Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02
Page 17
The door was answered by a pleasant woman in her fifties, figure long gone to matronly plumpness. She was wearing a cardigan sweater over a flowered cotton housedress and perfunctory makeup. Winter waited for the reflexive condemnation from within, but for once it didn't come, although Society would certainly have judged Winter to be the "better" of the two women.
Okay, so she'd probably be a failure on Wall Street. But for that matter, I don't know how to run a Bed-and-Breakfast, do I? Winter told herself.
"Ms. Douglas," Winter said aloud, "I'm Winter Musgrave—we spoke on the phone? I'm here about the room."
"Of course you are!" Lily Douglas said. "Come in and take a look—do you have any luggage? I'll just get Gary to bring it in. Gary! Gareth!" she raised her voice. "You come down here right now!"
Almost instantly Winter heard the clatter of footsteps on the stairs, and a moment later Gary-or-Gareth appeared.
"This is Gary—Gareth Crowther. He takes care of what needs doing—and in a place this big and this old, that's everything."
Gareth was a big bluff hearty puppy-dog of a man, with untidy blond hair and soft blue eyes and muscles worthy of a lumberjack bulging the fabric of his red-and-black flannel shirt.
"Hello," he said, holding out a painfully clean and callused hand for Winter to shake. "I got the storms off in the tower, Mrs. Douglas, so I can open up the windows now to paint the third-floor back."
"Good boy," Mrs. Douglas said, as if Gareth were the slow and patient draft animal he so much resembled. "But you just wait around—this is Ms. Musgrave that I told you might be coming and taking the Lilac Room, so you just hold on and see if she needs anything moved."
Gareth nodded seriously.
"I'm sure I'll love it," Winter said, gazing around the parlor. Her fears of shabby untidiness had been groundless. The immaculately clean front room of Justamere Bed-and-Breakfast was decorated in the Victorian high style of the era in which the house had been built. The fireplace was of white marble, carved with elongated sphinxes on each upright, and the face of the fireplace carried out the Egyptian motif, with lotuses and scarab beetles embossed into its sky-blue tiles. There was a high Victorian settee in carved rosewood flanked by matching chairs with crocheted doilies on their backs and arms and surrounded by half a dozen little tables. The whole room had a jumbled, lived-in feel to it, as if uncounted generations had lived and played here and loved each other and the house.
"Four generations in the same house," Mrs. Douglas said. "That's what putting down roots means, but with things the way they are these days, who'll want this place when I'm gone? I don't have anyone to leave it to unless one of my daughters comes to her senses, but I suppose nobody wants to live in the middle of nowhere any more."
As she spoke, Mrs. Douglas conducted Winter up the stairs and down a brightly lit hall. Each of the closed white doors had an oval brass plaque screwed into the wood.
"You're in Lilac; I have to keep track of the rentals for the tax-man somehow, so I thought I'd name all the rooms after the flowers I did them up in. There's Rose and Violet down the hall, and Daisy across the way, that's the other double." She unlocked the door—the interior lock was the first indication Winter had been given that she was not in a private home—and ushered Winter inside.
Winter looked around at a large spacious room with an Oriental carpet on the floor and wallpaper covered with sprigs of lilacs. A vase of lilacs—silk at this time of year, but pretty nonetheless—stood on the dressing-table, and through the half-open door at the other end of the room, Winter could see the promised bathroom. Dominating the room was a massive four-poster canopy bed, with a crisp white bedspread and masses of lilac-printed pillows mounded on it.
"I'll take it," Winter said instantly.
Mrs. Douglas explained that the room came with a Continental breakfast, and that she could only have it for two nights at most, as the couple who had reserved it would be arriving after that. The price she quoted was, of course, higher than Winter would have paid to stay in a Hilton, but it was worth it, Winter felt, to stay in a place that did not have the cold institutional feel of a chain hotel.
"Probably arriving, I should say, but I did promise to have it for them," Mrs. Douglas said. "And I like to keep my word to folks—or why give it?"
"I won't be any trouble, Mrs. Douglas. I'm planning to leave tomorrow morning, anyway," Winter said.
"Virtue in the defense of extremism is no vice," Grey said, punningly, out of the depths of Winter's memory.
More riddles.
Winter unlocked the trunk of her car and let Gary carry the bags into the house before he returned to what must presumably be the ongoing renovation of Justamere. Gary hefted the two large suitcases and the carry-on bag as if they weighed nothing at all, and Winter thought he could probably have carried her as well without any particular problem. He brought the bags up the stairs and into the room—two on the floor, one on the pretty embroidered suitcase stand—before leaving to resume the painting of the third-floor back.
"If you need anything, Ms. Musgrave, you just ask Mrs. Douglas. She's usually downstairs in the parlor."
"Thank you, Gary. I will." You didn't tip-as-you-went in a Bed-and-Breakfast, but Winter made a mental note that Gary Crowther deserved a generous remembrance when she left. Those bags weren't light—and besides, he hadn't leered at her legs once.
He closed the door behind him as he left and Winter was alone in the room. It was only midafternoon, and a guilty part of Winter's mind reminded her that she could have gotten in four or five more hours of driving before dark.
