"Do you think I don't know that?" Truth demanded, sitting down to pull off her hiking boots. She set them aside, and quickly pulled off the rest of her clothes before shrugging into the welcoming terrycloth robe.
"Have you forgotten who I am?" she said, although it was a little hard to be impressive when the robe you were wearing had multicolored pastel stripes instead of badges of mystic authority.
"You're Thorne Blackburn's daughter," Dylan said, "and when I think of all the years I wished you'd come to terms with that, so that we could explore the work that Thorne did—together—"
"Oh, yeah?" Truth snarled, pushed to the end of her patience. "Then explore this: there's an uncontrolled Gate—a sidhe Gate, a Blackburn Gate—running wild up there at the site of Wildwood Sanatorium, and it's at the center of ^// the inexplicable manifestations in Morton's Fork."
"'Oh, yeah'?" Dylan echoed nastily. "Prove it." He handed her the cup of hot coffee. "I'll make you a sandwich."
"Prove it?" Truth echoed blankly. The cup burned her fingers, feeling far hotter than it was because she was so cold. "But I've just told you—"
"And I've told you time and again that your opinion—or even mine— isn't proof. Bring me something I can measure—or at least witnesses. You haven't seen yourself the way I have. Truth—ever since you turned in that biography of your father, you've just been floundering, looking for something to take the place of researching and writing it—and of hating him. Now you've found this—and you aren't even stopping to question it. You're just charging straight into it."
"But it's dangerous!" Truth said. "An uncontrolled Gate—"
"Wouldn't be that much trouble, from what you've told me about Shadow's Gate. The people in Shadowkill have lived next to one for almost three hundred years without too much trouble."
"Except for the ones who've died!" Truth burst out. "The Gate demands a blood sacrifice each generation from the keeper's own family—"
"And you've just said the family's nowhere to be found," Dylan finished for her. "So who's going to be sacrificed?"
Truth glared at him in exasperation.
"It isn't that I'm unsympathetic," Dylan said. "But if you'd just calm down and be reasonable, you'd admit what we both know—that one of the biggest dangers in this field is the chance you'll end up like Margaret Murray. She was a respected Egyptologist before she began publishing her flights of fancy about the European Witch-Cult. A reputation's an easy thing to tarnish—what about the scientists who backed Geller? Or the Frenchmen who decided they'd found the Holy Grail—and that the Plantagenets were descended from Jesus Christ? The field's full of examples like these. And so I think the best thing for you to do would be to put some distance between yourself and . . . well, let's just call it temptation."
He was going to send her away. Pure cold alarm washed away Truth's every other emotion.
Of course it wasn't as simple as that. This wasn't the Dark Ages; she wasn't even married to Dylan. While he could cut her off from any association with the Institute's project, she had as much right to be in Morton's Fork as he did. If he drove her to the nearest airport, she could rent a car and race him back here. There was nothing he could do to stop her.
But he could turn the locals against her, even get her barred from the sanatorium grounds if he tried. She could not afford to have Dylan for an enemy.
Her j/W!6^-damned arrogance had set a trap for her once again. She should have been open with Dylan long ago, and told him the whole story of her father's reappearance and strange vanishment, of her own new sense of mission. Dylan had always seemed sympathetic about the things Truth had spoken of, and she knew he'd studied Thorne Blackburn, but she'd never before delved into the matter of just how much of a true believer in Thome's world Dylan was. She hadn't even told him that Thome's claims of sidhe descent were the literal truth.
And now it was too late to ask. She'd misjudged Dylan's willingness to accept the Unseen significantly, and now she must do all she could to repair matters.
"You're right, of course," Truth said, forcing a smile. "I know every-
one was worried about me . . ." She hesitated, choosing her words carefully. She mustn't lie, but she must tell a truth Dylan would accept from her.
