white.
“I have to go,” I whispered. I leaned over and kissed Hillary on the mouth. “I love you, Hillary—you know that, right?” He nodded again, eyes still shut. “And I’ll find you—I’ll see you, for sure, you can come hang with us in the city, it’ll be great—”
“C’mon,” said Jamie. He stood outside the car, looking nervously back in the direction of the mountain. “Be just my luck, my old man shows up and fucks this up for me—”
“That won’t happen.” I stepped out of the car onto the cracked concrete of the parking lot. “Not this time.”
We stood side by side, waiting for the train. Behind us there was the roar of a car engine and the sound of raining gravel. The roar grew fainter, as Hillary’s car drove back up the winding road to Bolerium. I waited until I knew it was out of sight, and turned.
I looked at the town, drowsing shopfronts and tattered playbills, Healy’s Delicatessen and the Constance Charterbury Library, and beyond them all the mountains and the lake and the woods, trees bowing to the coming winter and deer seeking pasture in the farmland to the south. Then there was a deafening sound as the train arrived, and Jamie Casson was tugging me after him across the platform and toward one of the middle cars.
“Come on! Lit, this is it—”
I looked over my shoulder as I ran, the wind cold on my shorn head; and leaped after Jamie into the back of the car. As the train began to move I stood in the open doorway and stared back at it all. I knew this was it, farewell to Kamensic, Kamensic with its trees and its children and the sleeping god who fed on them. The floor beneath me swayed back and forth, the trees swept past black as deep water as we headed south to the city. It had been a while since I’d visited but I knew there would be other gods there, sleeping gods and people who were sleeping, too, even if they didn’t know it, half-dead and just waiting for someone like me.
“Right,” I whispered.
I ran my hand across my ragged scalp and laughed, thinking of Jamie Casson straddling a jukebox while I sat in a Bowery bar and wrote in my notebook; thinking of all those sleeping people. I laughed, because I knew that even if it took a year—even if it took ten years, or a thousand—I would be the one to wake them.
A Biography of Elizabeth Hand
Elizabeth Hand (b. 1957) is the award-winning author of science fiction and fantasy titles such as Winterlong, Waking the Moon, Black Light, and Glimmering, as well as the thrillers Generation Loss and Available Dark. She is commonly regarded as one of the most poetic writers working in speculative fiction and horror today.
Hand was born in San Diego and grew up in Yonkers and Pound Ridge, New York. During the height of the Cold War, she was exposed to constant air raid drills and firehouse sirens, giving her early practice in thinking about the apocalypse. She attended the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, where she received a BS in cultural anthropology.
Hand’s first love was writing, but many Broadway actors lived in her hometown of Pound Ridge, and by high school she was consumed with the theater. She wrote and acted in a number of plays in school and with a local troupe, The Hamlet Players. After college, writing stories became her primary interest, and the work of Angela Carter cemented that interest. Hand realized that she wanted to create new myths and retell old ones, using a heightened prose style.
Hand’s first break came in 1988 with the publication of Winterlong. In this novel, Hand explores the City of Trees, a post-apocalyptic Washington, DC. The story focuses on a psychically enhanced woman who can read dreams and her journey through the strange city with her courtesan twin brother. The book’s success led to two sequels: Aestival Tide and Icarus Descending. All three novels were nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award.
Beginning with the James Tiptree, Jr. Award–winning Waking the Moon, Hand wrote a succession of books involving themes of apocalypse, ancient deities, and mysticism. Waking the Moon centers on the Benandanti, an ancient secret society in modern-day Washington, DC. that also appeared in Black Light, a New York Times Notable Book.
In 1998, Hand released her short story collection Last Summer at Mars Hill. The title story won the Nebula Award and the World Fantasy Award. Most recently, she has published two crime novels focusing on punk rock photographer Cass Neary—the Shirley Jackson Award–winning Generation Loss (2007) and Available Dark (2012).
When Hand isn’t writing stories of decadence and deities, she divides her time between the coast of Maine and London, with her partner, UK critic John Clute. She is a regular contributor to numerous publications, including the Washington Post and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Hand is the oldest of five siblings in a very close-knit family. This photo shows them in 1967, on one of their camping trips to Maine and Canada. All five kids, then under the age of ten, shared a canvas tent with their parents. From left to right: Brian, Patrick, Elizabeth, Kathleen, and baby Barbara. “Maine imprinted on me during this time, which is why I’ve lived there for the last twenty-five years,” Hand says. 
Hand in her driveway with her beloved family dog Cindy shortly before leaving for college in Washington, DC. “Note the skirt, made from a pair of massively embroidered jeans; my favorite red velvet beret, which my mother gave me for Christmas and which disappeared under dark circumstances a few years later; my Mom’s suede jacket (I added the denim cuffs); and needlework belt with my initials on it, made by my grandmother Hand. You can’t see them, but I was also wearing my lace-up Frye boots.” 
In her journal, Hand once wrote, “I am being haunted by a town.” The town was Katonah, New York, which she transformed into Kamensic Village, the setting or background for much of her fiction. This photo from 1975 shows the train station where characters Lit and Jamie Casson make their escape at the end of the novel Black Light. 
Hand recalls: “In 1976, I was hitchhiking in Putnam County, New York, with my friend Katy. A guy our age picked us up, we drove around and hung out for a few hours, and he then dropped me back at my parents’ house in Pound Ridge. It was only after I got home that I realized I’d left my journal in his car. Flash forward to 1999, shortly after Black Light was published. I was visiting my folks in Pound Ridge when the phone rang: I picked it up and a voice asked, ‘Is this Elizabeth Hand?’ It turned out to be the guy who’d picked us up—he’d seen a copy of Black Light in his local bookstore and remembered my name (which was in the journal). And, when he went back and read the journal again (which he’d done back in 1976 as well—hey, I would have, too), he realized that some of the people and places I’d written about in the journal ended up in Black Light.” 
Hand in proto-punk mode with some friends at their second New Year’s gathering at the Hotel Empire in New York City —at the time a “total dump” (just the way they liked it). Left to right: Michael, Oscar, Julie, Elizabeth, and Steve. Hand says: “The red blodge by my nose is actually my crimson fingernail and a cigarette. I was a chain smoker, also an early do-rag adapter. Oscar inspired Oliver in Waking the Moon; the book was dedicated to him.” 
Hand in the early 1980s. 
