Gravelight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Tell me to get back to my kitchen, will you? Uncle, you have a lot to learn!

  She turned to the Gate, and spread wide her hands. Between her fingers a blue-fire lattice grew, and as if in faint reflection of that power, the ghostly image of a door appeared between the pillars of the Gate. This Gate was already open nearly far enough to allow a human to pass into the sidhe realms beyond — and while it stood unsealed, it was a portal through which the dreams and nightmares out of humankind's darkest unconscious could issue forth to be given flesh and form.

  this was the reason Morton's Fork was the centerpiece of so many ghost stories and disappearances. Truth realized with a thrill of triumph. And it had to be closed.

  But that must be done by its Gatekeeper. Where was she? Truth cast around for a means of calling for her, and at last summoned the least trustworthy of her Guardians.

  The grey wolf slunk toward her, over a landscape that slowly had grown more craggy and boulder-strewn. Truth knelt to greet it: power, activity. She should have summoned its opposite at the same time for balance, but the wolf lost power in the presence of the black dog, and Truth needed all the power she could summon.

  "Sing for me, boy," she said, ruffling the wolfs thick mane as she knelt beside him, and the grey wolf threw back its head and howled.

  The lonely sound echoed from the pillars of the Gate and reverberated through the Otherworld. Truth felt the Gate stir to half-wakefulness at the call. The wolf howled again, and again. Truth waited until the last echo had died.

  Waking or sleeping. Adept or innocent, alive or even newly dead, this Gate's keeper should have come in response to that summons — unless the Gate had no keeper now, and the bloodline was lost.

  Truth got to her feet, sketching a symbol in the air to dismiss the grey wolf. It capered around her ankles for a few moments — its playfulness a response to the kindred power of the Gate — before loping away. Truth watched after it for a long time before she looked back at the Gate, wishing for a number of things, including that she had not just had a fight with Dylan.

  The Gate must be closed. This truth was unambiguous. And its keeper had not come to her summoning. That left Truth to try to close it by herself.

  She tried to feel optimistic.

  She'd only done this once before, under circumstances that had left the events indelibly printed upon her mind. Truth reached out with every fibre of her being for the spell keys that would let her lock this Gate. She reached for the fabric of the Gate itself —

  And she could not grasp it. Again and again she reached for the reality behind the power cascading all around her, only to feel it slip from her grasp like smoke. It was her SELF that had been the lock of Shadow's Gate, made possible by the bond of blood, but this Gate was not hers, and Truth could neither open nor close it.

  Failure.

  With a full working Blackburn Circle and five years of ritual preparation. Truth would have been willing to give it another try. The Blackburn work had been designed to affect the Gates, but without a woman of the dedicated line, even Thome Blackburn himself could not close a Gate.

  She had to find its Gatekeeper. But there was no Gatekeeper.

  The Astral Plane was growing dim and shadowy around her, the Gate beginning to dwindle as etheric currents swept Truth away from it. In the world below, her body was tired, and she had learned all she could here and now.

  Truth let the current pull her away from the Gate, and when she was far enough from its influence, she let herself fall free, back toward her body and the tyranny of the World of Form.

  ''Stop!"

  Heedless of his ankle, Wycherly rushed across the floor and snatched the book bound in white leather out of Luned's hands just as she was about to feed it into the wood stove fire.

  He didn't know what had awakened him; he'd come up out of a deep and uneasy sleep, heart hammering in panic. And it looked like he'd woken just in time.

  Quickly he riffled through the pages, making sure that the book wasn't damaged. He cursed himself for leaving it where a witless mountain girl could stumble over it.

  "Don't you ever take anything that belongs to me—do you understand? Ever!'' he shouted at her.

  Luned regarded him miserably. "It's evil. Mister Wych!"

  But you were the one who looked inside, weren't you, girl? a small voice inside Wycherly asked meanly.

  His first panic faded and, the book safe in his hands, Wycherly looked— as always—to cover his tracks. Besides, he might need Luned's cooperation later, and right now she looked like a scared rabbit, white-faced and staring. Tears streaked her cheeks and her hands shook. She stared toward the book as if Wycherly were holding a live adder in his hands.

