The Blackburn Work. Venus Afflicted was still in her suitcase, that biography of the magician whose “work” Truth said the five of them had repeated up at Nuclear Lake. What connection did their adolescent dabblings in whatever it had been have with what was happening to the members of the group today? She needed to talk to Ramsey … about that and so many other things.
BY THE TIME they got back to the house and had put their purchases away, the sky was growing dark and there were cars in the other driveways along the street. Winter opened one of the bottles of wine while Ramsey washed and diced ingredients for the omelette.
“But what about you?” Ramsey said, after a while. “It looks like I’ve been doing all the talking—you know about my wives, my kids, my gambling debts …”
“Gambling debts!” Winter tried and failed to keep the shock out of her voice. What can there possibly be to bet on in Ohio?
“Oh, yes.” Ramsey’s voice was without regret. “I was quite the lad. In fact, when the house finally sells the money’s going to be split between Household Finance and Laura; after I settle my debts there isn’t going to be a lot left. No thanks,” he said, as Winter offered him a glass of white wine. “I’m on the wagon these days.” He sighed. “After Marina left and I lost my job—in no particular order, those two—I just felt numb. Placing a bet was a way of feeling something, and I told myself that at least I wasn’t sniffing coke. Only they had to be big bets, and you could write the rest of this story in your sleep. So there’s my dark secret; what’s yours?”
“I had a nervous breakdown,” Winter said quickly before she could censor herself. “Only I’m not really sure that’s what it was. And … I’m trying to find out. That’s all.” She sipped her wine.
“That’s the short version, anyway,” Ramsey said. “But—other than that—are you okay? How are you fixed for cash? I don’t have much, but a few thousand won’t make any difference one way or the other.”
“No, I’m fine,” Winter said quickly. And to think I expected him to hit me up for money. “At least I’m fine that way.” For now.
Ramsey laughed sympathetically. “‘Partially fine, says former Wall Street broker,’” he quipped. “Well, it’ll do. But let’s move on to the big questions of life—do you still like onions?”
NOW THAT HER biggest secret was out in the open Winter felt more at ease. Ramsey was happy to talk about old times—he’d been Grey’s roommate at Taghkanic, something she’d forgotten.
“Everybody’s an eccentric in college, but I’ve never met anyone like Grey—then or since,” Ramsey said, waving a fluffy forkful of omelette. The built-in breakfast nook in the corner of the kitchen was one of the few parts of the house that had escaped unscathed, and when the food was ready, Winter and Ramsey had taken their plates and the bottle of wine there to eat.
“He really didn’t care what other people thought of him, so long as he had a good opinion of himself. Oh, not arrogant, not exactly …” Ramsey said musingly.
But he had a tongue like a whip and less tolerance for human stupidity than anyone I ever knew, Winter finished silently. The one thing Grey had never understood was that people weren’t being stupid on purpose—he’d really thought they could change if they were motivated enough. And Lord knew he’d done his best to motivate them. “There never was anyone like Grey,” she agreed aloud.
“Which is probably a good thing when you come to think about it,” Ramsey said solemnly, “because Grey didn’t exactly lend himself to the quiet life. But you’d know that best.”
I wish I did. “Do you keep in touch with him?” Winter asked with sudden hope.
“Don’t you?” Ramsey sounded surprised.
She shook her head, surprised at the strength of her disappointment. “I was hoping you did.”
Ramsey shook his head. “For a couple of years, yes, but you know how Grey was—detail-oriented wasn’t his style. I’m surprised you two didn’t …”
“Well, things never work out the way we expect,” Winter said hastily. Why did everyone who remembered Hunter Greyson seem so surprised that the two of them weren’t still together? “Who would have expected me to wind up on Wall Street?”
“Considering your family and all, I’ll admit I’m amazed,” Ramsey said. He emptied the seltzer from his glass and filled it with wine from the half-empty bottle. Winter said nothing. “But by the time you figure out what you want in life, you’ve usually pretty well arranged things so you can’t get it.”
