Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02 (2 page)

 
          
They were talking about me.
. . .
Another hard-won memory, and now her tottering steps brought her to the shelter
of an ancient oak, and the refuge of the bench that some former tenant had
built to encircle its trunk. Winter sank down on the moss-green wood and looked
back toward the house.

 
          
Talking
about her at the sanatorium. Saying it was just her imagination, when she knew
it was not, that the tales they ascribed to the inventive fancies of a
disturbed and unbalanced mind were real.

 
          
/
did not make it up.

 
          
Grimly
she clung to that truth, but the act took all Winter's strength, and she had
none to spare for the effort of remaining outside her refuge. She forced
herself to walk slowly, not to surrender to blind panic, but her mouth was dry
and her chest was crushed by iron bands by the time she could shut the front
door of the farmhouse behind her once again.

 
          
The
staircase beckoned; the elusive second floor of the house. That, and the memory
of the suitcases, and the need to draw some triumph from the jaws of this latest
defeat made Winter put her hand on the newel post and her foot on the first of
the risers.

 
          
This isn't so bard!
she told herself
rallyingly
a few moments later, even risking a quick peek
out the window on the landing. She could see the roof of the woodshed from
here, its slates knapped and mellowed with age.

 
          
Only three more steps.

 
          
The
second floor was smaller than the first. It held two bedrooms and a modernized
bath, its pink and white fifties curves
Rubenesquely
out of tune with the house's Shaker simplicity. The largest bedroom was the
back one, and Winter, peering through the door, saw two
Vuitton
suitcases and a Coach Lexington brief in British Tan flung haphazardly onto
the bed.

 
          
She
could go downstairs now. She could leave that reclamation of her identity for
another day, along with that sense that to reclaim herself meant also to take
up some awful burden.

 
          
But if I don't, there's no one else to do
it.

 
          
She
could not say where that certainty outside of time had come from—it would be so
easy to dismiss this sense of special purpose as just one more of the daydreams
of the delusional. When she had tried to talk about it at
Fall River
she'd been hushed and dismissed, until
she'd prayed for the nagging sense of mission to go away, to leave her normal;
to make her seem to respond to their treatment and their drugs just like all
the others who came to ...

 
          
To that privileged retreat for failed
overachievers,
Winter finished with a flash of mockery. But the words
weren't hers. Whose?

 
          
Never mind that now.
Her mind was trying
to distract her with inessentials to keep her from acting, but she knew that
trick by now. Squaring her shoulders, Winter stepped over the threshold into
the bedroom.

 
          
These
were the bags she—or someone—had packed when she went to
Fall River
. She emptied the contents of both
Vuitton
cases onto the sere candlewick bedspread; all
casual clothes, resort clothes; but somehow, by accident, her pit pass from
Arkham
Miskatonic
King was there.
She stared at the photo.

 
          
/
look like I've been caught in the
headlights of an oncoming train. . . .
Despite which, it had been her
proudest possession since the day she'd qualified for the Pit. As a
commodities broker. On Wall Street.

 
          
As
smoothly as that, the missing past rushed in. She was Winter
Mus
-grave, a trader at
Arkham
Miskatonic
King on Wall Street. She'd been there for ten
years, since they'd romanced her away from Bear Stearns. . . .

 
          
She
remembered getting up early in the morning to walk to work when the subway was
on strike; remembered her apartment. If she opened the
briefbag
lying on the bed now she could say just what it would contain: the
Wall Street Journal
and a bag full of
throat lozenges; a pink stuffed elephant—a good-luck charm—and a spare T-shirt
to change into; extra pens . . .

 
          
My life, in short.

 
          
She'd
had no life, outside of the Street. And she hadn't wanted one, either. She'd
ignored all well-meaning advice to ease up, slow down, find a hobby, get a
life.

 
          
/
had a life.

 
          
Until
that break between past and present; the event that she could not yet remember.
That she now knew would come in time, and explain, perhaps, this purposeless
sense of purpose.

 
          
Shaking
her head, Winter gathered up an armful of clothes. If she was going to stay
downstairs, she might as well have her clothes with her. At least she could
pretend she was normal.

           
But
don't crazy people always think they're normal? Isn't that how it starts?

 
          
No.
It had started with the breakdown that had brought her to
Fall River
—and now she was out of
Fall River
, but not because she was better. . . .

 
          
Face it
—FACE it!

 
          
Winter
ran down the stairs; not running away, but running to the only thing left to
frighten her; the thing that had driven her into this long fugue state.

 
          
The
clothes she had gathered scattered behind her like autumn leaves. She flung
herself across the serene parlor and into the cheerful kitchen. Here were the
dutch
doors leading out into the garden; to the orchard; to
the river. She threw open the door and recoiled with a cry, even though she had
seen what was there before; had seen it this morning, in fact. . . .