  He almost fancied he could hear her heart beat.

  "It's all right," he said, as gently as he could. "I know that it upset you. You called it evil; you're right. It is. But you have to understand, Luned, that things aren't always what they seem. Sometimes evil can be used in the service of good. I'm sorry you saw it. I wasn't expecting you back so soon. Just relax, Luned. I won't let anything hurt you."

  Wycherly felt oddly guilty, as though he was now responsible for some depravity that placed him more firmly in the power of one who did not wish him well. As if what he said to Luned could actually matter.

  "It's an evil thing," she repeated, less forcefully this time.

  "You should get out more." He pushed his guilty agreement—it was a. nasty little grimoire—to the back of his mind, and wondered if Luned had ever seen a horror movie—and if not, what she'd make of one.

  "Don't worry about it. It's nothing to do with you."

  Luned looked doubtful.

  "What are you doing up here, anyway?" Wycherly said. He tucked the book into his waistband and closed his shirt over it.

  She smiled with relief at the change of subject. "It's been nigh on two

  I

  GRAVELIGHT 171

  days since I've been here, and I expect you were perishing away here all by yourself." She turned back to the open door of the stove, picking up the poker and giving the fire a ferocious jab, as it to prove her industry.

  Wycherly forced himself to smile, and sat down at the kitchen table, preparing to exercise the not-inconsiderable family charm. He wanted something, after all. And if he turned her up sweet, maybe he could get her to bring him the car's registration and plates. Then nothing would tie him to the crash, except the word of a pack of backwoodsmen who probably didn't want to testify in court.

  It was a clever thought, and it warmed Wycherly. It was something his father would have thought of.

  "And when Mr. Tanner came up and got the icebox to running, he got the old pump to working, but I s'pect you wouldn't know what to do about things like that, and now I can make you a nice lunch, an wash up your clothes an all, an do for you, an you could take a bath and all—"

  "Look," Wycherly said hastily to stem the flow of domestic babble. "How about some breakfast? I don't know what there is, but—"

  "You said you didn't eat breakfast. Mister Wych," Luned said reproachfully.

  That was before I wanted something. A new cold sense of purpose guided his words, his thoughts, shaping his determination toward an as yet unknown goal. He trusted it because it was the path of least resistance, and because he couldn't see any danger in it.

  At least not yet.

  "Well, maybe I could manage some . . . biscuits? And coffee?" he added hopefully.

  He smiled, and Luned smiled back, as if all she asked in the world was to cook him breakfast. Oddly, it made him think of Sinah, who had something of the same wistfulness in her expression but was a woman grown.

  Fair game.

  A few minutes later, Wycherly nursed a cup of coffee—brewed, not instant, and some of the best he'd ever had—as Luned made biscuits from scratch, fried up a skillet full of ham produced from a can, and then made red-eye gravy with coffee and flour. His ankle was better than it had been earlier this morning, but it thr
obbed sullenly, reminding him of its presence.

  By then the inside of the cabin was like an oven; the dry heat of the

  Stove battled the humid heat of the day to produce an overwhelming if curiously pleasant sensation. Luned pumped water when she made the coffee, and Wycherly drank two glasses full. Hydration, nutrition, exercise were the checklist for the recovering alcoholic.

  He'd never felt less like an alcoholic—recovering or otherwise—in his life. Gingerly, he probed the edges of his consciousness. The black beast was gone. Camilla was gone. In their place was an undigested sense of promise, of forthcoming delights that verged on terror.

  Power.

  Luned produced breakfast; it was easier to choke down than Wycherly had anticipated, and easy to refuse the proffered beer. In fact, he ate with a flicker of real appetite, his mind trying ideas as though he were a mechanic sorting through a toolbox for a part that would fit.

  "I twisted my ankle when I was out walking the other day," Wycherly began.

