Could it be true?
Winter shook her head, refusing to think about it. She ought to do some work: make a list of questions to ask Ramsey, try to find out what he remembered about Nuclear Circle's work. See if he had ghosts, for that matter—if the thing had visited Janelle it would probably be after him as well.
If the Elemental even existed. If the Elemental was visiting all the former members of Nuclear Circle. And if it was—why?
But she didn't have the energy to be so organized tonight, not after seeing what had happened to her old friend. If the trap that Ramsey had fallen into was not as obvious a one as Janelle's, it was no less destructive.
"I fling open the gates of Dayton, Ohio, and shower its cultural riches upon you," Ramsey said, tossing a ring of keys onto the blanket as Winter started groggily awake. "I figured you wouldn't want to be cooped up in the house all day. There's a mall up the road if you want to do any shopping; there's a street map on the kitchen table and I've marked it for you. See you later."
Winter sat up, stiff from sleeping in the unfamiliar bed. "G'bye, Ramsey. Have fun," she said sleepily. Don't sell any Corvettes to Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Later, when he was gone, Winter got up and prowled around the deserted house. Paradoxically, it did not seem as empty when Ramsey was gone. Without his presence to remind it of what it had been, the house could be just any empty house.
Underfurnisbed, of course, and downright weird in spots, but. . .
Ramsey's bedroom was more or less intact—at least Winter didn't see any pressure marks in the rug to show where heavy furniture had been taken away. The suite was that heavy dark mock-Mediterranean style that had been popular a few years back, and looked as if the only way you'd get rid of it was to burn the house down around it. Winter closed the door behind her and tiptoed off, in search of the kitchen and coffee or tea. She vaguely remembered buying both last night at the store; she and Ramsey, two old friends—acquaintances now—playing house.
It gave Winter an odd detached thrill to pretend for a few moments that this could be her house and her life—a woman just moved into town, most of the furniture still on a moving van in another state, but all poised to settle into domesticity and family life. A kind of life she had— bypassed? Run away from? Tried and found wanting?
Was it really too late to go back and pick up the pieces of her life that she'd jettisoned?
In the kitchen Winter found the kettle and put water on to boil, deciding on tea. She wanted toast, but couldn't find a toaster—more of Laura's efficiency, Winter supposed—and decided to settle for dry cereal instead. She found the box in the cupboard and carried it over to the table.
What should she do today? She picked up the street map and tossed it aside. If she wanted to go shopping, there were better stores in New York. In fact, there was better everything in New York—what in Heaven's name was she doing out here in the middle of nowhere?
Ramsey's here, she reminded herself. And she needed to find out what Ramsey remembered about the Class of '82, and Nuclear Circle. Assuming that their teenaged occult dabblings didn't just constitute a silly coincidence, and really had anything to do with the things that were happening to her now.
It had been nearly two weeks now since the night at the lab at the Bidney Institute, and already the events were becoming hazy in Winter's mind—a memory-of-a-memory, soon to dissolve completely into unthinking acceptance of things as they were. The thought that something so vivid could just vanish was disturbing on a primal level; how many other thoughts, experiences, feelings, memories was she losing every day?
No more than anyone else, Winter told herself brutally. Now is all we have. Now is all that matters.
But the danger that followed her—and the growing suspicion that there was something she must do—mattered, too.
"Ramsey, you remember that Thorne Blackburn stuff we were mixed up with in college?"
Cartons of Chinese take-out food were strewn over every countertop surface of the kitchen. Ramsey was no better a cook than Winter was, and tonight he'd taken this easy way out.
"Thorne who?" He paused with chopsticks full of noodles halfway to his mouth.
"Thorne Blackburn. You know, the . . . occultist?" The unfamiliar term came clumsily to Winter's tongue. "You and I and Grey and Jannie and Cassie—back in school."
Ramsey regarded her with responsive interest, but without comprehension.
"We used to go up to Nuclear Lake." And do something I can't quite remember, and this book of Truth's isn't much help, either. "Just the five of us. You remember," Winter said coaxingly. I do. Don't I?
"I guess I don't." Ramsey's tone was regretful but uninterested. "I must not have gone with you."
But you did! You were there—/ saw you! "We used to go up there quite a lot," Winter began cautiously. "For years. It was Grey's idea at first, I guess, but we all fell in with it. He was doing something called the Blackburn Work, and we were all involved in it with him."
"Not me," Ramsey said, a little more decisively than could really be expected from someone searching through memories more than a decade lost.
As if he doesn't want to remember—and Janelle didn't talk about it either. And I want to remember, but I can't, Winter thought in frustration.
"I went back to visit the campus, you know," Winter began, trying another tack.
But while Ramsey was willing to discuss the campus, and professors they'd had in common, and even the Bidney Institute itself, Winter could not find any way whatever to bring Nuclear Lake back into the conversation.
But Nuclear Lake did exist. Nina Fowler'd had no trouble remembering it—and driving there. And neither had Truth Jourdemayne—in fact, Truth had seen the basement room where they'd all done what Truth had called the Blackburn Work.
