Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02

by Witchlight (v2. 1)

  "Thanks, Nina—this is a real help. But don't you have anything on Hunter Greyson?"

  Nina waved a small fan of cards tucked between her fingers. "You know how it is—people move and don't give out changes of address." She laid the three three-by-five cards out on the table in front of Winter as if she were telling her fortune.

  The Fool. The Hanged Man. The High Priestess. For a moment the voice echoed in Winter's ears, then the moment of disorientation passed.

  Janelle and Cassilda and Ramsey. Winter took a notepad and gold Cross pencil out of her Coach bag and bent over the counter to write.

  "I was thinking of going up there today," Winter said as she wrote. "To Nuclear Lake, I mean. But after what you've said, I'm not sure I want to go alone," she added, trying hard to make it sound like a joke.

  "I'll go with you," Nina said instantly. "That is, if you—"

  "That'd be great," Winter said quickly, trying to cover the sense of relief she felt. "To tell the truth, I'm not sure my car would make it—I've got a loaner from Kelly's Garage, and—"

  Nina hooted with laughter. "Oh, that old thing! I used to call it 'no va—I was a Spanish major; it means 'no go.' I'm the one that turned it in to Dave! No, you're better off going with me, that's for sure. Look, my student aide comes in at twelve; you want to have lunch and then run up there afterward?"

  "Sure," Winter said.

  It was amazing how much nicer it was to run around a strange town when you were with someone who knew it well. In Nina Fowler's company, Winter discovered a tiny vegetarian restaurant tucked in behind Bread Alone, the bakery she'd stopped at on her first visit into town.

  The dining room of Vegetable Love was in a large open courtyard, with only the kitchen and juice bar of the restaurant indoors. The courtyard was floored in loose brick and filled with small round French cafe tables. Arching aluminum ribs and a rolled canopy answered the question of how the restaurant accommodated its patrons on rainy days, but Winter could not imagine it could be a popular place to go in the winter. She mentioned this to Nina.

  "Oh, no! It's wonderful in the winter—they put up these free-standing fireplaces in the corners and it's terrific! You'll have to come back and see."

  "Sure." If I'm still alive. Winter wondered where the conviction had sprung from that she, instead of those around her, was personally at risk. Even though she honestly felt the truth of it, her emotions seemed curiously uninvolved. She followed Nina across the crowded courtyard.

  Vegetable Love was an evident college hangout, filled with noisy oblivious students in flannel and denim and spandex; the sort of untidy, undignified crowd that usually made Winter irritable. But this time, when that knee-jerk reaction began, she forced herself to step back and view it dispassionately. There was no earthly sensible reason for this blast of withering contempt that roared through her, except to estrange her from a group of people who could not possibly be all that bad.

  As it always did. Cutting her off, isolating her from everyone who did not match an increasingly narrow set of specifications. Until, in the end, Winter would be all alone.

  Alone. Helpless.

  Was there something that wanted that? Something stalking her?

  Nina found them a table in the corner because, all tolerance and even approval aside, neither of them was interested in being stepped on by the Doc Martens that were still all the rage for the under-thirty crowd, and the tables were pretty close together.

  "Whoa! What a crush!" Nina said, sliding into her seat. "Still, I love it. Do you remember when it opened?"

  Winter felt a sudden pang of fear, which dissipated when Nina answered her own question. "But you wouldn't—sorry!—you're Class of 'eighty-two and Veg didn't open until nineteen eighty-five." With an apologetic grin, Nina devoted herself to the menu.

  Saved, Winter thought with an inward sigh, and reached for her own menu. But she couldn't go on pretending forever—not when she was surrounded daily by the reminders of how easily everyone else seemed to recall their adolescent years, moving swiftly between Then and Now through the facility of their own mental time machines.

  Maybe it would come back to her. Even now, she felt that if she held very still and didn't startle them, the memories of her college days were close enough to touch.

