Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02 (13 page)

 
          
The
cement steps at the building's front had stood the test of time, and even the
front door, though glass, was reasonably intact, with only one sunburst crack
marring its integrity. Winter, pulling on it, was surprised to find that it
only rattled and did not move at all.

 
          
It
was locked.

 
          
But that's ridiculous
—
the five of us were in and out of here all
the time. . . .

 
          
Puzzled,
she went down the stairs again and walked slowly around the building. Once
there had been an apron of white quartz pebbles between the wall and the
sidewalk. Now the work of many seasons had cracked and crumbled the cement
paving, and storms had washed nearly all the pebbles away. Just so might all
the world look, if one morning it had woken up and found that Man was gone. A
brief century, a few upheavals, and no trace of humankind and its busy building
would remain.

 
          
Winter
shivered and hurried around the side of the building, wondering if it had been
such a bright idea to come here after all. She had to have been mistaking imagination
for memory—that front door was locked, and there didn't seem to be any other
way in.

 
          
That
was when she saw the other door.

 
          
It
was in the back of the building, obviously a service entrance of some sort, and
when she grasped the knob and turned, to her surprise the door opened easily.

 
          
A
wave of stale, musty air rolled out. Winter wrinkled her nose, peering into
the gloom. /
should have brought a
flashlight.
But the day was bright and the building was filled with
windows—there should be enough light to do a quick exploration.

 
          
Before
going in, Winter scouted about until she found a big rock to prop the door open
with. She clutched another, smaller one in her hand. Just in case.

 
          
Then
she went inside.

 
          
This
had once been a storage room of some sort—there were still steel shelves—rusted
now—along the walls, and a number of large storage drums in one corner. The
floor beneath her feet was a concrete slab. Ahead of her was a doorway—
doorless
now—that led into the main part of the building.

 
          
The
carpet there looked almost new—apparently artificial miracle fibers were
unpalatable to the microscopic life-forms that voraciously destroyed wool and
wood, leather and linen. But the walls were water-stained, and in places the
Sheetrock panels were buckling away from their supporting studs. Winter
sneezed, and then sneezed again—there must be enough dust and mold floating
around this air to send an allergist to test-positive heaven.

 
          
From
the back entrance Winter was able to walk straight through the building to the
front, where she inspected the glass door from the other side. She still
couldn't open it; the door had a key-lock dead bolt that needed a key to
release it from either side. She looked through the drawers at the built-in
receptionist's desk, hoping the key was there, and was surprised to find pens
and paper clips and rubber bands, and wads of paper gone to gray dust—the whole
building had just been locked up and left.

 
          
But
she didn't find any keys.

 
          
Why? Why leave all the stuff in the drawers
as if they'd just walked out? Maybe Nina was right.
Aiaybe
there was some kind of an accident here after all.
Winter peered around
herself and then struck off left, down the long windowed hall.
A funny kind of a lab, though
—
it looks more like office space than
research space.

 
          
But what kind of offices would be out here
in the middle of nowhere? This is
Amsterdam
County
,
for God's sake!

 
          
Winter
tried each of the doors in the hall as she passed them. Some were locked. Some
opened into small bare rooms with high narrow windows at the back.

 
          
One
didn't.

 
          
The
door looked like any of the others, but when she opened it she found herself
looking not into an obvious office, but into a large room with a spiral
staircase in the middle leading downward, disappearing through a hole in the
floor.

 
          
"How curious, said
Alice
,"
Winter quoted to herself.
It was dark at the foot of the stairs; the dimness of evening as opposed to the
afternoon light above. But she thought her eyes would adjust once she got down
there, and anyway, she wouldn't go far from the stairs.

 
          
Only an idiot would go down there in the
first place,
Winter told herself sardonically. She grasped the rail and
shook it, testing its sturdiness. Without conscious decision, she started
down.

 
          
So it was a laboratory after all.
Winter
stood in this unexpected basement, looking at a room illuminated by the light
coming in through a line of narrow windows high on the wall. The windows were
set at ground level, and weeds had done as much as dirt to diminish the amount
of light that reached the room within. Down here the rank musty scent of rot,
mildew, and decay was even stronger than it was on the floor above, and
underneath them there was a wet mineral smell like rocks or mud or setting
cement; chilly and antagonistic.

 
          
In
contrast to the receptionist's station above, everything movable down here was
long gone—either removed by the original owners or stolen—but the sinks along
the windowed wall and the complicated sockets drilled into the cinder block
above them were as much proof that this had been some kind of laboratory as
Winter needed. She took a step away from the staircase, and as her eyes
adjusted, the room around her became clearer and sharper. Some kind of
laboratory, long abandoned. But why?

