Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02 (30 page)

 
          
"Do
you remember why I left
Taghkanic
, Ramsey? I know I
left before graduation and I don't remember keeping in touch with any of you—
Janelle says I sent her a wedding present, but—"

 
          
"Janelle
may be mistaken," Ramsey said, very gently. "I suspect things aren't
going all that well for her, you know."

 
          
"I
know. I saw her before I came here. She doesn't paint any more. Ramsey, we were
all—" The grief came with an overpowering rush; Winter set down her
chopsticks.

 
          
We were all going to be famous: Janelle was
going to be an artist, and you were going to be a famous journalist. And what
was I going to be? I don't even know any more, but it wasn't what I became.

 
          
"—we
were all going to be kings and queens in
Narnia
; I
know. But everybody has to grow up sometime, Winter, and in the real world it
just isn't possible for everyone to be beautiful, famous, and rich. We were
kids, with kids' dreams. And we learned that dreams don't come true."
Ramsey refilled both their glasses.

 
          
She
was probably drinking too much, Winter warned herself, but just for tonight it
wouldn't matter. And Ramsey, for all his talk of being on the wagon, drank
heavily as well. But this was no time to lecture him on his habits or apologize
for hers. And even Dutch courage was a help in asking the questions she needed
to ask.

 
          
"So
why did I leave school, Ramsey? I've always wondered."

 
          
He
grinned at her, and a trace of the boy he'd been lingered on in the lines of
the man's face. "I'm afraid it's one of the great unexplained mysteries,
along with where missing socks go and the egg in the egg cream.

           
All of us but Grey went away for
spring break in April, and you never came back."

 
          
Winter
had taken a large bite of dumpling a moment before, and now she waved her
hands, semaphoring agitatedly:
I just
left?
Didn't you look for me? You just let it
drop? What if I'd been eaten by Bigfoot?
"
Murph
!"
she said aloud.

 
          
Ramsey
laughed at her agitation, then shrugged. "The Registrar's office said
you'd withdrawn. I think Cassie called you a couple of times, but I'm not sure.
It was a long time ago. It sort of hurt that you just dumped us," he added
after a pause.

 
          
Winter
felt an instant rush of guilt. It had never occurred to her how the matter must
look to the others, and Janelle had given no hint that she'd felt rejected by
what Winter had done all those years before.

 
          
"Ramsey,
I swear to you I don't remember doing that; either leaving or ... why. I'm . .
. I'm sorry. I don't know why ..." Her voice trailed off momentarily.
"I
still
don't know why I did
it. I don't remember."
And what must
Grey have thought, when I just went off and didn't come back?
She blinked
back sudden tears.

 
          
"Life
goes on," Ramsey said, although Winter could still detect a shadow of hurt
in his voice. "And anyway, six weeks later we'd all graduated, a gaggle
of fledgling BA's unleashed upon the world."

 
          
"Do
the rest of you keep in touch?" Winter asked, trying once more to lead the
conversation back to
Nuclear
Lake
.

 
          
"Oh,
I send
Jannie
a card from time to time," Ramsey
said evasively. "I tell her about my divorces, and she tells me which room
she's redecorated now. Speaking of which, have you seen—"

 
          
The
conversation slid away from personal matters into current events, and Winter
was finally willing to let it go. What Ramsey had told her disturbed her
profoundly, as well as making her feel strangely ashamed.

 
          
She'd
just walked out on them. She, Winter Musgrave, who prided herself on honoring
every pact, meeting every commitment, had just turned her back on four of her
dearest friends and left them without a single word of explanation.

 
          
But
she
would not have done it—and
neither would that girl from the yearbooks and newspapers, the Winter
Musgrave-as-was.

 
          
What
had happened? Oh, God, what had happened to her fourteen years before?

 
          
*     
*      *

 
          
If
Winter had entertained fantasies of suburban domesticity earlier in the day,
she got to play them out that night: Ramsey set up a card table in the living
room and beat her soundly at Scrabble three games out of four. She enjoyed it
far more than she thought she would—or ought. It was such a placid pastime;
harmless and conventional.

 
          
And don't forget inexpensive,
Winter
chided herself. It had not been so very long since she'd measured her enjoyment
of things by the amount they cost. Now she was playing board games in a
suburban living room with an old college buddy, and thinking of how nice it
could be if there could be more times like this in her life; if they could just
go on forever.

 
          
But not with Ramsey.
The automatic
amendment was swift. Ramsey Miller was a failure at the game of matrimony in
too many times and ways for Winter to believe him capable of being a success
now.

 
          
What had happened?
Winter asked herself
again, counting out tiles and trying to figure out if she could spell any words
with what she had. The methods Janelle had used to run away from the chance to
succeed was plain—but what had happened to Ramsey? He'd even had a job on a
newspaper once, heading in the right direction for the career he hoped to
have—and now he was here. And while it might be hard for some people to see
this as a failure, she'd known Ramsey before, and Winter could not believe that
he had freely chosen the life of a used-car salesman over his bright college
dreams.