It was so close to what Janelle had said that Winter was startled at the echo. She regarded Ramsey narrowly. “Are you saying we’re all doomed to be failures?” Winter asked evenly.
Ramsey glanced up at her and grinned engagingly. “Comforting if true, don’t you think? But as a matter of fact, I’m not.” He lifted his wineglass toward the light, studying it intently while the planes of his young-old face fell into somber lines.
“The way I see it,” Ramsey said, “—and this is the fruit of many hours of philosophical deliberation as the Steelers and the Buckeyes ran off with my money—is that sooner or later we all turn into our parents. Well, I ask you: Who else did we spend all our time watching when we were kids? We live our parents’ lives—I am, anyway.”
“But doesn’t everyone become their parents? You make it sound awfully grim. As if it’s some kind of trap.” Something stirred beneath the surface of her memories. Winter pushed it away.
“It is,” Ramsey said seriously. “Because we don’t become the best of our parents. We become them at their worst, and there’s only a small window of opportunity for escape—to become someone else, someone unique. Anything you do in that golden time sets the patterns you’ll live out for the rest of your life. Everyone gets a chance at it—back when we’re all too young to understand what we’re getting—but of all of us, Jannie and Cassilda and me, I always thought that only you and Grey really made it out. Well, you know what Morrison used to say: ‘No one here gets out alive.’”
But I didn’t get away, Ramsey, and Jim Morrison’s dead. And I’m still trapped, and I don’t know how to get free.
There were more questions to ask, but Winter didn’t quite have the heart for them tonight. She helped Ramsey wash up after dinner, but after that she pleaded tiredness caused by the long drive.
A short time later Winter was sitting alone in the guest room, a last glass of wine in her hand, staring down at the gaudy cover of Venus Afflicted. She could hear the sound of the living room television faintly through the door.
Everybody grows up, Winter told herself sternly. There’s no tragedy in becoming an adult.
But there was tragedy in a wasted life-and Ramsey’s life was a waste, Winter told herself with clinical detachment. It was on a—what was that buzzword?—on a downward economic spiral. That used-car lot could never have paid for this house; gambling debts aside, Ramsey must have been making more money once—money enough to afford everything that Laura Miller had taken with her, and this house as well.
… And all who sail in her, Winter thought, raising her glass in a faintly tiddly salute. Laura-the-wife, and the children now in Cleveland. It didn’t sound as if Ramsey was going to even try to sue for visitation or joint custody. What had he said at dinner? Something about a golden time, a window of opportunity when you had the chance to set the pattern of your life, where to fail was like a bad hand of solitaire that you would play out forever.
Could it be true?
Winter shook her head, refusing to think about it. She ought to do some work: make a list of questions to ask Ramsey, try to find out what he remembered about Nuclear Circle’s work. See if he had ghosts, for that matter—If the thing had visited Janelle it would probably be after him as well.
If the Elemental even existed. If the Elemental was visiting all the former members of Nuclear Circle. And if it was—why?
But she didn’t have the energy to be so organized tonight, not after seeing what had happened to her old friend. If the trap that Ramse
y had fallen into was not as obvious a one as Janelle’s, it was no less destructive.
“I FLING OPEN the gates of Dayton, Ohio, and shower its cultural riches upon you,” Ramsey said, tossing a ring of keys onto the blanket as Winter started groggily awake. “I figured you wouldn’t want to be cooped up in the house all day. There’s a mall up the road if you want to do any shopping; there’s a street map on the kitchen table and I’ve marked it for you. See you later.”
Winter sat up, stiff from sleeping in the unfamiliar bed. “G’bye, Ramsey. Have fun,” she said sleepily.
Later, when he was gone, Winter got up and prowled around the deserted house. Paradoxically, it did not seem as empty when Ramsey was gone. Without his presence to remind it of what it had been, the house could be just any empty house.