"But when I was up there today, I felt . . . Well, it seemed a lot to me like what I felt at Shadow's Gate. So I was trying to pinpoint exactly what it was . . . and I lost all track of time. I never even got much past the front gate, and then I guess I might even have fallen asleep. It was starting to get dark when I started back, and then I got lost. Dylan, I would swear I passed the same bench three times without turning around once!"
Dylan smiled faintly, although he was far from mollified. "Maybe that's what you did—haunted houses are notorious for getting people turned around, as you know. And I'd be the last to dismiss out of hand the possibility that there really is a psychic locus up there in the woods— your family seems to be attracted to them.
"But that doesn't change the fact that you went over the line here today. Truth. You don't belong here. You'll only get yourself in trouble, even if you don't get hurt."
"Who are you to presume to make my decisions for me?" Truth said, very softly.
The challenge she had not meant to make hung between them in the air, vibrating with a life of its own. She could see Dylan go pale, but he did not retreat.
"I'm someone who loves you, Truth. I don't want to see you hurt," he said evenly.
Too late, Dylan; too late, my love.
"You can't keep people you love in a bell jar," Truth said slowly. "You have to let them choose their own paths, no matter how much it hurts. Do you think I like my sister Light—almost my only family—choosing to go off with a man who believes that everything I do is evil? I tell myself that it's her life, that Michael loves her—"
"But you don't really believe it," Dylan finished. Truth shook her head.
"But I don't want to see you hurt," Dylan repeated. "I still think it would be better if. . ."
He was wavering; Truth silenced him with a kiss. It made her feel almost as if she were betraying him. "I'm sorry," she whispered against his neck. His body trembled as he held her.
Let him take it for an apology, instead of as an admission she could not
give him one. Whatever promises she'd made by implication here tonight were ones she had no intention of keeping, and Dylan would find that out, eventually.
No matter the cost to her human heart, she had to stay here in Morton's Fork, and find someone to close the Wildwood Gate.
No matter the cost.
TWELVE
THE GRAVE BEYOND THE DOOR
Lady, you are the cruelVst she alive
If you will lead these graces to the grave,
And leave the world no copy.
— WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
TRUTH JOURDEMAYNE TRUDGED UP THE HILL, CARE-fully following the trail—or trace, as it was known locally. If there was a Dellon cottage up here, she meant to find it. It was the payoff to a fortnight's grinding work in the neighboring towns of Pharaoh and Maske-lyne, where she had consulted newspaper morgues, libraries, and local history societies. It had enabled her to exercise the research skills she'd mastered in writing Venus Afflicted, and had furnished time for the breach between her and Dylan, if not to heal, then at least to cool.
She'd made a bargain with Dylan the morning after their fight—she'd stay away from the sanatorium unless she was with him, and confine her meddling to backtrailing the history of Wildwood Sanatorium and locating the family that had sold Quentin Blackburn the land.
"And I'll be quiet and circumspect, and hunt up your proof and not scare anybody. And you'll always know where I am. Deal?"
He'd agreed. She'd known he would—he loved her, the poor fool, and wanted to think they had a future together. He'd let himself think
that she'd realized the danger she was in and was going to follow his advice.
She'd realized the danger, all right. But Trut
h was a trained magician, and followed no one's will but her own. She and Dylan would inevitably fight again, but while they didn't, each day was precious to Truth, an unearned gift of normalcy and calm.
Which was about to end, now that she knew who to look for.
Like the aristocrats of another era, the names of the mountain people tended only to appear in the newspaper three times: at birth, marriage, and death. The Dellon women didn't seem to marry, but there'd been extensive coverage of the family nonetheless—in 19lo, when Arioch Dellon had sold most of the family land to Quentin Blackburn for a sanatorium; in 1913, when Jael Dellon disappeared and Arioch Dellon died; in 1917 when the sanatorium burned and Athanais Dellon died. The last mention of the Dellons in The Pharaoh Call and Record was in 1969—the same year as the disaster at Shadow's Gate—when the birth of one Melusine Dellon was recorded.
