Black Light (26 page)

“Ali,” I whispered, fighting panic. “Ali, can you hear me?”

Without warning her hand shot up, closed around my jaw and pulled me down. She kissed me, her mouth cold and her tongue tasting of sugar; but when her eyes opened they were bright and feverishly excited.

“Lit,” she said hoarsely, and grinned. “Where’d you go?”

“Christ! You scared me! I was downstairs, remember? Where’d
you
go?”

“Here.” She sat up groggily, reached to tug at Jamie’s short hair. “Jame. Company.”

“Leave him.” Hillary sank onto the blanket. “Listen to me, Ali—”

Ali smiled. “Fuck off, Hillary. Chipping, I was just popping—”

She tapped the inside of his elbow. Hillary slapped her hand away.

“God damn it. God damn it, Ali—”

“Look who’s talking.” She swept one arm lazily across the floor, brought up a handful of dried petals and tossed them into his face. “Pussy.”

“Ali. Please—” Hillary grabbed her hand and Ali gazed back at him, eyes glittering. His cheeks flushed; he blinked, holding back tears, and turned to the boy on the mattress beside her. “Jamie, I’ll fucking kill you…”

“Leave her alone.” Jamie’s voice rose ghostly from the mattress. He pushed himself up, his eyes gone to black and his lips dry and cracked. “Hillary, man. Leave her alone, huh?” When he stood petals fluttered around him. He took a few uneasy steps to the far side of the room, shuddered and for the first time noticed me. “Lit. How’s it goin’?”

“Great. Oh, I’m just great.”

Ali watched me, still smiling; then reached to curl a tendril of my hair around one finger. The album ended. In the brief silence before the next record dropped I could hear the staccato chirp of crickets somewhere in the room. There was a sudden gust of sound from the party below, laughter and the thump of a bass; then the album fell and music started once more.

“Look at you, Lit.” Ali reached for a cigarette, struck a match against the floor. “Do you eat men with your new red hair?” She reached forward to link her hands around my waist. Between us rose a thin plume of smoke. “Beware, beware.”

Ali flopped back onto the mattress. Hillary stood watching us, and I couldn’t tell if he was still enraged, or just depressed. Beneath the black light bulb Jamie swayed and stared at his hands.

“Show her Camille. That’s Jamie’s sun scorpion,” Ali explained. “Axel gave it to him.”

“I thought it was a spider,” said Hillary.

“It is.” Jamie stumbled to the wall, bent and picked up a glass globe the size of a soccer ball. He turned and held it out to me. “Sun spider, sun scorpion they sometimes call it. He brought it back from Oaxaca.”

I peered inside. Upon a bed of sand and small stones rested a creature the length of my hand, chocolate brown and covered with short stiff hairs, with long front legs that ended in pincers. It had myriad black eyes, clustered like currants upon its head. Suddenly it leaped in my direction, bashing itself against the side of the globe.

“Jesus!”

“Calm down. It’s not poisonous—” Jamie pointed at the spider, now tensed into a brown hairy fist. “She hunts things and crushes ’em with her jaws. See? No poison.”

I made a face. “Next time get a pony.”

“Wait! Come here—”

He moved until he stood directly beneath the overhead bulb, angling the globe so that it was bathed in ultraviolet. “Check this out.”

I looked cautiously. The sun spider had hunkered down with pincers raised. Beneath it the stones were nearly invisible in the black light. But like magic, as Jamie tilted its prison the ghostly image of a purple death’s head appeared on the spider’s carapaced back. I whistled.

“Whoa! That’s amazing—”

Jamie grinned. “Cool, huh? Axel showed it to me. It only appears under UV light. Like certain kinds of rocks and stuff.”

“Like all of this.” Ali rolled onto her stomach and gestured at the dingy room. “Like this whole place. Kamensic. Everything…it only comes out at night. You know. It moves when you’re not looking. It’s like a fucking ghost town. Wanna know what
I
think?”

“No,” Hillary blurted. “You’re too fucked up to think anything—”

“Yes,” said Jamie. “Tell me.”

“I think the real town is down there under the lake,” Ali said. “I think everyone is there. When they moved the houses and dammed the river and made the reservoir…I think all the real people went under there. I think all the real people were drowned.”

Hillary rolled his eyes and I snorted. Only Jamie nodded, walking with precise stoned steps to where Ali lay. He placed the globe on the floor and knelt beside her. “Yeah?” he said. “Then who are we?”

“Ghosts. We’re all ghosts. Of course.”

“Don’t be a jerk, Ali.” Hillary looked so furious I was afraid he might hit her. The black light made him look like some weird statue, Avenging Spirit or The Spurned Lover or something even worse. “Why are you even saying that?”