 
          
Her
Reeboks grated on the grit underfoot. She looked down and saw, half-erased,
some sort of design painted on the floor. Even after the passage of years, the
remaining scraps of color were bright.

 
          
What...?

 
          
A
circle. Someone had painted a circle on the floor—no, not exactly a circle;
some sort of design . . . There was a circle inside a circle and some sort of
marks between them, and inside that—

 
          
Without
thinking of what she was doing, Winter walked out into the center of the room.
There were black dots spaced evenly around the outer perimeter of the painted
circle, and she counted them: three, five, seven, nine . . . Not paint marks—
scorch-marks,
as if something had burned
all the way down to the ground here.

 
          
Candles.

 
          
There
was a sudden coppery taste in her mouth; without any transitional unease,
Winter was terrified, as if some malign God had flipped a cosmic switch to
plunge the world into horror. She swung around; her only thought to escape.

 
          
There
was something painted on the wall behind the staircase. She hadn't seen it
before—when she'd walked away from the stairs that wall had been behind her—but
against the white cinder block the dark curls and angles of the inscribed sign
were glaringly plain, and the sudden, jarring sight of it struck Winter like a
blow.

 
          
"Come on, Cassie
—
give me that, would you?" Ramsey said,
hopefully. He brandished his handful of candles and reached for the lighter.
The rest of the ritual equipment was already spread out on the table behind
him, and of course each of them had brought their own wand and dagger.

 
          
Cassilda
clutched it to her chest, shaking her head
and laughing at him. The motion made the wide sleeves of her tie-dyed
dashiki
flutter in the dim light of the
battery-powered lantern.

 
          
"Not until Grey gets here, Ramsey
—
you can't light them yet!"

           
"So
when's he getting here? He said he had a surprise for us. Oh, damn
—
did anybody think to bring a
corkscrew?" Janelle asked in sudden alarm.

 
          
"That's what you get for buying
expensive wine," Winter said, digging through the Danish
Bookbag
she carried as a purse. "Grey told me
—
oh, here it is." She placed the folding
tool in her friend's hand.

 
          
"It wasn't expensive
—
it was on sale!" Janelle protested.

 
          
"It's got a cork, doesn't it?"
Ramsey said inarguably. "That makes it expensive. " The pendant he
wore around his neck flashed in the lantern light. "Do you know what Grey
has planned, Winter?"

 
          
"She should
—
she spent last night with him,"
Cassilda
said slyly.

 
          
"In his
DORM ROOM?"
Janelle said, astounded.

 
          
"CASSIE—!"
wailed Winter in mock protest.
"Can't a girl have any secrets?"

 
          
"Only the greatest secret of all
—
the secret of Life Itself!" Grey's
trained voice filled the room with spooky echoes, punctuated by the rhythm of
his snakeskin boots as he descended the stairs. "Fellow acolytes of
Nuclear
Circle
—"

 
          
She
fell, hard, on the top step of the staircase, feeling the edge of the iron
riser gouge bloodily into her skin. Winter's hands slipped on the grit of the
tile floor as she scrabbled to her feet again, fleeing without knowing why she
ran.

 
          
How could she have forgotten
—
how could she have been stupid enough to
forget? And now it was almost too late
—
there
was danger, terrible danger, she had to
HURRY—

 
          
No!
Winter careened into a wall and
pulled herself up with an effort. Her entire body shuddered with the struggle
to remain still, to stay where she was when she could see the red border of
madness looming in her path.

 
          
Calm.
She needed to be calm.

 
          
She
breathed deep, filling her lungs until they ached, holding the air until the
world around her took on an extra brightness, then letting it out slowly. It
seemed to help, even if only a little.

 
          
Okay, now get out of here.

 
          
Winter
forced her mind away from the flashback—the vision that had granted her another
piece of her past. Of all the stupid, childish,
juvenile
things to be mixed up in—no wonder she'd felt an
instinctive revulsion to Tabitha Whitfield and her store if she'd been a
teenage Satanist.

 
          
Winter
snorted derisively, all her fear buried now in a scalding rush of contempt and
fury. If
that
was what her younger
self had wanted, she deserved to be dead and buried!

 
          
Winter
concentrated on her anger, letting it lull and strengthen her, erecting a
barricade strong enough to seal off the awakened memories. When she'd retraced
her steps to the exit again she found that the wind had picked up; the weather
had shifted in mercurial
Hudson
Valley
fashion and the day was now all scudding
storm clouds against a freshening breeze. When Winter dragged the rock away
from the door it had propped open, the wind slapped the heavy metal door shut
with the sound of a pistol-crack. Winter looked around. There was no one in
sight.