Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02

by Witchlight (v2. 1)

  "Welcome to the glamour world of statistical parapsychology," Truth said dryly. Dr. Palmer handed a second cup of the mixture to Winter.

  "What is it?" Winter said.

  "First aid for psychics: It's sweet wine mixed half and half with raw honey," Dr. Palmer said. "The alcohol shuts down the psychic centers and the sugar replaces energy."

  "It's horrible," Truth added dolefully, and Winter, dutifully drinking her cupful down, had to agree: The mixture was gaggingly sweet, and the wine probably came out of a screw-top bottle. But she felt better after drinking it and she could see that Truth, drinking a second cup more slowly, did, too. Slowly the jangled, exposed-nerve sensation that seemed to hang in the very air faded.

  "Okay," Truth said a few minutes later. "What happened here tonight. Dylan?" She seemed to have stopped bleeding, and, looking closely, Winter could not see where the blood could have come from, though there were still dried smears of it on Truth's hands and mouth. Though the sight should have terrified, or at least revolted, her, Winter remained curiously unaffected, as dispassionate as if she were merely a surgeon watching a new procedure being demonstrated.

  Was this what she had been once, in her college days? Someone like Truth?

  "I lowered the cage and powered it up," Dr. Palmer said, in answer to Truth's prompting. "Winter was sitting in the chair, you were walking clockwise around the inside perimeter of your circle." He stopped, frowning, and thought hard. "You walked around a second time—oh, the usual gestures and so on," he added, and Truth snorted affectionately, "and then the circuit breakers all blew and you told me to go get the power back up."

  Winter started to protest, but Truth shushed her with a raised hand. "And then?" Truth said.

  "I think I was downstairs about five minutes—I flipped the circuit breakers but nothing came back up, and it took me a couple of tries to get the backup generator started. When I got back up here, you were on the floor and Winter was standing; the chair had been knocked over."

  Winter, surprised, looked back toward the circle. The chair was indeed lying on its back, though she didn't remember it falling over. She shivered; the laboratory suddenly seemed very cold.

  "What about the equipment?" Truth asked, wiping her mouth again before taking another drink.

  Dylan shrugged and laughed shortly. "Let's see what we get. The poly-barometer didn't even know there was a storm going on outside, so it's probably a wash."

  "And you didn't see anything?" Truth went on. Winter envied the other woman her composure.

  "Other than the basement?" Dr. Palmer asked jokingly. "I'm not really sure. Phenomena consistent with a Class Two haunting—the railway-train sound, coldness, vertigo, disorientation. Other than that? I don't even know what I think I saw." He shrugged.

  "What about you, Winter?" Truth asked.

  Winter steeled herself. There was more than one time and place and way to oppose all that the serpent stood for, now that she had seen her enemy clearly at last. "I'm not sure about the right words to use for this sort of thing. I remember Dr. Palmer turning on the cage—I don't remember hearing you tell him to turn the lights back on, though. You did whatever you did with the four candles and the animals—" Only belatedly did Winter realize that she couldn't have seen all that she thought she had.

  The red pillar was directly behind her—and how did she know it was red? The candles in all four of the holders had been white.

  "And then?" Truth prompted. "Don't worry if what you think you saw happen sounds impossible—"

  "It did happen," Winter said stubbornly. "But it sounds so stupid—I watched you draw pictures in the air and throw them into the pillars— there were pillars—and I— And something— I knew you shouldn't call it, but it was too late, and everything went out."

  "It sure did," Dylan said. He walked back to the circle, stooped, and held up a dinner plate—sized splodge of wax and silver. "I think you're going to have to get these recast, darling."

  "Later, Dylan," Truth said briefly. "Do you remember anything after that, Winter?"

  "You told me not to help it," Winter said, slowly, "and I realized that part of its power came from me—that you couldn't keep it out while I was inside the circle."

  "Something I should have thought of myself," Truth said ruefully. "And after I'd gone and said that you'd be safe, too."

