Black Light

13. White Light / White Heat

IT TOOK ME SEVERAL minutes to catch my breath. I didn’t just feel winded by falling, or whatever I’d done to return. My heart pounded dangerously fast and my skin burned; whenever I tried to focus on the room around me, streams of cobalt and violet light flared and faded at the borders of my vision. Even my teeth ached.

But gradually all these symptoms faded; gradually the phantom lightning disappeared, and I could see that the casement above me was tall and narrow, with two sets of windows opened outward into the rainy night. Watery blue light filled the room, a long raftered space tucked somewhere under the eaves. The outer walls were granite, the floor unpolished wood and very cold. There were no rugs or furniture; only an odd, propane-blue light whuttering in the distance. I blinked, trying to bring the light into focus; and that’s when I realized there were other people in the room beside myself and Precious Bane. In fact, there were a lot of people, all gathered at the far end of the chamber. Before I could figure out what to do about that, Precious Bane sat up with a groan.

“God, I told you I hate this place.” She brushed back a tuft of cotton-candy hair. “Every time I come here I tear something.”

She stared ruefully at the band of shiny black polyester that was her miniskirt. It was slashed as though by a razor. “See? You think Axel will pay for this? He won’t. Thank god they’re too busy to notice—”

She inclined her head toward the people at the far end of the room, then got to her feet, long arms and legs unfolding like an accordion doll’s. She reached down to grab my hand. “Upsy-daisy, Miss Charlotte. My, your new party clothes are a mess.”

I stood groggily and looked down at myself. My dress was ragged and filthy, stuck with twigs and leaves; my Frye boots caked with mud. I touched my hair. It felt like the reindeer moss, brittle and damp. Precious Bane gave me a sympathetic look.

“Aw, don’t worry, honey. A little Prell, you’ll look super. Come here and let’s see what we can do to shine you up—”

“Wait—hang on a second…”

I slipped from her and darted to the window. It was set halfway up the wall, so that the bottom sill was level with my chin. If I slitted my eyes, the out-of-focus image was the exact inverse of that I had seen with the portal, its perimeter etched with light and the center a seething darkness. Very carefully I extended my hands, until my fingertips brushed the edge of the sill.

“Charlotte!”

“No. Wait—”

It was like being too close to an incredibly powerful electrical appliance. The air felt warm, almost furry; the hair on my arms stood on end. When I moved my fingers, threads of blue-violet light streaked between them, like paramecia swimming through the darkness. Out of nowhere words echoed around me, faint but clear, as though broadcast from a radio in an adjoining room. There was the smell of upturned earth, and my mother’s clear voice reciting—

“That’s what it is,” I whispered. “Black light…”

I took a deep breath, opened my eyes and firmly grasped the sill. As though I’d rammed my hands against a stone wall, a shock raced through me, from fingers to elbow and on to my shoulder. The pain made me shout, but I kept my hold tight on the window. The violet threads thickened, became ropes of light that encircled my wrists and arms, twisting about my shoulders until I could feel their pressure at my throat. Then suddenly the luminous bonds fell away. There was the summer-charged smell of ozone, a sound like the sea. With a gasp I let go of the sill and staggered backward.

Above me the window glowed like stained glass at dawn. Only it was not a window anymore. It was a portal. Flame runneled along its edges, blue-white deepening to indigo, feathered off into a desultory darkness that I knew was the room surrounding me.

But I could no longer see the room. My sense of it came only from knowing that it was not the incandescent threshold, a threshold that made everything else seem bleak and inconsequential. It was not a room there behind me, or even a world, but a prison. Ralph’s despairing voice came back to me—

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—

—and I thought of who they were and what they might become, those Chosen Ones who could pass through such a door.

“Charlotte.”

I stiffened, refused to turn.

“Charlotte. Come back. Come back now.”

I shook my head, then felt Precious Bane’s strong hand on my shoulder, pulling me away.

“You just got back here, honey,” she said softly. “Don’t be in such a hurry to leave. Not yet, anyway.”

The portal was gone. Rain slashed through the open window. From behind us came a faint echo of laughter. Precious Bane put a finger to her lips, indicating the far end of the room.

“Remember: we are not alone,” she said sotto voce. “Com-pa-nee!”

“Right.” I sighed, looked over and saw who the company was—eight or ten people thrashing naked on the floor, bathed in the leaden light spilling from a single glaring bulb on a pole. I gulped and looked away.

But there was Precious Bane staring at me, so I had no choice but to watch.

“Oh,” I said.

“Why look, Charlotte,” she said. “They’re making a movie.”

Above the heaving group Page Franchini stood impassively, filming it all with a Super 8 camera. The blue light gave everyone’s skin a wet, glassy sheen. It was less like an orgy than a school of dolphins arcing up through the floorboards, with only an occasional flash of a mouth or eyes to betray anyone as human. I stared, fascinated, until Page Franchini lifted his head from the camera and saw me.

“Hey,” he called. He set the camera on its tripod, still whirring, and waved at us. Behind him I glimpsed an open door, jeans and T-shirts flung over it. “You! C’mere, we could use some girl action—Precious, bring her over—”

“No way.” I spun around, and Precious Bane draped her arm around me protectively.

“Not today, Page,” she said, drawing a hand across her brow. “Our aura is very weak today—”

She tossed her head, cherry hair cascading down her back, and escorted me to the door. We had to step over several men, none of whom took the slightest notice. Page Franchini shrugged, lit a cigarette and tossed the match onto somebody’s bare ass.

“Well,” sniffed Precious Bane. “Now we know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.”

I laughed and squeezed through the door beside her. She kicked at a heap of clothes, then glanced back at Page Franchini angling in for a close-up. “Well, Charlotte. That’s what comes of wearing white shoes after Labor Day.”

“Was that, like, an orgy?”

“Very, very like.”

We were in the corridor, back on the main floor. There were people here, certainly more than I expected to be wandering the halls a few yards away from an orgy. An extremely pregnant woman in a dashiki dress, holding a wine glass and looking very drunk; a naked man in a wig. Music ricocheted from an upstairs room—

Just a few doors down, the corridor opened onto the music room. It seemed almost incongruously bright in there, all the lamps turned on and the candelabra alight atop the piano. Someone was hunched over the keys and a few people were gathered around, their backs to us. It took me a minute to disentangle their singing from the stereo upstairs and the resonant thump of dancing in the main hall.

But when we entered the room I saw it was Duncan at the piano, shirtless, his back slick with sweat and dusted with silver glitter, lank hair hanging around his face. He was banging out a ragged barrel-house version of “Moondance” and singing in his rich baritone, accompanied by a blonde high school chorus—Christie Smith, Alysa Redmond, Leenie Wasserman, all warbling cheerfully out-of-tune—and two predatory-looking women in tuxedos and stiletto heels.

“It doesn’t look good for Marsha and Jan and Cindi,” said Precious Bane. “I think I’ll leave you here with the cheerleading squad for a few minutes. Just don’t get lost. The party’s not over yet.”

She blew me a kiss and strode off. I nodded but forgot to thank her—I was too relieved to finally see my friends again, and something that looked like normal life. I hurried over to the piano. With a flourish Duncan finished the song. His face was glistening, his makeup smudged. But he looked astonishingly happy, and for a moment I almost forgot who I was looking at, Precious Bane or Dunc or the statuesque creature who had pulled me through the portal. The girls applauded, the tuxedo-clad women moved to touch their shoulders. Duncan looked over his shoulder at me.

“I wish my brother George were here,” he said.

Leenie and the other girls gave me stoned, slightly damaged smiles, brightening when one of the women dangled a small brown vial in front of them.

“Wanna come with us, Lit?” Leenie called as Christie and Alysa followed the older women across the room.

“No thanks.”

“Sure? Well, see you later—”

I watched them disappear into a corner, cheeping like goslings, then turned back to Duncan. “Hi, Dunc—”

He ran a hand across his face, leaving a smear of blue eye shadow. “Lit. Christ, what happened? You in a car wreck or something?”

“Or something.” I angled onto the piano bench and lay my head on his shoulder. “Oh, Dunc, am I glad to see you.”

“Yeah? How come? Aren’t you having a good time?”

“No.”

“Really?” He looked shocked. “Well—why not? I mean, who’ve you been hanging out with? Your parents?”

“Where are my parents? Are they still around?”

“Uh-uh. Nobody is—I mean, nobody from town. They all split around the same time, about an hour ago. Everyone but us, I mean. You know”— He flapped his hand, indicating the corner where Leenie and her friends appeared to be exchanging articles of clothing while singing “American Pie” —“the usual suspects. All our Kamensic heroes,” Dunc finished.

I stared bleakly at the piano.

“Well, jeez, Lit, it can’t be that bad—”

He struck a pose, head held high and candlelight glinting from a sequin stuck to his nose, then let his hands fall to the keys and began tinking out a few notes.

I shook my head. “Duncan, I don’t think Noel Coward would have liked this party very much.”

“Boy, you really are Captain Bringdown, aren’t you? Here—”

He reached beneath the piano bench and withdrew the bottle of Tanqueray. A scant two inches remained. He took a long swallow and handed it to me. I hesitated, finally took it and knocked back what was left.

“There! That’s better. Drunk Dunc and lit Lit.” He took the empty bottle and let it crash to the floor. “What should we sing now?”

I got woozily to my feet. “I think I’m gonna try to find Hillary. Have you seen him?”

“Not for a while. He and Jamie Casson were talking about going down to the city—”

“Tonight?”

“Yeah. There was some show at the Mercer Arts Center, the Dolls and someone else, I dunno. They blew that off, but I guess something’s going on afterward down on the Bowery, Jamie says he knows the band and he wants to get some people together and head down for it.”

“What about Ali?”

Duncan wrinkled his nose. “Man, she’s out of it. I tell you, I think Jamie Casson is bad news. He’s got her shooting smack or some such shit—” He shook his head. “I just don’t get it. All this pot and booze and great acid floating around, what’s she doing messing with her head like that?”

“Chacun à son goût.” As I started to walk away Duncan called after me plaintively.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It’s French for ‘Mind your own beeswax.’”

I sauntered off. The Tanqueray made me feel indestructible once more, but when I caught a glimpse of myself in an ormulu mirror in the hall I decided I’d better clean up. I found a bathroom, a cedar-paneled cubicle occupying what had once been a linen closet. That night it had obviously seen a lot of traffic despite its size. There was a pair of women’s red silk underwear wrapped around the light and a pile of shoes alongside the toilet. A joint was still smoldering on the sink, the porcelain beneath it amber with resin. Across the mirror, someone had scrawled TERRY TAKES IT UP THE ASS in hot-pink lipstick. I found a sock and cleaned off the mirror, smoked the rest of the joint, and did my best to make myself more presentable.

It was tough. I kicked among the shoes on the floor, searching for a comb or hairbrush, but found only a baggie that held a fine sifting of cannabis seeds and stems along with a pair of manicure scissors. I decided to save this, then tried to do something about my hair. All I could manage was dragging my fingers through the tangled copper mass.

“Ouch—”

I gave up. My dress was a lost cause as well. I plucked off as many twigs as I could, and scraped clumps of mud from the hem. One sleeve was hanging loosely. I tore it off, but then I had to tear off the other one, too. My bare arms were covered with scratches and insect bites. I examined them carefully, thinking of Ali and wondering if Dunc was right, if she actually had mainlined heroin. If so, is this what trackmarks looked like? My finger touched a small gash in the crook of my elbow. I winced, and glanced into the mirror above the sink. A mad girl stared back at me, ragged hair flaming around her mud-stained face, orange peasant dress in tatters, lips bitten and bloody-looking, pupils huge and very, very obviously stoned.

“Well, it’s a look,” I said.

I began to wash up. A few minutes later my face and arms were relatively clean and the sink was clogged with dirt and floating leaves. I was trying to get the drain to work when the door behind me flew open.

“Oh, hey man, sorry, I didn’t know anyone was—”

I turned too fast, and bumped into Jamie Casson.

“Jamie!”

“Huh? Hey—ow! what the—”

He drew up, staring at me. “Lit? Is that you?”

“Afraid so.”

He took in my ruined dress and hair, the mess on the bathroom floor. “Huh. I guess I must’ve missed something.”

“I guess you did.”

I made room as he edged inside, closing the door behind him. He looked tired and unhappy, shirt untucked and trousers hanging loosely from his hips. “I gotta get out of this fucking monkey suit,” he said. He held up a jumble of clothes. “You mind if I get changed?”

“Uh-uh.”

Immediately he started to undress. I wasn’t going to be so uncool as to leave, or deliberately look away. I busied myself again at the mirror, dabbing my face with water and doing my best not to spy on Jamie.

But it was impossible not to see him. In the mirror his thin pale form moved like a wraith, shrugging off the white shirt, trousers sliding from his legs so that I had a glimpse of his underwear and the silver-blonde hair on his thighs. Then he was pulling on black jeans and a T-shirt that said RAW POWER, and fumbling with the laces of his black high-tops.

“Hey, thanks.” He straightened, shoving a wisp of hair from his eyes, and balled up the clothes he’d just removed. “Guess I can just dump these here, huh? Boy, you really look bad, Lit.”

I flushed, glancing at the wadded clothes in his hand. “Hey”— I looked back at Jamie. —“are those your clothes? I mean, would you mind if I wore them?”

He shrugged. “Hell no. They’re not mine anyway— Kern gave ’em to me to wear tonight. He has, like, a whole closet full of these things, extras that he keeps around for the help. He wanted me in a fucking uniform, man, can you believe it? Like a fucking waiter. Here—” He tossed them at me. I grinned, and he shot a tired grin back. “—you’ll look better in ’em than I did, anyway.”

I took off my Frye boots and pulled the trousers on under my dress, then tucked the pants into the boots; made a half-assed attempt at modesty by turning sideways and tugging the dress over my head, and finally put on the white dress shirt. Jamie was insultingly indifferent, yawning and lighting a cigarette and leaning against the wall with his eyes closed. The trousers fit perfectly, soft wool and smelling of mothballs. I grabbed the baggie with the pot seeds and manicure scissors and stuck it in a pocket, along with a pack of matches. The shirt was much too big. I tucked it in, catching a breath of Jamie’s sweat and a smell like burnt sugar, the harsh odor of car exhaust.

“Ta da,” I said. I started rolling up the sleeves.

“Looks good,” said Jamie. “A lot better than it did on me.”

I tossed the dress into a corner and inspected my reflection in the mirror. It was a definite improvement on the madwoman who’d stared out at me before, even with the patina of grime that clung to the shirt, not to mention several cigarette holes. I still couldn’t do anything about my hair, though. I ran a hand through it, sighing, and turned back to Jamie.

“Well, thanks. Are Ali and Hillary still upstairs?”

“She passed out. And Hillary took off—”

“He left the party?”

