Truth Jourdemayne was not a teacher at Taghkanic College; she worked exclusively for the Institute as a statistical parapsychologist, the person ultimately responsible for rendering the findings of all the others into graphs and charts and dry tables of comparisons. Until recently, the most exciting thing in her life had been the chance to design an experi-
I
GRAVELIGHT 25
ment to compile a statistical baseline for incidents of clairsentient perception. That had changed on the day that Truth had finally acknowledged that she was Thorne Blackburn's daughter.
Black-haired and grey-eyed, Truth Jourdemayne did not much physically resemble her golden-haired—and infamous—father, Thorne Blackburn. Blackburn had been at the forefront of the previous generation's Occult Revival, and had claimed to be a hero in the Greek sense; a half-divine son of the Shining Ones, the Celtic Old Gods. When her mother had died in an accident during a magickal ritual at Thome's Shadow's Gate estate in the Hudson Valley and Thorne had vanished, it had taken Truth almost a quarter of a century to come to terms with the bereavement.
It had taken even longer for her to accept that Thome's boasts were no more than the literal truth, and that Truth herself was not quite human. Sidhe magic and Earth magic made an uneasy alliance in Thorne Blackburn's daughter; each time she reached out for her inheritance, it seemed that she must choose afresh which horse to ride. Decide whether to be human, or . . . not.
Through the years. Truth had managed to accept everything else about her Blackburn heritage but that. It was the one thing she had never discussed with Dylan: that Thome's claims oisidhe blood were not claim, but fact. That its ever-present inhumanity lived in her very bones, the mocking ghost of a bloodline that saw humanity as clever and incomprehensible children, barely worthy of notice—that thought of human emotions as toys, and manipulation of human lives as sport. Even diluted as the blood ran in her veins, it still lured Truth with the promise of power if she embraced its path.
But there was no more haven for her among her distant kindred than she had found among humans. She was an outsider. She always had been. To pretend that things would ever be any different was to open a gateway to endless grief.
Automatically, Truth pushed the intrusive thought away. It didn't help to dwell upon it. There wasn't anything she could do to change things, after all—no one had ever yet figured out a way for children to choose their parents. And she had to admit that she probably wouldn't change parents if she could, though it did make things difficult sometimes.
"Stony Bottom? Clover Lick?" Truth frowned at the map.
"No. Look here where I'm pointing, between Pocahontas and Randolph Counties. There's Lyonesse," Dylan said.
Truth peered intently at his finger. "Astolat River, Big Heller, Little Heller Creek. ..." The names were tiny type on an area that seemed to be mostly composed of national parks and wilderness areas.
"That's it," Dylan said encouragingly.
Truth straightened up. "Do we have permission to go there?" she asked dubiously.
"We don't need it," Dylan said, "but as a matter of fact I've written to a number of folks—the mayor of Pharaoh, the Lyonesse County Executive Director, the President of the Historic Arts Preservation Trust—and none of them have any objection to our paying Morton's Fork a visit in a few weeks, once I've cleaned up my end-of-year paperwork."
"Whether the natives like it is another matter," Truth commented almost to herself. "People tend to have an inbred aversion to being treated like goldfish, Dylan."
The tall blond man accepted her rebuke in good humor. "And members of isolated mountain communities in particular. We'll just have to see what happens, but if we get any cooperation at all, the results could be fascinating. Once I started charting what I was able to get from published sources onto this big survey map—" Dylan motioned toward the wall of office, where a foam-mounted map of Central Lyonesse County studded with small colored pins hung, "As you can see, Morton's Fork is the center of unexplained activity for a fifty-mile radius. There's got to be a lot more going on there than they've reported."
"Maybe even ghosts," Truth teased. Dylan grinned at her.
Truth glanced back at the map. The blue pins were for hauntings. Since the first Europeans arrived in those mountains in the seventeenth century, the area that would later be known as Lyonesse County had possessed the reputation of being haunted. Headless horsemen, spectral soldiers, Indians, ghostly maidens, and more, were a staple commodity in Morton's Fork, along with their attendant murders.
