TRUTH DROVE THEM in her own car; a late-model Saturn. Fortunately she knew the way; Winter was not certain she would have been able to reconstruct it. On the way back to Nuclear Lake, Winter told Truth every detail she could remember: the sudden storm, the way she had felt that it was somehow connected to her even though it resisted all her attempts to control it.
“But it wasn’t as if it were something I was creating—there are a lot of times I’ve felt that—as if I were controlling events outside myself—but this was different. And Dr. Luty and Dr. Mahar both said that feelings of disassociation were a common symptom of deep depression,” Winter finished bleakly.
Truth made a rude noise without taking her eyes from the road. “Psychotherapy! The so-called science of making every human peg fit the same round hole, no matter how hard you have to hammer. And like a stopped clock, it’s right twice a day!”
Winter was surprised into a blurt of laughter. She’d have to stop judging people, like books, by their covers. Who would ever have expected prim and proper Truth Jourdemayne to say something like that?
“So you don’t … ?” she faltered. Believe them? But if they weren’t right, what is the truth?
“Dylan says I should have more charity, but I don’t. My sister was in an institution for years, tortured by people too stupid or too lazy to have a spark of either compassion or imagination!” Truth said fiercely.
“What happened to her?” Winter asked, after a moment.
“She’s living with a man who loves her now, and who is helping her reach an accommodation with the world. And while I’d be the last person to say there’s no such thing as mental illness, I’d say a good proportion of the people in institutions are just people who can’t manage to survive in the world human beings have built for themselves.”
“It’s a pretty messed-up world sometimes,” Winter admitted.
“Sometimes,” Truth agreed. “But there are always ways to make it better.”
WHEN THEY REACHED the road that led toward the lake itself, Winter was faintly surprised to find Nina’s car still blocking the way. Its door hung half-open and the keys were in the ignition. Truth parked her Saturn behind it and got out. She walked up to Nina’s car, slid into the rain-drenched driver’s seat, and turned the key that was still in the ignition.
Nothing. Not even the grinding of the starter motor.
“I think I killed it,” Winter said, with a brave attempt at lightness. I wonder what Dave Kelly’s going to say—two in one week.
Truth didn’t seem particularly surprised. “Some poltergeists have an affinity for electrical systems, especially battery-driven ones. Did you do things like this a lot when you were a child?” Truth asked.
The question caught Winter off guard; automatically she tried to answer it—
—and encountered a rejection so emphatic it made her psychic teeth hurt. She tried to force words past that barrier—any words—and was as helpless as any stutterer to produce articulate speech. She shook her head helplessly, coughing.
“Well, never mind that now,” Truth said in that same easy casual way. She got out of the car, shut the door, and locked it carefully. “Not that I expect much in the way of human vandals up here,” she said in response to Winter’s unvoiced question, “but there isn’t a lot left of the inside of a car once raccoons get into it, either. Now, do you want to show me where the trouble was?”
“Where the trouble was.” What an admirably neutral way of putting it, Winter thought—but, it seemed, Truth Jourdemayne really was used to this sort of thing.
“Do you have a flashlight?” Winter asked. “There’s something else here that I want to show you, too.”
“MY,” TRUTH SAID, shining her light on the sigil on the basement wall. Whether it was the company or the fact that this time it didn’t come as a surprise, Winter no longer had the same sense of shocky horror she’d felt the first time she’d seen it. Of course, the fact that she was almost too tired even to stand under her own power might have contributed to her apathy.
Seen by the flashlight’s bright glare, the musty basement was only that—a basement laboratory, abandoned for unknown reasons and appropriated years later by students and squirrels. Harmless.
Truth shone the light on the floor. The scuffed and faded design painted there jumped out in once-bright primary colors—yellow, red, blue. “You painted this?” she asked.
“We all worked on it,” Winter said, slowly, testing her newborn memories. “Janelle laid it out—she was the Art major—but she was following a design in a book that somebody had. I don’t remember.”
