Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02

by Witchlight (v2. 1)

  "Problems," Truth repeated firmly. "Some of them are frightening for you—and I admit they worry me, too, insofar as they don't follow the standard pattern for poltergeists. There is no conventional treatment for poltergeist phenomena, as I said—but in your case, considering that you may have been Sealed to the Circle, there are some other things I would be willing to try, with your consent."

  Winter poked at the soggy remains of her salad. The thought of madness would have been almost comforting—madmen were not responsible for their actions, after all. Truth Jourdemayne's insistence on her sanity was nearly as frightening as her own willingness to surrender to insanity rather than face reality.

  And was that what the inner voice—the censor, the spoiler—wanted? Unthinking surrender?

  "I'll try anything," Winter said aloud. "Do what you like." Her voice was as hard and steady as ice.

  But Truth refused to take the matter farther that night, saying that it would be too dangerous for her to proceed with Winter so close to exhaustion. She and Dr. Palmer drove Winter home in Dr. Palmer's car.

  "This is a lovely place," Truth said, standing in the front hall of Greyangels. "But it's wide open."

  "I can't seem to keep the doors and windows locked," Winter said, with the odd feeling she was misunderstanding Truth's meaning. "I just keep closing windows and hoping for the best."

  "That isn't—" Truth began, and stopped. "Forgive me—you came to me for help and here I am proselytizing, which is utterly foolish. At least let me take a look around and see that everything's all right before we leave." Without waiting for a reply, Truth started up the stairs, and Winter was left staring at Dr. Palmer.

  Excuse me, but do you know that your girlfriend's delusional? a sarcastic inner voice prompted her. Aloud, she said only, "I feel as if I'm missing half the conversation."

  "The absent referent," Dr. Palmer said, smiling. "I was here a few times when Professor MacLaren owned this place; I think you'll probably want a fire tonight."

  "You knew the owners?" Winter said, following Dr. Palmer into the parlor. A fire was laid in the fireplace, and she tried to remember if she'd done that this morning, but somehow the memory wouldn't come.

  "Colin MacLaren lived here while he was the director of the Institute," Dr. Palmer said, kneeling by the hearth. "I know he sold it afterward, but I'm not sure who to. It's a great old place, isn't it?"

  "Sometimes," Winter said cautiously. She could hear—or thought she could—Truth moving about on the second floor, and wondered what Truth was looking for so intently.

  There was a scrape and hiss as Dr. Palmer stroked one of the fireplace matches alight, and then poked its flaming head in among the kindling and paper scraps beneath the logs. After a few moments, pale orange flames licked up over the wood.

  "That should do it," Dr. Palmer said with satisfaction.

  "Can I offer you some coffee? Tea?" Winter said dutifully, though her bones felt as if they were filled with lead and the need to sleep again was a passionate ache in her entire body.

  "You look like you need bed more than either," Dr. Palmer said bluntly, "and while ghosts are my specialty, I've also worked with enough mediums to know that what they do takes a tremendous toll on the nerves. Psychics need to take better care of their health than most people, or they suffer for it later."

  "Isn't Truth a psychic?" Winter asked. There was a swift patter of footsteps descending the stairs.

  Dr. Palmer hesitated, much as Truth had earlier. "Not exactly," he said, "but I'll leave that for her to tell you, tomorrow."

  Truth came into the parlor and regarded the fire approvingly. The crystal-and-silver pendulum was looped in her left hand.

  "Nothing here," she said. "No manifestation centering on the house. There's probably a residue down in the old orchard, but nothing that can reach the house, and it isn't malignant anyway."

  "What's in the orchard?" Winter asked. She avoided the upstairs because you could see the orchard and the river from most of its windows—she wondered what dire associations the place had for her unconscious mind.

  "Oh, Colin used to let some student groups meet down there," Truth said. "Wiccans and so on. Nothing to worry about."

  "Wiccans?" Winter said, then: "Witches?"

