while the black stars burn

by kucy a snyder

  “Oh. My. God! That is my favorite movie!” Natalya gushed. She stepped forward and touched the polished mahogany frame reverently. “Grayce Aberdine was amazing as the priestess. She should have won an Oscar. She was robbed.”

  “She’s my mom,” Kamerynne said, trying to sound cool. “This is her house.”

  “What!” Natalya looked shocked and did a little dance as if she was trying to levitate, afraid to have her mere-mortal feet touching the creamy white carpet of her movie idol. Then she danced around to face her mother. “Mom…?”

  “Is true!” Her mother beamed, clearly aware that she’d just earned herself premium Cool Mom points.

  Natalya let out a delighted shriek and practically bowled Olga over giving her a bear hug. “You are the best! Ohmigod this is the best!”

  “Loves you, too. But work. I have to.” Her mother gently pushed her away.

  “Hey, um, Natalya.” Kamerynne had fallen out of the habit of trying to impress anyone, but now every neuron in her brain was firing, fixed on solving the problem of making this amazing luminous girl like her.

  “Nat. My friends call me Nat.” She pushed her magenta bangs out of her eyes.

  “We could go watch the director’s extended cut of Cthylla downstairs in the theatre if you want.”

  Nat frowned and squinted as though she suspected Kamerynne of playing a prank. “What? There’s no director’s cut.”

  “Oh yeah there is. It just isn’t out yet; they haven’t even told the trade mags because the director is still messing with it. He had to cut some scenes to get it down to an R—”

  Nat clapped her hands and pogoed excitedly. “Omigod yes!”

  Kamerynne led her down the big spiral staircase to the theatre that her mother always called a screening room. It seated twenty-four people in three rows lined with little blue LEDs along the aisles. The screen was a genuine antique her parents had rescued from an old theatre before it was torn down. Her mother said it was the first place she’d ever seen a movie.

  “If you want, there’s soda and candy and stuff.” Kamerynne waved toward the wet bar at the back of the room.

  “You got any Sprite and vodka?”

  “Um...yeah.” Kamerynne felt a pang of guilt; her mother was into clean living and would not approve. But she felt far too anxious to tell Nat “no.”

  So she just turned on the media server and queued up the movie while Nat made herself a tall drink. They settled down on the front row, the screen huge above them, and Kamerynne hit “play” on the remote.

  Kamerynne hadn’t actually seen more than bits and pieces of her mother’s movie—her parents said it wasn’t suitable for children. She wasn’t a child anymore, but she hadn’t gotten around to watching it, either. It seemed like old news somehow. She’d heard everyone chat about it so much that she’d felt as though she’d seen it about twenty times over.

  But the talk and the trailers hadn’t truly prepared her for the film, and as the opening credits rolled, she found herself mesmerized by the dark, strange story about a cult of women raising an ancient goddess from the ocean. The goddess was like a mermaid, if the bottom half of a mermaid was an octopus instead of a fish. She wondered if the animators at Disney had seen the movie and ripped off the goddess to create Ursula the Sea Witch in The Little Mermaid. But Ursula was all cartoon wickedness and the goddess in Cthylla was terrifying and breathtaking.

  “It’s all real, you know,” Nat whispered as the eight-legged goddess rose from the water flickering above them.

  “What?” Kamerynne blinked at her, feeling disoriented; she’d gotten so engrossed in the movie she’d nearly forgotten Nat was there.

  “Well, it’s not real now, but it will be, someday.”

  “Oh.” Kamerynne blinked again, suspecting she’d missed something important, and then she realized that Nat’s hand was on her knee. Suddenly she felt as though her stomach was filled with a hundred buzzing, stingless bees.

  “This is so hot,” Nat breathed, staring raptly at the screen.

  Kamerynne looked up again, and her mother had dropped her red priestess robe and was standing there completely bare-ass naked, embracing the glistening goddess, whose purple tentacles were creeping up her bare legs....

  “Jesus. That’s my mom. I can’t watch this.” Kamerynne could feel herself blushing right down to the soles of her feet.