“I don’t know. No, I don’t think so—I think he was going to find you first. I’m taking off—going down to the Pit. You want to come?”

“The Pit?”

“Yeah, man. These guys I know are playing, a fucking great guitarist, it’ll blow your mind.” He began swaying, eyes half-closed, cigarette weaving figure eights in the air. “This amazing scene…”

Abruptly he leaned forward. His turquoise eyes were huge, their expression so intense it was like rage. “You hate it here, too, don’t you. I know you do, Lit. And I know why. I know what goes on…”

“Wh-what—”

“This place—” He waved his cigarette, let it fall to the floor. “This fucking madhouse—”

The little room was filling with smoke, but as Jamie moved his hand the smoke directly in front of him disappeared. Not as though dispersed by the motion, but forming in a pattern. The reddish wood of the bathroom walls suddenly seeming to glow through the haze. He spread his fingers, turning them in a deliberate way that was both odd and oddly familiar. As I watched him, my own hands clenched. In the air between us the pattern grew darker, more apparent. The smoke took on a harsh metallic color, like the singed blade of a steel knife. There was a soft crackling sound of leaves burning, the acrid smell of incense. Another moment and a face hung in the air before me.

I gasped. It was not a face, but the image of a mask, one of those gaping terra-cotta masks that adorned the houses of Kamensic in the autumn. Its eyes were oblique, the mouth wide, upturned in a malicious smile; the high cheekbones two slanted bars of steely light. It was a cruel visage; and unmistakably that of Axel Kern.

“No!” I jabbed at the air. It felt as though I’d plunged my hand into a freezer. But the image was already gone. There was only a roiling cloud of cigarette smoke, and someone banging on the bathroom door.

“Hey, man, give someone else a turn, whaddya say?”

Jamie stuck out his foot and nudged the door open. In the hall stood Page Franchini. He gave us both a disgusted look.

“Oh, Christ, what are we doin’ now, sneaking a ciggie? Fucking kids. Let me in, I got to piss.”

He shoved past me. “Good morning, little schoolgirl. Comb your hair and put on some lipstick, I’ll make you a star.”

“Fuck you.”

I stomped out. I was shaking so hard I was afraid to stop moving, afraid that if I paused to take a breath I’d shatter like one of those masks. I could hardly see the corridor around me, hardly see anything but that lewdly grinning face staring out of the smoke.

“Lit—damn it, wait—”

I stopped but refused to look at him. Jamie hurried to catch up, taking my arm. “Where did you go before? Were you with my father? Tell me, Lit, you have to tell me—”

I lifted my head, fury scalding me like acid, and stared at him, his sullen mouth and great bruised eyes. Not a god dying to be reborn, not a transsexual Amazon; not a redhaired girl gazing back at me across a Eurasian steppe four thousand years ago. Not any of these but a boy my own age who I’d met the day before sitting on a jukebox, a boy who’d just given me his clothes.

A boy who could make masks in the air.

Jamie was looking at me the same way he had in Hillary’s car, when I thought I could confide in him about Kamensic. After a minute he nodded. I took a deep breath, nodded back; and socked him in the mouth.

“Awwwowww…!”

“You,” I said, my knuckles aching. Jamie reeled and crashed against the wall. “You bastard. You knew, what did you know, tell me what the fuck is going on!”

“Ow—don’t, don’t! I swear, I just—”

He panted, one hand cupping his jaw. His lip was dark and swollen, but not bleeding. He looked a hell of a lot more awake than he had a few minutes ago. “Christ, Hillary was right—”

“Hillary?” I shouted. “What the hell did Hillary say?”

“In the bar—Deer Park—he said not to mess with you or you’d clock me—”

“Yeah? Well, you better tell me what the fuck you’re doing here or I’ll clock you again—”

“I told you! We just moved here—my father was supposed to do sets for some asshole project that Axel Kern is working on—”

“Wait—start there. How do you know Axel?”

“I don’t—stop! don’t look at me like that, it’s the truth! I never met him before two days ago—he wanted me to park cars for the party. Then I saw him tonight when he paid me and gave me—”

“How did you do that?”

Jamie shook his head. “What? The cars?”

“No, you idiot—that thing in the air. The thing that looked like a mask—how did you do it?”

He rubbed his lip, looked anxiously up and down the hall. The bathroom door creaked open and Page Franchini emerged, zipping his fly. He glanced at us and bared his teeth in a derisive smile.

“It’s three A.M., children,” he called as he sauntered off. “Do you know where your parents are?”

“Asshole,” Jamie muttered. “Look, let’s at least go somewhere a little more private, okay? C’mon—”

He grabbed my arm and pulled me after him. We found an empty room, a small study with a pair of oversized armchairs in front of a fireplace where graying embers gave off a fitful warmth. There was a row of candles on the mantelpiece, and a half-dozen votive candles on the floor. Jamie dragged the two armchairs together. He settled in one. I slid into the other, still glaring.

“This better be good, Jamie. This better be fucking great.”

“My father,” he said. “That’s how I learned. But you must’ve already figured that.”

I had a flash of Ralph Casson drawing a pattern in the air, a circle of fire blazing up around us. “Your father—”

“He doesn’t know that I know,” Jamie added. “Not that he’s ever been what you could call discreet. But I’ve watched him, at home when he’d go off by himself and practice…

“He’s always done stuff like that. We were always moving, trying to find some place that would give him tenure, or even hire him for more than a year. But nobody ever did. He’d start pulling this crazy shit, talking about cults, the doors of perception swinging open so you walk right through them—I mean, he was teaching this crap, it wasn’t like he was just talking to my mom and me. He’d go down to the rec room to eat mushrooms and stare at himself in a mirror for four hours. And he never made it a secret, what he was doing at the schools. Same thing later, when he got bounced from Berkeley and all he could do was build sets for all those shitty monster movies. Because eventually somebody would always complain, about the wacked-out witchcraft crap, or the drugs, or the girls—”

“Girls?”

“Sure. That crazy stuff he was talking about in the kitchen—you know, ‘go only with teenage poontang, for thus lies the way of truth’—you think he made that up? No way! Every time I’d bring someone home, that’s how it would end up—my fuckin’ father shagging her. That’s how come my mother left—”

I made a small sound. I couldn’t help it. I thought of Ralph holding me, the way he’d stroked my arm and tried to kiss me; then thought of him doing it to innumerable others like myself. I crossed and uncrossed my legs, fighting an absurd stab of jealousy. “Oh. I—I thought your mom joined a commune?”

“She did. First she became a lesbian, then she became a Jesus freak, then she joined a commune. And you know what? I don’t even blame her. I wish now I’d gone with her.”

He stopped, his voice ragged, and I looked away. He was close to tears. He punched the arm of his chair, leaving a dent in the worn leather, then lifted his head defiantly. “I’m splitting. Tonight. Ali says there’s a train at 4:35—if the trains still run out of this place. I’m taking off. This is it.”

“But—” I hesitated. “Well, I know you hate it here— but why?”

“Because it gives me the creeps. Because it’s sick. But how would you know,” he went on bitterly. “You’re part of it, you and your creepy little town, all these fucking actors and Kern up here playing lord of the manor—”

“Me?”

“Yes, you!” He leaned forward and poked me, hard, in the shoulder. “Taking notes about everybody, pretending you’re gonna write a play about all of us—”

“Who told you that?” I demanded furiously, but I knew who’d told him.

“Hillary. And Ali. ‘Oh, don’t mess with Lit, she’s Axel Kern’s goddaughter, she can do—’”

“Shut up!”

“No.” Jamie had moved so he was practically sitting in my lap. “Did you fuck him? Did you fuck him?”

“Who? Axel?”

“No—my father.”

I almost laughed; instead stared at him and said in a snide voice, “No, I didn’t fuck your stupid father—”

“What about Axel? Did you sleep with him? With Axel Kern?”

“What goddam business of yours is it who I—”

“Did you?” He took me by the shoulders, his eyes desperate. “Lit, please, you don’t understand—”

“No.” I stared at him with all the hatred and disdain I could muster. “And you let go of me, or—”

Jamie let his breath out, gazed at his hands as though they didn’t belong to him; then sank back onto his own chair. “You didn’t,” he said in a low voice. “You swear you didn’t—”

“I didn’t sleep with Axel Kern. I never have.”

“Thank god.”

His tone was so earnest that I laughed despite my anger. “What, are you a Moonie or something? You hate sex?”

“No. Of course not. It’s just that—well, this is all a trap, Lit. All of it here at this party—”

He turned to peer over the top of his armchair, like a kid playing hide-and-seek; then curled around again. “It’s all for you. Axel Kern—I’m not sure exactly what he is, but he’s sure as shit not just a movie director. Somehow or other my father conned Kern into thinking that he could do some work for him, but my father’s not here to work. At least not that kind of work.”

His voice dropped. “Have you ever heard of a man named Balthazar Warnick?”

“Professor Warnick?”

“God, you do know him—”

“No! I never even heard of him until tonight!”

“Well, he’s here because of my father—and because of you. I don’t know why, exactly—”

He began scratching nervously at his arms. “But I do know this—I know my father wants to hurt both of them. Warnick and Axel Kern. I hear him talking some nights, my father—talking to himself, but what really creeps me out is that it makes sense. I mean it’s like he hears a voice, or voices, telling him things. And I can tell by his tone of voice that whatever it is he’s listening to, he’s hearing it for the first time. And once he does hear about it, well, all this weird stuff turns out to be true. Like this party—I heard him talking one night, we were still in the city—and he just sort of listened to whatever it is he listens to, and finally he said ‘Fine, Kamensic Village, we’ll go there.’”

“But Jamie—people do move here. It’s not like you need some magic voice telling you about it. Lots of people have heard of this place.”

“He hadn’t. Not before that night. I know, because he had to get a map to figure out where Kamensic Village is—he thought it was in Massachusetts, or Maine. He didn’t know it was just upstate. He’s here because of you, Lit—you and Kern and that guy Warnick…”

His voice grew softer, more despairing. “Look, I know it sounds crazy, but you have to admit this place isn’t exactly Walton’s fucking Mountain. And my father is definitely into some weird shit. I think he’s in way over his head. My mother did, too—she thought he was in some kind of cult, she was even trying to collect stuff for a book about it, maps and things, but then of course my mother also thinks she’s the seventeenth incarnation of Mary Magdalene. So”— he lay his hands on his knees beseechingly. —“can you please tell me what’s going on?”

“But I don’t know. You—you drew that face in the air back there, in the bathroom—how?”

“I told you—I watched my father, and memorized what he did. It doesn’t always work—I have to focus on what I want to see, and”— he opened his palms, clapped them together. —“pffft! Like that. If it works.”

“But Jamie, why did it look like Axel?” He looked puzzled and I wanted to shake him, I was that frustrated. “The face you made in the air—it looked just like him.”

“Kern?”

“Yes! Didn’t you know?”

He gestured helplessly, his arms red-streaked where he’d scratched them. “But I wasn’t thinking of Kern. I was thinking of those things you see here on the doors, those creepy masks…”

His eyes went dead, and somehow that was more frightening than the thought that he could draw faces in the air. All the color drained from them, the way a blue jay’s feather goes from blue to gray if you strip the quills, and he stared vacantly into the air between us.

“I don’t want to see them,” he finally said, his voice listless as his eyes. I knew he was seeing something else in the room’s shadows; whatever it was, my skin prickled to watch it mirrored in his face. “But they’re always there. That’s why I get bent—so I won’t see them…”

He turned and grabbed my hand. His was icy cold, the long fingers flaccid as rotting leaves. I recoiled but he drew me closer, until his breath was on my cheek, nicotine and a faint green scent, crushed petals, the bitter tang of resin. “Come with me, Lit. You hate this place, you want to leave—come with me to the city. We can live cheap, practically for free. We can get high, we can hang out. If we leave tonight we can be there by morning. I mean, trains do stop here, right?”

“Well, yeah,” I said slowly. “Of course they do, the commuter trains come every day, but I don’t know about four A.M. on a Saturday…”

“Then we’ll hitch! There’s a place we can crash, a bunch of people I know are squatting there, it’ll be so cool—”

His hand tightened around mine and I nodded, not meaning Yes, not meaning anything; just trying to buy time to think.

“Why? I mean, why do you want me?” I said at last. I looked up, trying to will a spark back into those wounded eyes. “Why not Hillary, or Ali?”

“Because you’d know exactly what you were leaving. Hillary’s afraid to really go away—he just wants to hide at Yale for four years, and pretend this place doesn’t exist. But it does, and it’s not going to disappear—”

“But why not Ali?”

He shook his head. “Ali’s too much like me: she just wants to get high. Little rich white girls scoring nickel and dime bags…she’d never make it. She’s not tough, like you are. And she can’t sing.”

“Sing?”

“I’m getting another band together. I know these guys, they’ve been playing down on the Bowery for a few months now. We can get a regular gig there, and if we’re squatting we don’t have to make rent—”

“But I can’t sing! I’m horrible at all that stuff…”

I blinked back tears, my turn to feel desperate. Because suddenly it seemed as though there was a way out of Kamensic, and this was it. I shuddered, feeling the rush of chilly prescience that overcame me sometimes when I was drunk—the same dizzying sense of hopelessness and relief, the same sickening perception that this was the real world, teenage drunks and junkies nodding out in corners, midnight’s promise given over to crushed pill capsules and empty bottles and the same record playing over and over again on a neglected stereo.

And none of it, none of us, would ever mean anything. We would never be famous; we would never be rich. None of us would become what we were meant to be, beautiful and brilliant and enchanted, destiny’s tots taking bows onstage and receiving armfuls of roses, reading our reviews in the New York Times and Rolling Stone. Ali would go quietly mad like her mother, Hillary would teach Cymbeline to yawning high school students and one rainy night drive his car into the Muscanth Reservoir.

Yet in a terrible way it was a relief to know these things. To imagine that life could be ordinary and barren; to know that nothing I did would ever matter, that the visions of another world and another self were nothing more than bad dreams, the bitter aftertaste of bad acid and too much Ripple wine. Whatever secret that Kamensic and the Benandanti held was trumped by what Jamie was offering me—the chance to escape, to go to the city and lose myself. No one from Kamensic Village—or anyplace else, anytime else—would be able to find me. Not in New York City.

Not if I didn’t want to be found.

“Lit?”

I looked up to see Jamie staring at me. I opened my hands. “I can’t sing, Jamie. I can’t even act, and around here that’s like saying you can’t read, or drive. Actually,” I admitted, “I can’t drive, either. But Hillary can sing, and Duncan—”

“They’d never come with me—too chickenshit. Can you play guitar?”

