—and encountered a rejection so emphatic it made her psychic teeth hurt. She tried to force words past that barrier—any words—and was as helpless as any stutterer to produce articulate speech. She shook her head helplessly, coughing.
"Well, never mind that now," Truth said in that same easy casual way. She got out of the car, shut the door, and locked it carefully. "Not that I expect much in the way of human vandals up here," she said in response to Winter's unvoiced question, "but there isn't a lot left of the inside of a car once raccoons get into it, either. Now, do you want to show me where the trouble was?"
"Where the trouble was." What an admirably neutral way of putting it, Winter thought—but, it seemed, Truth Jourdemayne really was used to this sort of thing.
"Do you have a flashlight?" Winter asked. "There's something else here that I want to show you, too."
"My," Truth said, shining her light on the sigil on the basement wall. Whether it was the company or the fact that this time it didn't come as a surprise, Winter no longer had the same sense of shocky horror she'd felt the first time she'd seen it. Of course, the fact that she was almost too tired even to stand under her own power might have contributed to her apathy.
Seen by the flashlight's bright glare, the musty basement was only that—a basement laboratory, abandoned for unknown reasons and appropriated years later by students and squirrels. Harmless.
Truth shone the light on the floor. The scuffed and faded design painted there jumped out in once-bright primary colors—yellow, red, blue. "You painted this?" she asked.
"We all worked on it," Winter said, slowly, testing her newborn memories. "Janelle laid it out—she was the Art major—but she was following a design in a book that somebody had. I don't remember."
"And when it was done?" Truth asked, a new note of sharpness in her voice.
Winter shrugged, helpless to answer.
"Were you Sealed to the Circle? How far did you get on Smoothing the Path? Who was your Gatekeeper?"
"Path? Gatekeeper?" Something out of Winter's recent reading surfaced to blend with her recovered memories. "But that's—"
"The Blackburn Work," Truth finished for her, a grim new note of worry in her voice. "So if it's true that you and your friends were responsible for putting this here, then the five of you were about my father's business. And it's nothing for amateurs to meddle in."
"You don't really believe in that stuff," Winter asked hesitantly, once they were outside again. The sun was setting, and the last rays through the trees gilded everything they touched.
"A savage place, as holy and enchanted, as—" Oh, damn, I can't remember the rest of it. But that was a normal sort of forgetting, Winter knew. The sort everyone did.
"It all depends, I suppose," Truth said, "on how you define belief. Do you believe in chairs?"
"Of course I do!" Winter said, mystified. "I see them every day."
"The semanticist would argue that you didn't 'believe' in chairs, at all then—belief, after all, implies an element of faith, and faith isn't necessary when you have the physical object available to you on a moment's notice, now, is it?"
Why are we having this conversation? Winter wondered, but dutifully asked, as she supposed she was meant to, "But what about people who believe in God?"
"For every person who says they 'believe' in God, I can show you one who says they 'know' God—or Goddess, if you prefer, and I know whose integrity I'd rather place my faith in. Now," Truth said, briskly changing the subject, "can you tell me about where you were when you first saw the lake boil?"
To Winter's relief, it looked as though they weren't going to discuss Thorne Blackburn or his voodoo logic anymore. She didn't know if she could handle it, especially now that she began to suspect that Truth believed that nonsense, too. "What is Truth? said jesting Pilate." "Here," Winter said. She stepped into the place on the walkway where she'd stood to look back at the lake, but even to her strained nerves there remained no sense of menace.
She watched as Truth opened her shoulder bag—a Coach bag even more enormous than Winter's—and took out what Winter first thought was a necklace.
It was a length of bright silver chain almost three feet long. There was a large ring at one end and at the other, a cone-shaped pendulum of quartz or glass, big and heavy enough to pull the chain straight without jouncing. Winter remembered seeing much smaller versions of this in the glass case at Tabitha Whitfield's store. "What are you—?"
"Quiet now," Truth said gently. "It's a pendulum, and I just need a moment or two without distraction."
