Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02 (25 page)

 
          
She
could be home in her apartment in an hour. Chuck it all, get back to her
life—maybe two weeks in Saint
Barts
to round things
off, and then see if
Arkham
Miskatonic
King was interested in hiring her back. Not this . . . shadowboxing.

 
          
The
serpent-coils shifted beneath her skin, the serpent wondering if it had won.

 
          
No.
Even if she surrendered to the serpent and let it take over her life once more,
there would still be the other thing—the creature that Truth had summoned into
her magic circle at the
Bidney
Institute, the thing
that killed squirrels and rabbits and deer and left their bloodless corpses for
Winter to find. The thing that Truth said was a magician's servant, an artificial
Elemental sent to seek Winter out.

 
          
Why?

 
          
It
always came back to "why," and the answer was hidden in the place
Winter could not reach—her past. She could not stop now. She had to go on. If
Ramsey kept in touch with Janelle, he might be in touch with Cassie—and Grey.

 
          
When
it was that Winter had developed the notion that Grey could help her—never mind
"would"—she wasn't sure. Dr.
Luty
would
have pegged it as wishful thinking, one more defense against personal
responsibility. Make someone else a talisman, and you absolved yourself of all
need to do anything yourself. In Dr.
Luty's
cosmology, everyone was completely and personally responsible for everything
that happened to them.

 
          
A comforting idea, but what if it's wrong?
Winter
watched the cars crawl by like glowing insects on the streets below.
What about all the times that it
IS
wrong?

 
          
Still,
the notion that she was only searching until she found somebody who could fix
her life grated on Winter's sense of fitness. She wasn't doing that—was she?
The poltergeist was her problem, and she was handling it herself, as was right.

 
          
But
the other ... to think she could handle the other alone was true madness.

 
          
Either
the door and windows of the Marriott were exceptionally poltergeist-proof, or
whichever of the entities tormenting her was responsible for unlocking doors
and opening windows had taken the night off. Winter awoke to a hotel room that
was no messier than it had been when she'd gone to sleep the night before,
packed her bags and settled her bill, and was on her way by 9:00.

 
          
By
noon she had reached the Delaware Water Gap, once the gateway to the West, and
now the gateway to Pennsylvania. Despite the sprawling urban blight—and it
really was a blight, Winter decided, studying the eight lanes of highway
flanked by expanding shopping malls critically—the region was genuinely
pretty, and there were some places along the road that looked just as they must
have thirty or even fifty years before, when America was a slumbering giant,
just awakened from sleep by two world wars. Winter stopped for lunch at a diner
that looked as if it had been dropped down on the roadside fresh from a time
machine, and decided that no matter how early it was she ought to find
someplace to spend the night. Pennsylvania was something like 700 miles of
signs saying BRIDGE FREEZES BEFORE ROAD SURFACE, and she was going to have to
drive past every single one to reach Dayton, Ohio.

 
          
"Do
you know of any place around here I can spend the night?" Winter asked
the fresh-faced waitress in jeans and a polo shirt who brought her pie and
coffee. Winter had never had a sweet tooth before, but now it seemed as if her
metabolism ran on sugar—the quick burst of energy and the equally quick slide
into insulin-induced weariness. Either state was preferable to the jittery
overstimulated
panic that presaged one of her poltergeist
attacks, though Winter didn't worry about them so much now that she knew there
was some hope of controlling them.

           
"Some place to stay? Well,
there's the Hilton back up the road," the waitress said.

 
          
Winter
had passed it on her way here, and felt a pang of distaste at the thought of
its hundreds of sterile identical rooms. "I was hoping for something a
little friendlier," she said hopefully.

 
          
"You
mean like a Bed-and-Breakfast? Well, there's Lily Douglas's place. There's one
of her cards over there on the wall; you could call her and see if she's got a
bed free tonight," the waitress said dubiously. It was clear that she
could not imagine anyone passing up the chance to stay in a Hilton's luxurious
accommodations.

 
          
Oh, but there are better things than
perfection. . . .

 
          
"Perfection is so deadly dull. No
wonder Eve kicked the serpent out of Paradise, " Grey said.

 
          
The
voice was so real that Winter, rising off the counter stool to go in search of
Lily Douglas's number, actually looked around to see who was speaking. But it
was only Grey, popping up out of memory and imagination once more to offer up
his opinions.

 
          
This
time her mind presented him to her as he'd been his sophomore year at
Taghkanic
. They'd done
Camelot,
and he'd been
Mordred
. She saw him now, in dusty
Danskin
tights and black ballet flats, wearing a shabby
moth-nibbled green doublet that would look glorious from across the footlights,
gilded by theatrical magic. In her mind, Grey swung back his cloak and rested
his black-gloved fingers on the hilt of his dagger.

 
          
"As
Mordred
says, virtue can be deadly. And as Blackburn teaches, every virtue, carried to
its extreme, becomes a vice
—
usually
when it starts dictating the behavior of someone else."

 
          
The
memory dissolved. Was this something Grey had said to her, or was it her
wistful mind manipulating his image like a puppet to give her good advice? It
didn't matter; whether the words came from Grey or from her own mind, they were
worth heeding.

 
          
They just don't seem particularly applicable
right now,
Winter thought, staring at the bulletin board.
Why should I be worrying about virtue
—
or perfection?

