Luned had mentioned the root cellar the first night he'd come here—a fact Wycherly only remembered as he sat on the bed watching Sinah drag away the linoleum rug that covered most of the floor in the outer room. Beneath it, the planks of the cabin's original building showed clearly, grey with dust and grit. Once the linoleum was gone, the outline of a trap door cut into the wooden floor was easy to see.
"It's probably filled with spiders," Wycherly said helpfully.
Sinah ignored him, heaving it open. A dank, wet, earth-smell welled up out of the hole. It brought his exploration of the sanatorium vividly to mind.
"Looks dark," Sinah said. Wycherly snorted eloquently.
Holding a lighted oil lamp out in front of her, Sinah knelt beside the hole and peered down into it. "It isn't as big as the cabin. Looks like the walls are packed earth. The floor is. I bet there used to be a ladder here somewhere; they were obviously using it for storage, at least before the linoleum went down. I can see some shelves. . . . I'm going down there."
She got to her feet, setting the lamp beside the opening.
"How?" Wycherly asked. "I can't help you." He brandished the discarded Ace bandage. Meditatively, he began to wrap it around his foot. If he bound it tight enough and had something to hold on to, he thought he could probably walk, but that was a far cry from the athletics that getting into the root cellar would require. There was no ladder in the basement, and Wycherly would not have trusted one if it had been there.
"I think I can just jump down," Sinah said. "If you can come over here, you can hand me the lamp after I'm—"
As she spoke, she sat down on the edge of the trap and swung her feet over the edge. Holding tightly to the edge, she slipped down, hung from her fingers for a moment, then dropped free. Wycherly heard her grunt as she landed.
For a fleeting instant he entertained the impulse to just shut the trap again and leave her there in the dark, for no more reason than because he could. He rejected the idea with disgust as soon as it occurred to him, and dragged a chair over to the opening.
Moving carefully, Wycherly handed the lantern down into the dark-
ness, then lowered one of the kitchen chairs into the opening. Sinah set the lantern on the chair. The root cellar was now brightly illuminated. Wycherly looked down.
As she'd said, the walls and floor were of tightly packed earth. Tiny rootlets pushed through in a dim arterial tracery, and on one wall the large serpentine bulk of the taproot from some long-felled tree bulged out of the wall like the body of some half-glimpsed sea monster.
One wall was lined with crude brick-and-board shelves, on which were stacked row after row of Mason jars. A few of those had burst, so long ago that the spillage had already rotted away into dust. What must once have been cardboard boxes, long moldered to slippery blackness in the damp darkness, were piled in the opposite corner. Whatever its original uses, it was clear that the root cellar had not been used in decades.
"I've found something." Sinah's voice was tense with excitement. "A metal box. It's heavy."
She dragged it into Wycherly's line of vision. It was a small box, about the size of a large dictionary, and its surface was a dull grey color. Sinah struggled with the blackened clasp—the box was only held by a heavy twist of brass or copper wire, but the wire was corroded into an immovable clot of metal.
"You're going to have to get it up here to open it," Wycherly said.
"I can't even lift it!" Sinah protested.
"Have you got a towrope in your car? We can use that."
Once the Jeep had been put in place she'd made several trips up and down by means of the chair and the towrope anchored to it. It was late afternoon before Sinah, backing the Jeep Cherokee carefully down the hillside away from the cabin, could use the bright yellow, plastic towrope to drag the box up out of the root cellar. Wycherly waited by the trap, sitting awkwardly on the cabin floor, to make sure the rope they'd knotted around the box didn't break, and to raise the box over the edge with the crowbar from the Jeep Cherokee.
He felt every muscle in his back and shoulders protest as he levered the box up. As soon as it was free he waved frantically at the Jeep Cherokee and heard Sinah cut the engine.
By the time she'd gotten back, he'd untied the rope and the crowbar had broken the knot of wire away from the lock.
"It's lead," Sinah said.
