room schoolhouse was encircled on three sides by a living loft. Antique stained glass replaced all the ground-floor windows, as if the person who had made this place had a more than ordinary need for privacy, even in this enchanted, isolated place.
Her name was Melusine Dellon—Sinah to her friends, "Melly" to those who wanted to pretend to know her well. The first group had never been large, but the second was growing bigger every day.
At this exact moment, Sinah was "almost famous," meaning that while she was already more well-known than most people became over the course of their lives, so far it was only to a small group of people— Broadway producers, theater critics, casting agents. This December that select circle would widen to every person in the world who could turn on, download, or read the news, when Castle Rock Films released Zero Sum Game, the film adaptation of Ellis Gardner's successful Broadway play. On December i8, Sinah Dellon would make the jump from moderately-well-known Broadway actress to certified Hollywood star.
And instead of being on the Coast, working her career, she was here.
Sinah looked around the room. If she were a proper movie star, Sinah supposed, she would be traveling with an entourage, and have a personal assistant to see to the business of unearthing experts and persuading them to explain things to her. But the Hollywood fast track seemed so . . . overblown, in comparison with its opposite number back East. Or, as Variety still referred to it, ''Legitimate theater."
But Hollywood, once taken up, was not so easily dropped. There was a magic in being in front of the camera, in filtering out everyone else's emotions to concentrate on the director, taking from him, feeding him, searching for that addictive moment of transcendence.
She wondered if that was such a healthy thing to want, really. But if it wasn't, Sinah didn't know what other kind of life to wish for. The thought of turning back to the beginning and starting over again as a stockbroker or a marine biologist was something she couldn't even imagine. She was what she was.
A freak. Who had turned her freakish, unnatural empathy into a fast track in the dramatic arts, and now, like the lady who went for a ride on a tiger, she wasn't quite sure how to get out of the situation.
With a sigh, Sinah flung down the copy oiVariety she'd been pretending to read and rubbed her temples, at last acknowledging the headache she'd been fighting all day. All around her, the home she had made
mocked her with the memories of the haven she'd thought it would be. From the moment she'd come to Morton's Fork, everything had gone wrong—as if now, at last, it was time to pay for all the undeserved good fortune that had followed her for all her twenty-eight years of life.
God help her, she'd thought becoming an actress would solve her problems, not make them worse—and it had been so easy . . .
On her eighteenth birthday she'd boarded the bus for New York. Unlike so many other hopefuls, her time waiting tables was mercifully brief. Within six months Sinah was working steadily, though it would be another five years before her first starring role. Then she'd been cast in Zero Sum Game, which had run for almost two years before it had been sold to Hollywood, and Jason Kennedy—its star—had been part of the package, signed to recreate his role for the movie. Jason had possessed clout enough to specify that Sinah was a part of the deal, too.
Everyone had told her it was a stroke of luck, but she'd known it would happen from the moment the negotiations began. Melusine Del-lon had been the very best at what she did for so long that praise had become another form of abuse—because the praise wasn't for her, or for anything she did, but for a simple freak of nature. She was Adrienne, just as she'd been Juliet, Maggie the Cat, Antigone, Hedda Gabler. Sinah was always perfect for the role.
Each role. Every role. Any role. Except, it seemed, the one of daughter.
On August 14, 1969, Athanais Dellon, of Morton's Fork, West Virginia, had given birth to Melusine Dellon, father unknown, and died. Sinah had the documents; she'd trusted the information implicitly. But when at long last she'd come home to reclaim her history, everyone here in Morton's Fork said Athanais Dellon had never existed.
It really didn't matter if her expectations of being welcomed had been unrealistic. When she'd arrived to take possession of her rebuilt school-house, Sinah had felt as if she'd walked into an episode of The Twilight Zone. There were no Dellons in Morton's Fork, people said. No one named Athanais Dellon had ever lived here. It would have been easy to write the whole thing off to stiff-necked rural pride, except that there was more to it than that. They were lying. Lying to her, hating her, trying to drive her down into madness and darkness; Sinah Dellon knew that better than she knew her own—reclaimed—name.