  Almost.

  "Are you sure this is the right way?" Winter asked nervously half an hour later. She was grateful for the impulse that had led her to invite Nina along on this expedition. If Winter had been by herself, she would almost certainly have missed the turnoff from County 4. The side-road—a few miles past the turnoff for Greyangels Road—wasn't even marked, and after about half a mile the blacktop on the one-and-a-half lane road-by-courtesy vanished altogether.

  "It's the only way," Nina said cheerfully. "I'm an amateur herbalist, so I ramble all through The Angels looking for plants—there's a shop in town that sells herbal mixtures, and Tabby's always on the lookout for suppliers—I haven't been up here since my student days, but I know the area pretty well, and this is the only road that goes down to the river. Hang on!"

  The gravel that had replaced the blacktop petered out, and the dirt road that remained became progressively more rutted. At last Nina tapped the brake a few times and shifted the car into neutral.

  "I don't want to go any further, and the lake's less than half a mile from here anyway. Why don't you go on ahead—I've got my stuff in the back; I want to look around by the car and see if I can find anything worth harvesting."

  "I don't know how long I'm going to be," Winter said reluctantly.

  "Oh, don't worry about me! I go on one of my rambles and lose all sense of time. If I'm not at the car when you get back just honk the horn a couple of times, and if I get done first I'll come look for you. Just keep an eye on the sun, though—you don't want to try to find your way back here in the dark."

  "I shouldn't be that long. I just want to take a look," Winter said. She got out of the car, grateful for the sensible Reeboks that made walking down the trail not only possible, but a pleasure. In a few moments she had rounded a bend in the trail, and Nina's Honda was lost to sight.

  It was puzzling, Winter mused as she walked along. She remembered buildings at Nuclear Lake, and Nina had said there'd been some sort of lab here. Yet the path beneath her feet was hardly more than a trail now—how had people driven to work? Nina said there wasn't any other road leading in to the Nuclear Lake property.

  She also said she hadn't been up here in years, Winter reminded herself. There must be another road in. Even if the facility had been deserted for—what? twenty years or more?—a two-laned blacktopped access road just couldn't get itself into this condition in less than a century.

  Could it?

  Just how much can I say I really know about the nature of Reality, considering everything? Winter asked herself snidely.

  And then she saw the lake.

  It was not large. The trail she'd been following swung wide around it, and, at this time of year, the water lilies that turned the quiet backwaters of the Hudson into carpets of living green were not yet in bloom; Winter could see straight to the bottom, with its round stones, occasional Coke can, and fugitive anonymous fish. It looked both peaceful and tempting, though the water was still too chilly for wading and much too chilly to swim.

  Across the lake and a little to the left of it she could see a building— the oh-so-mysterious research laboratory. Squaring her shoulders in anticipation of another hike—she was still in lousy physical shape after all that bed rest, for all that she'd used to go to the gym three times a week—Winter struck off in that direction.

  The building had looked perfectly intact from across the lake; it was built in that style common to the sixties and early seventies that made no concession to the organic reality of its surroundings, as if it were poised to leap right into some hygienic future composed entirely of brushed aluminum and Formica. But once she got closer, Winter could see that the perfection was only an illusion. The loops of
polychrome spray-paint graffiti covering every exposed surface and the drifts of liquor bottles and fast-food trash were evidence enough of that.

  She was indignant and comforted at the same time. How dare these people trespass on grounds that were so special to her? Yet if they did come here, it certainly indicated that nothing weird or harmful had claimed the place for its own.

  Winter walked closer, her memories shifting and rippling like the stones seen through lake water. Was the building a little more battered than she remembered it? Did she really remember it at all? Winter studied the sight before her carefully. The main building was two stories tall and had a long one-story wing branching off to the right. The front wall of the wing was all glass; a wall of uncurtained windows; and vines had grown across several of them. Others were broken, and Winter could see a slurry of leaves and trash on the floor inside.