  Winter shook her head; the danger hadn't been Truth's fault, but hers—and Truth had paid in full measure for any rash promises she might have made.

  "It hated ... it was hate." Unconsciously Winter put her hand over her heart, as if denying expression to something still inside her. "But I don't think it wanted to kill me." Not kill, no, but something far worse, for when the mind, the self is gone, what can it matter that the body still lives?

  "No," Truth said. "It wasn't here to kill. There was something else it wanted from you." She took a deep breath. "I can't do what I said I could, Winter; I'm sorry. I could try to call it again—"

  "No," Winter and Dylan said in unison.

  "—but I think I'd have even worse luck than I did this time, even ready for it. I was expecting a doppelganger or one of the Lesser Elemen-tals. . . ." Truth's voice trailed off; she seemed to be looking inward. "What I can't understand is how; that Circle was broken fifteen years ago—"

  "Sweetheart, you aren't making a lot of sense," Dylan said.

  Truth ran a hand through her short dark hair and winced as if her hands still hurt, unmarked though they were.

  "All magical systems have a signature—like an artist's style: Wiccan, Christian, Rosicrucian, Golden Dawn; each leaves its own distinctive mark on the magic it makes. For someone very familiar with a particular school of magic, even the lodge—or coven—using the system can be told; sort of like telling Picasso's blue period from his late period, and so on.

  "Well, it's no secret to anyone that I know a good bit about the Blackburn Work, and the damnedest thing . . ." Truth's voice trailed off again, and Winter saw her rouse herself, making an effort to say something that would make sense to them.

  "What came to me tonight wasn't a true Elemental at all. It was an artificial Elemental—what some schools call a magickal child—something created out of a magician's life force, and sent to perform a task somewhere its creator can't or won't go. They're easy enough to create; this one was created by someone trained in the Blackburn Work and sent to Winter, and since she'd worked in a Blackburn Circle I thought she might know who ..."

  "A magician!" Winter burst out in disbelief. "I don't know any magicians—and I don't want to, either!"

  "Well a magician knows you," Truth said shortly, "and if I were you I'd find out who it is, and what he wants."

  "Can't you just—well—make it go away?" Winter begged, hating herself for asking, when the first attempt to help had nearly killed Truth.

  Truth shook her head, and Dylan put a comforting arm around her shoulder. "It's always going to come back. Throwing up a barrier powerful enough to keep it away from you would probably kill you, and would certainly kill me—Blackburn magic is tied to the living world and needs life to power it. Living energy. Sometimes even blood."

  "Which is why it keeps killing things," Winter guessed despairingly. And why Truth's hands and mouth had bled.

  "It's using the power generated by those deaths to stay in the realm of manifestation—the earth-plane—the world," Truth said. "The fact that it's taking larger and larger lives at increasingly frequent intervals worries me; it must need the power for something—but what is it doing with it? So far it's only attacked wild animals, but if it tries for humans, for children—or pets, domestic animals linked to humankind ..." Truth was almost mumbling now, keeping her eyes open by an effort of will that Winter could recognize.

  "You've got to get some rest," Dr. Palmer urged. "I'll take both of you back to my place and then come back and clean up here."

  Only now did Winter take a good look around the laboratory. Every flat surface glittered with broken gl
ass from the shattered windows, giving the entire lab a grotesque Christmas-card sparkle. If the chairs she and Truth sat in had been anywhere near a window, they too would have been covered with broken glass.

  "Winter, will you stay with her?" Truth made an annoyed sound but Dylan continued. "I've got a guest bedroom, and I don't really want to think of either of you alone tonight."

  Dylan Palmer owned an old white-painted wood frame house on a quiet residential street in Glastonbury. It was a part of town that Winter could tell had been open fields not so many years ago, and the old farmhouse looked faintly out of place among the modern tract housing. Winter had gone along with Dr. Palmer's insistence that she accompany Truth— more for Truth's sake than her own—but after Truth was settled and sleeping and he had driven back to the Institute, Winter went out onto the porch and sat on the railing, staring out into the night.