Red—that was poltergeists. When Nicholas Taverner came to Morton's Fork in the 1920s to gather material for his book on Appalachian folklore, Ha'ants, Spooks, and Fetchmen, he noted that the place seemed to be populated by whole families of poltergeists. Poltergeist activity— more usually these days called RSPK phenomena, for Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis—usually centered on a person, not a place, and usually ended when its locus matured, as the usual loci for poltergeist activity were girls just entering puberty.
Green stood for UFO sightings. While many argued for a purely mechanical, science-based explanation of UFO phenomena, the stories the self-defined contactees related belonged far more to the continuum of "fairy abductions" and the lore of the Wild Hunt than they did to some rational, reasonable Star Trek future. The fact of the matter was that UFOs and parapsychological phenomena seemed to go hand in hand.
In all, the map seemed to hold plenty of material for investigation by any number of parapsychologists.
"Which of the students are we taking?" Truth asked.
"Rowan and Ninian. You remember them."
Truth nodded. Only the fact that slots in the graduate parapsych program were so hotly contested explained Rowan Moorcock and Ninian Blake's continued toleration of one another—both were aware that a prima donna attitude could get either of them relegated to less desirable positions in the sixteen-place program, or dismissed from it entirely.
"That should make for an interesting six weeks," Truth commented. "I remember I spent an hour and a half explaining to Rowan about statistical averages and why I didn't want her participating in my study— where would I get if I included known strong psychics?—last year and she still threw a fit. Ninian's sweet, though."
"Ah, do I have a rival?" Dylan said jokingly.
Truth looked down at the emerald-and-pearl ring on her left hand. She and Dylan had set a December wedding date—this was June, and the closer December came, the more uncertain she felt.
When she'd first met Dylan Palmer, Truth had been young, confused, and rigidly obsessed with maintaining the distinctions between magick and science. Anything that seemed likely to cross over the boundary— like Dylan's ghost-hunting, or his interest in the esoteric borderlands of parapsychology. Truth had dealt with through harsh intolerance. But with her acceptance of her father's legacy, Truth had become a citizen of those realms that Dylan only mapped. Magick had invaded her life— now Dylan, with his insistence on cause preceding effect and a rational explanation for every event, seemed to be the rationalistic, hidebound one.
One of us has to change. And I know I won't. Not again. How could she, when her beliefs were not only the evidence of her own eyes, but the result of accepting a sacred trust to walk the boundaries between Light and Dark, down a path grey as mist? And how could Dylan commit himself
to something that strange and magnificent, with no more assurance of its reality than her own bare word and the evidence of his unreliable human senses?
Our relationship is doomed, Truth thought gloomily.
"Truth?" Dylan said. She looked up, and met his summer-blue eyes.
"No," Truth said. "No rival."
Dylan frowned. "I know it doesn't make for much of a pre-wedding honeymoon—six weeks in an RV in Appalachia, measuring spooks. Would you rather stay on campus? You could ask your sister to come and visit; use my place. ..."
"Light's with Michael."
Light Winwood was Truth's half-s
ister, another of Thorne Blackburn's children. For Light, there was no barrier between this world and the next, and her uncontrolled psychic powers had been a harrowing burden to her for most of her life. But now Light had found safe harbor with Michael Archangel. He helped Light to build walls around her gift and shut it out, and although Truth respected Michael Archangel, their ethical positions inevitably ensured that the two of them would clash. To Truth's regret, she had never really gotten to know her half-sister; she and Light grew farther apart as time passed—and Truth could see no way to bridge that gap.
"You could invite her to visit by herself," Dylan said patiently, and Truth shook her head.
"My place is with you, kemosahe. Besides, there's something odd about this pattern . . ."
Truth walked over to the survey map on the wall. With the aid of long practice—Dylan had been planning this expedition for well over a year—she deciphered the shaded green surface with its nests of contour lines, and the rainbow of push-pins that studded its center. Blue for hauntings, green for UFOs . . .