If she'd been smart she would have let matters slide right then, maybe even gone away again. But Sinah had always been a fighter—she'd an-
nounced herself to be Athanais' daughter and dared them to go on with their lies.
So they'd shut her out, and left her to her lonely splendor here in this wild beautiful place. Just as her foster parents had. Just as everyone who knew the truth about her did.
She didn't want to think about that, but what else was there to think about? Losing her mind? Dying? The taint in her blood—the monstrous gift that her dead mother must have shared, else how could the local people hate her so?
The carefully crafted social mask that Sinah wore even while alone crumbled, and she groped for a tissue to blot away the sudden, aching tears. Tainted blood. It sounded like the title of a cheap thriller, but it was the truth she'd fought against acknowledging all these years. Normal people couldn't do what Sinah Dellon could.
Normal people couldn't read minds.
She'd never known a time when she couldn't do it: the baby in the crib, absorbing its foster mother's thoughts and feelings with her touch; the schoolgirl with the answer to every test, who knew all her classmates' secrets—and told them, before she'd learned better. The word for what she was existed only in books, not in the real world.
Telepath. Mind reader. Filthy prying snooping freak no daughter of mine monster — Sinah choked back a sob. She'd prayed for the gift to leave her, but it had only gotten stronger as she'd gotten older, until she didn't need to touch someone to read his or her mind, though touch brought the sharpest images. With her gift, she could be anyone's dream girl, a perfect mirror. It had brought her success on Broadway, in Hollywood. . . .
But when she wasn't being a perfect reflection, who was Sinah Dellon? Here in her dream house she could be only herself, but she felt strangely empty, restless. As if, without someone else's emotions to mirror, she was nothing at all.
No. That can't be true.
But she thought it might be. That the tiny spark of individuality that called itself "Sinah" had already been ground away to nothing by the imprint of other minds, and that soon even the consciousness of that fact would be extinguished forever.
No. That isn't true. I won't let it be true. There must be others like her here—others of her bloodline who had also inherited her gift.
Unless they were all dead of the same "gift" that tormented her. Dead and gone and she was the last.
Wycherly s shout of primitive terror ripped him from his twilight dream and returned him to a world where the sun struck like a hammer, making the world dissolve into a red-lit kaleidoscope of pain. But he did not fear the pain as much as he feared whatever lay below the surface of consciousness, and so he forced his eyes to open, feeling the shock of the pain as a thousand burning pulses through his body.
When he sucked a deep lungful of air, he felt the sullen ache of blossoming bruises over his chest and ribs and the warning pressure of the dashboard against his thighs. The edges of the footwell were folded almost tenderly around his extended legs; there was a thick reek of liquor—the bottles had broken at last—mingled with the sharp, dangerous scent of spilled gasoline. With infinite care, Wycherly turned his head—and was stopped.
His cheek came to rest upon the rough bark of a tree trunk that plun
ged through the center of the windshield. All around him the crumbled safety glass lay like thrown rice at a wedding, and the chrome and steel frame of the windshield was twisted into a mere decorative ribbon. The headrest at the back of his seat had been torn away by the forward thrust of the trunk; the tree had passed just above his shoulder, a few inches away from his right ear, a raw splintered spike of wood as thick as Wycherly's thigh.
It could have killed him.
For a moment his consciousness of every other pain vanished as Wycherly realized it had only missed his head by inches.
/ could be dead. For the first time in his life, the thought repelled him. Dead—here, now, with all his promises unkept and decisions unmade. Fie looked down the hill. The sun was just rising above the trees, but the summer heat was already beginning to build. Below, the valley was still in deep shadow, its floor was shrouded by mist, suggesting that water lay somewhere below. The alcohol, the waking dream, and seventy-two hours without sleep coalesced into a conviction that Camilla was waiting for him across the river of death, and that he must make his peace with her or face worse than death when the time came.
