Gravelight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  "I guess you're set on it," Luned said grudgingly, and Wycherly felt a small unwilling flash of triumph. He'd managed to browbeat a sixteen-year-old girl into doing what he wanted. The petty victory made him angry, and in another moment he'd lash out at her again.

  "I'm going out now," Wycherly said hastily, standing and picking up the other two cans of beer. "I'll see you in a few days."

  Luned handed him his jacket.

  "You mind you don't get into any trouble. Mister Wych," she said seriously.

  Wycherly only laughed.

  The morning air was cool and green, and once Wycherly got beneath the trees the dimness of the forest canopy provided him a welcome relief from the sun's brightness. One can of beer fit snugly into each of his two jacket pockets. Wycherly promised himself that he'd just carry them, not drink them unless things got bad. A little exercise would probably help the drying-out process, as well as working out the last of the kinks from yesterday's crash. So he told himself.

  While the main reason for the excursion was to get away from Luned before he added one more thing to his list of regrets, it was true that he did have a faint amount of curiosity about the sanatorium—enough to make that his destination. Luned had said it was up the hill. Wycherly took the first trail he found leading upward.

  He could put names to few of the plants that surrounded him. Unfamiliar patterns of birdsong fell upon his ears, and small invisible animals scurried away through the underbrush. Once he startled a deer—nearly as much as it startled him when it exploded into motion and fled with awkward powerful leaps.

  The narrow foot-trail had not quite been overgrown by the decades of abandonment, or else someone from Morton's Fork still came up here, but his first clue that he was nearing the sanatorium came when Wycherly stumbled on a strip of paved road. It was nearly overgrown, but even eighty years of snow and rain had not managed to reduce the blacktopped slabs to rubble.

  He followed the road until he came to two pillars overgrown with green. The wings of a painted iron gate still hung between them. The gate hung open, twined with vines, sagging and eaten with rust. On the iron arch above, the faint gleam of gold leaf could still be seen, the ornate gilded letters spelling out wiLDWOOD sanatorium.

  The large brass plaque set into the pillar was blackened and pitted with years of corrosion. He lifted the vines away from it; you could still see the words "Wildwood Sanatorium, est. 1915" engraved on it.

  He was already sweaty and gasping from the mild exercise; it hadn't occurred to him that a walk through the woods could be so exhausting. Wycherly had always counted on his body even while he was abusing it, and took this betrayal as a personal attack. His body was starting to fail him, just as legions of doctors had always insisted it would. So it wasn't only his soul that was running out of time.

  A soul? You re reaching for that one, chummy. Who says you've got a soul to risk?

  No answer. But he never got answers, not this soon. Soon enough he'd have a whole chorus of horrors to talk to.

  Simple thirst, rather than tainted craving, made him reach for one of the cans he carried. Once he'd opened it, he got out two Tylenol and threw them back, draining the can in a few swallows. That much accomplished, he leaned back against the nearer of the two pillars.

  When he touched it, the bolts that held the brass plaque in place crumbled. He turned around to look, and it fell away from the stone, narrowly missing his foot.

  He bent down to pick it up, thinking vaguely that he would keep it for a souvenir. As he straightened with it in his hands, he saw that there was a shallow opening in the pillar behind the plaque, and it seemed to have something in it. Wycherly set the plaque down and reached cautiously inside, wary of spiders. He pulled the object out and shook it carefully to rid it of the worst of the accumulated grit.

  It was a bag of some sort. About four inches square, made of undyed linen—which explained why it was still here and not rotted away to rags. A design was embroidered on one side in colored thread: something that looked vaguely familiar to Wycherly. It was sewn shut.

  He weighed it between his fingers, debating if he should satisfy his curiosity by ripping it open immediately. It seemed to be filled with coins and beads, and a crackling between his fingers suggested leaves. He raised it to his nostrils and sniffed cautiously, but could smell nothing but decades-old dust. He shrugged and slipped it into his pocket. It would keep.

