[Oxrun Station] The Bloodwind (2 page)

"Damn," she said to the window, to the trees. "This
is stupid, you know. This is really and truly
godawful
stupid."

It was an admission at last that she did not want to
go. She did not want to leave. And it wasn't the cold or
the drive or the facing of her students; it wasn't her new
project or Greg Billings or even the obsequious Ford
Danvers. She just did not want to leave the tea and the
toast and the memory of the cardinal. What she did
want to do was strip off her blouse, her green-and-black
tartan skirt, unclasp her gold necklace, kick off her
mid-thigh boots, roll up her pantyhose and fall back
into bed. And sleep.
As long as she could.
Maybe until
April when the green returned, and the robins, the flowers, the sharp tang of lawns newly mowed. By
then, if her luck held and no one came to find her, the
meeting this afternoon would be over and they would have forgotten all about her. Dean George Constable
would bluster his pleasant way to oblivion (with Ford
Danvers slavering in his wake), the Trustees would
have all died and been replaced with robots, and she
would be able to continue as she always had, this time
without opposition.

The problem was
,
she wasn't at all tired. A little
skittish from all that partying, but not at all tired.

Frightened.
My god, she was frightened.

No, she decided in sudden panicked retreat; she was
apprehensive, not frightened. The pressures she had
subjected herself to in her struggle for the new depart
ment's creation were finally reaching her now that the
judgement
was at hand. And last night hadn't helped. It
hadn't helped a bit.

This time it came as a question: frightened? Well,
yes, just a little. Apart from the college and the depart
ment and all she was attempting . . . yes.
Unreason
ably, illogically, without any foundation beyond a few
too many drinks.
Just a little.
Because for a moment last night the world hadn't played by her rules.

Patrice, her father had said some years before, this nonsense of yours about rules and more rules has got to
stop.

Why? It works, doesn't it?

Because sooner or later you are not going to be able
to live by your own rules, or force others to follow them.

They do all right.

That's because the ones that don't you drop.

Not my
problem,
is it.

It is, Patrice. It is.
One of these days something's going to happen again, something's going to happen
that doesn't play your game and you're not going to be
able to drop it or run from it . . . you know what I mean.

I got through the divorce, Father.

Yes, you did. I give you credit for that, much credit.
But your luck won't hold, Patrice. Your luck just is not
going to hold.

Her station wagon was small, yet she knew when she
left the party it wouldn't warm up before she arrived
home. The ride was less than a handful of blocks. She
shivered then in the front seat, gloved hands bouncing
in spasms against the steering wheel, her slightly be
fogged mind swearing at the light snowfall that had
started just as she'd left the Chancellor Inn. There had
been no wind when she'd switched on the ignition, but
it had been waiting for her after she'd turned the first
corner. That's how it had felt. Waiting, until she'd left
the protection of her friends, was on the whitening streets alone. It had struck sharply, suddenly, like a padded fist, and she cried out in shocked surprise.
Leaned closer to the wheel and squinted through the
windshield.

The snow
blurred,
streaks instead of flakes. Her eyes
began watering in an effort to clear her vision, and her ears filled with a faint, curiously deep rumbling
—the
sound of a slow-moving locomotive entering the far end
of a long black tunnel. The windshield wipers sounded
like gunshots, the engine began whining as if stuck in
the wrong gear. The wind strengthened, buffeting the
station wagon and nearly shoving her into the curb.

There were obscenities now, directed at the drinking
she'd done more than the storm. It was confusing her.
The lingering taste of the liquor, the snow, the wind
—
and she felt her breathing quicken and grow shallow, tearing away somewhat at the webs that befuddled her.

Another
block,
and she was sure someone was fol
lowing her. Her gaze flickered to the rear-view mirror,
but she saw only the white stained red by the taillights.
Beyond that there was black. If it was a car its headlamps
were out; if it was someone walking behind her in the
street he was too distant for seeing. But she
was
being
followed. She would have sworn it. She could feel it.
The presence of something other than herself on the
road, other than herself and a good deal larger.

Then the flakes had gained a direction, a spinning right to left, and she screamed to herself she'd been caught in a tornado. She'd almost flung open the door
to escape, had braked sharply instead and cracked her
forehead against her hands fisted around the wheel. Like a slap for hysteria the dull stinging had calmed
her, and she'd driven the rest of the way home at a slow
walking pace.

The wind died when she reached her own block.

The snowfall eased.

She had sat trembling in the driveway for nearly an
hour, convincing herself it was a freak wind-surge un
derscored by the drinks.
Nothing more.
No one was
there. Nothing was there. Yet she sat trembling in the
driveway for nearly an hour and watched the street and
the sidewalk, waiting for someone, or something, to pass.

Suddenly her cup rattled harshly in its saucer, and she pulled her hand away to bury it in her lap.

The faucet began dripping; the refrigerator coughed
on.

She looked at the window and prayed for a blizzard.

