Smalltown Kings

By Denmark Laine

Jonathan Prester, only son and heir to one of America’s wealthiest families, is left with nothing after his reclusive father dies leaving the Prester fortune in the hands of nine strangers. As Jonathan searches for answers, he discovers the role his family plays in the world’s oldest mystery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483539829

Book preview

Interlude

Kindred: A Prelude

I was born on the second Sunday in October. A child of the autumn.

I’m told it is a day most venerated among our people. The twilight of the year, the dying hour – ripe with meaning. For then, in the orchards of our mind we harvest the fruits of prophecy. Skies made of shadows, trees made of fire. The smoky-blue east whispers with jeweled embers swirling under canopies of pyramid dust, dancing leaf-strewn above rust-colored weathers. A sickle moon burning gold behind scarecrow trees, pouring her scented hauntings down their sleeping hills. The red god at his barren feast, a bouquet of wild poison berries; nature bleeds uncovering her rawer beauties.

All cultures have a grasp of its significance – the passage of the age, the subtlety of revelations wrought in fierce color and distilled from earthen elixirs. The distinctions behind life and death were said to wane thin allowing congress between the everyday and the unreal.

These are the months when young love ferments into bitter vintages of wisdom; the fertile spirits of the poet, the magician and the madman are released in its herbal embrace from enchanted elsewheres, where every light fades, every inspiration burns and the wanderer finds return to origin. This is the season of dark figures emerging from lantern woods to speak in high riddles, when all manner of soft, half-formed creatures breathe through night-fallen rains – the boy who met himself as an old man coming through the alders – the cream maiden of tears, pale robes clinging to her dripping form. And ageless beings neither substance nor dream that dwell within undying twilights are cursed to roam the ashen country and leave their memory in nightmare sheets. The Second Sunday in October has long been celebrated as the patron day of autumn. It is sacred to the wolfsbane, hemlock and nightshade. Its guardians are the crow and the fox. Its legends speak of warrior women sacrificing to a blood star, a brotherhood of the dawn hunting the dead, cannibals with silver skins and medicine men eating animal spirits.

Oh yes. I was a true son of this unholy day.

I brought the worst storm Lake Tamryn had seen in years. They say day turned to night unusually early in the day, drenching my little town in fleets of black clouds.

The thunder, some told me, sounded like the wrestling of watchful demons and the lightning stalked the sky and prowled the rooftops like living things. They say there was so much cold rain that night the creeks and sewers flooded overturning the streets into rivers and houses into stranded peninsulas. And so, under this symphony of destruction and ferocity I was ushered into the world. Fitting. That nature herself felt the same stormy passions that had led to my creation in the first place.

My father was born and raised here in Lake Tamryn, Illinois, as his father and his father’s father before him. He was a musician who in his youth ran away from home to join a gypsy caravan and was brought up among artists and vagrants. It was said that when my father played, birds would join him in song and the leaves of the trees would gather at his feet to listen. But my father was not my father.

My mother was born across the sea. As a girl she lived among the Greek Isles. She belonged to an ancient European family with a long and mysterious past. It was said that the olden ones were in their blood and that their ancestors built Atlantis and walked among the angels in the days before Eden. But this was, I suspect, their grandiose way of admitting they did not know.

They came to this country on ships when MoseEddaDina, the Matriarch, Thrice-Great Yia-yia, a woman of fiery Mediterranean spirits, fled with her children when the Ottoman invaders came to Constantinople.

Others say they came earlier than that. Before the land bridge to the Americas when the oceans were warm, before the first apes dreamed in their caves, before Plymouth knew the white man’s boot heel, my people settled in Lake Tamryn. We were waiting when the migrants came; the races who became horsemen of the Osage plains and hunters of the Chippewa rivers. The red men feared us as evil spirits and shunned the land we walked. MoseEddaDina went as emissary to the newly indigenous tribes, the mother of mothers to the fathers of stone and wood and proposed they share their sons and daughters.

All were beguiled by her unearthly charms, but most were wise enough to refuse…with a few exceptions…

My mother, Marie, was a rare beauty; an exotic flower that had bloomed in the perfumed winds and rich soils of foreign lands. She grew up in the States along with her brothers and sisters, who after long years, one by one moved out, fell in love and intermarried with the descendants of the Mayflower.