  He felt steady enough to go on now, and pushed his way between the hanging, overgrown gates. The flagstone path beyond had once been wide enough for an automobile, and a trace of it remained. He walked down the center, but his shoulders and sides were still brushed by the

  trailing canes of wild rose that had overgrown the drive. After several minutes' walk, he caught his first glimpse of the sanatorium.

  Even in ruin it was breathtaking. It had been built at the same time the last palaces of the American merchant princes had risen, and that same unconscious arrogance and celebration of wealth must have been in evidence here in its heyday. From where he stood at the foot of the drive, Wycherly could see that what remained of vaulting walls of native granite covered an amazing amount of territory—a ruined palace indeed.

  With the sanatorium's remains as a focal point, Wycherly thought he could see the outlines of the grounds; a series of terraces falling away from the main house. As he stared directly toward it, Wycherly suddenly realized he was looking at a sundial on its white marble plinth. It stood in the middle of what once must have been a sweeping lawn. The grass had been choked out by weeds, which had been strangled in turn by the dense growth of vines and bushes that thrived beneath the trees.

  He walked over and pulled away some of the greenery about the sundial. It had been lavishly gilded once, but the gilding had been melted and burnt away by a swift heat that had left only the brass behind. The marble base, streaked with verdigris and softened by the passing years, also showed the effects of fire.

  Luned said this place burned in . . . 191 j?

  And it didn't look as if anyone had been back here since, even to salvage objects with resale value, like an antique sundial.

  It made no sense. Haunted? People believed in ghosts until the moment they realized there was a dollar to be made. The notorious Ami-tyville house had been bought by people well aware of its history—and who had been willing to overlook that history because of the house's low asking price. But in eighty years, Wildwood Sanatorium had neither been looted—nor rebuilt.

  Wycherly tried to imagine a motivation stronger than human greed and failed. Even self-preservation barely ranked in the top ten. This un-looted place did not conform to his experience of human nature, and Wycherly considered himself something of a connoisseur of human nature. Wildwood Sanatorium represented a vast outpouring of money even in a luxurious and exhibitionistic time. Even after the fire, there must have been something worth salvaging. Why would the place simply have been abandoned?

  The Depression. Wycherly's brow cleared. He'd known there must be a rational explanation, and that was it. The so-called Great Depression that had begun in 1929 had ruined fortunes vaster than this sanatorium represented. This place, and its owners' ambitious plans, would have been nothing more than another casualty of that catastrophe. And after World War II, when there might have been money to rebuild, the eastern mountains had been supplanted by the Sunbelt as the preferred destination of the ailing.

  Pleased to have assigned the puzzle to its appropriate pigeonhole, Wycherly walked on up the drive. The closer he got to the sanatorium, then thinner the overgrowth became. Though drifts of fallen leaves were rotted away to dust and mounded against the ruined walls where the wind had left them, there were no brambles growing over the stones.

  Wycherly scuffed at the ground with the toe of his shoe. Beneath its cover of fallen leaves, the soil was sandy and crumbling, as sterile as the vermiculite around the roots of a potted plant in a florist's window. In fact, the earth around the sanatorium—at least on th
is side—was as barren as if it had been poisoned.

  Poison was the first thing a child of the nineties would think of. Poison, radiation, toxic waste . . . but toxic waste was a byproduct of industry, and there had never been any industry in these mountains as far as he could see. Even the nearest coal mines were twenty and thirty miles away, and their blight, while profound, was nothing like what had happened here.

  For a fleeting, fantastic moment Wycherly considered radiation—had this been the site of some still-unpublicized Manhattan Project half a century ago? But Luned had said the place had burned decades before that, and it certainly seemed to have been abandoned since the fire.

  He shook his head. There could be a dozen prosaic explanations for the bare earth, including an antique insecticide spill. He pushed aside his speculations, and with them any acknowledgment of potential danger. He wondered how much of the inside was left.

