Last Summer at Mars Hill (11 page)

“Hey,” she began. Beside her Lie Vagal smiled and rubbed his forehead.

Without turning Linette asked, “Where does it go?”

“My bedroom,” said Lie as he slipped between them. “Would you like to come in?”

No,
thought Haley.

“Sure,” said Linette. Lie Vagal nodded and opened the door. They followed him inside, blinking as they strove to see in the dimness.

“This is my inner sanctum.” He stood there grinning, his long hair falling into his face. “You’re the only people who’ve ever been in it, really, except for me. My grandmother won’t come inside.”

At first she thought the room was merely dark, and waited for him to switch a light on. But after a moment Haley realized there
were
lights on. And she understood why the grandmother didn’t like it. The entire room was painted black, a glossy black like marble. It wasn’t a very big room, surely not the one originally intended to be the master bedroom. There were no windows. An oriental carpet covered the floor with purple and blue and scarlet blooms. Against one wall a narrow bed was pushed—such a small bed, a child’s bed almost—and on the floor stood something like a tall brass lamp, with snaky tubes running from it.

“Wow,” breathed Linette. “A hookah.”

“A what?” demanded Haley; but no one paid any attention. Linette walked around, examining the hookah, the paintings on the walls, a bookshelf filled with volumes in old leather bindings. In a corner Lie Vagal rustled with something. After a moment the ceiling became spangled with lights, tiny white Christmas-tree lights strung from corner to corner like stars.

“There!” he said proudly. “Isn’t that nice?”

Linette looked up and laughed; then returned to poring over a very old book with a red cover. Haley sidled up beside her. She had to squint to see what Linette was looking at—a garishly tinted illustration in faded red and blue and yellow. The colors oozed from between the lines, and there was a crushed silverfish at the bottom of the page. The picture showed a little boy screaming while a long-legged man armed with a pair of enormous scissors snipped off his thumbs.

“Yuck!” Haley stared open-mouthed, then abruptly walked away. She drew up in front of a carved wooden statue of a troll, child-sized. Its wooden eyes were painted white, with neither pupil nor iris. “Man, this is kind of a creepy bedroom.”

From across the room Lie Vagal regarded her, amused. “That’s what Gram says.” He pointed at the volume in Linette’s hands. “I collect old children’s books. That’s
Struwwelpeter.
German. It means Slovenly Peter.”

Linette turned the page. “I love all these pictures and stuff. But isn’t it kind of dark in here?” She closed the book and wandered to the far end of the room where Haley stared at a large painting. “I mean, there’s no windows or anything.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. I like it like this.”

Linette crossed the room to stand beside Haley in front of the painting. It was a huge canvas, very old, in an elaborate gilt frame. Thousands of fine cracks ran through it. Haley was amazed it hadn’t fallen to pieces years ago. A lamp on top of the frame illuminated it, a little too well for Haley’s taste. It took her a moment to realize that she had seen it before.

“That’s the cover of your album—”

He had come up behind them and stood there, reaching to chuck the kinkajou under the chin. “That’s right,” he said softly. “The Erl-King.”

It scared her. The hooded figure in the foreground hunched towards a tiny form in the distance, its outstretched arms ending in hands like claws. There was a smear of white to indicate its face, and two dark smudges for eyes, as though someone had gouged the paint with his thumbs. In the background the smaller figure seemed to be fleeing on horseback. A bolt of lightning shot the whole scene with splinters of blue light, so that she could just barely make out that the rider held a smaller figure in his lap. Black clouds scudded across the sky, and on the horizon reared a great house with windows glowing yellow and red. Somehow Haley knew the rider would not reach the house in time.

Linette grimaced. On her shoulder the kinkajou had fallen asleep again. She untangled its paws from her hair and asked, “The Erl-King? What’s that?”

Lie Vagal took a step closer to her.

“—‘Oh, father! My father! And dost thou not see?

The Erl-King and his daughter are waiting for me?’

—‘Now shame thee, my dearest! Tis fear makes thee blind

Thou seest the dark willows which wave in the wind.’”

He stopped. Linette shivered, glanced aside at Haley. “Wow. That’s creepy—you really like all this creepy stuff…”

Haley swallowed and tried to look unimpressed. “That was a
song
?”

He shook his head. “It’s a poem, actually. I just ripped off the words, that’s all.” He hummed softly. Haley vaguely recognized the tune and guessed it must be from his album.

