by Kim Wilkins
Copyright © 2003, 2005 by Kim Wilkins
All rights reserved.
Aspect
Warner Books
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.
The Aspect name and logo are registered trademarks of Warner Books.
First eBook Edition: January 2005
ISBN: 978-0-446-55975-1
Contents
Copyright Page
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
PART TWO
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
PART THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
THE TALE OF SILVERHAND STARLIGHT
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Mirko
Alles Liebe, So Weit Der Himmel Himmel Ist
PROLOGUE
—from the Memoirs of Mandy Z.
Once upon a time, a Miraculous Child was born. That night was the last of April—Walpurgis Night—on the summit of the Brocken in the Harz Mountains. It has long been thought that the devil holds court on the Brocken on such a night, but I am not a devil (for that Miraculous Child, dear reader, was me); I am the only son of the thirteenth generation of a special family. In the dim, distant past, my ancestors bred with faeries, bringing our family line infinite good fortune, but making a terrible mess of our gene pool.
My name is Immanuel Zweigler, but I am known as Mandy Z. I am an artist, renowned; I am wealthy beyond your wildest dreams, and always have been, for my family has money in obscure bank accounts in sinister places the world over. I am color-blind, truly color-blind. I see only black and white and gray, but if you wore a particularly vibrant color, perhaps a little of its warmth would seep into my field of vision and be rendered the palest sepia. But I have an extraordinary sense of smell, and an extraordinary sense of touch. That is why I like to sculpt.
You may wonder why someone so miraculous has waited until the age of forty-eight to commence his memoir. Simply, it had never occurred to me to do so, but then the British journalist came to interview me. He was a genial man. We had a good conversation and then I left him with the view from my west windows while I went upstairs to fetch a photograph—I always insist on providing my own photographs to be published with interviews. I was rummaging in the drawer of my desk in my sculpture room, a room I prefer to keep private, when I heard the British journalist clear his throat behind me.
“You should not have followed me in here,” I said.
“This is extraordinary,” he replied, advancing toward my latest sculpture.
Ah, the beautiful thing, so white and gleaming with gorgeous curves and ghastly crevices.
“It’s called the Bone Wife,” I told him as he ran his fingers over her hips (she only exists below the waist at present). I was amused because he didn’t know what he was touching.
“Are you going to finish her?” he asked, gesturing to where her face would be.
“Oh yes. Though some would say she is the perfect woman just as she is.”
He didn’t laugh at my joke. “What medium are you using?”
“Bones.”
His fingers jumped off as though scalded. “Not human bones?”
I smiled and shook my head. “Of course not.”
So he returned to his examination, confident that these were the bones of unfortunate sheep and pigs, and then I gave him his photos and asked him to leave. I sat for a long time looking at my Bone Wife, and mused about my continued disappointment in how I am represented by the world’s media, and about how so much of what I do can never be made public. I wanted to read about a version of myself that I recognized, even if I had to write it with my own pen; and that’s when I decided upon a memoir. I decided to celebrate me. Miraculous me.
Not human bones?
No. The thought is as repulsive to me as it was to the British journalist. As is the thought of animal bones; I bear no grudge against our four-legged companions. Not human bones, not animal bones. A rarer medium: faery bones. The bones of faeries I have killed.
Because, you see, I have a measureless loathing for faeries. And I am the Faery Hunter.
PART ONE
There is nobody at home. Autumn fills the rooms;
Moonbright sonata
And the awakening at the edge of the twilit forest.
“Hohenburg,” Georg Trakl
The water started to boil, and the flesh fell away from the bones, so he took the bones out and put them on the slab; he knew not, however, in which order they should go, and arranged everything in a big muddle.
“Brother Lustig,” Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
CHAPTER ONE
Please don’t make me remember, please don’t make me remember. Inevitable, however. Christine had known from the moment the man had glanced at her business card, his eyebrows shooting up.
“Starlight. That’s an unusual surname.”
“Mm-hm.”
“You’re not any relation to Alfa and Finn Starlight? The seventies pop stars?”
Pop stars! Her parents had considered themselves musicians, poets, artists. “Yeah, I’m their daughter.” Amazingly, her voice came out smooth, almost casual. She didn’t need this today; she was already feeling unaccountably melancholy.
“Oh. Oh, I’m so . . .”
“Sorry?”
“Yes. Yes, I’m very sorry.”
Because he knew, as most people did, that Alfa and Finn Starlight had died in a horrific car accident from which their teenage daughter had been the only survivor. Suddenly there was no point in resisting anymore: she was back there. The English Bookshop on Ludwigkirchplatz, its long shelves and neat carpet squares, spun down to nothing in her perception; it was all blood and metal and ground glass and every horror that those evil, stubborn thirty-five seconds of consciousness had forced her to witness.