  "Harmless," Truth said firmly. "And nothing you'd notice unless you were down there and knew what you were looking for." She dropped her pendulum back into her purse. "And how to look for it," she added, almost as an afterthought. "Have a good night, Winter. I'll call you tomorrow." She picked up her coat, and she and Dr. Palmer turned to go.

  Tell me, Ms. Jourdemayne, how do I learn to see things that aren't there—and ignore things that are? Winter's inner voice asked bleakly. But once again she said nothing, following the researchers from the Institute out into the hall, and closing the door behind them as they left.

  She was starting to realize there were a lot of answers she didn't really want.

  Once she closed the door, Winter dropped the antique bolt that should— in theory—keep the door barred to all intruders. In practice, by the time morning came the door would probably be standing wide open and the bolt would be somewhere else in the house.

  Two weeks ago the thought would have maddened her; now, she only felt a weary acceptance of the truth. It was the work of a poltergeist, and Truth Jourdemayne said it would go away.

  Of course, Truth had also said it wasn't a normal poltergeist. . . .

  The fire that Dr. Palmer had lit was burning invitingly now, reminding Winter that if she did not light the stove in her bedroom she was in for an uncomfortably chilly night. Moving slowly she put the kettle on to heat and then stoked the stove, adding a couple of pieces of coal among the kindling to ensure that the warmth would last. Her expedition to Nuclear Lake that afternoon seemed to belong in another universe.

  By the time Winter was done with her bedroom stove the kettle was whistling, and she poured boiling water over the last of Tabitha Whitfield's herb tea mixture. She'd better go and replenish her stock tomorrow; while it might not do everything the proprietor claimed, it did seem to help her sleep, and Winter had gotten used to the taste.

  Thinking about Inquire Within made her remember the pamphlet of "grounding and centering" exercises that Tabitha Whitfield had in-eluded with the tea. Feeling oddly guilty, Winter hunted around until she found it wedged behind the clothes hamper in the bathroom.

  She wandered back into the kitchen, holding the pamphlet in one hand. It was crudely—or perhaps simply would be a kinder word—done, just half a dozen sheets of photocopied typing paper saddle-stapled with a beige card-stock cover. Fundamentals of Grounding and Centering was printed on the cover in hand-drawn letters above an intricately woven pentacle.

  It seemed harmless enough.

  The tea was ready; Winter poured it out into one of the heavy stoneware mugs that seemed to have come with the house, and added a liberal dollop of honey. She made a note to pick up more honey, too, while she was in town. Hadn't Dr. Palmer said that psychics needed to keep up their strength?

  She wasn't, Winter told herself firmly, psychic.

  Pamphlet in one hand and cup in the other, Winter went back into the parlor. The undersides of the logs were bright poppy-red now, edged with brilliant gold lace, and the massed bank of coals was radiating a welcome heat into the room. Winter settled herself into the rocker and drew the cream-colored wool afghan over her legs. She'd just sit here a minute. . . .

  It was dark, and she was running, being driven farther and farther from the place she needed to be. Months had grown to years—how COULD she have shirked her responsibilities for so long? It was not as if she was free to do so; she had chosen the Path; had dedicated all of her lives to it. Such a promise was not something she could set aside when the burden grew too heavy! She was NEEDED; he had asked her for help—

  Asked her for help?

  Who had asked her for help?

  What—?

  The confusion drove her up out of
the dream; floundering about, Winter capsized the rocker and went sprawling onto the cold, hard floor.

  Serves me right, Winter thought groggily, getting painfully to her hands and knees. Folded paper slid beneath her palm—the pamphlet.

  The fire had died back to embers. The room was ice cold. Winter crawled over to the hearth and pulled a log from the pile in the scuttle, tossing it clumsily onto the embers and ash. She hoped it would have the good grace to light; she was too fuzzy-witted at the moment to build a proper fire.

  Winter groped around the floor until she found the afghan and pulled it around her shoulders, getting painfully to her feet. There was the faintest suggestion of light visible through the parlor windows, but it couldn't be later than 5:00 A.M. at the latest. She might as well finish the night in her bed—at least it was harder to fall out of.