Another memory, swiftly nickering like a butterfly's wing: the laboratory basement at Nuclear Lake, bleached white by hissing propane lanterns; Janelle on her knees, carefully painting a line on the floor as Ramsey held the jar of paint ready for her . . .
"Ramsey, don't you remember anything about Nuclear Lake?" Winter asked in frustration.
"It doesn't look like I'm the one having memory problems," Ramsey said with unusual asperity.
"Touche, you little yellow devil,'" Winter said, quoting Dooms-bury with a smile. "You're right: I'm not sure about what happened there either. There are a lot of places where my memory's just . . . jumbled."
Ramsey put a hand over hers in sympathy. "Sometimes, you know, it's better not to remember," he said gently.
And normally I'd agree with that, old friend, but unfortunately, this time the stakes are too high, Winter thought sorrowfully.
"Do you remember why I left Taghkanic, Ramsey? I know I left before graduation and I don't remember keeping in touch with any of you— Janelle says I sent her a wedding present, but—"
"Janelle may be mistaken," Ramsey said, very gently. "I suspect things aren't going all that well for her, you know."
"I know. I saw her before I came here. She doesn't paint any more. Ramsey, we were all—" The grief came with an overpowering rush; Winter set down her chopsticks.
We were all going to be famous: Janelle was going to be an artist, and you were going to be a famous journalist. And what was I going to be? I don't even know any more, but it wasn't what I became.
"—we were all going to be kings and queens in Narnia; I know. But everybody has to grow up sometime, Winter, and in the real world it just isn't possible for everyone to be beautiful, famous, and rich. We were kids, with kids' dreams. And we learned that dreams don't come true." Ramsey refilled both their glasses.
She was probably drinking too much, Winter warned herself, but just for tonight it wouldn't matter. And Ramsey, for all his talk of being on the wagon, drank heavily as well. But this was no time to lecture him on his habits or apologize for hers. And even Dutch courage was a help in asking the questions she needed to ask.
"So why did I leave school, Ramsey? I've
always wondered."
He grinned at her, and a trace of the boy he'd been lingered on in the lines of the man's face. "I'm afraid it's one of the great unexplained mysteries, along with where missing socks go and the egg in the egg cream.
All of us but Grey went away for spring break in April, and you never came back."
Winter had taken a large bite of dumpling a moment before, and now she waved her hands, semaphoring agitatedly: I just left? Didn't you look for me? You just let it drop? What if I'd been eaten by Bigfoot? "Murph!" she said aloud.
Ramsey laughed at her agitation, then shrugged. "The Registrar's office said you'd withdrawn. I think Cassie called you a couple of times, but I'm not sure. It was a long time ago. It sort of hurt that you just dumped us," he added after a pause.
Winter felt an instant rush of guilt. It had never occurred to her how the matter must look to the others, and Janelle had given no hint that she'd felt rejected by what Winter had done all those years before.
"Ramsey, I swear to you I don't remember doing that; either leaving or ... why. I'm . . . I'm sorry. I don't know why ..." Her voice trailed off momentarily. "I still don't know why I did it. I don't remember." And what must Grey have thought, when I just went off and didn't come back? She blinked back sudden tears.
"Life goes on," Ramsey said, although Winter could still detect a shadow of hurt in his voice. "And anyway, six weeks later we'd all graduated, a gaggle of fledgling BA's unleashed upon the world."
"Do the rest of you keep in touch?" Winter asked, trying once more to lead the conversation back to Nuclear Lake.
"Oh, I send Jannie a card from time to time," Ramsey said evasively. "I tell her about my divorces, and she tells me which room she's redecorated now. Speaking of which, have you seen—"
The conversation slid away from personal matters into current events, and Winter was finally willing to let it go. What Ramsey had told her disturbed her profoundly, as well as making her feel strangely ashamed.
She'd just walked out on them. She, Winter Musgrave, who prided herself on honoring every pact, meeting every commitment, had just turned her back on four of her dearest friends and left them without a single word of explanation.
But she would not have done it—and neither would that girl from the yearbooks and newspapers, the Winter Musgrave-as-was.
What had happened? Oh, God, what had happened to her fourteen years before?
* * *
If Winter had entertained fantasies of suburban domesticity earlier in the day, she got to play them out that night: Ramsey set up a card table in the living room and beat her soundly at Scrabble three games out of four. She enjoyed it far more than she thought she would—or ought. It was such a placid pastime; harmless and conventional.
And don't forget inexpensive, Winter chided herself. It had not been so very long since she'd measured her enjoyment of things by the amount they cost. Now she was playing board games in a suburban living room with an old college buddy, and thinking of how nice it could be if there could be more times like this in her life; if they could just go on forever.
But not with Ramsey. The automatic amendment was swift. Ramsey Miller was a failure at the game of matrimony in too many times and ways for Winter to believe him capable of being a success now.
What had happened? Winter asked herself again, counting out tiles and trying to figure out if she could spell any words with what she had. The methods Janelle had used to run away from the chance to succeed was plain—but what had happened to Ramsey? He'd even had a job on a newspaper once, heading in the right direction for the career he hoped to have—and now he was here. And while it might be hard for some people to see this as a failure, she'd known Ramsey before, and Winter could not believe that he had freely chosen the life of a used-car salesman over his bright college dreams.
