Witchlight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “That’s right; you live out on Greyangels Road, don’t you, ma‘am?” Sullivan said. “I don’t know much about it myself,” he went on, “it’s more a local thing, and Dad just moved up here in ’eighty-seven. The old-timers say there’s supposed to be angels haunting this part of the Hudson Valley. Like ghosts, you know, only good—most of the time.”

  How appropriate, Winter thought to herself. “Gray ones?”

  “I guess so.” Sullivan was dubious. “All I know is, I’ve never seen them—but we do get pretty heavy fogs from time to time, being so near the river and all. Maybe that’s them. Here we are.”

  SHE COULD ALWAYS call for another cab if the loaner car failed to materialize, so Winter sent Tim Sullivan on his way after assuring him she really had meant him to keep the fifty dollars. Walking around the building, she found Dave Kelly out in back, leaning into the engine compartment of a car that had rolled off the Detroit assembly lines five years before Winter had been born, in the company of a boy who was a younger, slenderer version of himself.

  “Hi,” Winter called.

  Dave straightened up out of the engine. “Oh … hi.” He didn’t look particularly happy to see her. He wiped his hands on a rag. “You just keep after that, Paul; I’ve got to tell this lady about her car.”

  The body under the hood made a noise that might have been either sympathy or contempt. Winter followed Dave back around to the front of the garage, thinking that if she didn’t get a chance to sit down soon she’d probably fall down.

  “It’s like this,” Dave began, and sighed. “BMW’s a damn fine car; German engineering and all. I’ve had it up on the lifts, and I don’t know what the hell happened, if you’ll pardon my French, Miz Musgrave, but there’s not a thing I or anybody else this side of Bavaria can do with it. Only time I’ve ever seen anything like what happened to your electrical system’s on a car got struck by lightning up in The Angels a few years back.”

  “The Angels?” Winter asked. Anything to avoid a discussion of what had destroyed her car. She was afraid she knew.

  “Local mountain range—well, foothills, really, but high enough; me and my boy Paul go rock-climbing there weekends. It’s called The Angels; the first guy to get this far upstate was French; the original name was Aux Anges.”

  Aux Anges—the Heights. And The Angels was simply a mistranslation into English. Maybe the explanation for the Grey Angels Tabitha Whitfield had mentioned was as simple.

  “So that’s what I’d do, if I were you,” Dave finished, and Winter realized with a pang of alarm that while she’d been woolgathering she’d missed everything he’d said.

  “I’m … sorry?” she said hesitantly.

  “I said, if you want a rental you’re going to have to go all the way down to Poughkeepsie to get it. It’s going to be at least a month before you can get an insurance adjuster up here, and all he’s going to tell you is the same thing I have. When the battery melted, it ruined just about everything else in the engine that hadn’t already fried. They might not even pay up; you know how those insurance guys are.”

  And what do you think melted my engine, Mr. Kelly? The twee little fairies in the bottom of the garden? Winter drew a deep breath. “Okay.” So they don’t pay. I can take that hit. “I’m going to need something to get around in until I can get down to … Poughkeepsie?” Winter said, stumbling over the outlandish and unfamiliar name. “Tim Sullivan said you might have some kind of a loaner car?”

  “Nothing I really want to offer a lady,” Dave Kelly said. “Because it isn’t fancy, and it isn’t what I’d call dependable, either.”

  “I’ve got to have something,” Winter said desperately. “Look, I’ll buy it.”

  “I couldn’t sell it to you,” Dave Kelly said, shaking his head. “Not in good conscience. Tell you what, I’ll loan it to you for a couple of weeks. Better get Timmy to run you down to Poughkeepsie, though.”

  “I will,” Winter promised.

  “Great. I’ll go get you the keys.” There was a brief hesitation; Dave looked at her as if she’d forgotten something. “And, uh, what do you want me to do about the BMW?”

  “Keep it,” Winter said. “Use it for a planter. The registration’s in the glovebox. I’ll sign it over.” I never want to see that car again.

