Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02

by Witchlight (v2. 1)

  "Welcome, my dear—welcome."

  Winter, peering closer at the nearest door, and just realizing that there actually were brass numbers on them—tarnished to black and indistinguishable from the varnished wood—jumped as she was hailed cheerily. She looked up.

  From the far end of the hall a man who looked more like a professor than anyone had a right to leaned out his open doorway and waved.

  "Professor Rhys?"

  If he wondered, she had an excuse for asking—the glare made it difficult to see, she could say. But the reality was, she could see him perfectly well; it was her stubborn memory that refused to give up its horde, and Winter was left feeling not as though she'd never known this place and people, but rather as if she'd known them once, and forgotten.

  "Yes, yes—" The voice was expansive and faintly English. "And you must be little Winter; how delightful."

  Hesitantly, Winter approached. Professor Rhys beamed—a ruddy-faced, white-haired cherub of a man, he was only a few inches taller than she was.

  "What a pleasure it is to have the opportunity to visit with a former student. Do come in, my dear, and tell me how you've been. Did you make a go of the theatrical life, or did you decide to stay with painting instead?"

  "Neither one, actually." Swallowing dread, Winter forced her voice to match his delight and cheerful tone. "And how have you been?"

  She followed Professor Rhys into his office. A corner room, it had windows on two sides, and a small fireplace on the wall it shared with the office next door.

  Yes, that was right; the first-floor offices all had fireplaces; it was one of the oddities of the building's construction.

  Pleased to have reclaimed even so small a scrap of her past, Winter smiled at Professor Rhys.

  "How have I been? Oh, you know the academic life; moments of the most lively terror interspersed with years of boredom. But come in, do, sit down." He lifted a teetering pile of magazines and folders from the end of the cracked leather couch and gestured for her to sit.

  Winter seated herself in the freshly cleared space and looked around. The office was almost a parody of what she'd expect an absentminded professor's office to be like: The built-in bookshelves were stuffed with books and papers and edged with memorabilia; the mantelpiece of the small, green-tiled fireplace was filled to overflowing with books, framed certificates, and peculiar objects less easy to identify. It was a homely place, in the oldest sense of the word—a place where one could feel at home.

  "I do hope you're feeling better now," Professor Rhys went on, "although I don't know why I'm talking about it as if it were yesterday—it was fifteen years ago, wasn't it?"

  "I left without graduating," Winter said, as if she were answering his tacit question. Coming here had been a mistake, she realized. Professor Rhys didn't know that she remembered neither him nor her college years—how could she expect him to give her the answers she needed unless she could bear to tell him why?

  "But of course your diploma was sent later," Professor Rhys said firmly.

  / wonder if it was. "Professor, I was wondering; could you tell me—"

  "Ah, there you are, Johnnie!" The speaker did not bother to knock, but came sailing in as if this were his office instead of John Auben Rhys's.

  Lion Welland was in many ways the physical antithesis of Professor Rhys. Tall and heron-gaunt—his blond hair worn in a flowing mane reminiscent of an old-time impresario—time had given him the brow of Shakespeare and sculpted the hairline into a dramatic widow's peak. He wore an open-collared shirt with french cuffs and a silk scarf tied around his throat a la apache.

  "Winter, you remember Lionel Welland—he's head of Drama now. Lion, this is one of my former students, Winter Musgrave."

  "A pleasure," Lion said briefly, his attention elsewhere. "Johnnie, love, you are not going to believe what those macho babus over in admin have done this time—" He leaned over Professor Rhys, his hand on the professor's shoulder, and lowered his voice to a fierce murmur.

  In short, Lion was a textbook-perfect picture of a theatrical "queen," and it was obvious from the intimate way he leaned over the other man that he and Rhys were a couple.

  There ought to be a place for people like that, where decent people wouldn't be exposed to them! The sudden flash of hatred was primal, irresistible—and somehow alien, as if neither the thought nor the feeling were truly Winter's. The emotion made her feel dirty, and as if she'd failed to live up to her good opinion of herself.