  What had she been dreaming? Winter groped after the tattered rags of her dream and could only recollect a sense of mission, of tasks left undone—the same sort of feeling that would awaken her in her early days at Arkham Miskatonic King; bringing her up out of a sound sleep to the conviction of trades left undone and deals unmade.

  But this was something more. A summons she must answer.

  No, Winter told herself firmly. Your nerves are shot and your emotions are running wild. You can't trust them. Poltergeists I'll believe in, but not these . . . delusions of adequacy.

  Go to bed.

  When Winter passed the kitchen on the way to her bedroom, she found that both halves of the dutch door were open—no wonder the house was so cold. Sighing, she pulled the door closed and bolted it again, then did the same for the kitchen window. Her bedroom was freezing as well; the windows, which opened outward, shutter-style, were wide open, filling the room with the faintly marshy scent of the river, and the more insistent smell of wet grass and spring leaves. The stove—and she was almost sure she'd lit it—was stone cold.

  Grumbling to herself, Winter pulled the windows shut and locked them, and by then she was awake enough to think she might as well go around and shut everything, as all the doors and windows were sure to be open. Just because she'd been lucky so far didn't mean that she couldn't find city crime in Amsterdam County—and she didn't think Tim's Grey Angels would be of any particular help if a housebreaker decided to come calling.

  The sky was already appreciably lighter than when she'd first awakened. Winter pulled the afghan tighter around her shoulders and went to check the front door.

  It was open, of course, and the crossbar was nowhere in sight. Winter sighed, looking around herself helplessly. Maybe the crossbar was outside this time; by rights she ought to just consign it to whatever limbo poltergeist-stolen objects respired in, but her irritating sense of responsibility demanded she make at least a cursory search. She shoved the door open wider, intending to take a quick look around the yard and then shut the door and go in to bed.

  That was when she saw the body.

  The first thing she registered was the slick red mass and the fact that there was no blood. The object was dull-finished with the time it had spent drying in the open air; it was somehow more frightening that there was no blood, because there was no way that something that large could have been killed so hideously and leave no blood behind, as if it were a drained carcass from some demented butcher's icebox.

  It was as large as a child.

  The fear that came on the heels of that thought was what drove Winter forward, because even if it was not her fault, even if it were some energy working through her, using her as a focus, she could not bear to be responsible for murder.

  But the outflung limbs ended in hooves, not toes and fingers. A deer, flayed and shredded and left on her front doorstep.

  I seem to be moving up in the world, thought Winter with desperate gallows-humor, because if she could not turn mockery against this thing she thought she would begin to cry and never stop.

  Moving up in the world.

  From birds, to rabbits, to deer.

  And what comes after deer, Winter dear?

  She would not think of that.

  She wouldn't.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER

  The red blood reigns in the winter's pale.

  — WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  IT WAS QUITE LATE THAT EVENING WHEN WINTER ARRIVED at the Bidney Institute. Truth had phoned that morning, and then Winter had spent the day doing determinedly normal things, such as taking Sullivan's Taxi down to Poughkeepsie to arrange the lease of a more reliable car. Now that the danger was so clear and so close, she almost wasn't afraid of it. She had been more frightened, she realized, of the half-real phantoms of her own mind—and they had possessed far less power to hurt her.

  But this thing—creature, poltergeist, whatever the official ghost-hunters wanted to name it—this was not under her control. This thing that hungered for the pain and blood of living flesh and grew stronger as it fed, was so clearly, so obviously a real and present danger that there was little room for fear and none for hysteria.

  Winter parked her new car—a Saturn like the one Truth had driven, and very reliable, so the dealer had said—in the college's guest parking and walked up the steps. Truth had told her to come directly in through the lab wing, so she detoured around the back of the Institute's building, to where the Federalist brick and marble facade gave way to the pragmatic stressed concrete of the only new construction on the Taghkanic campus in the last seventy-five years.