“I’m sorry too,” she said. Her lower back twinged in sympathy with the remembrance. She wouldn’t meet the man’s gaze, trying to discourage him. He was pale and clean-shaven, had a South African accent, and was clearly battling with his impulses. On the one hand, he was aware it was rude—maybe even distressing for her—to keep asking about the accident; on the other hand, he was talking with a real-life survivor of a famous and tragic legend. Christine was used to this four seconds of struggle: enthusiasm versus compassion. Compassion never won.
“When was that again? 1988?” he asked.
“1989,” Christine replied. “November.”
“Yes, of course. My sister cried for days. She’d always had a crush on Finn.”
“I think a lot of women did.”
“He was a good-looking man, and your mother was beautiful too.”
Christine smiled in spite of herself, wondering if the man was now pondering how such stunning parents had managed to produce such an ordinary-looking child.
“One thing I’ve always wanted to know,” he said, leaning forward.
Christine braced herself. Why couldn’t she ever tell these people to leave her alone? Why had she never developed that self-preserving streak of aggression that would shut down his questions, lock up her memories. “Yes?”
“You were in a coma for eight weeks after the accident.”
“Yes.”
“The kid who ran you off the road didn’t stop.”
“No.”
“And there were no witnesses.”
“That’s right.”
“Then how did they find him and convict him?”
Yes, her back was definitely twinging now, a horrid legacy of the accident, the reason November 1989 was never really consigned to the past, to that cold night and that long tunnel. Her doctor back home would tell her that these twinges were psychosomatic, triggered by the memory. She had no idea what the word for “psychosomatic” was in German, and the doctor she had seen twice since her arrival in Berlin two months ago was happy to prescribe painkillers without too much strained bilingual conversation.
“I was conscious for about half a minute directly after the accident,” she explained. “The kid who hit us stopped a second, then took off. I got his license plate, I wrote it on the dash.”
“Really?” He was excited now, privy to some new juicy fact about the thirteen-year-old story. Many details had been withheld from the press because the driver of the other car was a juvenile. The law had protected him from the barrage of media scrutiny, while Christine had suffered the full weight of the world’s glare.
“I’m surprised you could collect yourself to find a pen, under the circumstances,” he continued. “It must have been traumatic.”
Oh, yes. Her father crushed to death; her mother decapitated. Christine smiled a tight smile; time to finish this conversation. “If you phone at the end of the week, we should be able to give you an estimated due date for that book. It’s a rare import, so it could take a number of months.”
He hesitated. Clearly, he had a lot of other questions. Chief among them might be why the heir to the Starlight fortune was working as a shop assistant in an English-language bookshop in Berlin.
“All right, then,” the man said. “I’ll see you when I come to pick it up.”
Christine nodded, silently vowing to make sure she was out back checking invoices when he returned.
He headed for the door, his footsteps light and carefree, and not weighed down with thirteen years of chronic pain, thirteen years of nightmares about tunnels and blood, thirteen years of resigned suffering. A brittle anger rose on her lips.
“By the way,” she called.
He turned.
“I didn’t have a pen,” she said.
“Pardon?”
Had he forgotten already? Was that how much her misery meant to anybody else? “In the car, after the accident,” she said. “You were right, I was too traumatized to find a pen.”
His face took on a puzzled aspect. “Then how . . . ?”
Christine held up her right index finger. “My mother’s blood,” she said. “Have a nice day.”
Gray. Black. Brown. No matter which way Christine surveyed it, this painting of Jude’s looked like every other painting he had ever done. “It’s beautiful, darling.”
He lifted her hair and kissed the back of her neck. She pondered the colors, Jude’s colors of choice as long as she’d known him. She often wondered if his preferences bore any relation to the reasons he was attracted to her. Jude was alternative art’s pinup boy, with a wicked smile, a tangle of blond hair, and sparkling dark eyes. Christine, by contrast, knew she was profoundly forgettable. She was thin but not sleek, pale but not luminous, her brown hair was thick but not shiny; and with her button eyes, flat cheeks, and snub nose she possessed not even the distinction of ugliness. No matter how hard she tried to be good-natured and generous and kind, Christine knew that she was cursed with invisibility.
“What’s it called?” she asked him.
“Urban Autumn,” he said, dropping her hair. “You really like it?”
“Of course.”
Jude stood back and smiled at the painting. “Today’s the first day of fall,” he said. “It’s kind of a tribute.”
“First day of fall?”
“On the pagan calendar, according to Gerda. Except she calls it autumn.”
“Perhaps that explains why I’m feeling so odd. Summer’s gone, winter’s on its way.”
He turned to her, concern crossing his face. “What’s the matter? You sound kind of melancholy.”
She sighed. “I am melancholy. Don’t know why.”
“Is your back giving you trouble?” His hand dropped to the small of her back and pressed it gently. This was the locus of the chronic pain that—unbelievably—she was still not used to after so many years.
“No more than usual.” She thought about the twinges she’d felt while talking about her parents’ accident.
