Gravelight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  "Maybe," Dylan said. "But both of them know where to draw the line—and you don't."

  Truth stared at Dylan, too stunned to speak. Dylan ran a hand through his hair and made an abortive gesture of reconciliation.

  "Look, if it would make you feel better, we can go up to the sanatorium tomorrow morning—I mean, today. If Quentin Blackburn's haunting the place, Rowan ought to be able to smoke him out. I wanted to save Wildwood for last, but—"

  "The pins on the map—they're grouped around the sanatorium, aren't they—around Quentin Blackburn? Something you knew and didn't think worth sharing with a deluded hysterical woman."

  Truth felt a murderous cold rage boiling up in her, blotting out all trace of her earlier fear. In another moment, she knew she'd strike Dylan—or worse.

  "Truth, honey, come back to bed. It's been a long day. I'm sorry I got us lost. Everybody's worn out and edgy. You'll feel better tomorrow, when we can both discuss this rationally."

  Dylan's voice and face were pleading with her to let the argument drop. Truth had no intention of obliging him.

  "We can discuss it rationally now. Are the disappearances grouped around the sanatorium or aren't they?"

  "They aren't. The sanatorium wasn't built until the end of 1914. Some of those reports go back to the first settlers who came here—over 250 years. This is nothing to do with Quentin Blackburn."

  Truth put her hand over her face, unwilling to let him see her expression. The sanatorium was built in 1914 — hut the Gate's always been here, Dylan!

  But even as she formulated the thought, doubts struck her. What was she basing her belief in the existence of a Wildwood Gate on? A vision that was subjective at best, open to misinterpretation certainly, and that might be partially mingled with a dream?

  But no matter the reality of her belief, Dylan had withheld information from her, and that Truth could not forgive.

  "If you're as wrong about this little theory of yours as you are about most things, Dylan, you're sure to find out very soon," Truth said grimly.

  "Come back to bed, Truth," Dylan said gently.

  The last of her anger-fueled strength drained out of Truth, and she felt tired, small, and cold.

  And although Truth allowed Dylan to lead her back to the Winnebago, she spent the rest of the hours till dawn curled up in the driver's seat of the camper, staring sightlessly out through the windshield, into the night.

  By the time he navigated the distance between the Jeep Cherokee's passenger seat and the front door of the renovated schoolhouse, Wycherly was gritting his teeth with every step. His ankle flared whenever he inadvertently flexed it, and Sinah had nearly had to carry him into the house. Fresh beads of sweat had broken out on his skin and his shirt was

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  soaked by the time Wycherly lowered himself heavily into a chair in Sinah's gracious, designer-perfect living room. As usual, he'd overestimated his capabilities, and he was paying for it now. At times like this he generally craved a drink more than ever, but curiously, his craving had been blotted out, probably by the pain.

  It was tacitly accepted that he would sleep here tonight, and Wycherly was too tired to object much, even though the beer was back at his cabin. At least his pain pills were here.

  "Let me get you some ice for that ankle," Sinah said. "It's a little late to do much good, but better late than never." She moved away.

  The only ice I want has a double bourbon wrapped around it, Wycherly snarled mentally. He stared after Sinah malignantly. Sex was supposed to forge bonds of intimacy and trust—well, intimacy, anyway—but frankly, he'd liked Sinah better before he'd had her.

  He glanced around the room again. Normally he would take no notice—this was the way people lived, after all—but this interior was so out of place in the village of Morton's Fork that it constantly drew his attention. Cathedral ceilings, stained glass—a country home right out of Architectural Digest.

  As a veteran of his mother's frequent forays into home decoration, Wycherly knew this look was not lightly—or cheaply—achieved. But why do it at all? Wycherly shifted position and was rewarded with a new flare of discomfort.

  She'd hoped for this moment, prayed for it, and sternly lectured herself against believing it would ever happen. Now it was—and she wished it weren't.

  Her gift was leaving her.