  She began to stand, but Nat grabbed her wrist.

  “Don’t go,” she said. “Just sit on my lap and look at me instead.”

  Nat was pulling her wrist insistently, not letting go, so Kamerynne knelt across the girl’s slender legs and blinked at her as she gazed at the screen over her shoulder. Kamerynne tried to ignore the moans and wet noises coming in crisp remastered Dolby audio through the speakers. Nat held both of Kamerynne’s hands very tightly, her breath perfumed with alcohol.

  “When I first saw you, I didn’t think you looked anything at all like your mom,” Nat whispered, not taking her eyes off whatever was happening on the screen behind Kamerynne. “But now I can see it. You have her neck and her ears.”

  And suddenly, Nat was kissing her just below her left ear, and Kamerynne’s body filled with decalescent electricity, and she no longer gave a damn about what the cephalopod goddess was doing to her mother in the movie.

  *

  A month later, the two girls sat making out on Kamerynne’s bed.

  “Could I, like, show you something?” Nat asked, oddly shy.

  Kamerynne had seen Nat top to bottom, so what could possibly make her this bashful? “Sure, anything.”

  “Okay, but I mean, don’t laugh if you think it’s stupid or whatever.”

  “I’m not gonna think it’s stupid. Just show me.”

  “’Kay.” Nat retrieved her black nylon Jansport backpack from the floor, unzipped it and pulled out a sketchbook. “I sorta want to be an artist someday, and I just sort of wanted you to see my stuff....”

  Kamerynne opened the sketchbook, and at first she thought she was looking at a black-and-white photograph of a man with rats’ toothed maws where his eyes should have been, but then she saw the smudge of pencil graphite and realized it was a hyperrealistic sketch. She carefully turned the page, and saw another: this was a woman in a tawdry hotel room cradling a baby made entirely of insects’ eyes. The book contained page after page of beautiful monstrosity.

  “You did all these?” Kamerynne asked.

  “Yeah, I mean, they’re not how I want them to be, but maybe someday....”

  “What do you mean ‘someday’? These are amazing, right now! These are, like, better than the art that my dad drops a grand on down at the galleries!”

  “Aw, you’re a sweetheart. But nah, I’m not that good.”

  “I mean, okay, I’m not an expert, but my dad made me read like fifty billion art books. This is really really good. I mean, you are an artist, right now. Why do you think it’s not good?”

  “I just...I just want to get what’s in my head down on paper, you know? I want it to look the same as I see it in my mind, but it never does. It never comes close. I’m okay with pencils, I guess, but I need to get better with oil and acrylic. Maybe I need to learn how to work a computer or whatever.”

  “So learn to work a computer.” Kamerynne blinked at her.

  “I don’t have the money to buy a computer, and I feel weird working on my stuff at the computers at the library. People see naked bits and freak out. And the library doesn’t even have Photoshop or anything I could really use anyway.”

  In that moment, Kamerynne experience another major revelation: she herself might have no talents to speak of, but Nat had a talent that absolutely took her breath away. And it would be so easy to help her become the artist she was clearly born to be. Maybe helping was Kamerynne’s reason for being alive on the Earth.

  “Put your shirt back on; I’m taking you to the mall. You want a laptop or a desktop?”

  Nat stared at her as if she’d sprouted a tentacle in the m
iddle of her forehead. “Are you serious?”

  “Totally. Let’s go.”

  *

  A year later, Kamerynne was sticking her finger down Nat’s throat in a filthy McDonald’s restroom in Oakland, desperately trying to get her to throw up the bottle of tranquilizers she’d swallowed. It seemed obvious to Kamerynne, finally, that someone like Nat who had such wild nightmares spilling out of her imagination might have had some of that darkness seep into and poison her soul. And truly helping her might be a bit more harrowing than spending a few dollars here and there.

  “Why’d you do that?” Kamerynne asked, wondering whether she wanted to cry or slap Nat as the other girl retched melting blue pills and orange juice and vodka into the stained toilet. “You’re my best friend; you could have talked to me.”

