Black Light

else he’ll drive her mad, and she’ll kill herself. There’s nothing you or I can do about it. Except watch the fireworks.”

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

12. You Set the Scene

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course. What’d you think?”

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

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

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

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

“You never told me there were mysteries!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But what god?”

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

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

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

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

Axel nodded.

“But how?” I asked. “Why?”

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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