“And when it was done?” Truth asked, a new note of sharpness in her voice.
Winter shrugged, helpless to answer.
“Were you Sealed to the Circle? How far did you get on Smoothing the Path? Who was your Gatekeeper?”
“Path? Gatekeeper?” Something out of Winter’s recent reading surfaced to blend with her recovered memories. “But that’s—”
“The Blackburn Work,” Truth finished for her, a grim new note of worry in her voice. “So if it’s true that you and your friends were responsible for putting this here, then the five of you were about my father’s business. And it’s nothing for amateurs to meddle in.”
“You DON’T REALLY believe in that stuff,” Winter asked hesitantly, once they were outside again. The sun was setting, and the last rays through the trees gilded everything they touched.
“A savage place, as holy and enchanted, as—” Oh, damn, I can’t remember the rest of it. But that was a normal sort of forgetting, Winter knew. The sort everyone did.
“It all depends, I suppose,” Truth said, “on how you define belief. Do you believe in chairs?”
“Of course I do!” Winter said, mystified. “I see them every day.”
“The semanticist would argue that you didn’t ‘believe’ in chairs, at all then—belief, after all, implies an element of faith, and faith isn’t necessary when you have the physical object available to you on a moment’s notice, now, is it?”
Why are we having this conversation? Winter wondered, but dutifully asked, as she supposed she was meant to, “But what about people who believe in God?”
“For every person who says they ‘believe’ in God, I can show you one who says they ‘know’ God—or Goddess, if you prefer, and I know whose integrity I’d rather place my faith in. Now,” Truth said, briskly changing the subject, “can you tell me about where you were when you first saw the lake boil?”
To Winter’s relief, it looked as though they weren’t going to discuss Thorne Blackburn or his voodoo logic anymore. She didn’t know if she could handle it, especially now that she began to suspect that Truth believed that nonsense, too. “What is Truth? said jesting Pilate.” “Here,” Winter said. She stepped into the place on the walkway where she’d stood to look back at the lake, but even to her strained nerves there remained no sense of menace.
She watched as Truth opened her shoulder bag—a Coach bag even more enormous than Winter’s—and took out what Winter first thought was a necklace.
It was a length of bright silver chain almost three feet long. There was a large ring at one end and at the other, a cone-shaped pendulum of quartz or glass, big and heavy enough to pull the chain straight without jouncing. Winter remembered seeing much smaller versions of this in the glass case at Tabitha Whitfield’s store. “What are you—?”
“Quiet now,” Truth said gently. “It’s a pendulum, and I just need a moment or two without distraction.”
Winter watched as Truth stretched out her arm until the pendulum hung straight down from the end of it. The chain swayed slowly back and forth, the quartz weight at the end gathering sunlight and distilling it into small flashes of gold. As Winter stared at it, fascinated, the pendulum settled and became perfectly still.
She glanced at Truth. Truth was standing with her eyes closed, breathing slowly and deeply, her face relaxed.
The pendulum began to move—slo
wly at first, and then faster, until it was describing an agitated elliptical orbit. It seemed as if Truth must be swinging it, or at least moving her wrist, but as far as Winter could tell, Truth hadn’t moved at all.
Pendulum power. Is this what I’m reduced to believing in?
But dowsing—which could use a pendulum such as this as well as the more familiar copper-sheathed rod—was something, Winter knew from her reading, that even multimillion-dollar oil companies relied on to save themselves the expense of fruitless drilling. It was a legitimate—though inexplicable—method of gaining information.
Slowly the pendulum settled to a stop again. Truth opened her eyes.
“What was here—and after seeing that basement I’m inclined to think that something was—isn’t here now, Winter.”
“But you believe that it was here before?” Winter asked. You said I wasn’t crazy—do you still think so? It was true that she didn’t feel crazy—or even afraid. What she did feel was a faint but nagging sense of urgency—a sense of some unrealized omission, and that the time in which it would be possible to make amends was drawing to an end.
