How long since she had questioned why she ran—in the rat race, where the rats were winning?
It always kept coming back to “Why?”
Why was the magickal child after her?
—no, go farther back—
Why had she left Fall River?
—farther back—
What had put her in Fall River in the first place?
farther still—
Why had she chosen the work she had?
Close, now, but not there yet …
What had made her do it? What had turned that girl into the woman Winter Musgrave was now? It was more than just time and growing up; there was something … not right here.
She wanted answers. She wanted reasons. She wanted her friends, her past, her life back. Her real life.
And she was going to get them.
A sense of relief, of triumph—of guessing the answer that could not be revealed to the riddle that must be solved—sent a surge of pleasure through Winter’s weary body. She pulled her coat more firmly around her and fitted her key to the car door’s lock. She got in, and tensed for a moment as she turned the key in the ignition, but whatever vengeful power she possessed was quiescent now, and the Saturn started smoothly. Winter turned out of the college parking lot, heading down Leyden Road to Glastonbury, and from there to home.
THE FARMHOUSE FELT more welcoming than it ever had before—if this was a delusion it was a benign one—and despite the amazing horrors of the night Winter opened her front door without fear. For the first time in longer than she liked to remember, Winter did not feel thwarted at every step in her attempts to accomplish even the simplest tasks. She put water on for tea—she hadn’t been back to Inquire Within yet, so it would have to be chamomile—stoked the woodstove in the bedroom, and laid a new fire in the parlor, all the time thinking of what she must do now.
Truth had seemed to think that the Blackburn Work had something to do with the magickal child’s existence, and the fact that Winter had—so evidence if not memory told her—dabbled in the Work in college seemed to mean something important to Truth as well. She had said that the creature stalking Winter was the creation of a magician, and one trained in the Blackburn Work at that. But Hunter Greyson—if Winter stretched a point nearly to breaking—was the only magician she knew. Why would Grey do something like that?
For that matter, where was Grey, and what was he doing? Nina had been able to find everyone from Winter’s college days but him—and how could Winter have lost touch with him so thoroughly if they were as close as her memories hinted and Professor Rhys had implied?
What happened?
She kept coming back to that question, Winter realized. What happened, and when had it happened? And, as she’d realized earlier this night, the stakes were too high now to worry about looking foolish when she asked it. She must find Grey, find the others, find herself, find the answer to the monstrous riddle of the dark and bloody creature that stalked her.
Before it was too late.
I’m running out of time, Winter thought desperately. Won’t someone tell me what’s going on before it’s too late?
7
The Winter Carnival
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day,
In a Sieve they went to sea!
—EDWARD LEAR
IT WAS LATE afternoon when Winter turned her new Saturn down the dead-end street in the working-class New Jersey suburb where Janelle Baker lived. Why every single house in this development has to look the same I’m sure I don’t know—and if they do have to, why don’t they make the house numbers bigger? It would also help if there weren’t both a Medmenham Drive and a Medmenham Lane in the development. Winter checked her jotted notes for the twentieth time since turning off the main road.
She’d left Glastonbury this morning just as the sun was coming up, and just managing to get this far had given her a purely physical sense of accomplishment that had done much to bolster both her spirits and her determination. Though it would be foolish to pretend that she was not still physically weak and out of condition, and certainly she lacked the stamina she remembered having, just knowing her limits and being able to push them was a source of ongoing pleasure for her.
It’s like being reborn.
She’d wanted to leave Glastonbury without telling anyone, but a sense of guilty responsibility—for Truth’s injuries as well as for Nina’s car—had made her phone Dylan Palmer at the Institute yesterday, as soon as she was back from her errands. It was the morning after the disastrous Elemental summoning, and weariness still dragged at her. The interview had not been pleasant, but she hadn’t expected it to be.
“YOU CAN’T JUST go running off like this!” Dr. Palmer’s voice crackled over the telephone line.
“Perhaps you’d like to tell me, then, just how it is I ought to run off,” Winter shot back coolly, in a tone her former colleagues at Arkham Miskatonic King would have recognized and backed down from. “And I don’t believe I need your permission. I’m notifying you as a courtesy, nothing more. How is Truth?” Winter added, ruthlessly changing the subject.
“She’s … okay,”Dr. Palmer admitted grudgingly. “But I hope you’ll reconsider this, Winter. It’s not as if you’re alone in this … thing. You have friends, allies …”
“I appreciate your concern,” Winter said, a shade more warmly. “But I think I need to do a little more research before accepting your offer.” The sentence was a ghost out of her past and its resonance made her smile briefly. “I think I may know how to find out who this ‘magician’ is that you and Truth say is after me.”
“You think it’s Hunter Greyson?” Dr. Palmer asked shrewdly.
NO! Some powerful instinct within her could not accept that Grey could be responsible for something that carried so much of hating and hurting with it. Aloud she said, “Grey’s the only magician I ever knew, Dr. Palmer. Maybe he’ll know where to start looking for yours.” IF I CAN FIND HIM … .