“Hell no.” I bit my thumb, finally offered, “I guess I can dance. Sort of…”

“Well, you wanna write, right? We’ll just do covers at first but we’ll need songs, new stuff—”

“Songs? I can’t write songs—”

“Sure you can.” For the first time Jamie grinned. “Fuckin’ A, look at you”— he took in my filthy boots, the cast-off shirt rolled up around my elbows, my snarled hair and dirty fingernails. —“you’re a fucking mess! You’re perfect.”

“But—”

“Look, you’re pissed off, right? You’re mad as shit at the whole goddam world! You got a chip on your shoulder, I’ve got a monkey on my back—it’ll be fucking great! Come on, come on, come on,” he urged, rubbing my arm. “New York City really has it all…”

“But—”

I shut my eyes, dredged up the image of a horned man clawing his way through the trees; of a boy bound with ivy and Axel Kern in a rainswept chapel. I opened my eyes. Jamie was still there, his gaze no longer imploring but insistent. I sighed.

“But Jamie—if something really is happening here…if something is going on, and I’m part of it—how can I leave? How can I just go?”

“I’ll tell you how.” Jamie took his hands from me and slid from the chair. “Like this—you just put your legs together, and go.”

He crossed to the fireplace, squatted there and stared into the ashes. After a minute he turned back to me. “Look, I don’t care if you come or not. Or, no, I do care, I guess, but I’m going whether or not you come with me. Or anyone else. But if you stay here, it’s just like Hillary going to Yale, and Ali going to Radcliffe or whatever fancy place you all get shoved away in. It’s a cop-out; it’s a way of making sure you just keep coming back home again and doing what your parents did—

“Just like they always do, Lit. It’s their fight and they drag us into it. Always, always the same fucking thing. But you know what?”

He stood. He didn’t look wasted anymore, or tired. “This time I’m not buying into it. Whatever my father is involved in, whatever it is he thinks he’s breaking into, I’m breaking out. I’m breaking the cycle. And I think you should too.”

I groaned. “Oh, God, Jamie, I dunno…”

Jamie said nothing. He just stood there, then began to sing in a sweet boyish tenor. “I remember how the darkness doubled…”

I leaned forward and cradled my head in my hands. When I looked up a moment later, he was gone.

“Shit—Jamie, no, wait—”

I raced into the corridor. It was empty. Thin cyanic light filtered out from a few half-open doors, along with laughter, the tireless whir of a Super 8 camera. I turned and began walking toward the main hall. I felt wired, almost frantic, and my eyes burned. When I rubbed them I looked at my hands, to make sure they weren’t black with ash. Instead my knuckles were red, not with blood but something powdery, the color of brick-dust.

Ochre.

I touched my cheek and drew away fingers stained vermilion, then rubbed my face with my sleeve. The white cotton was streaked with rust. When I saw the arched entrance to the main hall in front of me, I began to run.

Music thudded from the monolithic speakers. Heavy bass, slivers of guitar noise; buried vocals that sounded like weeping. Beneath my boots the floor was awash in the party’s spoilage—spilled wine, auroras of glitter and sequins, roaches and cigarette butts.

But there was a more ominous residuum, too. Crushed acorns, their meat like grubs nosing amidst scattered piles of oak leaves; pinecones and opium pods, papery petals frail as moth’s wings. When I kicked through the detritus daddy longlegs raced underfoot, and spiders as long as my finger crept over broken syringes.

“Damn…”

I stepped inside. I expected to be blinded by the same carnival glare that had greeted me hours earlier, and shaded my eyes.

There was no need. The columns of ultraviolet light still marked the perimeter of the room, but all their otherworldly fire had been extinguished. There was only a faint flicker inside the tubes, like trapped lightning. The bulbs made a threatening sound, buzzing as though locusts hid within them. I walked past warily, making a circuit of the room and looking for someone I knew.

I saw no one. The dancers had all gone home. The hall seemed to be full of white-shrouded figures, frozen in the dying light. Something warm grazed my wrist; I looked up to see the candelabrums still hanging from the ceiling. Long streams of wax had spilled from them to the floor, hardening into veils and cataracts and tusks. It was these that I had taken to be cloaked figures; it had been a droplet of hot wax that spattered my wrist.

“It’s okay,” I whispered. “It’s okay…”

My breath was enough to send a shiver through the waxen shrouds. I walked on, tiny stalagmites crunching beneath my feet, and as I crossed the room the music changed. The droning bass was chopped off by the crackle and fizz of dust on the needle. As though it were water leaking in, the great hall filled with the sound of a chiming guitar and a tambourine’s funereal jangle. But I could still see no one, and I could no longer tell where the music was coming from.

I shivered. My eyes ached from trying to focus on anything within the colonnade of ruined candles and black light. The music thrummed and droned, the tambourine became a tocsin. As I walked things clung to me, cobwebs or dripping wax, I thought. But when I glanced at my arm I saw long tendrils of pale green sprouting from the cleft of my elbow.

“Ugh!”

I slashed at them and the tendrils fell away. Immediately three long red furrows rose along the inside of my arm, oozing dark liquid that spun in long droplets to the floor. I gazed down, stunned, but before I could move there was a rush of wind that swept away everything, music, light, dead leaves and cigarette ash. Something touched my cheek and I recoiled.

The room was alive with whirling petals, a vortex of red and pink and scarlet, as though the mansion itself were bleeding. They erupted from the casements like broken glass and drifted from the candelabrums, and where they touched my skin it grew numb. My feet were mired in blossoms; when I tried to shout my jaw didn’t move. The sound of wind in the trees grew deafening. It no longer came from outside but somewhere within the room. There was a smoky reek like hashish, the fruity odor of new wine. And still the papery blossoms swirled around me, sticking to the gashes on my arm and covering my face like snow.

As though unseen hands had slammed the windows shut, the gale stopped. The petals froze in midair; then, like iron filings circling a magnet, they made a shape—the ragged outline of a tree, limbs bare save where petals settled in the crux of trunk and branches. Something moved within those branches, just visible behind the scrim of blossoms; a shadow like a crouching figure readying itself to spring.

No…

I tried to summon the strength to move; but abruptly as it had appeared the phantom tree was gone. So were the falling blossoms. The music rang out again, thin and shrill. I blinked and drew an unsteady hand across my face. There were no flowers there; but on the floor faded petals mingled with broken wineglasses and oak leaves. I turned and started to walk across the room.

The sickly glow from the dying UV lights had faded. I could just make out a series of closed doors along the far wall, each a lozenge of deepest black with no hint of a lock or knob or window set within. I remembered seeing them earlier, almost hidden by a throng of partygoers. Now they seemed ominous as the doors to Bluebeard’s castle in a Hammer horror film or one of Ali’s ghost stories.

“Oh, Christ. Ali.” I whispered, anguished, and opened my hand. A single crimson petal lay pressed against the palm. “Ali…”

I knew then that it was as Jamie had said. Bolerium was a trap, a labyrinth; and I was ensnared. The only way I could truly escape would be to do as Jamie planned—leave right now, taking nothing, saying no farewells, with no money in my pocket and no idea of what I was really doing, except running away.

But that would mean leaving Ali nodded out in an empty room upstairs. That would mean leaving my parents, and Hillary; leaving Duncan and all the rest of them—Mrs. Langford and Moe and Flo and Ali’s father with his crapped-out car. It would mean leaving Kamensic itself.

And suddenly I didn’t know if I could do that. I wasn’t even sure if it was possible.

Because Kamensic wasn’t just a town. It was something that had seeped into my veins like a drug, something that had filled all the hollow places in my bones and heart and head, until even if I died the shadow of the town would be there, taking my shape, using my voice—and how would anyone even know I was dead?

How would I know?

I shuddered. The smell of spilled wine grew stronger as Axel Kern’s voice crooned in my ears, and Ralph Casson’s—

Nothing happens only once…

She is their pathfinder: She travels between this world and the realm of the dead…

I thought of Ali’s stories of the drowned village, of suicidal children given as tithe to a dark man in the back of an unconsecrated church. I thought of Hillary smashing a terra-cotta mask in a drift of autumn leaves, and Ali dancing drunk across her room, crooning gimme shelter as she waved a burning joint at me. I thought of all these things; and of my parents, and a silver-framed photograph of Axel Kern with me beside him, my hair crowned with a wreath of red flowers.

No, I had said when Ralph Casson held out the small swollen globe of a poppy husk to me, No, I don’t want it.

With every ounce of fury and despair I had, I beat my fists at the air and shouted—shouted until I drowned out the droning music and the entire hall became an echo chamber with only my voice roaring inside. The streams of candle wax snapped and shattered. From the long outer wall came a muted thump, and then another, as one by one the tall tubes of UV light flared like Roman candles and went black. My voice died into a rasp. I let my hands fall to my side and listened for the music.

There was none. A flood of frozen wax covered the floor, shards of white glass and metal threads. The French doors banged open and closed as the wind sent a spume of dead leaves into the hall. I watched them, but only for a moment. Then I turned away, terrified but resolute, and walked through the wreckage until I reached the row of closed doors. Some were veined with ivy, others covered with thumbtacked messages, bits of paper and strips of sequined fabric clinging to the wood like vines.

But there was never any doubt which entrance was meant for me. Toward the end of the long wall was an arched door of unpolished oak, its panels flaked with black; no knob, no latch. Set within the center, like a sundial in a garden, was a terra-cotta mask. Its slanted eyes glittered as though ruby glass winked behind them, or flame. Its mouth was set in a half-smile as though it were asleep.

“Axel Kern,” I said, and raising my fist I smashed it.

There was a satisfying crack, more like bone on bone than shattered clay. I drew back, to protect myself from flying debris, but there was no hail of broken terra-cotta. Instead bits of torn greenery rained down, stems and stamens stripped of their blossoms, ragged petals, crushed lilies and the fragile trumpets of narcissus. They covered me, tangling my hair and catching in my sleeves, their fragrance thick and choking as honey.

“God damn it, let me in!”

I kicked blindly at the door. The panels splintered beneath my boot and a lancing pain shot through my leg. Still it didn’t budge.

“Open!” I pounded where the mask had been. A rusty hand-shaped stain bloomed beneath my touch, grains of powdered stone trickling to the floor among the falling blossoms. “Open—!”

A sound like the tolling of a vast bell, a smell of burning leaves. As though it were a slab of ice the doorway seemed to melt. Its edges blurred into daylight. The storm of flowers subsided. I stood, breathing hard and glaring at the portal. Then I lifted my head, fists drawn before me, and walked through.

There was a sickening rush of vertigo, a flare of violet-blue light. My skin burned and my hair crackled with static. Then there was only darkness: no floor, no walls, no sense of whether I was falling up or down but only that the world had been ripped apart, like a tree torn by a hurricane. I couldn’t breathe but I felt neither fear nor panic; only numbness and exhaustion. The darkness spiraled away, sucked into a point of radiance that grew larger and larger until it enveloped me.

And suddenly I was falling, plunging down so fast that when I tried to scream the air felt like a stone thrust into my mouth. I saw a room racing toward me, walls and chairs and windows atop jeweled carpets. The sudden hiss of air mingled with my own voice, shrieking, as I crashed onto the floor.

“Giulietta!”

I moaned, turning slowly onto my side, opened my eyes and saw someone crouching beside me.

“Giulietta—what have you done! You should have waited, I would have—”

“Aw, shit,” I moaned again, sitting up. My head spun viciously. For a horrible instant I thought the whole scene was going to run backward, and I’d end up crashing back into some other awful place. But then warm hands were on mine. Carefully they opened my fingers and placed something heavy in them. I looked down and saw a cut-glass tumbler full of amber liquid; looked up again into the incongruously boyish face of Balthazar Warnick.

“Giulietta—”

I nearly dropped the glass, but he touched my wrist to steady me. “It’s all right, Giulietta, you’re here with me. Drink, it will calm you—”

I shook my head. “No way—”

“It’s only cognac. Very expensive cognac. So please—”

I sniffed at the tumbler, glanced back into his sea-blue eyes. With a shrug I drank.

“Ugh.”

He laughed. “That’s a bit fast for cognac—”

I shoved it back at him, my eyes watering. “Gross! Take it—”

“Here, Giulietta. Let me help you…”

He took my hand and got me to my feet. I stood woozily, unsure whether it was me or the cognac making the room look unnaturally brilliant—a gorgeous, Pre-Raphaelite vision of a scholar’s study, with paneled walls and Oriental carpets on the floor, rows of bookshelves and a huge bay window overlooking mountains.

And, while it had been after midnight in Kamensic, here sunlight streamed through the sweeping windows. Everything gleamed with a primal intensity: the crimson and indigo of the carpet so saturated they looked wet, the gold letters on the spines of books sparkling like flame. Decanters on a small round table glowed as if they held paint rather than liqueurs—emerald green, blood-red, sunflower yellow. A daybed was heaped with tapestried pillows, and there was a small cast-iron woodstove set into one wall, its isinglass window glowing beneath one of several beautifully carven plaques inscribed with Latin phrases—

It was all like some Victorian fever-dream, or a movie set. I rubbed my eyes, heedless for the moment of Balthazar’s hand on my arm.

“What—what is this place?” I finally said.

“My study. You are at the Orphic Lodge of the Benandanti, in the Blue Ridge mountains. People come here to work—students, visiting professors, classical scholars. But only the Benandanti see the inside of this room—Benandanti, or their guests,” he added. “Giulietta—”

I stiffened and drew away from him. “I’m not Giulietta. Whoever the hell she was. I’m Lit—Charlotte Moylan—”

I walked to the window, peered out at the mountains, a river threading between autumn-gold trees, all beneath a sky so blue it made my eyes ache.

“And I’d like to know what the hell I’m doing here.” I turned back to Balthazar. “Where’s Axel Kern? I thought…”

My voice trailed off: I wasn’t sure exactly what I had thought. “I thought I would find him—through that door, in Bolerium—”

“You would have.” Balthazar leaned against a desk, its surface covered with stacks of books, curling parchments, a silver tray holding the remnants of a meal. He still wore his formal evening clothes, though his iron-gray hair was tousled, his face more worn than when I had seen him last. He stared at me, so frankly delighted that I blushed. “But you were diverted.”

He walked over and eased himself on the window seat beside me, gazing out at the mountains with a proprietary air. “You’re not an adept, Giulietta—Lit,” he corrected himself. “You’re something far more unusual—and dangerous.”

“What’s that?” I snapped. I continued to stare out the window, desperately hoping he couldn’t tell how frightened I was. Whatever had happened to me—falling through a tear in the fabric of the world, stumbling through doors at Bolerium and ending up on the Eurasian steppe—I very much wanted to believe that those things were accidents.

