Gravelight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  By the time he got to the fifth candle, he felt as if he were moving through water. His hands shook with the tingling, toxic apprehension of a man whistling his way through the graveyard, terrified of what he might awaken, but his emotions were curiously numb.

  Wycherly hurried through the directions, skipping the steps he didn't understand or didn't have the equipment for. The room filled with the smoke from his makeshift brazier, making Wycherly light-headed, as if he were unconnected to both the cause and the effect of the events occurring here.

  A game. Just a game . . .

  As if what he did here did not matter at all, though a faint, dying part of Wycherly's soul shrilled out that it did, it did matter very much.

  He picked up the knife.

  Spill the blood, say the Names. . . .

  He meant to prick his finger. There were a couple of ounces of shine already waiting in a battered teacup; he'd mix the blood with that and then pour it out onto the drawing.

  Wycherly picked up the knife awkwardly in his left hand—that was

  what the book said to do and he might as well do this much of the ritual right—and laid his right hand palm-up upon the table.

  At that moment, insanity uncoiled in his mind like a striking cobra: the freshly sharpened point slid off his finger, carving a deep slash across his palm and sliding up his arm. He bore down, cutting deep the way suicides did, hungry for damage.

  "Jesus H. Christ!" Wycherly howled. The automatic oath, ripped out without thinking, was like a douche of ice water upon the coiling darkness of the room.

  He was able to drop the knife.

  With his bloody right hand, Wycherly swept everything off the surface of the table, knives and candles and bottle all crashing to the floor together. One of the candles lit the spilled liquor, and it burned for a few seconds with a weird blue alcoholic flame before guttering out. The careful chalk drawing was a blurred and meaningless mess, smudged with blood and bootleg whiskey.

  He flexed the damaged hand. The gesture made the edges of the wound pull and gape, and Wycherly hissed with the pain. Blood flowed freely, but everything worked. You could have severed a tendon, you stupid son of a hitch. He held the hand up over his head, trying to stop the bleeding. Blood flowed down his arm, collecting at the elbow before dripping to the floor. His hand burned as if it was on fire.

  Wycherly panted as though he'd just escaped some monstrous danger. His mind shied away from the enormity of it—even the need to punish himself did not excuse his trifling with this terrible harm. He'd never cut himself before—never even wanted to. His flirtations with self-injury had taken the form of alcohol, pills, reckless driving. Not this. Never this.

  His skin was feverish. The trickling blood felt cold.

  He tried to be angry, to take refuge in rage, but all he could feel was fear. Fear of losing control once and for all, of ultimate powerlessness, an inability to impose his own will even on his own body. Fear that there would finally be no place at all in which to hide.

  Wycherly looked down at the table. In the light of the kerosene lanterns arrayed along the wall, the surface of the table was dim, the chalk a brighter smear. The book was the only thing still there, though he'd thought he'd swept it to the floor with everything else.

  He picked it up, reaching for it automatically with his gashed right hand. His hand left a bloody smear across the grimy white leather cover.

  and the pain made his eyes tear, but he welcomed it. This was what was responsible, this perversely alluring . . . excuse. The key that unlocked all the corruption already within him.

  No. It wasn't the book. It was him.

  Wycherly knew about taking responsibility for his own actions, even if he'd rarely done it. He could not blame a book, an inanimate object, for the fact that he was twisted inside. Tainted. He was the one who'd found the obscenities in Les Cultes des Goules so engrossing. He was the one who'd tried acting them out just now.

  He could not change. But he could at least put an end to one temptation.

  / will drown my book, the magician Prospero had said. Well, Wycherly would burn his. Fire cleansed, that was the old belief.

  But fire had not been enough to scour the temple in the ruins up on the mountain—only to imprison the depravity it represented.

  Until he had come.

  Wycherly picked up the ladder from its place on the floor and unfolded it into position. As he did, he stared at it suspiciously. He must have bought it, but he was damned if he could remember when.

  Damned? Probably.

