Still, while having Uncle Cosmo as a parent was mortifying, a lot of my friends had it worse. Duncan Forrester’s father had remarried a famous feminist sculptor who filled their rose garden with enormous bronze castings of her vulva. Linette Davis’s mother, Aurora Dawn, had been a model and actress in the Warhol Factory who was famous now for drunk driving. Sport and Jacey Finn had six sons with golden hair and emerald eyes, all addicted to heroin. In a lot of ways Kamensic seemed like a throwback to medieval times, a walled fortress with a high child-mortality rate. There were not many children in Kamensic, certainly not as many as in the neighboring towns of Goldens Bridge and Mahopac and Pawkotan. Children were at once cherished and expendable; families were large, so that even if one or two of the older kids were lost to drugs or madness or the Ivy League, the younger ones could always be found hanging out in front of the library, or fidgeting in the back of the Congo Church during benefit performances of new works by Beckett or John Guare. The Vietnam War swept by us like an Angel of Death distracted by other things: there were enough Kamensic boys of age to fight, but somehow no one was ever drafted. Our parents were unilaterally against the war, the town was against the war; and that seemed to be enough to protect us.
We were all wild things there. Indulged or ignored by famous parents who traded psychiatrists, agents, drug dealers, spouses; shielded by the miles of wood and mountain that stood between us and the city to the south, the desultory suburbs all around. Kamensic itself stood guard against the darkness I sensed sometimes on a June day, the sun glaring off the surface of Lake Muscanth as though off a blue-lacquered plate, crimson dragonflies lighting upon my bare knees as Hillary and I lay naked in the summer warmth.
But still we knew something was there, waiting. Sometimes I imagined I could hear it—a sound that was just barely audible, an engine thrumming somewhere deep below the water like that faerie mill that grinds salt into the sea. Ali heard it, too, and she said she knew what it was—
“The dead bell.”
“The dead bell?” This was when we were thirteen or so, and Ali was reigning queen of slumber parties because of her repertoire of ghost stories and morbid lore. Ali was Alison Fox, my other best friend. She lived in a vast gray argosy of a house on the far side of Muscanth Mountain. Her parents were recently separated. At least I had both parents, even if there were times I longed to live somewhere else, Somers or Mahopac or Shrub Oak, with a father who worked for IBM and a mother who stayed home and played bridge on Thursday nights. It was a snow day and we were at my house, waiting for Hillary to join us so we could play Monopoly. “What the hell is that?”
“You know. Up there”— She cocked a thumb at the window. —“at Kern’s place. That bell in the gate. It rings when someone’s going to die.”
“So how come it didn’t ring last week when Mr. Lapp died?”
Ali cracked the window open and lit a cigarette, kneeling on the floor so the smoke would drift outside. “’Cause it’s not when just anyone dies. It’s like a banshee or something. It only rings for certain people.”
“Like who?” I was dubious. Ali was weirdly superstitious—she believed “I Am the Walrus” actually meant something, and had a bizarre theory linking Brian Jones’s death and the film version of Rosemary’s Baby—but she was also more plugged into local gossip than I was.
“Like Acherley Darnell. And all those people who killed themselves.”
“Acherley Darnell died two hundred years ago. That bell’s just for decoration or something.”
“Uh-uh. And you know what else—they killed someone every time they made one.”
“When who made what?”
“The people who made that bell, in England or wherever it came from. It was a custom. They would pour the melted bronze into a mold, and then they would take a person and zzzzt”— Ali mimed drawing a blade across her throat. —“they’d cut their neck and put the blood in with the metal. Because otherwise the bell would crack, and you’d never get the tone right.”
All this was actually starting to give me the creeps, but I didn’t want Ali to know that. I gave her a disgusted look. “What a bunch of crap.”
“It’s true. I mean, my father said Kern told him it was true,” she insisted. “Why would he make it up?”
“He makes all those movies. He makes everything up. That bell probably came from some Dumpster in Larchmont.”
“Hey.” Icy wind gusted into the room and there was Hillary, shaking snow from his hair as he tossed his ski jacket onto the floor. “How come the board’s not set up?”
“Cause Ali’s running her mouth again, that’s why.”
I pushed past Hillary, heading into the next room to get the Monopoly set. The truth was, I felt annoyed by Ali’s story. Not because it was another one of her crazy anecdotes, but because I’d never heard it before. Axel Kern was my godfather, after alclass="underline" I was the one who’d spent childhood evenings at Bolerium listening to his tales and watching movies in his screening room with my father, while the wind roared through the broken windows Axel never bothered to fix, and voles nested in the velvet seat cushions.
In Kamensic you could never trade much on fame, your own or your family’s—everyone was either famous, or sort of famous, or had been famous. The exception was Axel Kern. Because Kern wasn’t just famous. He was notorious, perhaps even dangerous. Like Acherley Darnell, who had been found guilty of the murders of his own daughter and her lover and hanged in front of the village courthouse, his body left on the gallows overnight. The next morning it was found swinging from one of Bolerium’s parapets, throat cut and body bled as though he had been a hare.
Nothing like that had happened to Axel Kern—yet. My own childhood memories of him were complex and rather strange, shaded as much by my physical impressions as anything else. These were startlingly acute. I have a strange gift for recalling sensations, and my father sometimes joked that I was psychic, though my mother would not allow a Ouija board in the house, and when I received an Amazing Kreskin’s ESP game for my birthday one year, she made me give it away. So while I recognized Kern’s famous profile—the tilted, deep-set eyes and high cheekbones, the iron-streaked dark hair and tawny skin that added to his exotic, unsettling persona—what I recalled most about him was the acrid scent of his trademark black Sobranies and the taint of red wine on his breath, at once sweet and foul. Or the way his hands felt when he occasionally and absently stroked my cheeks. Kern was not overly affectionate, at least with children, though he was always kind to me. His hands were large and heavily lined, as his face would one day be; it always felt as though he were wearing leather gloves, supple and rather tough. Yet his clothes were extremely dandyish, even for that foppish age. Custom-made Carnaby Street suits of silk velvet the color of ormolu. Belgian lace shirts so fine I could see through them to his coppery skin and the thick curling hair of his chest. Embroidered Berber robes from Morocco; cowboy boots of ostrich and elephant and python and what Axel solemnly assured me was mastodon, from a corpse recently uncovered in Siberia. I recall all of these, and his voice, lilting for such a big man—Kern was well over six feet—though I remember little of what he actually said. Probably this was because he seldom spoke to me. As I said, he had scant use for children.