Black Light (34 page)

I shivered. My eyes ached from trying to focus on anything within the colonnade of ruined candles and black light. The music thrummed and droned, the tambourine became a tocsin. As I walked things clung to me, cobwebs or dripping wax, I thought. But when I glanced at my arm I saw long tendrils of pale green sprouting from the cleft of my elbow.

“Ugh!”

I slashed at them and the tendrils fell away. Immediately three long red furrows rose along the inside of my arm, oozing dark liquid that spun in long droplets to the floor. I gazed down, stunned, but before I could move there was a rush of wind that swept away everything, music, light, dead leaves and cigarette ash. Something touched my cheek and I recoiled.

The room was alive with whirling petals, a vortex of red and pink and scarlet, as though the mansion itself were bleeding. They erupted from the casements like broken glass and drifted from the candelabrums, and where they touched my skin it grew numb. My feet were mired in blossoms; when I tried to shout my jaw didn’t move. The sound of wind in the trees grew deafening. It no longer came from outside but somewhere within the room. There was a smoky reek like hashish, the fruity odor of new wine. And still the papery blossoms swirled around me, sticking to the gashes on my arm and covering my face like snow.

As though unseen hands had slammed the windows shut, the gale stopped. The petals froze in midair; then, like iron filings circling a magnet, they made a shape—the ragged outline of a tree, limbs bare save where petals settled in the crux of trunk and branches. Something moved within those branches, just visible behind the scrim of blossoms; a shadow like a crouching figure readying itself to spring.

No…

I tried to summon the strength to move; but abruptly as it had appeared the phantom tree was gone. So were the falling blossoms. The music rang out again, thin and shrill. I blinked and drew an unsteady hand across my face. There were no flowers there; but on the floor faded petals mingled with broken wineglasses and oak leaves. I turned and started to walk across the room.

The sickly glow from the dying UV lights had faded. I could just make out a series of closed doors along the far wall, each a lozenge of deepest black with no hint of a lock or knob or window set within. I remembered seeing them earlier, almost hidden by a throng of partygoers. Now they seemed ominous as the doors to Bluebeard’s castle in a Hammer horror film or one of Ali’s ghost stories.

“Oh, Christ. Ali.” I whispered, anguished, and opened my hand. A single crimson petal lay pressed against the palm. “Ali…”

I knew then that it was as Jamie had said. Bolerium was a trap, a labyrinth; and I was ensnared. The only way I could truly escape would be to do as Jamie planned—leave right now, taking nothing, saying no farewells, with no money in my pocket and no idea of what I was really doing, except running away.

But that would mean leaving Ali nodded out in an empty room upstairs. That would mean leaving my parents, and Hillary; leaving Duncan and all the rest of them—Mrs. Langford and Moe and Flo and Ali’s father with his crapped-out car. It would mean leaving Kamensic itself.

And suddenly I didn’t know if I could do that. I wasn’t even sure if it was
possible.

Because Kamensic wasn’t just a town. It was something that had seeped into my veins like a drug, something that had filled all the hollow places in my bones and heart and head, until even if I died the shadow of the town would be there, taking my shape, using my voice—and how would anyone even know I was dead?

How would
I
know?

I shuddered. The smell of spilled wine grew stronger as Axel Kern’s voice crooned in my ears, and Ralph Casson’s—

Nothing happens only once…

She is their pathfinder: She travels between this world and the realm of the dead
…

I thought of Ali’s stories of the drowned village, of suicidal children given as tithe to a dark man in the back of an unconsecrated church. I thought of Hillary smashing a terra-cotta mask in a drift of autumn leaves, and Ali dancing drunk across her room, crooning
gimme shelter
as she waved a burning joint at me. I thought of all these things; and of my parents, and a silver-framed photograph of Axel Kern with me beside him, my hair crowned with a wreath of red flowers.

No,
I had said when Ralph Casson held out the small swollen globe of a poppy husk to me,
No, I don’t want it.

With every ounce of fury and despair I had, I beat my fists at the air and shouted—shouted until I drowned out the droning music and the entire hall became an echo chamber with only my voice roaring inside. The streams of candle wax snapped and shattered. From the long outer wall came a muted thump, and then another, as one by one the tall tubes of UV light flared like Roman candles and went black. My voice died into a rasp. I let my hands fall to my side and listened for the music.

