“It’s—it’s gone,” I murmured. I reached to touch the underside of one heart-shaped leaf. “But it was the same as what I saw before. The horned man. The thing in the woods…”
Suddenly I was rent by such horrible yearning that tears sprang to my eyes. I gasped—and everything tumbled together inside me, the feeling I had when I’d met Jamie Casson, the memory of a song played on a flute and the haunted rush of wind in the leaves, the shadow of the doomed stag upon a hilltop and a boy silhouetted on a jukebox: all of it somehow was the same thing, and if I could only find the pattern between it all, trace the lines that ran like veins within all those shadows—then I would be free of them. Then I could escape.
But not yet. Axel towered beside me. His hand covered mine, moved it from the ivy until my palm lay upon his breast. Beneath his green kimono he was naked; my fingers tangled in the thick hair on his chest and the fabric of my dress bunched up around my thighs. He leaned forward, raising his arms until they rested against the wall, the heavy drape of his kimono forming a canopy so that I was surrounded by him. Dim light filtered through the green silk; flaws in the cloth shone like stars. He put one hand on the back of my neck and thrust my head forward against his breast, pushed me until my mouth found his nipple. My lips closed around it and he moaned as I kissed him, ran my tongue over his nipple until it stiffened, became a small swollen seed in my mouth. My cheek rubbed against the hair of his chest, damp now and hot as though sun-warmed. There was a smell of musk and balsam, the acrid tang of salt upon my tongue. When I drew my hand across his breast I could feel the steady thump of his heart, like another hand beating beneath mine. I started to move, reaching to embrace him and pulling up my dress; when he murmured,
“What?” I asked hoarsely, half-blinded by the sudden surge of light as he pulled his kimono back around him. “What is it?”
Axel looked at me muzzily, as though uncertain where I’d come from. The rapt intensity that had candled his eyes a moment before was gone. Rain silvered his gray-streaked hair, and his cheeks looked raw and red from the cold. Suddenly he just seemed stoned, a little tired, the lines around his eyes more pronounced when he smiled.
“Later.” He plucked a sprig of ivy from the wall and tucked it into my hair. Behind him dancing figures stretched across the movie screen, the screen itself rippling as the wind nudged it. “It’s cold in here…”
He turned and began to walk a bit unsteadily, holding on to one of the pews for balance. I stared after him, my bewilderment giving way to anger.
“Tell me!” I demanded. I ran after him, grabbed his wrist and tugged it imploringly. “Axel, please—tell me, you said it was real, tell me what it is!”
He stopped and drew a hand across his eyes. Above us the hanging lanterns swung slightly back and forth. “God, I’m tired. But—yes, it was real. It is real. But it’s probably impossible to explain, even—even to you.”
He leaned forward to stroke my cheek, his hand cold and smelling of some sweet resin. “Because the hardest thing to understand is that nothing ever really changes, Lit. Nothing really dies. Not even very old things; not even gods. They flicker in and out of view, that’s all”— he gestured at the screen above us, then at the simple chapel altar. —“they go underground and they seem to die but they only sleep, they gather strength until finally they’re reborn. Because gods have seasons, too, time moves differently for them, it might take a hundred years or a thousand, but then their seasons come round again and they always return, they always return…”
He began to chant, so softly I had to strain to hear him.
He fell silent. There was no sound save the rain tapping against the windows and the midnight hum of the film projector, and faintest of all an echoing reverberation of music through the stone walls. Beside me Axel Kern stood deathly still, as though listening for a reply. For a long time I said nothing. Then,
“If that
“Because this is where he will be born, this time. This is where his children live. It is his sanctuary. Not the only one, but a place where his worship is strong.”
I looked incredulous. “Kamensic Village?”
“Why not? This is where the stories come from, Lit. Come on—haven’t you ever noticed anything strange about this place?”
“Yeah.” I shrugged. “I guess so. But normal people live here. My
Axel raised an eyebrow. “Just how normal do you think Kamensic is, Lit? How normal do you think I am?”
He peered down, brushing the hair from my forehead and tracing a circle there. “Walking in the woods and seeing things like you saw, walking into this house and talking to people like Precious Bane and Ralph Casson and me—
“How normal do you think
I pulled away. “Look, I don’t care! I
“You shouldn’t. It protects you, Lit. Just like it protects all of us…”
He pulled the kimono tighter about him and said, “Didn’t you ever wonder about things like that, Lit? Synchronicities? Like sometimes you dream about something and then it happens? Like when you’re thinking about an old song, a song you haven’t heard in years, and then you’re in the car and suddenly it comes on the radio?”
“Well, sure. I mean, yeah, that happens all the time. To me.”
Axel nodded solemnly. “Me too.” He began to sing in a low voice, as though trying to remember the words.
He started to pace across the room, head cocked and hands held out from his sides. It was like some clumsily executed dance, and I felt embarrassed watching it, embarrassed to be here at all. Axel was drunk, or worse; the spliced-together bits of films were just another fractured indulgence. Faded figures moved across the screen; there were a few black frames, and then a burning pyre filled the white square. Above it a laughing woman was suspended on a rack, while another woman in modern dress looked on, her expression more bemused than horrified. I could hear the hum of film scrolling through the projector, the slap of Axel’s bare feet upon the stone floor.