  For a moment a hotter sun than this shone down on her shoulders— May, almost summer, and she and the others coming here again just as they did every week, to—

  What?

  The memory and its certainty faded, and Winter swore under her breath. If memory was personality, then hers was fading in and out like a weak radio signal.

  Enough of this. Instinct told her she'd gone inside before, so she'd go inside again now. Maybe that would trigger something more—something she could hold onto.

  The cement steps at the building's front had stood the test of time, and even the front door, though glass, was reasonably intact, with only one sunburst crack marring its integrity. Winter, pulling on it, was surprised to find that it only rattled and did not move at all.

  It was locked.

  But that's ridiculous—the five of us were in and out of here all the time. . . .

  Puzzled, she went down the stairs again and walked slowly around the building. Once there had been an apron of white quartz pebbles between the wall and the sidewalk. Now the work of many seasons had cracked and crumbled the cement paving, and storms had washed nearly all the pebbles away. Just so might all the world look, if one morning it had woken up and found that Man was gone. A brief century, a few upheavals, and no trace of humankind and its busy building would remain.

  Winter shivered and hurried around the side of the building, wondering if it had been such a bright idea to come here after all. She had to have been mistaking imagination for memory—that front door was locked, and there didn't seem to be any other way in.

  That was when she saw the other door.

  It was in the back of the building, obviously a service entrance of some sort, and when she grasped the knob and turned, to her surprise the door opened easily.

  A wave of stale, musty air rolled out. Winter wrinkled her nose, peering into the gloom. / should have brought a flashlight. But the day was bright and the building was filled with windows—there should be enough light to do a quick exploration.

  Before going in, Winter scouted about until she found a big rock to prop the door open with. She clutched another, smaller one in her hand. Just in case.

  Then she went inside.

  This had once been a storage room of some sort—there were still steel shelves—rusted now—along the walls, and a number of large storage drums in one corner. The floor beneath her feet was a concrete slab. Ahead of her was a doorway—doorless now—that led into the main part of the building.

  The carpet there looked almost new—apparently artificial miracle fibers were unpalatable to the microscopic life-forms that voraciously destroyed wool and wood, leather and linen. But the walls were water-stained, and in places the Sheetrock panels were buckling away from their supporting studs. Winter sneezed, and then sneezed again—there must be enough dust and mold floating around this air to send an allergist to test-positive heaven.

  From the back entrance Winter was able to walk straight through the building to the front, where she inspected the glass door from the other side. She still couldn't open it; the door had a key-lock dead bolt that needed a key to release it from either side. She looked through the drawers at the built-in receptionist's desk, hoping the key was there, and was surprised to find pens and paper clips and rubber bands, and wads of paper gone to gray dust—the whole building had just been locked up and left.

  But she didn't find any keys.

  Why? Why leave all the stuff in the drawers as if they'd just walked out? Maybe Nina was right. Aiaybe there was some kind of an accident here after all. Winter peered around herself and then struck off left, down the long windowed hall. A funny kind of a lab, though—it looks more like office space than research space.

  But what kind of offices would be out here in the middle of nowhere? This is Amsterdam County, for God's sake!

  Winter tried each of the doors in the hall as she passed them. Some were locked. Some opened into small bare rooms with high narrow windows at the back.

  One didn't.

  The door looked like any of the others, but when she opened it she found herself looking not into an obvious office, but into a large room with a spiral staircase in the middle leading downward, disappearing through a hole in the floor.

  "How curious, said Alice," Winter quoted to herself. It was dark at the foot of the stairs; the dimness of evening as opposed to the afternoon light above. But she thought her eyes would adjust once she got down there, and anyway, she wouldn't go far from the stairs.

  Only an idiot would go down there in the first place, Winter told herself sardonically. She grasped the rail and shook it, testing its sturdiness. Without conscious decision, she started down.