Most of us could move among them undetected. We were with them as they raised their settlements, building their log cabins, little knowing we had watched the mighty timbers they felled grow from seedlings, just as we had watched their children grow to maturity and their children’s children after them that we now took into our beds.

That’s how my mother met my father.

I was the union between their worlds.

I grew up not far from here.

The little house on Barleycorn Road; the one with red shingles. As I was the first child born to them since coming to America and represented the beginning of their second generation in this new country, I am told that countless relatives passed in and out of that house to pay their respects in a seemingly never-ending procession. Uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces and cousins by the score, all from far off places with strange names who spoke even stranger words that tasted of spiced wine and precious oils on my tongue.

Dark and beautiful they were, people from distant countries that smelled of saltwater and mountain air. Milk and honey. Frankincense and myrrh. Olive skin, hair dark as ripened figs and perfect almond eyes they came. Tangled branches of the Family tree. Many of them bestowed gifts upon me.

Uncle Julian, the Bachelor, a man who, unlike the rest of his Family, never married but entwined about himself a string of lovers that practically encircled the earth. With his purple scarf and heavy coat that always contained as many surprises as love letters, he gave me a gold pocket watch that he said would continue to tick away the hours of my life as long as my heart did the same. It was said that Uncle Julian, our resident Eros, was a magician. I was certain the Seven Wonders of the World could have easily been hidden in his pockets.

Aunt Xana and her daughters, Silence and September, as different as the sun from the moon, gave me a sweater knit by silkworms with threads of Babylonian silk.

Clothing fit for a pharaoh, she promised it would grow with me. That it would continually form and reform to my body year after year. The girls left toys in my cradle won at the St. Louis World’s Fair, and murmured songs about circus tents and crackerjack candy lights.

Cousin Gnosis, who could speak every language in the world, gave me books. Libraries full of them: books of mythology and history; books about heroes; books about monsters; books about how the universe began, books on how it would end and books on how it would begin again.

Uncle Balthazar gave me a deck of erotic Tarot cards that had belonged to Pope Joan. Aunt Ilandere; lotus flowers, which she said would give me visions. Uncle Abraxas; a golden apple. Cousin Indigo; the bone of a diplodocus. Cousin Jophiel; a splinter of wood from the spear of Longinus. Cousin Toubat; a crystal from the Pleiades. Cousin Mobius; a handful of sand from a lost continent. Cousin Peter Pi, who could not speak but was a skilled artist, painted pictures of the wonderful places he’d visited and gave me paintings of London, Paris and Byzantium. Wise old Yia-yia, MoseEddaDina, brought a pomegranate tree from her garden by the Euphrates and gave me one of the deep red fruits and told me, if I so desired, its sweet juice and tender seeds would never let me age.

She was a woman of immense grace and dignity; skin touched with desert bronze that bespoke a tang of Moorish blood, the priest-kings of Khemet, the Silk Road in the East. Her triple name evoked three lifetimes lived as one, though her true age and Christian name were the stuff of rumor and superstition even amongst the Family.

She had been known as the Black Pearl, Bronze Venus and even Creole Goddess.

Only the boldest among us dared whisper such follies as God’s Wife, the Maha-Lila and the Other Eve. The only title she ever allowed in her presence was the Nubian Madonna, and even that but once, because it made her laugh.

It was said she had once taken a lover from the Indian warriors she’d visited. The young brave had lost all will to eat or drink, only to bask in the fullness of her, the unspoken stories of her lips, the untamed landscape of her body that he explored, conquered, was conquered by.

He died of old age before she could bear him any offspring.

She wondered if our fantastique kin could be remade in lesser blood; could we night-souled wanderers from the furthest beyond interbreed with living dust?

Her adopted godsons: Jack, who always dressed in black, had explored the Carpathian mountains, gave me the skin of a white tiger as a pair of pajamas.

Nikos, who had been raised in the pillared temples of Samarkand by monks and mystics, gave me a broken lock from the Gates of Alexander. And Thomas, whom they had found at Grand Central Station, an orphaned American boy who had none of the old blood in him, gave me his bottle cap collection, ashamed he had nothing so grand to offer as the others. MoseEddaDina also gave me stories. Stories of the world when it was young. From what she told me I was aware of her extensive knowledge of the earth, its breathtaking sights and glorious histories, however she remained almost exclusively confined to her suite of rooms at the rear of our quaint country house.