  When had it begun to fail? When she was around someone for any length of time, she learned to block out his or her thoughts and emotions, rather like turning down a too-loud television, but it was always there in the background, ready to be summoned to the forefront of her mind in an instant.

  And now she couldn't. Not with Wycherly, anyway.

  Oh, she could still feel the tidal press of his emotions, but anyone could read someone else's emotions from face or body or voice. The inner monologue of his thoughts—the endless first-person story that all people

  told themselves through most of their waking hours—had faded from her mind as if she'd never been able to hear it.

  How could she judge him without that? People's actions, their emotions, and their words rarely bore any relation to each other, and she already knew how conflicted Wycherly was. No matter what he was feeling at the time—and usually it seemed to be irritation—there was always something else beneath the surface of his emotions, something he was hiding not only from her, but from himself.

  And now she'd never be able to find out what it was.

  She concentrated on her surroundings, trying to blot out the inner life with the outer. Even without her gift, she knew Wycherly must be in pain. Maybe an ice-water soak and a couple more pain pills would take the edge off it.

  She remembered that he'd prefer iced tea to soda, but she wouldn't give him liquor—at least not if he didn't ask for it, and she knew his queer, twisted arrogance wouldn't let him ask. Let him steal it, then, if he had to have it—Sinah knew he knew where it was.

  She opened the refrigerator and got out the tea pitcher, selecting a tall glass and filling it with chunks of lemon and lime, then pouring it full of iced tea. No sugar. Wycherly only took sugar in his coffee.

  It created a false sense of intimacy to know so much about another person; a bizarre one-way relationship, like the ones fans created with soap opera stars. She didn't really know him, because he didn't know her—she was possessed of all the minutia of his life, but she was still a stranger to him, and he would treat her as such.

  She could change that. Even with her gift's peculiar fading, she could make him like her. She could make him love her. She could be his perfect dream girl.

  But it would all be an act, tailored to his expectations, and when it was done he still wouldn't know her at all. Even Jason Kennedy had never gotten quite as close as he thought he had, though their shared experience made her count him a friend.

  Her relationship—love, hate, or something in between—with Wycherly didn't have to be like that. But did she have the courage to play it straight, not to trade on what her gift had gained her, to let him get to know her for what she really was—without misdirection and half-truths—and respond to that? Sinah looked down at the sweating glass in

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  her hands. She didn't know. How much did she need Wycherly? That was the bottom line.

  Sinah took the glass back out into the living room, to where Wycherly was waiting.

  Lunch was something clever and civilized, served with more iced tea. Wycherly picked his way through it, feeling sleepy from the codeine he'd taken and all the morning's exercise. The air-conditioned air was cool and dry, and the painkillers were starting to blunt the ferocious ache in his ankle. They spoke of safe impersonal things—not the sanatorium or what had happened there—until the meal was over.

  'Td like to talk to you about what happened today," Sinah said. "Shall we go into the living room?"

  He shouldn't be asked to face anything like this without a drink in his hand, Wycherly thou
ght, but curiously, he was not even tempted to ask her for one. The part of his mind where the black beast lived was occupied by the dark vision of a man in flames.

  Who had offered him power.

  Sinah fluttered around the room, unable to settle. Wycherly recognized the restless avoidance of the nondrinking alcoholic, but he knew he'd have known by now if she was "recovering," as they called it. The few "recovering" alcoholics he'd known missed no opportunity to flaunt their amethyst jewelry, tell people that alcoholism was an illness, and explain for exactly how long they'd been "recovering."

  It was peculiar, Wycherly thought idly, that alcoholism, like cancer, was something they never pronounced one recovered from. For the rest of their lives they were always recovering, never quite reaching recovery.

  What did she want? Why wouldn't she come to the point after setting him on edge the way she had?

  "You wanted to talk?" Wycherly finally said.

  Sinah settled into the chair placed at right angles to the couch, leaning toward him. The baggy T-shirt masked her body, but the lovely fine-boned hollows of her gleaming throat were close enough to touch. A faint edible fragrance rose from the surface of her skin, bringing back muted flashes of what they'd done on the altar.

