Black Light (22 page)

She yanked the door open and announced, “Ta da.”

Before us was a small room shaking with the roar of a stereo and crowded with people I knew. DeVayne Smith and Amanda Joy; Mrs. Langford, resplendent in frayed taffeta; Constantine Fox and a woman I recognized as the opera singer Yvette deMessieres, wearing a velvet pantsuit and an extremely pained expression; my parents and several of their closer friends. At the front of the room hung a motion picture screen, where black and white figures moved jerkily as subtitles flashed.

UN FILM DE AXEL KERN

It took me a minute to figure out exactly what room we were in—Acherley Darnell’s private chapel—and to discern the sparely elegant figure standing off by himself to one side, eyes closed, a rapturous expression on his face as he listened to the music blasting from speakers perched atop a fireplace mantel: Axel Kern.

“Ooh!” Precious Bane clapped her palms over her ears.
“Too loud.”
She hesitated, then shrugged, put a hand on my shoulder, and gestured at the chapel.

“His Satanic Majesty awaits,” she shouted, and we went inside.

Once upon a time the chapel had actually resembled a mid eighteenth century New England place of worship. Whitewashed walls, stern wooden pews, an altar of unpolished hemlock and wrought-iron lanterns suspended by chains from the ceiling. This at least was the image on display in engravings from various Darnell biographies.

But every picture
I
had ever seen, in the courthouse museum or Bolerium itself, showed a distinctly more sybaritic temple, hung with the heads of animals hunted by Darnell and his ancestors, the windows draped in ivy that had crept through cracks to spread like mildew across the walls. I had never actually been in the chapel before; right now I would rather have been just about anywhere else. All eyes turned as I entered. Constantine Fox gave me a watery grin. My father beamed. At his side, my mother looked pale, her eyes red, but when she saw me she smiled thinly and I could see her mouthing my name, though of course I heard nothing, except for that music and its ominous bassline.

With the shriek of a phonograph needle the music ended. In the near-silence I could hear only the whir of a projector. I shrank closer to Precious Bane, catching the powdery-sweet scent of her pancake makeup, the acrid odor of sweat-stained fabric. She looked down at me, brows furrowed in a Kabuki representation of concern.

“Are you all right, sweetie? Aw, shit—we never got you cleaned up. Oh well,
he
won’t care—”

She led me to one side of the room, walking past the little mob of revelers. Slowly people began speaking again, voices scarcely raised above a whisper. I hoped they were just embarrassed by the sudden stillness, but I couldn’t help thinking that they were talking about me. I craned my neck to see my parents, but they had turned away to greet another friend from summer stock.

“Don’t slouch,” commanded Precious Bane. She glanced at the bodice of my peasant dress and frowned. “And you ought to wear a bra. You don’t want to end up looking like those ladies in
National Geographic,
do you?”

I laughed, but she only shook her head. “Youth is wasted on the young.”

We were alongside the first pew, a few feet from where Axel stood gazing at the ceiling. His hair was longer than when I had last seen him, iron-gray but streaked with black. Yet he looked no older; he had the same chiseled, hawkish features, the same deep-set eyes set above a face heavily lined yet oddly youthful. There was a rawness to Axel, an understated feral quality as disturbing as it was compelling. You could always smell him; not some expensive cologne, nor yet the smoky afterthought of his Sobranies, but Axel himself: his sweat, the earthy scent of his hair, an unnamable attar that I knew must be grown-up sex. Some people mistook this rawness for mere vulgarity, and shunned him; women mistook it for shyness or vulnerability, and suffered. There are photos of Nureyev that remind me of him, Nureyev and perhaps the young Klaus Kinski, with their Slavic grace and that tinge of cruelty about their mouths, like the spot of blood on a house cat’s paw.

But it was on a class trip to the Met, when I saw a golden burial mask from a Scythian grave at Pazyryk, that I truly recognized Axel Kern. The same gypsy eyes, the same glint of festal savagery. He knew the power of his appearance and played up to it, favoring clothes that would not have seemed out of place in a cossack’s regiment or opium den. Flowing trousers of canary-yellow, blood-red, sky-blue; cracked leather boots; knee-length tunics embossed with gold medallions and violet starbursts; plain black turtlenecks and black leather pants. The effect was not so much psychedelic hangover as it was a deliberate affront. No matter how you dressed when meeting Axel Kern, you never had on quite the right clothes.