If the Dellon family had owned the land the sanatorium was built on, it was a reasonable assumption that the Dellon family was the Gatekeeper line for the Wildwood Gate. But the moment Truth began trying to find Melusine or any of her living relatives, she'd been systematically stonewalled.
It had been Rowan who'd finally suggested that the County Historical Society would be able to at least tell Truth where in Morton's Fork the Dellons had lived. Her suggestion had sent Truth back to Maskelyne to look at page after page of deeds and land grants (some dating back to the 1700s) in a dusty upstairs room.
There Truth had found that the displacement of the Tutelo Indians who had been the area's original inhabitants seemed to have been a gentler business than it had been in other parts of the country; many of the earliest parcels in Lyonesse County were recorded as being purchased from one "James De Lyonn, a Native Sachem, or Chief, of the Tutelo Nation," and there were oblique references to intermarriage as well.
By the time De Lyonn had become Dellon, the land the Dellons owned had shrunk to an irregularly-shaped parcel that stretched in a widening V from halfway up the mountain all the way to the crest.
Truth had carefully transferred the coordinates on the grant to the
copy of the ordinance map that she carried. The next day she was back in Morton's Fork. Somewhere in the area between the Little Heller and Watchman's Gap Trace there had to be . . . something.
She hadn't told Dylan she was coming here, though technically she was not breaking her implied promises: She did not expect to go as far as the sanatorium today.
But the time for breaking all her promises was near, and she would do it without hesitation if it would serve the greater oath she had sworn.
If only she could find someone of the true bloodline before it was too late.
How did you know if you were losing your mind? Not in the flashy dysfunctional way that won you a "rest cure" in any of half a dozen places Wycherly could name—and had visited—but in the quiet way that eventually made you the lead story on the six o'clock news?
It was like wondering how to become good. As far as Wycherly could tell, you never knew. There were no signs to show when you'd reached goodness. But the benchmarks for losing a soul were easy and clear.
To a certain extent, it was about the relinquishment of standards. Wycherly rubbed his unshaven chin and grimaced. He hadn't intended to grow a beard—he looked unconvincing in one, for one thing, and his father wouldn't tolerate it—but it was just too much trouble to shave, and he wasn't sure where his electric razor was, anyway. His hair was long past shaggy, as well—he looked like one of those mountain men who never saw another human being for months at a time.
But slowly you developed a new insight into necessity. Things that had seemed incontrovertible, obvious, necessary, were slowly discovered to be . . . optional. Standards of grooming, standards of behavior.
Ethics.
Sanity.
Optional.
The small, close room was lit only by the flame of five kerosene lamps, all that Wycherly had been able to find in the old cabin.
He did not want to be down here in the dark.
Though the room was naturally cool even in the sweltering early August heat, the lamp flames heated it quickly, and Wycherly was stripped to the waist, wearing cutoffs made from the slacks he'd been wearing in
the crash that had brought him here. The cold of the earthen floor seeped up through the soles of his bare feet.
Over the past several days he'd painstakingly emptied the root cellar of its litter of decaying boxes and spoiled preserves.
At least, he thought he had.
The gap of missing time—of consequences that appeared suddenly in his life without antecedents—yawned beneath Wycherly's feet like the jaws of the abyss. He was sure he hadn't been drinking heavily enough to black out—but if he didn't remember this, what else was there in his recent past that he didn't remember?
Never mind. Think about now. Think about what he was going to do here.
Some of what he'd found in the boxes he could use for his own purposes. The rest he'd cobbled together from what he had on hand— Les Cubes seemed to assume he knew much more than he did, and the other book simply referred him to sources he didn't have.
But there'd been herbs and resins in the litter of the cardboard boxes, as well as a rusty iron dagger and a copper sickle and some bits of candle and chalk. It was enough to begin with.
