Black Light

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

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

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

“No,” I whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was the same man who had presided over the slaying of the great elk and the human sacrifice I had