Winter watched as Truth stretched out her arm until the pendulum hung straight down from the end of it. The chain swayed slowly back and forth, the quartz weight at the end gathering sunlight and distilling it into small flashes of gold. As Winter stared at it, fascinated, the pendulum settled and became perfectly still.
She glanced at Truth. Truth was standing with her eyes closed, breathing slowly and deeply, her face relaxed.
The pendulum began to move—slowly at first, and then faster, until it was describing an agitated elliptical orbit. It seemed as if Truth must be swinging it, or at least moving her wrist, but as far as Winter could tell, Truth hadn't moved at all.
Pendulum power. Is this what I'm reduced to believing in?
But dowsing—which could use a pendulum such as this as well as the more familiar copper-sheathed rod—was something, Winter knew from her reading, that even multimillion-dollar oil companies relied on to save themselves the expense of fruitless drilling. It was a legitimate—though inexplicable—method of gaining information.
Slowly the pendulum settled to a stop again. Truth opened her eyes.
"What was here—and after seeing that basement I'm inclined to think that something was—isn't here now, Winter."
"But you believe that it was here before?" Winter asked. You said I wasn't crazy—do you still think so? It was true that she didn't feel crazy— or even afraid. What she did feel was a faint but nagging sense of urgency—a sense of some unrealized omission, and that the time in which it would be possible to make amends was drawing to an end.
Truth hesitated, watching her. "You know that you fit many of the protocols for the identification of the adult poltergeist, so I'm inclined to believe that the phenomena you're reporting center on you rather than upon a specific location."
"What do you mean? Are you saying that thing wasn't here? I saw it, Truth," Winter said, trying to keep the pleading out of her voice.
"But you might have brought it with you," Truth said compassionately, "even though it doesn't seem to be anything like what you've described as happening before. But if in fact it isn't, as you say, something which comes from you, that leaves—if you'll allow me to theorize in advance of my data—the possibility that your—for lack of a better term— psychic locus is 'charging up' any potential manifestation it comes near. So you both could and could not be responsible for the phenomenon at the same time."
"Like plugging the battery into the Energizer Bunny," Winter said slowly. "You mean that something like that monster in the lake couldn't happen until I came along?"
"Something like that." Truth chewed upon her lower lip, brooding. "But—" she broke off, as if she'd been about to say more. "First let's try to find out definitely what's plaguing you before we decide what to do about it—although I think we can rule out insanity for the time being. And now, let's go home. There isn't much more we can do here."
Much to Winter's surprise, she found that "home" was literally what Truth meant. Over Winter's admittedly feeble protests, she was borne off to Truth's tidy two-bedroom bungalow just outside of Glastonbury, where she was put to work washing and slicing greens for a salad while Dylan Palmer tended both the pot of what he claimed was "killer spaghetti sauce" and the loaves of homemade bread baking in the oven.
The moment she'd crossed Truth's threshold Winter had felt an overwhelming sense of sanctuary, and now, sitting in the cheerful red-and-white kitch
en with the mound of scrubbed vegetables before her, it was all she could do to keep her eyes open.
"Is it the hour or the company, Winter?" Dr. Palmer's voice was gently amused.
Rousing with a start, Winter realized she had been all but dozing, her chin upon her chest. Reflexively, she opened her eyes wide.
"Oh, don't tease, Dyl, she's had an awful day. Winter, why don't you go lie down for a half hour or so before dinner—otherwise, I think you're going to end up facedown in the main dish."
The chance to lie down, to sleep, was sweetly tempting—Winter could not imagine having nightmares in this house. "The salad—" she protested automatically.
"Has been duly scrubbed, and you've done most of the chopping. I can finish up—it will let me contribute more to making dinner in my own house than boiling the water for the vermicelli," Truth said.
"Well if you think—"
"I do. Come on." Truth took Winter by the elbow and led her, un-protesting, off to the bedroom.