Underfurnished, of course, and downright weird in spots, but …
Ramsey’s bedroom was more or less intact—at least Winter didn’t see any pressure marks in the rug to show where heavy furniture had been taken away. The suite was that heavy dark mock-Mediterranean style that had been popular a few years back, and looked as if the only way you’d get rid of it was to burn the house down around it. Winter closed the door behind her and tiptoed off, in search of the kitchen and coffee or tea. She vaguely remembered buying both last night at the store; she and Ramsey, two old friends—acquaintances now—playing house.
It gave Winter an odd detached thrill to pretend for a few moments that this could be her house and her life—a woman just moved into town, most of the furniture still on a moving van in another state, but all poised to settle into domesticity and family life. A kind of life she had—bypassed? Run away from? Tried and found wanting?
Was it really too late to go back and pick up the pieces of her life that she’d jettisoned?
In the kitchen Winter found the kettle and put water on to boil, deciding on tea. She wanted toast, but couldn’t find a toaster—more of Laura’s efficiency, Winter supposed—and decided to settle for dry cereal instead. She found the box in the cupboard and carried it over to the table.
What should she do today? She picked up the street map and tossed it aside. If she wanted to go shopping, there were better stores in New York. In fact, there was better everything in New York—what in Heaven’s name was she doing out here in the middle of nowhere?
Ramsey’s here, she reminded herself. And she needed to find out what Ramsey remembered about the Class of ’82, and Nuclear Circle. Assuming that their teenaged occult dabblings didn’t just constitute a silly coincidence, and really had anything to do with the things that were happening to her now.
It had been nearly two weeks now since the night at the lab at the Bidney Institute, and already the events were becoming hazy in Winter’s mind—a memory-of-a-memory, soon to dissolve completely into unthinking acceptance of things as they were. The thought that something so vivid could just vanish was disturbing on a primal level; how many other thoughts, experiences, feelings, memories was she losing every day?
No more than anyone else, Winter told herself brutally. Now is all we have. Now is all that matters.
But the danger that followed her—and the growing suspicion that there was something she must do—mattered, too.
“RAMSEY, YOU REMEMBER that Thorne Blackburn stuff we were mixed up with in college?”
Cartons of Chinese take-out food were strewn over every countertop surface of the kitchen. Ramsey was no better a cook than Winter was, and tonight he’d taken this easy way out.
“Thorne who?” He paused with chopsticks full of noodles halfway to his mouth.
“Thorne Blackburn. You know, the … occultist?” The unfamiliar term came clumsily to Winter’s tongue. “You and I and Grey and Jannie and Cassie—back in school.”
Ramsey regarded her with responsive interest, but without comprehension.
“We used to go up to Nuclear Lake.” And do something I can’t quite remember, and this book of Truth’s isn’t much help, either. “Just the five of us. You remember,” Winter said coaxingly. I do. Don’t I?
“I guess I don’t.” Ramsey’s tone was regretful but uninterested. “I must not have gone with you.”
But you did! You were there—I saw you! “We used to go up there quite a lot,” Winter began cautiously. “For years. It was Grey’s idea at first, I guess, but we all fell in with it. He was doing something called the Blackburn Work, and we were all involved in it with him.”
“Not me,” Ramsey said, a little more decisively than could really be expected from someone searching through memories more than a decade lost.
As if he doesn’t want to remember—and Janelle didn’t talk about it either. And I want to remember, but I can’t, Winter thought in frustration.
“I went back to visit the campus, you know,” Winter began, trying another tack.
But while Ramsey was willing to discuss the campus, and professors they’d had in common, and even the Bidney Institute itself, Winter could not find any way whatever to bring Nuclear Lake back into the conversation.
But Nuclear Lake did exist. Nina Fowler’d had no trouble remembering it—and driving there. And neither had Truth Jourdemayne—in fact, Truth had seen the basement room where they’d all done what Truth had called the Blackburn Work.
