"It's good stuff," Luned assured him. "Mai's pappy was the one set up the works back in Prohibition. He don't sell it anywhere outside the Fork. Just to kinfolk."
And though the men who ran the illegal distilleries balked no more at adulterating the poisonous brew they shipped across state and county lines than big-city pushers worried about adding strychnine to their bags of heroine and cocaine, the backwoods ties of blood were strong, and Wycherly imagined that the product they sold to their neighbors would be slightly more wholesome.
"I appreciate the thought," Wycherly said. "But I don't care for any just at the moment. Maybe another time."
And as he said it, it was true. He felt no craving at all—she might as well be offering him fruitcake. He smiled at Luned, who stared at him with a puzzled expression, and got carefully to his feet.
"Thanks anyway."
"Well, if you're sure," Luned said doubtfully. She obviously didn't believe it, and Wycherly wondered how blatant his drinking had appeared to her. It didn't matter now.
Limping only slightly, Wycherly followed Luned to the cabin's front door and saw her out, an echo of a courtesy from another lifestyle. When she was gone, he hunted around until he found the bar that could be dropped into place to hold the door shut. At least he could lock the cabin while he was inside it.
He opened the refrigerator and looked inside, mostly to confirm that
the beer held no fascination for him. There was a fresh pitcher of lemonade in there too; he poured himself a glass of that instead and stood drinking pensively, thinking about the book bound in white leather that waited under his pillow.
Power. Power that could be his. Guaranteed.
Wycherly Musgrave had finally discovered the one thing in the world that held more charm for him than drinking.
Once Luned was gone, Wycherly took the books out into the other room to spread them out at the kitchen table, but, oddly, the more he read, the less real his conviction became that there was power here. Despite the disgusting nature of L^j" Cultes, it was somehow difficult to take either the grimoire or the overview of the occult entirely seriously upon close examination.
What was a Planetary Hour, exactly, and why was it important? Lesser Banishing Rituals, Talismans of Mercury—it was as if the book was written in a language he only thought he knew, one that seemed explicit but was in reality opaque and incomprehensible.
But there was power in this book, just as there had been power up at the sanatorium. Power that, if he could manage to swear himself to it, would give him all the charisma he needed to work as much evil as he wanted; power to compel, as real as a loaded gun.
Evil? Momentarily Wycherly recoiled from the thought. He'd never wanted to be evil—he'd only wanted to be left alone.
Reflexively, he summoned the image of Camilla Redford's drowned body—the white face, the drowned eyes, looking up at him accusingly through the rippling, black-glass river. He'd already been evil. Even if he remembered nothing of that night, he'd killed a woman—a child, he saw now, someone barely older than Luned, who'd died with all her life unlived. That was what had led him to this unpromising place. He'd wanted to know his own desires, to measure his own need to atone.
Only there was no atonement possible, no turning back from the course his life had been set on so many years ago. He knew what he wanted now—what he'd turned away from, what he'd let slip through his fingers all the days of his life.
Power. The ability to make people do what he wanted. That was what he wanted. And he'd get it.
Call it a sort of belated birthday present.
TEN
THE GRAVE OF HOPE
/ recoil and droop, and seek repose In Itstlessness from vain perplexity, Unprofitably travelling toward the grave. — WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
THEIR GUIDE HAD DESERTED THEM YESTERDAY, AND BY then the three of them — her guide, the priest, and she — had been traveling for months, having pressed always north and west, farther into the savage wilderness than any Englishman had yet penetrated.
They'd long since left the lands belonging to the friendly Delaware who farmed and hunted alongside the members of the tiny English outpost named after Lord Baltimore. The lands they were passing through now were under the control of a tribe called the Tutelo. The guide had wanted to turn back, but Father Hansard thought they might not see any Tutelo aboriginals at all if they were fortunate.
They had not been fortunate.