She would sit in her big chair by the fire, warming her Methuselah bones, a faraway look in her alabaster eyes framed by snowy, laurel wreath hair; the smoke from her pipe curling up like incense from some pagan altar.

The first story she gave me was on my thirteenth birthday.

It was about my mother, but more importantly, it was about my father. My true father.

And how I came to be.

Yia-yia said that when they first came to these shores the Family lived on the abandoned farm in the orange hills and yellow trees of southern Illinois. A tumbledown barn and a shadowy farmhouse surrounded by endless acres of cornfields, pumpkin patches and apple orchards.

She called our hidden abode Arimathea.

Lake Tamryn had no lake then. The land was newborn.

We did not name it. The red men gave it a name as the white men renamed after them when they built a few cottages scattered like pick-up-sticks just across Ember Creek, the boundary line that separated civilization from our home. The town was first settled as a campsite for trappers and fur traders hawking their wares to westward-bound pioneers. Legend had it the lake had been formed from the tears of an Indian princess, separated from her lover, a French explorer, who left her in pursuit of the coast. She had drowned herself in a lake of tears. Some of the older residents still claim to be descendants of that chieftain’s daughter, lending the tall tale its only note of credence.

Yia-yia told me the story was, of course, an invention of male vanity.

Such are the myths that my gender have constructed to shield them from the pain of how powerless they truly are. Man is a blind bee, as she said, Born to die in the honey.

We may build the walls and write the laws, but all the while we are pawns in the dark machinery of creation. Ministers of life able to serve in its temple, but forever barred from knowing the idol we worship at its center, the holy of holies, where the goddesses sing their siren call.

Yia-yia always spoke favorably of the native peoples in general. White men she viewed with contempt and suspicion, but the aborigines were of kindred root as she called them. To this day I fail to comprehend what she meant, but it strikes me as veiled reference to the unknown origins of our Family tree, of which we are surely unique blossoms on the sapien vine.

Lake Tamryn is a sleepy community; to some the idyllic, rural hamlet of Middle America, neigh untouched by neither past nor present. To others a backwater nowhere of intolerable quietude, tucked away from the nearest highway by a forest of pine and magnolia. Around the lake is fishing and farmland mostly, but down on Main Street are the general store, city hall, a few restaurants, a laundromat, Cleo’s Tavern, novelty shops, even a strip mall and the old movie theater – proving that even among the most mundane cultures, man will always have a need for the pretend.

Surrounding the lake are gravel roads dotted with tiny houses, almost enough to be mistaken for a small suburb. A simple people flourished there who had little thought for matters outside their daily routine, who lead resigned lives of partial happiness.

My father, the musician, Andrew, was the first one brave enough to venture from the town into the forest, across Ember Creek into the unknown. He saw my mother, Marie, in the garden under Yia-yia’s pomegranate tree where she was darning her socks. He played his flute for her from the trees, courted her with his music and she was lured away from the farm and into the woods to meet him. They quickly agreed to be married. Yia-yia did not approve, but gave her blessing as she knew that to survive in this strange land they must unite with the inhabitants, pale and plain and unremarkable as they were.

On the eve before their wedding it is said that my mother was visited by a nameless stranger.

My mother recalls almost nothing of the event. Her bedroom was dark and her window was open to let in the cool, night air.

He came to her as softly as a shadow, alighted upon her, gentle as a dove. There was fire on his breath and in his touch. That is all she remembers. The heat.

Her blood boiling in her veins. Pleasure, pain – indivisible. She moved as if she were in a dream.

When she awoke the only thing to remind her of his presence were the taste of pomegranates in her mouth and the smell of resin wine on her skin.

Nine days later she was pregnant with me.

Yia-yia said the olden ones must have followed them to the New World, to watch over us and reclaim what was rightfully theirs. My mother’s beauty belonged to them.

It was their arcane blood that fostered such perfections within her. Their deep, luscious groves, divine waters and celestial winds that bred ambrosia in her flesh and nectar in her veins.

The first fruits of her womb were an offering that could not be denied. Nevertheless, my father still wed my mother and raised me as his own son. He moved his young bride and unborn child away from the Family’s farm and into town, to the house with red shingles. As I grew so did the town, so did Aunt Xana’s sweater, so did the heartbeat seconds of Uncle Julian’s watch, and so did my fears that I was somehow different from the other children in my neighborhood.