Truth peered at the arc of red pins that straggled down the side of the mountain away from Watchman's Gap. She knew—because she had helped Dylan mark the map—that the events the red pins represented were spread over most of a century. It looked, in defiance of conventional wisdom, that this time RSPK activity focused on a place, using the people who lived there like so many unwitting lightning rods.
And then there were the black pins. They were the fewest of all, marking as they did the disappearances recorded in the newspapers that did
not come with any aura of mundane foul play or spectral intervention. Just people who . . . vanished. There was a small red X inked at the center of the ragged circle of pins.
"Dylan, w^hat's this mark?" Truth pointed.
Dylan came over and stood behind her, looking over her shoulder at the map. "Wildwood Sanatorium. I marked it because Taverner gives it an entire chapter in his book—according to his informants, two wizards had a duel up in Watchman's Gap, drawing the attention of the Almighty, who struck them both down and burned the sanatorium to the ground. The sanatorium, incidentally, burned in 1917."
"A little late for wizards," Truth mused. "But your missing persons seem to center right around the place. What did Taverner say about that?"
"Only that a dragon lives in Watchman's Gap." Dylan shrugged, dismissing personal investment in the belief. "He was a folklorist, not a scientist—and unfortunately, he died in the sixties, so there's no way of going back to him and seeing if he remembers more about Morton's Fork than he put in his book—which is all too likely."
"Pity," Truth said. She looked back at the map. "Does it strike you that this place is a little too good to be true—from an investigator's point of view, I mean?"
Dylan put his arms around Truth and turned her to face him.
"Well, if it turns out to be some sort of locals-puUing-a-fast-one-on-the-strangers sort of thing, proof of that would be worth writing up as well—and then we can give Rowan and Ninian a quarter to go to the movies, and ..."
Truth tilted her face up so that Dylan could kiss her, trying to share his lighthearted mood. She did not fear the Unseen World, and she could certainly handle anything Morton's Fork could throw at her, from "noisy ghosts" to little green men.
No, it was the so-called real world that she feared. She loved Dylan, but she could see nothing ahead for the two of them but pain.
TWO
SECRETS OF THE GRAVE
0 me, why have they not buried me deep enough? Is it kind to have made me a grave so rough, Me, that was never a quiet sleeper?
— ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
THE BATTERED AND ANCIENT FORD TRUCK MIGHT —BY
some Stretch of charity and the imagination—be called red, but there its kinship with the sleek Italian machine Wycherly had just ruined ended. It shuddered and bounced and wheezed along the narrow mountain road at a brisk thirty-five miles per hour, and its flat bed and wooden slat sides were something out of a fifty-year-old photo.
Wycherly sat carefully upright on the battered, blanket-covered bench-seat, his bag balanced on his knees. He tried to shut out his present situation, but the attempt wasn't working very well.
It wasn't that the situation was out of control. He trusted that—it was what he lived with. But the situation had passed into the control of others, and that Wycherly couldn't bear.
At least he'd gotten away from what was left of the Ferrari.
The Ford had been the first thing that had come by once Wycherly had reached the road above the wreck. He'd accepted the driver's offer of a lift to the nearest telephone without a second thought. The ninety-
minute trip gave Wycheriy's headache time to fully establish itself, and was enough time for the first faint intimations of a hangover to appear on his horizon. He almost wished he'd stayed with the wreck.
Almost.
Occupied with his misery, Wycherly hardly noticed when the truck came to a stop. He'd seen no sign that they were approaching a city, only the slow unfolding of the wild landscape.
"Here you are, mister. This is Morton's Fork," his rescuer said at last.
Roused from his thoughts, Wycherly looked around.
No. He has to be joking.
Morton's Fork looked like something out of an old photograph. The place seemed to consist in its entirety of a dispirited straggle of wood-framed buildings that clung to the side of the hill as if disputing with the pinewood for possession of the land. The one exception was the combination gas station and garage across the road from the other buildings. Wycherly glanced at it briefly—the area was filled with junked cars, none readily identifiable as having been built more recently than 1963— and turned his attention back to the other structures.
