Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02 (17 page)

 
          
"Sometimes,"
Winter said cautiously. She could hear—or thought she could—Truth moving about
on the second floor, and wondered what Truth was looking for so intently.

 
          
There
was a scrape and hiss as Dr. Palmer stroked one of the fireplace matches
alight, and then poked its flaming head in among the kindling and paper scraps
beneath the logs. After a few moments, pale orange flames licked up over the
wood.

 
          
"That
should do it," Dr. Palmer said with satisfaction.

 
          
"Can
I offer you some coffee? Tea?" Winter said dutifully, though her bones
felt as if they were filled with lead and the need to sleep again was a
passionate ache in her entire body.

 
          
"You
look like you need bed more than either," Dr. Palmer said bluntly,
"and while ghosts are my specialty, I've also worked with enough mediums
to know that what they do takes a tremendous toll on the nerves. Psychics need
to take better care of their health than most people, or they suffer for it
later."

 
          
"Isn't
Truth a psychic?" Winter asked. There was a swift patter of footsteps
descending the stairs.

 
          
Dr.
Palmer hesitated, much as Truth had earlier. "Not exactly," he said,
"but I'll leave that for her to tell you, tomorrow."

 
          
Truth
came into the parlor and regarded the fire approvingly. The crystal-and-silver
pendulum was looped in her left hand.

 
          
"Nothing
here," she said. "No manifestation centering on the house. There's
probably a residue down in the old orchard, but nothing that can reach the
house, and it isn't malignant anyway."

 
          
"What's
in the orchard?" Winter asked. She avoided the upstairs because you could
see the orchard and the river from most of its windows—she wondered what dire
associations the place had for her unconscious mind.

           
"Oh, Colin used to let some student
groups meet down there," Truth said. "
Wiccans
and so on. Nothing to worry about."

 
          
"
Wiccans
?" Winter said, then:
"Witches?"

 
          
"Harmless,"
Truth said firmly. "And nothing you'd notice unless you were down there
and knew what you were looking for." She dropped her pendulum back into
her purse. "And how to look for it," she added, almost as an
afterthought. "Have a good night, Winter. I'll call you tomorrow."
She picked up her coat, and she and Dr. Palmer turned to go.

 
          
Tell me, Ms.
Jourdemayne
,
how do I learn to see things that aren't there
—
and ignore things that are?
Winter's inner voice asked bleakly. But
once again she said nothing, following the researchers from the Institute out
into the hall, and closing the door behind them as they left.

 
          
She
was starting to realize there were a lot of answers she didn't really want.

 
          
Once
she closed the door, Winter dropped the antique bolt that should— in
theory—keep the door barred to all intruders. In practice, by the time morning
came the door would probably be standing wide open and the bolt would be
somewhere else in the house.

 
          
Two
weeks ago the thought would have maddened her; now, she only felt a weary
acceptance of the truth. It was the work of a poltergeist, and Truth
Jourdemayne
said it would go away.

 
          
Of
course, Truth had also said it wasn't a
normal
poltergeist. . . .

 
          
The
fire that Dr. Palmer had lit was burning invitingly now, reminding Winter that
if she did not light the stove in her bedroom she was in for an uncomfortably
chilly night. Moving slowly she put the kettle on to heat and then stoked the
stove, adding a couple of pieces of coal among the kindling to ensure that the
warmth would last. Her expedition to Nuclear Lake that afternoon seemed to
belong in another universe.

 
          
By
the time Winter was done with her bedroom stove the kettle was whistling, and
she poured boiling water over the last of Tabitha Whitfield's herb tea mixture.
She'd better go and replenish her stock tomorrow; while it might not do
everything the proprietor claimed, it did seem to help her sleep, and Winter
had gotten used to the taste.

 
          
Thinking
about
Inquire Within
made her
remember the pamphlet of "grounding and centering" exercises that
Tabitha Whitfield had in-eluded with the tea. Feeling oddly guilty, Winter
hunted around until she found it wedged behind the clothes hamper in the
bathroom.

 
          
She
wandered back into the kitchen, holding the pamphlet in one hand. It was
crudely—or perhaps simply would be a kinder word—done, just half a dozen sheets
of photocopied typing paper saddle-stapled with a beige card-stock cover.
Fundamentals of Grounding and Centering
was
printed on the cover in hand-drawn letters above an intricately woven pentacle.

 
          
It
seemed harmless enough.

 
          
The
tea was ready; Winter poured it out into one of the heavy stoneware mugs that
seemed to have come with the house, and added a liberal dollop of honey. She
made a note to pick up more honey, too, while she was in town. Hadn't Dr.
Palmer said that psychics needed to keep up their strength?

 
          
She
wasn't, Winter told herself firmly, psychic.