But even if I hadn’t known I would end up at the Orphic Lodge, I had chosen to walk through that portal at Bolerium. And that seemed to have upped the ante in whatever cosmic game I was part of. I recalled a moment in my childhood—the aftermath of that same Irish funeral, a whiskey-fueled wake where I’d watched my father argue strenuously with an Augustinian priest. Something about free will, and living with the consequences of one’s decisions no matter how dire…

I started as a breath of chilly air nosed through an open window, smelling faintly of river-mud. Balthazar reached to shut the window, gently touched my wrist.

“You’re a sort of prodigy, Lit.” He picked up an odd-looking toy that rested on the velvet seat cushion, a model of the solar system made of wire and polished stone beads. “A savant…”

“Ralph Casson didn’t think I was a savant. He said I was a Malandanti.”

Balthazar’s hand tightened around the shining array of wire. There was a small blister on his thumb. As I stared, the blister swelled, burst into a red star that bled down to stain the cuff of his dress shirt. “Malandante,” he said. “Malandanti is the plural.”

He let the wire toy drop back to the seat and looked at me, his eyes grim. “And I hope very much for your sake, Lit, that you are not a Malandante.”

Faster than I would have thought possible, he grabbed me by the shoulders. “Listen to me—you have no idea what you have walked into. This is a battle that has been going on for longer than there have been words to describe it. You have no part in this fight, Lit. Do you understand? You know nothing of the Malandanti—they would use you and discard you as casually as you would throw away a piece of paper. You would be destroyed—”

“So?” I spat, knowing my voice sounded thin and frightened. “So everybody dies, it’s not like—”

“It is not like anything you can imagine. Because you would not die, Lit, any more than I have died. Not now that you have become aware. For four hundred years I could bear this world and my place in it, the constant watchfulness and the eternal, eternal waiting—but only because I knew you were safe. Giulietta Masparutto, whom I saw burned to death, but who was then claimed by the Malandanti—I knew that she slept, and would be reborn, and die, and sleep only to be born again. All of this for centuries, thousands of years, perhaps. And as long as she was not aware of who or what she was, she was safe. Even in life, she would be sleeping.

“And so always I was sustained by the thought that she could be there, somewhere. Even if I never saw her, even if I was never able to find her again—it was enough. I could serve out my duty to my masters, knowing that she might be alive but with no memory, no knowledge of what she had been, nor of what she might be. And the cycle would have gone on, endlessly—if not for Ralph Casson.”

“Ralph Casson!” I tried to pull from him. “Ralph fucking Casson didn’t create me! I wasn’t waiting for him to make me come to life—”

“I did not say he created you,” said Balthazar. “I said he made you aware. Do you know why Giulietta was executed, Lit?”

His fierce gaze made me look away. “Because she slept with you,” I muttered. “And they thought she was a witch…”

“She was a witch. By their terms—she had the sight, she knew I was a Benandante the first time she laid eyes on me, covered with dust and carrying my scrolls in a rotting leather sack. She did not know precisely what a Benandante was, but she knew me for something more than what I seemed to be. She was sixteen when we met, she had been her own cousin’s lover for two years already—she was no child, any more than you are. And she did not know what she was, any more than you do.

“I was the one who told her of our work; of our fight against the Malandanti. Because I loved her; because I wanted her to join me. I—I thought that if she knew, it might be possible—that my superiors might have permitted us to marry—that she might then have helped us, helped me to fulfill my part in all of it…”

He fell silent. His grasp upon my shoulders loosened, and I drew back.

“I think you’re crazy,” I said. “But even if it were all true—and I know it’s not—why should I listen to you? You betrayed that girl—you let them burn her at the goddam stake—”

“There was no betrayal. I was going to help her, I had no idea that the Conclave had condemned her to death—”

“You were afraid. You were afraid of them, and you were afraid of—whoever she was.” I tilted my head back and regarded him coldly. “That was how the story went that Ali told us.”

Balthazar sighed. He ran a hand across his brow and sat back down on the window seat, shoving aside the model of the planets and watching me with bleak eyes. “They were all afraid of her.”

“Because she was so powerful?”

“No. Because she was so angry. Not bad-tempered—she was good-natured, too easily led into bed, too kind when it came to helping her father and her cousins. But she had a very great rage, sometimes it seemed that everything would make her angry—babies dying of the flux, her own mother dying as she struggled to give birth to her tenth child, her friends and cousins becoming pregnant before they were fourteen years old—all of it enraged her—”

“No shit.”

“—but there was nothing she could do about it. For herself, she took herbs, and was very careful in her lovemaking so as not to get with child. But she would shout at the others when they got pregnant, she would shout at the parents whose children died—she shouted at the village priest, and when he tried to force her confession during the sacrament of penance, she kicked him.”

I laughed. Balthazar smiled ruefully. “I was a bit afraid of her, as much as I was afraid for her. Not that she would hurt me—she loved me, and we argued very rarely—but because I knew her rage would draw attention to her.”

“Because she kicked a priest?”

“No. Because her fury is what gave her power. It’s what fueled her sight, it gave her the dreams she had, where she could see things she was not meant to see. Her anger is what drove her to learn about the plants that kept her sterile. It made her lash out at the other women, who refused to listen when she tried to help them—”

He stood and crossed to one of the massive book cabinets, shelves bowed beneath volumes bound in leather, untanned hide, rainbow silks, parchment. A library ladder leaned against the wall, and Balthazar nimbly climbed it, looking like an earnest schoolboy in the shadow of all those somber tomes. Dust puffed out around him as he withdrew a volume and blew on its spine.

“Kirsten better see to those,” he said as a pair of moths flew past his head. “Here, take this please—”

I hesitated, then walked over. I was half-expecting something exotic, or at least undeniably ancient—crumbling vellum, cracked leather and Latin—but the book he gave me was merely old and musty-smelling, its cloth binding frayed, its spine cracked as from much use. Disappointed, I turned it to read the cover.

“Do you know it?” asked Balthazar as he clambered back down the ladder.

“Oh, sure. Are you kidding?”

He walked over to a narrow table set along one wall. Papers covered it, and an old Royal upright typewriter. I followed him, opening the book to read its title page.

“Well,” I said as Balthazar took the book from my hand. “It’s not exactly The Catcher in the Rye.”

He smiled and with a flourish pointed to a velvet-padded chair, its arms carved with whorls and griffin’s-heads. “Sit.”

I sat. He pulled a matching chair alongside me and settled himself into it, smoothing the book’s cover. “It’s a very important work, that’s all. In my day students younger than you are could recite long passages by heart.”

In your day guys were reciting Beowulf in mud huts, I thought darkly, but said nothing. Balthazar opened to the table of contents, an impenetrable listing of bizarre names and Greek characters, with a few bits of Latin thrown in for leavening.

“Do you know who the Erinyes are?” he asked.

“No.”

“Really? Well, the name means ‘the angry ones.’ They were commonly known as the Furies, but also they were called the Eumenides, ‘the kindly ones.’ They are three women—usually old women, but not always. I have found depictions of them on black-figure vases where they are beautiful, and young, although they do have eagle’s talons and wings. They were associated with terrible, terrible things. Even their names are bloodthirsty: Megaera, the Jealous One; Electo, the Relentess; Tisiphone the Avenger. They are the Punishers—June called them the death-Sirens, who would drive guilty people to frenzy. In ancient Greece, the very word used to describe ‘rage’ was almost indistinguishable from their name. They are far older than any of the Olympic deities; they may be among the oldest supernatural creatures of which we have any written record.”

“What did they do?”

“They restored order. Not necessarily human order, and not divine order—certainly not divine order as we think of it now. Whatever their code of ethics was, it was far more ancient than anything we can even begin to imagine, and more horrible. June Harrington speculated that it was the order of the Mothers—of an unimaginably ancient form of worship. It is an extremely interesting thing, really.”

I looked up, surprised at how his tone had changed. It was softer, more thoughtful, and his expression as he gazed at a page of June Harrington’s book was almost dreamy. “So many of the images of women that we have from ancient Greece are terrible ones. Medea slaughtering her children, Medusa turning people to stone, wicked Clytemnestra plotting against her husband—

“But she wasn’t really plotting,” I broke in. “He murdered their daughter—he sacrificed Iphigenia, and Clytemnestra was just—”

“Ah.” Balthazar raised an eyebrow, his sea-blue gaze mocking. “And how came you by that bit of arcane knowledge?”

“We had to read it at school,” I said defensively. “At least we were supposed to read it, for one of my drama classes. We did all that stuff. Ali played Iphigenia in a scene for our acting class.”

“Did she?” Balthazar smiled. Suddenly he no longer seemed so old. The burnished light touched his cheeks and graying hair with gold, so that his face looked smooth and timeless. He tilted his back back, and in a soft voice began to recite.

I frowned. “I don’t remember that part.”

“It’s a different play,” confessed Balthazar. “Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris. There’s a happier ending than in the Oresteia, at least for Iphigenia—her father sacrifices a deer instead of his daughter.”

“That was big of him.”

“Ah! You think he was wicked—but the truth is, it was Artemis who demanded the sacrifice of Iphigenia. With the possible exception of Aphrodite, who was a bit of a latecomer to Olympus, none of the ancient goddesses were particularly nice people.” I glanced at Balthazar curiously: he was talking about these characters the same way my mother might discuss a neighbor who drank too much before Garden Club meetings. “They could be helpful, but there was nearly always a price, and usually it was blood. Nowadays we think of Artemis as the Huntress, and picture her like that—”

Balthazar waved a hand dismissively at an Edwardian illustration in the book, a demure young woman in long skirts carrying a bow, rather as though it was a tennis racket. “In fact, Artemis was a dreadful goddess, who didn’t hesitate to slaughter anyone who crossed her. Look at this—”

He turned the page. A gray-tinted photographic plate showed an alabaster statue of a woman, her face cast in bronze—but really, the statue scarcely looked like a woman at all. It was more like a thick column, topped by an androgynous face that wore a cylindrical crown; an austere, even cruel face. Beneath it the column was ornamented with animals with staring eyes and bared teeth, and by vaguely obscene shapes, swollen orbs that hung in distended rows from the goddess’s breast almost to her feet.

“The Artemis of Ephesus,” said Balthazar. He tapped the page officiously. “Sometimes called Cybele. This is a representation of the very goddess who so enraged Saint Paul when he visited the city. He referred to her as Diana, of course, in the Roman fashion—‘Diana whom all Asia and the world worshippeth.’ Not that one can blame him for being so disturbed by her rites. To this day, most people associate the Ephesian Artemis with fertility cults. They think these”— He indicated a bulbous ornament on the goddess’s dress. —“are breasts.”

“Well,” I said, squinting at the picture. “Aren’t they?”

“June Harrington thought they were the offerings of the galli—the men who castrated themselves to Artemis, and not always willingly.”

I grimaced, but Balthazar only turned the page and continued in the same solemn voice. “She was quite a remarkable woman, June Harrington. We disagreed on the most basic issue of—well, call it belief—but she was a tireless researcher, and fearless. She was obsessed with the ancient mystery cults, with how all of them so obviously had the same origin. She believed that the Erinyes were manifestations of the beings that were the companions of Dionysos. Have you read The Bacchae?”

“I have it.”

“Ah, yes,” murmured Balthazar. “The classic answer from first-year students from New York, no matter how obscure the text: ‘I have it.’ Well, bacchante is one of the terms for the women who followed Dionysos. There are many others. Bassarid, Maenad, Thyiad, Phoibad, Lyssad. Maenad means simply ‘mad woman’; lyssad means ‘the raging one.’ And we also have Potniades, which is particularly interesting because of its possible derivation from the far more archaic Minoan and Mycenaen Potnia, or—”

I exhaled impatiently. Balthazar looked surprised, even disappointed, but with a sigh he flipped through the volume in front of us. “Dionysos. The god of revelry, the god of ecstasy; the god of illusions. His rituals involve madness induced by wine or hallucinogenic plants; the apotheosis of the god was achieved in a state of intoxication, and often involved omophagia—the eating of raw flesh, of animals certainly but at some earlier point of humans as well. Most likely he is an Asian import, by way of Phrygia—Anatolia, that is, Turkey, and there are indisputable links with Shiva—and so from the same land that gave birth to the ancient matristic cults. They may literally have given birth to him—his mother is supposed to have been Semele, a mortal, but Semele is also a name for the goddess of the earth, the field that is wounded when it is tilled; and Semele is also linked with Cybele—who, as you will recall,” he added, gazing at me sternly, “is yet another manifestation of the goddess in her maiden form.”

I blinked, trying my best to look interested, and Balthazar’s expression softened. “Forgive me, Lit. You must be hungry. Here…”

He stood and walked to the far wall, where a small round device like a doorbell was set within the wainscoting. He pressed it. I heard nothing, but within a minute the hallway echoed with the sound of brisk footsteps.

“My housekeeper,” Balthazar explained. Seconds later there was an equally brisk knock upon the sturdy oak door.

“Yes, Kirsten. Come in please—”

The door creaked open. A dour woman in a dark blue paisley dress entered. “Professor?”

“Would you be so kind as to prepare some sort of tray for us?”

“Tray?” The woman gave me a reproving glance. She was tall, head and shoulders above Balthazar Warnick, thin-lipped and black-haired, with eyebrows so dark and straight they looked to have been drawn in black greasepaint. “I brought up your lunch only an—”

“My guest is hungry,” Balthazar said. “Is there any of that salmon left?”

“Inkokt lax,” the housekeeper corrected him with a frown.

Balthazar ignored her. “Do you like salmon?” he asked, turning to me.

“Sure.” What I really wanted was another drink, but it seemed unlikely that Kirsten would be that accommodating.

“Good. Kirsten, if you please—”

“I had intended to have the inkokt lax for my lunch,” said the housekeeper. There was no doubt as to who she thought was more deserving of it. “But I will see what I can do.”

She turned and left. Balthazar watched her go, then gave me a sheepish look. “Kirsten is a devout Lutheran,” he explained. “Here, let’s sit, I’m sure it will take her a few minutes to pry the inkokt lax from the refrigerator…”

He walked over to the woodstove and thrust two small logs into its belly. I sat back down at the table, feeling light-headed, almost disembodied by the atmosphere of this sorcerer’s den, with its Latinate inscriptions and stained-glass windows, the faint scent of woodsmoke and pine needles and the promise of food brought up by a glowering factotum.

And yet there was also something that was weirdly familiar, almost comforting, about it. I began flipping through one of the books in front of me, a musty-smelling folio containing tinted photographs of Greek vases and statuary. It was not until there was a knock at the door and Kirsten entered with a large silver tray, that I realized what it all reminded me of—my childhood visits to Bolerium, with Axel Kern’s housekeeper bringing in platters of inedible delicacies while my parents and Kern sipped their way through Bolerium’s legendary wine cellar.

“Here is your inkokt lax,” Kirsten announced coldly. She nudged aside a stack of papers and set down the tray, which held not only dilled salmon but several porcelain dishes holding capers, cucumbers and sour cream, a knot of cloverleaf rolls and jam, as well as a small silver pot surrounded by wisps of steam and the blessed scent of coffee.

