Gravelight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  p^

  THREE

  GRAVE MATTERS

  / have no relish for the country; it is a kind of healthy grave. — THE REVEREND SYDNEY SMITH

  MAKING BREAD HAD DONE NOTHING TO RELIEVE SINAH'S

  feelings—her heart still fluttered panickily, as if at any moment the scattered inhabitants of Morton's Fork would appear outside her door with torches and pitchforks, baying demands that they be given the witch to kill. . . .

  / won't think like that! She needed to get away from this place—go to Pharaoh for supplies, that was it. Get out among people, where every casual closeness—sitting on a bus, standing in an elevator—brought her their life histories and secret desires, their angers and their griefs. But it was better than staying here to let her empty mind collapse inward upon itself. Down in Pharaoh, they'd never heard of Athanais Dellon or her daughter, and furthermore, they didn't care. She could shop, maybe even have dinner in the Pharaoh diner.

  With brisk determination, Sinah changed her flour-spattered jeans and T-shirt for a sundress and denim jacket more suitable for a grocery

  shopping expedition. Even the mutter of the storm approaching through Watchman's Gap wasn't enough to deter her—she could wait it out in town and come back afterward.

  She opened the door and stepped out, mildly surprised to see that the evening was clear. The storm must still be on the other side of the Gap, then; well, it could stay there for all she cared. Holding her keys in her hand, she stepped toward her Jeep Cherokee, her lifeline to the outside world, her means of escape.

  That was when she smelled the smoke.

  Something was burning.

  She looked wildly in all directions, but there was nothing in sight. Only the soft summer twilight slanting through the white stands of birch trees, and the purling of a creek somewhere in the middle distance.

  And the smell of smoke.

  Why couldn't she see anything? The smell of smoke was so strong, the fire must be close by. The dappled sunlight burned on her skin like falling embers; the sky was darkening fast and suddenly she couldn't breathe. . . .

  The smoke was choking her. Sinah stared in horror. Fire made bright walls around her; the heat of it tightened her skin. She stared into the flames, unconsciously searching for the gas jets that would tell her this was all a fake, a movie set.

  But this was no set, no stage. There were no cameras, no audience. This was real.

  Sinah stood in the middle of a burning room, one that she'd never seen before, not even in pictures. There were brightly colored banners edged in fire, and tall candlesticks whose melting candle wax trickled down like water. Around her she could hear screaming, as though a hundred people suffered here just beyond her sight.

  "Hello!" Sinah cried, and almost immediately began to choke on the acrid smoke.

  Fire climbed the walls. Now the bright silk banners were all aflame. Soon the flames would reach her. Choking on her own panic, Sinah took a tentative step backward, away from the worst of the fire.

  There was a door beneath her hands, its handle already blisteringly hot. With a sense of trapped unreasoning horror she flung it open—there

  52 MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY

  was darkness on the other side, and blessed quiet. Sinah rushed through the door and slammed it. She held it closed for several seconds before she dared look around.

  She'd thought this place was dark. And it was, but somehow she could see her surroundings, as if she knew them so well that her memory was something she could trust. Stairs. Old and worn and shallow, leading down into the body of the earth, to where the crushing weight of rock became a separate living intelligence, waiting to crush her. Sinah put her foot forward and felt the edge of the first step.

  The wood of the door behind her grew warm against her back, reminding her that there was no retreat. She must go forward, down into where something waited—waited for her specifically, for Sinah Dellon. This was the past she'd so recklessly conjured; this was her heritage.

  It was waiting for her.

  This is a dream! Sinah thought wildly. She was—

  She could not remember where she'd been a moment before. All she could remember was the fire. Fear, and grief—and a wild sense of failure and despair.

  She had failed—herself, and the Line. And that which she had failed was here, waiting for her. In the dark.

  She could hear the sound of underground water, its plashing bizarrely magnified by the staircase beneath the earth. It was that insane adherence to the laws of physics that frightened her most; as if the reality of the small details of this vision were the most damning proof of her madness. What she'd called her gift was next to madness, after all. Perhaps this was only some logical evolution.