  Nat collapsed back on the piss-stained floor, shaking her head. “Nah. You’d be berr off wi’out me.”

  “I love you.”

  “I hate me,” she sobbed.

  *

  Kamerynne picked up Nat after she was released from the hospital.

  “I have to go to the pharmacy to get some meds.” She smoothed the crumpled prescription on her lap.

  “Okay. Matter which one?” Kamerynne turned the key in her BMW’s ignition.

  “Nope.”

  They drove in silence for a few minutes.

  “I’m sorry I scared you,” Nat said.

  “It’s okay,” Kamerynne replied. “It could have been a lot worse.” She cleared her throat. “You know, I wouldn’t be better off without you. I love you.”

  “I love you too,” Nat said.

  “I forbid you from dying, okay?”

  Nat laughed. “It doesn’t work that way, I don’t think.”

  “You’re smart, you’re beautiful, and you’re so much more talented than anybody I’ve ever met...look, if you decide you don’t deserve to live, how are the rest of us supposed to feel like we deserve to keep breathing, huh?” Kamerynne meant for it to all sound like a joke, but when the words left her mouth, she realized it wasn’t the least bit funny.

  Nat smiled at her anyhow. “It’s different for you. I see the Goddess in my dreams, and I know I’m a disappointment to her.”

  Kamerynne swallowed. Nat mentioned the Goddess sometimes, just in passing, but when Kamerynne asked her about her religion, Nat always said she wasn’t really supposed to talk about it. The whole thing seemed weird, but she didn’t want to be disrespectful. “How could you disappoint her?”

  “I have a role in her Coming. Not now, but later. And I’m too scared to do it. I’m a coward, and I’m worthless, and She knows it.”

  “Hey, no, you’re not worthless; don’t talk about yourself like that, okay?”

  “I am.” Nat began to weep.

  Kamerynne squeezed the steering wheel, feeling lost and helpless, but then she remembered the pills they were driving to get. The meds would surely help clear Nat’s mind. Kamerynne vowed to make sure she took her meds on time and stayed away from alcohol.

  *

  Kamerynne’s mother swept into the house with an enormous smile on her face.

  “Oh, darling, you’re here! I have the most wonderful news!”

  “What’s up, Mom?”

  “Charibdys Studios has gotten the funding for Cthylla: The Rising! They want me to reprise my role.”

  “Oh, wow, that’s great!” Part of Kamerynne cringed as she remembered the tentacled screen embrace.

  “I’ve talked to your father, and he’s interested in being a producer this time around, so we’re meeting with the studio president and some of his execs aboard his yacht this evening. We should be home by 11:00, I think.”

  *

  Shortly after midnight, Kamerynne got a call from the police. A propane tank exploded onboard the yacht, and the force knocked her parents off the deck. Unconscious and helpless, they drowned. They were dead.

  The next morning, she found that Cthylla fans had left a massive pile of roses and lilies outside the front gate.

  *

  Kamerynne met with her parents’ lawyer after the funeral.

  “It seems your parents made some changes to their will that I was unaware of and would have advised against,” he said gravely. “But nonetheless the alterations are legitimate and legal.”

  “What changes?” she asked. She’d had a hard time feeling anything but numb since the phone call. Her parents’ bodies were too badly damaged for an open casket funeral, and so their deaths still felt unreal.

  “Your father and mother have both left 80% and 90%, respectively, of their money to the Messina Strait Foundation.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a religious organization, one that your mother was apparently involved with most of her adult life. According to the notarized letter she left behind, she apparently joined it either before or during her work on Cthylla, and your father became involved recently. It’s news to me, too,” he added, apparently reading the confusion on her face.

  “What does the foundation do?”

  “They offer spiritual retreats and workshops. Past that, I’m honestly not sure, except that now they have a great deal of money with which to do it.”

  Kamerynne couldn’t help Nat or anyone else without money. And if she couldn’t help...what good was she?

  “Am I broke?” She immediately hated how much her question made her sound like a little girl.