  He climbed to the top of the ladder, still tightly clutching the book in his bleeding hand, and pushed open the closed trap. Smoke and heat rushed out, and the stifling air of the cabin felt chilly on his bare, sweating skin. Wycherly climbed out and dropped the trap back into place.

  He felt immediately better as soon as he'd done it, as if by shutting the trapdoor he could shut his nasty experiment out of his life. It was stupid to trifle with what some of his flakier friends called deep-mind archetypes that way, and he'd been duly punished.

  And now he was going to punish in his turn.

  He got to his feet. He was going to need both hands to start a fire in the stove. He set the book on top of the wood stove before going to the refrigerator to get a can of beer to pour over his gashed hand and wrist. The cold and the alcohol woke the dull, sullen pain to furious life, and encouraged the wound to bleed afresh. Wycherly yanked down one of Luned's freshly laundered dish towels and wrapped his hand in it, watching the towel blossom into redness before he wrapped that in turn in the Ace bandage he'd used for his ankle. The result was bulky and unwieldy, but it ought to serve, at least for a while.

  He turned back to the stove and began building a fire. When it was all

  ready to light, he realized that he'd left the matches down in the root cellar, and would have to go back down to get them.

  "Luned—?"

  The voice from the doorway made Wycherly spin around, heart hammering with startlement. He held the stove handle in his left hand like a weapon.

  Evan Starking stood in the doorway of the cabin, looking nearly as surprised to see Wycherly as Wycherly was to see the young proprietor of the Morton's Fork general store.

  "She isn't here." Wycherly turned back to the stove, dumping the book into the unlit stove and replacing the lid with deft economy.

  "Well, I wondered if. . ." Evan's voice trailed off as he got a good look at Wycherly and the cabin: the missing table, the blood spattered on the floor.

  Wycherly knew how he must appear: bloody, unshaven, red-eyed and smudged from all the smoke in the root cellar. Not reliable by any means. But if Evan didn't like his looks, that was too damned bad. Wycherly had problems of his own, and nobody had asked Evan to come up here.

  "You see, Mister Wych, she's gone missing, and I wondered if you might have any idea of where she'd got herself to. She was up here yesterday," Evan said, his tone half-questioning.

  Had she been? A cold knot of dismay grew in Wycherly's stomach. He couldn't remember. His last truly clear memory was of standing in Sinah's kitchen, looking at the knives while that too-vivid movie of what they could be used for played out in his head. Time since then had passed in an illusive haze, as it did when he was drinking heavily.

  But he wasn't.

  Was he?

  Where had the moonshine come from?

  "I don't think I saw her," Wycherly said, truthfully enough. And she wasn't in the root cellar, he was sure of that. The thought brought some relief.

  "She didn't come home last night. We thought she might of stopped here with you, but when she didn't come home today. Pa said as how I ought to come and see you," Evan said stubbornly.

  "She didn't spend the night with me," Wycherly said firmly. "But I wasn't here." He was pretty sure of that, at least, and Sinah would say it was true even if it wasn't.

  "I don't know where she is," Evan said again. His voice was filled with frustration and worry.
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  "We'd better go out and look for her."

  Some tardy impulse of guardianship—he'd tried to help Luned, even if only slightly—prompted Wycherly's offer. It was too easy to think of her floating face-down in the creek, dead. The image revolted him.

  "Just let me get dressed," Wycherly added, walking off toward the bedroom.

  Truth nearly walked past the cabin that stood so closely surrounded by trees that it seemed that the very forest had declared its guardianship of the time-worn structure. It looked unoccupied, but the windows were open and seemed to be unbroken.

  "Hello?" Truth knocked at the front door, only to have it swing inward, leaving her staring at an empty room.

  On the right was an old potbellied stove, its dogleg stovepipe piercing the wall near the ceiling. A high-backed settle flanked it. Directly ahead was a refrigerator and a sink with an old-fashioned pump beside it. There was a window over the sink, and it was open. There were three straight-back chairs, a rocker, and a stool scattered about the room, but no sign of a kitchen table. To the left, an interior door hung half-open, but she was not quite at the right angle to see through it.