  The thought was unbearable. It's a dream — it's a dream — it's a dream — Caught between the soft seduction of the darkness and the fire's roaring destruction, Sinah flung open the door and ran back out into the fire.

  No, no, NO —

  First heat, then pain. Unbearable brightness that seemed to penetrate her flesh and her perceptions. She died in flames.

  And was reborn.

  Sinah opened her eyes. She was rolling on the ground, covered with the flecks of last year's leaves, weeping with the terror and the pain of being burned alive. It took a long time for her battered mind to comprehend

  GRAVELIGHT

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  that those things were not real. That she was here, and safe. There wasn't even the smell of smoke in the air.

  The memory of the vision began to fade even as she grasped at it, until all the images were shadowy, as inchoate as any nightmare.

  What. . . happened? Slowly Sinah got to her feet. The fear of madness—never far from her—returned afresh. What had happened had not been a secondhand experience stolen from another's mind. It had been something else— she'd been someone else. And instead of remembering what she'd taken from that other mind, she'd been drowned in it and discarded.

  As though she hadn't quite fit.

  "You let it burn!"

  Luned's accusation was the first thing Wycherly heard as he came through the door. His undershirt was balled up in his hand, and his tattered shirt was draped across his shoulders, still damp from the sluicing he'd given it.

  He glanced around. The room was oven-warm from the fire in the wood stove, and the iron pot was still sitting on top of the stove, steaming gently. The table was set with napkins, bowls, and spoons, and there was a tin box of crackers placed prominently on the table. Beside each plate there was a tin cup filled with tawny liquid. Luned was sitting in one of the chairs waiting for him. Her hands were in her lap and her whole demeanor was one of painful dignity.

  "I'm not the cook." Wycherly went to the table and picked up the cup at the unoccupied place. He sniffed at it suspiciously.

  "It's hard cider," Luned said, relenting. "Don't they have that where you come from?"

  "I doubt Mother would let it cross the threshold," Wycherly said absently.

  Luned got up and picked up one of the bowls, moving toward the stove; Wycherly walked past her into the bedroom.

  The bed had been made up with fresh sheets and blankets, topped with a patchwork quilt. The white window curtains, which looked to have been at least shaken out, if not washed, swirled gently at the window. Most of the obvious dust was gone; the room looked like one in some over-quaint bed-and-breakfast.

  What in the name of all that was reasonable was he doing here?

  "Do you guess you'll want dinner now?" Luned asked from the doorway. She sounded uncertain. She wiped her hands down the apron she had tied around her waist.

  rd rather have a drink. Wycherly pushed the automatic thought aside out of some reflexive perversity. "You don't have to wait on me," he said instead.

  "I don't mind," Luned said shyly. "I'm sorry I rowed at you before; I was just scairt, is all. Looks like you're going to need someone to do for you, cooking and cleaning . . . and like that."

  "I'll
manage," Wycherly said shortly. Shouldn't this girl be in school somewhere, or off playing with dolls? An odd suspicion made him ask: "Look, exactly how old are you anyway, Luned?"

  "I'll be seventeen next birthday," the girl replied. "And I guess I could take care of you right well. Mister Wych."

  Oh, Lord. Not a backward twelve as he'd vaguely imagined, but sixteen. Old enough to think of herself as an adult, with what could be disastrous results.

  "No," Wycherly said carefully, "I don't really think you could. I'll be happy to have you come here and clean for me, and bring me things from the store, Luned. I'll pay you for that. You see, I'm going to be . . . sick for a while. I won't really need someone to, ah, 'do' for me."

  "Was it the church bells?" the girl asked eagerly. "Ev an' me, we figured it'd be something like that, with them ringing the bells down to Maskelyne for that Prentiss boy that drowned—"

  Drowned. It was silly, but Wycherly felt real fear. As if the possibility of drowning were a tangible and concrete thing, that could rise from a riverbed and seek him out as surely as a silver bullet. As if the waters could give up all the dead they had swallowed, and Camilla Redford could come back for him.