My best friend, Brent Harvest, who lived next door, would play with me in the woods from sunup to sundown: races, tag, and hide-‘n-seek. I always seemed to lose.

We met when we were children. Brent had wandered into the Family’s back orchard, where I was building a fort out of sticks and leaves. I found him sitting under an apple tree, staring wistfully up into the branches. Wish I had an apple, he sighed. Before I had a chance to explain to him that it was mid-April and the orchards weren’t in season, a big, shiny green apple fell out of the branches and landed smack in his lap. He was so delighted by this and we became so busy introducing ourselves that I must have forgotten that our orchard only grew red apple trees.

On the night of my thirteenth birthday Brent dared me to follow him across the creek and sneak out to the creepy old farmhouse that he said lay abandoned and haunted.

He double-dared me to run up to the porch and rap on the front door. I smiled.

Little did he know it was my beloved Arimathea.

I went up to the farmhouse, rapped on the door and wise old Yia-yia answered, wrapped in her withered shawl. I screamed and put up a fuss as she invited me inside and I slammed the door behind us. I explained my prank and we both laughed. That was the night she gave me the pomegranate which I ate while she told me the story of my birth.

I left that night changed. Found Brent, white as milk, who’d been telling the other kids I’d been carried off by a willow witch. I just smiled.

I had finally won a game.

Not many members of the Family ever visited the town; Gnosis found the children of Lake Tamryn inferior and uneducated and their playtime a complete bore to his more intellectual pursuits. He snubbed me for dressing like them and talking like them. He called me names like hybrid and bastard.

Jack and Nikos played only once then were never invited back again.

What began as an innocent game of war ended in setting wildfire to Mr. Marsh’s entire crop of wheat and the slaughter of the Widow Low’s prize cow. Their idea of fun was a little too bloody and brutal for even the most daring bully in our group. Everyone at school, on a number of occasions, confessed to being afraid of them. Thomas was far too shy to talk or play with anyone, even his own kind.

Only the girls, Silence and September, visited regularly.

They, unlike the rest of my Family, found the games and schooling and chores of the ordinary children quite adventurous. Silence, with her hair yellow as a haystack, contrary to her namesake was loud, boisterous and liked to rough and tumble with the boys. September, her hair black as an inkwell, was quiet and observant. She much preferred to sit and watch the other children at their games and engrossed herself in their books on reading, writing and arithmetic.

They both confided in me separately that they had both taken a liking to Brent Harvest and that they each had intentions of one day marrying him. Brent had no opinion on either of them one way or the other, except that Silence always beat him at stickball and September always giggled into her books whenever he was around. I never told him.

He had no interest in girls and no matter which one he picked the other would be heartbroken. Besides, Aunt Xana would have never approved. I did wish there was some way to spare my friend the frustration and my cousins the disappointment.

Unfortunately, pretty little September’s infatuation only grew worse with time. I found letters professing her undying affection fluttering about the woods, crackling white leaves in the late summer breeze. I heard she had locked herself away in her room and wouldn’t come out. She wasn’t eating. Aunt Xana, with her flamboyant hats always decorated in the latest Parisian styles, became seriously worried. She took me aside one day with a tray of rosemary tea and Danish butter cookies, her daughter’s favorites, and asked me to take these into her room and try to talk to her.

My sweet, sensitive cousin’s room was all dark, her curtains drawn, her dresser barricaded the door from inside. I gained access by scaling the drainpipe and coming in through her window.

Her entire bed was blanketed with paper, more love letters, and her face, fingers and elbows all smudged with ink. Her dress was damp from tears. I asked her what was the matter, though I hardly needed to.

Oh Zeno, she cried, How I wish Brent Harvest loved me!

There was no consoling her after that; she was a veritable storm of sorrow. Just as I was about to leave the way I’d come we heard a knock on the door. Go away Mother! September shouted, I told you I don’t want any supper! But the voice on the other side was not the one we’d expected.

September? It was Brent.

It was not long after that they made their intentions known; they were to be married within the year and planned to go honeymooning at Niagara Falls, as they’d heard many young people were doing nowadays.

Their wedding went perfectly save for one small discrepancy: Silence was nowhere to be found.

And her jealousy, I feared, was not soon to be forgiven nor forgotten.