The bizarre fantasy faded almost at once, leaving behind the odd, urgent feeling that there really was something he must do before he could
safely die. Slowly, Wycherly began the painful process of prying himself out of the car. He found that he didn't seem to be badly hurt—a bruise over his left eye, a gash along his leg from something that had sliced open his Dockers. It had bled freely but didn't even seem to ache at the moment.
The driver's-side door was jammed shut, and it took him several painful minutes to pull himself backward across the trunk before he could slither free, only at the last minute remembering to grab his leather shoulder bag. Its surface was dark with spilled liquor.
He rested his hands on the driver's-side door while he looked around. The nose of the little car was pointed down the slope; the convertible was wedged securely between a large rock and a small stand of pines. The rock and several of the trees were smeared with the bright scarlet of the Ferrari's paint. It must have ricocheted off them before settling. The angle it was at now suggested it had still been airborne when it hit.
Gasoline and oil spread beneath the car in a glistening puddle oddly reminiscent of blood, and the bottom of the hill was a very long way down. Gingerly, Wycherly reached out and touched the splintered tree trunk, every muscle protesting the movement. He could see now that the bark was weathered and peeling; a fallen tree, wedged among the others at the precise angle to skewer him like a butterfly on an entomologist's pin.
Well, that's totaled. I wonder if I have any insurance?
Wycherly patted himself down automatically, finding his wallet but failing to turn up either a driver's license or an insurance card. Experience told him that he probably didn't have either one—hadn't his license been revoked a few months ago after the latest DWI conviction? Wycherly suspected it had, which would account for the lack of insurance. He looked back at the Ferrari again, wondering with a certain pleased and distant malice if it was even his car. Perhaps it was Kenny's. Perhaps he had stolen it.
He was lucky to have hit the pines and not gone all the way to the bottom. He was lucky the car hadn't rolled.
He'd been lucky. Wycherly contemplated the unfamiliar concept. Lucky.
He wondered where on earth he was.
He wanted a drink.
Wycherly shuddered and turned away, starting his climb back up the hill to safety and the road.
* * *
Haifa day's drive north of New York City, along the eastern bank of the Hudson River, lies Amsterdam County, home of Taghkanic College. The college's nearest neighbors are the town of Glastonbury and a small artist's colony that seeks anonymity for its residents. The college was founded in 1714 and lies between the railroad tracks and the river, a location easy to miss unless one knows the area well. Taghkanic is a liberal arts college of the sort that once flourished in this country before a college diploma became only the overture to and preparation for a job. It exists to this day on the terms of its original charter, and has never accepted one penny of government support to cover its operating costs, choosing to remain independent first from Crown and Royal Governor and later from the representatives of the fledgling United States.
But a changing economic climate has forced the closure and assimilation of most of the private colleges in the United States, until only a handful of such privileged and expensive relics remain. Taghkanic does not owe its survival to the generosity of its alumni or the foresight of its trustees but to its affiliation with a most peculiar institution: the Margaret Beresford Bidney Memorial Psychic Science Research Laboratory, founded in 1921 by a bequest from the estate of Margaret Beresford Bidney, class of 1868.
Like so many of those who sought their loved ones amid the ghosts of the aftermath of the Insurrection of the Southern States, Margaret Bidney was a Spiritualist, a follower of the Fox Sisters of Hydeville, New York. In later life. Miss Bidney's interests broadened to include the Cayce work and Theosophy, and eventually, as a disciple of William Seabrook, the whole broad field of parapsychology and the Unseen World. She never married, and when she died, her entire fortune went to fund research into the psychic sciences—including a prize of one million dollars to the individual who conclusively provided proof of paranormal abilities. The prize has never been claimed.