Tonight he wore a long, emerald-green kimono patterned with ferns, his hands swallowed by sleeves long enough to trip over. He stared at the ceiling, his expression so intent that I looked up, too, saw nothing but coppery-green leaves and tendrils. When I brought my gaze back down, Axel Kern was staring at me, his eyes the same verdant, mottled shade as the ivy overhead, his pupils the size of poppy seeds.

“The girl with the mousy hair,” he said, his voice thick. “Charlotte Moylan—but look how you’ve changed! Little Lit, little Lit…”

He smiled, extending one silk-emblazoned arm to beckon me closer. I went reluctantly, looking over my shoulder for my parents or even Precious Bane.

They were gone. Everyone was gone. I had a glimpse of Constantine Fox, hesitating in a small side doorway and looking confused, as though trying to remember where he was. His eyes locked with mine and I caught a flicker of something, warning or admonition or perhaps just drunkenness. Then he, too, disappeared. I was alone with Axel Kern.

“I’m so glad you finally got here,” he said. On the screen behind him the film rolled on, a woman’s face going in and out of focus, a man throwing feathers in the air. “I’ve been waiting all this time…”

He looked as crazily blissed-out as any of his guests as he pulled me to him, the folds of his kimono falling around my face as he whispered, “Ah, Lit…

“Welcome home.”

B
ALTHAZAR WARNICK STOOD IN
the hall at Bolerium and stared at the closed door in front of him. It was of wood stained a rich deep green, the color of moss in the darkest part of the forest; through seams and chinks in the paneling he could feel a fine cold breeze. His hand clasped its polished brass knob as he leaned against the portal. An observer might have thought he was striving to hear something on the other side of the door. Frightened whispers, urgent cries, the soft thunder of a heaving bed.

But Balthazar was not listening. Or rather, what he was listening for was not beyond the door but in the hall behind him. His heart was beating so hard that he thought, absurdly, that someone might hear it and take him by surprise.

And that is very nearly what happened.

“Professor Warnick.”

Balthazar whirled. When he saw Ralph Casson he stared at him in silence for a long time, at last drew a long breath.

“You found her. How did you find her?” he asked.

Ralph Casson smiled. “You’re really surprised, eh, Professor? You really never thought I was very good, did you?” His tone was light, bantering even, but his blue eyes clouded as he leaned against the wall, angling himself so that he could look down upon Balthazar and have a clear view of the corridor beyond him. “Man, you really blew me off last time I saw you—you know that? When we were at that cocktail party with all your tight-assed friends—”

Balthazar shook his head, his expression pained. “Not my
friends,
Ralph. The Conclave. You knew when we started—”

“I knew fuck-all!” Ralph cried. “I joined you in good faith, Balthazar—good faith! I spent six years at the Divine—I worked for you, I went to Herculaneum when you told me to, I never even
questioned
what you did to Corey Lesser there, I typed your
fucking index cards
!”

His finger stabbed at the air between them as Balthazar watched, unblinking. “And how did you repay me? Exile, man—fucking
exile,
like I was some neophyte!”

“You betrayed us, Ralph,” Balthazar murmured. He moved ever so slightly, so that his hand remained on the doorknob but was hidden by a drape of black tuxedo jacket. “The day you joined Kern in Malta, it was over.” He shook his head regretfully. For the first time his eyes met the other man’s. “I warned you. I went to the airport—”

“Fuck that,” Ralph spat. “When the hell did you
ever
use an airport—did you fly
here,
Balthazar? Did you?”

“The choice was yours, Ralph. It was always yours. You went with the Malandanti. You’re here now—”

“So are you!” Ralph crowed, banging his palm against the wall. “You’re here, too, Balthazar—so what does that make you? Why are
you
here? Where’s
your
invitation?”

Balthazar forced himself to keep his tone even. “I came because of Giulietta, Ralph. You know that. You called me—”

“That’s
right
!” Ralph said with vicious triumph. “
I
called, and
you
came—just like that! What did the Conclave have to say about that, Balthazar? Do they even know? Did you tell them—”

“They know.” Balthazar broke in quickly: it was not precisely true. “Verrill knew even before I did. There was a disturbance at the temple of Dionysos Limnaios. Trees moving; a voice crying out that Pan is free—”

He hesitated before going on. “If I had not been remiss in my responsibilities at the Orphic Lodge—”

“You could have done nothing. You understand?
Nothing
,” Ralph said. “They’re moving, Balthazar—all your old enemies are waking. Here; in Penwith and Akrotiri and Rajputana—everywhere!”

