Black Light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No—”

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

“Lit…”

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

“Lit! Lit, wake up!”

“No—god, let go—!”

“Lit!”

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

“No! No, there’s—”

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

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

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

“Right. Sorry, Dad, sorry…”

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

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

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

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

Greek Plays for the Theater

“Damn it,” I whispered.

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

Join us.

PART TWO Twenty-Four Hours

8. How Do You Think It Feels

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

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

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

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

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

“Your mother won’t be home this afternoon.” My father put down the paper and looked after me, his mournful face unusually pensive. “I have to go down to the city to see a casting agent. Then we’re going to meet