  Just as she'd been told, the door marked PRIVATE—NOT OPEN TO STUDENTS was unlocked. As Winter stepped through it and into the vast warehouselike building she had visited briefly the day before, she could hear voices.

  Truth and Dr. Palmer.

  Unwilling to eavesdrop—but equally unwilling to give up any advantage she might gain by it—Winter stood where she was and listened.

  "Do you really think Winter's causing the phenomena herself?" Dr. Palmer asked.

  "Not consciously, Dyl—and not all of it. The part that can be blamed on an adult-onset poltergeist worries me almost as much as the part that can't, though," Truth answered.

  " 'Another kind of poltergeist activity may be the expression of psychic force in tension, not around a hysterical or maladjusted child, but around a relatively well-adjusted adult. When this occurs, there is some unresolved psychic force in action; it could be said that the Unseen is coming in search of the individual concerned.

  "I know my Margrave and Anstey, thank you, my love. And since our girl seems to have a fairly high psionic index—go ahead and laugh, but I'm not quite taking that on faith, what with the series she ran here as a student—she's probably summoned up some Elemental and bound it to her without being aware of it."

  Winter felt she'd overheard quite enough—if eavesdroppers never heard any good of themselves, neither did it follow that they heard anything good of others. "Hello?" she said, stepping out into the room.

  The central space of the laboratory had been cleared, the machines and couches moved back out of the way and a nine-foot circle chalked out on the floor. Four large candles—as yet unlit—were spaced evenly around the border of the circle, and a completely prosaic wooden chair stood in the circle's center. A black-handled knife lay on its seat.

  Winter recoiled inwardly. This looked more like witchcraft than like science. What was she letting herself in for?

  The oddest thing, however, was not a part of the circle at all. Suspended above it, almost like a deep lid about to be lowered onto a saucepan, was an enormous square cage of copper wire—and looking down, Winter could see a gleaming metal square set into the floor, with sockets into which the pegs of the hanging cage could fit.

  "It's a Faraday Cage," Truth said reassuringly, noting the direction of Winter's gaze. "It's perfectly harmless—once it's switched on, it generates a magnetic field that insulates you from all outside influences—the ones that make up the electromagnetic spectrum, at least."

  "What does that do?" Winter as
ked with grudging interest.

  "Some of the psychics we work with feel that the Faraday Cage enhances their abilities," Truth said, and Winter could tell she was choosing her words with care. "But what it seems to do best is insulate whoever is inside from influences outside the cage—PK doesn't work through the field, for example—and that's what we're going to use it for tonight."

  Winter glanced at Dr. Palmer. He was standing next to a formidable collection of machines that seemed to have enough toggles and dials and LED displays to equip all three seasons of the original Star Trek.

  "Tonight I'm just an observer,' Dr. Palmer said. "The polybarometer will record and measure gross physical changes in the environment, from temperature and pressure fluctuation to any earth tremors that might occur. I'll also be running a wide-band tape recorder and two cameras—assuming, of course, that I have your permission. If you agree, I've got a release for you to sign." Dr. Palmer grinned at her engagingly, holding up a clipboard.

  Winter walked over to him and reached for the pen. "Sure." She couldn't see that it made much difference, at this point. "Do you get your ghosts to sign these things, too?"

  "We try," Dr. Palmer said, grinning. Winter scribbled her name to the bottom of a sheet saying that she'd been notified of all risks attendant upon these experimental procedures and consented to having the case history and any photographs taken compiled as part of the experimental findings of the Institute; her name would not be used, etcetera, etcetera.

  "What do I do?" Winter said when she was done. When Truth had told her yesterday that she was going to try to get rid of at least some of the phenomena plaguing Winter—including the part that killed animals so horribly—Winter had assumed it would involve some kind of injection or treatment, not hex signs and candles.

  "The first thing you should do is take off anything you have on that's made of metal," Truth said briskly. "Do you have any fillings in your teeth?"