  “Oh, no, don’t worry...you still have your parents’ house, and they left you a trust fund that should enable you to maintain the house and pay for your college and personal upkeep indefinitely. You should be able to live comfortably without having to work unless you want to.”

  “I do want to work,” she said. “I want to be...worthwhile.”

  *

  She and Nat both started their freshman years at UCLA the next year. They left Olga to take care of her parents’ house and they split a dorm room on campus. Nat majored in art, of course, and Kamerynne tentatively settled on journalism; she wasn’t sure she wanted to try coding games, but writing about them for magazines seemed fun. And if she majored in English she knew she’d have to write a bunch of papers on a bunch of old books that had bored her half to death the first time her father made her read them.

  The week before midterms, two events changed Kamerynne’s life forever.

  The first was that she attended a guest lecture offered by a visiting investigative journalist from The New York Times.

  “There’s always a paper trail,” the journalist told them. “Every thought that every person physically writes down or sends through an email is recorded somewhere. Every communication leaves a ghost behind. If you jot down a note on a piece of paper resting on a phone book, and then you tear up that paper, guess what? The imprint of your pen marks are on the cover of the phone book. A good investigator can find that and read that. If you send an email, even if you and your recipient delete it? That message has traveled through a dozen routers, and that email can be packet sniffed or recorded. There’s always a paper trail, even if it isn’t paper.”

  Kamerynne sat up straighter in her seat. Bloody Mary didn’t have to be spoken aloud anymore to summon her spectre, it seemed.

  She was still mulling over palimpsests and packet sniffers when she arrived back at their dorm room. “Paint it Black” was blasting on the stereo, and Nat was unconscious on the floor, barely breathing in a puddle of pill-spotted vomit.

  *

  Kamerynne spent five long hours by Nat’s side at the ER. Nat regained consciousness briefly and started wailing and trying to pull out her nasogastric tube and IV. The doctors had to sedate her and told Kamerynne it was best if she went home.

  So she went back to the dorm room; the janitorial staff had cleaned up the vomit in her absence, but the air in the room had a sour chemical smell. Kamerynne sat on her narrow bed and wept out her frustration and worry. Nat had seemed to be doing so well; she’d seemed happy. And her art had gotten even better! A gal
lery in LA was interested in showing her work. But clearly she wasn’t actually happy...or something bad had happened.

  Kamerynne booted up Nat’s computer, composed a short, polite letter to let Nat’s instructors know that she was in the hospital, and got into her email to start sending out messages.

  In Nat’s inbox was a message from someone named Dr. Helene Arcanjo:

  Natalya,

  It’s very nice that the gallery is interested in your drawings, but remember that you must not focus on such trivial things. The Goddess has her plan for you, and you must dedicate yourself to her fully. Do not disappoint us after everything we’ve done for you.

  -Helene

  Who the hell was this Arcanjo woman? And what had she been doing for Nat? If Nat had confided in Arcanjo about her earlier suicide attempt, this email was as good as handing Nat a loaded pistol. A quick Web search revealed that Arcanjo had a PhD in divinity from the Innsmouth Theological Seminary in Rhode Island and she was the minister for the Temple of the Deep Mother in Oxnard. As far as Kamerynne knew, Nat had never been to the church...but she couldn’t be sure.

  Not knowing made her sick to her stomach. What was going on in Nat’s life? Kamerynne dug through Nat’s email, looking for messages to or from Arcanjo. And there was nothing, no messages from other church members, not even any messages referring to the Goddess. If she was deleting the emails, Nat had to believe they contained something incriminating...and that there was a risk of someone looking for them.

  Suddenly worried about leaving a search engine history on Nat’s computer, Kamerynne went to her own computer. Another query on Temple of the Deep Mother led to an older version of the church page in archive.org that contained a list of members. Searches on those names led her to a church member’s personal website, which contained a lot of poetry about the Goddess and links to several Cthylla fan pages, a couple of which mentioned Charybdis Studios. Whose representatives Kamerynne’s mother and father had been meeting with the night they died.