What were the choices that had brought Ramsey to this place in his life? Wrong ones, obviously, but had he known that at the time? Or had they been detours he thought he could get away with, unaware that he, too, had been living out the golden time that set the patterns that would dictate the rest of his life?
As she brooded, Ramsey's theory about the golden time became muddled in Winter's thoughts with the Grey Angels of the Hudson Valley, until for a brief bewildered moment she believed that the Grey Angels controlled the golden time; that its light shone from beneath their wings, and what it illuminated had the power to be different, really different, to throw off the chains of karma and—
"'Qwozle' is not a word, Winter—though I admit you'd get a lot of points for it," Ramsey said dryly.
Winter looked down at the board and felt herself flush.
"I guess my mind was wandering," she said.
"If you see my mind out wandering, be sure to send it back," Hunter Greyson said, suddenly vivid in her mind. Winter wondered, with adult insight, whether he'd kept up that barrage of Noel Coward bon mots to be clever—or to mask a compassion that he knew could have no outlet. If he were here now, seeing what had become of Ramsey, he'd be just that prickly—because there was no way he could help. There was nothing anyone could do for Ramsey, any more than anyone could help Janelle. In their separate ways, each had given up.
"I'm sorry, Ramsey. I guess I'm tireder than I thought," Winter said neutrally. Are all of my old friends emotional basket cases? They're my friends—what does that make ME?
"Well, you know what they always say—quit while you're behind, right? Go to bed, Winter, have a good night's sleep. I'll see you in the morning."
But when she was sitting on the end of the fold-out couch, gazing down at her meager library—Venus Afflicted and Tabitha Whitfield's manual of psychic hygiene—Winter was far from ready for sleep. She spread her hands out before her and stared at her fingertips. She felt a need to do something, and right now her options were limited. Of course, if she got upset enough about that, she could probably arrange to have a poltergeist fit; now that would really liven up the place. . . .
Winter's gaze unfocused as inspiration struck. She was almost certain that she could call up a psychic storm—all it really took was intense emotion and loss of control, and God knew she'd experienced enough of both lately. And after that night in New Jersey, she was also fairly certain she could also stop one from happening, provided she had warning in time.
Was there some middle ground, then? If she could start them and stop them, didn't that imply that more was possible?
hike what? Winter wondered. She wasn't all that sure what a poltergeist did: opened doors and windows, threw things. . . .
So why not see if you can move something through the power of mind alone, as the comic books say? And bring your personal demons under conscious control. Winter wasn't sure she wanted to believe in controlled psychism any more than in magic, but she knew that she no longer had the right to automatically reject the strange and uncanny. She looked around.
The room contained the fold-out couch she was sitting on, a floor lamp, and a folding tray-table that currently held her half-full wineglass and a litter of oddments. Her car keys. A lipstick. She rummaged through her bags until she had five objects lined up on the tray: her stuffed elephant good-luck charm, her hairbrush, a roll of Life Savers, the car keys, and a lipstick. She tossed off the last of her wine and tucked the glass out of harm's way on the floor. She wanted nothing breakable in sight.
Now what? Winter felt unbearably silly, staring at her makeshift test subjects. Wonderful. I've discovered the psychic equivalent of cutting out paper dolls.
She refused to simply abandon the idea, however. Her sense of fairness demanded that it at least be given an objective test. She arranged herself cross-legged on the foot of the bed and looked fixedly at her collection.
Nothing happened.
How long do I have to wait? Winter wondered, and for that matter, what exactly was she waiting for? If she were a character in a book, she'd feel an absolute certainty, a conviction of Tightness, an instant uprushing of power, and . . .
> But she had felt an uprushing of power—just before the ball of lightning had hit Nina Fowler's car. She'd been half out of her mind with fear, but even then the sensation had been distinct and memorable. Could she re-create it less disastrously now?
Almost out of habit Winter had fallen into the slow measured breathing of the exercise she used every night; the one out of Tabitha Whit-field's pamphlet. With each breath she pushed envisioned power through her body until she felt both energized and supremely relaxed. Because she was sitting up, this time she didn't fall asleep; instead, as she gazed at the tray full of objects she felt the illogical clarity of dreams—in which there are no limits, and everything seems possible.
The hand is the extension of the mind; now make the mind become the extension of the hand. . . .
It was almost as if some familiar presence stood beside her, guiding her. Winter became aware of a subtle tingling sensation in her chest, almost a heaviness, as though she had suddenly discovered the existence of a new internal organ whose presence she had never before suspected. This was the source of the strange painless flexing that was the somatic cue for one of her psychic storms.
There. That's it. That's your center.
The discovery pleased her—everyone always talked about how important it was to find your center and now she'd found hers. Holding her awareness of this feeling firmly in her mind in the way she had held the practice images, Winter concentrated on the objects on the tray. She would move the key ring. . . .
Now!
The ring of keys on its silver Tiffany tag jumped as if falling upward, and slewed sideways off the end of the table. The bang it made as it hit the bare wood floor made Winter jump, shattering her state of dreamlike alertness.
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