  So it was a laboratory after all. Winter stood in this unexpected basement, looking at a room illuminated by the light coming in through a line of narrow windows high on the wall. The windows were set at ground level, and weeds had done as much as dirt to diminish the amount of light that reached the room within. Down here the rank musty scent of rot, mildew, and decay was even stronger than it was on the floor above, and underneath them there was a wet mineral smell like rocks or mud or setting cement; chilly and antagonistic.

  In contrast to the receptionist's station above, everything movable down here was long gone—either removed by the original owners or stolen—but the sinks along the windowed wall and the complicated sockets drilled into the cinder block above them were as much proof that this had been some kind of laboratory as Winter needed. She took a step away from the staircase, and as her eyes adjusted, the room around her became clearer and sharper. Some kind of laboratory, long abandoned. But why?

  Her Reeboks grated on the grit underfoot. She looked down and saw, half-erased, some sort of design painted on the floor. Even after the passage of years, the remaining scraps of color were bright.

  What...?

  A circle. Someone had painted a circle on the floor—no, not exactly a circle; some sort of design . . . There was a circle inside a circle and some sort of marks between them, and inside that—

  Without thinking of what she was doing, Winter walked out into the center of the room. There were black dots spaced evenly around the outer perimeter of the painted circle, and she counted them: three, five, seven, nine . . . Not paint marks—scorch-marks, as if something had burned all the way down to the ground here.

  Candles.

  There was a sudden coppery taste in her mouth; without any transitional unease, Winter was terrified, as if some malign God had flipped a cosmic switch to plunge the world into horror. She swung around; her only thought to escape.

  There was something painted on the wall behind the staircase. She hadn't seen it before—when she'd walked away from the stairs that wall had been behind her—but against the white cinder block the dark curls and angles of the inscribed sign were glaringly plain, and the sudden, jarring sight of it struck Winter like a blow.

  "Come on, Cassie—give me that, would you?" Ramsey said, hopefully. He brandished his handful of candles and reached for the lighter. The rest of the ritual equipment was already spread out on the table behind him, and of course each of
them had brought their own wand and dagger.

  Cassilda clutched it to her chest, shaking her head and laughing at him. The motion made the wide sleeves of her tie-dyed dashiki flutter in the dim light of the battery-powered lantern.

  "Not until Grey gets here, Ramsey—you can't light them yet!"

  "So when's he getting here? He said he had a surprise for us. Oh, damn—did anybody think to bring a corkscrew?" Janelle asked in sudden alarm.

  "That's what you get for buying expensive wine," Winter said, digging through the Danish Bookbag she carried as a purse. "Grey told me—oh, here it is." She placed the folding tool in her friend's hand.

  "It wasn't expensive—it was on sale!" Janelle protested.

  "It's got a cork, doesn't it?" Ramsey said inarguably. "That makes it expensive. " The pendant he wore around his neck flashed in the lantern light. "Do you know what Grey has planned, Winter?"

  "She should—she spent last night with him," Cassilda said slyly.

  "In his DORM ROOM?" Janelle said, astounded.

  "CASSIE—!" wailed Winter in mock protest. "Can't a girl have any secrets?"

  "Only the greatest secret of all—the secret of Life Itself!" Grey's trained voice filled the room with spooky echoes, punctuated by the rhythm of his snakeskin boots as he descended the stairs. "Fellow acolytes of Nuclear Circle—"

  She fell, hard, on the top step of the staircase, feeling the edge of the iron riser gouge bloodily into her skin. Winter's hands slipped on the grit of the tile floor as she scrabbled to her feet again, fleeing without knowing why she ran.

  How could she have forgotten—how could she have been stupid enough to forget? And now it was almost too late—there was danger, terrible danger, she had to HURRY—

  No! Winter careened into a wall and pulled herself up with an effort. Her entire body shuddered with the struggle to remain still, to stay where she was when she could see the red border of madness looming in her path.