 
          
The
Water Gap Diner was the sort of place that had a cork board where the locals
could pin up business cards and notices. Most of them were for snowplowing,
game butchering, or taxidermy, but eventually Winter found the one she was
looking for. It was on
pearlized
pink stock printed
with raised lavender ink and said
Justamere
Bed-and-Breakfast,
with the name—Lily Douglas—a phone number, and a street
address that was meaningless to Winter. She carried it over to the pay phone.

 
          
Two weeks ago you'd have cut your throat
rather than telephone a stranger and go to a strange house.
True, but those
hadn't been the actions of her real self, but the actions of a Winter Musgrave
who was sick, frightened, and all but beaten.
And two years ago you'd have cut your throat rather than be seen in
such a tacky, unfashionable place as this,
her malicious other self added.

 
          
But
that woman—that sleek Wall Street shark—wasn't the real Winter either, was she?
Winter could not go back to living that stranger's rapacious, self-centered
life—but if she didn't step back into that life, where was she going to go?

 
          
The
phone was answered on the third ring.

 
          
"Hello?"
A kindly voice, far from young but without the fragile breathiness of true old
age. "
Justamere
Bed-and-Breakfast. Lily
Douglas."

 
          
It
was only then that Winter understood the play on words in the name—
-Just a Mere Bed-and-Breakfast
—and
amusement colored her voice as she replied.

 
          
"I
need a room for tonight; I know it's short notice, but the lady at the Water
Gap Diner said you were local and might have something."

 
          
"Well
bless her heart! You tell Amy that good angels must be watching over her—I
just had a cancellation—well, a postponement—this morning. Only it's a
double," Lily Douglas went on conscientiously, "and you might not
want to take it because it's so large; it's my best room with a bath and all.
..."

 
          
"Why
don't I come out and see it," Winter said. And if it wasn't to her taste,
there was always the Hilton back up the road.

 
          
Justamere
Bed-and-Breakfast was only five miles from the
diner. This part of the Delaware—New Jersey border was farm country; on both
sides of the road the trees were rich with new leaf and in the fields tiny
spears of green were poking up through last winter's dead stubble. Winter was
almost certain she had gone too far when she rounded a curve in the road and
saw it.

 
          
How in the world did something like that get
all the way out here?
she wondered.

           
The old Victorian house had been
built in the style known as Queen Anne Gothic, with garlanded turrets, bay
windows, and gingerbread lace and jigsaw ornamentation everywhere. It was
painted a pale custard yellow with the detailing picked out in white, and
looked pretty enough to eat. The gravel driveway was wide enough to accommodate
half a dozen cars at once, and Winter felt no qualms about pulling her Saturn
in beside what looked like a battered old farm truck.

 
          
The
door was answered by a pleasant woman in her fifties, figure long gone to
matronly plumpness. She was wearing a cardigan sweater over a flowered cotton
housedress and perfunctory makeup. Winter waited for the reflexive condemnation
from within, but for once it didn't come, although Society would certainly
have judged Winter to be the "better" of the two women.

 
          
Okay, so she'd probably be a failure on Wall
Street. But for that matter, I don't know how to run a Bed-and-Breakfast, do I?
Winter told herself.

 
          
"Ms.
Douglas," Winter said aloud, "I'm Winter Musgrave—we spoke on the
phone? I'm here about the room."

 
          
"Of
course you are!" Lily Douglas said. "Come in and take a look—do you have
any luggage? I'll just get
Gary
to bring it in.
Gary
!
Gareth!"
she raised her
voice. "You come down here right now!"

 
          
Almost
instantly Winter heard the clatter of footsteps on the stairs, and a moment
later Gary-or-Gareth appeared.

 
          
"This
is
Gary
—Gareth
Crowther
.
He takes care of what needs doing—and in a place this big and this old, that's
everything."

 
          
Gareth
was a big bluff hearty puppy-dog of a man, with untidy blond hair and soft blue
eyes and muscles worthy of a lumberjack bulging the fabric of his red-and-black
flannel shirt.

 
          
"Hello,"
he said, holding out a painfully clean and callused hand for Winter to shake.
"I got the storms off in the tower, Mrs. Douglas, so I can open up the
windows now to paint the third-floor back."

 
          
"Good
boy," Mrs. Douglas said, as if Gareth were the slow and patient draft
animal he so much resembled. "But you just wait around—this is Ms.
Musgrave that I told you might be coming and taking the Lilac Room, so you just
hold on and see if she needs anything moved."

 
          
Gareth
nodded seriously.

 
          
"I'm
sure I'll love it," Winter said, gazing around the parlor. Her fears of
shabby untidiness had been groundless. The immaculately clean front room of
Justamere
Bed-and-Breakfast was decorated in the Victorian
high style of the era in which the house had been built. The fireplace was of
white marble, carved with elongated sphinxes on each upright, and the face of
the fireplace carried out the Egyptian motif, with lotuses and scarab beetles
embossed into its sky-blue tiles. There was a high Victorian settee in carved
rosewood flanked by matching chairs with crocheted doilies on their backs and
arms and surrounded by half a dozen little tables. The whole room had a
jumbled, lived-in feel to it, as if uncounted generations had lived and played
here and loved each other and the house.