“Nothing else bothering you?”
There was, but she could barely articulate it. Fuzzy memories of her childhood, a recurring half-remembrance about a crow she had seen once, a fluttering buzzing anxiety lacing everything, a breath caught perpetually in her throat. “I don’t think so. I guess being back here reminds me of . . . happier times.”
He smiled and folded her into his arms and she tried to take solace in his beating heart—
He doesn’t love you as much as you love him.
—and to put aside all her irrational feelings.
“Hey, love pigeons!”
Jude released Christine and she turned to the door of the studio. Gerda stood there, shaking her head so her blond dreadlocks bounced around her shoulders. “You guys are always smooching.”
“Can’t help ourselves,” Jude said, shrugging.
“We’re on our way out,” Gerda said. “Coming?”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Christine asked.
“All of us. Me, Pete, Fabiyan. Shall we make it a Hotel Mandy-Z outing?”
“Yeah, cool,” Jude said, “just don’t ask Mandy.”
Gerda giggled; nobody genuinely liked their wealthy benefactor. “If we run into him downstairs in the gallery we won’t have much of a chance of losing him. Coming now?”
“No, give me a half-hour to get cleaned up.” Jude indicated his shirt, which was splattered with brown paint.
“We’ll be at Super Jazz on Chausseestrasse. It’s just been voted the smokiest club in Europe.”
“I’ll bring my gas mask,” Christine joked.
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll convert you yet, Miss Starlight,” Gerda said. “You can’t be the only person in the hotel who doesn’t smoke.” With a cheery wave she disappeared. Jude had turned back to his painting.
“I want to give it another fifteen minutes,” he said, picking up his brush. His eyes were taking on a distracted gaze.
“I’ll wait upstairs.” She’d lost him; until he came back from wherever it was in his head he went when he was painting, he was no longer hers. She glanced at him as she left the studio: his right shoulder was flexed, his hair fell over his eye as he touched the brush delicately, carefully to the canvas. As long as he was happy, his painting was a mistress Christine was prepared to tolerate.
Two hours had passed before they arrived at Super Jazz, and by then the others were all drunk. Mandy was not with them, to Christine’s relief. She found Immanuel Zweigler the most loathsome being she had ever met. He was a tall, corpulent man with pinkish skin and pale watery eyes. He dyed his hair black, but ginger roots peeked through, conspiring with his ginger eyebrows to give him away. He usually smelled of the heavy incense he burned in his upstairs rooms, where he also wandered around naked and didn’t care who came to the door; Gerda had already reported popping in to borrow coffee and getting an eyeful she’d never forget. But it was none of these things—his appearance or his habits—that Christine despised. It was some other ineffable malignancy that washed off him
, some calculating miserliness or inhuman detachment, that made her lean away whenever he spoke to her.
“Drink for you?” This was Fabiyan, the Belarusian sculptor who lived across the hall from them. He had to yell over the band playing loud Miles Davis in the corner. Jude slid onto the sofa next to Gerda, and Christine took the seat opposite.
“Beck’s,” Christine said.
“Beck’s!” Gerda exclaimed as Fabiyan went to the bar. “You’re so predictable.”
“I’m living in the capital of Germany,” Christine responded. “It’s only right I should drink German beer.”
“Berlin’s not the capital of Germany,” Gerda said, waving her cigarette effusively, “it’s the capital of the world.”
Every year in summer, four new artists took up residence at Hotel Mandy-Z for their twelve-month Zweigler Fellowships. This year they were Jude Honeychurch, New York’s hottest young thing with a paintbrush, fresh from an immensely successful West Chelsea exhibition; Gerda Ekman, an ebullient Swede who worked in metal and stone; Pete Searles, a nineteen-year-old Australian who put together bizarre video and multimedia installations that required warnings about epilepsy; and Fabiyan Maranovich, first time out of Belarus where he had spent his life working as an electrician. Christine had a soft spot for Fabiyan especially. He had conscientiously learned German before taking up his fellowship, only to find that English was the linguistic currency at Hotel Mandy-Z. He was picking it up quickly, but sometimes Christine had to translate for him into German. Not that her German was faultless, but she had lived here briefly in the seventies with her parents and a refresher course taken over the spring left her with a better grasp than the rest.
“So,” Gerda said to Jude, snaking her arm around his shoulders, “I like your painting. Nearly finished, is it?”
“Nearly.”
“You must be so proud of him, Christine,” Gerda said, smiling her Cheshire-cat smile.
“Yes, I am.”
Fabiyan leaned down and handed Christine a beer. She sipped it gratefully, then rested it on the scarred table. If she were to be totally honest, she didn’t think much of anybody’s art in the hotel. All those abstract, impenetrable shapes and images. It baffled her far more than it delighted her. But she was perfectly willing to admit she wasn’t an expert and she hadn’t the faintest idea about what artists felt or intended, even after four years with Jude.