  Wycherly circled the building, choosing his footing carefully. The curving drive had led up to a front entrance reached by a grand terraced staircase. The stairs and their balustrades were still there, although the closer he got to the top, the more the stonework showed the effects of that long-ago fire. Finally he reached the last step. The archway through

  which a long-ago patron would have entered remained, as did a part of the wall.

  There was nothing else.

  Wycherly stood on the last step and gazed down, fascinated. The floor plan of the house remained, printed on the earth, but the years and the fire had left nothing behind but the house's shell. The upper stories had caved in and burnt to ashes, and where there had been cellars, those too stood exposed, opening a chasm three stories deep beneath his feet. Below the level of the sheltering earth the outer walls were intact; he could see the decades-old bricks and mortar, and everything was laid out in such a neat regular fashion—all straight lines and right angles and cubes—that he'd only been staring at it for several minutes when the thing that didn't fit caught his eye.

  It was a black stone staircase running down along the left-hand wall. It began at what had once been ground level and made a gentle curve out into the main part of the cellar, running from nowhere to nowhere. When Wycherly's eyes had adjusted fully he realized that the staircase ended below the basement level. He wondered where it led, and why.

  It did not occur to him that no one knew where he was; that a fall could leave him trapped and helpless. He felt the same irresistible glee that he had always felt when he stumbled on someone else's secrets: that the secrets here belonged to long-dead strangers made no difference.

  Wycherly circled the building until he reached the black stairs. They were marble, and might once have even been ornate, though they seemed to begin below the levels of the public rooms. Another oddity in a sanatorium that seemed to have been erected by eccentric plutocrats. There was a landing two-thirds of the way down the black stairs, and after that, one last short flight would take him below the sub-cellar.

  Wycherly started downward. The walls of the sub-sub-basement seemed to close in on him as he descended; he looked back the way he had come, and the far-off daylight was cool and dim. He could escape easily. He was perfectly safe.

  So Wycherly told himself, but it was with a certain reluctance that he stepped off the bottom step, onto the floor. It was smooth and flat and dark: a close-grained stone like basalt or even sandstone, covered with fallen leaves, ancient cinders, and blown dust. The surface made for slippery footing.

  The walls were rougher than the floor, and bore the marks of the hammers and chisels that had sculpted them out of the living rock. He could still see the marks where the bolts anchoring some framing or wallcovering had been sunk, though the paneling had gone to dust and ash as if centuries, and not mere decades, had passed.

  Walking gingerly across the floor, Wycherly felt a sensation of weight, of depth—though logically there was no way for him to be able to sense such things. He looked around, trying to distract himself from the sense of claustrophobic pressure that being here gave him.

  The room was . . .

  Wycherly frowned, peering into the gloom. To tell the truth, he couldn't tell exactly how big the room was, or even its shape. A phrase from an old book he'd read once came back to him: non-Euclidean geometries. Maybe the architect had been drunk when he designed the place.

  As drunk as Wycherly would like to be.

  He thought of the remaining can of beer in his pocket. He and the beast both knew he was going to drink it, but just to spite the beast he thought he'd see if he could hold off a little longer. What else was there down here to see? He took a few steps toward the center of the room.

  That.

  In the center of the room stood a vaguely loaf-shaped object. It stood about forty inches high and was the same color as the walls, and the camouflaging shadows and uncertain perspective had made it blend in with its surroundings so well that Wycherly had first taken it for part of the back wall of the cellar. At first he thought it was a coffin; it was roughly sarcophagus-shaped: eight feet long and nearly as wide as it was tall.

  It was an altar.

  He wasn't sure where the notion came to him from—certainly the Musgraves' visits to the smug Episcopalian temple of their expensive faith had been rare enough that Wycherly was largely unfamiliar with religious things. But the conviction remained: This was an altar.