From its inception, the Laboratory—or, as it came informally to be known, the Bidney Institute—was funded independently of the College, though offering courses in psychology and parapsychology to the Taghkanic students and working with the college to provide one of the country's few degree programs in parapsychology. Nevertheless, the Taghkanic trustees had been attempting to claim the entire Bidney bequest on behalf of Taghkanic College for more than fifty years and were
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on the verge of success when Colin MacLaren accepted an appointment as director of the Institute in the early seventies.
When Dr. MacLaren came to the Institute, it was on the verge of closing. Though the height of the anti-occult backlash was still twenty years in the future, occultism as science had received one of its not-infrequent death blows, and parapsychology was not far behind. The dark side of the Age of Aquarius had become more evident in recent years, and less than five years previously Thorne Blackburn, Magick's most notorious advocate, had vanished in a lurid ritual that left one woman dead, Blackburn gone, and a number of unanswered questions.
Colin MacLaren changed all that. Publisher, lecturer, parapsycholo-gist, he held the opinion that Magick and Science were both fruitful fields of study, and that Mankind could not be understood without the use both of Science and of Science's dark twin: the Occult. MacLaren maintained that there should be no distinction made between occultism and parapsychology when studying the paranormal—that if anything, the occultists should have the edge since they had been studying the Unseen World for centuries and attempting to distill a scientific method of dealing with its effects.
Pragmatist and born administrator, MacLaren hurled himself wholeheartedly into the work of winnowing the deadwood at the Institute and turning its focus toward documentation and standardization. Under his guidance the Bidney Institute became an international clearing house for research into the irrational truths of human perception. As the Age of Aquarius reinvented itself to become simply The New Age, MacLaren's steady guidance kept the Institute from following popular culture into a frenzy of crystal points and channeling. By the time MacLaren left the Institute at the end of the eighties the specter of its discontinuation had vanished like expended ectoplasm, and it became clear to the disappointed trustees of Taghkanic College that their rich but unwanted foster child would be around until the time Hell froze over—an event that the staff of the Bidney Institute intended, in any event, to measure.
The beautiful Federalist campus drowsed in the muggy heat of a Hudson Valley summer. Pollen and humi
dity gave the air a glistening shimmer and the rows of apple trees which covered and surrounded the campus were in radiant summer leaf Although it was June, a month in which most private colleges—which closed early and opened late—would be
easily likened to ghost towns, there was still a great deal of activity on the campus: The Institute operated year-round. Its non-faculty staff enjoyed the quiet of a campus without students, and its associated faculty—technically members of Taghkanic's Psychology Department—used the time to generate the "publish or perish" projects common to academia and Science both.
Dylan Palmer was typical of the "new breed" of faculty who had come up under Colin MacLaren. A 1982 graduate of Taghkanic College, he had gone on to pursue the College's doctoral program in parapsychology, and then returned to the Institute to teach. He was a professor in the Indiana Jones mold, being tall, blond, handsome, easygoing, and occasionally heroic. A researcher by profession and a ghost-hunter by avocation, Dylan's primary field of interest was personality transfers and survivals—or, in more mundane parlance, hauntings.
Dylan taught the undergraduate Introduction to Occult Psychology course that Professor MacLaren had pioneered, as well as handling his share of the usual influx of inquiries and requests that occupied the Institute's working year.
But he saved his summers for ghosts.
"Here it is," Dylan announced, spreading the West Virginia map out on his hastily cleared desk.
Dylan's office, like its occupant, possessed a rumpled and friendly informality. There was a Ghostbusters movie poster on the back of the door, and another one over the desk.
"Morton's Fork, Lyonesse County, West Virginia."
His glasses and the gold ring in his ear glinted in the overhead lights as Dylan bent over the map. In his rugby jersey and baggy jeans, he looked more like one of the students than one of the teachers.
His companion peered at the map over his shoulder. She presented a far more professional appearance than Dylan did, even garbed in a simple blouse and tailored slacks—and a cardigan worn against the Institute's over-enthusiastic summer air conditioning.
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