Gravelight (32 page)

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Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley

BOOK: Gravelight
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No. In the name of Time and the Seasons, what am I
becoming?
Truth drew a deep breath, and only then remembered the purse slung carelessly over her shoulder, with the copy of
Les Cultes
at the bottom of it. That was something that needed to be brought up soon.
And it's something even Dylan can understand—for a change … .
She set her purse on the counter beside the door and slid into the dinette beside Ninian. Rowan got up to get more soda out of the refrigerator, her silence more eloquent than any comment.
Did Rowan fancy herself in love with Dylan? Instant, hot jealously seized Truth—what was hers, she would keep, whether she wanted it or not.
Oh, stop it!
Truth helped herself to a slice of pizza. But it would be kinder to let Dylan go to the younger woman, a part of her said soberly. Kinder to leave him to his own kind.
But I love him!
Truth protested
. Don't I?
And even if I don't, he's mine, he's mine, he's mine … .
“So how did it go today?” Truth said aloud, biting into a slice of pizza.
“We didn't get much done—there's a girl missing—Evan's sister; he runs the general store. Apparently she didn't come home last night,” Dylan said.
“I know. Apparently a lot of people have been looking for her: no luck,” Truth said, trying to gain control of her unruly emotions. Control was the first work of the Adept, and Irene had set her to it over two years ago. Slowly she felt calm radiate through her body from her Tiphareth chakra.
“Did you find any Dellons?” Rowan said. Her expression held interest in news of a mystery, nothing more. “I think it's just bizarre the way everyone keeps saying they don't exist—I was asking about them when I was asking permission to set up the monitors—you know, asking about the local witch-woman and cunning man, that sort of thing.”
As Truth had learned during her own researches, folk
beliefs were still a large part of mountain culture, though no one took them as seriously these days as their grandparents had. Modern mountain folk were quite capable of seeing a doctor in a nearby city and then returning home to consult with the local yarb-and-fetch woman, who was often as useful as the doctor, if not more so, in the treatment of everyday complaints.
Struggling hard, Truth strove to match Rowan's light tone.
“I found not only the cabin, but an actual Dellon. She's a local product—born here in 1969—but she was fostered out and raised in Gaithersburg. She's an actress working in Hollywood, or so I gather, but she came back to Morton's Fork to try to find something about her past,” Truth said.
She felt Dylan's eyes shift to her with strange intentness, then flick aside to Rowan, but whatever he might have intended to say, he was not fast enough to prevent Rowan's next words.
“And will she agree to come in for testing?” Rowan asked eagerly. “Did you get to take a case history?”
So he'd told them. Truth tried not to feel hurt—he'd had to tell them something, after all, and with the noise level of the argument she and Dylan'd had his students had probably overheard most of it. Still, Truth wondered how much more he'd told them—and about what.
“I doubt she could do all that on a first meeting,” Dylan said pacifically. “I mentioned you were trying to track down the family that had owned the land the sanatorium was built on to see if there was some history there, since a lot of our apparition reports are concentrated in that area.”
Oh, yes. There's a history there,
Truth thought bitterly. Aloud she said, “Well, I've met her—unfortunately, she's getting the same pariah treatment you do when you ask about the Dellons.”
“Shunned,” Dylan said. “More effective than violence in an isolated community, and often just as deadly.”
“They talked to me,” Ninian said unexpectedly.
The other three all turned to stare at him. Ninian ducked
his head. His long black hair fell forward, but failed to conceal the blush spreading over his pale skin. He looked very much as if he wished he hadn't said anything.
“Ninian?” Dylan asked.
“Before we heard about Luned Starking being gone, I was over at the Scotts' place—you know: cold spot, broken dishes, black dog—” he added, using verbal shorthand to sketch the kind of manifestations every researcher was familiar with. “They were happy to talk; Mrs. Scott's great-aunt was a spirit-caller—you know, a medium—and I told her about my gran, so we got on just fine. Anyway, after a while she went into the house to cook lunch, and I was out on the porch shelling peas with Morwen—”
“Is there a point to this, Nin?” Rowan asked, twirling her long red braid as if it were a lariat.
“I'm getting to that! Morwen's about my age; we got talking, and when I brought up the Dellons,
she
said that the whole reason the rest of the Fork wouldn't talk to them was because they're cannibals—werewolves, in fact. She said her mama'd said that if you did anything a Dellon woman didn't like she'd overlook you, drive you out of your skull, maybe turn you into a wolf yourself. She's sure that now a Dellon's shown up again, somebody in the Fork's going to die.”
“And someone
has
disappeared, right on schedule,” Dylan said.
“On schedule …” Truth said, a sudden inspiration taking possession of her. “Dylan, where's the master list, the one organized by date?”
The list was unearthed without too much trouble—it was the one that Truth had run from Dylan's database to try to chart seasonal peaks in local activity.
“Here. Look. The disappearances peak in mid-August on some kind of multi-year cycle. And I'm almost sure—” Truth jumped up again, this time for her purse, digging through it until she found her notebook.
“Yes—I was right. Most of the Dellon women have vanished within a few days either way of the fourteenth of
August: the last one—two, actually—twenty-eight years ago in 1969. But why then? Lammas is the only Great Festival anywhere near here, and that's August first.”
“It didn't used to be,” Dylan said slowly, “or, rather, August first didn't used to be. In Pope Gregory's 1582 calendar reform, fourteen days were removed from the calendar in the conversion from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. There were riots all over Europe, with crowds demanding ‘give us back our fourteen days.' Researchers of that period still have to be careful to indicate whether they're citing New Style or Old Style dates, since both were in use for quite some time after that.”