 
          
Pamphlet
in one hand and cup in the other, Winter went back into the parlor. The
undersides of the logs were bright poppy-red now, edged with brilliant gold
lace, and the massed bank of coals was radiating a welcome heat into the room.
Winter settled herself into the rocker and drew the cream-colored wool afghan
over her legs. She'd just sit here a minute. . . .

 
          
It was dark, and she was running, being
driven farther and farther from the place she needed to be. Months had grown to
years
—
how
COULD
she have shirked her responsibilities for so
long? It was not as if she was free to do so; she had chosen the Path; had
dedicated all of her lives to it. Such a promise was not something she could
set aside when the burden grew too heavy! She was
NEEDED;
he had asked her for help
—

 
          
Asked her for help?

 
          
Who
had asked her for help?

 
          
What—?

 
          
The
confusion drove her up out of the dream; floundering about, Winter capsized the
rocker and went sprawling onto the cold, hard floor.

 
          
Serves me right,
Winter thought
groggily, getting painfully to her hands and knees. Folded paper slid beneath
her palm—the pamphlet.

 
          
The
fire had died back to embers. The room was ice cold. Winter crawled over to the
hearth and pulled a log from the pile in the scuttle, tossing it clumsily onto
the embers and ash. She hoped it would have the good grace to light; she was
too fuzzy-witted at the moment to build a proper fire.

 
          
Winter
groped around the floor until she found the afghan and pulled it around her
shoulders, getting painfully to her feet. There was the faintest suggestion of
light visible through the parlor windows, but it couldn't be later than 5:00
A.M. at the latest. She might as well finish the night in her bed—at least it
was harder to fall out of.

 
          
What
had she been dreaming? Winter groped after the tattered rags of her dream and
could only recollect a sense of mission, of tasks left undone—the same sort of
feeling that would awaken her in her early days at
Arkham
Miskatonic
King; bringing her up out of a sound sleep
to the conviction of trades left undone and deals unmade.

 
          
But
this was something more. A summons she must answer.

 
          
No,
Winter told herself firmly.
Your nerves are shot and your emotions are
running wild. You can't trust them. Poltergeists I'll believe in, but not these
. . . delusions of adequacy.

 
          
Go to bed.

 
          
When
Winter passed the kitchen on the way to her bedroom, she found that both halves
of the
dutch
door were open—no wonder the house was
so cold. Sighing, she pulled the door closed and bolted it again, then did the
same for the kitchen window. Her bedroom was freezing as well; the windows,
which opened outward, shutter-style, were wide open, filling the room with the
faintly marshy scent of the river, and the more insistent smell of wet grass
and spring leaves. The stove—and she was almost
sure
she'd lit it—was stone cold.

 
          
Grumbling
to herself, Winter pulled the windows shut and locked them, and by then she was
awake enough to think she might as well go around and shut everything, as all
the doors and windows were sure to be open. Just because she'd been lucky so
far didn't mean that she couldn't find city crime in Amsterdam County—and she
didn't think Tim's Grey Angels would be of any particular help if a
housebreaker decided to come calling.

 
          
The
sky was already appreciably lighter than when she'd first awakened. Winter
pulled the afghan tighter around her shoulders and went to check the front
door.

           
It was open, of course, and the
crossbar was nowhere in sight. Winter sighed, looking around herself
helplessly. Maybe the crossbar was outside this time; by rights she ought to
just consign it to whatever limbo poltergeist-stolen objects respired in, but
her irritating sense of responsibility demanded she make at least a cursory
search. She shoved the door open wider, intending to take a quick look around
the yard and then shut the door and go in to bed.

 
          
That
was when she saw the body.

 
          
The
first thing she registered was the slick red mass and the fact that there was
no blood. The object was dull-finished with the time it had spent drying in the
open air; it was somehow more frightening that there was no blood, because
there was no way that something that large could have been killed so hideously
and leave no blood behind, as if it were a drained carcass from some demented
butcher's icebox.

 
          
It
was as large as a child.

 
          
The
fear that came on the heels of that thought was what drove Winter forward,
because even if it was not her fault, even if it were some energy working
through her, using her as a focus, she could not bear to be responsible for
murder.

 
          
But
the
outflung
limbs ended in hooves, not toes and
fingers. A deer, flayed and shredded and left on her front doorstep.

 
          
I
seem
to be moving up in the world,
thought Winter with desperate gallows-humor,
because if she could not turn mockery against this thing she thought she would
begin to cry and never stop.

 
          
Moving
up in the world.

 
          
From
birds, to rabbits, to deer.

 
          
And what comes after deer, Winter dear?

 
          
She
would not think of that.

 
          
She
wouldn't.

THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER

The red blood reigns in the
winter's pale.

— WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

 
          
IT
WAS  QUITE  LATE  THAT EVENING WHEN WINTER ARRIVED at the
Bidney
Institute. Truth had phoned that morning, and then
Winter had spent the day doing determinedly normal things, such as taking
Sullivan's Taxi down to
Poughkeepsie
to arrange the lease of a more reliable car. Now that the danger was
so clear and so close, she almost wasn't afraid of it. She had been more
frightened, she realized, of the half-real phantoms of her own mind—and they
had possessed far less power to hurt her.

 
          
But
this thing—creature, poltergeist, whatever the official ghost-hunters wanted to
name it—this was not under her control. This thing that hungered for the pain
and blood of living flesh and grew stronger as it fed, was so clearly, so
obviously a real and present danger that there was little room for fear and
none for hysteria.

 
          
Winter
parked her new car—a Saturn like the one Truth had driven, and very reliable,
so the dealer had said—in the college's guest parking and walked up the steps.
Truth had told her to come directly in through the lab wing, so she detoured
around the back of the Institute's building, to where the Federalist brick and
marble facade gave way to the pragmatic stressed concrete of the only new
construction on the
Taghkanic
campus in the last
seventy-five years.

 
          
Just
as she'd been told, the door marked PRIVATE—NOT OPEN TO STUDENTS was unlocked.
As Winter stepped through it and into the vast
warehouselike
building she had visited briefly the day before, she could hear voices.

 
          
Truth
and Dr. Palmer.

 
          
Unwilling
to eavesdrop—but equally unwilling to give up any advantage she might gain by
it—Winter stood where she was and listened.

 
          
"Do
you really think Winter's causing the phenomena herself?" Dr. Palmer
asked.

 
          
"Not
consciously,
Dyl
—and not all of it. The part that can
be blamed on an adult-onset poltergeist worries me almost as much as the part
that can't, though," Truth answered.

 
          
"
'Another kind of poltergeist activity may be the expression of psychic force
in tension, not around a hysterical or maladjusted child, but around a
relatively well-adjusted adult. When this occurs, there is some unresolved
psychic force in action; it could be said that the Unseen is coming in search
of the individual concerned.

 
          
"I
know my Margrave and
Anstey
, thank you, my love. And
since our girl seems to have a fairly high
psionic
index—go ahead and laugh, but I'm not
quite
taking that on faith, what with the series she ran here as a student—she's
probably summoned up some Elemental and bound it to her without being aware of
it."

 
          
Winter
felt she'd overheard quite enough—if eavesdroppers never heard any good of
themselves, neither did it follow that they heard anything good of others.
"Hello?" she said, stepping out into the room.

 
          
The
central space of the laboratory had been cleared, the machines and couches
moved back out of the way and a nine-foot circle chalked out on the floor. Four
large candles—as yet unlit—were spaced evenly around the border of the circle,
and a completely prosaic wooden chair stood in the circle's center. A
black-handled knife lay on its seat.

           
Winter recoiled inwardly. This
looked more like witchcraft than like science. What was she letting herself in
for?

 
          
The
oddest thing, however, was not a part of the circle at all. Suspended above
it, almost like a deep lid about to be lowered onto a saucepan, was an enormous
square cage of copper wire—and looking down, Winter could see a gleaming metal
square set into the floor, with sockets into which the pegs of the hanging cage
could fit.

 
          
"It's
a Faraday Cage," Truth said reassuringly, noting the direction of Winter's
gaze. "It's perfectly harmless—once it's switched on, it generates a
magnetic field that insulates you from all outside influences—the ones that
make up the electromagnetic spectrum, at least."

 
          
"What
does that do?" Winter asked with grudging interest.

 
          
"Some
of the psychics we work with feel that the Faraday Cage enhances their
abilities," Truth said, and Winter could tell she was choosing her words
with care. "But what it seems to do best is insulate whoever is inside
from influences outside the cage—PK doesn't work through the field, for
example—and that's what we're going to use it for tonight."

 
          
Winter
glanced at Dr. Palmer. He was standing next to a formidable collection of
machines that seemed to have enough toggles and dials and LED displays to equip
all three seasons of the original
Star
Trek.

 
          
"Tonight
I'm just an observer,' Dr. Palmer said. "The
polybarometer
will record and measure gross physical changes in the environment, from
temperature and pressure fluctuation to any earth tremors that might occur.
I'll also be running a wide-band tape recorder and two cameras—assuming, of
course, that I have your permission. If you agree, I've got a release for you
to sign." Dr. Palmer grinned at her engagingly, holding up a clipboard.

 
          
Winter
walked over to him and reached for the pen. "Sure." She couldn't see
that it made much difference, at this point. "Do you get your ghosts to
sign these things, too?"