“‘Oh, father, my father,’” he sang, and reached to take Linette’s hand. She joined him shyly, and the kinkajou drooped from her shoulder across her back.

“Lie!”

The voice made the girls jump. Linette clutched at Lie. The kinkajou squealed unhappily.

“Gram.” Lie’s voice sounded somewhere between reproach and disappointment as he turned to face her. She stood in the doorway, weaving a little and with one hand on the doorframe to steady herself.

“It’s late. I think those girls should go home now.”

Linette giggled, embarrassed, and said, “Oh, we don’t have—”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Haley broke in, and sidled toward the door. Lie Vagal stared after her, then turned to Linette.

“Why don’t you come back tomorrow, if you want to see more of the house? Then it won’t get too late.” He winked at Haley. “And Gram is here, so your parents shouldn’t have to worry.”

Haley reddened. “They don’t care,” she lied. “It’s just, it’s kind of late and all.”

“Right, that’s right,” said the old lady. She waited for them all to pass out of the room, Lie pausing to unplug the Christmas-tree lights, and then followed them downstairs.

On the outside patio the girls halted, unsure how to say goodbye.

“Thank you,” Haley said at last. She looked at the old lady. “For the tea.”

“Yeah, thanks,” echoed Linette. She looked over at Lie Vagal standing in the doorway. The backlight made of him a black shadow, the edges of his hair touched with gold. He nodded to her, said nothing. But as they made their way back down the moonlit hill his voice called after them with soft urgency.

“Come back,” he said.

It was two more days before Haley returned to Linette’s. After dinner she rode her bike up the long rutted dirt drive, dodging cabbage butterflies and locusts and looking sideways at Kingdom Come perched upon its emerald hill. Even before she reached the cottage she knew Linette wasn’t there.

“Haley. Come on in.”

Aurora stood in the doorway, her cigarette leaving a long blue arabesque in the still air as she beckoned Haley. The girl leaned her bike against the broken stalks of sunflowers and delphiniums pushing against the house and followed Aurora.

Inside was cool and dark, the flagstones’ chill biting through the soles of Haley’s sneakers. She wondered how Aurora could stand to walk barefoot, but she did: her feet small and dirty, toenails buffed bright pink. She wore a short black cotton tunic that hitched up around her narrow hips. Some days it doubled as nightgown and daywear; Haley guessed this was one of those days.

“Tea?”

Haley nodded, perching on an old ladderback chair in the kitchen and pretending interest in an ancient issue of
Dairy Goat
magazine. Aurora walked a little unsteadily from counter to sink to stove, finally handing Haley her cup and then sinking into an overstuffed armchair near the window. From Aurora’s mug the smell of juniper cut through the bergamot-scented kitchen. She sipped her gin and regarded Haley with slitted eyes.

“So. You met Lie Vagal.”

Haley shrugged and stared out the window. “He had Valentine,” she said at last.

“He still does—the damn thing ran back over yesterday. Linette went after it last night and didn’t come back.”

Haley felt a stab of betrayal. She hid her face behind her steaming mug. “Oh,” was all she said.

“You’ll have to go get her, Haley. She won’t come back for me, so it’s up to you.” Aurora tried to make her voice light, but Haley recognized the strained desperate note in it. She looked at Aurora and frowned.

You’re her mother, you bring her back,
she thought, but said, “She’ll be back. I’ll go over there.”

Aurora shook her head. She still wore her hair past her shoulders and straight as a needle; no longer blonde, it fell in streaked gray and black lines across her face. “She won’t,” she said, and took a long sip at her mug. “He’s got her now and he won’t want to give her back.” Her voice trembled and tears blurred the kohl around her eyelids.

Haley bit her lip. She was used to this. Sometimes when Aurora was drunk, she and Linette carried her to bed, covering her with the worn flannel comforter and making sure her cigarettes and matches were out of sight. Linette acted embarrassed, but Haley didn’t mind, just as she didn’t mind doing the dishes sometimes or making grilled cheese sandwiches or French toast for them all, or riding her bike down to Schelling’s Market to get more ice when they ran out. She reached across to the counter and dipped another golden thread of honey into her tea.

“Haley. I want to show you something.”

The girl waited as Aurora weaved down the narrow passage into her bedroom. She could hear drawers being thrown open and shut, and finally the heavy thud of the trunk by the bed being opened. In a few minutes Aurora returned, carrying an oversized book.