“Hard to see why anyone'd get that upset,” Rowan said. “It isn't as though anybody was actually taking anything away from them.” She popped a last bite of pizza crust into her mouth and chewed contentedly.
“It was before MTV, Rowan,” Ninian said caustically.
“So August fourteenth is really August first?” Truth said.
“Let's say rather that the ‘Feast of Sacrifice' in the old Celtic year—it was really called ‘Lughnasadh'; Lammas is the Christian name for the day—falls on August fourteenth, not the first.” Dylan said.
“Lew-nassat?” Rowan said.
“Farewell to the Light,” Ninian translated briefly. His Scots ancestors had held onto many folk survivals of pagan practice far longer than the rest of Europe.
“And the cycle of disappearances cover roughly a month—factoring in all of them—and peak on August 14th,” Dylan summarized.
“But what
really
happens to them, Dylan?” Rowan asked. “I'll buy ghosts, but not werewolves—or baby-eating wicked witches.”
“Who knows?” Dylan said. “Our source data isn't exactly one hundred percent reliable—ran off, died of natural causes, even murdered—none of these things requires a supernatural explanation, though I admit it's a bit of a reach when you find most of them disappearing during the month
of August I only hope someone isn't using Ms. Dellon's reappearance as a license to, well—”
Rape and murder?
Truth finished for him silently. It would almost be a more comforting answer to the problem of poor Luned Starking's disappearance than what she believed—and could not prove.
But if she and Sinah Dellon could put an end to it there wouldn't be any need to prove it. Truth tried to comfort herself with that thought.
The talk turned to the minutia of the fieldwork that was the actual reason for the presence of at least three of them in Morton's Fork. The results had been disappointing so far; for all their work, the ghost-hunters hadn't been able to record—or observe—anything out of the ordinary anywhere in the Fork. They'd been reduced to nothing more extraordinary than reconfirming the reports of Taverner and Ringrose with a new generation—necessary, but trivial in the face of what they'd hoped to accomplish.
“There's always the old graveyard down by the ruined chapel,” Rowan said. “It's got a vanishing hitchhiker, ghost lights—and the chapel is supposed to be haunted.”
“I'll try that if I don't find anything better,” Dylan said reluctantly. “But it's really at the edge of the main concentration of events, and I'm not sure I believe in that haunted chapel. It's just too good to be true, somehow.”
Rowan and Ninian exchanged glances and shrugged. “Maybe a seance?” Ninian said. “There's a Spiritualist circle that meets around here—I'm sure Mrs. Scott would let me attend.”
Why hadn't they checked out Wildwood? The manifestations centered on it: It was obviously the source—the wellspring, as a matter of fact—of everything happening at Morton's Fork. It wasn't like Dylan to nibble around the edges of a thing instead of plunging right in.
Unless he was staying away from it for her sake—sort of a professional courtesy to a fellow professional. Perversely the thought irked Truth so thoroughly that she almost missed the next words spoken.
“That's reaching, Ninian; I'd rather not.” Dylan shook his head. “We may not get lucky this summer—but even if we don't, this is important groundwork; don't either of you forget that.”
After a last cup of tea—or, in Rowan's case, glass of Coke—both students retired to their tents, and Truth and Dylan were alone.
“Okay, now what is it?” Dylan asked, turning to her. “You've been like a cat on a hot stove all evening. You didn't, um, make a bad impression on Sinah Dellon, did you?”
His tone was wary; he looked more resigned than anything else. Truth gritted her teeth and gave Dylan her most carefree smile.
“Well, I didn't accuse her of being a werewolf, if that's what you mean,” Truth answered teasingly, and was rewarded with a faint smile from Dylan. “She's a psychic, in fact.”
Truth hesitated for a long moment over her next words, though honesty compelled her to tell Dylan. “We're going to go up to the sanatorium tomorrow, and, well, see what she makes of it.”
Though that wasn't the extent of Truth's agenda by any means, she doubted that anything more would be visible to any observer—and in this particular Working, she was going to have to feel her way as much as any novice.
“I see. Thank you for having the courtesy to notify me in advance, at least. I hope you won't mind if I tag along?” Dylan asked levelly.
“What do you think I'm going to do—push her off a cliff?” Truth demanded, all her suspicions of Dylan freshly aroused.
“No—but since you seem to think that there's a Blackburn Gate up there that needs to be shut, I don't think that after turning the county inside out to find her, you're going to take the only member of the, er, bloodline up there just to show her the view.” Dylan was trying to be reasonable, but the anger that had been simmering for the last two
weeks was an undertone in his voice. “Did you tell her about the Gate? Does she even know why the two of you are going up there?”
“Yes,” Truth said, not looking at him.
She was caught between wanting to lash out at him for speaking to her this way—and grieving for the love that was slipping through their fingers as neither of them acted to save it. Why couldn't he see the world the way she did?
Dylan wanted proof, but nobody required independent verification of the weather—when someone said it had rained yesterday, people accepted his testimony without a thought. Anything someone else could confirm that easily with his own five senses didn't need to be proven.
And now—when Truth had discovered the use of more senses than five—she did not need to test, and prove, and test again, like a blind man moving through a minefield. She simply
knew
, and she was impatient with those who insisted that she blind herself again. What part could Dylan play in her future if that was the world she lived in? In the bad old days it had always been the woman's place to submit without a murmur of protest, to give up herself for her marriage. Everyone said things had changed, but attitudes fostered by social privilege died hard. She could not go back to being blind, or even pretending to be, and it was time to admit to herself that she would not be the one making the accommodation in their relationship; it would be Dylan. How could she ask that he make every concession on behalf of a relationship Truth wasn't even sure she wanted anymore?

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