The following year, when we were eighteen, Brent and I were asked by my Uncle Pymander to pick the apples in the back orchard. By far the ugliest of Yia-yia’s progeny, Uncle Pymander lived in a sweat lodge behind the orchard with his wife, a monstrously fat and ill-tempered medicine woman he ironically named Little Feather. She taught him how to make paste of herbs and roots to sharpen his virility, with which he used to chase after young girls who strayed too far from town.

We’d arrive every day after school, ready to reap the season’s bounty. We climbed trees, flew from limb to limb, threw red, ripe apples at each other and return at the end of each day, flushed and full of autumn air, carrying overflowing bushels between us.

I still think of those as the best days of my life. Would that they could have lasted.

One day while me and Brent were up a tree, dropping apples into a basket below, we happened to hear something sung loudly and off-key, coming through the trees and getting closer.

As it grew louder we recognized the tune as a dirty drinking song that the men down at Cleo’s Tavern would often belt out when they were hitting the bottle. A song that Mr. Van Doren, the schoolteacher, had told us we were not to sing under any circumstances in his, or anyone else’s presence, especially young ladies. So naturally we all knew it by heart.

Born on a mountain, raised in a cave, fightin’ and fuckin’ is all that I crave! the rowdy singer grew louder as he came closer, We’s the boys from Illinois who works in caves and ditches, beats our cocks on jagged rocks ‘cause we mean sons a’ bitches! As the intruder rounded a tree he came into view.

Russell Baines. Big Rusty, the school bully, about a foot taller than us and a least three feet wider, stomping around, hooting, hollering, raising a ruckus like he owned the place. Stealing apples. Ripping fat handfuls right off the branches, knocking more onto the ground than he could hold. He’d take a bite out of each one then toss it away, stepping on the ones that had fallen until they were mash.

Put those back! Brent shouted down at him.

Rusty looked around stupefied, searching for who had spoken with his big, dumb bovine face.

When he spotted us hidden on our perch he belted out a deliberate laugh, What, these? and held up an apple for us to see, then bit into it with a huge, sloppy crunch.

You get on outta here, Rusty! Brent hollered, You’re trespassing!

The two-times-too-big-for-his-age 12th grader, sucked the juice with an exaggerated slurping noise and grinned up at us, a wet, sticky grin, Ha! he said, spitting bits of seed, Come down here and say that, coward!

I put a hand on my friend’s shoulder, Don’t, I said quickly, He’ll get bored and go away.

But this was evidently the most amusement Rusty had all morning, so he threw away the apple core and plucked a fresh one, Come on! Get down here and face me like a man, or I’ll eat every apple you got!

At first I thought this was a mule-headed lie, but then after a second look at the size of his gut I was inclined to believe that Big Rusty could carry out that threat.

Brent looked at me sternly, You gonna let him ruin your orchard?

I parted my lips but I couldn’t come up with a thing to say. What could we do? He was bigger than us! But Brent didn’t seem to care. He wasn’t afraid as I was. I finally turned away, ashamed.

Well, I’m not gonna let him, said Brent and with that he jumped out of the tree.

Are you daft?! I shouted after him.

He landed on his hands and knees and stood to face the bigger boy.

Rusty just laughed. Squared his stance and bunched up his fists, each about the size of two apples, I’m gonna pound you ‘till cider squirts out your head! he promised.

He kept his word.

Brent fought hard as he could, he was quick and could kick and punch with the best of them, but Rusty was a good deal tougher. He might as well of been taking swings at a rock. All that big lug had to do was stay put until Brent got within arm’s reach, then clobber him with a blow that sent him flat on his back. Every time Brent got up, Rusty knocked him down again.

I couldn’t watch. My fingers clung to my branch in a death grip. I should have fought him. Should have ran for help. Something. Anything. But I couldn’t. I was so scared.

I just sat there in that tree, shaking, crying softly, until the orchard was quiet once more.

When I looked down again, Rusty was gone.

Brent was on the grass, sprawled out over a patch of russet, an apple squashed against his forehead.

I climbed down and rushed to his side. He had broken his nose, blood slobbering past his mouth, down his chin. I recall trying to speak, to ask him how he was, if there was anything I could do, by my tongue stuck in my teeth. He looked at me, all tears and blood, Goddamn him! he spluttered, Goddamn son of a bitch! Laughed at me! He’ll tell everyone…everyone at school…Travis, Sammy, Lou…they’re gonna know, they’re all gonna know how Big Rusty broke my nose! They’re gonna think I’m a pussy!