  There was a delay while Dave took the plates off the BMW and wrapped them up for her, but forty-five minutes later, Winter pulled out of the garage and started up Main Street in a battered yellow Chevy Nova with one blue and one red door and no backseat at all.

  And now I don’t have to worry about the Beamer, she told herself in self-congratulatory mental tones. “There’s no problem so big it can’t be run away from.” Who’d said that? Someone she knew? Someone she’d known—somewere in the lost seasons of her past?

  It doesn’t matter, Winter told herself, and even in her mind the words had the forlorn gallantry of someone whistling in the dark.

  THOUGH SHE’D LEFT the Bidney Institute before noon, it was late afternoon as Winter stepped through her own front door again, her purse slung over her shoulder and the sack from Inquire Within clutched in one hand. Despite its having been the scene of so much terror, the farmhouse on Greyangels Road welcomed Winter back with an apologetic air of reassurance, like the family pet begging forgiveness for some recent transgression and offering the hopeful promise that it would not happen again.

  If only that were true, Winter thought somberly. In the last day or so it seemed as if some sort of veil had been lifted from her will—maybe those drugs took longer to wear off completely than I thought—and she was thinking clearly at last.

  Even about the unthinkable.

  From ghoulies and ghaesties and long-leggedy beasties, the Good Lord deliver us. Amen.

  She locked the door firmly behind her: dead bolt, chain, and the key-turn bolt that was part of the door’s lock. A circuit of the remaining ground-floor rooms—front parlor, kitchen, mud room, and bedroom parlor—revealed that the windows and doors of each were firmly locked, just as she’d left them. No problems there. She looked into the bathroom and set the enormous cast-iron Victorian tub to filling, dropping in a generous dollop of Joy de Bain from the round black bottle on the windowsill. The luxurious scent of jasmine followed her as she headed into the kitchen.

  The kitchen was tight and tidy, just as she’d left it this morning, the ancient speckled linoleum clean and dry.

  Nope. No monsters here. And if it would just stay … Sudden tears of weakness prickled at the corners of her eyes, and Winter felt the day’s exertions catch up with her in a rush.

  Some of that silly woman’s tea. That’s what I need. And maybe a good book. She filled the teakettle and set it on the stove, willing the tears away.

  BUT THE FARMHOUSE’S previous inhabitants weren’t readers, apparently, although any place that was rented as furnished ought by rights to include a shelf of books or two. She even ventured upstairs again, tiptoeing as if she were in enemy country, and didn’t find so much as a magazine.

  Which left her with a choice between Venus Afflicted and the pamphlet Tabitha Whitfield had tucked in with the tea. Winter stood beside the bathtub, weighing them both in her hands and wondering why she’d never noticed the house’s lack of reading material before. A large mug of Centering Tea, dark-steeped and liberally dosed with honey, stood waiting on the windowsill beside her bottle of bath oil.

  Well, the so-called biography was longer, at least. She could look through the pamphlet later, before using it to start the bedroom stove. Winter tossed it aside and stepped into her bath, then opened Venus Afflicted and began to read.

  The author—could it really be the same dark-haired young woman she’d met this morning?—made it clear in the preface that this book would deal in names and dates, facts and figures, which was much to Winter’s taste—at least until the preface went on to refer to Thorne Blackburn as an important figure in twentieth-century Occultism, just as if all this sort of Dungeons & Dragons stuff ough
t to be taken seriously.

  She set the book aside and picked up her tea, regarding it with equal wariness. It was a deep red, nearly the color of Burgundy, and had a woody, almost briny, scent that Winter found paradoxically appetizing. The taste of it went well with the honey she’d used to sweeten it—she realized it was the same tea Dr. Palmer had served her at the Institute, and as she sipped it, Winter finally understood Tabitha’s insistence that she use honey or molasses in the tea. With plain sugar, the taste would have been unbearable.

