Black Light (24 page)

Balthazar allowed himself a small smile. “I’m certain I never said
that
.”

“Well, words to that effect. We do the same things over and over and over again, down through the centuries; we worship the same gods and slaughter them and wait for them to be reborn. The pattern repeats itself endlessly. Nothing ever really changes—”

“But that’s exactly why we must be resolute!” cried Balthazar. “To keep the chaos at bay, to maintain
order
—”

“One man’s order is another guy’s ordure. If you take my meaning.”

Ralph stood, shading his eyes. The mist had thickened until it was impossible to see more than a few yards in any direction. Sunlight charged the fog with a preternatural brilliance, so that it was like staring into the milky glowing heart of an opal. Ralph blinked, trying to find the portal within the shifting clouds. For an instant the mist cleared and there it was, a dark lozenge hanging in the air like a watercolor by Magritte.

“I have to get back to the party,” said Ralph. He looked at his former mentor, stoop-shouldered, graying hair blown across his melancholy face, and unexpectedly felt a spasm of regret. “I—I guess I’m sorry, Professor Warnick. That we couldn’t find any common ground. That we couldn’t reach an understanding.”

“Let her come to me,” Balthazar pleaded one last time. He opened his hands to Ralph beseechingly. “Please.” In the blanched light he looked small and wizened, a goblin in black formal wear grasping for something that would forever be out of reach.

“She’s not mine to give, Balthazar,” said Ralph softly. He turned and strode toward the portal, raising his arms as though to embrace it. At the last moment, before stepping through, he looked back. “She’s pledged to the god of illusion. And you know what
that’s
like. She’ll fuck him, and then she’ll kill him. Or 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.

A
CHERLEY 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.

“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,
“No,”
and drew away from me.

“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.

“We will try for the best.

And the more we try, the more we will spoil, we will complicate matters

till we find ourselves

in utter confusion.

And then we will stop.

It will be the hour for the gods to work.

The gods always come.

Some they will save,

others they will lift forcibly, abruptly

…and when they bring some order they will retire.

And we will start over again.”

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
was
a god,” I said, “if it
was
some kind of—thing—what is it doing here? In Kamensic? Why isn’t it in Greece or someplace like that?”