Truth hesitated, watching her. “You know that you fit many of the protocols for the identification of the adult poltergeist, so I’m inclined to believe that the phenomena you’re reporting center on you rather than upon a specific location.”
“What do you mean? Are you saying that thing wasn’t here? I saw it, Truth,” Winter said, trying to keep the pleading out of her voice.
“But you might have brought it with you,” Truth said compassionately, “even though it doesn’t seem to be anything like what you’ve described as happening before. But if in fact it isn’t, as you say, something which comes from you, that leaves—if you’ll allow me to theorize in advance of my data—the possibility that your—for lack of a better term—psychic locus is ‘charging up’ any potential manifestation it comes near. So you both could and could not be responsible for the phenomenon at the same time.”
“Like plugging the battery into the Energizer Bunny,” Winter said slowly. “You mean that something like that monster in the lake couldn’t happen until I came along?”
“Something like that.” Truth chewed upon her lower lip, brooding. “But—” she broke off, as if she’d been about to say more. “First let’s try to find out definitely what’s plaguing you before we decide what to do about it—although I think we can rule out insanity for the time being. And now, let’s go home. There isn’t much more we can do here.”
MUCH TO WINTER’S surprise, she found that “home” was literally what Truth meant. Over Winter’s admittedly feeble protests, she was borne off to Truth’s tidy two-bedroom bungalow just outside of Glastonbury, where she was put to work washing and slicing greens for a salad while Dylan Palmer tended both the pot of what he claimed was “killer spaghetti sauce” and the loaves of homemade bread baking in the oven.
The moment she’d crossed Truth’s threshold Winter had felt an overwhelming sense of sanctuary, and now, sitting in the cheerful red-and-white kitchen with the mound of scrubbed vegetables before her, it was all she could do to keep her eyes open.
“Is it the hour or the company, Winter?” Dr. Palmer’s voice was gently amused.
Rousing with a start, Winter realized she had been all but dozing, her chin upon her chest. Reflexively, she opened her eyes wide.
“Oh, don’t tease, Dyl, she’s had an awful day. Winter, why don’t you go lie down for a half hour or so before dinner—otherwise, I think you’re going to end up facedown in the main dish.”
The chance to lie down, to sleep, was sweetly tempting—Winter could not imagine having nightmares in this house. “The salad—” she protested automatically.
“Has been duly scrubbed, and you’ve done most of the chopping. I can finish up—it will let me contribute more to making dinner in my own house than boiling the water for the vermicelli,” Truth said.
“Well if you think—”
“I do. Come on.” Truth took Winter by the elbow and led her, unprotesting, off to the bedroom.
THE BEDROOM was spartan and simple, with a single bed covered by a white candlewick spread flanked by Shaker reproduction night tables. The room’s severity was softened by the braided rug on the floor and the wealth of framed photographs on the wall.
“Just make yourself comfortable,” Truth told her generously. “There’s a bathroom through there that should have anything you need.”
But after Truth had left, it was the photographs, and not the bed, that drew Winter.
Some of the pictures she recognized from reading that book Venus Afflicted. Here was Thorne Blackburn, dressed for some New Age Shriners’ convention. There, a photo of the same man in the casual dress of thirty years before, swinging a small child up over his head. There were other pictures—a dark-haired woman with long, wild tresses; an older woman with short-clipped graying hair. There was one of Dylan, standing in front of a Ghostbusters poster and waving a vacuum-cleaner hose, with a manic expression on his face.
Friends. Family. And the love and caring in those frozen images made Winter curiously uneasy, as though they presented a threat—or a vital clue to a riddle she must solve.
She turned away from them and stretched out on the bed.
“SHE REMINDS me of Light,” Truth said, coming back into the kitchen a few moments later.
“She’s nothing like her, you know,” Dylan pointed out reasonably.