“Thank you, Kirsten,” said Balthazar. When I opened my mouth to say the same, the housekeeper fixed me with such an icy stare that I hastily turned my attention back to the book.

“I will be in the laundry room, Professor Warnick. Goodbye.”

Only after the door closed did I dare look up. Balthazar regarded me, amused, then opened his hand to indicate the heaping tray between us.

“Kirsten will have starved in vain if you don’t eat something,” he said. “Please.”

I ate. Not very much, but enough to satisfy Professor Warnick. He dabbed strawberry jam on a roll and nibbled at it, finally set it aside and poured coffee into two cups.

“Here,” he said. He handed one to me and pushed the tray to the other side of the table. “Do you feel better?”

I nodded. For several minutes we sat without talking. Balthazar stared broodingly at the bay window. I drank my coffee gratefully, pouring myself a second cup. When Balthazar remained silent I turned my attention back to the folio. At first its sepia-toned images seemed to share the same detached, rather prim gravity that all old photographs possess, each picture carefully numbered and named, dated and referenced—

But as I perused the volume, photographic plates like moths pinned to the oversized pages, the images began to take on a stranger, even malevolent, cast.

Dionysos…

I moved the folio so that its contents were not visible to Balthazar, lowering my face until it was scant inches above the page. The first picture showed three young women carrying branches, hair hanging around angular faces as they followed a distinctively unperturbed-looking man whom I guessed must be Dionysos. The man had lean features and slanted, blank eyes, and carried a long staff topped with a pinecone.

I turned the page. The next one showed an orgy, the women slim, unclothed save for fillets of ivy pinning elaborately dressed hair. The single male figure was naked, too, and had the same lean features, the same oblique eyes and dark locks framing an unlined brow. In this picture, the god appeared to sit in midair, one hand grasping an immense and swollen penis. His expression was neither lascivious nor even sensual. He looked thoughtful, even sorrowful; and more than anything else that unnerved me. I turned the page again.

This time I could not help drawing in my breath sharply. Unlike the others, this plate was in color, tinted in rich, dark tones like the embellishments of a medieval text. It showed a painting of a room, its walls daubed a lurid red and crowned by the repeating pattern of a labyrinth, all crossed squares and intricately linked shapes like swastikas. There were figures in the chamber, but also figures painted on the wall, so that the whole thing was a skillful trompe l’oeil of a room within a room, and the figures on the wall appeared to be watching those in the chamber.

There was a lot to watch. A naked man, bound, was kneeling on the floor. His head was crowned with ivy and what looked like pinecones, or acorns; his expression, unlike that of the Greek god, was anguished. Three women were grouped around him, also naked, but these had none of the detached calm of the Greek figures. Their bodies were rounded, where the Greek maenads had been slender and boyish, and their faces looked sly and gleeful and aroused, by turns. One stood with arm raised above the kneeling man. In her hand she held a wooden stake with a leather thong attached to it, like a flail.

“Ah,” said Balthazar, his voice tinged with distaste. “I see you have discovered the heart of the labyrinth. Villa dei Mysteri, where the initiates take their first steps into the underworld. Their experiences set them apart to such a degree that they had their own cemetery, the bebaccheumeoi. A remarkable likeness, isn’t it?”

I said nothing, just nodded as he continued. “What is most amazing is not that the god himself should be so utterly recognizable to us, two thousand years later, but that these images survived at all.”

Balthazar moved his chair beside mine. “Because it really is a miracle, isn’t it?” I could feel the warmth of his body, the wispy touch of his hair where it grazed against my cheek as he leaned over the page. “More of a miracle, in its way, than the death and rebirth of a god…”

“How could anything be weirder than that?” I said, my voice cracking. I tried to keep my eyes from the picture of the kneeling suppliant who was not really a suppliant but a god, not a god but a man I had eaten with, spoken with that evening. The same finely drawn mouth, its faint cruelty made exquisite by suffering; the same beautifully muscled arms, filigreed with ivy as though tattooed.

But what was most terrible was the young woman who stood above him, her ice-pale eyes wide open and staring calmly, almost dreamily, from the page, her auburn hair threading to her bare shoulders. With a cry I shoved the book and sent it flying onto the floor.

“How could anything be weirder than that?” I shouted.

Balthazar reached to comfort me and I yanked away. “Don’t touch me! Don’t you fucking touch me!”

Despair flickered in his eyes. “We didn’t paint those frescoes, Lit—”

“I know you didn’t fucking paint it! Who did?” I leaned down to grab the book, stabbed at the first page from the Villa dei Mysteri and turned to the next one. It showed the same red-haired girl, now lying on a settee and embracing the god while men and women watched, all with the same eerily calm expressions. “Tell me—who did?”

Balthazar stared at me, then down at the book. “A Malandante, an artist commissioned by the man who owned the Villa two millennia ago. The work is very similar stylistically to that of the House of the Stags, at Herculaneum, and also to the images in the Villa of Ariadne at Pompeii. The girl—”

He inclined his head toward the page. “The redhaired girl is Ariadne, beloved of Dionysos. Or his victim, depending on which account you read. In the version that Plutarch gave us, Ariadne rescued Theseus when he came to Crete—Theseus and a number of Athenian boys and girls had been given as sacrificial tribute to Ariadne’s father, King Minos. It was Minos, of course, who kept the Minotaur, the monster who was half-man and half-beast, imprisoned in the labyrinth; and it was to the Minotaur that the youths of Athens were given to be slain and devoured.”

“But that’s not true,” I said, fighting to keep my voice steady. “That’s just a myth.”

“A myth? More likely a memory—we know that there was bull-worship at Crete and the Cycladic Islands, brought there from Anatolia, where all sorts of animals were worshipped. Be that as it may, Ariadne fell in love with Theseus, and helped him escape from the labyrinth. In so doing, of course, she betrayed not just her father but her people.

“And her god as well. It is fairly evident that the story of the Minotaur is a remnant of a far more ancient religion, one that reaches us only as fragments—myths, stories, vase paintings and bits of statuary, rituals like the Crane Dance, which is still performed on Crete.

“Whatever happened there, Ariadne ran away with Theseus, but no sooner had they escaped but he betrayed her. He abandoned her on the island of Dia, near—”

“No!” I broke in. “It had another name—I just heard it, where did I hear it—Naxos! It was the name of the opera that Axel was going to do…”

My voice trailed off. I looked at Balthazar in despair. “But—it all fits together. Why?”

“Naxos is one name,” he said. Gently he closed the folio. “Homer said that she was abandoned on Dia, at the command of the god Dionysos, who killed her there. Others said that she killed herself, and still others say that it was Dionysos who saved her, coming to the island and taking her as his consort. That is the version that made it into Axel’s opera. Very likely Plutarch’s version is the true one, since Plutarch was himself a Dionysiac mystes—and so, of course, one of the Malandanti.”

I couldn’t even begin to argue with this craziness. Balthazar just gazed at the scattered books and papers on the table, as though they formed a map, an archipelago of scrolls and faded tomes. Finally I asked, “Why did Theseus abandon her? I mean, if she saved him—”

“The Athenians worshipped Apollo, and Theseus was the son of the Athenian king, Aegeus. Theseus himself was a follower of Apollo Delphinos, and as such, Ariadne would have been tainted to him. On Crete, she would have been involved in the rites of both the Goddess and the Master of Animals—the god who over tens of thousands of years was known as Dionysos, or Shiva, or Cernunnos, or Orpheus; the master of song and the theater, of chaos and intoxication and death. The oldest god, save only for the Goddess, who was his consort—

“—and mother, and daughter.” Now it was Balthazar’s voice that sounded unsteady. “The most ancient rift in the world is the one which looms between order and chaos; between those who serve Apollo and his agnates, and those who serve our enemies. Ariadne was abandoned because she would not forsake her god. Even if she had recanted, Theseus would not have given her refuge. The first thing he did after leaving her was to sail to Delos, where he made a great sacrifice to Apollo. And then went on to become the greatest hero of Athens.”

“That’s a horrible story,” I said at last.

“It is the oldest story I know,” replied Balthazar.

“But it can’t be true. I mean, you talk about all this as though it really happened—”

“But it did happen, Lit. It still does. Again, and again! In a way, it is the only thing on earth that really does happen: gods living and dying, their avatars struggling to be born and reborn.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not. And you know I’m not, Lit—you’ve seen too much, you are too much—you could never begin to explain all this, any more than you could begin to understand it.”

I shot him a furious look, but Balthazar did not notice, only went on, his tone patient and somewhat weary, as though addressing a favored child who was behaving badly.

“What has happened is that we have lost the ability to see these things. We no longer perceive the sacred in our world—but it exists, Lit, oh, it does exist! It is as real as this room, as real as this—” He took a handful of papers and shook them at me, tossed them in the air so that they came down around us like so many birds settling for the night. “—More real. We just don’t see it, that’s all. Not because it’s not there, but because we have lost the senses that would enable us to perceive what is all around us. You are familiar with the work of Claude Levi-Strauss?”

“No.”

“A very great man. Not, as many people think, an anthropologist. More of a mapmaker,” said Balthazar, giving me one of his maddeningly secretive smiles; “a cartographer, and a very great aid to us in our work. In his Mythologiques, he wrote of certain sailors, the Bororo of Central Brazil and the Caribs of Guiana, and how they were able to navigate using the stars, just as sailors have for centuries. But the Bororo could see the stars in daylight. When Levi-Strauss asked astronomers about this, they scoffed at him—but of course the stars are there, and the Bororo, among others, really did use them to steer by in daylight. It is we who have lost the acuity that would allow us to see them.

“Look,” he said more gently, and took me by the hand. He led me across the room to the bay window. “Look there, above that mountain—”

He pointed to a distant peak, crowned by gold-leaved trees. “What do you see?”

“Nothing.”

“Keep looking. No, not at the mountain—at the sky. Try to concentrate. There…”

I stared, frowning, tried to see anything but the pulse of blue sky, blurring as my eyes watered. “There’s nothing th—”

I gasped. Something was there. A starburst of white, and then another, smaller flare, and another. A whole group of them, clustered close together in the northeast sky. Like cracks in blue glass, or the refraction of sun on a windshield. But these did not move, even when I did, or disappear when I blinked and shaded my eyes. They remained, burning faintly but steadily above the mountaintop.

“The brightest one is Aldebaran,” said Balthazar. “The eye of Taurus. That is the entire constellation, there—”

I shook my head, and this time the stars did disappear. “They’re gone!” I turned to him in amazement. “How did you do that?”

“I didn’t. You saw them, Lit. You didn’t make them appear, any more than I did. You saw them, that’s all.”

“But how? That’s incredible.” I gazed out at the greeny-gold sweep of mountains, the river like a silver highway, and wondered what other marvels were there, just beyond my sight. “I’ve never seen them before.”

“You didn’t know where to look. You didn’t know to look. And no, not everyone can see them—not unless one is trained to, or has the nascent ability—”

“But how did I see them? I’m not trained, and I—”

I fell silent.

“No, you’re not trained,” said Balthazar. He remained standing, staring at the horizon with his arms crossed. “But you can see; you have talents. That is what the Benandanti are; that is what we do. We find those who are gifted, and train them. Sometimes children are born to our order. There are families that can trace their lineage back over three thousand years. Others want more than anything to be born into it, but are not. They can only serve us, as researchers or couriers, and in other ways. But those who choose to work with us…”

He turned, eyes blazing. “Join us, Lit. Join me. Centuries ago I failed Giulietta, but I won’t fail you, I swear it! Stay with me now and I will help you—I can do great things for you, I can show you the world within the world you know—”

His voice was pleading, desperate. He took me by the shoulders and gazed at me. “I would marry you,” he said in a low voice. “The Conclave could not deny me that; not this time—”

“What?” I gaped at him, then laughed. “Marry you? I can’t marry you! I’m only seventeen—”

“Lit! Please—”

“Let go,” I commanded; then more urgently, “let go—”

He did and I withdrew from him, shoving my hands into my pockets. “I’m not marrying anyone. Not to mention I don’t even know you—”

“Then don’t marry me,” he begged. “Just stay—no, not here, not with me! But with us. You’ll be starting college next year—I can arrange for you to be placed at the University of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine. We can arrange for a scholarship, you’ll be able to—”

“What?” I snorted in disbelief. “Don’t you get it? I can’t do any of this—this Benandanti stuff. It’s crazy! And I’m already going to school—to NYU. Maybe.”

I fell silent, thinking of Jamie Casson; of how even though the sun was shining here, it had been after midnight in Bolerium, and there was a train at four-thirty-five…

“I have to go,” I said curtly. “I—I’m sorry. I’m sorry I bothered you, I’m sorry I came but now I have to—”

I was halfway across the room before I stopped.

Exactly how was I to go? I looked around, dazed. Balthazar shook his head.

“You can’t go back,” he said. “Not to Bolerium. Please, Lit. You don’t really comprehend any of this—how could you? He wants you to return—he needs you, without you there will be no apotheosis. Without you he cannot be reborn—”

I looked at him as though he were nuts. “Jamie?”

“No! Axel Kern—”

“But he is born—I mean, he’s there, he’s not—”

“Not Axel Kern. He is just the avatar; the vessel. It is Dionysos who seeks to be born, and Kern will be discarded as though he were a ruined statue. He needs you, Lit. You’re a lightning rod for him—you and your rage, your energy—that is what gives him power. It has always been like this. The god and his initiates are intimately linked—without them, any sacrifice is merely another death.

“But with them—with the girl who serves as his consort, and slayer—with you, it all begins again.”

I listened, then asked in a low voice, “Is that what happened to Kissy Hardwick?”

“Yes. And to Laura Stone, Kern’s mistress, and to others. Many others. If you go to him, Lit, you will die, just as they did.”

“I don’t believe that.” I didn’t care that he could hear how my voice shook, or see how my entire body was trembling. “I don’t believe any of it. Because if you’re right, and I’m somehow connected to your Giulietta, then I’m different from all of them—”

My hand shot out to point at the books strewn across the table and floor. “Is Kissy Hardwick in there?” I demanded. “Is there a painting of Laura Stone in the Villa of the Mysteries? Is there?”

For one long moment I stood and waited. Waited for him to tell me, Yes, they’re all in those books, there’s nothing so special about you at all, waited for him to say, Hush, Lit, wake up, wake up…

Balthazar Warnick said nothing. Behind him clouds started to gather above the mountaintop. Far below, the river darkened from silver to lead. Finally I turned, looking for a way out; looking for the way back to Bolerium.

There was none. Or rather, there was only one, and I knew what that was.