  What did it all mean? The unanswerable vagueness of the question made her smile ruefully. Where to begin? Was the beginning the place where her life had stopped with a crash—or after that? When she'd decided to seek out her own truths—or when she realized what they were?

  It's in me. Not the power that had nearly killed both her and Truth tonight—and which would kill her if she could not manage to accept its unbelievable reality—but the other. The force that stopped watches and drained car batteries and knocked pictures off of the mantelpiece. That was part of her—the part that called to the—what was it Truth had called it?—that called to the magickal child.

  Winter held her hand out, palm up, and regarded it dubiously. She tried not to care that she might be on her way to becoming a deluded spoon-bending crank—no, that wasn't right. She wasn't deluded, and what she had to try not to care about was suddenly being forced to live in a world where this sort of unreasonable fairy tale was real. Where telepathy coexisted with magic, where invisible entities could walk through walls, where the faint electrical pulses of the human nervous system could become lightning powerful enough to ...

  To blow out a car's electrical system, at the very least. Poor Nina—that was my fault. I hope I can find some way to make her let me pay for it. . . .

  Thinking this way was stupid, a reptilian inner voice assured her. It was magical thinking—megalomania—disassociative delusional conditions characteristic of the borderline schizophrenic state. Believing in these intangible things was not normal. It was not healthy. It was not sane.

  Then I won't be sane, Winter decided with despairing clarity. / can't afford to be. The price is too high.

  Clinging to the safety of what she had always believed would only free the hatred that lived beneath her skin to do as it pleased. In order to make a conscious choice to stop it, she had to believe in the serpent, and if she believed in it, she had to believe in everything its existence implied: that an unseen world existed side-by-side with their own, where Grey Angels walked the Taconic hills and ghost ships sailed the Hudson. That in that world, things like telepathy and poltergeists were real.

  "Choose," Winter told herself. And don't snivel about it afterward. And don't look back.

  Believe.

  Believe as she had once, when she was a girl on the threshold of life, and anything had seemed possible. Before she had known that all the possibilities dangled before her eyes led only to grief and disappointment.

  Winter sighed and stretched, rising to her feet. She walked back inside the house and went into the bedroom where Truth lay sleeping in Dylan's bed, dark smudges of exhaustion like moth-wings under her eyes.

  / cannot disbelieve, Winter told herself. If this is madness—delusion—hypocritical self-indulgence—then so be it. I think I've come about as far as rationality can take me.

  And I think I know where I have to go next.

  Satisfied that Truth would sleep on uninterrupted, Winter called for a cab to take her back to her car and took the time to scribble a note to Dr. Palmer. She knew he hadn't wanted her to be alone tonight, but she wondered if he'd really understood what Truth had said: that this magickal child was coming for her.

  Why?

  That was the question everyone ought to be asking, Winter thought as she waited on the steps for the cab. Assume magic, assume magicians—if that was what they were called—why would a magician be sending monsters after her?

  "If he wanted to send a message, why didn't he just use Western Union?" she asked herself crossly, just as the cab pulled up.

  Winter paid the cab off in the college parking lot—her new Saturn was in guest parking, and Dr. Palmer would be using the faculty section, so there was little danger of running into him. Winter didn't know how long it would take him to clean up the lab—considering the mess it had been in, she wondered how he thought he could possibly do it alone— but she was fairly sure that clean-up efforts would keep him busy for a few hours, and she could be home at Greyangels before he knew she was gone. But Winter stood in the empty parking lot after the cab had driven away, making no move to unlock her car and go.

  It was close to midnight; the spring night was chilly and she was glad for the warmth of her wool-lined Burberry trench coat. Only the hiss of the wind through the pines and the reproachful wail of a northbound freight train on the other side of the river broke the silence. How long had it been since she had stood anywhere like this, relaxed and open to the world around her? For as long as Winter could remember she'd been running—running to get somewhere, running to stay in the same place. Even her fun had been frenetic—weekend jaunts to London, to L.A., to wherever there had been people and noise and parties that had in themselves been another form of war.