“She’s a psychic in danger,” Truth said inarguably, “and, if this is poltergeist activity, all I can say is that atypical doesn’t begin to describe it. I’d almost be happier to see her setting fires—and you know how troublesome pyrokinesis can be to channel and control. But that’s not the worst of it—did you know that she was part of a working Circle when she was at college here?”
Dylan turned to stare, giving Truth the full benefit of his attention, his lips pursed in a soundless whistle. “A Blackburn Circle? Are you sure?”
“They’d been working in the basement of the abandoned building out there—an uncontrolled, unsecured site—I saw the North Gate sigil on the wall and somebody’d done a pretty good job of painting the marks for Laying the Floor of the Temple. They probably just walked off and left it when they were through playing; I’d better go out there as soon as I can and close it down completely.
“Stupid kids!” Truth burst out. “How could they? Playing about with forces they have no comprehension of—and then surprised when the Unseen gives them a good swift kick in the—”
“Now, now—is this the same woman who only about a year ago was telling me that my ghosthunting was only an excuse to cater to my obviously delusional megalomania?”
Truth’s cheeks turned pink. “It’s a good thing I’ve got you around to yank me down off my high horse,” she said meekly. “But at Taghkanic, of all places.”
“Of all places,” Dylan agreed. “And Hunter Greyson was on the parapsych track—he should definitely have known better than to go fooling around like that. Remember the ‘Philip’ experiments in Toronto back in the seventies? The group generation of psi phenomena, including RSPK? Colin would have pinned his ears back if he’d known—Grey was in his Occult Psychology seminar in his senior year. Come to that, so was Winter. I’ve been doing some checking,” he added in explanation.
“Hunter Greyson? Winter didn’t mention him,” Truth said, frowning.
“She’s very cagey about letting on what she actually remembers and what she doesn’t, have you noticed? It isn’t normal to have memory gaps like that—not without organic trauma or at least a history of drug abuse,” Dylan said.
“Or physical abuse,” Truth suggested. “Repressed memory—”
“—will mask single isolated incidents for which there is no corroborative reinforcement, not the kind of ongoing abuse that someone would need to just drop four years of their life. Besides, she was living on campus, and you know how closely the faculty, proctors, and student services watch
those kids. If she’d exhibited anything like an abuse pattern then, they’d have spotted it,” Dylan said firmly.
Truth reached for the uncorked bottle, and Dylan moved to intercept her and pour the wine himself. Truth smiled at him over her glass.
“It sounds like you’ve done your homework on Winter Musgrave,” she acknowledged. “Should I be jealous? And you never did tell me who Hunter Greyson is.”
“Hunter Greyson’s file is missing from the admissions office, but most of the faculty still remember him—Professor Rhys even suggested that Grey’d stolen his own file; apparently he was known for pranks like that. Winter Musgrave and Hunter Greyson were quite the item their senior year, and with three other students had quite a close-knit little clique. They ran twenty percent over baseline in group telepathy experiments—those records are still in the file over at the Institute.”
“I’d like to see them,” Truth said soberly. “I bet Winter would, too.”
“I’d think twice about showing them to her—at least until I found out what she remembers—and why she can’t remember the rest,” Dylan said.
“Maybe you’re right,” Truth said, unconvinced. “I just get the feeling …” She paused for a moment, then went on. “That there’s something she needs to do, and not much time left for her to do it in.”
WINTER HAD BEEN sure she wouldn’t sleep, but to her surprise, Truth actually had to shake her to awaken her, and when she did, Winter found she’d slept for almost two hours.
“Don’t look so tragic!” Truth teased. “Dylan says the sauce could use the extra time, and since I’m usually up at the lab half the night, I’m more used to late dinners than early ones, and so is Dylan.”
Winter regarded her dubiously, her mind awash with suspicion and reflexive guilt.
But why? She frowned. It was almost as if she were split into two people inside herself—one with a rational response to events, the other determined to assign blame for everything, usually to herself.
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