He heaved a muffled sob and wiped the blood on his sleeve. Then he said it.

He said, I wish to God I was dead.

That’s when it happened.

Brent’s eyes went big. Huge. Bullfrog huge, bulging out of his sockets. His mouth opened wide, but no sound came out.

His whole body went rigid, as if every muscle sprung tight and every limb turned to barbwire.

Then he flopped on his face, limp as a deflated balloon.

He didn’t get up. Didn’t move.

I called to him. He didn’t answer.

I pushed his arm gently. He felt cold. Not like the chill from when you’ve been outside all day, but as if he’d been stored in a icebox.

It was then I realized he was dead.

It was then I realized that I had killed him.

Whatever dark forces had been at work in me from before I was born, forces that had orchestrated every unforeseen circumstance throughout my life, had now at last played out the final note in their grotesque opus.

The olden ones sought vengeance for their people’s betrayal, for abandoning their motherland and taking up mundane lives, for tainting their primordial lineage with the weak bodies and finite minds of an insignificant subspecies of childlike beings that were, in their eyes, little better than beasts of the field.

They had cursed them all by sending them me.

I would forever be a danger to those I loved so long as I stayed.

That’s when I knew I had to run away.

That day. That instant.

I ran with the clothes on my back to the nearest bus station on the outskirts of town.

Hopped the first bus that came by, bound for Chicago.

And so…here I am.

I never returned to Lake Tamryn.

I never saw my Family again.

Though it pains me I can rest in the knowledge that at least my loneliness means they’re safe.

It is a dark world ahead of me. An empire of steel and concrete, far from the creeks and trees that I love.

A world of men that I shall never be a part of.

I refuse.

But I take solace in the gifts that remember.

Aunt Xana’s sweater still grows and Uncle Julian’s watch still ticks.

They are ever with me. In my blood. My father’s music, my mother’s smile, Yia-yia’s stories and distant taste of paradise.

And yes…even my real father, that shadow within a dream, even that strange and incomprehensible world beyond, that time before all time, the eternal darkness that moved over the surface of the deep, even this is very much a part of my being.

The western sky is on fire now. Clouds burning red and orange and purple. But it’s also still raining.

The world is split right down the middle.

Half of the horizon bathed in blinding light, the other shrouded in total darkness. Like the actual moment separating day and night.

All the while gentle rain falling in between.

The light from the sun turns it to liquid gold.

Beautiful. Perfect. Only in solitude can we find moments so pure and vivid.

I step out into it. Embracing it.

This is when I feel most whole, most at peace. Like Adam in the Garden, when God walked with him in the cool of the day. When I feel most like myself. Neither morning nor evening, good nor evil, waking or sleeping, but a third thing, a separate country, where the best of both these worlds abide.

But as Yia-yia said – God did not banish Adam from the Garden. Adam exiled God from Paradise. We are all of us still living in Eden…but because we are no longer one with the divine we know not its splendor. Yet if I could see only sunsets such as this, I would live and die content.

The Isle

Thunder brooded in the distance. Black waves gathered along the darkening horizon. On a sandy slope overlooking the ocean’s stormy surface stood a work of art in wrought iron and glass.

The Prester Beach House, a modern masterpiece of some architectural renown, was an exercise in extravagance: four stories of interlinked galleries, airy piazzas, a volley of bay windows and hanging gardens. It towered like a prismatic puzzle box over the shoreline.

On a balcony above the salt reef, a young man examined the shifting greens and grays that cut across the depths. He was of rough features, a hard jawline unshaven with dirty blonde scruff that gave him a woodsman-like quality.

Hazel eyes flecked with gold dust (the hereditary Prester greed some said) separated by the thick bridge of his nose gave the vaguest impression of a bear, while a disheveled mess of rich chestnut hair reinforced the idea of a well-traveled bachelor, likely studied abroad. A handsome-ish face to most, a body built for a coarser, more agrarian time. His strong, angular build and farmer’s tan contrasted by a fine suit coat.

He fingered the glass of brandy in his hand and considered its bittersweet aroma that lingered on his ebony jacket.

Mr. Prester?

A short, comical little man hurried through the glass French doors onto the balcony.

The young man straightened up from the wrought iron railing and turned to face their family lawyer, What is it, Trent?