They'd thought they were, for a while. She and Father Hansard had accounted themselves lucky when they'd awakened one morning to find that the guide had only taken his own horse and left them the pack mule and supplies. They were not lost. Among the supplies Athanais had kept under her personal rule was a sextant, an excellent astrolabe — and the geomantic map. All she had to do was reach the place the stars spoke of and claim the land.
I
GRAVELIGHT I79
* * *
The ambush, when it came, was brief and effective. A hail of arrows from cover; monstrous misshapen dark-skinned men with painted bodies, howling like demons. An arrow took Father Hansard in the throat; Athanais might have escaped herself but for that the devils killed her horse under her. It threw her as it died, and instants later she was dragged to her feet by one of the brutes.
They did not kill her, but neither did they speak any Christian tongue, and she had no other weapon with which to beguile them. She was forced along with them unwilling, her hands bound behind her back with leather thongs.
The village was a crude cluster of shacks made from tree bark and matting, more primitive conditions even than beyond the Pale in Ireland. It was filled with other savages, mostly women and children. Their only garment was a crude apron of fringed leather, and they fingered the smooth stuff of her riding dress with open interest.
Her captors shoved her ahead of them into a hut like the others. They were not gentle — Athanais went sprawling through the opening made by the rolled-up mat and fell to the floor beside the bier
The dead woman lay upon several layers of woven mat. Her eyes were closed, and her face was sunken in the fashion of the several-days dead. She wore ornaments of shell and bone in her hair, her ears, and about her throat, and her buckskin apron was richly beaded. The she-savage's skin and hair were painted and oiled more elaborately than that of anyone Athanais had yet seen, and she was surrounded by barbaric offerings, but all the pungent spices on her and around her could not disguise the gagging odor of corruption.
At first Athanais thought they meant to make her a sacrifice, to join their pagan queen on her journey to the underworld. She fought them as they dragged her clothes from her, fought them as they cut and tore to remove garments whose fastenings they had obviously never encountered before.
When she was naked as a babe newborn, the village women came in and began to strip the dead woman as well and garb Athanais in the corpse's ornaments. When she realized they did not mean to kill her she stopped fighting them, and sat quietly through all that came after — the feast and the ceremony and the incomprehensible ritual calling upon gods older and stranger than any Athanais had ever worshipped. As the hours passed, she realized that they meant to make her one of them, and to make her take the dead woman's place as concubine to her savage mate. But Athanais was an Englishwoman — she might have been Queen of England, and she would not set aside her hopes to mingle her blood with this degenerate cattle.
She would fight them. She would escape. And if she could not prevail at first, she would not surrender. She would hate, and hate would make her strong. She would hate. And hate. And hate . . .
Hate — An anger that could kill pursued Sinah into consciousness. She moved her hands weakly, completely disoriented.
"Wycherly?"
No answer.
She sat up, groaning, and looked around. It was late morning and the day outside was bright and clear.
Wycherly wasn't in the bed. His clothes were gone. She went to look over the railing. He wasn't down
stairs, and though he might be in the kitchen or bathroom, Sinah somehow knew he wasn't either place.
He'd left.
She was too weak for anger; her eyes filled with painful tears and she drew a ragged breath. Well, that was Wycherly all over—didn't she know him as well as he knew himself? As David Niven once had said of another self-destructive charmer, "You can always depend on Errol, because he will always let you down."
And so had Wycherly. He knew how much she needed him—she'd been more open with him than she'd been with any human being before.
And he'd still left her.
A brisk shower and a cup of strong coffee did nothing to dispel the sense of despair she'd woken with. The dream—the vision—Athanais' memories swirled around in her mind, mixing with Sinah's sense of self the way oil would with water and leaving her with nothing but Athanais' passions, Athanais' desires.
Athanais' vendetta against Quentin Blackburn.
But that's ridiculous, Sinah told herself, striving for clarity if she could not have understanding. Athanais' memories belonged to the seventeenth century, but surely Wildwood Sanatorium and its Satanic temple was a creation of the twentieth—how could there be any connection between the two?