He took a step closer to the other man, his hand sliding down the wall until it was only inches from where Balthazar clasped the doorknob. “How does that feel, Professor Warnick? Knowing that all your vigilance is for nothing? Knowing that your whole world is going under”— Ralph snapped his fingers and drew back, laughing. —“just like
that
.”

“Oh, I think the world has a few revolutions left in it, before it all spins out of control. And the—events—at West Penwith were not unexpected,” Balthazar said lightly. He smiled, was rewarded by Ralph showing an instant of discomfiture before the older man continued, “But you and I both know that’s not why you went to all the trouble to get me here. Where is she, Ralph? Where is Giulietta?”

“Lit.”
Ralph drew the word out. “Got that, Balthazar? At least for this particular turn of the karmic wheel, her name is Lit. Kind of a funny name, considering all that bad stuff that came down back in Moruzzo—”

“Stop it.” Balthazar’s voice broke. His face grew pale. “Stop it.”

“—and I mean, it’s kind of ironic, don’t you think it’s sort of
funny,
here you’ve spent, like, what? Five thousand years? Ten thousand years? Anyway, a really,
really
long time, battling these Malandanti—and there you were back in Moruzzo, in love with a girl who was actually
one
of them. Your own
masters
were the ones who burned her at the stake and where the hell were
you,
Balthazar? What were you thinking, why didn’t you—”

“Stop.”

Between them the air crackled, flickers of electric blue and gold like iron filings swirling around a magnet. One of the sparks flew dangerously close to Ralph’s face; he cried out, slapping a hand over his eye.

“You bastard! You blinded me—!”

With a groan Ralph fell back against the wall. His fingers splayed across his cheek, blood seeping between them. Balthazar stared, remorse welling up in him like panic; then turned and flung the door open.

“No!”
shouted Ralph.

Framed within the door’s opening was the landscape of a dream: a corrugated expanse of hills bare of any trees, their summits crowned by stone ruins and overgrown with yellow-blooming gorse and tiny, thorn-spun roses. Overhead the sky was dark gray, swept with clouds that scudded toward the western horizon, showing gashes of soft blue between them. Then the clouds dispersed and all melted into an endless vista of indigo ocean, its surface scarred by white cresting waves. Birds wheeled overhead, and there were bees in the flowering gorse; but the scene was utterly silent, a vivid film with the sound turned off. From where he stood in the doorway, Balthazar gazed upon it as though poised on a neighboring hilltop.

“In nubibis,”
he whispered, and stepped through the portal.

A sickening instant in which he seemed to plunge, his head roaring and the wind raking his face. Dimly he was aware of a voice shouting, the dulled sensation of something tugging at his hand as at an anaesthetized limb. Then there was a smell of salt and wet granite, the pounding of waves against the cliffs and the unbearably sweet, high-pitched cry of a linnet. Balthazar stumbled upon the rocky ground, caught himself, and straightened.

He stood upon one of the tor-capped hills crowding the westernmost point of Cornwall. Maps showed the place as West Penwith, the peninsula that toed into the Atlantic at Land’s End. But the Benandanti had another name for it:
Affon,
the land between. Affon stretched here but also at myriad other spots across the globe. Places that existed both within and without of time, places that the Good Walkers had created and stood guard over for countless millennia; places where they watched, and waited, and prepared for the great conflict that had been building over the entire history of their world, and others.

Penwith was one such place. The Orphic Lodge in West Virginia was another, and the University of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine a third. The rest were scattered throughout the world that the Benandanti and their enemies had shaped: in the Aegean and Anatolia, across the subcontinent and the vast Eurasian steppes; in London and Rome, amidst the ruins of the ancient Dravidian cities of India and Pompeii. Any place where the ancient gods of the earth had walked and been worshipped, in Crete or along the Ganges, in Siberia or the Orkneys—there the Benandanti had built their own temples and places of learning, their banks and basilicas and steel-lined bunkers. All were linked by the Benandanti’s portals, each bearing the Benandanti’s motto—
Omnia Bona Bonis
—in carven script or hidden cantrip. If you were to look at a map of the world the Benandanti had made, it would be webbed with these portals and the occult paths between them, the way a lacquered globe can be webbed with cracks. And in the same manner that the globe will break, its veneer shatter, when the cracks overtake it, so the Benandanti had shaped their assault upon the old world and old gods that had preceded their own: by stealth and manipulation, thievery and coercion, auto-da-fé and conversion.