 
          
The
creature was difficult to identify, although from the size, it had probably
once been a squirrel. Only a few wisps of gray fur clung now to the ruined blob
of shredded meat flecked with white spurs of shattered bone.

 
          
Like all the others. Just like all the
others.

 
          
It
began with pigeons. Pigeons and squirrels and mice; she'd found the tiny
bloodless corpses everywhere she went until each new discovery had been almost
beyond bearing. When she'd gone to
Fall River
there had been no more for a while, but
then the bodies had begun appearing again, and when she'd sworn she had nothing
to do with the deaths, Dr. Atheling said he believed her but none of the others
did. They said she was doing it herself—that
she
was the one responsible: catching and hurting and killing. . .
.

 
          
And
so she had run away, praying that if she ran far enough, hard enough, she could
outrun that vengeful shadow. And for a while she'd thought she'd succeeded.

 
          
Until
today.

 
          
Winter
was restless all the rest of the day, as if the appearance of the tiny
shattered body had brought with it a summons that could no longer be denied.
Winter spent that night sleepless before the old fieldstone fireplace, feeding
the last of the woodpile to the greedy flames.

 
          
With
the morning light came the certainty that she could hide here no longer. If she
was sane, she could test that sanity in the outside world. If it failed, she'd
. . .

 
          
What?

 
          
/
can't go back there,
Winter told
herself, although Fall River Sanatorium was not a bad place—not like some
she'd heard of, where malice was disguised as concern and sadism took the place
of care.

 
          
It's just that
Fall
River
is a place that should help people
—
and
it can't help me.

 
          
Even
without knowing where the conviction came from, Winter trusted it—even though
she no longer trusted herself.

 
          
/
guess the world
—
and I
—
will just have to take
our chances.

 
          
The
morning was spent in a thousand delaying chores. Even though each strengthened
her confidence in her ability to function outside the safe refuge the farmhouse
had become, they were also a form of escape from the consequences of her
decision. She washed the dishes, and made a list of the things she would need
to replenish her larder in town, carried the rest of her clothes downstairs and
put them away in the large red cedar armoire that shared the kitchen parlor
with the woodstove and the white iron bed, and even went through her purse and
Coach
briefbag
, alternately amazed and baffled by
the contents. There were a fistful of unopened monthly statements, forwarded
to her at
Fall
River
from the accountant who paid her monthly bills. Winter glanced at one of them,
but the rows of numbers, of transfers and debits, were a meaningless jumble.

 
          
More
real were the wads of twenties and fifties crammed at the bottom of the
bag—enough to take care of any conceivable immediate expense-— crumpled loose
in the bottom of the purse like so much play money.

 
          
Play money. That's what it was to us. We
were like kids with a Monopoly set
—
none
of it was real to us,
she thought, clutching the small pink stuffed
elephant that had been at the bottom of her Lexington brief, along with a
Wall Street
Journalwdch
last year's date and clutter of things almost unfamiliar to her now. Her years
at
Arkham
Miskatonic
King
were solid but curiously distant, as if out of a particularly vivid book she'd
read and enjoyed. She'd lived fast and high, bought the usual toys and paid for
the usual perks, and none of it was unique to her, somehow. It was the sort of life
that any of the traders could have had, as
unindividuated
as the life of a drone in a hive.

 
          
And we thought we were so special, and all
along we were just a funny kind of money-making robot. Wind us up and we'd
trade, and trade, and trade, until...

 
          
But
Winter still wasn't sure what had taken her from the floor of the New York
Stock Exchange, to
Fall River
, to here. Maybe she'd just gotten . . . tired? People did, after all.
Burnout was the commonest reason for leaving the Street.

 
          
But
not Winter's reason. Even if she didn't know what her reason was, she knew that
much.

 
          
At
last she could delay no longer without acknowledging to herself that she was
running away from the outside world. She changed her scruffy jeans and worn-out
sweater for something more suitable to an appearance in town.
Although Glastonbury isn't much of a town,
as far as I can remember.

 
          
The
fashionable, expensive woman in the gray cashmere sweater and Harris tweed
skirt who stared back at Winter from her bathroom mirror was gaunt and
hollow-eyed until Winter painted the illusion of health into her skin with
cosmetics labeled
Chanel
and Dior. Expensive
accessories for a lifestyle she had once worshiped with all her heart, that
now more and more seemed a silly and expensive sort of mistake. But the rouge,
and the
Paloma
Picasso earrings, and the thin sparkle
of Elsa
Peretti
"Diamonds By The Yard" all
helped disguise the sleepless nights filled with fear.