  Had the child she'd been thought and felt these things? Winter was almost certain she had not. Confusion replaced disgust.

  "It's a pleasure to meet you—again—Professor Welland," Winter said, with such fierceness that Rhys chuckled.

  "That will serve you out for your rudeness, Lion," he said.

  Lion turned to Winter and advanced upon her, both hands extended. "My dear lady—forgive my obliviousness. We of the theater tend to live in worlds of our own, you know—until someone makes it impossible for us," he added darkly.

  "The administration is saying that Lion ought to charge for the Shakespeare festival, rather than ask for an increase in his budget," Professor Rhys supplied.

  "The point of theater is that it should be performed—not paid for," Lion said peevishly. "Everyone enjoys it—and you made such a lovely Portia in your time, my dear."

  The quality of mercy is not strained, Winter quoted mentally. "Thank you," she said, putting real warmth into her voice. "I don't get a chance to do much acting now." Unless my whole life's become an act. All the world's a stage, and everyone but me's a featured player.

  "Well, not everyone can be a Hunter Greyson," Lion said comfortingly. "Tell me, how is Grey? You do keep in touch, don't you?"

  Hunter Greyson. Grey. A tension headache flared behind Winter's eyes like sudden summer lightning, and the creature slumbering in her bones roused itself.

  "Now, Lion, you haven't given Winter a chance to open her mouth. Not everyone keeps in touch with college friends."

  "Do you?" The words came out of her mouth as a harsh croak. "See Grey?" Tantalizing hints of the past swirled through Winter's mind; kaleidoscopic impressions rather than true memories.

  A vase on the end of the mantelpiece began to rock.

  Grey. His hair was blond—white blond—straight, pale—worn in a tight ponytail; the harshness of the style giving his face the severe purity of an angel of judgment—until he smiled. And then Grey became a different sort of angel entirely; he—

  There was a faint crackling; the noise hot glass makes when it cools too suddenly, just before it breaks.

  All of them had followed Grey—laughing, mercurial Grey—into whatever fancy caught his interest. She would have followed him anywhere; she—

  Winter's headache had grown to a searing lightless pressure that felt as if it would burst her head from within. But even the clamor of the blood in her ears could not block the sound that filled the room; the antic vibration of the paperweights and mementoes on the shelves.

  There was a crash. Something fragile had worked its way to the edge of some shelf and fallen.

  "What the bell?" Lion yelped.

  Something very bad would happen if she stayed here.

  "Winter?" Rhys asked.

  "I— I'm sorry. I haven't quite been myself lately. It's just that things have been so different and I'm really not used to it yet so sometimes things happen and I really—"

  She was babbling and she knew it, but it seemed that only words would keep the internal betrayal at bay. She groped to her feet, frantically clutching her purse to her, as if by holding it she retained her grip on reality as well.

  "I have to go."

  The atmosphere in the room was that of the oncoming storm; both men were on their feet.

  "I have to go," she repeated.

  "Winter, can I—" Rhys said.

  "Keep away!" Winter cried, and the picture over the mantelpiece fell. The world burned out in a blaze of pale fire, and Winter did not s
tay to see more. She ran, and this time no one stopped her.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ALL HEADS TURN WHEN THE HUNT GOES BY

  And every winter change to spring So runs my dream: but what am I? — ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

  YOU HANDLED THAT SO WELL, WINTER TOLD HERSELF bitterly, straightening up from her retching and reaching into her bag for a wad of tissues. She wiped her mouth, shuddering with disgust. The flaring pain had subsided to a sick background ache, though its pressure forced meaningless tears from her eyes. She leaned against the old cider mill—now the Alumni House and headquarters for The Angulus—and gasped for breath, every muscle trembling from the unaccustomed exertion.

  And 1 thought I was doing better. Almost an entire week without a psychotic break. How could I have been so stupid?

  It had been the room, the closeness—the strain of pretending to remember things she didn't that had brought on the panic attack.

  The panic attack.

  That was all it had been.