 
          
"We
try," Dr. Palmer said, grinning. Winter scribbled her name to the bottom
of a sheet saying that she'd been notified of all risks attendant upon these
experimental procedures and consented to having the case history and any
photographs taken compiled as part of the experimental findings of the
Institute; her name would not be used, etcetera, etcetera.

 
          
"What
do I do?" Winter said when she was done. When Truth had told her yesterday
that she was going to try to get rid of at least some of the phenomena plaguing
Winter—including the part that killed animals so horribly—Winter had assumed it
would involve some kind of injection or treatment, not hex signs and candles.

 
          
"The
first thing you should do is take off anything you have on that's made of
metal," Truth said briskly. "Do you have any fillings in your
teeth?"

 
          
Winter
looked at Truth. Truth was wearing a set of green surgical scrubs and a pair of
terry-cloth slippers on her feet. Her shoulder-length dark hair floated free
about her shoulders, and she was wearing no jewelry that Winter could see.

 
          
"No
fillings." Winter set her purse on a nearby table and took off her
earrings, ring, and bracelet. She hadn't replaced her last watch yet—the damned
things were always stopping and she wasn't really sure why she'd taken up
wearing one again in the first place—so she didn't have that to remove.

 
          
"Shoes,"
Truth said, and Winter slipped off her shoes. The utilitarian gray rubber tile
of the laboratory floor was chilly beneath her
stockinged
feet. She blessed the impulse that had made her wear a sport bra with no snaps
or hooks, because she could tell that Truth wasn't wearing a brassiere and that
Truth would probably have asked her to remove hers without so much as a
by-your-leave.

 
          
"That's
your lot—I'll take on any airport metal detector in the land," Winter
said, trying for a light tone.

 
          
"Okay."
Truth smiled; it made her look very young. "I'll try to keep this
nonthreatening
. Just come inside the circle—don't step on
the chalk marks—and sit down in this comfy chair, and I'll try to answer your
questions." Truth picked up the knife on the chair seat and set it on the
floor beside one of the candles.

 
          
Winter
stepped carefully over the chalk mark and walked to the chair, looking
dubiously at the line on the floor as she stepped over it. It didn't seem to
her that a chalk mark was going to be much protection against anything. Winter
sat down in the hard wooden chair and arranged her limbs self-consciously. She
placed a little more faith in the cage hanging overhead, though it, too, looked
too flimsy to be much of a defense.

 
          
"What
are you going to do?" she asked.

           
Truth gestured to Dr. Palmer. He
went over to the wall and began lowering the copper cage over both women.

 
          
"Like
any fan of the scientific method," Truth began, "I have a theory and
I'm going to test it. The poltergeist—doors and windows and missing
objects—isn't bothering you as much as the slain animals—am I right?"

 
          
Winter
agreed. "The open doors and missing objects are just a nuisance, really,
but ... it killed a deer this morning," she finished, her voice flat and
ugly. "It looked like something had run it through a grinder."

 
          
Truth
nodded, her expression remote. "What I'm betting is that, since its
appearances are so linked to blood and death, you're dealing with something
more than simple RSPK; very likely it's an Elemental which you've somehow
attracted to yourself. Strong emotion, especially anger or depression, often
draws them; I'm not sure why. If the disturbance has its source in Nuclear Lake
as you believe, we may be dealing with a water Elemental; they're highly
destructive, and often too lazy to return to their own Plane of Manifestation.
..."

 
          
The
copper cage rattled as it brushed the floor, and Dr. Palmer cut power to the
winch. He checked his watch and made a note on a clipboard.

 
          
"And
so?" Winter prompted. Truth was so briskly matter-of-fact about everything
that it made it easy for Winter to ignore the fact that what she was saying
came straight out of an episode of
Mystery
Science Theater
3000.

 
          
"You're
a cool one," Truth said approvingly. "First of all, I'm going to call
upon your Elemental to present itself here so I can identify it, and once
that's done, I'm going to use the proper formula to banish it back to its own
Elemental Plane. If I can't manage that—some of these things are remarkably
tenacious—I can at least dislodge it from you and attach it to myself, and then
really give it a run for its money."

 
          
Winter
glanced through the wires of the cage at Dr. Palmer, but he didn't seem
particularly disturbed by anything Truth had said. She wasn't quite sure what
an "Elemental" was, but
Venus
Afflicted
had mentioned them also, and she could always ask later.

 
          
"All
connected?" Dr. Palmer said.

           
Truth checked the perimeter, and
fitted the last pegs into the sockets on the floor. "Ready," she
said.

 
          
"Charging,"
Dr. Palmer answered back. He threw the switch.