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deepened Kern’s friendship with my father. After his drug imbroglio, it was Kern who recommended my father for the part of Uncle Cosmo on Tales from the Bar Sinister. There wasn’t exactly a lot of competition for the role—a few unknowns, a former kiddie-show host on the skids and an ailing Vincent Price clone. But my father threw himself into the audition with his usual brio and walked out of the casting director’s office with a new job. He was sober by then, eager for work, and his devotion to Kern—always intense—became positively slavish. My mother used to laugh and say that the only thing my father wouldn’t do for Axel Kern was promise him his only child. Of course, she was wrong about that.

2. Some of These Things First
…on the first day Bumpy took me on a rapid tour of the nearest village of any size…
    FREDERICK EXLEY, A FAN’S NOTES
    T HE MOST IMPORTANT THING you have to understand is that we lived in a haunted place. A town that over the centuries had survived death by fire, water, wind; a town that endured—and not only the town itself, you see, but everyone who lived in it. The village was founded in 1627 as a far-flung remnant of the old Dutch colony of New Netherland. The oldest houses—stem fieldstone dwellings with steeply pitched roofs and gables—dated from twenty years later, but there were ruins of older houses still, wooden buildings burned to the ground by the Tankiteke Indians in retaliation for the slaughter of an entire Indian village. In the late 1700s the town was burned again, by the British General Eustis “Bloodjack” Warrenton, a convert to Jansenism who met an unhappy fate—murdered by Polly Twomey, a former tragedienne (her Ariadne in The Rival Sisters was rumored to be superior to Mrs. Siddons’s) and singer of bawdy songs, well known to be a witch. Warrenton’s mutilated body was found by his aide-de-camp in the woods outside of town. Cat-a-mountain, the villagers blandly insisted, what do you think? But those with Tory sympathies knew it was the witch.
    A century later the White Hurricane of 1873 left the woods along the Muscanth River as desolate as though they had been struck by a meteor. The forest scarcely had a chance to regenerate when in 1907 it was drowned, the Muscanth dammed to form a reservoir that would provide water for the great city to the south. Most people moved their houses, by horse and oxen—you can see the photographs in the Constance Charterbury Library and the Kamensic Village Courthouse (now a museum, Open Weekends)—but some refused. Their homes lie there still beneath the green murky waters of Lake Muscanth, alongside rusted-out refrigerators and doomed autos and a few unclaimed corpses.
    Through the centuries, high above it all stood the strange grand mansion known as Bolerium, its mottled granite walls so covered with moss and lichen they were nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding stones, its turrets and gables and cupolas thrusting from its walls as though carven from the mountainside itself. Bolerium seemed not so much separate from Kamensic as some marvel given birth by the town, phantasm or prodigy or portent. Its whorled-glass windows gazed down upon the lake’s deceptively placid dark surface as though dreaming of itself.
    Bolerium was the oldest building in Kamensic. Legend had it that when the Dutch settlers arrived, the mansion was already there, torchlight guttering behind its thick panes and shadowy figures moving slowly through its corridors. This was absurd, of course. It would have taken years, decades, even, to build such a mammoth structure.
    What was known about the house was that its granite blocks were not native to New York State, or even to the New World. During the Victorian era Owen Schelling, founder of Schelling’s Market and an amateur geologist, determined that the building material came from the Penwith peninsula, on the westernmost tip of Cornwall. And because of an unusual variation in the stones,