There was a general store—the signs in the window said pelts BOUGHT and FAX—with an almost-archetypal collection of sitting locals grouped upon its porch, a narrow post office with American flag, and two or three other buildings whose purpose did not seem immediately definable. The sign above the post office door said Morton's fork, west Virginia.
West Virginia. Appalachia: a world of poverty light-years away from the universe of debutante balls and sporting gentry that made up Wycheriy's previous exposure to the South.
It didn't seem far enough away, somehow, for all the driving he'd done—and in another way, there was no place on Earth he could have gone that would be farther from Wychwood on the North Shore of Long Island, New York. Poor white trash. The label came easily to his mind. That was what the people here were.
And what was he? Rich white trash?
"Mister?" the driver said again, as if perhaps Wycherly hadn't heard him.
"Yes," Wycherly said shortly.
The driver—they might have been introduced, but Wycherly hadn't bothered to remember his name—looked at him, and Wycherly reached
into his bag and pulled out his wallet, extracting the first bill his fingers touched. The man accepted it and peered at the fifty for a moment as if he'd never seen one before.
Gritting his teeth, Wycherly forced the door open, ignoring the protests of abused muscles. The stiffness was only going to get worse. The ground seemed a long way down.
Once he was on his feet, pain crawled like electric snakes up his legs, into his back. He glanced to the side and saw that a few feet beyond the last building even the crumbling paving ended, and the road became the rutted pale dirt of the hills.
The driver was still looking at him.
"For your trouble," Wycherly said, indicating the bill. Didn't the people here have even the rudiments of civilization? His head hurt and he wanted a drink. At least he'd be able to buy liquor at the store.
"This'n's too much for just bringing you up here. H'ain't you got nothing smaller?" the driver said, holding it back out to him.
Enlightenment dawned. The driver didn't trust the money. Probably thinks ifs counterfeit, Wycherly decided, taking it back. It wasn't worth arguing abou
t; and the man had stopped for him in the first place. Wycherly looked through his wallet again, passing over the tens and pulling out a twenty. "Will this do?"
The local looked at it dubiously, as if this note, too, were not acceptable.
"I still need somebody to haul my car to the nearest garage," Wycherly snapped, losing patience. "I don't suppose I can hire you to do that?"
The man grinned, exposing large yellow teeth and shoving the money into his pocket as though Wycherly s question had settled some lingering doubt in his mind.
"Well, you could QdW to Buckhannon for the wrecker, but I don't know that she's going to get you'm up that grade whether she comes or not. Might be you need to see if Caleb's a mind to bring his team out." There was secret delight in the local's voice.
If he'd had the energy, Wycherly would have flayed the man verbally for amusing himself at his expense, but he was tired, in pain, and far from home. Most of all, Wycherly didn't want his family to know where he was, even as he suspected that when the police—of whatever stripe— came to inspect that crash, their actions would put him beyond Kenneth Musgrave's power to save.
Arrest. Jail this time, even though no one had been hurt.
This time.
The memory of Camilla Redford rose up instantly before his mind's eye like all of the Furies; Wycherly shuddered, stepping back from the truck.
He needed a drink. Enough playing around. He really needed a drink.
"Francis?"
The new voice seemed to come out of nowhere; the shock of hearing it told Wycherly he was more badly hurt than he'd thought. Carefully he turned toward the speaker; it was one of the locals who'd been gathered in front of the general store.
The newcomer, like Francis, had the faintly malnourished, inbred look of West Virginia's coal-mining country, a pocket of poverty in the midst of Rustbelt affluence. Pale blue eyes and skin as light as Wycherly's own proclaimed kinship with the Celtic forbears who had settled this unforgiving land in the eighteenth century, but there the resemblance ended. Wycherly Musgrave was the end product of money: expensive health care, expensive nutrition. He looked younger than his thirty-two years; the body he abused so casually had the resilience to endure what he did to it. He suspected the stranger was near to his own age, and the thought gave Wycherly an odd, uncomfortable feeling that might almost have been pity.
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