Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02 (15 page)

 
          
"Where the trouble was." What an
admirably neutral way of putting it,
Winter thought—but, it seemed, Truth
Jourdemayne
really was used to this sort of thing.

 
          
"Do
you have a flashlight?" Winter asked. "There's something else here
that I want to show you, too."

 
          
"My,"
Truth said, shining her light on the sigil on the basement wall. Whether it was
the company or the fact that this time it didn't come as a surprise, Winter no
longer had the same sense of
shocky
horror she'd felt
the first time she'd seen it. Of course, the fact that she was almost too tired
even to stand under her own power might have contributed to her apathy.

 
          
Seen
by the flashlight's bright glare, the musty basement was only that—a basement
laboratory, abandoned for unknown reasons and appropriated years later by
students and squirrels. Harmless.

 
          
Truth
shone the light on the floor. The scuffed and faded design painted there jumped
out in once-bright primary colors—yellow, red, blue. "You painted
this?" she asked.

 
          
"We
all worked on it," Winter said, slowly, testing her newborn memories.
"Janelle laid it out—she was the Art major—but she was following a design
in a book that somebody had. I don't remember."

 
          
"And
when it was done?" Truth asked, a new note of sharpness in her voice.

 
          
Winter
shrugged, helpless to answer.

 
          
"Were
you Sealed to the Circle? How far did you get on Smoothing the Path? Who was
your Gatekeeper?"

 
          
"Path?
Gatekeeper?" Something out of Winter's recent reading surfaced to blend
with her recovered memories. "But that's—"

 
          
"The
Blackburn Work," Truth finished for her, a grim new note of worry in her
voice. "So if it's true that you and your friends were responsible for
putting this here, then the five of you were about my father's business. And
it's nothing for amateurs to meddle in."

 
          
"You
don't really
believe
in that
stuff," Winter asked hesitantly, once they were outside again. The sun was
setting, and the last rays through the trees gilded everything they touched.

 
          
"A savage place, as holy and enchanted,
as
—"
Oh, damn, I can't remember
the rest of it.
But that was a normal sort of forgetting, Winter knew. The
sort everyone did.

 
          
"It
all depends, I suppose," Truth said, "on how you define belief. Do
you believe in chairs?"

 
          
"Of
course I do!" Winter said, mystified. "I see them every day."

 
          
"The
semanticist would argue that you didn't 'believe' in chairs, at all
then—belief, after all, implies an element of faith, and faith isn't necessary
when you have the physical object available to you on a moment's notice, now,
is it?"

 
          
Why are we having this conversation?
Winter
wondered, but dutifully asked, as she supposed she was meant to, "But what
about people who believe in God?"

 
          
"For
every person who says they 'believe' in God, I can show you one who says they
'know' God—or Goddess, if you prefer, and I know whose integrity I'd rather
place
my
faith in. Now," Truth
said, briskly changing the subject, "can you tell me about where you were
when you first saw the lake boil?"

 
          
To
Winter's relief, it looked as though they weren't going to discuss Thorne
Blackburn or his voodoo logic anymore. She didn't know if she could handle it,
especially now that she began to suspect that Truth believed that nonsense,
too.
"What is Truth? said jesting
Pilate."
"Here," Winter said. She stepped into the place on
the walkway where she'd stood to look back at the lake, but even to her
strained nerves there remained no sense of menace.

 
          
She
watched as Truth opened her shoulder bag—a Coach bag even more enormous than
Winter's—and took out what Winter first thought was a necklace.

 
          
It
was a length of bright silver chain almost three feet long. There was a large
ring at one end and at the other, a cone-shaped pendulum of quartz or glass,
big and heavy enough to pull the chain straight without jouncing. Winter
remembered seeing much smaller versions of this in the glass case at Tabitha
Whitfield's store. "What are you—?"

 
          
"Quiet
now," Truth said gently. "It's a pendulum, and I just need a moment
or two without distraction."

 
          
Winter
watched as Truth stretched out her arm until the pendulum hung straight down
from the end of it. The chain swayed slowly back and forth, the quartz weight at
the end gathering sunlight and distilling it into small flashes of gold. As
Winter stared at it, fascinated, the pendulum settled and became perfectly
still.

 
          
She
glanced at Truth. Truth was standing with her eyes closed, breathing slowly
and deeply, her face relaxed.

 
          
The
pendulum began to move—slowly at first, and then faster, until it was
describing an agitated elliptical orbit. It seemed as if Truth must be swinging
it, or at least moving her wrist, but as far as Winter could tell, Truth hadn't
moved at all.

 
          
Pendulum power. Is this what I'm reduced to
believing in?

 
          
But
dowsing—which could use a pendulum such as this as well as the more familiar
copper-sheathed rod—was something, Winter knew from her reading, that even
multimillion-dollar oil companies relied on to save themselves the expense of
fruitless drilling. It was a legitimate—though inexplicable—method of gaining
information.

