Witchlight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  EITHER THE DOOR and windows of the Marriott were exceptionally poltergeist-proof, or whichever of the entities tormenting her was responsible for unlocking doors and opening windows had taken the night off. Winter awoke to a hotel room that was no messier than it had been when she’d gone to sleep the night before, packed her bags and settled her bill, and was on her way by 9:00.

  By noon she had reached the Delaware Water Gap, once the gateway to the West, and now the gateway to Pennsylvania. Despite the sprawling urban blight—and it really was a blight, Winter decided, studying the eight lanes of highway flanked by expanding shopping malls critically—the region was genuinely pretty, and there were some places along the road that looked just as they must have thirty or even fifty years before, when America was a slumbering giant, just awakened from sleep by two world wars. Winter stopped for lunch at a diner that looked as if it had been dropped down on the roadside fresh from a time machine, and decided that no matter how early it was she ought to find someplace to spend the night. Pennsylvania was something like 700 miles of signs saying bridge freezes before road surface, and she was going to have to drive past every single one to reach Dayton, Ohio.

  “Do you know of any place around here I can spend the night?” Winter asked the fresh-faced waitress in jeans and a polo shirt who brought her pie and coffee. Winter had never had a sweet tooth before, but now it seemed as if her metabolism ran on sugar—the quick burst of energy and the equally quick slide into insulin-induced weariness. Either state was preferable to the jittery overstimulated panic that presaged one of her poltergeist attacks, though Winter didn’t worry about them so much now that she knew there was some hope of controlling them.

  “Some place to stay? Well, there’s the Hilton back up the road,” the waitress said.

  Winter had passed it on her way here, and felt a pang of distaste at the thought of its hundreds of sterile identical rooms. “I was hoping for something a little friendlier,” she said hopefully.

  “You mean like a Bed-and-Breakfast? Well, there’s Lily Douglas’s place. There’s one of her cards over there on the wall; you could call her and see if she’s got a bed free tonight,” the waitress said dubiously. It was clear that she could not imagine anyone passing up the chance to stay in a Hilton’s luxurious accommodations.

  Oh, but there are better things than perfection … .

  “Perfection is so deadly dull. No wonder Eve kicked the serpent out of Paradise,” Grey said.

  The voice was so real that Winter, rising off the counter stool to go in search of Lily Douglas’s number, actually looked around to see who was speaking. But it was only Grey, popping up out of memory and imagination once more to offer up his opinions.

  This time her mind presented him to her as he’d been his sophomore year at Taghkanic. They’d done Camelot, and he’d been Mordred. She saw him now, in dusty Danskin tights and black ballet flats, wearing a shabby moth-nibbled green doublet that would look glorious from across the footlights, gilded by theatrical magic. In her mind, Grey swung back his cloak and rested his black-gloved fingers on the hilt of his dagger.

  “As Mordred says, virtue can be deadly. And as Blackburn teaches, every virtue, carried to its extreme, becomes a vice—usually when it starts dictating the behavior of someone else.”

  The memory dissolved. Was this something Grey had said to her, or was it her wistful mind manipulating his image like a puppet to give her good advice? It didn’t matter; whether the words came from Grey or from her own mind, they were worth heeding.

  They just don’t seem particularly applicable right now, Winter thought, staring at the bulletin board. Why should I be worrying about virtue—or perfection?

  The Water Gap Diner was the sort of place that had a cork board where the locals could pin up business cards and notices. Most of them were for snowplowing, game butchering, or taxidermy, but eventually Winter found the one she was looking for. It was on pearlized pink stock printed with raised lavender ink and said Justamere Bed-and-Breakfast, with the name—Lily Douglas—a phone number, and a street address that was meaningless to Winter. She carried it over to the pay phone.

  Two weeks ago you’d have cut your throat rather than telephone a stranger and go to a strange house. True, but those hadn’t been the actions of her real self, but the actions of a Winter Musgrave who was sick, frightened, and all but beaten. And two years ago you’d have cut your throat rather than be seen in such a tacky, unfashionable place as this, her malicious other self added.