  A panic attack.

  Old buildings settled—even New York had quakes—someone next door or upstairs had banged the wall hard enough to jar the picture loose. And the vase would have fallen anyway. The rest was just weak-willed self-indulgent hysteria.

  Just another panic attack. They were what had driven her to Fall River, weren't they? There was nothing supernatural about a panic attack.

  A panic attack. Nothing more. And cats killed pigeons all the time, and raccoons, probably—and weren't there coyotes around here now? She'd read something in the local paper, and if she hadn't, she could have . . .

  The comforting rationalizations settled into place as they always had, soothing away her will to believe in the impossible. Only one bright spark of desperate self-preservation blazed through.

  Who was Hunter Grey son?

  Again, that frustrating tickle of half-memory; something between dream and fantasy that slithered from her grasp just as she tried to pin it down.

  She'd known Hunter Greyson—rather well, she gathered, if her faculty advisor expected her still to be in touch with him all these years later. And he'd help her; he would—the conviction existed even without memory to support it. She needed to find Grey . . .

  She levered herself away from the building and took a few tottering steps. She hurt in every bone and muscle as if she'd fallen down a flight of stairs, and her head still throbbed painfully, sending flashes of light through her vision. The parking lot was a long way from here—Winter wondered if she could make it that far.

  Mistrustfully, she looked behind her. If she wanted to find Hunter Greyson, reason said that the alumni office was the logical place to start.

  But tomorrow. Now she only wanted to crawl away and hide.

  She made it home by driving with agonizing slowness, but just the sight of the old farmhouse restored some of her energy. Greyangels. Named for the road, or for the creatures that her taxi driver had said walked these hills? When Tim Sullivan had talked about the Grey Angels, she'd thought of watchful nature spirits, bound neither to good nor evil, taking their direction from the emotions in the hearts of those who sought them.

  Regretfully she dismissed the notion. There was nothing in this world to reward and punish like some all-seeing Santa Claus. There were only people, and the certainty that even the best intentions turned to ashes in the end.

  Her melancholy mood gave way to a spiraling absentmindedness once she entered the house; over and over as afternoon became evening Winter would come back to herself with a jolt, to discover the sink overflowing, the kettle boiled dry—though what she'd been thinking about the moment before she didn't know. When at last she found herself sitting in the rocker beside the hearth in the front parlor, staring out into the night without the slightest idea of how she'd gotten there or what time it was, Winter gave up. If this was a sample of the unconscious rebellion that Dr. Luty had been so fond of assigning her problems to, then she'd just let her unconscious win the field for once. She was going to bed. And let Dr. Luty make what he chose of that!

  But tonight sleep, when it came, was an unsettled thing, filled with confusion and fear—and a sense of fleeing desperately from the truth. But that's stupid, Winter thought half-lucidly, why would someone not want to know the truth?

  How bad could knowing be?

  After what seemed an eternity of false awakenings and strugglings with sleep, Winter opened her eyes groggily. The room was filled with chilly morning light; and her bed was a mare's nest of knotted sheets and twisted blankets. Her head no longer hurt, but she was filled with a curious exhausted blankness, as if some fever had finally broken.

  She turned over to reach for the light and felt a stabbing pain in her thigh. Grabbing for the hurt, her fingers encountered a thin hard shape— a pencil? She clutched it in her fingers, inspecting the wound. A scrape; nothing serious, but surely she had not taken a pencil to bed with her?

  Winter turned on the light and looked around, shivering in the morning chill that was the inevitable result of failing to build up a fire in the bedroom stove the night before. Apparently she'd taken not only a pencil but paper as well; she recognized the notebook from the kitchen on which she'd written down her grocery list a few days before.

  She picked it up—and swallowed hard as she realized that page after page was covered in writing; loopy, straggling writing; the scrawling letters nearly impossible to read.

  Names, written over and over as if by some mad and desperate journalist. Janelle Baker, Cassilda Chandler, Ramsey Miller, Hunter Greyson.