Another memory, swiftly flickering like a butterfly’s wing: the laboratory basement at Nuclear Lake, bleached white by hissing propane lanterns; Janelle on her knees, carefully painting a line on the floor as Ramsey held the jar of paint ready for her …
“Ramsey, don’t you remember anything about Nuclear Lake?” Winter asked in frustration.
“It doesn’t look like I’m the one having memory problems,” Ramsey said with unusual asperity.
“‘Touché, you little yellow devil,’” Winter said, quoting Doonesbury with a smile. “You’re right: I’m not sure about what happened there either. There are a lot of places where my memory’s just … jumbled.”
Ramsey put a hand over hers in sympathy. “Sometimes, you know, it’s better not to remember,” he said gently.
And normally I’d agree with that, old friend, but unfortunately, this time the stakes are too high, Winter thought sorrowfully.
“Do you remember why I left Taghkanic, Ramsey? I know I left before graduation and I don’t remember keeping in touch with any of you—Janelle says I sent her a wedding present, but—”
“Janelle may be mistaken,” Ramsey said, very gently. “I suspect things aren’t going all that well for her, you know.”
“I know. I saw her before I came here. She doesn’t paint any more. Ramsey, we were all—” The grief came with an overpowering rush; Winter set down her chopsticks.
We were all going to be famous: Janelle was going to be an artist, and you were going to be a famous journalist. And what was I going to be? I don’t even know any more, but it wasn’t what I became.
“—we were all going to be kings and queens in Narnia; I know. But everybody has to grow up sometime, Winter, and in the real world it just isn’t possible for everyone to be beautiful, famous, and rich. We were kids, with kids’ dreams. And we learned that dreams don’t come true.” Ramsey refilled both their glasses.
She was probably drinking too much, Winter warned herself, but just for tonight it wouldn’t matter. And Ramsey, for all his talk of being on the wagon, drank heavily as well. But this was no time to lecture him on his habits or apologize for hers. And even Dutch courage was a help in asking the questions she needed to ask.
“So why did I leave school, Ramsey? I’ve always wondered.”
He grinned at her, and a trace of the boy he’d been lingered on in the lines of the man’s face. “I’m afraid it’s one of the great unexplained mysteries, along with where missing socks go and the egg in the egg cream. All of us but Grey went away for spring break in April, and you never came back.”
Winter had taken a large bite of dumpling a moment before, and now she waved her hands, semaphoring agitatedly: I just left? Didn
’t you look for me? You just let it drop? What if I’d been eaten by Bigfoot? “Murph!” she said aloud.
Ramsey laughed at her agitation, then shrugged. “The Registrar’s office said you’d withdrawn. I think Cassie called you a couple of times, but I’m not sure. It was a long time ago. It sort of hurt that you just dumped us,” he added after a pause.
Winter felt an instant rush of guilt. It had never occurred to her how the matter must look to the others, and Janelle had given no hint that she’d felt rejected by what Winter had done all those years before.
“Ramsey, I swear to you I don’t remember doing that; either leaving or … why. I’m … I’m sorry. I don’t know why …” Her voice trailed off momentarily. “I still don’t know why I did it. I don’t remember.” And what must Grey have thought, when I just went off and didn’t come back? She blinked back sudden tears.
“Life goes on,” Ramsey said, although Winter could still detect a shadow of hurt in his voice. “And anyway, six weeks later we’d all graduated, a gaggle of fledgling BA’s unleashed upon the world.”
“Do the rest of you keep in touch?” Winter asked, trying once more to lead the conversation back to Nuclear Lake.
“Oh, I send Jannie a card from time to time,” Ramsey said evasively. “I tell her about my divorces, and she tells me which room she’s redecorated now. Speaking of which, have you seen—”
The conversation slid away from personal matters into current events, and Winter was finally willing to let it go. What Ramsey had told her disturbed her profoundly, as well as making her feel strangely ashamed.
She’d just walked out on them. She, Winter Musgrave, who prided herself on honoring every pact, meeting every commitment, had just turned her back on four of her dearest friends and left them without a single word of explanation.
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