  Winter lay back in the bath, relishing the warmth within and without, letting her mind drift where it would. Hadn’t there been more than a little bit of whistling past the graveyard in her scornful dismissal of Thorne Blackburn, boy wizard? If she was going to have poltergeists, she probably ought to take books like this more seriously. She picked up Venus Afflicted once more, and despite herself, this time Winter found herself becoming interested in the Blackburn bio.

  Fortunately there wasn’t too much—at least in the early chapters of Venus Afflicted—that was particularly hard to swallow. She read about the history of the Western Mystery Tradition and people with names like Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley, and about the start of Blackburn’s own career as a fortune-teller in New Orleans, and by the time she came to herself again, the room was dim, the tea was gone, and the bath was cold. She felt better than she had in longer than she could remember.

  Stepping out of the bath and wrapping herself in a large white towel, she addressed an invisible opponent.

  You won the first rounds—but that’s just because you caught me off guard. I’m ready for you now, who- and whatever you are, and if you think I’m just going to lie down and give up, you picked the wrong Winter Musgrave. I will beat this. I will survive. I will be … whoever I wish to be.

  As if to mock her vow, calm hours became calm days—and then a week—without any disturbance at all.

  THE TAGHKANIC COLLEGE library had been constructed in a time when it was considered the height of fashion to ape English models, and so Winter’s notes and reference were spread out in a chamber that looked as if it would have been at home in any of Oxford’s colleges. Light streamed into the main reading room through a wall of narrow, Gothic-arched windows, and a twisting iron ladder provided entrance to the library’s second floor.

  Opposite her chair, Winter had an unobstructed view of an enormous muddy-colored oil painting hanging on the oak linen-fold paneling depicting a dissatisfied-looking man in vaguely Puritan dress. Winter had been interested enough to inspect the engraved nameplate, and so knew that it was the portrait of Jurgen Lookerman, the original founder of the college.

  Her college.

  Faced with a riddle she could solve—her missing past—she had fastened on it with a stubborn determination that would not admit of failure. And she had not failed, though she had to admit that progress was maddeningly slow. Winter had walked the campus until her feet ached and the security guards all greeted her by name. She had poked into the classrooms, the student union, the dorms, trying to kindle the fires of memory.

  A stop at the Bursar’s office had yielded proof of her attendance here, as well as a copy of her college transcript. It sat, now, atop a stack of Taghkanic College yearbooks, and a folder containing a sheaf of photocopies from The Angelus, the student newspaper.

  She’d written poetry once. Yes, and had it published in the paper, too. Most of it was pretty bad—the usual overdramatized self-obsession of late adolescence—but a few of the poems were actually pretty good. That girl would have been a moderately competent poet—if she’d lived.

  Don’t be an idiot, Winter reproached herself, quelling even the tiniest sign of fancifulness. That girl was her—she’d even checked to make sure that there hadn’t been another Winter Musgrave enrolled at the college in ‘81—and the poems, like it or not, were hers.

  And I’m not dead. At least I think I’m not.

  But what had happened to that girl and her impassioned poetry?—the girl who’d taken Art and English courses with a fine disregard for the realities of earning a living once she graduated? The girl who had joined the Drama Club and played Juliet and accompanied strolling carolers on her guitar? Winter didn’t even own a guitar—until she’d seen the pictures of herself in The Angelus she hadn’t even suspected she could play one!

  This is not right. This is not normal. There’s something—wrong—about this.

  She’d been doing a lot of research in the last several days. All the books she’d consulted said that this form of amnesia was not unknown, but they all agreed that it was symptomatic of a hysterical response to shock.

  And that made no sense. She’d had a fine life. If she hadn’t just checked herself out of Fall River, she’d have been worried about a brain tumor, but she’d been tested for every possible physical explanation of her problems before she’d been admitted.

  She was—more or less—young, healthy, and rich.

  So, what was the problem?

  Winter sighed, and turned back to her books. She’d come back to school in more ways than one. On the table before her was a stack of books; in addition to copies of the school yearbook, books on psychology, parapsychology, and any other -ology that could possibly help her.