  She knew them. They were her friends—had been her friends. They'd all gone to Nuclear Lake together. . . .

  Elusive remembrance came—for once—at her bidding. Janelle's red hair. The blond streak Cassie dyed into the front of her brunette mop; she'd looked like a demented Lhasa Apso. Ramsey had . . .

  But the memory blurred into uncertainty again; its image, the distortion of shapes seen through mist, and Winter was left with the conviction that these people were real, that she'd known them, and little beyond that.

  It's just a meaningless dream, she told herself uncertainly. False memory syndrome is all over the news these days—half the time they find out that those so-called recovered memories are phantoms the mind has created under stress. You've been reading the college yearbooks; even if those turn out to really be the names of Taghkanic students you could have picked the names up from there. No matter how real this seems, it isn't. You can't trust your memory—not after what you've been through.

  But she was her memory! Winter cried out silently to that oh-so-reasonable inner voice. "'Who will be for me, if I am not for myself?"

  She did not think she could trust the inner insistence that she reject the evidence of her eyes and mind. That inner voice would do anything, say anything, to lull her back into unreasoning acceptance; to assure her the abnormal was normal; that flying glass and slaughtered animals had nothing to do with her; a lulling, lying voice that would prefer her to be a monster than to admit the existence of such a simple thing as a poltergeist.

  She could not trust that voice.

  Boy, talk about getting in touch with your inner paranoid. . . Winter gibed desperately.

  But for the moment she would trust the instinct that said not to trust. She would believe that the people in her dreams were real, and that they had been her friends. The best and worst of friends—and lovers. The people who held the key to her past.

  A past she had to reclaim ... to survive.

  "Have you ever heard of a place called Nuclear Lake?"

  Practical to her marrow, Winter began her quest at the alumni office, to see if any of the people she remembered from the Class of'82 were on file with the office.

  "Nuclear Lake? Oh, my, I haven't thought about Nuclear Lake in years."

  Nina Fowler was short, plump, and pretty, with brown eyes and faintly freckled skin. She was the alumni office's one full-time employee, a combination of desktop publishing wizard
and school historian, and had become familiar to Winter over the last several weeks as Winter came to her with request after request, all of which Nina had found some way to fill.

  "We all used to go up there when we were kids."

  Nina stopped paging through the drawer of file cards and gazed off into space. Winter had taken one look at her initially and dismissed her as "one of those women who'd let herself really go," without wondering where the knee-jerk impulse to belittle the other woman had come from. Now some life-affirming impulse to distrust her facile disdain of every human being that crossed her path made Winter reexamine her hasty judgment.

  Just what was wrong with Nina Fowler? It was true that she wasn't wearing a Chanel suit and a lot of expensive makeup, but when had fancy dress or the lack of it made a difference to what a person really was? When had Winter started judging other people solely on the cost of their clothes?

  "I did, too," Winter said, smiling.

  "It gave us all the creeps," Nina said, laughing, "I guess that's why we went there! That—and to make out; the place is smack in the middle of nowhere, isn't it? We used to tell each other stories—how it was a research facility back in the nineteen seventies, and how some really horrible experiment got out of control and the government came in and closed it down."

  "Nuclear research? Is that why it's called Nuclear Lake?" Winter asked.

  Nina frowned. "I'm not sure why it's called Nuclear Lake; just that everyone does. I looked it up; on the maps it's Haelvemaen Lake—that was a surprise! I'm not even sure it's still private land; it was just a little parcel tucked into State land; somebody up in Albany probably eminent do-main'd it into Huyghe State Park."

  Haelvemaen. Dutch for "Half Moon," the name of the galleon that Henrik Hudson had first sailed up what would become the Hudson River almost 400 years ago.

  Nina had returned to her records. "Well, I've got three of the names you asked about—Baker and Miller are current; they're getting our newsletter and say it's okay to give out their addresses. Chandler I've got marked as 'moved no forwarding,' with a last address in Berkeley. You can have that, too, if you want—but I haven't got anything on Hunter Greyson."