There was none. A flood of frozen wax covered the floor, shards of white glass and metal threads. The French doors banged open and closed as the wind sent a spume of dead leaves into the hall. I watched them, but only for a moment. Then I turned away, terrified but resolute, and walked through the wreckage until I reached the row of closed doors. Some were veined with ivy, others covered with thumbtacked messages, bits of paper and strips of sequined fabric clinging to the wood like vines.

But there was never any doubt which entrance was meant for me. Toward the end of the long wall was an arched door of unpolished oak, its panels flaked with black; no knob, no latch. Set within the center, like a sundial in a garden, was a terra-cotta mask. Its slanted eyes glittered as though ruby glass winked behind them, or flame. Its mouth was set in a half-smile as though it were asleep.

“Axel Kern,” I said, and raising my fist I smashed it.

There was a satisfying
crack,
more like bone on bone than shattered clay. I drew back, to protect myself from flying debris, but there was no hail of broken terra-cotta. Instead bits of torn greenery rained down, stems and stamens stripped of their blossoms, ragged petals, crushed lilies and the fragile trumpets of narcissus. They covered me, tangling my hair and catching in my sleeves, their fragrance thick and choking as honey.

“God damn it, let me
in
!”

I kicked blindly at the door. The panels splintered beneath my boot and a lancing pain shot through my leg. Still it didn’t budge.

“Open!”
I pounded where the mask had been. A rusty hand-shaped stain bloomed beneath my touch, grains of powdered stone trickling to the floor among the falling blossoms.
“Open
—
!”

A sound like the tolling of a vast bell, a smell of burning leaves. As though it were a slab of ice the doorway seemed to melt. Its edges blurred into daylight. The storm of flowers subsided. I stood, breathing hard and glaring at the portal. Then I lifted my head, fists drawn before me, and walked through.

There was a sickening rush of vertigo, a flare of violet-blue light. My skin burned and my hair crackled with static. Then there was only darkness: no floor, no walls, no sense of whether I was falling up or down but only that the world had been ripped apart, like a tree torn by a hurricane. I couldn’t breathe but I felt neither fear nor panic; only numbness and exhaustion. The darkness spiraled away, sucked into a point of radiance that grew larger and larger until it enveloped me.

And suddenly I
was
falling, plunging down so fast that when I tried to scream the air felt like a stone thrust into my mouth. I saw a room racing toward me, walls and chairs and windows atop jeweled carpets. The sudden hiss of air mingled with my own voice, shrieking, as I crashed onto the floor.

“Giulietta!”

I moaned, turning slowly onto my side, opened my eyes and saw someone crouching beside me.

“Giulietta—what have you done! You should have waited, I would have—”

“Aw, shit,”
I moaned again, sitting up. My head spun viciously. For a horrible instant I thought the whole scene was going to run backward, and I’d end up crashing back into some other awful place. But then warm hands were on mine. Carefully they opened my fingers and placed something heavy in them. I looked down and saw a cut-glass tumbler full of amber liquid; looked up again into the incongruously boyish face of Balthazar Warnick.

“Giulietta—”

I nearly dropped the glass, but he touched my wrist to steady me. “It’s all right, Giulietta, you’re here with me. Drink, it will calm you—”

I shook my head. “No way—”

“It’s only cognac. Very
expensive
cognac. So please—”

I sniffed at the tumbler, glanced back into his sea-blue eyes. With a shrug I drank.

“Ugh.”

He laughed. “That’s a bit
fast
for cognac—”

I shoved it back at him, my eyes watering. “Gross! Take it—”

“Here, Giulietta. Let me help you…”

He took my hand and got me to my feet. I stood woozily, unsure whether it was me or the cognac making the room look unnaturally brilliant—a gorgeous, Pre-Raphaelite vision of a scholar’s study, with paneled walls and Oriental carpets on the floor, rows of bookshelves and a huge bay window overlooking mountains.