  "It seems like such a stupid question," she admitted sheepishly, "but I

  have to . . . today—up at the ruins—did you . . . Have you ever heard of something called The Antique Church? Church of the Antique Rite? Something like that? Or Quentin Blackburn?"

  It was not what he'd expected to hear. The words resonated in Wycherly's mind with an awful importance, like the pronouncement of doom. The name "Blackburn" was oddly familiar to him, and the Church of the Antique Rite had the ring of one of those semi-illicit New Age scams that the rich constantly seemed to fall for. The—vision?—had been like a brief, bright pulse of lightning, but the more he thought about it the more it seemed to unfold, as if a vast amount of information had been unloaded into his mind in a lightning stroke.

  A psychic flash? In Wycherly's experience such nebulous unreliable things belonged to the realm of television fantasies, but there must be something objectively . . . strange . . . about Wildwood Sanatorium. Satanic chapels with black altars weren't a normal part of any hospital he'd ever been in!

  "Quentin Blackburn?" Wycherly asked carefully. "Why?"

  "Oh, no reason. ..." She stopped, turning away. Either she was the worst liar of any actor he'd ever met, or she hated the thought of trying to lie to him. Wycherly found either alternative hard to credit.

  "I just . . . did you . . . was there anything out of the ordinary up there today?" Sinah asked haltingly.

  Sinah's question brought him a vivid flashback of that afternoon—not when he'd taken her on the altar stone. Just before that, when he'd . . .

  "No. Nothing. Why do you ask?" Wycherly lied easily.

  "I . . ." Her face was turned toward him, serious and sad. As if she'd expected his answer, but was still disappointed by it. A desire to change that expression made him say:

  "But I've heard of The Church of the Antique Rite—or something like it, anyway."

  "You have?" Her relief was a palpable thing, like sunrise.

  "It's one of those neo-Satanist things: you know, sex, drugs, and orgies all dolled up as the search for higher truth. You're the one from California. Aren't New Age religions and nut-cults a dime a dozen out there?" he asked.

  "Yes. ..." Sinah said slowly, still trying to feel for the truth beneath Wycherly's emotions. She'd joined such groups more than once, but

  she'd always been disappointed, discovering that none of them believed the occult truths that they proclaimed so plausibly to their members.

  "Hereward—an actor I dated for a while in New York—was really into that sort of thing, but I just wasn't interested," she said, groping for the words to explain.

  Or to be more accurate, the images she'd seen in Hereward Farrar's mind had frightened her to death, even if she could no longer remember quite what they'd been. He'd had a deep interest in magic, as a lot of theater folk seemed to, ritual and theater being so closely intertwined. But nothing in the books Hereward had given her—or those she'd bought later—had been able to explain or control her power, and the rituals that some of them advocated seemed sort of like Zen cooking to her—an elaborate and finicky process producing no visible results.

  "He loaned me a bunch of books, but I never got around to reading them," she said, cautiously shaving the truth. "I think I brought them with me when I shipped my things here from the Coast. Maybe they're still here somewhere."

  "You'll probably find your church listed in the Whole Magick Encyclopedia or something like that," Wycherly said, sounding bored. "Fortunes bilked while you wait, that sort of thing."

  "Maybe," Sinah said reluctantly. Her ability to read Wycherly's mind might have dwindled to the point where she could only feel his emotions and not hear his thoughts, but she'd still felt the flash of recognition he'd had when she mentioned The Church of the Antique Rite.

  He knew what it was. And he was lying to her.

  Sinah lay awake in the dark, hearing Wycherly's drugged, even breathing beside her. His mind was stilled now, the dreams moving like bright fish just out of her psychic reach. She reached out to the nightstand, where the ancient leather of the pouch crackled through the modern fabric of the neck purse as she closed her fingers on it.

  It seemed to Sinah that she could feel the contents vibrating with the personality—and the will—of the woman who had first worn it. That woman would have been more than a match for the man—or ghost— who had threatened Sinah up at Wild wood today. Athanais de Lyon had never let anything stand in her way—not king, god, or devil—and Quentin Blackburn would be no different. . . .

