Gravelight (22 page)

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Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley

BOOK: Gravelight
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It seemed to Sinah that she could feel the contents vibrating with the personality—and the will—of the woman who had first worn it. That woman would have been more than a match for the man—or ghost—who had threatened Sinah up at Wildwood today. Athanais de Lyon had never let anything stand in her way—not king, god, or devil—and Quentin Blackburn would be no different … .
Her easy use of her ancestress' name frightened Sinah on some deep level, as though it meant she was admitting
that her self-delusion wasn't delusion at all. That Athanais de Lyon was real.
It's your mother's name; the rest of it is borrowed wholecloth from prime-time television!
she told herself bravely. But it wasn't. She already knew that. She came from a hereditary witch family, and apparently it had hereditary enemies as well. Like The Church of the Antique Rite.
But what's the point? Soon enough—the way your mind's going—YOU won't be around to care at all,
her inner voice mocked.
There was too much truth to that to make the thing easy to think about. She needed help. She needed to know what Wycherly knew. Maybe she could lead the conversation around to the subject again in the morning.
No
. Wryly, Sinah acknowledged that even her own sense of self-preservation couldn't make her manipulate Wycherly Musgrave that way. She needed his help—but she wouldn't trick it out of him. Maybe he'd learn to trust her.
Maybe hell will freeze over.
Another half hour of sleepless tossing and Sinah got up and went downstairs to the kitchen. On the shelf beside the teacups was the prescription for a sleep aid that she'd gotten to smooth over her jet lag when she'd been commuting from coast to coast. She shook two of the tiny white capsules—a double dose—out onto her palm and swallowed them dry. She wanted to sleep, deeply and without dreams. It was the only escape she had left.
Sinah looked around the kitchen, and out through the louvered doors into the great room beyond.
This
was supposed to have been her escape, but all it had been was another dead end.
Wycherly woke just before dawn again, as abruptly as if someone had shouted in his ear. He'd been dreaming of a vast and featureless plain and a throne made of skulls. He'd dreamed he'd grasped a serpent of white-hot metal and held it, screaming in pain, until his hands had burned away.
He couldn't let that happen. He had to … what?
Experimentally, Wycherly thought about the liquor cabinet on the floor below. He could have been thinking about chocolate ice cream for all the craving the thought kindled.
He didn't want a drink.
He didn't want a drink.
Wycherly moved away from Sinah and sat up, stunned by the enormity of the thought. He'd started drinking when he was twelve—there was always liquor around Wychwood, and both parents and his older brother drank—and Wycherly could not really remember a time when he hadn't been planning what he'd do to get his next drink.
But he didn't want one now.
That felt wrong.
Moving slowly and favoring his ankle—though it was no longer very sore—Wycherly gathered up his clothes and brought them back downstairs to put them on, rewrapping the bandage around his ankle as tightly as he could. He'd loosen it as soon as he got back to his own cabin. Getting back there might not be such a bad idea, anyway. Always negotiate from a position of strength—that was what his father had always taught him.
Was the old man dead yet? Wycherly couldn't think of any way to find out without letting the family know where he was. He shrugged. First things first.
When he was dressed and about to leave, one last thought stopped him. Sinah'd mentioned having some books on magic that an old boyfriend had given her. Since she was the closest thing to a library he was likely to find in Morton's Fork, it wouldn't hurt to check them out.
There was a copy of something called
Venus Afflicted: The Short Life and Fast Times of Magister Ludens Thorne Blackburn and the New Aeon;
the name on the cover stopped him until he realized it was
Thorne
Blackburn, not Quentin, and that the man in the photograph had been born long after Wildwood Sanatorium had burned. There were books on finding your inner white light—Wycherly curled his lip in disgust—and on UFOs; there was something that looked like a general history of the occult—he set that one
aside to take—but none of them was the book he was looking for.
When he picked up one of the thicker discards—
The Autobiography of the Great Beast, Written by Himself
—to reshelve it, it shifted in his hands, slithering out of the dust jacket. Wycherly caught it hastily before it hit the floor, and when he did, he realized he'd found a secret.
There was another book hidden inside the first; the back pages were cut away to make a niche for it. Something you'd never notice—unless you dropped the book, as he just had.