But 1 don't want to get so tired that I can't keep the poltergeist under control— and what if the magickal child finds out where I’ve gone? Winter told herself. She opened her suitcase but didn't feel any impulse to unpack—and she'd be leaving tomorrow morning, anyway.
If nothing more went wrong.
Winter sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled Tabitha Whit-field's pamphlet out of her purse. Besides, I can get in a couple of hours of psychic aerobics before it's time for bed.
With Mrs. Douglas's guidance, Winter located a local restaurant where, if the food wasn't quite up to Manhattan standards, she was able to make a tolerable meal. Driving into the driveway at Justamere afterward, she looked up at the floodlit exterior and the warm light coming from the expansive windows. I'd like to have a house like that, was her automatic thought. But not to live in alone, nor to run as an inn. A house like that was for children, a family; a place to share with the right man.
The direction her thoughts were taking pulled her up short, even as the car coasted to a halt. Husband? Family? Winter had always dismissed marriage out of hand before, and now, in her thirties, she suspected she was getting too set in her ways to compromise enough, even for love, to be able to make a home with someone else. And certainly no "right man" had ever presented himself.
Maybe you're looking in the wrong place. The image of Hunter Greyson flitted across her mind again and Winter sighed. If—when—she found Grey, he'd probably introduce her to his wife and their two adorable children. He was her age, after all; they'd been in college together. By the time they reached their thirties, most people knew the direction they wanted their lives to go in and were settled somewhere. They'd become what they wanted to be.
The way that Janelle did?
Automatically Winter rejected the thought. Janelle hadn't become what she'd wanted to be; she'd opted for safety instead, and even if it was a poisonous sort of refuge, at least Janelle had known what she was running away from.
It was only Winter who still didn't know what to run from ... or to. Or scratch that—who'd known once but discovered she was wrong.
She got out of the car slowly and locked it, then turned toward the steps. There was one thing this wild Grey-chase was doing for her, and that was postponing the moment when she would have to try to reenter the current of her normal life and make a success of it once more.
Whatever it t
urned out to be.
And assuming she lived to do it.
That night, lying in her canopied bed in the Lilac Room, Winter dreamed of Grey.
She stood in a dream-landscape, knowing she wouldn't remember the dream once she awoke. It was a place she'd been many times before, though she knew she wouldn't remember that either. The light was ghostly; Winter stood in the middle of a plain so vast it seemed to have no end, a horizonless place where the sky met the ground without any demarkation line. In the distance stood the remains of a ruined watchtower, alone in the emptiness, and, having no other goal, Winter headed for it.
A spectral wind plucked at her clothing, making a low irritating keening in her ears. Where was Grey? He was supposed to be here already, waiting for her.
As if her thoughts had invoked him, the scene changed: a dream within a dream. She sat at her desk in the Taghkanic dorm, working on a paper for her music class while Grey lay on the bed, her guitar across his stomach, plunking idly at the strings.
She looked over toward him, to where his blond hair spilled over her pillow, gleaming in the lamplight. His eyes were half shut, and lashes like dark honey nearly brushed his cheeks.
"What are you going to do after you graduate?" she asked him, and realized that this was a memory, not a dream. This had happened, once upon a time.
"Get rich, get famous, do whatever I want." Grey's answer was flip. "Be a singer in a rock 'n' roll band. What about you?"
/ want to stay with you, Winter thought to herself, and Grey, as if reading her mind, set the guitar aside and held out his arms to her, his smile mocking and welcoming at the same time.
"Too much study makes you go blind," he said huskily.
She reached for him, but instead of flesh her hands touched jagged rock. She was back in the gray place again, and she cried out at the unfairness of it, at being snatched out of that lovely dream, away from Grey.
"Help me, Winter. Help me, my love."
Beneath her hands was the ruined stone of the watchtower, and half erupting from it was Grey's body, face and hands yearning toward the light, as if he had been trapped in the stone like an insect in amber, trapped forever—
"Leave me alone!"
And suddenly it was spring; the apple trees were in bloom, and petals were showering everywhere. . . .
Winter sat up in bed with a gasp, heart pounding. It was nearly two in the morning, the wolf hour, the hour when suicides and premeditated murders happen. The room was dark, with only a faint glow from the security lights outside the house penetrating the translucent curtains.
The images in her dream scattered, until all that was left was the memory of Grey and the feeling of panic—and the cloying scent of apple blossoms out of season. Winter took a deep breath. She couldn't remember having nightmares before, even at Fall River; only meaningless jumbled dreams that left her more tired than before when she finally awakened from them. Dr. Luty had tried to get her to tell him her dreams, as if knowing the trash her unconscious mind threw onto the beach of sleep would let him know her.
But this dream was different—both a true nightmare, and something worse. Winter got herself under control enough to switch on the bedside light, and the bright glow through the hobnail milk glass made the pretty Victorian room bright and defined. Any shadows left would be merely a trick of the light, and not messengers from the unseen world.
She rubbed her forehead. What had the dream been about? Something about Grey, and trouble. But not trouble that could still be averted. Trouble that had already happened. But if it's already too late then why do I have to hurry . . . ?