She was dripping with sweat and covered in cellar dust. Her hair was plastered to her forehead and neck, its honey color darkened with dampness. She looked more real than she ever had before, and Wycherly felt something kindle sluggishly inside him for a moment before it subsided.
"Lead doesn't corrode," Wycherly said. "Whoever made this box wanted what's inside to last." He pulled at the hasp, and then gently raised the lid.
Disappointingly, after all their long struggle, the box contained only a few small objects.
A knife, about six inches long. The handle was of deer horn, but the blade was stone, not steel—carefully chipped flint, sheened with oil.
A photograph in a tarnished silver frame. It was very old—the woman in the picture had the grim, pale-eyed look of the subjects of the earliest portraits, the trapped look of a wild thing caught in a cage—but the face in the picture was recognizably Sinah's own.
"I was right. It looks like this was your family's cabin," Wycherly said. And the box contained, not a solution to the mystery, but a deepening of it.
"I don't like this," Sinah said uncertainly.
"Tough," Wycherly said, slapping the photo into her hand. "You wanted to know. I told you that you wouldn't like what you found."
"You can't judge the entire world by your own experience," Sinah protested.
"Can't I?" Wycherly said. He reached for the last item in the box.
With the modern American craze for Native American spirituality, it was easy enough to identify this item as a medicine bag: the pouch—this one was beaded leather—that members of shamanic cultures all around the world wore to hold amulets and talismans, as well as other items of spirit medicine.
The medicine bag crackled between Wycherly's fingers as he held it up, the leather dried and brittle with the passing of unknown years. The leather was a deep amber color now, but he could tell that once it had been white. Sewn to the front of the bag, amid the decoration of seed beads and porcupine quills, was an unmistakably European earring, a glittering green stone in a gold-and-pearl setting.
"Where did she get it? Why did she keep it?" Indian captive? Frontier scout? Wycherly didn't expect any answer to his questions.
The story this pouch symbolized would probably never be told, but
Virginia, like all of the United States, had been Indian country once, before the rising tide of white settlers had pushed this land's first inhabitants ever westward, until at last there was no place left for them to go.
"There's something inside." The flap of the pouch was sewn shut, but the sinew disintegrated almost as Wycherly dug his fingers under it. There was a folded paper inside.
That's mine! Only years of an iron self-discipline meant to conceal her gift kept Sinah from snatching the fetch-bag out of his hand. The ghost beneath her skin knew that object—had worn it in stubborn defiance of her fate long after all hope was dead.
But now I have another chance. Now, at last. . .
"Give it to me," Sinah said harshly.
"It looks fragile," Wycherly commented.
"Give it to me."
Without comment, Wycherly passed the pouch to Sinah.
Sinah kept herself from crushing the pouch in her hand. Many years had passed since she—she?—had last held it. With trembling hands she lifted out the object, a many-folded piece of amber-colored parchment. It came to pieces as she unfolded it, and the edges flaked away like ash. She put the segments on the floor, assembling it rather as if it were a jigsaw puzzle, and a sweet smell like rotting leather filled the sweltering cabin.
Here, yes, here — so close, all the years of my life! See, hlood-of-my
-hlood. See what awaits you. . . .
"It's ... a horoscope?" Sinah said blankly.
Open, the sheet of paper was about twenty inches square, written on in colored inks that had barely stood the test of time. The shape of the horoscope—the nested circles divided into twelve wedges, one for each house of the Zodiac and filled with astrological notations—was unmistakable.
"That, and something else," Wycherly said. Only half the paper was occupied with the horoscope. The other half seemed to be a crudely distorted map of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, with longitude and latitude drawn in, as well as—
"Dragon's Head—and there's the Dragon's Tail," Wycherly said, pointing. "Geomancy. I only recognize the symbols—it's some kind of fortune-telling, I think. I'm not sure."
Sinah rocked back on her heels, frozen in the struggle within her mind,
a battle against a ghostly avarice that yearned to walk in the sunlight once more. Now that she had some information at last, she felt farther away from any answers than before. A photograph and some ancient scraps of hoodoo hardly added up to a complete biography. And they didn't explain the reptilian presence slithering beneath the surface of her mind.