Wycherly pulled the hidden book out and opened it.
It was old, battered, and shabby, the gold-stamped white leather having faded to a uniform dirty grey. It was a small book—about four inches by seven, and about half an inch thick—easy enough to overlook if you grabbed the other volume. He put the dust jacket back around
The Autobiography
and placed it carefully back on the shelf before he opened the hidden volume.
The faint grey light of dawn was barely enough to let him make out what it said:
Les Cultes des Goules—The Cults of the Ghouls, Being a True Account of Certain Pre-Christian Abominations Practiced in Modern Times in the Languedoc and Navarre
, and below that
Translated from the French with Appendices and Commentary by Nathaniel Lightborn Atheling, M.D., LL.D., FRS, Oxon
. The page was printed in a mixture of black and red and said it had been printed by Charles Leggett, London, 1816.
This was the one.
The same mixture of excitement and terror that Wycherly had felt at the black altar filled him now. He'd been meant to find this.
The first page was punched and embossed with an old-time library accession seal that years of dirty fingers had made easy to read. TAGHKANIC COLLEGE LIBRARY. The page was stamped: DO NOT CIRCULATE in faded red ink. Wycherly smiled to himself and read on. He wondered how Sinah had gotten her hands on it—or if she'd even known that it was there.
The first half had facing pages in English and French, both in antique type and neither easy to read. The French pages were thick with carefully drawn diagrams and illustrations, some hand-tinted painstakingly in watercolor. Wycherly paged through the book quickly, slowing only when he realized what he was seeing.
It looked like the storyboards for an antique snuff film.
He stared at the page in disbelief, then closed the book hastily, as if somehow the images printed on the paper could escape into the real world. It did no good. What he'd seen lingered in the mind's eye, poisoning the imagination.
Here was the power he had been promised.
Beyond question, he knew it was true. Didn't everything in twentieth-century culture tell him that power—respect—was bought with blood? The book and what it seemed to advocate were hideous, but maybe—if he read it carefully—it wouldn't be what it appeared to be, or at least not seem so bad.
Are you out of your mind?
an inner voice demanded. Wycherly ignored it. Hastily he set the book atop the other one he wanted, and levered himself awkwardly to his feet again. Time to go.
Going from Sinah's climate-controlled refuge to the gloomy early morning was going from comfort to a clammy, faintly cool world that set Wycherly's teeth on edge. It wasn't quite rain, but heavier than humidity, and too wet to be bracingly cool. The mist deadened sound; Wycherly limped slowly through a world swathed in cotton batting, clutching his stolen books to his chest and balancing his weight on the borrowed walking staff.
His ankle hurt, but not as much as yesterday; it was more of a weight than an actual pain. The Little Heller was somewhere on his left—he could hear it, echoing off the fog—and about a mile to the right was the road that led up to Wildwood.
It seemed to Wycherly almost as if the sanatorium had weight; between his shoulderblades the skin crawled with
its presence, tugging him toward it as insistently as gravity.
Hallucination.
Maybe. But the books were real. They seemed to burn with the cold destructive fire of radiation against his chest.
The river was real. He could hear the taunting chorus of drowned voices calling for him.
She isn't there. She can't be there. She's dead and buried in an expensive bronze box out on Long Island. You saw the tombstone—remember?
And since he'd been safely away at an institution whose name he no longer cared to remember, he didn't remember anything else. Trial, charges, and sentencing—if any—had been dropped into the black hole where the Musgrave family kept all its unpleasantness. He'd had to go through quite a lot of hell a couple of years later just to find out where Camilla was buried. She was really there, and he was the one who'd put her there. He'd been the one driving.
But maybe that wasn't going to matter any more.
It was six o'clock by his watch when Wycherly reached his cabin. The linoleum rug was still lying in the dooryard, curled between two trees. His weak ankle was complaining fiercely by now, and he was running low on T-3s. He pushed the thought from his mind. He'd always been good at ignoring the future.
He limped inside, leaning heavily on the stick. He'd left the windows open; it was as damp inside as out, and stuffy besides. The outline of the trapdoor was plainly visible in the floor, though at least they'd had the foresight to close it. God alone knew what else was down there, and whatever it was, he'd like it to stay there.