BUT IF HUNTER Greyson remained maddeningly elusive, at least the rest of her school friends were not so hard to find. Winter had reached Rappahoag around noon, checked into the first large hotel she saw, and called the number Nina Fowler had found for Janelle Baker.
Only I have to remember she’s Janelle Raymond now, Winter reminded herself as she pulled the car to a stop outside 167 Grammercy Park Road. Janelle was married, and, like the others, had gotten on with her life, but she’d been delighted to hear from Winter when Winter phoned her from the nearby Marriott.
Should she tell Janelle that she didn’t really remember her? Winter fretted. She was hoping she wouldn’t have to—she was counting on the sight and presence of the woman who had once been one of her closest friends to shake loose her repressed memories.
Repressed? What an odd idea. What on earth could there be to repress about four years of college?
“Winter!”
But the thought vanished at the sight of the plump redhead standing on the porch of the small tract house. Janelle stood on tiptoes, waving and wearing a kelly-green sweatsuit with a row of plaid heart appliques across the bosom, and a matching plaid bow holding back her wavy flame-red hair.
She looks like a Cabbage Patch doll with no fashion sense, Winter thought with automatic unkindness, before guiltily curbing the thought. But there was something about her friend’s appearance that generated a faint impulse of alarm, though Janelle looked clean and healthy—and certainly well fed.
Oh, stop it! Winter told herself sternly as she got out of the car. She waved back at Janelle and started up the walk.
THE INSIDE of 167 Grammercy Park Road was as relentlessly ordinary as the outside; Janelle led her into a living room that looked to Winter as if it had been furnished with one of those “decorator room groupings” from a national chain department store. There was a gray velveteen La-Z-Boy with the Scotchgard label still on it in the corner and French Provincial end tables in white pic
kled polyurethane waterproof finish flanking the overstuffed couch upholstered in peach floral Herculon. The floor lamp coordinated with the two peach-colored ginger-jar lamps on the end tables. Wall-to-wall acrylic pile in a harmonizing shade of gray swept across the floor to vanish beneath the edge of the companion entertainment and media center. The open spaces on the shelves of the entertainment center were filled with untidy piles of the current popular videos and the sort of soulless decorative “accents” that came from the same place that everything else in the room had—creating a room that was both cluttered and impersonal.
Winter felt a faint sense of recoil, and didn’t think the cause was anything as simple and unflattering as snobbery. It was true that the room looked like a page from a less-expensive catalog, but that wasn’t what gave the room the ambiguously chilling sense of emptiness. Winter pushed the thought away, unwilling to follow it to its logical conclusion.
The only thing that didn’t fit in with the rest of the room was the picture over the couch.
It was a landscape, painted with all the hot bright colors of a New England summer—a forest surrounding a mixed field of poppies and lupines, leading the eye inevitably to the flash of gleaming silver at the center; the pool in which the rising moon was reflected even at midday, and the unicorn that waited beside it.
“Do you still paint?” Winter burst out impulsively, cheered by remembering. Janelle had been an artist. She was sure the memory was a true one.
But …
“Who has time?” Janelle said, shrugging. “If you only knew … . But here I am babbling on and you’re hardly in the door. Give me your coat—um, Burberry, very nice—and you’re going to stay for dinner, right? Of course you are—then you can meet Denny; I’ve told him so much about you that he’s just dying to meet you. But let me hang up your coat; come on back to the guest room, it’s in through here. Where are you staying?”
Following Janelle down the hall, Winter felt a traitorous pang of relief that she was already checked into the Marriott. The small suburban tract house was the very antithesis of Greyangels Farm, and Winter did not think she could have borne to accept Janelle’s hospitality overnight.
“Oh, that’s too bad,” Janelle said when she answered. “We’ve got the cutest little guest room—you’ll see—it used to be my studio—but no one ever uses it now except Denny’s mother. I wish you’d called earlier—you could have stayed with us.”
Oh no I couldn’t have.
The guest room Janelle conducted her to was very much like the living room. All the furniture seemed to have been purchased by someone less concerned with their own taste than with satisfying some arbitrary external standard. There was a prim single bed and a chest of drawers, and a couple of tired-looking prints of flowers on the wall.
“I used to have my own stuff up, but Mama Raymond said it made her head hurt to look at it, and then she gave us these,” Janelle said, talking over her shoulder as she opened the closet and hung Winter’s coat inside. “Just toss your bag anywhere—how do you ever manage that thing; it looks big enough to smuggle babies in!”
Winter smothered a laugh and felt a pang of wistful tenderness for her friend. Janelle had always been a clown, hiding her shyness behind a flurry of one-liners. Winter threw her briefbag on the bed.
“So how have you been, really?” Winter said awkwardly. “It’s been a long time.”
“You never call, you never write …” Janelle teased impishly, “but then, I didn’t ever get around to thanking you for the wedding present, and it’s been—what?—eight years now?”
Winter wondered what she’d sent.
“And it’s so great to see you again—you look really terrific.” Janelle stood in front of the closet door, regarding Winter with frank envy.
“Thanks,” Winter said, “so do you.”