But Ali and Jamie were out of it. Jamie was stroking her back, not with anything like desire but absently, the way you stroke a cat. And Ali was utterly heedless of him; her eyes were dark bruises in a face the color of twilight, her black hair bleeding into the shadows. Wasted as she was, I knew by her expression that she was on a roll: the Ali of all those slumber parties where I would be too scared to fall asleep, the Ali who knew stories about girls named Topaz and Juniper and Sweet Lavender: girls who all disappeared before dawn, stories that all ended with a scream.

“This is the story of Giulietta,” she said, raising herself so that she stared straight out at the closed door, her eyes wide and black. “She was a girl a long time ago in Italy, in a small town in the mountains. After the Black Plague, during the Insurrection—”

“The Inquisition,” hissed Hillary. I put my hand on his arm to silence him.

“—during the witch trials. She was not the most beautiful girl in the village, but she had many lovers, though she did not become pregnant, or marry any of them. And because of this the villagers said she was
una strega:
a witch. And they talked about her, and made accusations, until finally the priests came from the cities, the investigators—the inquisitors—and they questioned her.

“She was not a witch, of course. There
were
no witches. There were only the people who worshipped the old gods, and the priests hated them and killed them, and they called their gods devils. If they found out you were one of them, you would be brought to trial, and if you did not renounce your gods then the priests would burn you. But Giulietta would not renounce the gods, because she was a chosen one. She had her mortal lovers, but she was also the beloved of the god of the mountain. And she was also the lover of a priest—”

“A
priest
?” interrupted Jamie.

Ali nodded. “Sure. Back then priests all had lovers. Some of them had
wives.
He was a man from the village who had gone to Rome to study, and remained there as a librarian. He was not an inquisitor but a scholar; but when the complaints reached the Holy Office and they sent their interrogators to the village, this man was asked to accompany them and to aid them in their work, since he knew the villagers and the surrounding countryside.

“He had not seen Giulietta for several months, and while they were in the village preparing for their task he visited her and tried to warn her. He went to her at night, and begged her to recant.

“‘But I have done nothing wrong,’ she said.

“‘I know that,’ said her lover. Though he did not quite believe her: he was a priest, after all—and even though he loved her, he couldn’t stop believing that she was wrong—but still he wanted to save her.

“‘Recant and marry me,’ he begged her.

“‘Will you give up your god?’ she asked.

“He said no. But he loved her—she knew that—and she loved him. So she stayed with him that night, and the next morning after he left the inquisitors came, and took her. They questioned her but she would not admit to having done wrong: she
had
done no wrong. But she would marry no one and none of her lovers would stand up for her.

“‘Where is your god now?’ asked the priests; but Giulietta said nothing except ‘He will come. He will come.’

“And all the while her lover was there in the same room with her, writing it all down…

“They found her guilty. They told her she would only be imprisoned, they told her lover the same thing. But they lied. The next day they took her to a field outside the village and they burned her alive. Her lover went mad: the other priests struck him on the head with stones, to make him unconscious, and so that he wouldn’t bring shame on them by killing himself.”

“What about the god?” I broke in. I had crept forward until I was sitting on the floor beside the mattress. My heart was pounding, just as it always had during one of Ali’s stories—but there was something worse about this one, something about it that made me feel nauseous and dizzy and revolted.

I wasn’t going to tell Ali any of that, though; so I only repeated my question.

“Oh, he came.” Ali was sitting up now on her knees, hands flat upon her thighs so that she looked like a sphinx. “After they left the field, after they all went home, he came…

“Her lover woke—they had brought him to the back room of the village church—and that evening as the sun was setting he returned to the field. There he found the ruins of the fire, and what remained of his beloved. They had not even bothered to take her remains for burial, when they learned of her execution not even her parents or her brother or any of the other men of the village had come to claim her. Only the priest was there, alone. He found her bones in the embers, bones and grease, that was all that remained of her. And he
did
go mad, then—

“And that was when the god came.

“He thought it was the Devil, because of his horns. He walked down from the mountain, through the trees at the edge of the field, and when he got to where the priest lay upon the ground the Devil spoke to him.

“He said, ‘Go to the top of the mountain and remain there; otherwise you will die.’

“And the priest said, ‘Without her I want to die.’

“But the Devil shook his head and said, ‘No.’ He bent and picked up a fragment of her rib, and in his hands it became white and not black, and when he raised it to his lips it was no longer a bone but a bone flute. ‘Because of you my beloved Giulietta is dead,’ he said to the priest. ‘It will be your punishment to live with that always. And because you have named me your enemy and are among those who seek to destroy me, you yourself will never die; but it will be no joy to you but torment everlasting.’

“And then the Devil began to play upon his flute. And the song that he played was so full of grief that the mountain wept, and as it wept it became a torrent, and the tears of the Devil and the tears of the mountain swept down and became a flood that overtook the village. And it was drowned, and all who lived there died; all except 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
Night Gallery
?”

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.”