Nervous breakdown, Sinah told herself flatly. She was sure she could find many to agree with that diagnosis and provide appropriate treatment. Only she didn't believe it.
Reincarnation? The bag—and the artifacts found with it—seemed to imply that it belonged to an ancestor of hers. Was she doomed to have her powers turn inward, to shut out the minds of others as she'd prayed to do, only to find herself subject to a chorus of ancestral voices?
Is that how my mother died? And all the others?
Still clutching the buckskin bag, she reached out and took Wycherly's hand.
It was callused—that surprised her—and she felt the hot tender spots that meant new blisters were starting. But his raw hungers and stifled passions poured into her without any barrier, driving the other—
Marie Athanais J ocasta de Courcy de Lyon, at your service, nit hi ing wench.
—back away from the surface of her mind to become just another of the stolen souls that lived deep within Sinah's memory.
"Well, it's old," she said uncertainly, still clinging to Wycherly's hand. "Parts of Virginia were settled in the early 1700s, but—"
"But the Founding Fathers didn't go around carrying horoscopes in Indian medicine bags, no matter what you may read about Thomas Jefferson in your revisionist schoolbooks. And while this is all very amusing, it doesn't bring you any closer to finding out what happened in 1969," Wycherly observed acidly.
Sinah folded the pieces of paper back together and tucked them into the bag again. She slipped the string over her head, and let the bag lie against her skin. Jewels worthy of a sachem's daughter, her daughter . . .
And this Judas-headed young drunkard, with his money and his family, I can keep him as an expensive pet. . . .
The thought carried with it a chill disinterest that made Sinah shudder. Not gone, not banished—Athanais was too powerful and cunning to be cast out by borrowed pain. Sinah fell backward when she tried to reach out and steady herself; Wycherly clutched reflexively at the hand he still held.
She stared at him, seeing her wild-eyed expression echoed in his own.
"Dizzy spell," Sinah croaked out, hearing her voice as if it were someone else's, a stranger's—hearing, to her horror, not even the flat West Virginia drawl she'd worked so hard to eradicate from her voice, but the strange, slurred accents of long ago and far away. As if the alien impulse that had taken over her mind now was reaching out to claim her body as well.
"Some dizzy spell," Wycherly agreed neutrally, letting go of her hand. "I'm supposed to be the one who does these unscheduled brodies, remember?"
You almost drowned in the creek below the ruins. What happened to you up there, Wych? What made you fall? Sinah hesitated over the questions. To ask would give him the right to ask questions of his own, and Sinah didn't dare answer them—with lies or the truth.
"Okay," she said. "I'm okay."
"The rest of your answers are probably in those boxes down there," Wycherly said, "which means it's going to take Indiana Jones to make head or tail out of it—the stuff's probably already rotted to pieces."
Sinah looked so despondent that Wycherly actually wanted to say something to make her feel better. He looked around for something to distract her.
There was writing on the bottom of the inside of the lead box. The inscription was as fresh as the day it'd been made, bright silver against dark, carved into the bottom of the box by a more recent hand than that which had drawn the horoscope or beaded the bag which held it. Now that the box was empty, the marks could be seen clearly—a purposeful line of symbols, terse as a command. Symbols Wycherly had seen recently.
He felt a faint indignation—he'd managed to convince himself that everything he'd seen up at Wildwood had been a particularly vivid hallucination. To see proof—incontrovertibly displayed—that it wasn't so, struck Wycherly as a form of cheating.
"This is from—" he began falteringly. "Up at Wildwood. There's a sub-basement with some kind of altar in it. These are the same symbols."
SEVEN
LINEAMENTS OF GRAVE DESIRE
Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave.
— THE SONG OF SONGS
WYCHERLY LEANED BACK IN THE FULL-LENGTH SUNKEN
tub, pure sensualism driving every other thought from his mind. As with every other room in the renovated schoolhouse, Sinah Dellon had poured money lavishly into the bathroom's appointments. It had stained-glass windows, hanging ferns, a sauna, heat lamps, a professional-quality wall of lighted mirrors, and the bathtub came outfitted with a Jacuzzi and was easily large enough for two.