I would have to leave the same way I had arrived. My heart began to pound, but I focused all my will on keeping my hands steady, raising them in front of me and staring at the wall. There was no window in it, no door. I had seen two doors in that room, the one Kirsten had entered by, and another, battered door of wood set into a recessed wall and topped by a lintel with Latin words painted in faded letters—

As I stared at the door the words seemed to glow, and I heard Ralph Casson’s disdainful voice—

They call themselves The Good Walkers—Those Who Do Well—

And just as suddenly the meaning of the Latin words came to me, spoken by another, kinder, voice—

All things are good with good men.

“Join us,” whispered Balthazar. The battered door glowed brighter, the radiance of a thousand suns striving to reach me.

But I would not go that way. Instead I wrenched my gaze from the door and turned back to the far wall, the shelves bowed beneath the weight of all the secrets they held, an entire world captured between leather and vellum and cloth covers. I held my arms straight, making my entire body go rigid until my arms and shoulders ached. I stood there and stared at the wall, willing my escape from the Orphic Lodge; willing the portal to come.

And it came. Like flame stitching the edges of a parchment, its outlines appeared before me: a ragged doorway with a threshold that burned so fiercely I blinked, then cried out as I almost lost the image to the darker silhouettes of shelves and wainscoting—

“Lit! No!”

Tears streamed from my eyes as I struggled not to blink again. Like a shipwreck rising from dark water the shape of the passage burned through the wall. Its perimeter glowed dazzlingly, but at its center was a blackness at once terrible and terrifyingly beautiful, a glittering penumbra like the remnant of a shattered star. Even as I fought to remain standing I was drawn toward it, sucked down as though I were toppling into the abyss. There was a roaring in my ears, the thunder of a raging fire. Behind me I could hear Balthazar’s voice, faint and ineffectual as a sigh—

“Lit! Don’t! You don’t know—”

I was falling forward. Howling wind raked me, sent my hair streaming outward into ashes and smoke as I plunged into the portal.

“—you don’t—”

“Get back!” I screamed.

The flesh along my arms rippled and burned, the darkness seared my throat but somehow I found the will to laugh. Because I had done it—I had created it, the portal was there and even if it destroyed me, even if I never drew another breath to tell anyone what I had seen, the making of it was mine. Around me was nothing but flame and heat and the void, and I shrieked even as the abyss took me and Balthazar’s warning voice came one last time—

“You don’t know what you’re doing—”

As I fell, laughing, and shouted back at him through the darkness—

“Then I’ll learn the hard way.”

14. Harvest

THIS TIME IT WAS not like crashing, but waking. There was no pain. Darkness and flame alike receded into a muted gray expanse that held the promise of vast space, an unseen ocean beyond the fog. The mist grew brighter, feathered with electric blue and violet. I blinked, blinked again as the realization dawned that I could blink; that I was alive, and awake, and definitely no longer in the Orphic Lodge. There was something familiar about the surface under my back, something that was soft without actually being very comfortable; something cold.

“Hello?”

It took a second to register that this was my own voice, croaky and tentative.

“Hello?” I said again, louder. There was no answer. I rubbed my eyes, trying to dispel the sense that the air was somehow fuzzy, along with everything else. It took another moment, but then I knew. I was in the room where I’d last seen Hillary and Ali; the room with the black light and the stereo and the sun spider. I was in Bolerium.

“It worked,” I breathed. Beside me the sheet was bunched up, weighted by a knot of blankets. Without looking I elbowed it aside, then rolled to the other end of the mattress, groaning, and stood. “God, I can’t believe it worked…”

My legs trembled as though I’d been on a roller coaster. Underfoot was the same rough carpet of acorns and twigs and poppy pods, above me the same ultraviolet light buzzing ominously in its plaster medallion, like a wasp in a rose.

And there was another sound as well, the monotonous click and scratch of a needle stuck on vinyl. I crossed to where the stereo sat in the corner, surrounded by a desolation of album sleeves and loose records, marijuana seeds and a broken syringe. I picked up the stereo arm, replaced it and switched the OFF button; then slid the album from its spindle, tilting it so that I could read the label.

I grinned wryly: that would have been Ali’s choice. I glanced around for the cover but didn’t see it. I stuck the record atop a stack of albums, turned and tripped over something round and smooth.

“Oh, fuck!”

I’d stepped on the glass globe that held the sun scorpion. Swearing, I kicked aside shards of broken glass and stone and a small gritty heap of sand. Something gleamed as it skittered across the floor, glowing cobalt in the UV light; then disappeared, as though it were a flame that had been extinguished. I hopped over the shattered globe. The fact that I had on heavy leather boots with two-inch heels somehow didn’t seem much of a comfort. I headed for the half-open door, but when I reached the mattress again I froze.

Sprawled across its center was the tangled mass of blankets I’d shoved aside minutes before. One side of the pallet was bare, and still showed the faint imprint of my body.

But there was someone on the other side of the mattress, the side that was closest to me. Her body curved to form a question mark, arms drawn in front of her with hands clasped. She still wore her dress with the heart-shaped cutouts; in the cold light the flesh that showed through looked slick and damp, the color of a mussel shell. Her eyes were slitted, her mouth open and teeth bared, tongue protruding like a kitten’s. Along the bottom of her jaw a silvery filament of saliva glistened.

“Ali. Hey, Ali…” I knelt, paused before touching her arm. “Shit.”

I jerked my hand back. Her skin felt hard, cool as plastic. I swallowed, tasting bile; forced myself to look at her again, my gaze traveling from face to breast to abdomen, searching for some sign that this wasn’t real, that I’d made a mistake and she was just sleeping.

She wasn’t. I steeled all my courage to lay one palm against her breast. It was like touching a hot water bottle that’s been left overnight, cold and slightly flaccid.

“Oh, Christ, Ali, don’t do this, don’t do this, please please don’t—”

I lowered my face until it grazed hers. Her cheeks were cold, her hair stiff. I ran my hand along her arm, stopped when I reached the crook of her elbow. There was a row of tiny bruises there, each with a bright dot in the center, as though she’d been playing with a red Magic Marker. I brushed a dank tuft of hair from her forehead, let my finger trace the outline of her cheek, trailing down the side of her nose until it reached her upper lip. There was something sticky there, sticky and granular. I pulled away, letting a wash of blue light cascade from the overhead bulb onto her face. Sparks of purple and black glittered on her lips and around her mouth, as though she’d been eating poisoned sugar. I hesitated, then touched her mouth and held my finger up to the light. The same purplish gleam was there, flecked with grains of glowing violet. I inhaled, breathing in a perfumed sweetness that was also rank, like wisteria or fetid water.

“They look so peaceful when they’re asleep.”

A figure loomed above me, her sharkskin jacket and miniskirt given a sinister, inky sheen by the light.

“She’s—she’s dead.” I stumbled to my feet. “Have you—did you—”

Precious Bane stared at the corpse. “‘Lethaeo perfusa papavera somno,’” she said in a throaty voice. “Poppies soaked with the sleep of Lethe.” She stooped and gently touched Ali’s lips with her finger. “Opium soaked in honey.”

She held up her hand, the UV bulb making her nails glow like so many lit tapers. “She must have eaten an entire cake of it—yeah, look, there it is—”

She pointed at the floor near my feet, reached to pick up a filmy piece of paper, its surface shiny like aluminum foil. “See? There was enough here to kill someone twice her size. Little slip of a thing like that.”

Precious Bane flicked the paper so that it floated into the shadows. She knelt beside the corpse, lifting one of the arms to study it. “And she was using.”

“She said she wasn’t. She said she was just chipping—”

“Uh-uh. Sorry, honey, but she lied. Lesson Number One: junkies always lie. She was trying to find a vein— see?”

A shining talon tapped at the cluster of star-shaped bruises on Ali’s arm. “But she wasn’t very good at it. Junkies are stupid, too,” she said flatly, and with a soft thud she let the arm drop to the mattress.

Rage and horror bloomed inside of me. I tried to hit Precious Bane, but she was too quick.

“That’s enough—” She grabbed my wrist and I started to cry. Gently she pulled me beside her, smoothing the hair from my forehead. “First time you ever saw one of your friends OD?”

I nodded.

“Yeah. Well, it’s not a pretty sight, even if it doesn’t kill you. Here”— she held out a big, white, man’s handkerchief. —“that’s it. Aw, don’t cry, honey, you’ll rust. God, I hate it when they cry,” she sighed. “C’mon—”

She stood, took me by the shoulder and guided me to the door. “You start shooting that stuff, you’ll be hanging with the Lee sisters—Homely and Ugly. And then you’ll be dead. Ha ha.”

After the ghastly light of that room, the corridor seemed black as a lake-bottom, and as cold. Broken glass was everywhere, along with twisted muntins and powdery chunks of plaster. Every window we passed had been shattered. We sidestepped twisted tree-limbs and branches thick with wet yellowing leaves, and acorns everywhere like marbles tossed across the floor. Precious Bane made little grimaces and grunts of distaste, her platform heels clunking on bare wood. Occasionally she would stop to kick at a twig or piece of bark, nearly losing her balance in the process.

“God, this place. I hate this place—”

I followed her, too exhausted and frightened to fight any more, too horrified by what had happened to Ali. There was no light, save what seeped down from the windows. The few doors we passed were small and invariably shut, with rusted hasps dangling from broken latches. The floorboards were so worn it was like walking over crumpled carpeting, the windows so deeply recessed that looking into one was like gazing into a dark kaleidoscope. All the familiar landmarks looked shrunken and out of place, the lake where the night sky should be, gale-tossed trees moving slowly back and forth, as though they had sunk to the bottom of a river. The fitful rain of early evening had grown to a steady downpour. Now and then voices would abruptly ring out from the surrounding darkness, but they sounded hollow and metallic, fragments from a soundtrack or a television left chattering in an empty room.

“Man, it’s freezing.” I rubbed my arms, grateful for Jamie’s clothes. But then I had a terrible thought.

Had he known Ali was dead?

“She passed out. Hillary took off…”

I stopped, my breath coming way too fast. How could Jamie have left her?

How could I?

“You couldn’t have done anything, even if you’d been there.”

Precious Bane’s voice was gentle, as was the hand she laid on my shoulder; but to me it was the accusation I’d been waiting for.

“But I did leave her! I knew she had no fucking idea what she was doing, and I still left her—I left and she—she—”

“No.” Precious Bane shook her head. In the darkness her face was more masklike than ever. The heavy pancake makeup was faded, her lipstick chalky-looking, so that the masculine lines of her face showed clearly: the strong chin and square cheekbones, wide mouth and bluish unshaven skin. But her eyes were still garishly mascaraed and flecked with glitter, and her cherry-colored hair still flamed around her Medusa-like. “You couldn’t have done a thing. Believe me, honey—I’ve been here before. People get hurt, and it always ends badly—”

“Then why are you here now?” I asked, my voice quivering.

“Why am I here?” Precious Bane smiled, lipstick seaming the cracks in her mouth. “Honey, this is what I do. You think there’s a lot of job opportunities for a girl like me? I make movies for Axel, help to entertain the troops. And I schlep people like you back and forth”— she waved her hand dismissively, but her expression was enigmatic, almost teasing. —“here and there, hither and yon. Look, it’s a living. And when I say it ends badly, that doesn’t mean it ends badly for you, personally. You got spunk,” she said, her Jersey City accent suddenly bursting through. “Plus you can be a real little bitch if the situation demands—hey, don’t look like that, I meant it as a compliment. But you know, honey,” she added, lowering her voice conspiratorially, “let me give you some advice. Lose the hair—”

She flicked at my tangled curls. “It’s all the wrong color for you. And it’s too long. You want my advice?”

“No.” I yanked away. “I want to get the hell out of here.”

Precious Bane laughed. “Well. Just remember, nothing makes a girl feel so good as a new do. Now let’s just look over here and see what Carol has for us behind Door Number Three—”

She took my hand and gestured to where a door was set into a deep alcove. In front of it stagnant water pooled, and blue-white flickers traced the outlines of the doorframe, as though a live electrical current flowed through it. When Precious Bane reached for the knob I stiffened.

“What’s in there?”

“Wonderful things,” she murmured, and opened it.

The flickering light flared, the door creaked inward and thudded against a wall. Before us was a room. Not a large room, but it seemed cavernous after that endless twisting hallway swept with rain and the sound of wind. Shadows flowed along the walls, blood-red, violet. When I followed Precious Bane inside I saw that they were not shadows at all but threadbare velvet drapes hanging from long metal rods. Strands of ivy had been braided around the rods, ivy and grapevines and evergreen boughs heavy with pinecones. The floor was covered with candles, stuck in mason jars and upended terra-cotta masks. The scent of wax mingled with incense, a sharp head-clearing scent of juniper. On one wall glowed the bright square of a film being projected without benefit of a screen, or even a sheet. The projector was on the floor, balanced shakily atop a pile of coffee-table books. The scene juttering on the wall was badly out of focus; it seemed to involve a number of women and a very large animal.

“This is where I leave you.” Precious Bane’s expression was grave but not unkind. “Don’t!” she commanded, and pressed her finger to my lips. “Don’t freak out. You want my advice, pretend you’re in a movie—”

I stared at her, disbelieving, then tried to bolt for the door. But she pulled me back to the center of the room, where a large mattress was set on a low platform, covered with paisley scarves and an old Victorian crazy-quilt. Bottles were arranged around the platform—dozens of them, burgundy and brandy and Southern Comfort, sloe gin and Boone’s Farm Apple Wine—bottles and incense burners, brass trays and vials, decanters and long-stemmed pipes and even a hookah, its tubes spilling onto the floor like entrails.

“A movie? Christ, it looks like a fucking head shop exploded—”

“Name your poison,” advised Precious Bane. “It’ll make it easier for you.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“I mean it. Have a little drinkie.” She hesitated, head tilted; then leaned forward and kissed me on the mouth. “Good luck,” she said, and crossed to the door.

Despairing, I watched her go. She stopped to look back at me, her oversized frame filling the narrow space; drew one hand to her mouth and blew me a kiss.

“Remember, honey—don’t get even. Get mad.”

The door closed. I was alone.

“Great. This is fucking great.”

I went to the platform and sat. A more comforting scent hung here, patchouli and the musty smell of mothballs. I ran my hand through my hair and sighed, fighting tears, stared down at the ludicrous assembly of liquor waiting for me. After a minute I picked up a bottle.

There was no cork. I sniffed it, then took a swig. A spark of heat on my tongue, sweetness and a tart aftertaste like unripe apples. I drank some more, finally set the bottle down, knocking it against a dark-green decanter that sloshed as it toppled over. I caught the decanter before it fell, but when I replaced it I saw a cloisonné tray alongside, patterned with ivy and honeybees. There were little squares like fudge on the tray, wrapped in foil. Not aluminum foil but some thinner material that you could see through, like cellophane. I frowned and picked up one.