  Luned, sitting opposite him, was chasing the last dregs of gravy around her blue enamel plate with a scrap of biscuit. She glanced up, her mobile face filled with worry and curiosity.

  "It's fine now, more or less. It happened up at the sanatorium. What do you know about the place, incidentally?"

  His unsubtle feint would not have disarmed a more sophisticated subject, but Luned readily accepted the bait. Filled with her own importance, she told him what he already knew: that it had burned in 1917.

  "—and ever'body said that Attie Dellon was the one as set the fire, since it was on Dellon land but her brother never could hold his likker and he sold off ever'thing from their stead on up to the Watchtower to that flatlander man, and wasn't nobody surprised when Arioch went off down to the bottom of French Lick and busted his fool neck, but Attie couldn't get the land back nohow, even if she sacrificed her own blood sister to Mr. Splitfoot to make Quentin Blackburn fall down dead of the ague!"

  "Quentin Blackburn?" The name made Wycherly sit up and take notice, but Luned didn't seem to notice his increased interest.

  "That was the flatlander's name, hear tell. And the sheriff—" she pronounced it "shurf," slurring the syllables together in the clipped mountain dialect "—he come and took Attie Dellon up and didn't bring her home for a week, but couldn't nobody find hide nor hair of Miss Jael, and her brother done fell down and bust his neck while she was behind iron bars," Luned finished in an awestruck rush.

  I

  GRAVELIGHT I73

  "Well," Wycherly said. "That would seem to settle it." The unsolicited corroboration of Quentin Blackburn's existence made his heart beat faster with excitement, as if it made the rest of the events more plausible. He discarded Luned's insistence on Satanic rituals, though ... for the moment.

  "Wouldn't nobody in the Fork talk to her after she'd done murdered her own kin like that, and then when Wildwood burnt and she went with it, her Mellie got took in by Reverend Goodbook, only she was wild as her ma an' took up with the conjure-man just as soon as she was a woman grown. And then her daughter Rahab become the witch-woman after Thomas Carpenter was called to glory, and she was Miss Artie's mother."

  Wycherly reflected that any woman raised by a clergyman who named her daughter Rahab was probably making something in the nature of a personal statement.

  "But Attie . . . Athanais, was it? . . . Dellon came back to Morton's Fork after the sheriff released her?" Wycherly asked, wanting to make sure of his facts.

  Luned looked at him with awe. "How'd you know what her right name was. Mister Wych? Miss Attie was a witch-woman like all the Dellon girls—all their kind is wicked as sin, and we don't want none of that here in the Fork," Luned finished piously.

  Wycherly hesitated between chiding Luned for believing in witches, and telling her that he'd been with Athanais' great-great-granddaughter (he guessed it would be) just last night. But neither statement would serve him—nor would questions about why the locals hadn't driven the family out a few generations earlier.

  "You seem to have some use for witches here, though," he said instead.

  Luned turned wide, pale blue eyes on him and laughed. "Oh, Mister Wych— you're not a witch. You're a conjureman. Thafs all right—we hain't had one of them for years either, but we don't mind if you've come to stay."

  "I don't understand," Wycherly said, probing. "Why is it okay for me to be here and not Athanais Dellon?" Or her descendant.

  Luned bounded to her feet as if he'd offended her. "You're just funnin' with me," she said uncertainly. "You aren't anything like her. You've got the Lord Jesus on your right hand and Old Scratch under your left foot, like the old-time prophets. But her—wherever she is a pit just naturally opens up among the kingdoms of the Earth, just like for the Scarlet Woman."

  The combination of prim disapproval and Biblical language culled from Sunday sermons made Wycherly smile. The "she" Luned referred to must be Sinah—of course Luned would have met her, or at least know she was here.

  He felt a faint qualm when he thought about Sinah. She'd be awake now, wondering where he was. She'd better get used to my unreliability early, Wycherly told himself brutally. But was that really true anymore? If the beast was gone . . .

  No, he assured himself after the flash of panic. It wasn't gone. It was only dormant, plotting some fresh new horror. Things could not have changed that much. He took a deep breath, holding his right hand out in front of him.