  But that woman—that sleek Wall Street shark—wasn’t the real Winter either, was she? Winter could not go back to living that stranger’s rapacious, self-centered life—but if she didn’t step back into that life, where was she going to go?

  The phone was answered on the third ring.

  “Hello?” A kindly voice, far from young but without the fragile breathiness of true old age. “Justamere Bed-and-Breakfast. Lily Douglas.”

  It was only then that Winter understood the play on words in the name—Just a Mere Bed-and-Breakfast—and amusement colored her voice as she replied.

  “I need a room for tonight; I know it’s short notice, but the lady at the Water Gap Diner said you were local and might have something.”

  “Well bless her heart! You tell Amy that good angels must be watching over her—I just had a cancellation—well, a postponement—this morning. Only it’s a double,” Lily Douglas went on conscientiously, “and you might not want to take it because it’s so large; it’s my best room with a bath and all …”

  “Why don’t I come out and see it,” Winter said. And if it wasn’t to her taste, there was always the Hilton back up the road.

  JUSTAMERE BED-AND-BREAKFAST was only five miles from the diner. This part of the Delaware–New Jersey border was farm country; on both sides of the road the trees were rich with new leaf and in the fields tiny spears of green were poking up through last winter’s dead stubble. Winter was almost certain she had gone too far when she rounded a curve in the road and saw it.

  How in the world did something like that get all the way out here? she wondered.

  The old Victorian house had been built in the style known as Queen Anne Gothic, with garlanded turrets, bay windows, and gingerbread lace and jigsaw ornamentation everywhere. It was painted a pale custard yellow with the detailing picked out in white, and looked pretty enough to eat. The gravel driveway was wide enough to accommodate half a dozen cars at once, and Winter felt no qualms about pulling her Saturn in beside what looked like a battered old farm truck.

  The door was answered by a pleasant woman in her fifties, figure long gone to matronly plumpness. She was wearing a cardigan sweater over a flowered cotton housedress and perfunctory makeup. Winter waited for the reflexive condemnation from within, but for once it didn’t come, although Society would certainly have judged Winter to be the “better” of the two women.

  Okay, so she’d probably be a failure on Wall Street. But for that matter, I don’t know how to run a Bed-and-Breakfast, do I? Winter told herself.

  “Ms. Douglas,” Winter said aloud, “I’m Winter Musgrave—we spoke on the phone? I’m here about the room.”

  “Of course you are!” Lily Douglas said. “Come in and take a look—do you have any luggage? I’ll just get Gary to bring it in. Gary! Gareth!” she raised her voice. “You come down here right now!”

  Almost instantly Winter heard the clatter of footsteps on the stairs, and a moment later Gary-or-Gareth appeared.

  “This is Gary—Gareth Crowther. He takes care of what needs doing—and in a place this big and this old, that’s everything.”

  Gareth was a big bluff hearty puppy-dog of a man, with untidy blond hair and soft blue eyes and muscles worthy of a lumberjack bulging the fabric of his red-and-black flannel shirt.

  “Hello,” he said, holding out a painfully clean and callused hand for Winter to shake. “I got the storms off in the tower, Mrs. Douglas, so I can open up the windows now to paint the third-floor
back.”

  “Good boy,” Mrs. Douglas said, as if Gareth were the slow and patient draft animal he so much resembled. “But you just wait around—this is Ms. Musgrave that I told you might be coming and taking the Lilac Room, so you just hold on and see if she needs anything moved.”

  Gareth nodded seriously.

  “I’m sure I’ll love it,” Winter said, gazing around the parlor. Her fears of shabby untidiness had been groundless. The immaculately clean front room of Justamere Bed-and-Breakfast was decorated in the Victorian high style of the era in which the house had been built. The fireplace was of white marble, carved with elongated sphinxes on each upright, and the face of the fireplace carried out the Egyptian motif, with lotuses and scarab beetles embossed into its sky-blue tiles. There was a high Victorian settee in carved rosewood flanked by matching chairs with crocheted doilies on their backs and arms and surrounded by half a dozen little tables. The whole room had a jumbled, lived-in feel to it, as if uncounted generations had lived and played here and loved each other and the house.