Trent, a precise, busy fellow – soft mousy face, buzzed haircut, who always appeared uncomfortable in his clothes – was today draped in a faded charcoal jacket with oversized shoulder-padding too broad for his slight frame.

Sorry sir, but they-they’re waiting for you.

The younger man sighed. He turned up his collar to the cooling, humid air and strode back inside the echoing marble ballroom where the reception was being held.

Crowds of fashionably dressed men and women the colors of a storm clouded the circular chamber; parallel shades of sea and sky.

This had been his family’s summerhouse not too long ago. Its inspiration imported from the plantation homes of the Carolinas wedded with avantgarde luxury of contemporary Euro design. He’d visited once before as a child, while his parents were vacationing here in the Hamptons. Visited, but never lived in. Kept discreet by servants who silently maintained its pristine emptiness. He never felt comfortable enough to touch anything, as though he were disturbing a museum exhibit.

A long banquet table spanned the room set with a sable cloth and a feast of five star catering on antique silverware.

Waiters floated through the crowds offering trays of wines and liqueurs. Electric lights disguised as candle sconces shone from above with faint, emotionless warmth. Low voices filled the room with their steady locust murmurings.

Jonathan Prester watched them: millionaires, high-powered executives, media moguls, political figures and realized American high society hadn’t evolved much since 1913.

Ass-kissers, well-wishers, he thought.

None of them knew the man personally whose memory they’d come to honor. Few did. Edgar Prester had amassed the fortunes of several men over the course of his brief and much debated life; the bulk of which he’d inherited from his father, Hiram Woolridge Prester. He brought his son into the family business of running a chain of steel mills across most of the eastern seaboard. Old Hiram had also made a substantial profit in the gunrunning and bootleg racket of Prohibition. With it he bought up land, factories, housing developments, stadiums, hotels, casinos, women.

Along with their mounting power and influence came no small amount of fame and disrepute. The glamorous world of penthouse parties and stock market empires soon drew attention to the tangled roots and covert crimes that were its foundation.

From their position of privilege the Presters behaved like American gentry, and in that grand tradition, any excess was seen as moderation; any indulgence, above the common law whether personal or corporate and was hidden discreetly beneath the family’s financial labyrinth of legal intrigue. There was the scandal of the prostitute found dead in front of Hiram’s high rise, evidently thrown from a window on the top floor. After paying off the local police, the incident was forgotten as quickly as if he’d been accused of littering.

Edgar’s third fortune (after Hiram’s steel industry and black market) was acquired in the form of his wife, Muriel Drake, whose family owned the third largest international trade and shipping enterprise in the world. Muriel’s father, playboy freight magnate, Plato Ramses Drake, whose import-export syndicate dealt mostly in fine art and rare artifacts, was headquartered in America’s most exclusive collection of priceless heirlooms for historical connoisseurs with a discerning eye: the Drake Hill Antiquarium.

Muriel was a carefully calculated business endeavor. Their blessed matrimony was so much a transaction between the two great houses to cement their alliance. In addition to her dowry: expanding the Prester name to a global market, Mr. Drake held a handful of popular magazine and newspaper companies under his thumb, both at home and abroad, granting his newfound son-in-law subtle sway over popular opinion from politics to entertainment.

As testament to their frigid union, Edgar and Muriel performed the marital act but once, the minimum requirement to consummate their relationship. Jonathan was the unintended consequence of that isolated occurrence. According to disreputable sources, when he was a teenager Edgar had taken up an affair with the upstairs housemaid, an amateur psychic and dabbler in sex magic. It was not uncommon in those days for the boys of high society families to celebrate their coming of age by helping themselves to the help. It was this housekeeper who first introduced Edgar to the lure of the mystique and soon after he became obsessed with all subjects occult.

Edgar took up endless sojourns to the remotest corners of the earth: Prague, Varanasi, Istanbul, the Amazon, Tangier, Congo, Samarkand – studying the black arts, snake charming, transcendental meditation, Voodoo ritual and spirit mediums. He sought out training under Hindu mahatmas, Tibetan sages and Oriental magicians. However, as most muckrakers knew, he was merely avoiding his wife and their unborn child. Muriel died while bringing Jonathan into their unhappy kingdom, and Edgar either never cared or never forgave himself for missing his son’s birth and wife’s funeral.