  It did not tremble.

  After breakfast, Wycherly retreated to the bedroom for some privacy while Luned did what she deemed necessary to clean the cabin.

  Once he'd gotten over his initial shock, Les Cubes des Goules was fascinating in a peculiar way. It was like a window into a world where things were somehow more real . . . were matters of life and death, in fact. Wycherly sat in a chair before the open window of his bedroom, puzzling slowly through the archaic English and the deliberately obscure French of the small white book as his mind roved randomly.

  Power. He'd been offered it in a vision. But what was power? Wycherly had seen it exercised all his life, and had sought after it in vain since he'd become an adult. At its simplest, power was respect. If you had power, people listened to you. People did what you wanted. People wanted you to be pleased with them.

  Wealth did not inevitably bestow power, nor did breeding or high office. Power was an intangible thing, created by the amount of belief in its reality that others had. Wycherly had watched financial kingmakers fall to earth, going from czar to clown in an afternoon, ruined by nothing more real than malicious laughter. Power resided in whatever intangible thing there was that made others bend to the will of one no better than they. Elusive as breath, enduring as the soul. That was power.

  Could this book truly bestow power? A few splashy murders, some trivial community theater, the invocation of gods who were probably no more real than the God of gold and wrath worshipped in the lavish

  churches of his youth and certainly no more imminent—could this really be the secret? Could this be enough?

  Wycherly knew in his heart that it could. The only question was, was it worth the price?

  He hesitated. His father or brother would have said yes without delay; his sister would simply have laughed as if the question had no meaning. Wycherly closed the book and ran his thumb meditatively over the cover. No wonder Taghkanic College hadn't wanted this book to circulate. Parents would have withdrawn their children in droves if any of them had brought this home. He supposed it must have been stolen, concealed in the book that an old boyfriend had given to Sinah. And now he'd stolen it in turn.

  But was he going to use it? And if he did use it, who should he use it on?

  There was a knock at the bedroom door.

  With one smooth movement, Wycherly slid Les Cultes beneath his pillow and grabbed for the other book (rescued from the woodbox and a future as kindling). He glanced briefly at the cover— An Occult History of the New World —and opened it at random.
<
br />   "Come in?" Wycherly said. Luned poked her head through the door.

  "I'm all done here, Mister Wych," she said, "and I'll just go on down the store and tell Evan there's a list of things you need I ought to get you."

  One of the things he liked about Luned, Wycherly thought guiltily, was that she acted as if it ought to be a privilege to cater to him. Whether he deserved such treatment or not, he enjoyed it.

  "I'd better give you some money, then. And the icebox—how much was that?"

  "Maybe about . . . forty dollar? Mr. Tanner charged up the tanks, too." The hesitation in her voice was probably because of the price. Wycherly set An Occult History of the New World aside and reached for his wallet. He slipped out two twenties and added a third for good measure. He was running low. Maybe he could get Sinah to drive him down to Pharaoh; there must be a bank there.

  "Here," he said. "Go wild." He held out the money.

  Luned came over to him and took the bills, then hesitated. Now that he knew her better, Wycherly could see the teenaged girl in her wizened, prematurely aged child-face. He wondered if the vitamins were helping her at all. She ought to be able to get something nearly as good over the counter.

  "You said," she began, and stopped.

  "Yes?" Surreptitiously Wycherly glanced at his watch. Nine a.m., and it had already been a long day. And he wanted to get back to Les Cultes.

  "You said you might want a bottle of shine—I could get it for you, today, maybe."

  Shine. Moonshine. Bootleg liquor, potent and illegal.

  Wycherly swallowed reflexively, remembering the dark amber liquid Evan had poured him down at the general store. It had been better than good; overproof alcohol with the dark, seductive allure of self-destruction thrown in.

  "No," Wycherly said, surprising even himself. "But thank you."

  The best he'd ever had, here within his grasp for the asking, and it wasn't the slightest effort to refuse it. It didn't even tempt him.