  "'Curiouser and curiouser,' said Alice." Truth took a cautious step backward and circled the cabin. Someone was living here—that was plain to see—but there was something not quite right about the cabin that roused Truth's suspicions.

  She continued her circuit of the outside of the house. There was a stone chimney that the stovepipe fed into, and as she turned the corner she saw the open window over the sink. From this angle she could see the waste pipe poking out of the foundation; the earth beneath the waste pipe was still damp, which meant that there had been someone here as recently as a few hours ago. There was a large silver gas tank, obviously new, and a few feet further along. Truth passed through a wash of heat from the refrigerator's condenser. The refrigerator made a noise like a lawn mower, and she wondered how anyone could sleep with all that racket. Then she came to the bedroom, and saw what convinced her to enter the cabin.

  The bedroom had more furniture than the outer room, containing a washstand, night table, dresser, and armoire in addition to the big brass

  bed. There was a braided rag rug on the floor, and freshly laundered white curtains in the open window.

  And there was blood on the unmade bed.

  There was a trailing spatter of dark brown spots on the incongruous pale-pastel striped sheet, and a blotch upon the pillow as though someone had wiped his hand there. It was too much for a simple scrape, but not quite enough for a gunshot.

  "Hello?" Truth called again, a harder edge to her voice this time. There was still no answer.

  When she went back to the front door and pushed it all the way open, she saw what she hadn't seen before—crisscrossing trails of blood drops on the floor, and a smeary puddle near the edge of the trapdoor in the center of the floor.

  The devastating sense of wrongness caught Truth just as she stepped over the threshold; she gagged, trying not to retch, as sickened as if she had discovered herself wading through cooling blood. She reeled back, clutching at the door.

  What was it?

  Truth, for all her sidhe blood, was a magician, not a psychic. A dozen people could have been murdered in this room and she would not have sensed it. What she sensed here was magick, and its wrongness had an oddly familiar tang, resembling what she had sensed up at the sanatorium. She frowned in puzzlement, and steeled herself to advance into the room.

  Viewed with her Otherworldly sight, the room was curiously distorted. Some aspects became larger, others vanished from sight. Solid objects disappeared; she could see the room beneath the floor as clearly as if that floor were made of glass.

  After a moment's hesitation. Truth knelt and lifted the trapdoor. It came up easily.

  The room below was lit by half a dozen burning oil lamps scattered haphazardly about the floor. The missing kitchen table was down there, and the smeared and bloody figure chalked upon its top glowed with dark intensity.

  Truth rocked back, nostrils flaring in disgust. Though intense, the power was curiously unfinished, its intensity fading as the power of the spilled blood dissipated. Whoever had been playing around in this makeshift temple, he hadn't known quite what he was doing—able to raise the power, he could neither contain nor control it.

  Having satisfied herself that there was no dead body hidden in this secret room, Truth let the trap fall shut again. As she stood, she sketched a quick symbol in the air to hurry the fading of the dark power. Without reinforcement, it should dissipate of its own accord within a day or so; she'd come back to make sure.

  A quick look through the bedroom was enough to assure her that no one lurked there either, injured or otherwise. And as the first shock of the cabin's foul magickal atmosphere faded, Truth realized she had almost automatically moved away from the strongest source of her disquiet.

  That source lay in the other room, but what—and where—was it? A few moments later she found herself standing facing the wall to the right of the door. Stove, settle, pie safe, wood pile; what could be here that burned with such malign intention? Finally, in desperation. Truth opened the door of the stove, and at last saw the thing that did not belong.

  It was August, and swelteringly hot, but the stove had been prepared for a fire: kindling scraps and tightly-wadded newspapers laid as a foundation for a few split logs. And thrust in among them was a small book. Fresh blood still shone wetly on its binding.

