Black Light

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Uh-uh-uh. No boys allowed. Sorry.”

“But—”

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

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

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

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

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

UN FILM DE AXEL KERN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Welcome home.”