“Hah!” Janelle laughed dismissively. “We can’t all keep our girlish figures. But come on; let me get you some coffee, and try to spoil yours.”
THE EAT-IN KITCHEN was decorated country style, in French blue and beige with pictures of geese everywhere. Janelle had always had a penchant for things the other members of the group considered unbearably corny, Winter thought, with a surmise that owed more to intuition than memory.
“Do you still collect teddy bears?” she asked.
Janelle beamed, her gray eyes disappearing into smile-crinkles. “Yeah. Sometimes. Remember the Lost Bears?”
“And you were Wendy,” Winter said, only half-guessing now.
“And Tiger-Lily Bear, and Cub-tain Hook. I sure do miss them,” Janelle sighed. “But sit down,” she urged, changing the subject quickly. “I’ll put up the coffee.”
Janelle chattered on as she bustled around the kitchen, putting out cookies, pouring coffee, and filling in the story of the last several years without any need for Winter to ask any questions.
“Would you believe it? I met Denny working at a computer store—we’d get two or three deliveries a day from shippers and he was the UPS guy. We ended up seeing a lot of each other, and, well …” Janelle shrugged again, and popped a cookie into her mouth.
Somehow this was not the sort of future Winter would have predicted for Janelle all those years ago. “Computer store?” she asked, sipping at her coffee. Janelle had put in the sugar and it was far too sweet for Winter’s taste.
“Yeah, well,” her friend said evasively. Despite Janelle’s insistence that she wanted to have a conversation, she wouldn’t sit down, fussing and hovering about the kitchen as if she both wanted to talk to Winter and wanted to avoid it.
“But what about your art career?” Sudden recollection made Winter blurt the question out tactlessly, but the image was crystal-clear: Janelle with her sketches, Janelle with her portfolio … “You sold some paintings to that gaming company, and—”
“It didn’t really work out,” Janelle interrupted hastily. “Besides, there isn’t a living in book covers unless you’re Michael Whelan or somebody. So what are you doing these days?”
Well, I just got out of a mental institution and I’m being followed around by some kind of invisible monster … .
“I guess I’m taking a much-needed vacation,” Winter said diplomatically. “I almost feel guilty about just calling you up out of nowhere like this—”
“Oh, pooh—what are old friends for? Emphasis on the old,” Janelle said, finally lowering herself into a chair with a sigh. “Don’t mind me—I was up at five this morning, cleaning up the yard—again.”
“What happened?” Winter asked idly. She glanced past Janelle to the window above the sink. The goose-printed café curtains shifted in the breeze, and Winter suddenly noticed that there was a long jagged crack across the glass beneath.
“Damned kids. Denny says its a Satanic cult, and I think he’s joking. They go through the whole development dragging the trash cans out into the road and emptying them, mixing up the recyclables, that kind of thing. But what’s really sick is the way they keep scooping up roadkill off Route Seventeen and leaving it around. It’s gotten to where you have to look twice before you step out your front door in the morning.” She made a face.
“Anything else?” Winter asked, mouth suddenly dry.
“Anything else what?” Janelle asked, frowning puzzledly.
“Anything else weird—like doors that won’t stay shut, and unexplained storms. Trouble with your car. Things that break.” She was too paranoid to believe in coincidence any more—and Janelle’s description sounded all too much like Winter’s own litany of complaints … of her poltergeist, and of something darker.
Janelle laughed. “You don’t need any other explanation for why things break when I’m around! Denny says we ought to buy our dishes by the carload! Honestly, Winter, do you think New Jersey’s gone over to the dark side of the Force or something?”
“No.” Yes, but how could I even begin to explain? “Of course I don’t, Jannie. But do sit down. Have some coffee. Do you ever hear from any of the others?”
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It was a clumsy way to change the subject, but Winter had the growing sense that their conversation was built around awkward silences, as if there were some great secret that they both shared but couldn’t speak of. Only I don’t know what it is … do I?
No matter the cause, Janelle was grateful to follow Winter’s lead.
“Oh, you know how it is—there isn’t a lot of point in keeping up with everyone else, is there? Ramsey’s the only one, really, and just Christmas cards, that sort of thing. I thought about going to our ten-year reunion, but Denny didn’t want to stand around all day talking to people he didn’t know, and it is a long way …”
But I drove it in a day! Winter protested silently, and Janelle, as if she could read her mind, answered, “Some places are different distances depending on who’s going there.”
BY THE TIME Dennis Raymond arrived home from work, Winter was already half-prepared to dislike him, and nothing she saw in the first five minutes after his arrival changed her mind.
Dennis Raymond was somewhere around forty, although his overall air of dissatisfaction made him look older. When he came in, he was wearing a cheap, unbecoming suit and carrying a large, overstuffed briefcase. Winter instantly pegged him as some sort of salesman, in the male equivalent of a woman’s dead-end secretarial job. His hair was thinning and greasy; not so much slovenly as given up on. In fact, everything about Dennis Raymond said that he was a man who had given up; who was simply serving out his time and waiting until he could move on.
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