He closed the door of the cabin behind him and set the books he carried down on the red and white oilcloth cover of the kitchen table.
Les Cultes des Goules
seemed to glow in the dim light, drawing the attention as irresistibly as if it were a severed human hand placed there.
What an appetizing image
, Wycherly thought to himself. He headed over to the refrigerator. Somehow the weird impulse of continence that had sustained him since he'd he
woken up this morning was still with him, but there was nothing else to drink here but beer. Oddly enough, he'd actually have preferred water, but the thought of going near the creek still made him cautious.
He debated closing the windows and decided he wasn't up for the struggle. The place would be as dry as it was going to get in a few hours anyway.
“When it's dry, the roof don't leak, and when it rains, you cain't fix it nohow.”
The tagline of an old hillbilly joke passed through his mind. True enough, and a reasonable enough way to live, if anyone was interested in Wycherly's opinion.
Only nobody was. And everyone always seemed to want to borrow trouble: his whining mother, his dull-witted brother, his overachiever sister.
And then there was his father, who until recently had lived in so perfect a world that he hadn't even understood the concept of failure.
Wycherly thought about reading through the books, but it was too dim in the cabin to read, and he didn't feel like hunting around for the lamps. Besides, now that he was back on his home turf he was starting to feel sleepy again. He'd had a restless night, and it had followed a strenuous day. Now that the sun was up, he thought he might be able to sleep for a few hours—he always slept better when the sun was up.
The bedroom was still disheveled from the day before, but he didn't care. He flung himself down on the ancient mattress, and fell fast asleep as the sun rose through the trees.
GODLY AND GRAVE
My father is gone wild into his grave.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
THIS IS ANOTHER FINE MESS YOU'VE GOTTEN YOURSELF into
, Truth told herself with a sigh. Relations at breakfast had been strained, to say the least—Truth wondered how much Rowan and Ninian had heard of last night's quarrel and what they'd made of it.
Well, grown-ups fought. That was part of life. And it was never the end of the world, more the pity. Because Truth knew that she and Dylan would patch up their quarrel this time, only to fight again—and again. Until the fighting finally became bitter and unreconciled enough to separate them forever.
And what would she do then? She wasn't independently wealthy; she was a statistical parapsychologist, and there weren't that many job openings for one of those. The Bidney Institute was the most respected name in the field—Truth had opportunities there she just wouldn't get elsewhere.
And for that very reason, Dylan wouldn't want to leave either. Truth supposed they could just avoid contact with
each other—just consider that impossible Aillard woman who ran the ghost-hunting department at the Institute.
She
was all but certifiable, and Dylan managed to work with her. Dylan, Heaven knew, was all-forgiving to the point of self-destructiveness.
With a guilty start, Truth realized how far her thoughts had wandered from the real problem—not her relations with Dylan, but her, Quentin Blackburn, and the Wildwood Gate.
If there
was
a Gate.
Between last night and this morning, Dylan had tacitly dropped his offer to begin the team's investigations with the sanatorium and that suited Truth just as well. She was more interested in what her own exploration would reveal.
Evan Starking over at the general store had been helpful, if a little confused about what she wanted. Several times he'd offered to direct her to some “real witches”—as if Truth couldn't see real Wiccans, with too much eye makeup and dripping with silver jewelry, at Tabby Whitfield's store in Glastonbury any day of the week. But finally Evan had given her some deceptively simple country directions to find the sanatorium—“just follow Watchman's Gap Trace till you come to the gates.”
What he hadn't mentioned was how
far
it would be. She'd been following Watchman's Gap Trace for about two hours now—as it got steeper, narrower, and progressively more rutted, and the canteen and her bag of working tools got heavier with each step.
At last, when she'd nearly given up, Truth reached the gates of Wildwood Sanatorium.
She paused just outside the gates, feeling an odd sense of disquiet. Even through her weariness and her concentration on Earth-plane things, Truth could feel the strange wrongness here.
Something is missing.
She did not know where the conviction came from—the building had burned, the gates were in ruins; what
wasn't
missing?—but it was strong and irrefutable: Something wasn't here that ought to be here.
Truth looked around slowly, trying to cudgel her lazy mind into providing the information. After a few minutes, she acknowledged the futility of her hope with a shrug. If she wanted information, there was nothing to do but go on.