"Pat!" she said then, very nearly yelling, and slammed
a palm on the table. The cup and saucer jumped, the
butter dish skittered,
the
plate that held her toast almost
flipped over the edge. She turned her hand over and
stared dumbly at the reddening skin. A
moment,
and
she decided that as of now she was a teetotaler in the
heroic mold of ancient Carrie Nation. It was that, or she
would have to believe that
Oxrun
Station was beset by
midwinter tornados and she was the abrupt subject of
covert surveillance.

And she wished her nerves were as convinced as her
brain.

A
 
BLUR of red and a darker shadow behind it.
Pat looked to the window and saw the cardinal back on its perch, a blue jay on a thicker branch closer to the trunk.
Neither of the birds remained there very long; the cardi
nal fled first, the jay a moment later. But it was enough
to quell the unsettled surging that had begun in her
stomach.

A finger to her lips, across her cheek and through her hair, and she reached blindly for her purse and the first cigarette of the day. A few seconds' fumbling and she
laughed aloud, relief and abashment giving her a case
of gently lingering giggles. The purse, she remembered,
was on the butler's table beside the front door, and the
thought of getting
up,
walking all the way out there and
all the way back, stayed her for the present. And that,
she thought with smug self-satisfaction, was precisely
the idea. The longer she delayed that initial coughing
spasm, the less time she had to finish her two packs a day. By March she hoped to be whittled down to one.
By April, a half.
That she might eventually quit al
together was a fantasy she kept deftly at bay
—this slow and easy method of cutting down at least managed to entertain no uncommon illusions. And it was certainly
more effective than the time she had attempted an abrupt
withdrawal, without any preparation but a quickly reached
resolution. That had been an unmitigated disaster, not
only for herself but for her students as well. Their work
had suffered measurably under the onslaught of her
fierce critiques, and they had only regained their sanity
and their progress when one of them
—she'd never learned
who, though she suspected either Ollie or Ben—had left
a new pack of English Chesterfields on her office desk
one morning. The wrapping was undone, a cigarette
halfway out, and a lighter stood beside it waiting to be
used.

It had been the most succulent tobacco she had ever
tasted in her life. And when she had returned to the class not one of them had been smiling.

Dears.
They were, most of them, dears. They called her Doc with affection, formed and reformed groups
around her latest work, her latest exhibitions (depending
on tastes, depending on grades), though her only cavil might be their singularly unenthusiastic support for her
campaign. She would have thought the creation of a
Fine Arts Department devoted entirely to the visual arts
would have made them rapturous
—in the manner of
students who were getting their own way at last.
But
not them.
Or, rather, not all of them.
Ollie, Ben, and
Harriet, in particular, had somehow decided that she
would be chosen to chair this new entity, which in turn
would leave them in the hands of someone else.

Silly.
They were dears, but they were silly.
On all
counts.

A prickling, then, at the back of her neck, and she
turned her chair around slowly. There was a thick, dark
pine shelf attached to the wall beside the door. On it
was a statuette just under a foot high
—a grizzly half-
risen, its great head cocked to one side, massive paws
up to strike, its mouth open to reveal gleaming pin-
needle teeth. Its name was Homer, the first satisfactory
piece she had completed after arriving in
Oxrun
. A
talisman he was, something to be patted wearily before
bedtime, to be caressed cheerfully in the morning. Its
doppleganger
in flesh she had met at dusk in Montana,
eight years ago on a trip she had made to cleanse the
divorce from her dreams and her child's funeral from her nightmares.

The creature had stood there watching her from the
other side of a stream given color by October's early foliage. She had been too terrified to scream, too weak to run, and the grunts it had issued while it paced the
grassy bank nailed her to the ground. Then it had reared
in a single swift movement, and she had been positive it
could have reached across the narrow band of water and
swiped off her head with no trouble at all. But it had only watched her and had tested the cold air and
had gestured as if were batting at insects. For a full five
minutes before it had dropped to all fours and had lumbered into the woodland. She had not moved. She could
hear it grunting for what seemed like hours, hear the
thrashing of underbrush,
hear
its paws thunder the earth.

She thought she had died, and had somehow been
reprieved.

Now the grizzly was reduced to a gleaming grey-
white marble she had quarried herself, back in the hills
that coddled the Station on three of its sides. The gleam
came not from polishing; it was a quality of stone she
had not seen in any other, and it gave the bear a
translucence that at times gave it movement, when the
lighting was right and she wasn't quite looking. And in
its reduction
—with eyes deliberately left blank in the
ancient manner—it had become a partner, a friend, and
a stubbornly silent confidant.

"All right," she told it. "All right, so I'm stalling. Sue me."

Homer simply stood there, testing the air.

Another check of the clock, eight thirty-five and
sweeping
—and when the telephone rang
she
nearly
dropped her cup. God, she thought as she scraped back
the chair, get hold, woman, get hold. She plucked the
receiver from its wall cradle and sat again, her right
hand curling the cord once around her wrist.

The voice was decidedly masculine: "Was it as good
for you as it was for me?"

She couldn't help it; she laughed. "Good morning,
Greg."

"Sorry to call so early, Pat, but I wanted to be sure
you were ready for battle. After last night, I'm surprised you can still breathe without a machine."

