for the priest who had been Giulietta’s lover.
“When the waters receded, people from the towns and neighboring farms came. Where the village had been they found a lake of black water that seemed to glow blue-black from somewhere deep within its depths, and which reflected the face of the mountain that rose above it. And it was upon the mountaintop that they found the priest who had betrayed Giulietta and brought about the destruction of the town. He had been bound with strands of ivy to a tree there; it had kept him from escaping, it had kept him alive. When they freed him he said not a word but returned to the city and his masters there.
“The village itself remained within the lake. Over the centuries people would try to dive and bring up the treasures that were rumored to be there, but no one ever succeeded. The lake was cursed. No one who ever went beneath its surface returned. Sometimes late at night, people in the neighboring countryside say that they can hear the sound of bells ringing, a tocsin warning the villagers of the flood that would engulf them; but other people who have heard it say that it is the sound of a bone flute.”
All this time the album had been playing, a steady sonic tide of feedback and guitars. Now, as though on cue, it ended. The room was silent except for the metallic scrape of crickets and the ceaseless background din of the party roaring on behind Bolerium’s walls. Ali bowed her head, smiling slightly, like a child waiting to be rewarded. Beside her Jamie lay on his back, one hand across his eyes and the other on Ali’s shoulder. I couldn’t tell if he had nodded out or was still listening. His mouth was parted in a half-smile, his chest moving slowly up and down as he breathed.
“Nice, Ali,” Hillary sneered. He still stood a little apart from the rest of us, but despite his tone he seemed to have relaxed somewhat; at least he no longer looked as though he intended to strangle Jamie. “What, you get that from
Ali just smiled and shook her head. I took a deep breath, trying to make myself look and sound less frightened than I was. “Ali. Where did you hear that?”
“Axel told me.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I can’t remember—a long time ago, maybe?”
Like someone roused from deep slumber Jamie suddenly groaned and turned, so that he was almost straddling Ali. “Nice bedtime story. I told you, this place is fucking weird. The whole town is nuts. Your buddy Kern is running around giving out shit like it’s candy—not that I’m complaining, don’t get me wrong—”
“Forget it,” Hillary said. “God, I can’t take this. I’m not going to stand here and watch this…”
He stooped and ran his hand across the floor, stood and opened his palm to display broken poppy calyxes, the cracked plastic casing of a hypodermic needle. He looked at me, his face rigid. “Lit. I gotta go. I—”
He turned, throwing the needle and crushed seed-heads onto the mattress. Ali squealed, Jamie swore and ducked. A moment later the door slammed.
“What’s his fucking problem?” Jamie sat up, fumbling with the bedspread until he found the needle; then leaned over and picked up an ashtray filled with spent matches and a blackened spoon. “C’mon, Lit…”
I shook my head. Ali peeked up at me, brow furrowed. “You do opium, Lit. All that stuff. It’s the same thing.”
I thought of smoking opium in Ali’s room, the little smoldering bit of resin impaled on a needle with a glass cupped over it to capture the smoke; then looked down at Jamie carefully opening one of the little envelopes. It was empty. He licked the paper and tossed it aside, probed under the mattress and withdrew another packet.
“No,” I said. “I—I’m going to go talk to Hillary.”
Ali nodded. “Tell him not to be pissed off, okay?”
“Yeah,” said Jamie. “Don’t go away mad. Just go away.”
Outside the hall was empty. “Hillary?” I called softly, then louder. “Hillary—”
There was no sign of him. I retraced our steps, returning to peer down the narrow stairwell, its risers filthy with dead leaves and twigs. It was too dark to see anything there, and behind me only a thin glowing band of ultraviolet showed where I’d left Ali and Jamie. Rain beat relentlessly at the eaves, a moth battered at a windowpane. From downstairs echoed the faint wail of “Stairway to Heaven.”
Well, Hillary
“Hillary?”
The hall continued, up a few rickety steps that threatened to give way when I walked on them. It smelled dank. Not the closed-up, mildewy odor of an old house, but wet and somehow alive, the scent of a marsh or rotting stump. To my left was an exterior wall, crosshatched with small windows through which lavender-tinged light seeped into the corridor. To my right was the other wall, barren of anything—no doors, no lights, no paintings. I walked very slowly, scuffing the toe of my boot on the floor to make sure I wouldn’t trip on a sudden loose board or step. After a minute or two I reached to touch the outer wall, for balance; and was surprised to feel not paneling or plaster but stone. It was cold and damp, the surface rough. When I flattened my palm against it I could feel lichen, so brittle it crumbled at my touch.
“Damn it, Hillary, where’d you go?”
My voice echoed back at me, too high and shaky to fool anyone into thinking I wasn’t scared. The passage took a dogleg to the right. I turned the corner, saw a window that took up most of the outer wall, and through this I could glimpse what seemed to be a dormer, thrusting outward high above the hillside. Sure enough, when I passed the window I found a door, the first I’d seen since leaving Ali and Jamie Casson. The corridor wound on. Chunks of stone littered the floor, and shards of broken glass. The air above me was crisscrossed with rafters formed of immense logs. Even in the darkness I could see pale hanks of cobwebs strung between them, patterned with the ghostly remains of insects. Rain lashed the dormer windows, finding its way through cracks to spatter me. Still I stubbornly kept on, head bowed against the rain; when behind me echoed a deafening crash.
I shrieked and backed up against the inner wall. On the floor beneath the window lay a twisted piece of wreckage. It stirred wildly in the wind, and at first I thought it was alive, struggling amidst the glitter of rain and broken glass. But then I saw it was a branch, ten or twelve feet long, rain-blackened and so thick with lichen it resembled a piece of coral dredged up from the sea. I stared at it, then stood on tiptoe to peer through the shattered dormer.
There were no trees. Far, far below, Bolerium’s ragged lawns gave way to the black swathe of old-growth forest. Oaks and hemlocks tossed angrily in the wind, and skeins of dead leaves like a net thrown up against the sky.
But between here and the first trunks rearing up from the mountainside was a good quarter-mile. There was no way any branch could be hurled such a distance, not with enough force to reach Bolerium’s upper stories. I stepped back and nudged the tree-limb with my boot. A slab of bark fell to the floor, revealing a soft white pith like marrow. I stooped to examine it more closely when the dormer above me shook. There was a dull roar, a violet flash that left skeletal afterimages burning in the air around me. Something bit at my neck. I clapped my hand there, saw my fingers gloved in red. Glass and wood flew everywhere; acorns rattled down like hail. The window’s lead muntins buckled as a massive branch ripped through them. With a cry I fled, stumbling blindly until I found the door just past the window—an arched wooden door made from a single board, furrowed with dry-rot and scabs of grayish moss.
But there was no knob, no handle; nothing that would serve as a means of opening it. Behind me echoed the steady crash of glass, and worse. When I glanced back, I saw tree-limbs thrusting through the ruined dormer. The corridor was impassable, a black thicket of glass and broken tree-limbs; but when I looked desperately in the other direction I saw only darkness, with not even a seam of light to show where I might escape. The wind rose to a howl, the wall of tree-limbs shook as though something moved within them—
And then it seemed that something