  Her easy use of her ancestress' name frightened Sinah on some deep

  level, as though it meant she was admitting that her self-delusion wasn't delusion at all. That Athanais de Lyon was real.

  It's your mother's name; the rest of it is borrowed whole-cloth from prime-time television! she told herself bravely. But it wasn't. She already knew that. She came from a hereditary witch family, and apparently it had hereditary enemies as well. Like The Church of the Antique Rite.

  But what's the point? Soon enough — the way your mind's going — YOU won't be around to care at all, her inner voice mocked.

  There was too much truth to that to make the thing easy to think about. She needed help. She needed to know what Wycherly knew. Maybe she could lead the conversation around to the subject again in the morning.

  No. Wryly, Sinah acknowledged that even her own sense of self-preservation couldn't make her manipulate Wycherly Musgrave that way. She needed his help—but she wouldn't trick it out of him. Maybe he'd learn to trust her.

  Maybe hell will freeze over.

  Another half hour of sleepless tossing and Sinah got up and went downstairs to the kitchen. On the shelf beside the teacups was the prescription for a sleep aid that she'd gotten to smooth over her jet lag when she'd been commuting from coast to coast. She shook two of the tiny white capsules—a double dose—out onto her palm and swallowed them dry. She wanted to sleep, deeply and without dreams. It was the only escape she had left.

  Sinah looked around the kitchen, and out through the louvered doors into the great room beyond. This was supposed to have been her escape, but all it had been was another dead end.

  Wycherly woke just before dawn again, as abruptly as if someone had shouted in his ear. He'd been dreaming of a vast and featureless plain and a throne made of skulls. He'd dreamed he'd grasped a serpent of white-hot metal and held it, screaming in pain, until his hands had burned away.

  He couldn't let that happen. He had to . . . what?

  Experimentally, Wycherly thought about the liquor cabinet on the floor below. He could have been thinking about chocolate ice cream for all the craving the thought kindled.

  He didn't want a drink. He didn't want a drink.

>   Wycherly moved away from Sinah and sat up, stunned by the enor-

  mity of the thought. He'd started drinking when he was twelve—there was always liquor around Wychwood, and both parents and his older brother drank—and Wycherly could not really remember a time when he hadn't been planning what he'd do to get his next drink.

  But he didn't want one now.

  That felt wrong.

  Moving slowly and favoring his ankle—though it was no longer very sore—Wycherly gathered up his clothes and brought them back downstairs to put them on, rewrapping the bandage around his ankle as tightly as he could. He'd loosen it as soon as he got back to his own cabin. Getting back there might not be such a bad idea, anyway. Always negotiate from a position of strength—that was what his father had always taught him.

  Was the old man dead yet? Wycherly couldn't think of any way to find out without letting the family know where he was. He shrugged. First things first.

  When he was dressed and about to leave, one last thought stopped him. Sinah'd mentioned having some books on magic that an old boyfriend had given her. Since she was the closest thing to a library he was likely to find in Morton's Fork, it wouldn't hurt to check them out.

  There was a copy of something called Venus Afflicted: The Short Life and Fast Times of Magister Ludens Thome Blackburn and the New Aeon; the name on the cover stopped him until he realized it was Thome Blackburn, not Quentin, and that the man in the photograph had been born long after Wildwood Sanatorium had burned. There were books on finding your inner white light—Wycherly curled his lip in disgust—and on UFOs; there was something that looked like a general history of the occult—he set that one aside to take—but none of them was the book he was looking for.

  When he picked up one of the thicker discards— The Autobiography of the Great Beast, Written by Himself —to reshelve it, it shifted in his hands, slithering out of the dust jacket. Wycherly caught it hastily before it hit the floor, and when he did, he realized he'd found a secret.

  There was another book hidden inside the first; the back pages were cut away to make a niche for it. Something you'd never notice—unless you dropped the book, as he just had.