Black Light Read Free

Ouch—!”
    It was burning hot. I snatched my hand back, very tentatively ran my palm along the door, worrying that there might be a fire on the other side. But the door itself was cool. I knocked, softly; heard nothing but a dull metal boom. I covered my hand with a protective fold of my dress, carefully turned the knob, and peered inside.
    It was empty. I glanced back at the dark hallway, then stepped in, shutting the door behind me.
    I was in a long, high-ceilinged room. Not much different than the corridor I’d just left, except that there were no doors save the one I’d entered by. On the floor flickered a votive candle stuck onto a small white saucer. Its flame looked disproportionately large; so did my shadow, rising and falling as I stepped toward the candle. I knelt in front of it to warm my hands, then looked around.
    “It’s green,” I whispered. “A green room…”
    And it was. Not the lurid, concrete-stairwell green you might have expected to find in that place, but a soft, ferny green, dappled where the candlelight struck it, and so welcome after the Nursery’s endless black that I almost laughed out loud. I stood, went to one of the walls and touched it, half-expecting to feel the moist warmth of foliage. But no, it was just paint, cool and slick beneath my fingertips. I crossed the room lengthwise, walking slowly and running my hand along the wall. The candle gave everything an odd velvety glow, and the way my shadow leaped beside me only added to the strangeness. I felt as though I were inside one of those fairy rings that grew behind our house in Kamensic, ferns reaching high enough to form a curved green roof above my head.
    And there was a sound, too, so faint it was several minutes before I really became aware of it—a soft, steady whoosh. At first I thought someone had left a tap running in a neighboring bathroom. But when I reached the end of the room, the noise grew even louder, and I realized it was not water but the sound of wind in the leaves. Not a gentle rustling, but the restless, unrelenting toss of trees in the night.
    I cocked my head, puzzled. There were no windows, no doors save the one I’d entered by; no skylight. And it was dead winter in lower Manhattan—there were no leaves, either. Yet the sound was so persistent, and so near, that I almost imagined I could feel a cool breath upon my neck.
    It’s a movie, I thought. They’re just running a movie somewhere …
    I stood for a minute, listening, then turned. The votive candle had burned down to a nub. I was halfway across the room when I noticed something hanging on the far wall. Another painting, I thought, like that blandly weird canvas of a shoe. It was very big, so it was odd I hadn’t seen it when I came in, but unlike the other paintings I’d seen scattered around the Nursery, this one wasn’t immediately identifiable. It wasn’t a famous face, or a shoe, or a box of Cracker Jack. The edges were irregular and uneven, the colors dark swirls of brown and black and a deep, rusty red. I walked until I stood in front of it, and frowned.
    It wasn’t a painting. Or rather, it wasn’t just a painting, but an immense slab of rock, perhaps ten feet high and twice as wide. It didn’t seem to be fixed to the wall so much as protruding through it. I could see no nails or wires, nothing on the floor that might support such an enormous weight. Its surface was smooth but uneven, with patterns in it like waves, and moist. I drew my hand carefully upward, the curved rock beneath my palm like something huge and alive, the flank of a sleek horse or bull. When I reached the middle of the stone I stopped.
    There was something painted there, in colors so similar to the rock’s natural tones that I almost missed it. A figure as tall as I was, its body drawn out of proportion and its limbs all mismatched, and posed in grotesque angles. It stood upright, shoulders hunched and arms drawn up before it awkwardly. Dwarfishly foreshortened