossoms had already fallen. Once more she was embracing someone, not the man-woman but someone else, a tall man with hawkish features and dark hair that fell to his shoulders. He was naked, and in one hand held a staff topped with a carven pinecone. As he crushed the girl to his breast, wine streamed down her back, staining her hair reddish-violet.

“No more!”

I was yanked away roughly by the man-woman. In the deepening sunlight his leather robe looked burnished. But as we ran the robe seemed to unfurl like a long ribbon, until I saw it was not a leather robe at all but a gown of dark-green cloth, embroidered with five-petaled flowers. His careful braid unraveled, long hair snaking in the wind. Ahead of us the sunrise grew blinding. I shaded my eyes, found that I could make out an eerie darkness within the brilliance, like spots on the sun’s corona. I staggered after my rescuer, and with each step the darkness grew more palpable and took shape, until I was staring at a rectangular pillar in the air.

But it was not a pillar. It was a door, only a few inches taller than the man who led me and half as wide. A door made of shadow and light, the shadow the utter blackness of a starless night; the light more blinding than the sun, brilliance like a red-gold sea boiling up from the portal’s center.

“Close your eyes!” the man shouted. “Stay beside me!”

His voice was familiar. But I had no time to question him, no time to do anything but race, gasping, until I was beside him.

Before us the portal opened like the world’s molten core. A moment when I felt the ground beneath me drop away; a moment when air and wind and even the flesh upon my face were sucked away, devoured by a ravening heat. A column of flame ripped through me, erupting into pure white light as a voice shrieked deafeningly.

“Jump! Now!”

I jumped. There was silence and annihilating darkness, no sense of falling, of being; of anything at all. Then with a roar the world crashed all around me. I was thrown facedown onto a cold floor. The core of light exploded into pain, and for an instant I blacked out.

Then I heard a sound, a soft repetitive thumping, the murmur of voices that were not forming words. When I managed to open my eyes, I found myself lying on the floor of a darkened room, window casements thrown open so that a spatter of icy rain came down, and scattered oak leaves. I was back in Bolerium. On the floor beside me, holding her head and moaning, was Precious Bane.