  “Four generations in the same house,” Mrs. Douglas said. “That’s what putting down roots means, but with things the way they are these days, who’ll want this place when I’m gone? I don’t have anyone to leave it to unless one of my daughters comes to her senses, but I suppose nobody wants to live in the middle of nowhere any more.”

  As she spoke, Mrs. Douglas conducted Winter up the stairs and down a brightly lit hall. Each of the closed white doors had an oval brass plaque screwed into the wood.

  “You’re in Lilac; I have to keep track of the rentals for the taxman somehow, so I thought I’d name all the rooms after the flowers I did them up in. There’s Rose and Violet down the hall, and Daisy across the way, that’s the other double.” She unlocked the door—the interior lock was the first indication Winter had been given that she was not in a private home—and ushered Winter inside.

  Winter looked around at a large spacious room with an Oriental carpet on the floor and wallpaper covered with sprigs of lilacs. A vase of lilacs—silk at this time of year, but pretty nonetheless—stood on the dressing-table, and through the half-open door at the other end of the room, Winter could see the promised bathroom. Dominating the room was a massive four-poster canopy bed, with a crisp white bedspread and masses of lilac-printed pillows mounded on it.

  “I’ll take it,” Winter said instantly.

  Mrs. Douglas explained that the room came with a Continental breakfast, and that she could only have it for two nights at most, as the couple who had reserved it would be arriving after that. The price she quoted was, of course, higher than Winter would have paid to stay in a Hilton, but it was worth it, Winter felt, to stay in a place that did not have the cold institutional feel of a chain hotel.

  “Probably arriving, I should say, but I did promise to have it for them,” Mrs. Douglas said. “And I like to keep my word to folks—or why give it?”

  “I won’t be any trouble, Mrs. Douglas. I’m planning to leave tomorrow morning, anyway,” Winter said.

  “Virtue in the defense of extremism is no vice,” Grey said, punningly, out of the depths of Winter’s memory.

  More riddles.

  WINTER UNLOCKED the trunk of her car and let Gary carry the bags into the house before he returned to what must presumably be the ongoing renovation of Justamere. Gary hefted the two large suitcases and the carry-on bag as if they weighed nothing at all, and Winter thought he could probably have carried her as well without any particular problem. He brought the bags up the stairs and into the room—two on the floor, one on the pretty embroidered suitcase stand—before leaving to resume the painting of the third-floor back.

  “If you need anything, Ms. Musgrave, you just ask Mrs. Douglas. She’s usually downstairs in the parlor.”

  “Thank you, Gary. I will.” You didn’t tip-as-you-went in a Bed-and-Breakfast, but Winter made a mental note that Gary Crowther deserved a generous remembrance when she left. Those bags weren’t light—and besides, he hadn’t leered at her legs once.

  He closed the door behind him as he left and Winter was alone in the room. It was only midafternoon, and a guilty part of Winter’s mind reminded her that she could have gotten in four or five more hours of driving before dark.

  But I don’t want to get so tired that I can’t keep the poltergeist under control—and what if the magickal child finds out where I’ve gone? Winter told herself. She opened her suitcase but didn’t feel any impulse to unpack—and she’d be leaving tomorrow morning, anyway.

  If nothing more went wrong.

  Winter sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled Tabitha Whitfield’s pamphlet out of her purse. Besides, I can get in a couple of hours of psychic aerobics before it’s time for bed.

  With Mrs. Douglas’s guidance, Winter located a local restaurant where, if the food wasn’t quite up to Manhattan standards, she was able to make a tolerable meal. Driving into the driveway at Justamere afterward, she looked up at the floodlit exterior and the warm light coming from the expansive windows. I’d like to have a house like that, was her automatic thought. But not to live in alone, nor to run as an inn. A house like that was for children, a family; a place to share with the right man.

  The direction her thoughts were taking pulled her up short, even as the car coasted to a halt. Husband? Family? Winter had always dismissed marriage out of hand before, and now, in her thirties, she suspected she was getting too set in her ways to compromise enough, even for love, to be able to make a home with someone else. And certainly no “right man” had ever presented himself.