  He went closer, curious. If it was an altar, then an altar to what? He crouched down beside it, studying it closely. The sides were covered with purposeful, delicate carvings that seemed halfway between letters and pictures. He traced over one with one finger. If they were letters, they did not look like any language he knew—but he suspected he knew the sort of book that would contain them.

  For most of his adult life Wycherly had moved through the shadow-world of pointless self-indulgence, where evasion of personal responsibility frequently crossed the line into all sorts of New Age manifestations: channeling, reincarnation, the worship of peculiar spirits. . . . They didn't really believe in it any more than Kenneth Musgrave truly believed in the impressive God to whom he paid sketchy homage at Christmas and Easter. The pretence of belief, o{fealty, was just a . . . convenience.

  Black Magick in West Virginia? It was unfortunately not unbelievable.

  Stiff muscles quickly protested the crouch, and Wycherly got to his ^t^t, clutching at the altar for support. The top was smooth and flat; he ran the palm of his hand over it and felt an odd sense of inadequacy hovering just below the surface of his mind.

  As if someone had made him an offer he'd failed to understand.

  As if he'd failed.

  Wycherly wasn't sure why he was angry, only that he was. He flung himself away from the carved block of stone, but he'd gotten muddled and ended up moving away from the stairs, not toward them.

  That was when he saw the doorway.

  It was a carved gothic archway in the smooth stone wall of the basement. As Wycherly approached, he could see the charred remains of a wooden door blocking it.

  Leave it alone. It was the clear, quiet voice of self-preservation, and Wycherly brushed it aside easily. The wood came away in his hands, and in a few moments the doorway was clear. He put his hand on the frame. It was the same stone as the walls of the basement, and when he poked his head through it, he felt a cold, wet draft of air blowing toward him from the darkness. There were steps cut into the rock leading down. He could only see the first one or two; beyond that, the wide low steps disappeared into the darkness and he could not tell where they went. They were worn and shallow, the depression in the center of each tread suggesting that they had seen the passage of hundreds—thousands—of feet.

  Wycherly took a hesitant step backward, wishing for a flashlight. It was a little after noon on a hot July day; the sun was nearly overhead. But here in this black room it was cold and dim, and what light there was did not penetrate beyond the archway to whatever lay below.

  Don't be an asshole, Wycherly sneered at himself. Afraid
of a hole in the ground because of some carvings on an altar? There weren't any carvings.

  There probably wasn't any altar. He knew the beast was already prowling, blurring the borderline between reality and delusion. All there could possibly be down there was spiders and snakes.

  And Camilla.

  Dark. Dark icy water climbing his body, and he could not see what lay beneath. White body, white teeth, wound-red mouth. Coming for him, to draw him beneath the surface and feed upon him forever. . . .

  Wycherly struggled free of the vision. He'd been here before; this was the shadowland that the black beast lived in. His heart hammered and he was sweating; there was a taste of copper in his mouth.

  More than anything in life Wycherly feared the return of the night river and its profane undine. Camilla shouldn't be coming back for him like this. It wasn't fair. It was daytime. He was awake.

  In a sudden frenzy, he dragged the unopened can of beer from his coat pocket and flung it into the cave opening. He could hear it bouncing and rolling for a long time as it clattered to the bottom of the stairs. He turned and fled back to the black stairs, as though safety could be found in the sunlight.

  But it was too late. As he climbed the water mounted around his legs and the light drained away.

  The river was cold, so cold, and he could feel his warm blood draining away into it —

  —and he fell, leaves crumbling beneath his hands, and looked down over the edge of the black staircase at a twenty-foot drop onto bare rock. A little closer to the edge and he would have been dead—if he were to fall over the side, it would be a broken leg at the very least.

  Wycherly ran his tongue over dry lips and wondered if he dared get to his feet and walk the rest of the way. He looked up. Another flight of stairs to go to reach the surface. Maybe he should crawl.

  But he could still hear the water. And suddenly, horribly, came the realization that he was directly above the water, that the night river was rushing along beneath his feet, and at any moment he might fall through the stone, into the water beneath.