“Did I ever show you this?”

She padded into the umber darkness of the living room, with its frayed kilims and cracked sitar like some huge shattered gourd leaning against the stuccoed wall. Haley followed, settling beside her. By the door the frogs hung with splayed feet in their sullen globe, their pale bellies turned to amber by the setting sun. On the floor in front of Haley glowed a rhomboid of yellow light. Aurora set the book within that space and turned to Haley. “Have I shown you this?” she asked again, a little anxiously.

“No,” Haley lied. She had in fact seen the scrapbook about a dozen times over the years—the pink plastic cover with its peeling Day-Glo flowers hiding newspaper clippings and magazine pages soft as fur beneath her fingers as Aurora pushed it towards her.

“He’s in there,” Aurora said thickly. Haley glanced up and saw that the woman’s eyes were bright red behind their smeared rings of kohl. Tangled in her thin fine hair were hoop earrings that reached nearly to her shoulder, and on one side of her neck, where a love bite might be, a tattoo no bigger than a thumbprint showed an Egyptian Eye of Horus. “Lie Vagal—him and all the rest of them—”

Aurora started flipping through the stiff plastic pages, too fast for Haley to catch more than a glimpse of the photos and articles spilling out. Once she paused, fumbling in the pocket of her tunic until she found her cigarettes.

YOUTHQUAKER
! the caption read. Beside it was a black-and-white picture of a girl with long white-blonde hair and enormous, heavily kohled eyes. She was standing with her back arched, wearing a sort of bikini made of playing cards.
MODEL AURORA DAWN, BRIGHTEST NEW LIGHT IN POP ARTIST’S SUPERSTAR HEAVEN.

“Wow,” Haley breathed. She never got tired of the scrapbooks: it was like watching a silent movie, with Aurora’s husky voice intoning the perils that befell the feckless heroine.

“That’s not it,” Aurora said, almost to herself, and began skipping pages again. More photos of herself, and then others—men with hair long and lush as Aurora’s; heavy women smoking cigars; twin girls no older than Haley and Linette, leaning on a naked man’s back while another man in a doctor’s white coat jabbed them with an absurdly long hypodermic needle. Aurora at an art gallery. Aurora on the cover of
Interview
magazine. Aurora and a radiant woman with shuttered eyes and long, long fishnet-clad legs—the woman was really a man, a transvestite Aurora said; but there was no way you could tell by looking at him. As she flashed through the pictures Aurora began to name them, bursts of cigarette smoke hovering above the pages.

“Fairy Pagan. She’s dead.

“Joey Face. He’s dead.

“Marietta. She’s dead.

“Precious Bane. She’s dead.

“The Wanton Hussy. She’s dead.”

And so on, for pages and pages, dozens of fading images, boys in leather and ostrich plumes, girls in miniskirts prancing across the backs of stuffed elephants at F.A.O. Schwartz or screaming deliriously as fountains of champagne spewed from tables in the back rooms of bars.

“Miss Clancy deWolff. She’s dead.

“Dianthus Queen. She’s dead.

“Markey French. He’s dead.”

Until finally the clippings grew smaller and narrower, the pictures smudged and hard to make out beneath curls of disintegrating newsprint—banks of flowers, mostly, and stiff faces with eyes closed beneath poised coffin lids, and one photo Haley wished she’d never seen (but yet again she didn’t close her eyes in time) of a woman jackknifed across the top of a convertible in front of the Chelsea Hotel, her head thrown back so that you could see where it had been sheared from her neck neatly as with a razor blade.

“Dead. Dead. Dead,” Aurora sang, her finger stabbing at them until flecks of paper flew up into the smoke like ashes; and then suddenly the book ended and Aurora closed it with a soft heavy sound.

“They’re all dead,” she said thickly; just in case Haley hadn’t gotten the point.

The girl leaned back, coughing into the sleeve of her T-shirt. “What happened?” she asked, her voice hoarse. She knew the answers, of course: drugs, mostly, or suicide. One had been recent enough that she could recall reading about it in the
Daily News.

“What
happened
?” Aurora’s eyes glittered. Her hands rested on the scrapbook as on a Ouija board, fingers writhing as though tracing someone’s name. “They sold their souls. Every one of them. And they’re all dead now. Edie, Candy, Nico, Jackie, Andrea, even Andy. Every single one. They thought it was a joke, but look at it—”