The bedroom was spartan and simple, with a single bed covered by a white candlewick spread flanked by Shaker reproduction night tables. The room's severity was softened by the braided rug on the floor and the wealth of framed photographs on the wall.
"Just make yourself comfortable," Truth told her generously. "There's a bathroom through there that should have anything you need."
But after Truth had left, it was the photographs, and not the bed, that drew Winter.
Some of the pictures she recognized from reading that book Venus Afflicted. Here was Thorne Blackburn, dressed for some New Age Shriners' convention. There, a photo of the same man in the casual dress of thirty years before, swinging a small child up over his head. There were other pictures—a dark-haired woman with long, wild tresses; an older woman with short-clipped graying hair. There was one of Dylan, standing in front of a Gbostbusters poster and waving a vacuum-cleaner hose, with a manic expression on his face.
Friends. Family. And the love and caring in those frozen images made Winter curiously uneasy, as though they presented a threat—or a vital clue to a riddle she must solve.
She turned away from them and stretched out on the bed.
"She reminds me of Light," Truth said, coming back into the kitchen a few moments later.
"She's nothing like her, you know," Dylan pointed out reasonably.
"She's a psychic in danger," Truth said inarguably, "and, if this is poltergeist activity, all I can say is that atypical doesn't begin to describe it. I'd almost be happier to see her setting fires—and you know how troublesome pyrokinesis can be to channel and control. But that's not the worst of it—did you know that she was part of a working Circle when she was at college here?"
Dylan turned to stare, giving Truth the full benefit of his attention, his lips pursed in a soundless whistle. "A Blackburn Circle? Are you sure?"
"They'd been working in the basement of the abandoned building out there—an uncontrolled, unsecured site—I saw the North Gate sigil on the wall and somebody'd done a pretty good job of painting the marks for Laying the Floor of the Temple. They probably just walked off and left it when they were through playing; I'd better go out there as soon as I can and close it down completely.
"Stupid kids!" Truth burst out. "How could they? Playing about with forces they have no comprehension of—and then surprised when the Unseen gives them a good swift kick in the—"
"Now, now—is this the same woman who only about a year ago was telling me that my ghosthunting was only an excuse to cater to my obviously delusional megalomania?"
Truth's cheeks turned pink. "It's a good thing I've got you around to yank me down off my high horse," she said meekly. "But at Taghkanic, of all places."
"Of all places," Dylan agreed. "And Hunter Greyson was on the para-psych track—he should definitely have known better than to go fooling around like that. Remember the 'Philip' experiments in Toronto back in the seventies? The group generation of psi phenomena, including RSPK? Colin would have pinned his ears back if he'd known—Grey was in his Occult Psychology seminar in his senior year. Come to that, so was Winter. I've been doing some checking," he added in explanation.
"Hunter Greyson? Winter didn't mention him," Truth said, frowning.
"She's very cagey about letting on what she actually remembers and what she doesn't, have you noticed? It isn't normal to have memory gaps like that—not without organic trauma or at least a history of drug abuse," Dylan said.
"Or physical abuse," Truth suggested. "Repressed memory—"
"—will mask single isolated incidents for which there is no corroborative reinforcement, not the kind of ongoing abuse that someone would need to just drop four years of their life. Besides, she was living on campus, and you know how closely the faculty, proctors, and student services watch those kids. If she'd exhibited anything like an abuse pattern then, they'd have spotted it," Dylan said firmly.
Truth reached for the uncorked bottle, and Dylan moved to intercept her and pour the wine himself. Truth smiled at him over her glass.
"It sounds like you've done your homework on Winter Musgrave," she acknowledged. "Should I be jealous? And you never did tell me who Hunter Greyson is."
"Hunter Greyson's file is missing from the admissions office, but most of the faculty still remember him—Professor Rhys even suggested that Grey'd stolen his own file; apparently he was known for pranks like that. Winter Musgrave and Hunter Greyson were quite the item their senior year, and with three other students had quite a close-knit little clique. They ran twenty percent over baseline in group telepathy experiments— those records are still in the file over at the Institute."