Smoke hung in a flat cloud just below the low ceiling. He'd moved the kitchen table down here—the new ladder he'd bought had made that easier—and his crude implements were laid out on it. He'd drawn the elaborate figure from the book with care: The drawing covered most of the table, and the twisting, not-quite letters made his eyes hurt if he stared at them for too long. The iron knife lay in the middle of the symbol, and candles ringed its edge.
It all looked hideously real, somehow, as if this mummery was somehow more important than anything that might exist in the world beyond it.
And that was all it was, Wycherly told himself. Mummery. Theater, playacting, let's pretend. ... It wasn't real. Not really. He was just passing the time.
Then why did he feel so revolted by what he was doing?
Stop it, Wycherly told himself firmly. It's only a game. If you can't even do this, what good are you to anyone?
None at all, but he'd already known that. He was a drunkard and he never intended to stop.
The thought reminded him, and he picked up the bottle of moonshine
on the edge of the table. He took a dutiful swig. It tasted vile, and he shuddered. He didn't want it, and by now he hated the taste.
But he wanted even less to be tormented by visions of Sinah stretched out upon this table, and what he would do then. It seemed to Wycherly that there was no middle ground—drink, and doom himself, or embrace that strange sobriety and become something that frightened even him.
But he was hoping there was some other way, and that was why he was here— just playing —to explore Les Cultes, to prove to himself that the book's rituals had no power, that Quentin Blackburn was only a hallucination, that none of this was real.
That he was not compelled to do the things that made such bright pictures in his mind.
He took another drink. It was like swallowing a snake, and each swallow rekindled that burning pain in his stomach. Ulcers, he suspected, but somehow he found the pain comforting through its ordinariness. Maybe an ulcer would kill him, and take away the ability to choose.
Because Wycherly knew what he would choose when he was finally forced to make his choice. He was a weak, helpless, useless failure—a disgrace to the family name, his father said. He'd choose to save himself and let the girl die—just as he had thirteen years before. "As it was in the he-ginning, it is now and ever shall he. World without end. Amen.''
The semi-blasphemy of the mock prayer made him shudder, but there was no need for that, was there? God wasn't dead, but He'd retired, and now there were new gods to take His place. Young gods, and hungry.
He set the bottle down and returned to the book.
It was a
ritual of Summoning and Adoration to something Wycherly could not pronounce, but it had looked like the simplest of the rituals in the book and an easy place to start. Draw the glyph, spill the blood, read off the Names. Fortunately Atheling's translation included a phonetic rendering, or Wycherly would never have been able to manage it.
The directions for the ritual called for Wycherly to be standing in the middle of the symbol, but since the root cellar was too small for Wycherly to draw the diagram inside the nine-foot radius that was called for anyway, he thought the top of the table would have to do.
He also had no intention of providing whatever might be "a suitable Blood sacrifice for the Season and Hour." He had no idea what Season and Hour this was, and he couldn't catch any of the local wildlife anyway. And while he could probably buy a live goat or at least a chicken fairly
easily, the thought of actually killing it made him recoil. Somehow the slaughter of an animal was different from the bloody fantasies of Sinah that obsessed him more each day. And if his demons wouldn't be satisfied with farm animals, why bother with them at all?
But the choreography of the rite required him to spill something, so he'd decided to use a few drops of his own blood and some of the whiskey. This was only a game, anyway. There was no need to make everything exact. And the book stopped short of telling him what results he ought to expect, anyway.
"Okay." The word came out in a shaky whisper, telling him how keyed up he was, how frightened.
Because he was weak. Because he was useless. Because he was a coward, a worthless accident tainting the Musgrave bloodline. His father had said so. His mother had wept.
A sullen resentful anger made Wycherly grit his teeth. He didn't deny the truth of his father's words, even to himself, but the anger within him made him want to punish Kenneth Musgrave for ever having said them.
Maybe this was the way. He picked up the box of kitchen matches that lay on the table and lit the first of the candle stubs that ringed the chalk sigil.
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