“Hey, Red! Here—”
Someone thrust a joint into my hand. I sucked on it, my fingers damp with someone else’s spit; then held it up over my head to be snatched back. Before anything else could come my way—magic needles, wreaths of poppies, an arrest warrant—I lurched forward, and at last found the way out.
There was no door; just a high arched entry, so wide you could have driven a VW bus through it. For all I knew that was how all those guests arrived. A small cluster of relatively sedate-looking people stood in the passageway. Men in tuxedos; Amanda Joy and her rival, the agent Margot Steiner. Opposite them lounged my high school classmates Christie Smith and Alysa Redmond, in matching white silk jumpsuits, whispering to each other with fingers interlaced. As I walked by they glanced sideways and smiled.
“Hi, Lit.”
“Hi, Lit. Great party…”
As though I had something to do with it. I gave them both a wobbly smile. “Hi, Alysa. Christie. Have you seen Hillary any—”
I stiffened. One of the tuxedoed men was laughing at something a companion had said. He turned casually in my direction—a short slight man with dark silver-touched hair, a keen blade of a nose and disarmingly alert blue eyes. When he saw me his laughter did not stop, but there was a nearly imperceptible change in its timbre, as though he’d drawn a breath of cold air. His gaze caught mine and held it. Not challengingly, not fearfully, but with disbelief—
But a sort of disbelief that seemed almost like ecstasy, a raw surge of emotion that I had never observed before, and certainly never directed at me. His brow furrowed and his blue eyes narrowed, as though he was not quite sure of what he was seeing. Then he turned away again, so that I saw only the back of his bespoke tuxedo jacket.
It was not quickly enough. I had recognized him. The man I had seen atop Muscanth Mountain; the man Ralph had named Balthazar Warnick.
Yet what terrified me, what sent me pushing past that little crowd and into the reassuring silence of the music room, was not the memory of slashing wind or the soft dreadful cries of the dying stag. What was most horrible was that, somehow, in that flash instant, Balthazar Warnick had recognized me. The unguarded look he had given me was not mere disbelief. It was the joy I had seen on Peter Burke’s face when he learned his son Evan was not dead in a place crash, but had missed his flight. It was the look my mother had one dawn when I hadn’t bothered to call first and returned home from an unexpected party; the look of a man seeing a loved one he thought dead. And the revenant was me.
10. The Punk Meets the Godfather
I STUMBLED INTO THE music room. After the shrill, overheated melee of the outer hall, it seemed positively monastic. Tiffany lamps and austere Prairie School lanterns cast a cozy glow over worn leather furniture—hassocks, oxblood couches, armchairs large enough for two people to sleep in side by side. Which at least one blissed-out couple was doing, the woman’s miniskirt still hiked up to her waist while her partner snored.
Otherwise the place was empty. Oriental rugs were scattered across the floor, not the elegant Chinese silk pastels favored by my parents but thick rough-textured rugs from Turkey and Afghanistan, wool so heavy it left your fingers sticky with lanolin, with intricate mazelike patterns dyed in the autumnal hues of the wines Axel Kern loved: claret, burgundy, the golden bronze of Armagnac, pale sunlit sémillon. The floorboards were worn and creaked underfoot; the plaster ceiling cracked and blotched with water-stains. There were music stands holding black-and-white photographs of a naked Marilyn Monroe, a harp hung with a Soviet flag, a Steinway covered by a fringed paisley shawl. A shabby polar bear rug lay in front of a huge stone fireplace where a fire crackled. The room was so big, and so inadequately heated, that I hurried there to warm myself. I avoided the polar bear—its fur matted, the color of city slush—instead stood on tiptoe on the tile border in front of the hearth.
The fire must have been blazing for hours. There were logs as large as I was angled across the brass firedogs, and a mountain of ash beneath. After a minute or two I blinked, my cheeks burning, and stepped backward until I leaned against the Steinway. I could still hear laughter and thumping music, and fainter strains from other parts of the mansion. I was debating whether to brave the hall again or head off in search of Hillary, when someone grabbed my ankle; someone beneath the piano.
“Lit Moylan,” a voice intoned drunkenly. I tried to pull away but the hand moved up to my calf and gripped me. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Hillary?”
I had to lift the fringed shawl before I could see him, lying on his stomach, his flannel shirt open and his long hair sticking out like Struwwelpeter’s, a heap of apple cores beside him. “Gee, Hillary, I thought you were prostrate with grief looking for me.”
“I am. I’m completely housebroken. Get down here—”
I slid beside him. He kissed me sloppily, his mouth tasting of red wine and apples, then drew back, puzzled. “Your hair smells funny—Christ, your hair looks funny! What happened?”
I pulled away. “Nothing.”
“Nothing? You look like—well, I don’t know what you look like.” Hillary reached behind him and grabbed a wine bottle. He took a long pull, then regarded me thoughtfully. “Actually, you know what you look like? That picture in Ali’s room.”
“Really? ‘The Lady of Shallott’?”
“No. The creepy one, that girl with the red hair and the ripped white dress who looks like she’s pulling her hair out—what’s his name? Stuck? Gluck?”
“You idiot.” I turned angrily and crawled back out. “I hate that picture—”
“Munch,” Hillary said, snapping his fingers. “That one! Hey, where you going?”
“Leave me alone! And it’s orange, not white.”
Hillary stared at my dress. “Yeah, no lie.”
“Fuck you.”
I stormed from the room, not even noticing which doorway I left by. I was such a roil of pure emotion—embarrassment, fear, excitement, arousal, rage—that I felt sick to my stomach. I was halfway down a darkened hallway before I stopped to catch my breath. Overhead the ceiling was so ornately carved it seemed hung with dark crumpled linen. I glanced back for the telltale glow of firelight from the music room.
It was gone.
“Damn,” I whispered.
I was in one of those labyrinthine oak-paneled passages that wound through Bolerium like the trails bored by deathwatch beetles, opening upon anterooms and stairways, pocket libraries and maprooms, and even upon a tiny private chapel where it was said Acherley Darnell had been shriven the night before his execution. As a child I had sometimes wandered in these halls, when the adult conversation bored me and I’d tried unsuccessfully to find my way to the kitchen in search of normal food, rather than the robust and inedible spreads that Axel and my parents loved: morels, imported truffles and dark bread, venison studded with juniper berries; fiddleheads and shad roe.
But I could never make any sense of the corridors. Sometimes I found the kitchen, and Axel’s housekeeper would give me turkey sandwiches and a glass of milk before sending me back. But just as often I would wander for what seemed like hours, futilely jiggling doorknobs, climbing narrow stairways where the ceiling grazed my head, staring out lead-paned windows onto the slope of Muscanth Mountain and the distant play of light upon the lake. Eventually, of course, I always found my way back; but ever after was haunted by dreams of dim passages, muted voices speaking behind walls; doors I could never quite open and words I could not understand.