  Every magician knew that inanimate objects could become infused with intention —what else, after all, was a consecration, save the infusing of its object with the intention of the magician? And even to Truth's relativistic senses, the book radiated wrongness as if it were a living thing. Cautiously—fearflil of spiders if of nothing worse—Truth reached for the book.

  She pulled her hand back as if she'd been burned. Though Irene had told Truth about pure Evil, Truth had never expected to experience it; her few experiences with Absolute Good had shown her that both that and True Evil existed in a continuum the practitioners of her own Balance weren't truly equipped to penetrate. Gritting her teeth and invoking all her shields. Truth reached into the cold stove once again and extracted the book.

  It seemed a very small and innocuous thing to be the source of so much psychic disturbance; roughly four inches by six and about half an inch thick, it was almost more of a pamphlet than a book. She flipped through it, wincing at the bloodstains: It looked like a facsimile of a much earlier book, printed in craggy antique type. She caught sight of some familiar symbols—Black Magick, without a doubt—but what interested her more than that at the moment was that the book had come from Taghkanic.

  Due to the convergence of a number of circumstances, not the least of which was the presence of the Bidney Institute, Taghkanic College was one of the largest repositories of books on magick and sorcery on the East Coast. Only the various special collections at Miskatonic were larger, and neither they nor the Mount Tamalpais collection in California were as accessible to scholars.

  And someone found this hook a little too accessible. It had obviously been stolen—the first page was stamped plainly with the words "Do Not Circulate," and considering the contents Truth could see why.

  She swaddled the book carefully in a sheet of newspaper from the stack beside the stove and stuffed it into her purse, then went over to the sink to wash her hands. The pump baffled her; she worked the handle desultorily a few times, but nothing happened.

  "Who the hell are you?"

  The rough male voice behind her made Truth jump. She turned around.

  The speaker was a red-haired man somewhere in his thirties. He had pale skin that still showed the effects of a recent sunburn, and hooded, deep-set eyes in a curious, pale shade of amber. He looked strangely familiar, though Truth could not remember having seen him before.

  "I'm sorry; the door was open—" And there was blood on the floor.

  His right hand was roughly bandaged—it was eas
y to spot the source of the blood. He must be the one dabbling in Black Magick with Les Cultes.

  "I'm looking for a member of the Dellon family." Truth brushed her hands together, trying to rid them of dried blood. The last thing she wanted was for him to think she'd stolen—r^-stolen, rather—his book. "Would that be you?"

  "Up the hill." The stranger was brusquely uninterested in small talk, though Truth could tell from his voice that he was not local. But he knew who she meant, and seemed to think the Dellons might still be there. Relief held Truth speechless for a moment.

  As she stood there, the man walked over to the sink and worked the pump handle briskly with his left hand until water spouted clear and cold from the opening. He plunged his head beneath the stream, gasping at the shock of it. Straightening again, he brushed his sopping hair back one-handed and wiped water from his face. Apparently there was no towel.

  "Thank you," she said, putting as much warmth into it as she could. "I've been trying to track down the—"

  "Why?" The question was almost a demand, brusque and abrupt.

  "I need to talk to a member of the family," Truth said, trying to seem forthcoming without answering his question. "Are you a member of the family?"

  "Hardly."

  And whoever you are, you aren't from around here, buddy, Truth thought grimly. Not unless you've been away at school for a long, long time.

  "I'm sorry; we haven't been introduced, have we? I'm Truth Jourde-mayne; I'm here with Dr. Dylan Palmer. We're from the Bidney Institute in Glastonbury, New York."

  "The one at Taghkanic College," the stranger said.

  Truth was surprised. Not too many people had heard of the Bidney Institute, and still fewer knew of its scholastic affiliation. Of course, if he'd been stealing books from its library . . .

  "Do you work in the field?" she asked.

  "As a snake-oil salesman in a psychic sideshow? I don't think so," the man said with a sneer.

  You've got a helluva lot of nerve to jeer, considering you're the one doing bargain-basement Satanism.

  "Well, you're certainly entitled to your opinion," Truth said aloud.