"I'd like to see them," Truth said soberly. "I bet Winter would, too."
"I'd think twice about showing them to her—at least until I found out what she remembers—and why she can't remember the rest," Dylan said.
"Maybe you're right," Truth said, unconvinced. "I just get the feeling . . ." She paused for a moment, then went on. "That there's something she needs to do, and not much time left for her to do it in."
Winter had been sure she wouldn't sleep, but to her surprise, Truth actually had to shake her to awaken her, and when she did, Winter found she'd slept for almost two hours.
"Don't look so tragic!" Truth teased. "Dylan says the sauce could use the extra time, and since I'm usually up at the lab half the night, I'm more used to late dinners than early ones, and so is Dylan."
Winter regarded her dubiously, her mind awash with suspicion and reflexive guilt.
But why? She frowned. It was almost as if she were split into two people inside herself—one with a rational response to events, the other determined to assign blame for everything, usually to herself.
"All right," Winter said with an effort. If there's any blame to assign here, it's Truth's, not mine. She's the one who knows when she wants to eat dinner. "Just let me wash my face and I'll be right with you." I'm not responsible for the entire world, after all.
That defiant vow actually seemed to have some effect; the beclouding guilt receded, and Winter found that without its choking presence her grasp of those newly won memories that she'd tested today was stronger— vague and wavery still, like something seen through heat-haze, but persisting even in the face of that inner voice's disapproval.
Those people were real. Her past was real—and if the past, as everyone always said, was a foreign country, then she'd just gotten her passport back.
It only remained to make use of it.
Winter found herself eating with real appetite—and dinner, she told her inner censor fiercely, certainly didn't seem to have been ruined by any delay. The pasta was tender, the sauce was savory and filled with meat, and the bread was still warm, with a chewy golden crust and soft white interior. They did not talk about Nuclear Lake or its monster through most of the meal, but toward the end, when the pasta had been removed and the salad bowl set out, Winter broached the subject to Truth again.
"You said—at the lake�
��that there was a way to find out what's really causing all this," she said to Truth.
Truth hesitated. "There are some things I can try that I didn't mention before," she said, sounding faintly reluctant. "Knowing that you've been involved with the Blackburn Work . . . That changes things."
The Blackburn Work. All Winter really knew about it was what she'd read in the book about Truth's father—that and a confused memory of shadows in candlelight, music and incense. . . .
And Hunter Greyson.
"Is— Was— Was Grey a Satanist, then?" Winter asked hesitantly. "Those drawings ..."
"The Blackburn Work isn't Satanism," Truth corrected her firmly, "any more than astrophysics is. Thorne—my father—created it—drawing on older sources—to be a way of knowing; a way of gathering information from the universe. Of course, it has its risks, but everything does—from climbing Mount Everest to crossing the street."
"It isn't that far from gathering knowledge to gathering power," Dylan said, glancing meaningfully at Truth. "As you well know."
"And I think I would have noticed if that were so, even after all this time," Truth shot back. "Anywhere there is faith, there is a danger of its perversion."
"You're saying you're a psychic," Winter said, her voice quivery as she attempted to keep disapproval out of it.
"It's just as foolish to say you're not when you are, as to say you are when you're not," Truth said pragmatically. "And haven't you had enough proof that psychism is real?"
Winter flinched inwardly. "I'm just . . . crazy," she said defiantly. "All this—it's coincidence, nothing more. Really."
"You're not crazy," Truth contradicted determinedly. "And you don't really want to be, do you? You're not making things up just to get attention, as so many so-called psychic sensitives do. But that is what you are—a psychic sensitive. You're having your life invaded by a change you aren't ready for—a psychic change; and just as a physical growth spurt will cause aches and pains and make a person clumsy for a while until she adjusts, you're having problems."
"Problems!" Winter exploded, thinking of the pathetic corpses of birds and squirrels she'd found on her doorstep and in her house. Was it better to think they were her fault—or that they were not?
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