/ don't know. Her mind felt bruised, saturated—she needed Wycherly
as she needed a lifeline back to the real world. She couldn't let him put this barrier between them. Not when she needed his help so much. . . .
Not when she was truly losing her mind to a woman who might never have existed at all.
"I decided to come and see if you were dead," Sinah said, looking in through the open window. "And the door was locked."
Wycherly had been dozing through the heat of the day, his mind roving restlessly over the images he'd seen in Les Cultes. Now he sat up, looking toward the sound of her voice.
Sinah was standing just outside the bedroom window, the perfect embodiment of Bel Air chic. Large round sunglasses masked most of her face. She looked as if she didn't have a care in the world, but Wycherly knew it was an act, not real. He wondered if she'd noticed the missing books and had come to demand them back.
Just deny everything, Wycherly told himself. If that was Sinah's business here, he could bluff her. She wasn't, after all, a Musgrave. Only his family could see through him quite that disastrously.
"Sorry, but I got tired of half the county traipsing through at will," Wycherly said, with unconscious brutality. "But do come in; I'll go unlock the door. I'll even give you a glass of lemonade."
"And what brings you here on this bright summer's day?" Wycherly asked, holding the door open for her with feigned graciousness.
His ankle was still tender, but now it hardly twinged at all. He couldn't remember the last time he'd thought before setting his weight on it. The constant betrayals of the body seemed to have vanished. He controlled his appetites. He controlled his suffering. He had become master in his own house.
Sinah stepped inside.
"My God, it's like an oven in here. How do you stand it?"
"I am the salamander, my nature is fire," Wycherly said, only remembering afterward that it was a line from the book. "Want to step outside?" he added, trying to cover up. "It's cooler."
And it would get her away from the book.
He felt a sense of easing as soon as he'd gotten her outside. She carried
out the chairs, as Wycherly filled two glasses with lemonade and brought them out to her.
At four in the afternoon at the end of July, the day was far from over, but at that hour there was a brilliant gold color to the light that made everything seem more vividly real.
"Ankle's better, too, I see," Sinah said.
"As you see," Wycherly said.
"So everything's all right now?" Sinah said. She was studying his face through the lenses of her sunglasses; he could see his face reflected in their dark mirrors.
"Except that I missed you," Wycherly lied easily. He hadn't thought about her except in relation to the book, but he knew that he didn't want her to just shut him out, decide he'd been a one-night stand. He had plans for her.
If witch blood ran in families as Luned said, what kind of blood sacrifice could hold more power than the last living survivor of a family of witches that had endured for over three hundred years?
Sinah smiled at him uncertainly. He took a step toward her; she let him put an arm around her waist. He felt the warm solidity of her ribs against his, and decided he liked the feeling.
For whatever reason.
Cautiously, Sinah leaned her head on Wycherly's shoulder, and felt his arm reflexively tighten around her waist. She felt the muted surge of his emotions—anger, excitement, an underlying animal pleasure—but his thoughts were as closed to her as if he was a thousand miles away. There was nothing here to hammer her mind, nothing that would keep Athanais from growing stronger by the hour until there was no Sinah Dellon left.
What was she going to do?
"So," Wycherly asked her after a moment, "aren't you going to ask me if I've found out anything new about the mysterious Dellon clan?"
She could hear what he was saying, but what did he mean? Was it just her fearful imagination, or was there a predatory undertone to his voice? It was almost as if she'd been struck suddenly blind.
"Yes, of course," Sinah said dutifully. "Have you?" She was grateful for the concealment her sunglasses offered, masking most of her face. If he couldn't see her eyes, he didn't know what she was thinking.
Was this how normal people felt?
"About what we'd expected to find," Wycherly said. "But sit down, and rU tell you everything.