What utter nonsense. The thought was sharp and bracing, lending her strength. / suppose that poltergeists have to be real, and maybe even the thing that chased you out ofGlastonbury, the brisk internal censor went on. But just because those two things happened you don't have to embrace every half-baked idea from Spiritualism to UFOs! Prophetic dreams and poltergeists don't exactly go together. There's got to be a limit somewhere. You're upset, you're worried, you want to find Hunter Grey son—it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that this means you're probably going to dream about him. Like Freud said, sometimes a bad dream is just a bad dream.
Winter drew a deep breath, uncertain of whether the thoughts were good common sense or hysterical denial. A dream is just a dream, she repeated, feeling her body relax. Every bad dream didn't have to be a message—if she started thinking that way, she'd be wearing crystals and looking for omens in tea-leaves next.
That's right. Just a dream. Not an omen.
The dream had left her too keyed-up to sleep, however, and she didn't want to run a bath at this hour for fear of disturbing Mrs. Douglas's other guests. With a sigh, Winter swung her legs over the edge of the bed and went looking for the pamphlet from Inquire Within. The way things stood, she wasn't going to get any sleep for a couple of more hours at least. Thank heavens she'd managed to be sensible about the whole thing, or she'd probably be in the middle of hysterics right now. And over a bad dream, no less!
It was not until many days later that she recognized those words of rationality for the trap they were.
CHAPTER NINE
EVERY MILE IS TWO IN WINTER
It was not in winter Our loving lot was cast! — THOMAS HOOD
TO EYES ACCUSTOMED TO THE MANHATTAN SKYLINE, Dayton was a small clean city with a scattering of skyscrapers and no smog to speak of. It had taken Winter three days, taking the trip by easy stages, to cross Pennsylvania, and by the time she was done, she was heartily sick of the rolling landscape, the endless fields being planted with nameless springtime crops, and the signs for Stuckey's. Pulling into the traffic tangle that was Dayton's outer loop was almost a relief after the endless hours of high-speed highway driving.
There had been no more dreams or peculiar incidents of any sort, and though Winter continued to do the psychic exercises from the pamphlet and drink her Centering Tea, it was more for the help they gave her in falling asleep than for any arcane benefits. Her physical stamina was rapidly returning, her mirror told her she was putting back on the lost weight and softening the sharp edges of her gauntness, and she was beginning to wonder if the "artificial Elemental" that Truth had told her about might be nothing more than an elaborate network of coincidences. The smaller animals she'd found could easily have been a cat's prey, dragged so far from the place where they were killed to seem like bloodless deaths. The deer could be chalked up to poachers. Even the night at the Institute's lab probably hadn't happened the way she remembered it now—and the rest? Coincidence, hysteria, bad luck—it didn't even really matter if everything had happened as she thought it had, so long as it went away now. Hadn't Truth said that the poltergeist would just give up and go away at some point? Well, maybe it had. She should be glad the thing wasn't around to get up to its old tricks with her new car.
Winter felt more optimistic than she had in weeks. The problem hadn't been nearly as bad as she'd thought it was after all. And besides, it was over now.
Winter took the exit that Ramsey had indicated in his directions, and immediately found herself in the middle of the downtown area, lost in a bewildering tangle of secondary streets. Where was—? Oh, here it was. With a little more verve than prudence, Winter cut a sharp left and found herself on a main street: four lanes plus turn lanes divided by a grassy median, the edges dotted with fast-food restaurants and chain hotels.
This doesn't look much like a residential district. Or a business one.
She followed Ramsey's directions until large buildings gave way to small ones and to outlet warehouses, an area where real estate prices were lower. She'd nearly given up hope of finding the address when—
Oh, for heaven's sake.
Why couldn't he just have said so? she asked herself, even though she knew how much Ramsey Miller liked practical jokes—assuming they were harmless ones.
Winter hit her turn-signal and made a left just under the sign that said miller's used cars.
Winter got out of her car and stood beside it, waiting for him to reach her.
"What can I do for you today?" he asked, his tone professionally polite. He was wearing the loudest sport coat Winter had ever seen—a polyester horror of green and yellow and orange plaid, with a few red and blue stripes thrown in for good measure.
"You can throw away that jacket for starters; it's the most horrible thing I've ever seen," Winter said, smiling.
Ramsey's face lost its expression of formal politeness and broke into a genuine grin of recognition.
"Winter! I told you to call me the day before you got here!" he said, enveloping her in a hug.
"I forgot," she said meekly, hugging him back, "and Dayton was closer than I thought it was. But just look at you."
"I'd rather look at you," Ramsey leered, in the style of a borscht-belt comic. "You look tem'fic! What have you been doing? What brings you to my humble city?"
"I'm looking up old college friends—you know, the group?" The Blackburn group, Winter meant, but Ramsey didn't take her up on that.
"Well, when you find Grey, give him my best—and tell him I haven't forgotten about the twenty bucks he owes me. But come on inside—oh, don't worry about moving the car; Mike can keep an eye on it. Lends a touch of class to the place. And if I sell it, I'll make sure you get top price."