"I can breathe just fine, thank you very much." Her
smile began to drift, one corner turning down. "I'm not
so positive about the battle, though." She thought of
telling him about the ride home, thought of what he would say and discarded the notion.

"Sounds like a good dose of the nerves, huh?"

She nodded, stuck her tongue out at Homer, then
blinked and grunted.

"Well, welcome to the club, Dr. Shavers. But listen, I was thinking, see, and the meeting's not until four-
thirty, so why don't you and I have lunch or something? Maybe we can get Stephen and Janice to go with us. I
mean, we could plan strategy in case the Trustees have
shafted us. Like, we could create a minor diversion,
like slitting Danvers' throat. That would really throw
Constable off his stride, don't you think?"

"I don't know, Greg. Don't you think that's a little
drastic?"

"Who for?
Danvers? Hell, he'd never notice until he
figured out he couldn't lick the dean's shoes anymore."

She laughed again, gratefully and loudly. She knew it
wasn't all that funny, knew that poor Danvers wasn't
really as bad as they liked to pretend. But apprehension
spurred her (and a cold finger of the wind that had
pursued her last night), and it was some time before she was able to control herself long enough to thank her
colleague for the release and ring off, still chuckling
and just as aware as he that she hadn't answered his invitation. He tried too hard sometimes, Gregory Bill
ings did, but somehow he always managed to sense
when she needed being silly, needed a willing target for
her occasional undirected bitterness, needed to be alone.
And it bothered her quite a lot lately that she was often
incapable of reciprocating in kind.

Immediately the receiver left her hand, however, she
patted Homer's head and walked to the front door,
where her fawn overcoat was waiting in the cane rack
against the wall. Though her first studio class did not
begin until
ten
, Greg's call had served to magnify the
apartment's silence, and her suddenly unpleasant soli
tude. She was giving herself too much time to think, to
worry, and she had no intention of assuming the role of
the instrument of her own defeat. She had worked too l
ong and too hard for this day, had yielded the feast
possible number of compromises for it all to be wasted just because she didn't have the nerve to leave her own
home.

"Darling," her mother had asked just three weeks ago, at the end of her last visit, "I don't understand
what you're trying to prove. Don't you realize you're
jeopardizing your position at the college with what you're doing?"

Pat hadn't answered. Mother and Father entrenched
in their penthouse museum hadn't even understood why she had chosen to come to the Station; how could she
expect them to understand her now?

Once the coat was on and buttoned, she grabbed a tasseled white woolen cap and pulled it down over her
ears, down to her eyebrows, flung a six-foot white
muffler cavalierly around her neck, and drew leather-palmed gloves over her long fingers. The door closed
behind her, and she tested the lock
—more often than
not she didn't bother to use it. A bad habit, perhaps, but
she had never felt other than safe in the Station.

It was done. She was out. There was no turning back.

She stood on the front porch and allowed the damp
cold to attack her, pulling stiffly at her cheeks and nose,
stinging her chin, slipping beneath her skirt to tighten
her calves and thighs.

Her blouse turned to ice.

She tucked her purse under one arm and shoved her
hands into her pockets.

Like most of
Oxrun
Station this side of the huge
park, Northland Avenue was lined with homes ranging
from gingerbread Victorians to stately Dutch Colonials,
all of them considerably bulky, all of them maintained
in scrupulous repair. The lawns were broad, the trees
ancient and massive, the inhabitants with few exceptions well enough off not to worry about the direction
the rest of the country was taking.
A self-contained street in a self-contained community that carried its wealth like a topcoat well worn.

She inhaled slowly, deeply, the last of the evening's
punishment driven to hiding by the chill, the last rem
nant of her scare made ludicrous by daylight. Behind her the house loomed quietly, the bay windows on either
side
primly white-curtained and reflecting the pale new sun in each of the square panes.
Two blocks
to her right the street dead-ended at the fencing of the
town's cemetery; two blocks west the traffic on Main
land Road was easing as commuters gave way to those
just passing by.
Directly across Northland, old man
Stillworth
was sweeping snow from his walk, puffing
whitebreath
like smoke and grumbling loudly at his
broom about New England's insane weather. The block's
children were already in school, but their spirits re
mained hovering around abandoned sleds on porch steps,
in snowmen guardians behind hedges, in a stray red
mitten propped atop an evergreen shrub.
The steady
clanking of a snowplow several streets over.
The frigid
call of a bird.
The brittle slam of a door.

Nothing had changed during the night, then. It was
definitely safe to leave. The ritual she'd inaugurated the
day she'd moved in was completed in the space of a few familiar seconds.

She took the steps cautiously, one hand out for bal
ance while the other held her purse. Goldsmith had
already cleared the inlaid stone-block walk to the pavement, had already overspread patches of ice with lumps
of salt. She shuddered when she estimated the hour he
must have risen in order to do it before the others had
left for work, and she decided the man should be struck
a special medal. Not that he would accept it, even in.
jest and good humor. He was very much the recluse,
keeping to his own rooms most of the day as far as she could determine, shambling out only when there were
repairs to be done, grass to be mowed, the back garden
to be weeded.