"Apparently," Wycherly began, settling into one of the straight-backed kitchen chairs, "the locals believe that your great-great-grand-mama Athanais burned down the sanatorium in 1917."
Athanais! Like the closing of a circuit, the sound of that name woke the shadow within her flesh; Sinah felt the world recede as within her, another being struggled for mastery.
She was Athanais—raised from her long slumber to find that the power that she had coveted was within her grasp at last. Now the sacred blood coursed through the veins of this her descendant, giving her the right to wield the power of the Wellspring, and she would come into her dominion at last.
"But why talk of that?" she said playfully. "Surely there is many another pleasant dalliance that we might be about this day?"
The look he gave her told her she had somehow misspoken herself— but though his hair was red, he had such an air of her bonny sweet Jamie that it led her awry. . . .
"Jamie?" Sinah echoed in confusion. No! Not Jamie — Wycherly!
"Dreaming of absent company? I'd leave, but this is my house," Wycherly said, and this time his playful words were edged with a decided coolness.
This was the worst yet. All the other times it had been as if she struggled for control of her body with an interloper. This time the monstrous ghost in whose reality Sinah could not quite believe had simply brushed her aside.
"I'm sorry," Sinah said in a strangled voice. She pulled off the sunglasses and rubbed her suddenly-aching eyes. "But I think I'm going crazy."
"Well." Wycherly settled back in his chair, mollified. "I've been there a number of times—it's unpleasant, but not really dangerous. Can I help you plan your trip?"
"You don't believe me!" Sinah cried in frustration.
Somehow that was the worst. She wanted Wycherly to believe her— to trust her. But how could he if she wasn't honest with him—and how did you tell someone you were a sideshow freak from the pages of Fate magazine without sounding as if you were losing your mind?
And I am — only not that way. I really am a telepath — most of the time. That part isn't what's crazy. And that's what makes it harder.
"Why shouldn't I?" Wycherly said easily. "It isn't as if actors are the most stable people in the world—you're in the business; surely you've figured that out? Now tell your Uncle Wycherly what seems to be the problem, and he'll recomme
nd a nice clinic for you."
Sinah stared at him, not sure how to interpret what she was hearing.
"Oh, come on," Wycherly said. "You've just told me you're leaving normal. It's only fair for you to tell me why."
"Well ..." Sinah said, drawing out the word.
Wycherly always surprised her. There was kindness in him—in some ways, Sinah knew him better than he knew himself—but the combination of privilege and illness had caused him to dispense with empty conversational pleasantries a long time ago.
She hovered on the verge of telling him everything, realizing that she'd never told the whole real truth to anyone in her entire life—not even Jason or Ellis, the two men she'd felt closest to. She twisted the frames of her glasses, a tiny part of her mind hoping she wouldn't break them. That would be an embarrassing show of stress. Grace under pressure was the only dignity she had.
"Sometimes I think I'm other people." There! The statement—bald and inaccurate though it was—was made.
"Okay." Wycherly showed no surprise—nor felt any, as far as Sinah could tell. "I take it this is more than preparation for a role?"
"It's—" Sinah pressed her free hand over her heart, and felt the buckskin pouch inside its bag crackle beneath her fingers. A prized possession—but hers or Athanais'?
"I can't control it. It's like drowning."
Now she felt him recoil, though she didn't see him move. Sinah felt a rushing spectral coldness through the portal of her attenuated gift, and for a moment it was as if she was sinking into turbid water that rose higher and higher, over her chest, her face. . . .
"Tell me about it," Wycherly heard his own words with a strange sense of detachment, as though a strong, sure hand were placed over his own, guiding his actions through the tumult of rushing water that suddenly, vividly, filled his imagination. To drown, to sleep . . .
"This isn't the first time it's happened, is it?" he added.
She looked up at him with—gratitude?—and Wycherly felt something in his chest twist. He concentrated on breathing evenly, slowly, revealing nothing. Be calm, he told himself. Don't even he here.
Gravelight Page 21