Edgar rarely returned to the States except for the occasional meeting or brief visits to shrines and temples. He kept his economic affairs alive through overseas transfers and phoned orders. He kept his private life out of the papers through bribes and philanthropy. He funded his son’s education at Cambridge the same way: by check and from a distance. But everyone knew, toward the end of his life, Edgar began to lose interest in the family business, concerned for nothing but his esoteric studies. Rumor had it he appeared at a stockholders meeting covered in warpaint like a shaman or was caught bathing in a public fountain at midnight with witches in some devil’s ceremony. The steel mills fell into foreclosure, the shipping routes were lost to hostile takeover while Edgar himself began to court psychosis.

Jonathan waded through the deluge of fake smiles, quiet laughter, limp handshakes and empty words of condolence. One by one his guests, none of which he knew by name, made their rounds bestowing upon him every respectful cliché in the whole of the English lexicon.

Parties generally sickened him, but this was worse.

The falsehood of it all, the forced politeness and social airs and graces.

An elderly gentleman in a pinstripe suit, the picture of an old money oil baron, with a fat pearl in the middle of his necktie, told him solemnly, Sorry for your loss, Jason.

A dark man dressed like a Mafioso don with a trout’s face and gold rings on his fingers took him aside and whispered something indistinguishable. A loudmouth blonde with a model’s legs and a freckled kid with a camera tried to interview him claiming to be reporters for The Morning Star.

They were both escorted out.

An obese woman in a black veil, weeping mascara tears, actually attempted to trap him in an embrace, lamenting, Oh you poor, dear boy! He gave the public their obligatory five minutes, then retreated down a side hall that led to the private wing of the house.

It was the first time he’d visited his father’s study since his death.

An impressive library that housed tiers of shelves stocked with leather-bound volumes. Selections of modernist art adorned the walls. A bowl of pears rested on a table. It was a hidden sanctuary to write, where every chair looked like a cozy refuge to read an entire novel. The desk was a chaotic collage of notes, newspapers and poems in Latin.

He prayed the room would be empty.

Emory was there, as per usual.

Hello John-John.

Emory Elliott was the youngest looking twenty five year old Jonathan had ever known; he couldn’t believe he was a full year older than himself. Long, lanky, scarecrow frame, while his face, bright and youthful with a clumsy Rubenesque mouth, made one think of cherubic teenage altar boys slumming around CBGB’s circa 1980. His hair was black, bleached at the tips, cut short, spiky, gelled up into a fauxhawk: rebellious and chic, just like Emory.

He wore an identical suit and tie as Jonathan’s, over which he had on a waist-length, black peacoat, lending the whole ensemble a nautical theme. Not spoiling the party by reading, are you? Jonathan asked from behind. "It’s your fan club," Emory reminded him, without looking up from an illuminated manuscript.

I made my appearance, Jonathan explained, Now I’m working on a disappearance.

Your dad had quite the collection, said Emory, I had no idea he was so big into the occult.

Was he? asked Jonathan, uninterested.

Books on mysticism: Zoroaster, Blavatsky, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Rosenkreuz, Osman Spare, Levi, Crowley, Emory paced up and down the aisles, "The psychedelic drug pioneers: Burroughs, Gysin, Huxley, Pynchon, Leary. The existentialists: Jung, Sartre, Joyce, Blake, Swedenborg, Bierce, Stapledon, Chambers. Parapsychology… Eastern philosophy…the Vedas…metaphysics…mystery religions… Kabbalah… Tarot…the I Ching…astrology…numerology…"

Like ‘em? sighed Jonathan, They’re all yours, deliberately knocking a book to the floor for emphasis.

Emory had been Jonathan’s closest friend since childhood, his tutor in English Lit, and by far the more intellectually curious of the two. His friend’s offhand outburst gave him pause, Jonathan, most of these books are either rare or out-of-print. Some of them aren’t even known to be extant. The knowledge here is priceless, don’t be so quick to toss it in a rummage sale.

These books turned my dad into a recluse and finally a mental patient.

A stillness fell between them that lingered.

Jonathan swirled his brandy glass, He put all his time and money into collecting this…bullshit. Traveling. Searching for… he gave a bitter chuckle, Who knows. I don’t think anything else mattered.

That can’t be true,

Yeah? I can count on one hand how many times we spoke in my life. Without using all my fingers.

Some people have…trouble…expressing-

Spare me! Jonathan snorted, Some people are just damaged! Nothing for him to express ‘cause there was nothing of him left!

Emory stooped to pick up the book