She turned up the narrow drive—it had been graveled once, and traces of the surface remained in sheltered places—and began to walk up through the long, green tunnel of roses gone wild.
The moment she passed between the gates, the sense of wrongness intensified. Truth knew it might be a case of Observer Effect, of seeing what she expected to see. She tried to discount it, but the farther Truth got from the rusted iron gateway, the slower she walked. When the rose brambles opened out enough to show her a marble bench sitting in a clearing kept close-cropped by deer, she made her way over to it and sat down, trying to sift out what she felt.
Power. To describe the reality of the Unseen World in terms of the five senses of the Earth plane could only be misleading, but Truth felt the power of the place pour over her with the driving tidal reverberation of a mighty engine running flat-out. The phantom heat of an astral blast furnace made her skin tingle.
The power was here in this physical reality that corresponded to the landscape of her dream: the forest glade, the whirlpool, the vision of Quentin Blackburn swearing he would make that power his.
But she could not just blunder forward blindly, Truth told herself sternly. Truth knew as much about the Gates as anyone alive, but she lacked her father's sanguine Summer of Love conviction that such power could be tampered with safely. Dylan had established that the “real” Quentin Blackburn had actually been here. Now Truth must determine the nature of the power here as well. Was this another Gate as her vision had suggested? She only suspected that was true—she didn't
know.
How many unsealed Gates still existed in the world today?
Thorne himself had not known, though the Blackburn Work was based on their existence. On the ability to open and close them at will, to summon the power of the
sidhe,
and, possibly, even to open a new Gate where none had been before.
Truth squared her shoulders at the magnitude of the task before her. She reached for the bag sitting upon the bench beside her and began unbuckling its closures. Time to get to work, and this place was as good as any to begin.
But half an hour later Truth had to admit that too much evidence was as baffling as too little. The first thing she'd wanted to do was identify the source and bounds of the power, but when she'd extended her pendulum, the plumb had swung out wildly, the rock-crystal weight dragging at the sterling chain until its spinning trajectory was nearly horizontal. It had wrapped itself painfully around her ribs, and after the third time she'd unwound herself, she'd given up trying to use it.
Next she'd tried the wand. One half of it was iron, its surface dark and sheened with the oil that kept it from rusting. The other half was glass, clear as water and gathering light like a lens. A thick ring of pure gold bound the two halves together. It was not really meant for dowsing—it symbolized the transformation of brute intellect through directed Will—but it would serve as a dowsing rod if the need arose.
But when she balanced it on her palms and opened her outer shields to the surrounding influences, her wand twisted wildly in her hands. Before Truth could stop it, her wand had fallen to the ground, shattering the glass portion of itself against the leg of the marble bench.
Truth stifled a cry of pure dismay at the devastating blow, and bent to pick up the pieces. She cradled the iron in her hands, for a moment uncaring of the effect the gesture would have upon the symbolic language of her inner temple. Everything would have to be reforged and rededicated.
But it is only a symbol, for convenience. Not the thing itself.
Carefully Truth wrapped the pieces of the broken wand—careful to collect all of them—first in silk, then in linen, and stowed the packet back inside her bag. She looked through the rest of the bag's contents. Some were as mundane as wooden stakes, chalk, herbs, spring water, and fishing line; some exotic—the nine-banded bracelet, flasks of Anointing Oil and Universal Condenser, knives of silver and obsidian.
It looks as if I'm either going to cook or survey,
Truth observed with a wry smile. But the reality was that this was the illusive paraphernalia of High Magick, and these were the tools she must use to investigate.
Her skin itched from the outpouring of power around her, but that was a subjective, unquantifiable datum; she needed details. Truth looked through what she had left. It would have to be the mirror. As little as she liked searching this place on the Astral, it was not as if she must do it unaware and undefended. She slid the nine-banded bracelet onto her left wrist, settling it into place against her skin.
Three for iron, the bones of the Earth, which die in their season. Three for silver, the eyes of the wind, which die without care. Three for gold, the heart of the fire, which does not die, nor shall it change … .