  How long since she had questioned why she ran—in the rat race, where the rats were winning?

  It always kept coming back to "Why?"

  Why was the magickal child after her?

  —no, go farther back—

  Why had she left Fall River?

  —farther back—

  What had put her in Fall River in the first place?

  —farther still—

  Why had she chosen the work she had?

  Close, now, but not there yet. . .

  What had made her do it? What had turned that girl into the woman Winter Musgrave was now? It was more than just time and growing up; there was something . . . not right here.

  She wanted answers. She wanted reasons. She wanted her friends, her past, her life back. Her real life.

  And she was going to get them.

  A sense of relief, of triumph—of guessing the answer that could not be revealed to the riddle that must be solved—sent a surge of pleasure through Winter's weary body. She pulled her coat more firmly around her and fitted her key to the car door's lock. She got in, and tensed for a moment as she turned the key in the ignition, but whatever vengeful power she possessed was quiescent now, and the Saturn started smoothly. Winter turned out of the college parking lot, heading down Leyden Road to Glastonbury, and from there to home.

  The farmhouse felt more welcoming than it ever had before—if this was a delusion it was a benign one—and despite the amazing horrors of the night Winter opened her front door without fear. For the first time in longer than she liked to remember, Winter did not feel thwarted at every step in her attempts to accomplish even the simplest tasks. She put water on for tea—she hadn't been back to Inquire Within yet, so it would have to be chamomile—stoked the woodstove in the bedroom, and laid a new fire in the parlor, all the time thinking of what she must do now.

  Truth had seemed to think that the Blackburn Work had something to do with the magickal child's existence, and the fact that Winter had— so evidence if not memory told her—dabbled in the Work in college seemed to mean something important to Truth as well. She had said that the creature stalking Winter was the creation of a magician, and one trained in the Blackburn Work at that. But Hunter Greyson—if Winter stretched a point nearly to breaking—was the only magician she knew. Why would Grey do something like that?

  For that matter, where was Gre
y, and what was he doing? Nina had been able to find everyone from Winter's college days but him—and how could Winter have lost touch with him so thoroughly if they were as close as her memories hinted and Professor Rhys had implied?

  What happened?

  She kept coming back to that question, Winter realized. What happened, and when had it happened? And, as she'd realized earlier this night, the stakes were too high now to worry about looking foolish when she asked it. She must find Grey, find the others, find herself, find the answer to the monstrous riddle of the dark and bloody creature that stalked her.

  Before it was too late.

  I'm running out of time, Winter thought desperately. Won't someone tell me what's going on before it's too late?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE WINTER CARNIVAL

  In spite of all their friends could say, On a winter's morn, on a stormy day, In a Sieve they went to sea!

  — EDWARD LEAR

  IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON WHEN WINTER TURNED HER new Saturn down the dead-end street in the working-class New Jersey suburb where Janelle Baker lived. Why every single house in this development has to look the same I'm sure I don't know—and if they DO have to, why don't they make the house numbers bigger? It would also help if there weren't both a Medmenham Drive and a Medmenham Lane in the development. Winter checked her jotted notes for the twentieth time since turning off the main road.

  She'd left Glastonbury this morning just as the sun was coming up, and just managing to get this far had given her a purely physical sense of accomplishment that had done much to bolster both her spirits and her determination. Though it would be foolish to pretend that she was not still physically weak and out of condition, and certainly she lacked the stamina she remembered having, just knowing her limits and being able to push them was a source of ongoing pleasure for her.

  It's like being reborn.

  She'd wanted to leave Glastonbury without telling anyone, but a sense of guilty responsibility—for Truth's injuries as well as for Nina's car— had made her phone Dylan Palmer at the Institute yesterday, as soon as she was back from her errands. It was the morning after the disastrous Elemental summoning, and weariness still dragged at her. The interview had not been pleasant, but she hadn't expected it to be.