 
          
Slowly
the pendulum settled to a stop again. Truth opened her eyes.

 
          
"What
was here—and after seeing that basement I'm inclined to think that
something
was—isn't here now,
Winter."

 
          
"But
you believe that it was here before?" Winter asked.
You said I wasn't crazy
—
do
you still think so?
It was true that she didn't feel crazy— or even afraid.
What she did feel was a faint but nagging sense of urgency—a sense of some
unrealized omission, and that the time in which it would be possible to make
amends was drawing to an end.

 
          
Truth
hesitated, watching her. "You know that you fit many of the protocols for
the identification of the adult poltergeist, so I'm inclined to believe that
the phenomena you're reporting center on you rather than upon a specific
location."

 
          
"What
do you mean? Are you saying that
thing
wasn't
here? I
saw
it, Truth," Winter
said, trying to keep the pleading out of her voice.

 
          
"But
you might have brought it with you," Truth said compassionately,
"even though it doesn't seem to be anything like what you've described as
happening before. But if in fact it isn't, as you say, something which comes
from you, that leaves—if you'll allow me to theorize in advance of my data—the
possibility that your—for lack of a better term— psychic
locus
is 'charging up' any potential manifestation it comes near.
So you both could and could not be responsible for the phenomenon at the same
time."

 
          
"Like
plugging the battery into the Energizer Bunny," Winter said slowly.
"You mean that something like that monster in the lake couldn't happen
until I came along?"

 
          
"Something
like that." Truth chewed upon her lower lip, brooding. "But—"
she broke off, as if she'd been about to say more. "First let's try to
find out
definitely
what's plaguing
you before we decide what to do about it—although I think we can rule out
insanity for the time being. And now, let's go home. There isn't much more we
can do here."

 
          
Much
to Winter's surprise, she found that "home" was literally what Truth
meant. Over Winter's admittedly feeble protests, she was borne off to Truth's
tidy two-bedroom bungalow just outside of Glastonbury, where she was put to
work washing and slicing greens for a salad while Dylan Palmer tended both the
pot of what he claimed was "killer spaghetti sauce" and the loaves of
homemade bread baking in the oven.

 
          
The
moment she'd crossed Truth's threshold Winter had felt an overwhelming sense
of sanctuary, and now, sitting in the cheerful red-and-white kitchen with the
mound of scrubbed vegetables before her, it was all she could do to keep her
eyes open.

 
          
"Is
it the hour or the company, Winter?" Dr. Palmer's voice was gently
amused.

 
          
Rousing
with a start, Winter realized she had been all but dozing, her chin upon her
chest. Reflexively, she opened her eyes wide.

 
          
"Oh,
don't tease,
Dyl
, she's had an awful day. Winter, why
don't you go lie down for a half hour or so before dinner—otherwise, I think
you're going to end up facedown in the main dish."

 
          
The
chance to lie down, to sleep, was sweetly tempting—Winter could not imagine
having nightmares in this house. "The salad—" she protested
automatically.

 
          
"Has
been duly scrubbed, and you've done most of the chopping. I can finish up—it
will let me contribute more to making dinner in my own house than boiling the
water for the vermicelli," Truth said.

 
          
"Well
if you think—"

 
          
"I
do. Come on." Truth took Winter by the elbow and led her, un-protesting,
off to the bedroom.

 
          
The
bedroom was
spartan
and simple, with a single bed
covered by a white candlewick spread flanked by Shaker reproduction night
tables. The room's severity was softened by the braided rug on the floor and
the wealth of framed photographs on the wall.

 
          
"Just
make yourself comfortable," Truth told her generously. "There's a
bathroom through there that should have anything you need."

           
But after Truth had left, it was the
photographs, and not the bed, that drew Winter.

 
          
Some
of the pictures she recognized from reading that book
Venus Afflicted.
Here was Thorne Blackburn, dressed for some New
Age
Shriners
' convention. There, a photo of the same
man in the casual dress of thirty years before, swinging a small child up over
his head. There were other pictures—a dark-haired woman with long, wild
tresses; an older woman with short-clipped graying hair. There was one of
Dylan, standing in front of a
Gbostbusters
poster
and waving a vacuum-cleaner hose, with a manic expression on his face.

 
          
Friends.
Family. And the love and caring in those frozen images made Winter curiously
uneasy, as though they presented a threat—or a vital clue to a riddle she must
solve.

 
          
She
turned away from them and stretched out on the bed.

 
          
"She
reminds me of Light," Truth said, coming back into the kitchen a few
moments later.

 
          
"She's
nothing like her, you know," Dylan pointed out reasonably.

 
          
"She's
a psychic in danger," Truth said inarguably, "and, if this is
poltergeist activity, all I can say is that atypical doesn't begin to describe
it. I'd almost be happier to see her setting fires—and you know how
troublesome
pyrokinesis
can be to channel and
control. But that's not the worst of it—did you know that she was part of a
working Circle when she was at college here?"