  Maybe you’re looking in the wrong place. The image of Hunter Greyson flitted across her mind again and Winter sighed. If—when—she found Grey, he’d probably introduce her to his wife and their two adorable children. He was her age, after all; they’d been in college together. By the time they reached their thirties, most people knew the direction they wanted their lives to go in and were settled somewhere. They’d become what they wanted to be.

  The way that Janelle did?

  Automatically Winter rejected the thought. Janelle hadn’t become what she’d wanted to be; she’d opted for safety instead, and even if it was a poisonous sort of refuge, at least Janelle had known what she was running away from.

  It was only Winter who still didn’t know what to run from … or to. Or scratch that—who’d known once but discovered she was wrong.

  She got out of the car slowly and locked it, then turned toward the steps. There was one thing this wild Grey-chase was doing for her, and that was postponing the moment when she would have to try to reenter the current of her normal life and make a success of it once more.

  Whatever it turned out to be.

  And assuming she lived to do it.

  THAT NIGHT, lying in her canopied bed in the Lilac Room, Winter dreamed of Grey.

  She stood in a dream-landscape, knowing she wouldn’t remember the dream once she awoke. It was a place she’d been many times before, though she knew she wouldn’t remember that either. The light was ghostly; Winter stood in the middle of a plain so vast it seemed to have no end, a horizonless place where the sky met the ground without any demarkation line. In the distance stood the remains of a ruined watchtower, alone in the emptiness, and, having no other goal, Winter headed for it.

  A spectral wind plucked at her clothing, making a low irritating keening in her ears. Where was Grey? He was supposed to be here already, waiting for her.

  As if her thoughts had invoked him, the scene changed: a dream within a dream. She sat at her desk in the Taghkanic dorm, working on a paper for her music class while Grey lay on the bed, her guitar across his stomach, plunking idly at the strings.

  She looked over toward him, to where his blond hair spilled over her pillow, gleaming in the lamplight. His eyes were half shut, and lashes like dark honey nearly brushed his cheeks.

  “What are you going to do after you graduate?” she asked him, and realized that this was a memory, not a d
ream. This had happened, once upon a time.

  “Get rich, get famous, do whatever I want.” Grey’s answer was flip. “Be a singer in a rock ‘n’ roll band. What about you?”

  I want to stay with you, Winter thought to herself, and Grey, as if reading her mind, set the guitar aside and held out his arms to her, his smile mocking and welcoming at the same time.

  “Too much study makes you go blind,” he said huskily.

  She reached for him, but instead of flesh her hands touched jagged rock. She was back in the gray place again, and she cried out at the unfairness of it, at being snatched out of that lovely dream, away from Grey.

  “Help me, Winter. Help me, my love.”

  Beneath her hands was the ruined stone of the watchtower, and half erupting from it was Grey’s body, face and hands yearning toward the light, as if he had been trapped in the stone like an insect in amber, trapped forever—

  “Leave me alone!”

  And suddenly it was spring; the apple trees were in bloom, and petals were showering everywhere … .

  WINTER SAT UP in bed with a gasp, heart pounding. It was nearly two in the morning, the wolf hour, the hour when suicides and premeditated murders happen. The room was dark, with only a faint glow from the security lights outside the house penetrating the translucent curtains.

  The images in her dream scattered, until all that was left was the memory of Grey and the feeling of panic—and the cloying scent of apple blossoms out of season. Winter took a deep breath. She couldn’t remember having nightmares before, even at Fall River; only meaningless jumbled dreams that left her more tired than before when she finally awakened from them. Dr. Luty had tried to get her to tell him her dreams, as if knowing the trash her unconscious mind threw onto the beach of sleep would let him know her.

  But this dream was different—both a true nightmare, and something worse. Winter got herself under control enough to switch on the bedside light, and the bright glow through the hobnail milk glass made the pretty Victorian room bright and defined. Any shadows left would be merely a trick of the light, and not messengers from the unseen world.