And, while it had been after midnight in Kamensic, here sunlight streamed through the sweeping windows. Everything gleamed with a primal intensity: the crimson and indigo of the carpet so saturated they looked wet, the gold letters on the spines of books sparkling like flame. Decanters on a small round table glowed as if they held paint rather than liqueurs—emerald green, blood-red, sunflower yellow. A daybed was heaped with tapestried pillows, and there was a small cast-iron woodstove set into one wall, its isinglass window glowing beneath one of several beautifully carven plaques inscribed with Latin phrases—

CONSILIO ET ANIMIS

It was all like some Victorian fever-dream, or a movie set. I rubbed my eyes, heedless for the moment of Balthazar’s hand on my arm.

“What—what is this place?” I finally said.

“My study. You are at the Orphic Lodge of the Benandanti, in the Blue Ridge mountains. People come here to work—students, visiting professors, classical scholars. But only the Benandanti see the inside of this room—Benandanti, or their guests,” he added. “Giulietta—”

I stiffened and drew away from him. “I’m
not
Giulietta. Whoever the hell she was. I’m Lit—Charlotte Moylan—”

I walked to the window, peered out at the mountains, a river threading between autumn-gold trees, all beneath a sky so blue it made my eyes ache.

“And I’d like to know what the hell I’m doing here.” I turned back to Balthazar. “Where’s Axel Kern? I thought…”

My voice trailed off: I wasn’t sure exactly what I
had
thought. “I thought I would find him—through that door, in Bolerium—”

“You would have.” Balthazar leaned against a desk, its surface covered with stacks of books, curling parchments, a silver tray holding the remnants of a meal. He still wore his formal evening clothes, though his iron-gray hair was tousled, his face more worn than when I had seen him last. He stared at me, so frankly delighted that I blushed. “But you were diverted.”

He walked over and eased himself on the window seat beside me, gazing out at the mountains with a proprietary air. “You’re not an adept, Giulietta—
Lit
,” he corrected himself. “You’re something far more unusual—and dangerous.”

“What’s that?” I snapped. I continued to stare out the window, desperately hoping he couldn’t tell how frightened I was. Whatever had happened to me—falling through a tear in the fabric of the world, stumbling through doors at Bolerium and ending up on the Eurasian steppe—I very much wanted to believe that those things were accidents.

But even if I hadn’t known I would end up at the Orphic Lodge, I
had
chosen to walk through that portal at Bolerium. And that seemed to have upped the ante in whatever cosmic game I was part of. I recalled a moment in my childhood—the aftermath of that same Irish funeral, a whiskey-fueled wake where I’d watched my father argue strenuously with an Augustinian priest. Something about free will, and living with the consequences of one’s decisions no matter how dire…

I started as a breath of chilly air nosed through an open window, smelling faintly of river-mud. Balthazar reached to shut the window, gently touched my wrist.

“You’re a sort of prodigy, Lit.” He picked up an odd-looking toy that rested on the velvet seat cushion, a model of the solar system made of wire and polished stone beads. “A savant…”

“Ralph Casson didn’t think I was a savant. He said I was a Malandanti.”

Balthazar’s hand tightened around the shining array of wire. There was a small blister on his thumb. As I stared, the blister swelled, burst into a red star that bled down to stain the cuff of his dress shirt. “Malandante,” he said. “Malandanti is the plural.”

He let the wire toy drop back to the seat and looked at me, his eyes grim. “And I hope very much for your sake, Lit, that you are
not
a Malandante.”

Faster than I would have thought possible, he grabbed me by the shoulders. “Listen to me—you have no idea what you have walked into. This is a battle that has been going on for longer than there have been words to describe it. You have no part in this fight, Lit. Do you understand? You know nothing of the Malandanti—they would use you and discard you as casually as you would throw away a piece of paper. You would be destroyed—”

“So?” I spat, knowing my voice sounded thin and frightened. “So everybody dies, it’s not like—”

“It is not like anything you can imagine. Because you would
not
die, Lit, any more than I have died. Not now that you have become aware. For four hundred years I could bear this world and my place in it, the constant watchfulness and the eternal,
eternal
waiting—but only because I knew you were safe. Giulietta Masparutto, whom I saw burned to death, but who was then claimed by the Malandanti—I knew that she slept, and would be reborn, and die, and sleep only to be born again. All of this for centuries, thousands of years, perhaps. And as long as she was not aware of who or what she was, she was safe. Even in life, she would be sleeping.