 
          
What
were the choices that had brought Ramsey to this place in his life? Wrong ones,
obviously, but had he known that at the time? Or had they been detours he
thought he could
get
away with,
unaware that he, too, had been living out the golden time that set the patterns
that would dictate the rest of his life?

 
          
As
she brooded, Ramsey's theory about the golden time became muddled in Winter's
thoughts with the Grey Angels of the Hudson Valley, until for a brief
bewildered moment she believed that the Grey Angels controlled the golden time;
that its light shone from beneath their wings, and what it illuminated had the
power to be different, really different, to throw off the chains of karma and—

 
          
"'
Qwozle
' is not a word, Winter—though I admit you'd get a
lot of points for it," Ramsey said dryly.

 
          
Winter
looked down at the board and felt herself flush.

           
"I guess my mind was
wandering," she said.

 
          
"If you see my mind out wandering, be
sure to send it back,"
Hunter
Greyson
said,
suddenly vivid in her mind. Winter wondered, with adult insight, whether he'd
kept up that barrage of Noel Coward bon
mots
to be
clever—or to mask a compassion that he knew could have no outlet. If he were
here now, seeing what had become of Ramsey, he'd be just that prickly—because
there was no way he could help. There was nothing anyone could do for Ramsey,
any more than anyone could help Janelle. In their separate ways, each had given
up.

 
          
"I'm
sorry, Ramsey. I guess I'm
tireder
than I
thought," Winter said neutrally.
Are
all of my old friends emotional basket cases? They're
my
friends
—
what does that make
ME?

 
          
"Well,
you know what they always say—quit while you're behind, right? Go to bed,
Winter, have a good night's sleep. I'll see you in the morning."

 
          
But
when she was sitting on the end of the fold-out couch,
gazing
down at her meager library—
Venus Afflicted
and Tabitha Whitfield's manual of psychic
hygiene—Winter was far from ready for sleep. She spread her hands out before
her and stared at her fingertips. She felt a need to
do
something, and right now her options were limited. Of course, if
she got upset enough about that, she could probably arrange to have a
poltergeist fit; now
that
would
really liven up the place. . . .

 
          
Winter's
gaze unfocused as inspiration struck. She was almost certain that she could
call up a psychic storm—all it really took was intense emotion and loss of
control, and God knew she'd experienced enough of both lately. And after that
night in
New
Jersey
,
she was also fairly certain she could also stop one from happening, provided
she had warning in time.

 
          
Was
there some middle ground, then? If she could start them and stop them, didn't
that imply that more was possible?

 
          
hike what?
Winter wondered. She wasn't
all that sure what a poltergeist
did:
opened
doors and windows, threw things. . . .

 
          
So why not see if you can move something
through the power of mind alone, as the comic books say? And bring your
personal demons under conscious control.
Winter wasn't sure she wanted to
believe in controlled
psychism
any more than in
magic, but she knew that she no longer had the right to automatically reject
the strange and uncanny. She looked around.

           
The room contained the fold-out
couch she was sitting on, a floor lamp, and a folding tray-table that currently
held her half-full wineglass and a litter of oddments. Her car keys. A
lipstick. She rummaged through her bags until she had five objects lined up on
the tray: her stuffed elephant good-luck charm, her hairbrush, a roll of Life
Savers, the car keys, and a lipstick. She tossed off the last of her wine and
tucked the glass out of harm's way on the floor. She wanted nothing breakable
in sight.

 
          
Now what?
Winter felt unbearably silly,
staring at her makeshift test subjects.
Wonderful.
I've discovered the psychic equivalent of cutting out paper dolls.

 
          
She
refused to simply abandon the idea, however. Her sense of fairness demanded
that it at least be given an objective test. She arranged herself cross-legged
on the foot of the bed and looked fixedly at her collection.

 
          
Nothing
happened.

 
          
How long do I have to wait?
Winter
wondered, and for that matter, what exactly was she waiting for? If she were a
character in a book, she'd feel an absolute certainty, a conviction of
Tightness, an instant
uprushing
of power, and . . .

 
          
But
she
had felt
an
uprushing
of power—just before the ball of lightning had hit Nina Fowler's car. She'd
been half out of her mind with fear, but even then the sensation had been
distinct and memorable. Could she re-create it less disastrously now?

 
          
Almost
out of habit Winter had fallen into the slow measured breathing of the exercise
she used every night; the one out of Tabitha Whit-field's pamphlet. With each
breath she pushed envisioned power through her body until she felt both
energized and supremely relaxed. Because she was sitting up, this time she
didn't fall asleep; instead, as she gazed at the tray full of objects she felt
the illogical clarity of dreams—in which there are no limits, and everything
seems possible.

 
          
The hand is the extension of the mind; now
make the mind become the extension of the hand. . . .