Truth hesitated, gazing at the bracelet, and then for added protection, tied the phylactery low on her forehead, so that the flat stone sewn into the linen band pressed hard against the place between her brows. Occultists held that this was the location of the Third Eye, the organ whose vision was tuned to past, future, and the Unseen World. She knotted the linen band tightly at the back of her head, secure against accidental displacement, and then picked up the scrying mirror.
Her shewstone was made of jet, which, like amber, had once been a living thing, and like amber was prized by Pagans and magicians alike for its ability to hold an electric charge. The scrying mirror in her hands—or
speculum,
as the medieval magician had called it—was seven inches across, slightly concave, and polished mirror-bright. Truth gripped it firmly so that neither unseen forces nor nervous
twitches could pull it from her hands, and stared down into its bright surface.
At first all she saw in it was her own image, blurred and softened by the jet and distorted by the curve of the mirror's shallow bowl. Black hair, blue eyes, unremarkable and stubborn. Her mother's daughter, with no trace of her
sidhe
-sired father in her face.
Her mind was drifting again—where was her discipline? Truth summoned her attention back to the mirror, shutting out the world. The wards that were a part of her life now would summon her back to the body if anyone approached her. All that was left was to do what she had been trained for.
Truth summoned up all her will, and thrust herself into the Otherworld. Find the Gate. Summon its Guardian. If the Gatekeeper could not be found, then she must try to close it herself.
The bland, featureless, subjective landscape was reassuringly familiar. This time Truth knew what she was looking for. If it was a Gate, its signature should be unmistakable; the power of a Blackburn Circle was as much like it as a candle was like the heart of a star.
There.
As Truth focused on it, she became aware that the architecture of this place without landmarks all bent inexorably toward it, as mindlessly obedient as the patterns made by iron filings around a magnet.
She chose not to summon her Guardians, but to go forward on foot, garbed in the red robe and white shift of a Blackburn adept. Seven silver stars burned upon her brow where the phylactery was bound on the Plane of Manifestation, and the nine-fold bracelet upon her left wrist was a cold and comforting weight. She flexed the fingers of her right hand, and her wand appeared between them, intact here in the Otherworld, though its symbol in the world below was broken.
Slowly, she approached the Wildwood Gate.
She had seen it before first as a whirlpool, then as a
serpent; this time it appeared in the mutable Otherworld as a vast and cyclopean doorway: two vast pillars and a capping lintel, making a stark, hyper-real henge here in the featureless plain. It radiated power.
Once she could see the Gate, approaching it became more difficult. Though the path seemed still to be level, Truth felt as though she were trying to ascend the steepest of inclines. She made her wand into a staff and used her embodied and transformed Will to pull her forward. The closer she got, the larger the Gate seemed to loom, until—when Truth reached it after subjective hours of striving—it was so enormous that it was as if she stood at the foot of the tallest skyscraper on Earth and tried to see the top.
Cautiously she extended her fingertips to touch the stone of the doorway. It was rough and cool beneath her fingers; not an unpleasant sensation.
Truth hesitated, and as she did, she realized she was waiting for Quentin Blackburn to appear. But it was the Gatekeeper she wanted, not Quentin—even if he happened to be of the proper bloodline, he was male. Only women controlled the power of the Gates, though men could pass this legacy to their daughters.
Tell me to get back to my kitchen, will you? Uncle, you have a lot to learn!
She turned to the Gate, and spread wide her hands. Between her fingers a blue-fire lattice grew, and as if in faint reflection of that power, the ghostly image of a door appeared between the pillars of the Gate. This Gate was already open nearly far enough to allow a human to pass into the sidhe realms beyond—and while it stood unsealed it was a portal through which the dreams and nightmares out of humankind's darkest unconscious could issue forth to be given flesh and form.
This was the reason Morton's Fork was the centerpiece of so many ghost stories and disappearances, Truth realized with a thrill of triumph. And it had to be closed.
But that must be done by its Gatekeeper. Where was she? Truth cast around for a means of calling for her, and at
last summoned the least trustworthy of her Guardians.
The grey wolf slunk toward her, over a landscape that slowly had grown more craggy and boulder-strewn. Truth knelt to greet it: power, activity. She should have summoned its opposite at the same time for balance, but the wolf lost power in the presence of the black dog, and Truth needed all the power she could summon.

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