  "Drowned? Where is there around here that anyone could drown?" he asked sharply.

  "In the river," Luned said, as if this were something everybody ought to know. "The crick out back's the Little Heller; she runs right into the Astolat, and the Astolat runs pretty fast just below the dam. The funeral was this morning, and Reverend Betterton was going to ring a long peal at sunup, so we figured the church bells must be what made you crash. ..."

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  Wycherly stared at her, wondering if Luned were a violent maniac or just delusional. What in God's name could church bells have to do with his accident this morning, or whether he was going to dry out?

  "Did I say something wrong?" Luned asked anxiously.

  "Just who is it—^precisely—that you think I am?" Wycherly said slowly. "And don't lie," he added, "because I'll know." He took a menacing step toward the doorway.

  Luned Starking turned pale enough for her faint freckles to show plainly, proof enough that she took the threat seriously.

  "You're a conjureman. Mister Wych. Wouldn't nobody else be coming to Morton's Fork to live in old Miss Rahab's cabin. And you've got red hair—that's the mark of Judas—and you drank down Gamaliel Tanner's best shine like it was well water. Couldn't any mortal man do that." Her confidence seemed to return as she enumerated the reasons for Wycherly to be a "conjureman."

  "And you said you'd know if I lied," Luned added seriously, "so that proves it."

  Hearsay, innuendo, and half-truths. If this was some elaborate rural practical joke, Wycherly intended to see that its perpetrator got no joy from it.

  "This is medieval," he said bluntly. "Do you know what year this is? It's practically the year 2000, and you're going on with this—nonsense. Who do I look like to you, the Flying Nun? There's no such thing as a 'conjureman'—and if there were, I wouldn't be one."

  His angry speech did not have the effect he intended. Luned's eyes filled with tears, and she fixed her eyes on her feet. "Then you cain't help me?" she said in a low voice. "I thought maybe you could."

  Ghoulish apprehension kept Wycherly from speaking for a moment, while his fancy made him imagine every sort of terminal illness beyond the help of medical science. The vigor with which Luned had polished and cooked now took on the luster of a desperate act—a bid for aid from a fantastic creature summoned up from her own imagination.

  "Tell me," Wycherly said harshly.

  Luned launched into a rambling explanation so filled with euphemism and dialect that Wycherly couldn't really understand it. "Haven't you seen a doctor?" he demanded, cutting through her words.

  "Doctors just want to put you into the hospital," Luned said scornfully. "Doctor Standish comes around four times a year from the County

  SO the babies can get their shots for school and all, but he won't do nothing. There's the sanatorium up the hill a ways—if you go on up the ridge you can probably see it, if you go in daylight—but it don't do folks around here much good."

  "Why not?" A sanatorium implied a medical staff of some sort, and the doctors there should at least be willing to refer local emergencies— though if Luned's assessment of the County Medical Service's Dr. Stan-dish was any indication, the inhabitants of Morton's Fork would do anything rather than be sent out of the area to the hospital.

  "Wildwood Sanatorium burned down eighty year ago next month. Ain't nothing there now but ha'ants and brambles," Luned explained simply.

  They don't go because it isn't there.

  Feeling as if he'd been played for a fool, Wycherly snarled, "So what do you expect me to do for you?" He was hungry, and he wanted a hot bath that it didn't look as if he was going to get, and he felt an uneasy sense of responsibility that he didn't like, as if merely by virtue of coming from a privileged background he had some responsibility to those who had less.

  Luned stared at the floor, biting her lower lip to keep from crying, something that irritated Wycherly even more.

  "I thought . . . maybe . . . if you were a conjureman like old Miss Ra-hab . . . you could maybe fix me up a tonic so's I didn't feel so poorly all the time," she finally said.

  That's ALL? Wycherly nearly said. But there was no "all" to it; that something was wrong with Luned was clear, from her pallid complexion to the fact that it had been so easy to mistake her for a child half a dozen years younger. He could tell her to eat better food, to rest more, but was there any way for her to follow such orders, living as she did?