It was heavier than it looked, with a thick, perfumey smell. I peeled back a corner of the wrapping. The square beneath was sticky and dark, the color of burnt toffee and with the same faint sickly scent I had caught on Ali’s skin. As though it had hissed at me, I yelled and threw it as hard as I could across the room.

With a thunk it struck the projector, ricocheted off and landed somewhere in the shadows. The jerkily moving figures on the wall trembled, then continued their monotonous posturing.

“God damn it!” I picked up the tray and sent it skimming toward the projector. Silvery cakes flew everywhere. This time I made a direct hit. The projector thudded to the floor; a blue-white arc swept across the wall like a comet and disappeared. The projector lay on its side, reels grinding as its lens glowed like a small imprisoned moon. There was a flash, the stink of burning film. With a soft pop the projector’s lamp went dead.

I stared at it, a little fallen monolith surrounded by glints of silver where the opium cakes were strewn. My skin was cold and my heart beating much too fast. The wall hangings moved slowly in and out. A candle sizzled and there was a scorched smell, like burning hair.

From behind me I heard something walking; something far too big for that room. Its stride was heavy and uneven, as though it limped or dragged a broken limb. Where its head scraped against the ceiling chips of plaster fell. I held my breath as its shadow fell in front of me: the shadow of an enormous tree, branches like black lightning. It stood behind me, unmoving, inexorable. Finally I turned to face it.

It was not a tree, but a stag, the same monstrous creature I had seen slain upon the mountaintop. Its antlers curved upward, so huge it seemed they must hold up the massive roof of Bolerium; its legs like columns, ending in scarred hooves splotched black and green with lichen.

The stag lowered its head. Droplets of rain fell from the ridge of stiff hair upon its humped back, and I saw that one hind leg was badly wounded. Blood oozed from three long downward slashes in the matted fur. There was a shimmer of white within, the glossy pink bulge of exposed muscle. Its breath came in short bursts—huff huff huff—that smelled of sun-warmed bracken, goldenrod and yellow coneflower, hawkweed and beechnut. As it staggered toward me I cringed, helpless: it was too huge, it would crush me as it fell…

But it did not fall. Its shadow swept across me, and for an instant I felt its warm breath upon my face. When I looked up again, the great stag was gone. In its place stood Axel Kern. The emerald-green kimono drooped from his frame. A wreath of entwined ivy and grape vines sat crookedly on his brow, leaves tugging at his hair. Like the deer, he swayed slightly. His breath and even his sweat reeked of wine.

Yet when he reached to lay one hand against my cheek, his touch was steady and reassuring, the brilliant green-flecked eyes nearly incandescent; but not the least bit drunk.

“Lit.” He smiled. “You came.”

I stared at him, then scrambled to my feet. “Right. And now I’m leaving—”

“No. Not yet.”

His hand shot out to grab my sleeve. I kept going; he yanked me backward and the sleeve tore. I turned furiously.

“You can’t make me stay!” I shouted. “You can’t—”

“Yes I can, Lit.”

“Yeah? How? By killing me, like you killed Ali?”

The maddeningly calm smile never left his face. “I didn’t kill Ali. Girls overdose all the time—”

“Around you they sure do.” I tried vainly to pull my hand free. “Kissy Hardwick, Laura Stone—”

“Laura would be very flattered that you called her a girl.”

“Fuck you.”

Axel Kern sighed. “You are mistaken if you think I have ever killed anyone, Lit.”

“Right—you just gave them drugs—”

“No, Lit.” He wiggled his eyebrows and twirled an invisible mustache. “I don’t give people drugs. I am drugs.”

“You’re fucking crazy, is what you are! You’re a fucking psycho!”

To my surprise he let go. I backed away from the mattress, but instead of following, Axel remained where he was. He was staring at the opium cakes, gleaming on the floor like so many little fish left mudbound at ebb tide. After a moment he stooped to pick one up. He turned it back and forth so it glittered in the candlelight, then looked at me and asked, “Do you know what this is?”

“Yes,” I snapped. “It’s opium.”

“No.”

He shook his head. His long hair had tangled inextricably with the vines upon his brow, so that green tendrils and darker grape leaves seemed to thrust from the skin beside his temples, and a spiral of ivy nestled in the hollow of his throat as though inside the bole of a tree.

“No,” he repeated. He lifted his arms. In a shimmer of green the kimono fell to the floor. He was naked, but his lean body had none of the softness I would have expected in someone my father’s age. His arms were smoothly muscled, covered with fine dark hair like an otter’s, his legs beautifully formed, save where a glossy red scar ran along one thigh. Only his face held that mixture of cruelty and amusement that I had seen so often over the years, as he told of some producer’s fall from grace or the death by misadventure of an old, beloved friend.

Now he looked scarcely older than one of my own friends, though more broad-shouldered, his hair like a winter sky, his face heavily lined. I stared at him, too tired to be embarrassed or aroused. But then it was as though my vision grew fuzzy, as though this were a film that had suddenly gone out of focus.

Because I was no longer seeing Axel Kern. It was like one of those optical illusions that would leave me fuming as I struggled to find the Young Girl in a blot of ink, when all I could see was The Crone. For a fraction of a second both figures would be there on paper, maiden and hag, and then I would have to try all over again to bring one or the other back in focus.

The same thing was happening now. In front of me Axel quivered and blurred like a flame, while behind him—or within him, or above him—something else tried to flicker into being.

But it never quite appeared. As abruptly as it had begun, the eerie haziness dispersed. Axel Kern stood gazing at the ceiling, arms raised, a circlet of leaves upon his brow. He lowered his head, until he was staring at me.

“No.” He extended one hand, fingers curled into a fist, then opened it. “Not just opium.”

In the center of his palm was a single poppy calyx, mahogany-colored, the points of its crown standing upright like so many serrated teeth. He tapped the pod, once; then ran his thumbnail down the small swollen globe. A split appeared in its flesh. Tiny droplets oozed forth, milky white, viscous. Axel gazed at the seed-head measuringly, then at me; and tossed it onto the bed. “Never just opium. Much, much more…”

He extended his hand. His gaze did not leave mine. A sea-colored line ran the length of his arm, a vein slightly raised above paper-white skin. With his other hand he traced the vein as a lover might, let one fingernail hover above the crook of the elbow. The vein throbbed like a seed about to burst. Smoothly as though it were a razor Axel slid the nail into his flesh. He drew it back, opening a seam from elbow to wrist, and stepped toward me.

“It is a kingdom,” he whispered. “It is mine.”

Along the inside of his arm white liquid welled, thick opalescent drops that grew until they spilled down to the floor in a slow steady rain. Axel stared at it, smiling, then turned and offered his arm to me.

“Drink.”

“No.” I tried to shake my head but could not move. As he drew closer I cried out. “No! Please—”

He stopped and shrugged. “As you will,” he said, and drew his palm beneath the open wound. He let the white sap fill his cupped hand, brought it to his face and drank. Then he extended his other arm, with a finger caressed pale flesh before once more dipping his nail into it. As though he were skinning a hare’s belly he slashed downward, leaving a bright tear, like a scarlet fern. I tried to cover my eyes but Axel took my wrist, pulling me to him as he murmured, “This you will drink—”

He pushed me to my knees and clamped his hand on the back of my neck. Red flowed from his arm, but as he pressed my face into the crook of his elbow I smelled not blood but wine and upturned earth.

“Drink,” he said, softly but urgently. When I struggled his grasp grew tighter. His hand slid upward to hold my skull. “Drink.”

I clamped my mouth shut but he jammed his arm up against it, hard enough that my teeth rattled. “Drink—”

He continued to press his arm against my mouth, at the same time began to stroke my head. “Come now, Lit, drink, drink…”

And finally I let my lips part, and drank. Liquid spurted onto my tongue, heat like blood and the unmistakable burn of alcohol: wine. But stronger than any wine I had ever tasted, stronger than anything I had ever drunk—dark and rich as broth, so that I lapped at it greedily, warmth streaming across my cheeks and staining my shirt, drops flying as I tossed my head back and laughed, gazing up into Axel’s eyes.

“Do you remember now?” he asked.

I shook my head. It was hard to see clearly—everything looked at once too bright and misty, as though I was in a steam-filled room. With a flourish, he let go of me. I started to stand, lurched sideways, and almost fell.

“Whoa,” I said. The man laughed.

“Strong wine,” he said. I nodded, grinning. When I tried to take a step toward him I stumbled and sat down, hard, on the mattress.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. Smiling he sank down beside me.

“Now,” he whispered. He took my hand and drew it to him, brought it down until I could feel his cock. I had avoided looking at it before. Now I glanced down and quickly away again. I tried to turn but his hand tightened on mine, forcing my fingers to circle what I had glimpsed. He was bigger than any of the boys I had fucked, but not grotesquely so. Certainly he was neither ludicrous nor monstrous, like the owl-eyed creature I had seen carved upon Bolerium’s arched gate, or the horned man I had seen at Jamie’s house. Beneath my fingertips I felt his skin, smooth and velvety, the rough fringe of hair below. He withdrew his hand and I let my fingers move upward, until they reached his glans. There was a tiny bead of moisture at its tip, rose-pink. As I watched it grew larger, swelling like nectar on a honeysuckle bloom. When I bent to touch it with my tongue I tasted a bright spark of the wine I had drunk moments before. The man groaned but made no other move—no fumbling for my shirt, no tugging at my zipper; no hand sliding frantically down my stomach and beneath the waistband of my pants. I waited, my breath quickening. Still he did not move. He sat cross-legged on the mattress, a hand on each thigh, his head tipped back and eyes closed. Along the inside of each arm a bright red line was drawn. There was no trace of white sap, no supernatural wine, no blood.

I stared at him, surprised, even a little angry. Then I pulled my clothes off, thinking that might be the problem.

“Hey,” I said thickly, dropping my shirt. He seemed not to hear. I frowned, reached for one of the bottles on the floor. It was three-quarters full, the cork protruding a good inch from the top. I took the cork between my teeth and pulled it out, hefted the bottle and drank.

I drank way too much. But I drank anyway, until my mouth burned and my head buzzed, until I felt the same familiar three A.M. twanging in my skull that presaged those wild bursts of clarity I lived for at Deer Park with my friends, mad jangling music and ragged black light just outside my range of vision. When I tried to set the bottle down, it slid from my hand and smashed onto the floor.

“Shit,” I mumbled. “God damn it…”

I leaned over to survey the damage. I saw no broken glass, no spilled wine; just a drift of white poppies, wrinkled as tissue, and here and there one red petal like a bloody thumbprint. I blinked and turned back, feeling as though the whole room turned with me. The ivy-crowned man was still cross-legged on the bed. His eyes were open, verdant eyes shot with amber like the surface of a stream.

“Lit.”

He smiled and took my hand, pulled me close to kiss him. This time he tasted not of wine but of blood, a taste that maddened me. I tried to pull away but he wouldn’t let go. I pushed at him, pounded ineffectually with one fist, struggled and kicked and flailed: no good.

So I bit him. On the cheek—there was a metallic spate of blood in my mouth, as though my own cheek had been pierced by a needle. He moaned. I shoved him onto the mattress and he fell onto the heaped scarves, their folds rippling so that I saw the pattern that had been there all along: scarlet vines and purple leaves, glistening black figs and clusters of grapes that exploded where he touched them, so that threads of red and purple radiated like cracks around his body, a living mosaic.

“Your turn now,” I said drunkenly. “Drink…”

I straddled him, placed my hands on either side of his head. I kissed him, my tongue lingering on his cheek, the taste of salt and wine; rubbed my face against his until it was raw and left a smear of blood across his chin. Then I moved away, raising myself until my cunt was above his face. I lowered myself carefully, resting against his solar plexus as I inched forward, until his mouth was under me. I felt his lips, and his tongue: barely touching me at first but then harder as I moaned, his tongue tracing the edges of my labia and then flicking at my clit as I rocked back and forth. I felt wet, not just my cunt but all of me, arms and legs and breasts. I glanced down, gasping, saw my body mottled red and white and the air around me filled with blossoms. When I came it was like watching that small throbbing vein in his arm, a rhythmic pulse that finally burst, a wash of red across my eyes and petals on his tongue. I cried out and pushed myself from him, sprawling on the mattress with my hand across my eyes. I could feel him alongside me, his chest and the little hairs around his nipples, his cock nudging against my stomach.

“Take me, Lit.” I opened my eyes. He was staring at me, his expression yearning, almost desperate. “Now…”

I forced a smile. “In a minute.” I was exhausted, too drunk to think about fucking right now; almost certainly too drunk to focus on anything else. “Can’t we, uh, just rest for a—”

“No.” He sat up, his eyes wide and staring. “Now. The harvest cannot wait, ever.”

I started to giggle, clapped my hand over my mouth. “That’s a new one—”

He gave me a thin smile, his green eyes feverishly bright. “Bound and scored, flailed and bled, burned and consumed,” he whispered.

He raised his arms above his head, crossed them at the wrists. I watched, unsure whether to laugh or run.

“One buries children,” he recited, “one gains new children, one dies oneself; and this the race of men take heavily, carrying earth to earth. But it is necessary to harvest life like the vine, and that the one may be, the other is not. I am the son of the earth, and the stag that treads upon it; son of the earth and the starry sky.”

His voice rose, cracking like a young boy’s.

From overhead came a rustling. I looked up.

The ceiling was alive, a thrashing sea of vines and leaves, tendrils like grasping green hands and the dark filigree of exposed roots. In a writhing curtain they fell around us. I yelled, kicking at a long strand of ivy that encircled my bare leg, in a frenzy grabbed it and tried to pull it off. With a hiss like burning grass the ivy lashed itself around my wrist. I held not a vine but a snake, its triangular head set with eyes like obsidian flakes, its yellow tongue tasting the air as it tightened around me.

“God, no—”

I staggered backward and fell. The snake slid from my hand as my head banged against the edge of the platform. I felt dizzy, no longer drunk but delirious. Around me swept a coruscating tide of green and gold and black and brown, serpents and field mice, oak leaves and gnarled husks of beech-nuts, withered poppy blooms and bunches of grapes like dusty pearls. I flailed and beat my hands against them, but still they came: a yellow-and-black mat of crawling honeybees, ermines in their fuscous autumn coat, boughs thick with figs and olives and a tumult of coppery acorns: all of October’s woodland harvest, a golden flux burying me, drowning me, devouring me—

And then it was gone. I blinked and let out a shuddering breath, looked around at the room. All was as it had been, save for scattered leaves and seeds, the slithering echo of something taking refuge in a dark corner. On the bed reclined the man who had been Axel Kern. The crown of ivy still rested upon his brow, and at first I thought there were vines across his lap; but when I pulled myself up, I saw that he held several coils of rope. Coarse hempen rope, the same kind of rope used to hang terracotta masks when autumn came to Kamensic Village.