  She’d even found herself reading more about Thorne Blackburn, trying to understand how normal people could believe without evidence in the sort of thing that she had evidence of but refused to believe in. It was true that she continued to find the doors and windows unlocked at the farmhouse, but the weather was warming into late spring, and it was often warm enough to open the windows now—and she still did not trust her memory completely enough to know for sure if she’d closed and locked a window she’d previously opened or simply forgotten about it. A cup of the Centering Tea at bedtime seemed to ensure an untroubled sleep, and as long as there were no more dead animals, she could live with that ambiguity. Meanwhile, she continued to search for answers to her other questions.

  Winter found that Taghkanic owned one of the largest collections of occult and magical paraphernalia, and the largest collection of Blackburniana in the world; reasonable, she supposed, since his daughter worked here, but …

  “Well, hello, Winter,” a familiar voice said.

  She glanced up. Dylan Palmer stood beside her table, his arms full of books.

  “The librarian told me that someone over at this table had one of the books I wanted today, and here it’s you. How are you doing? Feeling better?”

  “Oh, um, fine,” Winter said awkwardly. “Which one is it—which book, I mean?”

  “Ha’ants, Spooks, and Fetchmen, by Nicholas Taverner; the Appalachian poltergeist book.” Without invitation, Dr. Palmer set his books down on an unoccupied corner of the table and sat down.

  Winter scrabbled through her pile of books until she’d found the title Dr. Palmer had indicated. The Taverner book was one of the older ones in her stack—1924, she remembered the date was—and dealt mostly with folklore, although it did mention in passing a family of Ozark poltergeists. It didn’t seem to be especially germane to Winter’s current situation, but she’d been grabbing anything she could get her hands on.

  “Here it is,” she said, holding it out and willing Dylan Palmer to go away. Something more seemed to be called for. “I’m sorry I was so rude the other day—barging in on you and carrying on like that. I’ve been under a lot of stress lately. I’m sorry.”

  He took the book but made no move to go. “You didn’t make an appointment to come back to the lab,” he said.

  Winter felt her cheeks grow hot, like a child caught in a lie. “I decided not to.”

  “Oh.” Dr. Palmer seemed to consider this. “Mind telling me why?”

  “There just didn’t seem to be a lot of point. Truth—Ms. Jourdemayne—said that it would just go away on its own, and the books all agree with her, so there really doesn’t seem to be a lot of point in laying out Tarot cards and gazing into crystal balls in the name of Scien
ce.”

  “I see.” Dr. Palmer did not seem to be unduly offended by Winter’s declaration, and she felt herself relax a bit. “And how’s the other thing coming?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “The search for your roots.” Dr. Palmer tapped the stack of yearbooks.

  “Oh.” This subject, though loaded, was safer. “I have an appointment with Professor Rhys at two-thirty.”

  “You were a student of his?”

  “He was my faculty advisor,” Winter said. “I thought we could get together and talk about old times.”

  “Which you still don’t remember,” Dr. Palmer suggested with damning insight.

  “I remember … something,” Winter protested. Like a dream that I woke up from a long time ago. But at least in the dream I was happy … . “How can someone just forget their past?” she burst out helplessly.

  “A lot of people would like to,” Dr. Palmer said. “Maybe you’re fortunate.”

  And maybe not. “I’m sure it will come back to me,” Winter said, and this time she made the cool dismissal in her words unmistakable.

  Dr. Palmer took the hint. “Well, good luck then. And if there’s anything else you need, Winter, remember that you have friends here.” He stood, adding the Taverner to his stack of books.

  “Thank you,” Winter said formally. “You’re very kind.”

  She watched as Dr. Palmer walked away, and for a vulnerable moment she wished to summon him back. He had been kindness itself—maybe he could help.

  No. She didn’t need anyone’s help. Whatever had to be done, she’d do herself. Needing other people only got you hurt. She glanced at her watch. It was time to go. Winter gathered her things together and stood up.