  "I better go," Luned said.

  "No." Though Wycherly hated the thought of getting entangled with some ignorant mountain girl, still less did he like the thought of being a man just like his father: someone who used people and then threw them aside when they were no longer useful.

  And ignored them until they were.

  "Sit down. Eat your soup. I may be able to do something for you. And quit sniveling," he snapped.

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  57

  Though Luned had said the soup had burned, there was more than enough for dinner. Even though most of the ingredients had come out of cans, it was surprisingly good, enough to awaken even Wycherly's flagging appetite. As they ate, Luned pattered on about her housekeeping skills, demanding that he give her his shirt so she could clean and mend it for him.

  "—and I'm a powerful good seamstress. Mister Wych—you'll see."

  He supposed that he would, like it or not. But at least he had a solution for some of her problems.

  "Wait here," Wycherly said, when dinner was over.

  He got up from the table and went back into the other room, not waiting to see if she obeyed. His shoulder bag was right where he'd left it, on the floor beneath the window. She hadn't touched it when she'd cleaned—at least, he hoped she hadn't. He slung it onto the bed and opened it.

  In it were all the necessities of a wastrel's life: his shaving kit with its rechargeable electric razor, a bottle 0^1903" cologne. An address book, containing the telephone numbers of enough doctors and lawyers to keep the police away from him for at least a little while, if the need came. A cellular phone he wasn't going to use, a roadmap leading nowhere. A shirt and underwear he didn't remember packing. Reading glasses he never used. Tylenol-3. A bottle of sleeping pills, the prescription carefully doled out to him in non-fatal amounts—as if that would slow him down when the time came. A pint of Scotch.

  Wycherly held it up to the light: It glowed like amber, like fire, like everything good and precious in his world. Its loving warmth seemed to radiate through the glass into his hands. He knew that if he was serious about drying out, he had to get rid of it.

  But he couldn't bear to do that just now. He set it carefully on the pile with the other things, as gently as if it were alive.

  And here, down at the bottom, the thing he was looking for.

>   The prescription bottle was the size of a small jar of instant coffee and made of white plastic to protect its contents from the light. The bottle held 150 pills—no one cared how many he had of these.

  Vitamins. Strong ones. A contribution to his therapy from the psychiatrist he was—in theory—currently seeing, who felt she should preserve his health while not interfering with his drinking. Alcoholics, she'd said.

  usually suffered health problems exacerbated by malnutrition; either because they preferred drinking to eating or because chronic drinking stripped the body of essential nutrients. These were supposed to make up for that. He supposed they'd work equally well for someone whose body had been stripped of essential nutrients by something else.

  But Luned was expecting magic from a red-headed conjureman who flew through the air in a sorcerous automobile. He unscrewed the cap. God knew why he was humoring the simpleminded wench. She had all the sexual appeal of a backward ten year old, and Wycherly was no Humbert Humbert.

  The foil seal was still in place, which meant the bottle was full. About five months' supply. But how to get her to take them?

  He looked around the room.

  There was a small, hinged silver box on top of the dresser, about the size of two packs of filter cigarettes taped together. He picked it up, wondering why Luned had left it behind when she'd cleaned out everything else. Because it looked valuable, probably. He turned it over, looking for a hallmark, but all he saw were some odd square imprints, the designs too muddled to make out.

  Possibly this was an antique snuffbox, but even if it was, Wycherly felt no qualms about using it—old and ornate, it was just the right size to hold the contents of the pill bottle, and Wycherly dumped the contents into it and closed the lid. Hefting the box in his hand, he walked back out into the other room.

  Luned was still sitting at the table, just as he'd left her. In that moment, the whole situation took on a surreal clarity that Wycherly associated only with being very drunk indeed. What was he doing meddling in the life of a stranger on whom he could have no hope of having a permanent effect? And meddling just for fun; Wycherly could imagine no other reason. What was Luned to him? Nothing. So why should he help her?