“Where—where did they go?” I asked hoarsely. “Where did they come from?”

“It is always here,” he said, his eyes dull. “I told you: it is my kingdom. That is why they name me Kissos, lord of the ivy, and Dendrites, the one in the tree…”

His voice died, but I heard another voice then, Balthazar Warnick’s—

…the god of ecstasy; the god of illusions…

I stared at the man on the bed. Hatefully, feeling a new rage clawing at my chest; rage intense and raw as grief, less an emotion than another being struggling to escape from inside me.

“You did that,” I said. There was a blackness in the middle of my eyes, a darkness in my head that told me I should stop now, I was too drunk, I should run away…

But I couldn’t stop. I said, “You drugged me, like you drugged Ali—” He shook his head. I went on, my voice rising. “—you’ve made all these things happen, it’s like a—a sickness, like some kind of delusion. I don’t know how you do it but you made it come—”

I sprang at him, screaming. “You fucking bastard! You think you own this place, you think you own everything in Kamensic—but you don’t own me! I am not your fucking kingdom!”

He raised one arm above his face but I smacked it aside. I could see his chest moving in and out as he breathed, fast and shallow, could see the blood rising to his face like sap. “I am not yours!” I shouted. The ropes slid from his lap and I grabbed them, grunting as I pushed him down. He did not fight. He moved feebly, as though too drunk or stoned to control his limbs. I wrapped the hempen cord around first one wrist and then the other, the rope like a brand against his white skin, his veins the same glaucous color as the ivy in his hair. When I had knotted the ropes and drawn his wrists together behind his back I did the same to his ankles, pushing him down roughly when he struggled.

In a few minutes it was done. He lay on his side, long hair disheveled, the crown of ivy falling over his eyes. His cock was erect, no longer red but a deep angry blue, almost violet. In the guttering candlelight his hair looked gray-green, the color of old lichen. I knelt beside him, my breath quickening. With one I finger circled his nipple, teasing it until it stiffened. I took my thumbnail, pressed it against the base of the nipple and drew it upward, hard. He groaned, and a stippled line of tiny red dots appeared. I touched one, drew my finger to my mouth and tasted.

Blood, not wine. When I squeezed the nipple another bright bead flowed out. I licked it as the bound man moaned. Then I turned away.

There was an unused length of rope on the bed, caught in a tangle of paisley cloth. I took the rope and made knots at one end—one, two, three of them—then stumbled to my feet again.

On the bed the man looked like one of the slain deer you saw during hunting season, neatly trussed and heaved upon the back of a pickup truck. His head was thrown back, his eyes squeezed shut, his mouth twisted. I wondered fleetingly if he felt anguish, or ecstasy, or both.

“I was never yours,” I said. Then I raised the knout, and with all my strength brought it down upon him.

I struck him, without mercy, again and again and again, and after a while without even feeling the rope in my hands. It rose and fell, the man at my feet moaned and cried out and screamed, and still I did not stop. Once he gave a long wail, a cry that ended with a groan and his bound feet twitching spasmodically against the mattress. My arm went up and down. My wrist ached, and my shoulder. My legs itched where something spattered them.

After a long time the pain in my arm eased and I felt only numb. The shadows of the room around me seemed to fade, and there was a faint musky smell, like fox-grapes, like raw honey. I saw nothing but an umbrous shape before me, a stain on the wall. I was conscious of only two things, the rise and fall of the rope in my hand, the muted sound when it struck. I felt like one of the figures in Balthazar Warnick’s folio, girls with hands eternally lifted to the heavens, flails in their slender fingers or the shorn leg of a fawn.

But after a long time weariness overcame me; not even weariness so much as a sense that something was finished. I stopped, panting, let the rope slide from my hand. It felt wet as a strand of seaweed. When I looked at my palm it was creased with red. There was red on my legs as well, and my feet. I shook my head groggily and stared at the man beneath me.

He was still as death, but not dead. His breath came in shallow gasps, and though his eyes were closed they twitched beneath their lids, the way a dog’s eyes move when it dreams of pursuit. His skin was dappled dark green and blue-violet, with here and there a starburst of red where the flesh was broken. There were darker spots beneath his ribs, small crescents where the skin had been flayed into petals of pink and scarlet, and in places the veins showed through, vibrating ever so slightly as though something swam beneath them. A glistening rope ran from his groin up to his breast; his cock had shrunk, and was curled between his legs like another soft brown seed. Gazing at him I felt neither pity nor remorse nor even horror. It seemed natural to me, that he should lie there thus. If he had been cast upon the forest floor rather than this room, you would not have noticed him at all: he would have been nothing but dead leaves and pallid fungus, acorn mast and a slug coiled in the roots of a tree.

“There.” My voice sounded ragged; I wondered if I had been shouting. Only a few candles still burned. The incense had been reduced to ashes upon the floor. “No more illusions, now.”

I walked unsteadily to the wall, where the faded velvet drapes hung. One by one I yanked them down, letting each fall and turning to the next without bothering to see what mundane things they had hidden, moldering plaster or cheap rec-room paneling, doors that led nowhere or windows staring out onto the village where all of Bolerium’s other guests now slept, restlessly or peacefully as they deserved. “All gone, all gone.”

I glanced at the bound man. He was motionless, his face drawn into a grimace. Silently I turned back to the wall.

There were faces there. Terra-cotta masks and gargoyles carved in stone, doors in the shape of mouths and eyes—the walls were covered with them. Yet it did not seem that they were walls anymore, but a pitted surface of stone alive with animals. Hundreds of animals; thousands. From one end of the room to the other they raced and capered and fought—bison and mastodons, birds like huge penguins or auks, ibex and antelope and bears with teeth like claws, hares and snakes and squirrels and bulls.

And everywhere, deer. Dappled fawns and red deer, reindeer with arching horns and does whose bodies were waves and hugest of all a stag like an oak tree, the great Irish elk megaloceros, its legs mountains and its horns a thundercloud, flanks pierced by a hundred spears so that its blood rained down into the open mouths of tiny figures scratched below. Men, or creatures like men—two-legged forms with human heads, though their legs were furred and their feet ended in hooves. They held sticks or axes or S-shaped twigs, and some were obviously women, heavy-hipped and with pendulous breasts, with snakes for hair and faces like birds. I walked slowly, tracing the figures, and where I touched the stone the impressions of my hands remained, as though someone trapped within the rock pressed against it with her palms.

When I reached the center of the wall I stopped. There was the same figure I had seen at the Nursery years before: the owl-eyed man with a tail and paws instead of hands. Surrounding it was a series of simple images.

The first was drawn in charcoal. It showed a figure almost like a seahorse, its two legs bound together so that they seemed like one, its body represented by sketchy lines evocative of fur. Its ears were long and pointed, as was its nose, and two horns projected from its head.

The second drawing was like the first, although its execution was more graceful. A line-drawing like those on Balthazar’s vase paintings, showing a slender man, his body curved, his hooved feet close together and his horned head thrown back as he danced.

The third and final image was not a drawing at all, but a photograph: a black-and-white film still of a man lying bound and gagged on a four-poster bed. Another man stood above him, holding a whip; the man on the bed stared at him wild-eyed. In the background I could just make out a small white face like a spot on the negative, a girl with tousled hair and blank staring eyes.

“You have to do it right,” a matter-of-fact voice said from behind me. I turned.

“Ralph,” I said dully.

“That’s right.” He stepped toward me—still wearing his ridiculous shiny blue jacket, though it was now torn and stained, his shirt pleached with filth. He stopped near the platform and looked down, grimacing, then back at me. “Looks like you enjoyed yourself, Lit. Looks like you had a bit of fun.”

“Shut up. Don’t come near me—”

“You?” He laughed, a sharp sound like an injured dog. “You think I’d want to get anywhere near you? Christ, look at you!”

He pointed at me. “You look like a fucking animal! You look like you killed him with your teeth—”

“He’s not dead,” I said. There was a thunder in my ears. “He’s—maybe we should call an ambulance.”

“An ambulance?” Ralph shook his head. “No, sweetie pie. The only way out of this is through it. Here—”

He held out his hand. In it was a small bone knife with a broken blade. “Finish what you started.”

“No—” I started to back away. “No, I won’t, you’re crazy—”

“You have to.” He grabbed my wrist, shoved the knife into my palm. “You can’t leave him like that.”

“Then you kill him!”

“I can’t, Lit. If anyone other than you kills him, it won’t be the apotheosis of a god. It’ll be the murder of Axel Kern.” He forced my fingers around the handle. “He’s almost free now—help him, Lit. It’s what you were born for. It’s why you’re here. It’s why we’re all here…”

He pushed me toward the body, his hand clasped around mine so that the jagged blade was poised above the man’s chest. “Kill him.”

I pushed back but it was no good, he was too strong. Slowly the blade drew closer to the bruised body. I could hear his breathing, so rapid it must stop, suddenly, like a clock; and Ralph’s breathing, too, a slower, measured panting. It sickened me, but I could not keep myself from twisting my head to look at him, as I tried one last time to pull the blade free.

“No—you—don’t,” he gasped. “You little bitch—”

His face was contorted, eyes bloodshot. He smiled, horribly, and said, “Poor little puppet…”

And at those words something broke inside me. If before my rage had felt like another living thing bashing against the inside of my chest, now it burst free. With a shout I kicked, my boot driving into Ralph’s stomach. He gave a strangled cry and went flying backward. The bone knife spun from my hand as I straightened and watched Ralph crash into the wall beneath the cave painting of the horned god.

“YOU!” I shouted, and the entire room shook. “YOU!”

I pointed at him. My arm felt as though an iron bar were rammed inside it. Before me the room swam. The wall with its gallery of ancient figures began to blur and fade. “YOU—ARE—NOTHING!”

As though I truly was a lightning rod, a jolt of radiance streamed from me, leaped from shoulder to arm and from my fingers across the shadowy space that separated me from Ralph Casson. With a scream he flattened himself against the wall, one hand in front of his face. Then, as though an immense hand had struck him, he receded into the wall—into it and becoming part of it, his arms curving upward, his face growing hugely elongated: eyes exploding into chasms, mouth swelling and then splitting in two, so that his lower jaw formed a great jagged threshold and his upper jaw a lintel. In between yawned a dazzling black space, and from that space echoed a scream that went on and on and on, fading at last into a low, ominous buzz.

Panting, I stared at the portal—the prison—I had made. Then I turned and crossed to where Axel Kern lay upon the bed. He was motionless save for his shallow breathing, a trickle of blood down his breast. On his brow the crown of ivy and grape-leaves trembled, as though stirred by the wind. Slowly I knelt beside him, lowered my head until my lips brushed his; then stretched so that my body covered him. For a long time I lay like that, listening to the faint shushing of his heart, the rustle of wind in the leaves. Finally I drew back, my hand lingering upon his cheek; stood and for one last time looked down upon him.

He did not look peaceful, or asleep. He did not look like anything I had ever seen, except perhaps for the body of my friend lying blue beneath black light in another upstairs room. I stared at the bound man, his arms bruised and chained with ivy, the pulpy shapes of crushed grapes and figs beneath his cheek, the smear of honey on his thigh.

And as I looked it was like before, when his figure had appeared to blur and burn before me. Once more I felt that shiver of apprehension, a prickling along my arms and neck and it seemed that something would break through. There was a mystery there, a secret bound like the man in vines and blood, fire and seed.

But it was not my mystery. Not now, anyhow; not yet. As Precious Bane had done to me, I blew a kiss at the bed. Then I gathered my clothes and dressed.

“Very nice,” someone murmured. “Your portal. The irony will be lost on Ralph, of course, but not on me.”

I turned, pulling on my boot, and saw Balthazar Warnick standing in front of the door. A real door, an ordinary door, that opened onto a hall where wind sent rainy gusts of brown leaves spiraling into the night.

“You—you saw—” I stammered.

He smiled, a small rueful small, and stepped toward me. Then he stopped, frowning, and bent to pick up something.

It was the bone knife. He turned it over in his hands, carefully slipped it into the inside pocket of his wool greatcoat. “I’ll take this,” he said. “For safekeeping.” He looked at the man on the bed. “And I will take care of that as well.”

He glanced at the bottles strewn everywhere, the scattered opium cakes and bloodstained ropes. After a minute he turned back to me. In a low voice he asked, “Lit—will you change your mind? Will you come with us? Now, or—well, soon?”

I shook my head. “No.” Then, trying not to sound so harsh, “No, thank you.”

“Then go,” he commanded. “Now.”

But as I hurried toward the door he stopped me. “Wait. Take this—”

He took my right hand and prised it open, slid something onto the middle finger. I blinked. It was a ring, shaped precisely like the grotesque image of Ralph Casson’s face that now served as a portal.

“So you’ll always have a way out,” said Balthazar Warnick softly. “Or back.”

For a long moment his sea-blue eyes held mine. Finally I pulled away.

“Thank you,” I whispered. “G’bye—”

I walked like a seasick passenger into the hall. It was dark, but through the windows a chilly light gleamed. Behind the watchful shadow that was Muscanth Mountain, dawn was gathering. I staggered down the corridor, found a stairwell and nearly fell down it, my boots sliding on the runners. When I reached the bottom I lurched into another corridor, and another, until at last I made my way to the great hall. There were bottles and ashtrays everywhere, candle stubs and light bulbs, torn clothing and record albums, the detritus of a dozen parties; but no people. I walked through the room and went onto the patio.

“Oh, man…”

It was covered with terra-cotta masks. All broken, so that as I crossed to the lawn I stepped through a wasteland of crushed mouths and hollow cheeks, beatific smiles turned to death’s-heads where they had been trodden into the flagstones. At the very edge of the patio one lay, more intact than the others, eyes slanted beneath a crown of grapes. It shattered beneath my boot as I left the patio and walked downhill. It was still raining, fine icy needles that made my skin feel numb, but that was okay. Numb was okay. Numb was good.

I reached the drive and started down. I shoved my hands into my pockets and something pricked my thumb. I swore, fumbled in the pocket until I found something sharp.

I pulled it out—the baggie full of pot seeds and manicure scissors I’d discovered in the bathroom, right before Jamie found me and gave me his clothes. I held the scissors up, wiping rain from my eyes; then tugged thoughtfully at my hair.

“Huh,” I said. “Well, nothing makes a girl feel better than a new ’do.”

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

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

Precious Bane was right. I felt great.

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

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

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

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

“Whoa! Nice job!”

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

“Where’s Ali?”

“Where’s your clothes?”

“Where’s—”

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

Hillary frowned. “That’s the ambulance.”

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

“But Ali—”

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

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

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

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

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

He nodded. “Right.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The fuck you are,” snarled Hillary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why don’t you come?” asked Jamie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Come on! Lit, this is it—”

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

“Right,” I whispered.

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