A disinterestedly malicious desire to meddle had caused Wycherly to suggest that more answers might be found up at the sanatorium, and Sinah had agreed they should go first thing in the morning, suggesting in turn that he might like to spend the night at her cabin further up the mountain in order to get an early start. With a lot of strapping, icepacks, and a night's rest, Wycherly might actually be able to walk tomorrow.
He had to admit that this was a more pleasant place to spend the night
than his own hot and airless cabin was. Roughing it was all very well if you were one of those people who believed that privation conferred purity, but Wycherly wasn't. He associated asceticism with a series of only semi-voluntary incarcerations in treatment programs, and he'd never liked it much. Sinah must have some liquor somewhere.
He broke off the automatic assessment, grinning sourly at the habitu-alness of it. He wasn't going to do that any more, right? A few beers— just enough to lull the black beast and keep the flying mice at bay—but no serious drinking.
It occurred to Wycherly for the first time that with his father dying, his days of being forced to check in to places like Fall River Sanatorium in order to retain his allowance were over. Mother would complain about his drinking, but since she'd always ascribed it to his inheritance of her own nervous sensibility, she'd never do much to interfere with it.
All the more reason not to go back to Wychwood, he decided sagely. Especially now that he'd found the woman of his dreams—one with indoor plumbing. Wycherly watched the steam rising from the water through heavy-lidded eyes.
"How are you doing?" Sinah asked from the doorway.
He could see her image reflected in the mirror, but because of the angle she couldn't see him. She'd taken a quick shower before filling the bathtub for him, and now was dressed in slim, elegant, raw linen pants, sandals, and a sleeveless, knitted-silk turtleneck in taupe. Small gold knots gleamed in her ears, and her hair was held back by a narrow suede headband. She looked . . .
She looked like a woman of his own class, a subspecies from whom Wycherly had fled his entire life.
"I'm fine," he said quickly, struggling
upright and stifling a hiss of pain as his ankle banged against the side of the tub. In the mirror, he saw her wince in sympathy.
"If there's anything you need, just yell. I've brought a robe that should fit you; I keep it for . . . company. Your clothes should be out of the dryer soon. And dinner will be ready in half an hour."
She retreated.
It was all so domestic and civilized, Wycherly thought sourly as he slid back down beneath the water. He didn't want a lover, no matter how convenient. Lovers clung and tried to make you into their mirror image.
And the one thing he'd shown real aptitude for in his misspent life was killing women.
Wycherly came instantly awake, every nerve quivering. The pale, cold light of earliest dawn filtered in through the stained-glass windows on every side, turning the room into a watercolor in charcoal hues. He was sleeping on the living room couch.
He needed a drink. The need was tinged with panic, a sense that the beast that he fled from had nearly reached him. He could feel the shaking through all the deep muscles of his body, an acknowledgment of the deepest levels of his hunger.
She must keep something here. The unquestioned assumption drove him to his feet. His ankle only twinged a little. Another day or so and it ought to be good as new.
It was tucked into a corner, but Wycherly's radar found it unerringly. In his T-shirt and shorts, he padded over to the reproduction cherry-wood tea chest. It contained four bottles and as many glasses. He lifted the triangular green one out. Glenlivet. She even stocked his brand.
There was no point in bothering with a glass; it would only leave evidence of his drinking behind. Hastily, Wycherly uncapped the bot^e and tilted its neck to his lips. Scotch burned his tongue and the inside of his mouth as he swallowed again and again. Fire raced down his throat, into his stomach, outlining all of his organs in flame.
Terrific. You didn't even make it to the end of the first week, he thought when he stopped for breath.
Self-loathing was as strong as the craving had been only moments ago. Carefully, Wycherly placed the bottle back inside the tea chest and closed the lid. His hands no longer shook. He felt like a new man, although the effect of such a small drink would begin to wear off almost at once.
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